Adopted unanimously by the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) at

its founding congress in Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011, this document is

vital for a deeper understanding of the problems of development of
the revolutionary movement on the Indian subcontinent. It draws the
critical lessons of the Fourth International's 75-year struggle for
Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution in South Asia. The
founding in 1942 of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI), by
leaders of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) who had escaped
British jails in Ceylon, marked a decisive advance for the Fourth
International in Asia. The document traces the rise, decline and
ultimate betrayal of the LSSP, which joined the 1964 coalition
government of Madame Sirima Bandaranaike, abandoning the
struggle to unify the Tamil and Sinhalese working class, and opening
the road to the bloody 25-year civil war from 1983 to 2009. The
SEP’s forerunner, the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), was
founded in 1968 to draw the necessary political lessons from the
LSSP’s betrayal and to rearm the working class politically on the
basis of the Trotskyist program fought for by the ICFI. The document
sums up the lessons of the RCL’s principled and courageous struggle
against all forms of nationalism and communalism.

Adopted by the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) at its 2011 founding
congress in Colombo, this document depicts the 75-year struggle of the
Fourth International in South Asia for Trotsky’s theory of Permanent
Revolution.

The founding in 1942 of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI), by

leaders of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) who had escaped British
jails in Ceylon, marked a decisive advance for the Fourth International in
Asia. The document traces the rise, decline and ultimate betrayal of the
LSSP, which joined the 1964 coalition government of Madame Sirima
Bandaranaike, abandoning the struggle to unify the Tamil and Sinhalese
working class, and opening the road to the bloody 25-year civil war from
1983 to 2009.
1. Introduction
2. The Theory of Permanent Revolution
3. The formation of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party
4. The LSSP’s turn to the Fourth International
5. The founding of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India
6. The Quit India movement
7. Stalinism betrays post-war revolutionary upheavals
8. The Chinese Revolution
9. The partition of India
10. Formal independence in Sri Lanka
11. The liquidation of the BLPI
12. Pabloite Opportunism
13. The LSSP’s response to the Open Letter
14. The LSSP’s political backsliding
15. The SWP reunification
16. The Great Betrayal in Sri Lanka
17. The formation of the RCL
18. The RCL’s struggle against petty-bourgeois radicalism
19. The political degeneration of the British SLL
20. The collapse of the second coalition government
21. The UNP government and the descent into war
22. The RCL, the WRP and the national question
23. The 1985–1986 split with the WRP
24. After the split with the WRP
25. The United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam
26. The International Perspectives of the ICFI
27. The Collapse of the Soviet Union
28. The RCL and the United Front
29. The RCL and the peasantry
30. The National Question
31. The Socialist Equality Party
32. The World Socialist Web Site
33. The Sri Lankan crisis of 2000
34. War and militarism
35. The crisis of capitalism and the tasks of the SEP
World Socialist Web Site
The Historical and International Foundations
of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 1
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
26 March 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in
Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011. It will be posted in 12 parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
1. Introduction
1-1. The Socialist Equality Party is the Sri Lankan section of the
International Committee of the Fourth International, the world party of
socialist revolution founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. The ICFI
represents the continuation of the political and theoretical struggles waged
by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky for the political independence of the
working class. It is the only political party seeking to mobilise, educate
and unite workers internationally for the overthrow of the outmoded
capitalist system and the reconstruction of society on a socialist basis.
1-2. The onset of the greatest economic breakdown since the Great
Depression of the 1930s, which began with the global financial crash in
2008, signifies that capitalism has entered into a new period of systemic
crisis. In every country, the ruling class seeks to shore up its position by
undermining its international rivals, on the one hand, and by imposing
new burdens on the working class, on the other. The former is greatly
exacerbating global tensions, conflicts and the drive to war, while the
latter is fuelling the class struggle and opening up a new period of
revolutionary upheavals.
1-3. The global crisis is centred in the heart of world capitalism—the
United States. The advanced decay of American capitalism and the rise of
new powers in Asia—especially China—have dramatically sharpened
inter-imperialist rivalries. The reckless attempts by the US to offset its
economic decline through the use of military force have already produced
a series of wars, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, aimed at
establishing an American stranglehold over the energy-rich regions of
Central Asia and the Middle East. These conflicts arise out of the
fundamental contradictions of the profit system—between the world
economy and the outmoded nation-state system and between socialised
production and private ownership of the means of production. The
globalisation of production has raised these contradictions to a new pitch
of intensity.
1-4. The rise of China, and to a lesser extent India, over the past two
decades has dramatically shifted the centre of gravity of world politics
towards Asia. China has risen from the world’s 10th largest economy in
1990 to overtake Japan in 2010 and become the second largest after the
US. China’s burgeoning industries compel it to import vast quantities of
raw materials, including oil and gas from the Middle East and Africa.
China is building a blue-water navy to secure its shipping lanes, bringing
© World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
it into competition in the Indian Ocean with Japan, India and above all,
the US. Every corner of Asia, including Sri Lanka, is caught up in this
rivalry that is leading inexorably to a catastrophic conflict. Unlike the first
two world wars that focussed on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, a new
conflagration is likely to be centred in the Indian Ocean.
1-5. Asia is destined to become a vast arena not only of inter-imperialist
rivalries but also of the social revolution. Economic expansion has created
huge new battalions of the working class. China alone has an urban
workforce of 400 million. Moreover, the social gulf between rich and
poor has widened in every country. China, which has the second largest
number of billionaires in the world, also has at least 250 million people
living below the poverty line. In India, obscene wealth exists alongside
the world’s greatest concentration of poverty. None of these immense
social contradictions can be resolved on the basis of capitalism. The sharp
deterioration of living standards since 2008, as governments imposed the
costs of the crisis on working people, has already propelled millions into
struggle in Europe and in Tunisia, Egypt and the Middle East. It will drive
workers throughout Asia and internationally to fight for decent living
standards and democratic rights and against militarism and war. These
struggles must be integrated into a global counteroffensive by the working
class to abolish the bankrupt profit system and its outmoded nation- state
system and replace it with a world-planned socialist economy.
