A reply to Sammy Meilaq: the last socialist who didn’t sell his soul

Yesterday, of course, I watched Jon Mallia’s premier of his podcast with Sammy Meilak. I am pretty sure I am going to make many readers angry with this post. For those who don’t know me, I have always been fascinated by how Malta against all odds developed economically from a poor and miserable country to one of the richest island states in the world.

I’ve done an MA on Malta’s economic history and it is clear that Malta’s paradigm of colonial dependence and poverty was broken in the 1970s. Economic development was mainly caused by foreign direct capital, mostly German which turned Malta into an export-led economy, but a socialist government and significant economic and monetary planning distributed resources efficiently to cut poverty quickly and protect the economy from the foreign tribulations of those times with record-soaring inflation. The most significant benchmark in this success was the end of the Malthusian policy of depopulating Malta with thousands of emigrant departures every year. This trend was reversed, eventually making Malta a nation with a net inflow of immigrants over its outflow of emigrants. However, things turned bleak in the 1980s with the collapse of the rule of law, increased violence, corruption, and a government that failed to reform the economy in line with the rapidly changing society.

Sammy Meilak was a shipwright and a prominent trade union leader at Malta’s Drydocks. He is a very intelligent man who writes and reads many books but is known for being a leading pro-Labour and socialist thug and militant in the 1980s. He participated in various violent events and major acts of direct action such as the ransacking of the Curia and the blocking of the HMS Ark Royal from entering the ports of Malta. He gives an eloquent and Marxist justification for the use of violence which he also says is influenced by Christianity. This is basically, the theory that the rule of law does not necessarily provide an ideal or just social pact and that laws can be violently oppressive. This philosophical, political, and legal discussion should, of course, be contextualised in its historical framework.

Sammy Meilak also confirms what I have also found in Labour Party documents and archives, that the pro-Labour thugs and militants of the 1980s were uncontrollable and Mintoff had no control over them: Sammy Meilak even boasts about this fact. There were of course many Labour thugs who were just unprincipled thugs, but Sammy Meilak was always politically and ideologically motivated. He acted at his behest driven by his own conviction and was not pushed around to do as others pleased. So he ca be described as a militant.

I do not agree with Sammy Meilak’s militancy of the 1980s and I have already written about this, but I know where he comes from. Sammy Meilak saw and experienced the difference in the living standards of workers from the 1960s to the 1970s. He also saw and experienced the emancipation of the working class after being humiliated by colonialism and poverty for years on end. Militants like Sammy Meilak fought because they genuinely believed they had to preserve what they gained: gains brought from years of difficult and arduous struggles against the colonialists, the Church, and ultimately the Nationalist Party. It was quite a very long road – these people (the working class) had nothing for years on end and suddenly they ruled the country.

Now, this is history, irrespective of how you see it. My opinion on this history is that had I lived in the 1980s, I would have been against Sammy Meilak and would have preferred a Western-styled free market economy with a rule of law – of course, this was not possible in the 1970s. Economically, Malta in the 1960s could only survive because of mass emigration that peaked at the end of the decade – a Western-styled free market could not work at that time when most of the wealth was being created through government and defence spending. Sammy Meilak was wrong politically in the 1980s but he was also wrong to use violence because he was by then already part of the equivalent of what he used to see in the 1960s, as the ruling class – only that he couldn’t see that he was in such a position of power. Having experienced as a worker being the victim of much bigger forces against him, Sammy Meilak was not aware of the true extent of power and influence that Labour and the working class had by the 1980s – he still felt vulnerable and weak even when in power. And he will say that by hindsight he was right to have felt that vulnerability in those violent moments of the 1980s because today, there is an ever-increasing number of precarious workers and workers are losing many of the economic benefits and living standards they had in the 1980s.

I know exactly how Sammy Meilak thinks because I know socialism very well. I disagree with him on many things, but I’d choose him any day and any time for a beer and conversation over most of the current Labour wax-polished rent-seeking figurines who have never read a book in their life other than their university course book. And I’d also chose him as my babysitter and my second-hand car dealer over most of the other Labourites. It’s obvious. You can disagree with Sammy Meilak on many things, but he is one of the last remaining figureheads who is politically and ideologically motivated instead of being motivated by money and also has a history untainted by corruption and rent-seeking. He is a true socialist with a Marxist reading of politics and you can disagree with that and even find it abhorrent. I can disagree on friendly terms with a socialist like Sammy Meilak and even be on the opposing end of a fight against him, but I can’t hate him for what he stands for. However, I do find abhorrent people like Robert Abela, Silvio Schembri, and Roderick Galdes who have exploited the politics and heritage of people like Sammy Meilak to enrich themselves. I would have felt the same kind of abhorrence to the likes of Lorry Sant who was also corrupt, but at least Lorry Sant had something to show for his evil in his late years in terms of political history and activism: the only history Robert Abela has is that of rent-seeking and money laundering.

Today, after having lost my political party like a sheep that strayed away from the flock, I live like a libertarian petty-capitalist and my politics are accordingly, but of course, I still retain the socialist values driven by empathy for the weak and the oppressed. I agree with Sammy Meilak that we have an ever-growing section of the population that is growing poorer while the other is doing better, and I also agree with him that the Labour Party can change given its heritage. After all, I am a product of Malta’s socialism having benefitted from the wealth and housing that workers could earn in the 1970s and 1980s, and the consequent free healthcare and free education. The welfare state is an essential component in creating a just society by providing essential services for free to those who can’t afford them.

I also don’t see myself as someone who has lost hope in the Labour Party (he said this at the end of the lengthy podcast saying he still has hope for the Labour Party given its heritage). I don’t have hope in the Labour Party as it is and with a prospective future leadership by Miriam Dalli, which is very possible. I would have immediate hope in the Labour Party if the MPs and delegates oust their leader in a coup and bring back the rule of law in the country. The Labour Party is not a political party of values, it is a criminal organisation that has become well-embedded with Malta’s criminal groups and turned our economy into a criminal-enterprise-controlled economy. Changing this system requires a war on organised crime, so any internal change inside Labour that is not radically posed to steer the country in this direction will result in more of the same.

So, it is not just a matter of expanding the welfare state. Structural problems in our society such as precarious work and the housing crisis are exacerbated by our crony capitalism and the way our political system is structured. The political parties’ dependence on the rent-seeking construction industry is a case in point. There is a whole system to change, so although my politics may be different from Meilak’s, like him I am a revolutionary because we both believe that the extent of the changes has to be radically massive.