The Left leaning becoming arch capitalist-roaders does not have a better example in this part of the world, than the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP – People’s Liberation Front) which began as a revolutionary Left movement. But in its current incarnation the party is an enabler of the worst of capitalist excesses having been in tow with the United National Party (UNP), and now being somewhat transparently sympathetic towards the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB).
Is this a domestic tendency or is it a global trend that caught on in this country following the transformations that have the Left eating out of the hand of the neo-liberals? While the Right-wingers have made themselves populist in most countries, the Left has abandoned their base and gone on to cohabit with big business and the peddlers of undiluted global capitalism.
The British Guardian which is of course a Left-wing publication by the conventional yardstick of assessing media bias, was virulently against arguably the most Left-wing politician that emerged in post war Britain, the trade union backed Jeremy Corbyn.
The Guardian has also turned a blind eye to Britain’s involvement in various dubious armed campaigns, but even more significantly has almost completely ignored British complicity in propping up dictators and various elements that carry out atrocities such as the regime in Brunei – which has a dastardly record of persecuting the gay community, for instance.
Left-wing media
Other so-called Left-wing publications have been routinely in tow with big business and this tendency has been markedly becoming an article of faith for these publications. For example, why is it that the UK Left-wing media was so vehemently against Corbyn who was on the side of the underdog, no matter how radically Left located he was deemed to be on the political spectrum? It was because he was advocating for reform and a measure of nationalization that would have hurt the capitalists such as Sir Richard Branson to take just one example of those tycoons who were running the British transport system.
Professor Des Freedman of Goldsmiths, University of London, who is the editor of a book on The Guardian, told Declassified, a maverick publication: “While The Guardian claims to offer high-quality, independent journalism, its reporting and comment all too often dovetail with establishment agendas and interests. For all its welcome criticism of corruption and inequality, it repeatedly attacks Left-wing voices aiming to provide a meaningful challenge to corruption and inequality.”
So you get the picture. Other so-called Left-wing media around the globe offers much of the same, and is seen veering closer than ever to the establishment and the entrenched neo-liberal interests.
But it is not just the media, is it? Leftists so-called all over the world except in a few countries have become coterminous with the establishment.
Which is one of the reasons Leftism all over the world has become rather ‘illiberal’ and intolerant too. The Left-leaning have in some university campuses in the US walked all over free speech values that have existed for generations, and banned certain Right-wing ideologues, etc., from making speeches at these seats of learning, for instance.
Intolerance
When the Left becomes a vehicle for this type of intolerance, it can generally be surmised that Left ideologues have gone overboard and become pillars of the prevailing establishment. If the example of the British Guardian cited earlier is considered, it can be seen that the organization that owns it is made up of several ex-financiers who had close connections to the British financial establishment.
So, when the so-called Left almost becomes synonymous with the global establishment, it is not surprising at all that the Right-wing has sometimes encroached on the space vacated by the Left, in the form of so-called Right-wing populists. From Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro, and the good the bad and the ugly, Right-wing populists have become some sort of antidote to the establishment Left that has taken to defending establishment causes – and the causes of neo-liberal capital too, in some instances.
Sometimes this Leftism is disguised as the Centrism of the Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Tony Blair type, but most ordinary folk who see no difference between these Centrist and Right-wing regimes that overtly support capitalist causes such as the former George Bush regime in the US, and the former Margaret Thatcher regime in the UK, are so disillusioned that they would rather go with Right-wing populists of sorts these days such as Boris Johnson.
Not that the Left establishment cares for Johnson in theory at least, but when it came to a tussle between Jeremy Corbyn and the Conservative party’s Boris Johnson for example, you could see the Guardianists as they are called these days almost transparently hoping that the Right-wing Johnson prevails over the rather radically Left-leaning Corbyn.
All this probably is the result of the death of old fashioned welfarist Leftism. Take this country, where after 1977 and the open market turn, there was no reversal to market restrictions and the control economics of the pre-liberalization era. All this made the old Left parties which had already taken defeat after defeat at local elections, thoroughly irrelevant.
Outdated brand
The JVP almost by default occupied the space vacated by the Old Left in this fashion, and then the apparatchiks in the party founded by the revolutionary Rohana Wijeweera soon found out that Leftism as it existed was an outdated brand. Instead of at the least trying to be responsibly middle-ground, the JVP then became utterly opportunistic and started doing whatever it took to be relevant or what the party thought it is to be relevant.
The result is that this party today has totally abandoned progressivism and become some sort of appendage for the ultra-right wing UNP/SJB cabals. There is no recognizable Left-leaning media as such in this country anymore and those who masqueraded as the Left-leaning, such as some of the former more progressive NGO types such as Nimalka Fernando would rather defend the anti-Rajapaksa JVP and not censure it.
In this way the JVP which of course nauseatingly allied with the Right-wing UNP as stated, and with it what used to be the remnants of the Left movement in Sri Lanka, has become quite flagrantly Right-wing and pro-establishment and therefore mimics the subsuming of the Left-leaning media in the British establishment, which tendency was mapped out in the preceding paragraphs.
People would rather close ranks with the Rajapaksas particularly under these circumstances in which there is no progressive Left alternative to the unabashedly right-wing UNP and its offshoot the SJB.
This Government too has been called populist even though such a label does not stick to it the way populist sticks to say Donald Trump or Boris Johnson for instance.
If this is the End of History that Francis Fukuyama wrote about, it is sad that the enthroning of Western Liberalism as the so-called enduring ideology as he had predicted has snuffed out the Left in its entirety.
What is even worse is that the pretend-Left we have today both here and in the Western capitals such as London, Berlin, etc., are the most fervent touch-bearers for the neo-liberal capitalist brand. That is not good, but if that is what prevails, the fact that people hanker after populists such as Trump or Bolsonaro is not an accident.
In Latin America the Leftism that we knew of long ago still exists in some form in Bolivia for instance, even though locked in an eternal struggle with Western-backed capitalist parties. But that sort of Left politics is sufficiently rare today for us to conclude that the Leftist brand today is of the Pseudo-Left variety that prevails in the UK – or for that matter most of Europe where so-called Centrists with totally transparent links with the pillars of capitalism excess, try to sucker the people into thinking that they are genuine progressives.
They are failing so badly that the people would rather ally with Right-wing ‘populist’ figures that have no sympathy for them but would opportunistically espouse their causes sometimes rather more than the official ideological Left, which is these days in most people’s minds, mostly a total fraud.
Add new comment