Notes from an Election: Falling in(to) the middle
In an underdeveloped or under-developing economy where life is constantly on the edge, the voting patterns of the middle class can’t be ascertained, much less predicted, on the eve of an election. The problem is one of definition, I suppose: who is middle class and who is not?
An advertising executive I met two years ago told me that based on a survey, his agency had found that the middle class in the country consisted of four segments: traditional, aspiring, urban, and emerging. Since the middle class clamours to graduate from one segment to another, over the years these segments have seen changes; for instance, while the traditional middle class wife earlier tended to housework, with economic constraints she now seeks employment. For reasons best known to themselves, their political preferences thus remain more confusing than ever.
The underclass can only vote, and since they form the bulk of the population (52% of all local rural households, according to statistics, earn incomes of Rs. 43,000 and below) both parties try to get or win their attention. Despite the democratisation of public institutions and despite devolution, however, the underclass remains woefully underrepresented, because they do not have the power to represent themselves.
The historical task to represent them has fallen, for better or worse, on the intermediate class: the petty bourgeoisie and the urban middle class. The irony is that much of history has shown us that the intermediate class uses the underclass for the same purpose as politicians do: to agitate for change in political structures that are not amenable to their sense of political and economic self-worth. Once they clinch power, as they did in 2015, the policies they enact tend to be wildly incongruent with the aspirations of the poorest, who end up becoming as underrepresented as they were before.
My distrust of the middle class goes back to 2015. The reactions of the intermediate classes confused me: on the one hand they were complaining about the deteriorating democratic framework, and on the other they were complaining about rising prices. Not that Mahinda Rajapaksa, after the Sirisena capitulation, was indifferent to the impact the latter would have on the middle class: Budget 2014 saw, among other goodies, the simplification of vehicle taxes, reducing the cost of a luxury van by Rs. 1.2 million.
But then the middle class had got tired of Rajapaksa’s white elephant projects and casinos which were entrenching the elite; not unlike the reformists of 18th century France, their interests compelled them to campaign against the regime’s flouting of democratic ideals, even if under that regime they’d seen prosperity flourish. Nearly all that rhetoric about governance, if you think about it, was hence a convenient cover for the unrest of an intermediate, clamouring bourgeoisie.
The middle class has never had it so good. It hasn’t had it so bad either. Stuck in a rut, trying to get out, it has ended up between a rock and a hard place. Politically, culturally, it’s hence undeniably caught in the middle. A country like ours isn’t really amenable to those who hail from it, precisely because its social, cultural, and political aspirations isn’t really coterminous with the development of the economy; to date, no economic or business forum organised by those echelons of the middle class has listed out as one of the main issues facing the country the lack of proper industrialisation.
The issues they pick and choose and talk about are always the same: power should pass from the populist to the professional, corporate bosses are better administrators than (democratically elected) political representatives, and reform must be led by intellectuals from their class. People like Harsha de Silva and Eran Wickramaratne have come out as the great green hopes of this milieu, not because they themselves hail from it but because they articulate the kind of language it has spoken and got used to over the decades. The middle class, especially the middle class of lower and midlevel professionals, artists, and bureaucrats, thus remains as complex yet stable as ever today.
To say this isn’t to belittle their historical achievement, even in a small country such as ours. Marx and Engels were not indifferent to the role that history had thrust on the middle class, in societies where the rising proletarian tide was soon to corner the capitalist bourgeoisie; in their acknowledgment (however begrudging) of the part played by this milieu in leading the revolution, they were perhaps far ahead of other philosophers, economists, and thinkers.
Then in the 20th century, when the gospel of Marx reached Asia and Africa, a radically different set of circumstances compelled the revision of many of the tenets of that gospel: it was in such a context that the 20th century’s foremost intellectual voice of the Third World, Frantz Fanon, denounced the complicity of middle class elites and intellectuals in the Third World in the developed world’s continuing colonisation of the developing world.
Because of the many viewpoints, however conflicting and contradictory they may be, and the many clashes of personality, ideology, and personal prejudices among them, the middle class, and specifically the lower middle class, continues to dither: linked by reason of their upbringing to their world, yet decoupled by reason of their cultural colonisation from it. Their spokespersons, made up mostly of academics, artists, professionals, even clergymen, campaign heavily for reform, but every time they do so they fall back on the same set of representatives who they allege let them down after a couple of months. They perch on top of either party, which is how the same anti-Rajapaksa middle class can, while speaking ill of the Rajapaksas, look back nostalgically at the Premadasa era, remembering Jana Saviya and Gam Udawa but forgetting the burning tyres and the good squads. And in case you’re thinking I’m picking sides, it works the other way around too: those who lambast Premadasa forget the Rapaksa era.
It’s more than a matter of belabouring my point if I were to argue that nearly every reform this country has seen through has ended up benefiting the intermediate elite. Take one reform. The Grade Five scholarship. The exam was in reality grafted on a three-tiered elitist colonial education system. Since better funded and more popular schools have been located in economically better off regions, students who cross the cut-off marks tend to hail from the more prosperous parts of their localities.
In other words, despite the socially equitable base of the exam, there is a correlation between scholarship marks, family incomes, and the school the child enters: the more popular the school, the higher the parent’s income. Thus in a context where, despite the free-for-all nature of our public education system, you need to have money to study through local exams, this marginalises the poorest; a study in 2017 conclusively found out that while more than 95% of students from well funded national schools take the exam, less than 80% of those from poorer regional schools do.
Not too long ago I said, out of disillusionment and not a little bitterness, that we in Sri Lanka are not ready for revolution. I’d like to qualify that a little now: we are not ready as long as what we consider as a revolution doesn’t serve our interests. This, of course, isn’t something unique to Sri Lanka: probably no revolution from world history has been fought without the promise of power at the end of it for the revolutionary. But it’s very pronounced in Sri Lanka, because we are, after all, a small island.
We like to think that we are a nation of great and immense potential and pomp. We are not. Where does that leave us? Nowhere near the many who remain at the bottom, yet nowhere near the 5% who are at the top. In other words we clamour to reach the ranks of the elites; in our rush to do so, we forget the country, the people, and ourselves. Is it not an irony, then, that politicians, that convenient scapegoat picked and pilloried by the middle class, should find in the middle class the perfect tool, the perfect instrument, through which they can climb into power?
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com