1-6. The bitter lesson of the twentieth century, however, is that the
working class cannot spontaneously take power. That requires the
building of revolutionary leaderships based on an assimilation of all of the
critical historical experiences of the working class. The International
Committee of the Fourth International is the embodiment of the lessons
derived from the protracted struggle of Trotskyism against Stalinism and
all forms of opportunism. That rich legacy is summed up in The
Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party
adopted by the SEP (United States), which also constitutes the basis of the
political work of the SEP in Sri Lanka.
2. The Theory of Permanent Revolution
2-1. Central to a scientific, that is a Marxist, revolutionary perspective is
Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution—an integrated
conception of world socialist revolution that encompasses the backward
colonial and semi-colonial countries as well as the advanced ones. First
formulated in the wake of the 1905 revolution in Russia, the Theory of
Permanent Revolution was developed in opposition to the two-stage
perspective of the Menshevik faction of Russian Social Democracy. The
Mensheviks held that Russia must first undergo a prolonged period of
capitalist development before the socialist revolution was possible. They
concluded therefore that the proletariat had to ally itself with the liberal
bourgeoisie in carrying out the basic tasks of the democratic
revolution—the destruction of the Czarist autocracy and the radical
transformation of land relations in rural areas.
2-2. Trotsky, along with Lenin, demonstrated the organic incapacity of
the Russian bourgeoisie—dependent on international finance capital, tied
to the rural landlords and fearful of the emerging working class—to carry
out the democratic tasks. Trotsky and Lenin both foresaw that the natural
ally of the proletariat against the Czarist autocracy was the
multi-millioned peasantry. But Lenin’s formula of a “democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”, while imparting a
particularly radical character to the democratic revolution, left unresolved
the political relationship between the two classes. Notwithstanding the
daring nature of his conceptions, Lenin did not regard the democratic
dictatorship as the instrument for the socialist reorganisation of society,
but rather as the means for giving the fullest scope to the development of
capitalism.
2-3. Trotsky’s conclusions went further. On the basis of an examination
of the entire historical record, he insisted that the peasantry was unable to
play any independent revolutionary role. Given the inability of the
bourgeoisie to resolve the democratic tasks, it fell to the proletariat at the
head of the insurgent masses to carry out the bourgeois democratic
revolution through the establishment of “a dictatorship of the proletariat
that leads the peasant masses behind it.” The essential ingredient was a
vigorous and consistent struggle by the revolutionary party for the
political independence of the working class from all factions of the
bourgeoisie. Having seized power, however, the proletariat would of
necessity be compelled to carry out the revolutionary tasks through its
own class methods, and would inevitably make deep inroads into the
private ownership of the means of production. In other words, it would be
forced to begin the reorganisation of society on socialist lines, and in
doing so link its fate to the European and world socialist revolution.
2-4. Trotsky’s theory of the class dynamics of the Russian Revolution
flowed from his conception of the world socialist revolution as an
integrated, though not simultaneous, process. The social revolution in
Russia could not be confined to one country, but, would be compelled for
its survival to extend onto the international stage. “The conquest of power
by the proletariat does not complete the revolution, but only opens it.
Socialist construction is conceivable only on the foundation of the class
struggle, on a national and international scale. This struggle, under
conditions of an overwhelming predominance of capitalist relationships
on the world arena, must inevitably lead to explosions, that is, internally
to civil wars and externally to revolutionary wars. Therein lies the
permanent character of the socialist revolution as such, regardless of
whether it is a backward country that is involved, which only yesterday
accomplished its democratic revolution, or an old capitalist country,
which already has behind it a long epoch of democracy and
parliamentarism.” [1]
2-5. The revolutionary events of 1917 in Russia verified Trotsky’s
Theory of Permanent Revolution in all its essentials. On his return from
exile in April 1917, Lenin took sharp issue with the Bolshevik leaders,
including Stalin, who were giving critical support to the bourgeois
Provisional Government which had formed after the overthrow of the
Czar in February. In his April Theses, Lenin broke from his formula of
the democratic dictatorship and in practice adopted the standpoint of
Permanent Revolution. He called for the working class to oppose the
Provisional Government and to take power through the workers’
councils, or Soviets, that emerged with the fall of the Czar. Lenin’s
reorientation of the Bolshevik Party laid the basis for the October
Revolution of 1917 and the establishment of a Soviet government, which
gave a mighty impetus to the processes of world socialist revolution.
2-6. The Chinese Revolution of 1925–27 also confirmed the
farsightedness of the Theory of Permanent Revolution in countries of
belated capitalist development, albeit tragically and in the negative. The
© World Socialist Web Site
defeat of the Chinese Revolution was above all the responsibility of the
Soviet bureaucracy headed by Stalin, which had arisen in conditions of
the continued isolation and backwardness of the Soviet Union, and
usurped power from the working class. Under the banner of “Socialism in
One Country”, the Stalinist bureaucracy increasingly transformed the
Third International from the organising centre of the world socialist
revolution into a pliant tool of Soviet foreign policy and used the
communist parties to manoeuvre with bourgeois parties and governments.
In China, Stalin revived the Menshevik two-stage theory, insisting that
imperialist oppression compelled the national bourgeoisie to play a
revolutionary role. His subordination of the young Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) to the bourgeois Kuomintang (KMT), which he hailed as the
vanguard of the Chinese Revolution, resulted in crushing defeats for the
revolutionary movement—first in Shanghai in April 1927 at the hands of
KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek, and then in Wuhan by the “left” KMT
government in July 1927.
2-7. Trotsky and the Left Opposition, formed in 1923 to politically
combat the Stalinist bureaucracy, subjected Stalin’s policies to a
withering critique and in doing so enriched the Theory of Permanent
Revolution. Trotsky, who had strenuously fought for the political
independence of the CCP from the KMT, explained that imperialism did
not weld the national bourgeoisie together with the proletariat, the
peasantry and intelligentsia into a revolutionary “bloc of four classes” as
Stalin claimed. Trotsky wrote: “[E]verything that brings the oppressed
and exploited masses of the toilers to their feet inevitably pushes the
national bourgeoisie into an open bloc with the imperialists. The class
struggle between the bourgeoisie and the masses of workers and peasants
is not weakened, but, on the contrary, it is sharpened by imperialist
oppression, to the point of bloody civil war at every point.”[2] As the
revolutionary tide ebbed in 1927, Stalin criminally ordered the mutilated
CCP in Canton and other cities to improvise insurrections that were
doomed to defeat. The Canton Commune was timed to coincide with the
Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—to
demonstrate Stalin’s “revolutionary” credentials as he expelled the Left
Opposition en masse and sent Trotsky into exile.
