Drugs, Dollars & Prostitution: The Political Economy of Economists
Posted on June 18th, 2023
e-Con e-News
‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’
e-Con e-News June 2023 Part 3
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The economist’s role became to ‘explore & explain’,
not to ‘uphold or condemn’– SBD de Silva, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment
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‘We could export heroin and prostitutes’, wisecracked SBD de Silva, ‘to obtain foreign exchange. If it’s a dearth of foreign exchange that is the problem.’
Could such chambered commerce achieve much-touted ‘development’ goals?
SB was reacting to the media’s perennial persistence, that it is Dollars we desperately need most of all: Blah-blah-blah bleats the humdrum for FDI – foreign direct investment – to resolve Balance of Payments, Deficits, Debts. Blah-blah-blah…
‘Dollars for what?’ SB would ask, ‘To import more cars? For joyrides? Investment in what? In highways for joyrides? What about roads & highways to connect rural supplier & factory & distributor & research institute?’
SB made the transition on 15 June 2018. It is now 5 years. He was well aware we were speeding to this dead end. Long before we got here. Now the oligarchy wishes to extend the dead end, and even carpet it – with more Wall Street ‘infrastructure’ loans via the IMF. The import-export colonial plantation system, long dead, still rules. We are dead end too. Yet SB’s words still haunt and stir.
SB was not responding to the still-continuing aragala ululation that it is dollars that we lack, that we need more loans, preferably from the US Treasury’s IMF. SB has long turned into the corporeal dust that mingles twixt the monoxides that blow through Kalubovila.
Curiously, the private ‘fund managers’ who clogged the flow of Dollars last year, now tell us that the remittances of workers have increased. And yet, all we hear are prophecies of doom. Ominously, the (UNP-SJB) dispensers of the IMF’s explosive elixirs, keep repeating they are going to ‘look after’ the ‘poor’. And we know well what this means… So, there it is. ‘The poor will always be with us.’ Amen!
Rather than groan and grind teeth, what exactly do we need do of what needs to be done? This ee therefore points to the Communist Party of Sri Lanka’s Economic Strategy being rolled out on 03 July:
‘In 1957, the Provident Fund was given purely due
to a 3-month struggle conducted by the Communist Party.
Today the EPF has become the biggest fund in the whole of South Asia.’
– see ee Focus, The Communist Party’s Economic Strategy: DEW Gunasekara
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• Not knowing the difference between the sex trade and modern industrial production is not just a perpetual pestilence afflicting the Sri Lankan media and intellectuals. SB, in the introduction to his classic, points to the ‘eminent’ English economist, Professor, ‘Baron’, Lionel Robbins, who in invoking ‘‘the economics of hired love’… blurred the social & moral differences between different types of productive activity, as for example, a brothel and a manufacturing enterprise’ (see ee Focus).
Robbins indeed profited, at least indirectly, from retail prostitution. SB recalled that the ‘Baron’ published an English state survey on the matter, whose title, Sitting on a Fortune, Robbins purchased after he interviewed the first ‘subject’ he ran into on a street corner. She told him, she had been working as a typist clerk for many years before she realized, ‘I was sitting on a fortune’.
Robbins’ hindsight haunts us more, for he was chair of the Economics Department at the London School of Economics (where SB acquired his PhD, whose thesis he soon recanted as fundamentally flawed!). Robbins’ Malthusian reduction of economics to ‘scarcity’ is reinforced in Sri Lanka’s high school curricula – O-Level & A-Level. In 1931, Robbins hired Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek’s utopian ideas of laissez faire and free trade are now pimped in Sri Lanka by all the empire’s thinktanks, economists and other hitmen. Apparently ‘Britannia rule[d] the waves,’ but permitted a ‘free and open’ Indian Ocean. 1796. 1815. 1818. 1848. 1878, 1915. 1948. 1971. 1980. 1983. 1987. All had no bloody ‘state’ behind its conspiracies and bloodlust…. or so the media proclaims. The colonialist Hayek – no doubt aching for a recently dismantled Austro-Hungarian empire – clearly had no need to state the obvious about the bellicose state of Europe’s states.
