Power Without a Philosophy: Why Governance
Fails in Sri Lanka
Dr Lalith Chandrakantha
For much of the seventy-six years since independence, Sri Lanka has been governed by three main parties: the UNP and SLFP, and later the SLPP. While these parties articulated broad ideological narratives at different moments, in practice they evolved primarily around personalities, families, and patronage networks rather than enduring political philosophies. Party structures were often assembled or revitalised in anticipation of elections, and manifestos were hurriedly produced, supported less by conviction than by access to resources and influence.
As a result, political patronage became embedded in everyday governance. Conflicts between social groups, institutions, and the media ceased to be exceptional events and became routine features of political life. Power was exercised pragmatically, often tactically, but rarely within a coherent moral or philosophical framework.
The JVP–NPP, having consciously abandoned its Marxist–Leninist ideological foundation, now finds itself in a different but equally precarious position. Stripped of its former doctrinal clarity, yet without having articulated a new governing philosophy, it is compelled to confront entrenched interests, privileged groups, and institutional resistance without a unifying framework to guide policy or action.
Sri Lanka thus finds itself once again in familiar territory: the exercise of power without a philosophy — a condition that invites confusion, centralisation, and conflict rather than coherent governance.
Comrade, in our youth, in the famous five classes, we learned that in Marxist theory class struggle refers to the ongoing conflict between social classes with opposing economic interests, rooted in their relationship to the means of production. Sri Lanka today is a very different society. Ownership of capital is fragmented. The working population is heterogeneous. Power exists across markets, the state, civil society, the media, the courts, and professional institutions. Conflict is therefore multi-dimensional and cannot be reduced to class alone. Classical Marxist class struggle may still offer insights into patterns of inequality, but it no longer captures the dominant modes of power and conflict in contemporary Sri Lanka.
No single social or political theory is sufficient to explain the complexity of modern Sri Lankan society. Elite theory and pluralist theory, while themselves incomplete, offer more useful analytical lenses for understanding the operation of privilege, institutional capture, and fragmented power in the current socio-economic and political context. We must match theory to reality, not reality to theory.
Contemporary political conflict is better understood as a struggle between entrenched, status-based privilege networks and the general public. These networks span religious authority, professional monopolies, patronage-dependent businesses, and elite social institutions, collectively shaping access to state power and public resources. Individually, these groups may appear weak; collectively, they exercise decisive influence. Governance failure arises from their cumulative veto power, not from popular resistance.
Every government in Sri Lanka, regardless of ideology, has failed in part because it underestimated this cumulative veto power of privilege groups.
Our present leaders’ political education was moulded within a Marxist framework. Marxism–Leninism collapsed grand theory, governing philosophy, and analytical lens into a single, totalising system. Any political project that fuses explanation, morality, and governance into one doctrine becomes incapable of adaptation. The structural consequences of such fusion leave no institutional space for plural interpretation or independent judgment. In practice, this produces what later appears as a “one-man show” — not necessarily by intent, but by design.
What is now required is a conscious separation of these three components: analytical lenses, governing philosophy, and political organisation. We must be explicit about our governing values — equality of citizenship, social justice, democratic accountability, rule-based regulation, protection of fundamental freedoms, and institutional autonomy. We must recognise that Sri Lankan society is pluralistic, and that power is exercised through multiple centres rather than a single class or institution.
Democratic socialism should therefore be understood as our governing framework. It is not a theory of everything, nor a totalising doctrine. Rather, it is a moral and institutional framework for governing a plural society in the public interest — one that accepts markets, constrains privilege, protects freedoms, and subjects power to democratic accountability. In doing so, we would finally give substantive meaning to the constitutional description of Sri Lanka as a democratic socialist republic.
In the next part of this series, we will examine how this framework can be used to address contemporary conflicts, starting with the issue of rogue media.