2-8. In the course of the twentieth century, the subordination of the
working class to the so-called “progressive” bourgeoisie under the banner
of the “two-stage theory” and the “bloc of four classes” has invariably
ended in disastrous defeat. At the same time, the Stalinists and their
apologists have waged a relentless campaign of vilification against
Trotskyism in general and the Theory of Permanent Revolution in
particular. However, Trotsky’s astonishing theoretical insights more than
a century ago remain the essential guide for workers and youth seeking a
revolutionary road forward. Nowhere has the struggle for the Theory of
Permanent Revolution been more thoroughly fought out than in Sri
Lanka. The rich strategic experiences of the struggle for Trotskyism on
this small island, embodied in the SEP, provide vital lessons for the
building of mass revolutionary parties throughout Asia, Africa, Latin
America and around the world.
3. The formation of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party
3-1. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) was founded in December
1935 by members of the Youth Leagues in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) which
had opposed the limited constitutional reform of 1931 that provided for an
elected State Council to advise the British colonial administration.
Inspired by the mass independence movement in India, the Youth
Leagues not only demanded an end to British rule, but, amid the social
distress caused by the Great Depression, turned towards socialism.
3-2. The Youth Leagues had struck roots among workers and the rural
poor. They challenged the control of A.E. Goonesinha over the trade
union movement in Colombo, most effectively in the 1933 strike at the
Wellawatte Spinning and Weaving Mills. Goonesinha had led significant
union struggles in the 1920s, but in the 1930s, under conditions of mass
unemployment, functioned as a strike breaker and purveyor of
anti-immigrant and anti-Tamil racism. In 1934, the Youth Leagues
launched a broad campaign to assist the victims of a malaria epidemic,
which, compounded by the malnutrition caused by falling incomes and
poor harvests, caused at least 100,000 deaths.
3-3. From the outset, the LSSP contained diverse elements. Its
formation took place against the backdrop of mounting reaction centred in
Europe. Hitler had come to power in 1933 in Germany as a result of the
criminal policies of Stalin and the Third International whose ultra-left
“Third Period” line, adopted in 1928, split and paralysed the German
working class. In opposition to the Stalinist policy of denouncing the
Social Democratic Party (SPD) as “social fascists”, Trotsky had fought
for a united front of the German Communist Party and the SPD. The
tactic of the united front was based on unity in action around concrete
objectives, without any mixing of political programs, slogans or banners.
Its purpose was to mobilise the strength of the working class against the
Nazis and their storm troopers, while exposing the perfidy of the Social
Democratic leadership. After the coming to power of the Nazis failed to
provoke any criticism of Stalin’s policies within the Third International,
Trotsky concluded that the working class must turn to the building of a
new international—the Fourth International.
3-4. Prominent in the LSSP leadership was a layer of brilliant young
people who had studied in America and Britain. Amid the intellectual
ferment produced by the political upheavals in Europe and internationally,
they were strongly influenced by Trotsky’s writings. The foremost among
these was Philip Gunawardena, who studied in America before moving to
Britain in 1928. He joined the British Communist Party but was expelled
after criticising Stalin’s policies in India and China. Those who were part
of his circle included Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene, N.M.
Perera and Vernon Gunasekere.
3-5. The LSSP, however, also included Stalinist sympathisers and
radical bourgeois nationalists. This mixed membership was reflected in
the party’s amorphous program. Its manifesto declared that the party’s
fundamental aim was the establishment of a socialist society through “the
socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange of
commodities.” It called for “the attainment of national independence” and
“the abolition of economic and political inequality and oppression arising
from differences of class, race, caste, creed and sex.” But the program did
not identify the LSSP as a party of the working class nor did it elaborate a
revolutionary program for achieving socialism. It made no attempt to
address any of the issues confronting the international working class,
above all, the emergence of Stalinism and its betrayals.
3-6. The emergence of the LSSP as a radical, anti-colonial party
oriented to the toilers was a product of the economic backwardness of the
Sri Lankan capitalist class and its political servility to British colonial
rule. Even compared to the local capitalists in India who were prominent
in the textile, jute, coal and steel industries, their counterparts in Sri Lanka
played a minor economic role. The tea plantations—the dominant and most
profitable industry—were British-owned. The main transport
infrastructure—the docks and railways—had been built by British capital.
The Sri Lankan bourgeoisie filled the less profitable gaps in the colonial
economy—accumulating capital through their employment as servants of
the colonial state, the farming of liquor rents, and their ownership of
rubber and coconut estates and graphite mines.
3-7. Politics followed economics. The Ceylon National Congress (CNC)
formed in 1919 was a pale reflection of the Indian National Congress
(INC) established by the Indian bourgeoisie in 1885. Whereas the INC
called for self-government as early as 1907 and in the aftermath of World
War I launched mass campaigns for self-rule, the CNC was capable only
of the most timid appeals for constitutional change. The CNC had far
more in common with the backward-looking communal organisations of
© World Socialist Web Site
India—the Muslim League founded in 1907 and the All India Hindu
Mahasabha in 1915—that, insofar as they opposed British rule at all, did so
from the standpoint of preserving the privileges of the traditional Muslim
and Hindu elites. In Sri Lanka, the CNC rested on the Buddhist revivalism
of the Sinhala elites who were hostile to the island’s Tamil and Muslim
minorities. The CNC split on communal lines in 1921 when the leadership
refused to accede to the demands of its president, prominent Tamil leader
Ponnambalam Arunachalam, over Tamil representation. The
organisations of the Tamil and Muslim elites in Sri Lanka distinguished
themselves from the CNC only by their even greater subservience to
British rule.
