"Arma Virumque Cano," said Rev. Paul Caspersz, opening a two day symposium to felicitate Hector Abhayavradhana on his eightieth birthday. "Now is the time to praise great men", the Jesuit of Kandy went on to translate the Latin line from Virgil’s Aeneid. That was ten years ago. Six years later, by and large the same crowd would gather to politically felicitate and ecumenically concelebrate Father Paul’s eightieth birthday. Tomorrow, January 5, 2009, Hector will turn ninety. And, once again, it is time to praise this great man, the grand old solitary chip of the Old Left block.

Born in 1919, Hector was sixteen years old when Sri Lanka’s first political party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, was founded on December 18, 1935. He joined the Party a few years later while a student at the then University College, answering a secular political calling that was in every sense path-breaking from his Christian upbringing. Hector never looked back. Those of us who have seen Hector’s political inspirations and intellectual versatility during his active days have now come to admire him for his graceful aging and his ageless curiosity and interest in politics, all of which are worthy of the politics he practiced.

Much has changed in Sri Lanka and elsewhere between the emergence of the LSSP seventy years ago and its eclipse seventy years later. The trajectory of the LSSP through history and Hector’s political life moved along three cardinal axes: Marxist socialism, South Asian regionalism, and Sri Lanka’s national and political emancipation. I cannot think of a better way to praise Hector than to reflect on the changes during the last several decades – in Marxism and socialism, the South Asian region and Sri Lankan politics – using as frames of reference a selection of Hector’s observations and commentaries.

Marxism itself has had its own trajectory, in fact, quite a few of them over the course of a century and a half. At his felicitation symposium, Hector recalled Engels’s speech at Marx’s funeral and his crediting Marx with two great achievements: the discovery of the laws of history (Engels compared this to Darwin’s discovery of the laws of nature) and the uncovering of the workings of modern capitalism. Hector also noted that Marxism was not an ideology during Marx’s lifetime (Marx famously disclaiming that he was a ‘Marxist’), but invariably became one after his death and unsurprisingly found its most fertile terrain in the most backward of European societies – Tsarist Russia. He attributed to Lenin the presentation of Marxism to the world as "a finished and a watertight system of ideas that challenged existing philosophical and religious systems and … an all-inclusive solution to the totality of world problems."

More ominously, whether forced by circumstances or not, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders presided over the "repudiation of democracy and democratic methods" with devastating consequences for the Bolshevik Party and for the Soviet Union. At no point in its seventy three year history, Hector went on, was the Soviet Union able to be "directly engaged in the construction of socialism." The immensely portentous Russian Revolution and the hugely disappointing "collapse of the Soviet Union by implosion" and everything that went on in between have shaped the trajectories of Marxism in different societies.

In the First World of industrial and mostly urbanized societies the Soviet experience by and large produced a negative reaction to socialism. But the more positive influences of Marxism as well as the fear of Marxist revolutions led to fundamental transformations in the nature of the state, its regulatory institutions, and the operation of capitalism itself. These changes collectively explain the secret of capitalism’s capacity to survive despite its cyclical crises. The changes were the outcome of struggles – of organized labour against capital, of tenant farmers against landlords, of vulnerable middle classes against price gouging corporations – invariably led by Marxist, Left and Centre-Left Parties.

The now familiar welfare state first arose in Bismarck’s Germany, not coincidentally in 1884, one year after Marx died, and not due to any other reason than the fear of a revolution. Bismarck sensed the growing political intelligence of industrial workers inspired by the ideas of Marx, Germany’s famous expatriate, and began the process of reform. Britain followed Germany not only establishing the welfare state but also repudiating the fundamental premises of classical economic theory and laissez faire capitalism, initially through the theoretical work of Arthur Pigou and later culminating in the so called Keynesian revolution. The British model of the welfare state was installed in every British colony including Sri Lanka.

