May Day after Aragalaya Ahilan Kadirgamar

The Great Revolt in weeks after the May Day in 2022, characterised by the masses taking over the streets in their millions, led to hopes of setting our country on a progressive path. However, despite the realisation of the “Gota Go Home” demand with the president fleeing the country, a counter revolution was unleashed by a president appointed by the remnants of the discredited regime. The tremendous repression, the gruelling IMF-inspired austerity measures, the refusal to hold elections and the alignment with great power interests are attempts of the Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa regime to usurp authoritarian power.

Such anti-democratic measures to consolidate power have met with little opposition in parliament. The SJB, which had after all split from the ranks of Wickremesinghe only a few years back, has no other economic alternative, but to surrender to the austerity and free market policies of the IMF. The NPP has not done any better as they expected an electoral victory to land in their lap, and in wanting to woo the middle classes, they remained lackadaisical if not muted in their criticism of the IMF package and stuck to the neoliberal discourse of corruption. In this context, the great rising of Aragalaya, followed by the counter revolution of the ruling regime as with all of them before in history, illustrates now to the working people the class interests of the rulers and those who back the counter revolution.

The Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa regime has been cunning in deflecting the strivings of the working people that culminated in Aragalaya. Through political repression and economic obfuscation the regime has been setting the agenda for the country. The trade unions and social movements have remained reactive and unable to corner the regime. The challenge before the working people on May Day after Aragalaya is to confront the counter revolution and begin setting the political and economic agenda for the country.

Counter Revolution Agenda

How has the counter revolution worked? The political repression against the activists after Aragalaya preoccupied the movement, as they neglected the economic lives of the working people. The rise in cost of living and disrupted livelihoods have reduced real wages of formal sector workers by 40% and informal sector income streams by 75%, amounting to tremendous wage repression that should have rocked the country. But with parliament asleep, the economic devastation has continued where the working people have been forced to absorb the shock—the economy contracting by a fifth over the last few years, poverty more than doubling and over a third of the population food insecure.

The devious strategies of the ruling regime have involved using their majority in parliament to push through or threaten to pass repressive laws that kept the trade unions and social movements in reaction against the laws while neglecting the economic troubles of the people. The threat of a High Security Zone bill, the passing of the Rehabilitation Bureau bill and the ongoing push for the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), are some of the well-crafted legal moves that even if defeated cost little to the regime. However, such legal moves provide the regime valuable time to consolidate and deflect attention from the economic suffering of the masses that could coalesce into formidable resistance.

The rise in cost of living and disrupted livelihoods have reduced real wages of formal sector workers by 40% and informal sector income streams by 75%, amounting to tremendous wage repression that should have rocked the country

The regime’s wager with the laws is akin to flipping a coin and heads they win and tails you lose. Take the ATA for example, which if the regime can pass it in parliament, then it sets a

repressive legal terrain, and augments its capacity to attack any resistance to the IMF package and its class interests. If the bill is not passed, the regime can still fall back on the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which it has deftly used against even student leaders over the last year. While the international actors and the liberals in Colombo consider if the ATA can be modified to meet “international standards” the economic repression agenda continues. Again, the logic of these positions including those of “international standards”, which are inevitably the standards of an unequal and unjust global order, should expose on which side of the counter revolution those actors stand.

Next, even as many actors are caught opposing the ATA and other such moves, the agenda of drastically restructuring the political economy of the country continues. Measures of privatisation are underway with public services likely to become out of reach for the working people. Social welfare is under attack not only through the rising cost of electricity that has tripled on the average, but also underfunding of education and healthcare. Next, a push to reduce those who will be entitled to social welfare through targeted measures of social protection with cash transfers; the targeting will steadily be narrowed and cash transfers will be inflated away. Labour reforms are now on the agenda to hire and fire workers with ease; with already 500,000 jobs lost in recent times and tremendous wage repression, this move is to cement labour repression into the foreseeable future in the interest of global and national capital.

Working People’s Agenda

May Day this year has to begin with a working people’s agenda. And as such it has to start with the demands of working people’s day to day lives. Cost of living and access to food is of primacy. Without affordable transport, fuel and electricity, people are pushed back to the Stone Age. Lower interest credit for urban and rural livelihoods, as well as a range of needs like housing, are crucial, if the working people as a whole are not to become indebted, including through predatory microfinance and dispossessing pawning schemes. People’s hard earned retirement funds, which have already lost 40% of their value with inflation caused by government policies of sudden devaluation and market pricing of essential imported goods, have to be safeguarded from any form of domestic debt restructuring. Privatisation that can lead to further job losses and cuts to public services should be stopped.

These economic demands of the working people are well known to the trade unions and social movements. The question is how to set this as the main agenda in a country, where the economy is collapsing and the working people are drowning. The ruling regime will of course deflect it by claiming the IMF path is the only way forward and that the Government has no money. If people are going to starve the IMF path means little, and if the Government has no money, it is high time it appropriated the wealth and property of the upper classes through measures like wealth taxes. On May Day after Aragalya, there is a hard choice before trade unions and social movements. They have to resist the counter revolution or face annihilation.

(This article was originally published in The Daily Mirror on May 1, 2023)