3-8. The abiding fear of all sections of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie was
the emergence of a powerful, combative working class. The proletariat
was concentrated in the tea plantations to which Tamil-speaking workers
had been brought from southern India as indentured labour. By 1921,
plantation workers and their families numbered around 500,000 out of the
island’s total population of 4.5 million. An urban proletariat also
developed in Colombo especially in the docks, railway workshops and
emerging industries. In India, the INC under Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi sought in a limited and tightly-controlled manner to appeal to the
anti-colonial sentiment and socio-economic grievances of the masses, so
as to pressure the British for concessions. In Sri Lanka, the CNC did not
call for independence from British rule and waged no public campaigns
for either political or social reforms. Its organic hostility to the masses
was reflected in its fierce opposition to the introduction of universal
suffrage on the recommendation of the British government’s
Donoughmore Commission as part of the 1931 constitutional reform.
3-9. Thus, in the 1930s, as layers of the intelligentsia were radicalised
by the oppressive conditions in Sri Lanka, the political upheavals in
Europe and the growing danger of war, their views found no outlet within
the Colombo political establishment. Unlike India, no Communist Party
had formed in Sri Lanka. The only party based on the working class was
the Labour Party formed in 1928 by the Colombo trade union boss
Goonesinha under the tutelage of the British Labour Party. It did not
support independence or advocate socialism and was deeply hostile to
Marxism. The LSSP thus became the political home for various
tendencies—those who were drawn towards Trotskyism, as well as militant
bourgeois nationalists and reformers for whom a socialistic or even
Marxist colouration was a necessary means of approaching the masses.
3-10. It was a measure of the extreme class tensions at the time in Sri
Lanka and internationally that those who were thrust into the LSSP
leadership were the most audacious and revolutionary elements oriented
to the working class—the so-called Trotskyist-group or T-group. Colvin R.
de Silva became the LSSP’s first president and Leslie Goonewardene its
first secretary. Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera were elected to the
State Council in February 1936 and used their position to emphatically
declare the LSSP’s opposition to any support for Britain in the looming
world war. The LSSP gained support in the Colombo working class
through its determined defence of basic rights and conditions in the teeth
of violent opposition by Goonesinha and his union apparatus. The failure
of bourgeois parties to advocate, let alone fight for, even limited social
reforms or democratic rights, including freedom from colonial rule, meant
that those tasks fell to the emerging representatives of the proletariat. The
LSSP campaigned for and won a series of partial reforms, including
changes to the oppressive village headman system, the use of local
languages in the courts and unemployment relief.
3-11. In 1937, the LSSP sponsored a tour by prominent Congress
Socialist Party leader Kamaladevi Chattopadyaya from India, who
addressed a rally of 35,000 people at Galle Face Green in Colombo. A
young Australian, Mark Bracegirdle, a planter’s apprentice who had
joined the LSSP, spoke alongside her in the plantation areas, denouncing
the exploitation of tea estate workers. The colonial administration’s
attempt to deport Bracegirdle turned into a David and Goliath
confrontation with the LSSP that electrified the island. In the face of
overwhelming public opposition, a censure of the governor in the State
Council and a Supreme Court order against the deportation, the colonial
authorities were compelled to retreat, greatly enhancing the LSSP’s
political stature.
3-12. However, the most fundamental issues facing the LSSP were
bound up with international events. From its founding in 1935, the LSSP
had taken no public stand on the life-and-death political struggle being
waged by Trotsky and his co-thinkers against Stalinism and for the
building of the Fourth International. Its only international affiliation was
with the Congress Socialist Party in India, formed in 1934 as a loose
socialistic faction within the INC. However, between 1935 and 1939, the
LSSP leadership was increasingly driven into conflict with the Stalinist
Third International and was compelled to grapple with the decisive
international issues of the period. The so-called T-group was deeply
disturbed by the Popular Front politics advocated by Stalin that resulted in
devastating defeats in the 1930s of the semi-insurrectionary French strike
movement and the Spanish revolution. The “Popular Front” was the
diametrical opposite of the United Front that Trotsky had advocated in
Germany. In the name of the fight against fascism and the defence of
democracy, it involved a common political platform with opportunist and
openly bourgeois parties that shackled the working class to the
bourgeoisie, private property and the state, and blocked its independent
revolutionary activity. As part of the Popular Front policy and its
manoeuvres with the “democratic” powers of France and Britain, the
Stalinist bureaucracy abandoned the Third International’s previous
support for full independence for the colonies of those countries; and, in
doing so, betrayed the developing anti-colonial revolution.
3-13. Privately the LSSP leadership was hostile to the monstrous
Moscow Show Trials of 1936–1938 that were targeted at the Trotskyist
movement but also served as the pretext for the systematic murder of
hundreds of thousands of socialists, including Bolshevik leaders, Red
Army commanders, scientists and artists—the finest representatives of the
generation that had carried out the Russian Revolution. The LSSP leaders
were also strongly influenced by Trotsky’s profound analysis of Stalinism
in The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It
Going?, which first became available in English in 1938. It was, however,
the outbreak of World War II that proved decisive in the LSSP’s turn to
Trotskyism and the establishment of a section of the Fourth International
in India and Sri Lanka.
To be continued
Footnotes:
1. Leon Trotsky, Permanent Revolution (London: New Park
Publications, 1971) pp. 154–55.
2. Leon Trotsky, “The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade
Stalin” in Leon Trotsky on China (New York: Monad Press, 1976) p. 161.

To contact the WSWS and the

Socialist Equality Party visit:

http://www.wsws.org

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World Socialist Web Site
The Historical and International Foundations
of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 2
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
27 March 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in
Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011. It appears in 12 parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
4. The LSSP’s turn to the Fourth International
4-1. The Fourth International was founded at a secret meeting held in
Paris in September 1938 of 30 delegates from 11 countries. Although
unable to send delegates, three Asian parties—in China, French Indochina,
and Australia—affiliated as sections of the Fourth International. The
Transitional Program: The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of
the Fourth International written by Trotsky and adopted at the conference
declared: “All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet
‘ripened’ for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious
deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have
not only ‘ripened’; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a
socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe
threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn now is to the proletariat,
i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind
is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”[3] The program
outlined “a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s
conditions and today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class
and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by
the proletariat.”[4] The transitional demands were to develop the
revolutionary initiative and consciousness of the working class, not to
water down the program to the existing consciousness of workers.