Independent and unnoticed at that time, the unassuming Swedes developed their own culture and tradition of welfare economics, state and society. Gunnar Myrdal, the celebrated author of The Asian Drama, was a late arrival in a long tradition. President Roosevelt’s New Deal brought welfarism to the US to combat the Great Depression, settling for maximum reform as a conscious alternative to full blooded socialism. Father John Ryan emerged as the Catholic theologian of social justice and a strong supporter of President Roosevelt against the official Catholic Church. The Church was not the only detractor; the New Deal faced powerful opposition ranging from the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Each New Deal measure, creating public work, establishing workers’ rights, implementing agrarian reform, ameliorating African Americans, and instituting old age pensions, was condemned as creeping socialism. North of the border, Canada, like Sweden, quietly but steadily built its own welfare state predicated on agrarian reforms, trade union rights and universal healthcare.

In the late twentieth century, the welfare state was rolled back and the free market was given a free ride under the transatlantic leadership of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The collapse of the socialist Second World was not a small impetus to the resurgence of laissez faire in the capitalist First World. Again at the felicitation symposium, Hector insightfully identified a number of consequences flowing from the collapse of the Second World. First, the disappearance of the Second World undermined the role of the national state as the dominant instrument and driving force of economic development, especially in Third World countries. Second, it accelerated the globalization of capitalism and the accumulation of capital spilled over the protective reservoirs of national states, weakening the economic basis of imperialism and rendering irrelevant the old rhetoric and agenda of anti-imperialist politics. Third, and here Hector was impressively prescient, the furious pace of global capital accumulation was surpassing all demands for productive investments and was taking "the appearance of a casino." The world is now cleaning up the mess of two decades of casino capitalism.

It might seem ironical that while capitalism is currently facing its biggest crisis on a global scale with no serious non-capitalist alternative to it anywhere in the world, the same crisis is creating a new interest in Marx’s writings and his diagnosis of the weaknesses of capitalism. The twenty first century counter development to twentieth century capitalism is the gradual, if not inexorable, shift of the centre of gravity of capitalism from the West towards China and India in Asia. It is as though the globalization of capital has turned on its head Rosa Luxemburg’s early twentieth century thesis on The Accumulation of Capital through colonial exploitation. But her graphic description, in the Junius Pamphlet, of the "peoples who must drink down the bitter cup of misery and horror of two social orders, of traditional agricultural landlordism, of super-modern, super-refined capitalist exploitation, at one and the same time" continues to ring true for the billions of rural poor in the Third World, including India and China.

In sum, the fear of Marxist revolution has contributed to the survivability of capitalism, which in turn has undermined Marxism’s ultimate goal of overthrowing it. On the other hand, Lenin’s presentation of Marxism as a "finished and watertight system of ideas … and … all-inclusive solution" has also come under challenge from the more current analyses of capitalism, the state and society all of which have grown far more complex than what they were when the classical texts of Marxism were written. There is no need here for the old debate if, in attributing to Marx the discovery of the laws of history, Engels with understandable revolutionary intent overplayed his ‘second fiddle’ and distorted Marx’s ‘first violin’.

Suffice it to say, what are variously described as post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-Marxist, and post-colonial analyses reject the grand narratives and historical formulations of social problems and totalizing solutions that were the hallmark of European modernity and enlightenment. In their assessment, Liberalism, Nationalism and Marxism are failed modernist projects and the resolution of contemporary inequalities of gender, sexuality and identity cannot and need not wait for a grand final event – be it revolution, or national self-determination. Central to this debate in the West is the competitive roles of class politics and identity (racial, ethnic, gender) politics and there are two dimensions to their rivalry. The shifting modes of capitalism –from commodity production to knowledge production – have dispersed and diffused the class relations characteristic of industrial societies. At the same time, the shifting modes of politics in the context of the yet unfinished business against patriarchy and the perennial immigration of non-European ‘other’, and the immediate need for recognition and representation of women and minorities in the political status quo have given identity politics its post-modern urgency at the expense of modernist class politics. I have barely scratched the surface of this important debate, but it is enough as a point of departure into Sri Lankan and South Asian politics.