Some posters have a way of standing out and not just because
of colour or absence of interfering competition. I saw one today. The line was so powerful that even though it
is a free ad for whoever put it up, I shall talk about it.
It was in Sinhala. ‘Maskvaadaya venuwata marxvaadaya’
(Marxism instead of Maskism) was the slogan trying to persuade people to
purchase a new bi-monthly magazine called ‘Aurora’.
The line is catchy, the play on words cute and it is a say-all capture.
Good stuff. Got me thinking.
The implication is that Marxism is somehow ‘real’ whereas
other doctrines are not what they make themselves out to be, ‘other’ including
other versions of Marxism (since there are more than one), I would
imagine. Good to be assertive in the
matter of marketing. Kudos.
I would imagine that those involved in this Aurora believe
that everyone apart from themselves are engaged in a deliberate or else
unwitting process of hoodwinking follower and self both. Well, I am sure some of these ‘others’ would
say the same of others as well, Marxists and non-Marxists and of course those
who wish to re-launch the good ship Aurora. The fact is that masks are conveniences. They
are frames of reference that are seen to be more useful than others, more
amenable to convincing people than other masks, also available for wear.
The truth is that the most dominant doctrine from the
beginning of time has been Maskvaadaya or Maskism, i.e. doctrine pertaining to
the use of masks. We are a species that
has used masks to disguise ourselves, mislead and confuse people, hide blemish,
dodge the need to apologize or justify, lie, erase and in the final instance
open ourselves to the ultimate slippage, that of tripping over our make-up and
losing identity.
What was most interesting about the line was the arrogance and
the self-delusion of assuming that Marxism (ok, the particular variety
that the Aurorists subscribe to) is not a mask, that it rebels against Masks,
Maskism and Maskists. It made me think
of Marxism and Marxists as such have existed in this island and elsewhere. The
biggest error was to think that Marxism was an ‘other’ of Capitalism, which is
of course nothing more than a half-truth in terms of desired telos, paradigm of
development, species-primacy and economic determinism. It was just another version of that which was
called the dominant ideology of the time.
Marxism was a mask that a lot of people wore, some conscious
of what it hid and some quite ignorant about it all. It allowed people to indulge in the fiction
that they were somehow being anti-West (and all that this term connotes) while
engage in a fairly old element of the colonial enterprise; bashing things
‘native’ especially culture. There was a
facelessness advocated by Marxists (only ‘class’ being exempt) which naturally
inflicted the greatest violence upon majorities, i.e. Sinhalese and Buddhists
in Sri Lanka. It allowed them, at the same time, to
champion minority issues, even to the point of legitimating myth and legend and
vilifying any assertion of culture or history by the Sinhalese and/or Buddhists
as being chauvinistic and/or fundamentalist.
When you call for culture to be taken out of the equation while
exempting minority identity and identity politics, you are essentially
declaring war on the Sinhalese and Buddhists.
Marxists played on social inequalities and citizenship
anomalies that cut across community-identity and persuaded many to wear its
apparently emancipatory mask. For a while.
The personal political trajectories of the most ardent Marxists and the
identities that they sought to suppress by the Marxist mask show a decided
political project that had nothing to do with class or capitalism, nothing to
do with resolving anomalies pertaining to production relations. That was a Maskism that was quite effective.
It shows that we sometimes wear masks believing they are our
own skin or the skin we would like to live in.
It is good to be aware of skins and masks, I think. It is good to consider the proposition that
Marxism is a Maskism and a far more pernicious one than most Maskisms around,
especially as it arrived not as detractor but as saviour. That’s a line from Umberto Eco’s lovely
novel, ‘The Name of the Rose’; that the devil arrives in the garb of the
emancipator. Louis Althusser said that
ideology resides within. It is something
that we learnt from the Buddha’s life; where Maara launches his final
battle with the ascetic Siddhartha by appearing in the image of the
ascetic.
There are masks and masks, Marxists and Maskists, Marxisms
and Maskisms. A bit of self-reflection
and the occasional rubbing of skin to see if you are still wearing the one you
came with or at least one which you really want to wear and not something
someone else has convinced you becomes you more would not harm in these days of
masks and maskings.
Anyway, good luck to the Aurorists, even though they’ve
garbed themselves in the anecdotal skins of another people who themselves were
duped to wear masks that had little to do with who they were.
This was first published on December 14, 2010 in the Daily News.
malindawords@gmail.com
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