4-2. The founding document succinctly summed up the perspective of
Permanent Revolution based on the combined and uneven development of
capitalism: “Colonial and semicolonial countries are backward countries
by their very essence. But backward countries are part of a world
dominated by imperialism. Their development, therefore, has a combined
character: the most primitive economic forms are combined with the last
word in capitalist technique and culture. In like manner are defined the
political strivings of the proletariat in the backward countries: the struggle
for the most elementary achievements of national independence and
bourgeois democracy is combined with the socialist struggle against
world imperialism. Democratic slogans, transitional demands, and the
problems of socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical
epochs in this struggle, but stem directly from one another.”[5]
4-3. In a letter to Indian workers in July 1939, Trotsky further
elaborated on the political issues they faced in the impending war.
“Agents of the British government depict the matter as though the war
will be waged for the principles of ‘democracy’ which must be saved
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wsws.org
from fascism. All the classes and peoples must rally around the
‘peaceful’, ‘democratic’ governments so as to repel fascist aggressors.
The ‘democracy’ will be saved and peace stabilised forever. This gospel
rests on a deliberate lie. If the British government were really concerned
with the flowering of democracy then a very simple opportunity to
demonstrate this exists: let the government give complete freedom to
India.”[6] While not minimising the danger of fascism, Trotsky insisted
that the main enemy of oppressed classes and peoples was at home. In
India, that meant British imperialism whose overthrow would deliver a
massive blow to all oppressors, including the fascist dictators.
4-4. Trotsky was scathing in his appraisal of the Indian bourgeoisie:
“They are closely bound up with and dependent upon British capitalism.
They tremble for their own property. They stand in fear of the masses.
They seek compromises with British imperialism no matter what the
price, and lull the Indian masses with hopes of reforms from above. The
leader and prophet of this bourgeoisie is Gandhi. A fake leader and a false
prophet! Gandhi and his compeers have developed a theory that India’s
position will constantly improve, that her liberties will continue to be
enlarged, and that India will gradually become a Dominion on the road of
peaceful reforms. Later on, perhaps even achieve independence. The
entire perspective is false to the core.”[7]
4-5. Turning to the role of Stalinism, Trotsky explained that as in other
countries, the Soviet bureaucracy subordinated the interests of the Indian
masses to its diplomatic manoeuvres with the “democratic
powers”—advocating the right to self-determination for peoples under
fascist domination, but continued subjugation for the colonies of Britain,
France and America. To wage a struggle against British imperialism and
the approaching war meant a complete break with Stalinism. That was
precisely the issue that confronted the LSSP leaders who turned towards
the Fourth International. Selina Perera was sent to Britain and the United
States in 1939 to make contact with Trotskyist leaders in Europe and
North America and, though the attempt failed, to meet with Trotsky.
4-6. In December 1939, the Trotskyist faction threw down the gauntlet
to supporters of Stalinism within the LSSP by moving the following
motion in the LSSP’s Executive Committee: “Since the Third
International has not acted in the interests of the international
revolutionary working class movement, while expressing its solidarity
with the Soviet Union, the first workers’ state, the Lanka Sama Samaja
Party declares that it has no faith in the Third International.” The motion
was passed 29 to 5. The Stalinists and their supporters broke from the
party, forming the United Socialist Party in November 1940 and then the
Ceylon Communist Party in July 1943.
4-7. Leslie Goonewardene wrote a critique of Stalinism entitled: “The
Third International Condemned,” in which he highlighted the opportunist
shifts of the Communist parties in Britain and France in 1939 from
support for the imperialist war to opposition to it. He pointed out that the
wild political swings were dictated by the about-face in the Kremlin from
unprincipled manoeuvres with the “democratic powers”—Britain and
France—to the signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact in August 1939. He
concluded: “The Second International betrayed the working class in the
war of 1914–18. Today the Third International, by subordinating the
international revolutionary movement to Soviet Union foreign policy, is
committing another betrayal. It is our duty to point out this fact.”[8]
4-8. The breakaway by the Stalinists and the LSSP’s turn to the Fourth
International marked a decisive shift in its class axis and the political
reorientation of the party on the basis of the Theory of Permanent
Revolution. Above all, the LSSP leaders recognised that the fight against
imperialist oppression and for socialism in Sri Lanka was indissolubly
bound up with struggles of the working class in India and internationally.
In a farsighted step, the LSSP called for the formation of an all-India
party as a section of the Fourth International to integrate the struggles of
workers throughout the subcontinent against British imperialism. In
accordance with this strategic turn, the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India
(BLPI) was founded in 1942. The available histories of the LSSP,
reflecting its subsequent degeneration in the 1950s, either ignore the
experience of the BLPI or treat it as a hopeless adventure in revolutionary
romanticism. But it was precisely in its break from the radical, nationalist
outlook of Samasamajism and its reorientation on the basis of proletarian
internationalism that the BLPI made an indelible contribution to the
struggle for Marxism in South Asia and internationally that continues to
hold crucial political and theoretical lessons for workers and youth today.
4-9. With the approach of war, Stalin set out to destroy the
newly-established Fourth International and, above all, to eliminate
Trotsky himself. Stalin feared that the revolutionary convulsions, which
the war would necessarily produce, would immensely strengthen the
Trotskyist movement, including in the Soviet Union, posing a direct
challenge to the Soviet bureaucracy. Prior to the founding of the Fourth
International, the GPU, aided by a network of agents planted inside the
Trotskyist movement, murdered Erwin Wolf, one of Trotsky’s
secretaries; Ignace Reiss, a defector from the GPU who declared his
support for Trotsky; Trotsky’s son and close collaborator Leon Sedov;
and Rudolf Klement, secretary of the Fourth International. After a failed
assassination attempt in May 1940, Trotsky was assaulted by GPU agent
Ramon Mercader on August 20, 1940 in his home in Coyoacán, Mexico,
and died the following day. Trotsky’s assassination was the political
crime of the century and a profound blow to the international working
class. He was the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution, the
irreconcilable opponent of Stalinism, and the last and greatest
representative of the traditions of classical Marxism that had inspired the
mass revolutionary workers’ movement of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
5. The founding of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India
5-1. From the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939 between Britain
and France, on one side, and Nazi Germany and its allies on the other, the
LSSP categorically opposed any support for the war. When CNC leader
D.S. Senanayake moved a resolution in the State Council giving
“whole-hearted support” to the British government, Philip Gunawardena
denounced the war between the two imperialist camps, declaring: “We
refuse to be a part of any imperialist war. We are against all imperialist
wars and exploitation. The class struggle has refused to stop because a
country is at war.”[9] The LSSP played the leading role in a wave of
strikes among plantation workers that began at the Mooloya Estate in
December 1939 where police shot dead a tea factory worker, Govindan.
