A few months ago Sri Lanka was rocked by massive, nation-wide protests resulting from an economic crisis. The nation had arrived at the brink of bankruptcy and suspended payments on its foreign loans – which in turn meant no more foreign loans.

The country erupted with growing mass protests that were only made worse by the government’s heavy-handed use of riot cops and then the Army. Fighting Tamil terrorists is one thing: fighting an entire country quite another, especially when it’s your own people. And of course it was more than just protests. Hungry people were literally preying on wealthy residents and officials, burning their homes and cars, including those of numerous government MP’s. One MP was assassinated by an angry mob.

But that crisis in turn was the result of an ideological, scientifically ignorant decision by its (former) President to ban agrochemicals for farming:

Within six months of the ban, rice production in the country—a once very sufficient industry—dropped 20 percent, forcing Sri Lanka to import $450 million of rice to meet supply needs and surging rice prices rose nearly 50 percent.

Now, Sri Lanka will pay farmers across the country 40,000 million rupees ($200 million) to compensate for their barren harvests and crop failures. In addition to the funding, the Sri Lankan government will pay $149 million in price subsidies to rice farmers impacted by the loss.

The protests were wildly successful in at least one respect:

[On May 9] Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, the de facto leader of the regime and the president’s brother, handed in his resignation and was forced to take refuge in a naval military base on the eastern coast of the country.
…
[On July 9 people stormed] the presidential palace, the Presidential Secretariat, and the official residence of the prime minister. This was an unprecedented moment in Sri Lanka’s political history. President Rajapaksa fled that evening to Maldives and handed in his resignation. 

That last article is titled the ‘Morning After’ Moment, and it could have been titled, So What Now? In other words what does a revolution do when it has succeeded in its immediate primary aim of deposing the top leaders? A Ceaușescu moment, followed by the implementation of a new system?

Not in this case, despite the unusual sight of political groups being caught out by their own voters, especially the Left who are supposedly always ready to Speak Truth To Power:

Many organized political forces tried to position themselves as its legitimate representatives; but the truth is that it was a remarkable and genuine uprising of the masses that surprised the organized left as much as the ruling political class. The country’s leading left-wing party, the People’s Liberation Front, even cautioned the public at the beginning against taking part in these unregulated protests, even if they were quickly forced to change their position and to claim a leadership role in the mass uprisings.

When you observe how detached most of the political Left in the West is from their traditional working class voters, this doesn’t sound unusual. Neither does the subsequent pandering. Sadly, niether does this:

What we are witnessing now is the return and the reorganization of the state. After the resignation of the president, the prime minister was sworn in as his acting successor. A few days later, the prime minister was officially elected, as per the constitution, by the majority vote of the parliament. The same allegedly corrupt MPs of the previous regime voted for him, meaning that their grasp on state power remains largely intact.

And “the masses” have gone home, presumably to eke out their lives as best they can. The security forces also got a second chance and have taken it with relish, with hundreds of activists arrested and thousands more being questioned by the police, plus some very dodgy imprisonment-while-awaiting-trial of the usual student activists, even though this revolution did not start in the universities. Again, looking at the outrageous treatment of the January 6 protestors in Washington D.C., with people held for months awaiting trial, one sees the similarities, as well as the US no longer being able to sneer at developing nations and their “extremist” laws. The following also struck a chord both for the USA and New Zealand:

Ironically, the president himself had allocated a nearby strip of land as the official “agitation site”[next to the Presidential Secretariat building]. Protesters, in a rare moment of agreement with the law, duly occupied the adjoining area—and began an occupation that continued for almost four months.

An allocated spot right outside the President’s building for any “Rivers of FilthTM” that may wish to turn up and protest about something. What a concept!

The writer points out that it isn’t all gloom. After all, something very significant and new in Sri Lanka’s history – a true people’s uprising that deposed a President and a Prime Minister (and decidedly dodgy and corrupt ones to boot), and that has to have some impact on voting and elections and “people’s representatives”, somewhere down the line. But the key point of such revolutions has to be remembered:

Most Sri Lankans are now waking up to the statist nightmare of “the morning after.” But it is also clear that there was no way a rational and concrete program, to be implemented later, could have emerged from such a people’s uprising…  it has to be admitted that as a pure eruption, a mass uprising cannot be posited as an alternative to politics as such.

Which is where revolutions and the State end up entangled with each other; either the revolution’s aims get embedded in the body politic via an election and the State changes, or their’s another revolution – perhaps next time destroying the existing State to replace it with it’s own (think Russia in 1905 vs 1917).