Underdevelopment, through its control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, of technology and markets, had acquired an ‘automaticity’ (SB’s lovely word) in our world, that does not always require direct military occupation (unless you’re an upstartish Korea, Japan, Taiwan & Germany!), though there would be, and are, sporadic annihilations…
This ee reproduces some of the recent, though scant, recall about the legacy of SBD de Silva by other Sri Lankan scholars. This weekly ee itself was first prompted in 2018 due to our dedication to SB’s insights, which locate and examine Sri Lanka midst the colonial deindustrialization of much of the world.
Sri Lanka’s role as a drug entrepot (linked very much to the US wars on Afghanistan & Southeast Asia), and seller of unprotected workers abroad, has been accelerated since 1977. Yet deindustrialization certainly didn’t just begin in 1977. A proper political, economic and military plan and strategy for modern industrialization, like in the USSR or China, would never be willingly allowed. This ee records some of SB’s contributions to disassembling this state of Sri Lanka’s underdevelopment.
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Before the [Dominion Status] Bill was introduced in the Imperial Parliament,
it was necessary that Ceylon should sign certain agreements with London.
– see ee Focus, Independence, the First Cabinet
Most accounts of the ‘independence’ London afforded (or ‘granted’) us, fail to reveal in clear language what these ‘certain agreements’ actually amounted to. The ‘certain agreements’ that ensured the continuation of the underdevelopment of a non-settler colonial state. Can the supernumerary English classes and departments (facilitated by the US World Bank & Brutish Council) tell us what the English of ‘Dominion Status’ and ‘Fully Responsible Government’ has really meant; tell us in condescending mathematics, beyond Oxford’s limited dictionaries?
In his classic (or should we mimic, ‘Epic, dude!’), SB recalls how England’s agency houses were allowed to flush capital from Sri Lanka even after 1948, even as they continued to exercise economic control over us.
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• SBD de Silva had rejected the rushed attempt by Oxford University to publish his PhD thesis. In the Introduction to his book, eventually published (by Cambridge), he explains why he rejected his own PhD thesis (see ee Focus). ee mentions Oxford and Cambridge not to call down Anglo accolades on SB’s head. He was always quick to point out that Oxford and Cambridge had little to do with England’s industrial revolution. SB instead pointed to the mechanics’ institutes, etc.
As is said about SB: he saw it was better to know than to be known. And he wrote in order to express his thoughts best. For himself first. And then to ask another, if they too saw what he saw. And what he had seen was an import-export plantation economy, monopolized by merchants and moneylenders, that was underdeveloping the country. And this is what ee now sees too.
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• In the end, SB saw that without an organized movement, no plan would be allowed or enforced that aims to invest and accumulate capital through modern industrial production. Firstly, most of our intellectuals, Left, Right and Neutered, have no idea what machine capitalism means. See how the pitiful media praises every other trader, who makes nothing, as an ‘entrepreneur’. Our scholars have even less idea about what machine socialism means. Our imported rock&rollers ‘rage against the machine’ – Luddite-like – even as they use the latest technology to broadcast their nihilistic & anarchistic nostrums.
No ‘independent researcher’ (Independent of what, we are tempted to ask? Independent like a Wall-Street addicted Central Bank?) has archived the experience and indispensability of socialist industrial strategies, both the splendid advances and bitter lessons. Nor will they be funded to do so. The preclusion of the role of Marx & Engels, let alone of the 20th century’s Lenin, Stalin & Mao in industrial development, have turned a hole in the head into a modern fashion statement in the Anglomanic hemispheres.
(When unable to avoid Marx, they turn him into an atheistic romantic anarchist, not as the incisive observer of machine capitalism, the promethean who sought to harness industrialization to serve human need).
Having bade ‘goodbye to the working class’, we are sold the latest of pre-used liberal panaceas, which may ultimately form the epitaph for a middle-class aragalaya:
Everything is allowed
Nothing is possible