As the strikes spread, culminating in the formation of a workers’ council
on the Wewessa Estate in May 1940, prominent planters demanded action
against the LSSP, warning “that the aggravating situation in Ceylon might
© World Socialist Web Site
lead towards bloodshed and rioting … with undoubted repercussions of the
utmost seriousness in India.” Police unleashed a reign of terror throughout
the tea estates. On June 18, just days after the fall of Paris to the Nazi
armies, the LSSP was banned and four leaders—Philip Gunawardena,
N.M. Perera, Colvin R. de Silva and Edmund Samarakkody—were
arrested. The party had already made preparations for illegality and
continued to function in Sri Lanka throughout the war, despite the
imposition of martial law.
5-2. In May 1940, the LSSP began sending members to India to contact
groups of Trotskyist sympathisers and lay the groundwork for an all-India
party. The LSSP gained the support of three groupings—in Calcutta led by
Ajit Kumar Mukherji Roy and Kamalesh Banerji; in the industrial city of
Kanpur led by Onkarnath Verma Shastri; and in Bombay led by
Chandravadan Shukla. Both Shastri and Shukla had been members of the
Communist Party of India (CPI) but opposed the turn to Popular Frontism
and broke from the party in the late 1930s. Under conditions of illegality,
the LSSP convened two secret meetings in Kandy in December 1940 and
March 1941 to lay the basis for a single Trotskyist party of India, Burma
and Ceylon. Both meetings were attended by the jailed LSSP leaders, who
had recruited their jailer. The second involved delegates from India.
Recognising that a politically explosive situation with profound
revolutionary implications was developing in India, most LSSP leaders
moved to the mainland. On April 7 1942, the four LSSP leaders walked
out of their Kandy prison, with their jailer, and successfully evaded a
police dragnet to reach India. In May 1942, a meeting of LSSP and Indian
Trotskyist leaders formally established the Bolshevik Leninist Party of
India (BLPI), adopted a program and sought affiliation to the Fourth
International.
5-3. The founding of the BLPI represented a milestone in the struggle
for revolutionary Marxism in South Asia. Nothing that they subsequently
did can detract from the achievement of the BLPI leaders in introducing
Trotskyism into the Indian subcontinent. In marked contrast to the
LSSP’s amorphous 1935 platform with its limited call for socialism in Sri
Lanka, the BLPI’s program was firmly rooted in proletarian
internationalism. It was based on the recognition that the struggle against
imperialist oppression and for socialism in Sri Lanka was completely
bound up with socialist revolution in India and internationally. The
program made a comprehensive analysis of British rule in India, the
emergence of capitalism, the role of the various classes and of all the
political parties, and elaborated a series of transitional demands based on
the founding program of the Fourth International.
5-4. The BLPI exposed the politics of compromise of the Indian
National Congress, its close connection to the landlords and its betrayal of
the mass civil disobedience movements of the early 1920s and 1930s.
Turning to Gandhi’s “non-violence”, it explained that through this
doctrine “the bourgeoisie have attempted to ensure their control of the
national movement by restricting the form and scope of the struggle and
insuring against its moving into revolutionary channels.” The BLPI
denounced as “flagrant deception” the attempts of the Stalinists to justify
their collaboration with the INC by declaring it to be a multi-class party.
Congress was, it warned, above all in its political leadership, akin to the
bourgeois Kuomintang in China that crushed the 1925–27 revolution.
5-5. The close connection of the Indian bourgeoisie to the landlords
meant that Congress was organically incapable of meeting even the most
elementary needs of the peasantry. “The leadership of the revolution,
which the peasantry cannot provide for itself, can come only from an
urban class. But the Indian bourgeoisie cannot possibly provide this
leadership, since in the first place, it is reactionary through and through on
the land question itself, sharing as it does so largely in the parasitic
exploitation of the peasantry. Above all, the bourgeoisie, on account of its
inherent weakness and dependence on imperialism itself, is destined to
play a counter-revolutionary role in the coming struggle for power.”[10]
The BLPI elaborated a series of demands starting with “the abolition of
landlordism without compensation” and including the slogans “land to the
tillers of the soil” and the “liquidation of agricultural indebtedness” as the
means for mobilising the peasantry, particularly its most oppressed layers,
behind the working class in the struggle for power.
5-6. The BLPI exposed the role of the CPI, founded in 1920, which had
been thoroughly corrupted by Stalinism. As it had done in China, the
Comintern instructed the CPI in the 1920s to pursue an alliance with the
so-called “revolutionary” sections of the bourgeoisie, organised in the
Indian National Congress. With a view to prodding Congress to the left,
the CPI was further directed to focus its energies on building “dual class”
worker and peasant parties with a bourgeois-democratic program, thereby
further eroding its class independence and rendering it incapable of boldly
fighting for the leadership of the working class. In the early 1930s,
following the Third Period line, the CPI coupled continued advocacy of
the Stalinist-Menshevik two-stage theory of revolution with rhetorical
denunciations of the Indian National Congress. It stood aloof from the
second mass civil disobedience movement, refusing to directly challenge
the Congress leadership. With the turn to the Popular Front in the
mid-1930s, the CPI even more openly and crudely promoted the INC as
the protagonist of the struggle against British rule, even as Congress
accepted the 1935 constitutional reforms and became a partner in colonial
rule by forming ministries in a majority of the provinces of British India.
The latter part of the 1930s saw a militant upsurge of the working class
that came into open conflict with the Congress ministries, and a wave of
peasant struggles, including the rapid growth of Kisan Sabhas (peasant
associations). The Stalinists strove to harness these movements to the
INC, constraining the struggles of the working class to economic demands
and dropping the call for the abolition of the zamindari landlord system
for fear it would lead to a confrontation with the Congress leadership.
5-7. After the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939, the CPI
shifted from support for the “democratic” powers against fascism to
opposition to the war. In another about-face following the Nazi invasion
of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the CPI gave its full support to Britain
and acted as the chief strike-breaker and advocate of the imperialist war in
the working class. Summing up the CPI’s treachery, the BLPI declared:
“Today, this attitude is the most shameful and callous of all, since in
servile obedience to the counterrevolutionary Kremlin clique, they are
openly advocating unconditional and active support of the imperialist war.
With its false theory of the National Front, the CPI is making ready to
repeat the betrayal of the Chinese Revolution by handing over the
leadership of the revolutionary struggle to the treacherous bourgeoisie.
The Communist Party of India, because of the prestige it seeks to obtain
from the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, is today the most
dangerous influence within the working class of India.[11]
5-8. Turning to the Congress Socialist Party, the BLPI declared that it
had “from the beginning followed a policy of utter subservience to the
Congress bourgeoisie, and remains today completely without a base
within the working class. Surrendering its claim to an independent
existence, the CSP has been split wide open by the Communists who
worked within it, and is today an empty shell, devoid of political
substance.” It insisted that only the BLPI, “with its revolutionary strategy
based on the accumulated experience of history and the theory of
Permanent Revolution in particular, can lead the working class to
revolutionary victory.”[12]
5-9. The BLPI firmly supported the Fourth International’s defence of
the Soviet Union against imperialist intrigue and attack. On the outbreak
of World War II, Trotsky had waged a political struggle against a faction
inside the American section, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), led by
Max Shachtman, James Burnham and Martin Abern, who argued that the
Soviet Union could no longer be considered a degenerated workers’ state
and that the Fourth International should not call for its defence in the
© World Socialist Web Site
event of it being drawn into the war. The USSR, however, still rested on
the nationalised property relations established by the Russian Revolution
despite the impact of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its betrayals. Behind
Burnham’s redefinition of the Soviet Union as “bureaucratic
collectivism” was the pessimistic conclusion that it represented a new
form of society, not foreseen by Marxism, dominated and run by a
managerial elite. This acceptance of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a
permanent feature of society, rather than a temporary, cancerous
excrescence on the workers’ state, flowed from a rejection of the
revolutionary role of the working class and the nature of the imperialist
epoch as the death agony of capitalism. The arguments advanced by
Burnham and Shachtman were to foreshadow a long line of attacks on
Marxism that emerged after World War II. While their conclusions varied,
all of these revisionist groupings—whether in the form of various theories
of “state capitalism” or Michel Pablo’s “centuries of deformed workers’
states”—regarded the Stalinist regimes as having historical validity and
wrote off the working class as a revolutionary force.
To be continued
Footnotes:
3. Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution
(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977) p. 112.
4. Emphasis in the original; ibid, p. 114.
5. Emphasis in the original; ibid, p. 137.
6. Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939–40) (New York: Pathfinder Press,
2001) pp. 29–30.
7. Ibid, pp. 30-31.
8. Blows Against the Empire: Trotskyism in Ceylon the Lanka Sama
Samaja Party, 1935–1964 (London: Porcupine Press: Socialist Platform,
1997) pp. 64–67.
9. Quoted in George Jan Lerski, Origins of Trotskyism in Ceylon: a
documentary history of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, 1935–1942
(Stanford: Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, 1968) p.
206.
10. Charles Wesley Ervin, Tomorrow is Ours: The Trotskyist Movement
in India and Ceylon, 1935–48 (Colombo: Social Scientists Association,
2006) p. 300.
11. Ibid., Appendix B, p. 304.
12. Ibid., p. 305.
To contact the WSWS and the
Socialist Equality Party visit:
http://www.wsws.org
World Socialist Web Site
The Historical and International Foundations
of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 3
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
28 March 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in
Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011. It appears in 12 parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
6. The Quit India movement
6-1. The BLPI’s anticipation of a political upheaval in India proved
correct. Within months of its formation, the tumultuous Quit India
movement erupted in August 1942. Congress had formally opposed the
war and its ministers had resigned their posts in the autumn of 1939, but
its opposition had been limited to token individual civil disobedience.
Following the outbreak of war in the Pacific, Gandhi and the Congress
leaders calculated that the imminent danger of a Japanese invasion of
India gave them greater leverage with the British. Under conditions of
mounting socio-economic dislocation caused by India’s subordination to
the British war effort, Congress sought to pre-empt the emergence of
mass unrest. On August 7, the Congress Working Committee deliberated
before huge crowds at the Gowalia Tank Maidan, a large open area in
central Bombay, on a resolution that called for mass non-violent struggle
for “orderly British withdrawal.” In what became a major political blow
to the CPI, the Stalinist members of the Working Committee publicly
opposed the resolution.
6-2. The BLPI circulated its leaflets at the Bombay meeting, supporting
any anti-imperialist struggle that Congress launched and calling for “a
mass general political strike against British imperialism”, backed by rural
no-tax and no-rent campaigns leading up to the seizure of land by peasant
committees. In doing so, the BLPI was following the advice contained in
Trotsky’s letter to Indian workers: “In the event that the Indian
bourgeoisie finds itself compelled to take even the tiniest step on the road
of struggle against the arbitrary rule of Great Britain, the proletariat will
naturally support such a step. But they will support it with their own
methods: mass meetings, bold slogans, strikes, demonstrations, and more
decisive combat actions, depending on the relationship of forces and the
circumstances. Precisely to do this must the proletariat have its hands free.
Complete independence from the bourgeoisie is indispensable to the
proletariat, above all in order to exert influence on the peasantry, the
predominant mass of India’s population.”[13]
6-3. Despite his rousing “Do or Die!” speech on August 8, Gandhi’s
expectation was that the resolution would force the viceroy to open talks.
However, the British responded by detaining the entire Congress
leadership—a move that unleashed a wave of angry protests and strikes in
many parts of the country. The Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha
joined the CPI in supporting the suppression of the protests. With top
© World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
Congress leaders including Gandhi in jail, the Congress Socialists
assumed the leadership of the movement, but had no perspective for
taking power. They made no orientation to the working class and instead
indulged in futile acts of sabotage and peasant guerrillaism. The BLPI
threw itself into the protests, turning to sections of workers and students,
and participating in or organising demonstrations in Bombay, Calcutta,
Madras and other cities. It paid a heavy price. Assisted by the Stalinists,
who branded the BLPI as “criminals and gangsters who help the
Fascists”, the police arrested many BLPI members and senior leaders. The
Quit India movement involved millions of people and continued for
months in the face of brutal police repression. According to official
figures, more than 1,000 were killed and 60,000 were imprisoned during
the period from August 1942 to March 1943. After the movement ebbed
and the British turned back the Japanese army, Congress effectively
shelved its Quit India demand for the remainder of the war.
6-4. The BLPI’s tenacious struggle enhanced the stature of Trotskyism
throughout the region. Under difficult conditions of illegality, police
persecution and wartime isolation from the Fourth International, it had
oriented to the Quit India movement, above all to the working class,
without making the slightest political concession to Congress or the
Congress Socialists. However, as the revolutionary wave ebbed, sharp
political differences emerged inside the BLPI. The genesis of these
differences lay in the transformation of the LSSP into the BLPI—a
transformation that had involved a fundamental shift on to a new
proletarian-internationalist axis and inevitably generated internal tensions.
The initial disputes revolved around Philip Gunawardena’s hostility to
Doric de Souza’s efforts to refashion the BLPI in Sri Lanka as a Leninist
party. From Bombay, Gunawardena denounced the “petty bourgeois
intellectuals” in Colombo who had turned the party into “a narrow
conspiratorial sect entirely cut off from the masses.” In 1942, he and
N.M. Perera formed a Workers Opposition faction that gathered a layer of
trade unionists. De Souza, who led the BLPI’s underground work in Sri
Lanka during the war, responded by forming a Bolshevik Leninist faction.
6-5. While these factional differences were at first unclear, the end of
the Quit India movement brought more fundamental disagreements to
light. Impatient with the size and development of the BLPI, Philip
Gunawardena and N.M. Perera issued a document from jail in 1943
entitled “The Indian Struggle—The Next Phase” that argued for an
unprincipled fusion with various petty bourgeois formations, including the
Congress Socialist Party, in a vaguely defined “United Revolutionary
Front.” The scheme was a marked retreat towards the Samasamajist
tradition with which the BLPI had broken. At its 1944 congress in
Madras, the BLPI emphatically rejected the Gunawardena-Perera
document. The adopted resolution declared: “This proposal, we believe, if
carried out, can only result in the dissolution of the only party (however
small it may be) existing in India today with a clear-cut revolutionary
program, and the creation in its place at the best of a broad centrist
party.”[14] The dispute, however, remained unresolved and was a
harbinger of the political issues that were to emerge with great force
following the end of the war.
6-6. The main resolution at the BLPI congress made a detailed analysis
of the reasons for the defeat of the Quit India movement. “The basic
reason for the August movement not outstripping in any significant
manner the bounds of the bourgeois perspectives was the failure of the
working class to move into militant class action on a decisive scale,” it
stated. While workers had been sympathetic to the protests and had
engaged in sporadic strikes, the working class had been held back by the
CPI, through its control of the trade union apparatus, and the Congress
Socialists, whose orientation was to the peasantry. The resolution laid the
basis for deepening the party’s intervention into the working class,
particularly after the end of the war.
7. Stalinism betrays post-war revolutionary upheavals
7-1. Trotsky’s prognosis that the bloody horrors and deprivations of the
war would bring a post-war revolutionary upsurge was vindicated
throughout Asia. The massacres carried out by Japanese imperialism in
China, Korea and other countries under its domination were paralleled by
the criminal manner in which US imperialism brought the war to an end.
The intense American bombing of Japanese cities, including the extensive
use of incendiary devices designed to maximise civilian casualties,
culminated in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in August 1945. The chief aim of these last two atrocities was to
demonstrate the devastating power of the new weapon to the Soviet Union
and to bring the war in the Pacific to an abrupt halt as the Soviet armies
advanced rapidly into China and Korea. Six years of imperialist
barbarism, following the acute hardships of the Great Depression, had
exposed capitalism before the eyes of humanity. The efforts of the
discredited ruling classes to reassert their control provoked determined
opposition from the working class and revolutionary upheavals
internationally.
7-2. As the Transitional Program explained, the central issue was
revolutionary leadership. While the Trotskyists had fought courageously
to unify and mobilise the working class against the war, the Fourth
International had been seriously weakened by the sheer scale of the
repression against its sections—by the so-called democratic powers, the
fascists and the Stalinists. Moreover, the Soviet bureaucracy emerged
from the war with its prestige enhanced by the Red Army’s victories over
the Nazi armies. Stalin, however, was terrified that successful revolutions
in the West would give an impetus to a movement of the Soviet working
class against his regime. He struck a series of deals with Roosevelt and
Churchill at Tehran (1943), Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July
1945) to help preserve capitalism in return for a limited Soviet sphere of
influence in Eastern Europe. In France and Italy, where the bourgeois
parties were thoroughly compromised by their connivance and outright
collaboration with the fascists, the Communist parties, following
Moscow’s directives, disarmed resistance fighters, joined capitalist
governments as ministers and suppressed any independent activity by the
working class. As part of the capitalist government in France, the French
Communist Party supported the efforts of French imperialism to regain
control over its colonies, including Algeria and Indochina. In Japan, the
Communist Party played a no less treacherous role in containing a huge
upsurge of the working class. Based on a bizarre version of the Stalinist
two-stage theory, the Japanese Communist Party claimed that the
American occupation forces were carrying out the “democratic
revolution” and, on this basis, subordinated the strike movement of the
working class to the dictates of General Douglas MacArthur. As a result,
capitalist rule was salvaged and Japan transformed into a crucial ally of
© World Socialist Web Site
US imperialism in Asia.
7-3. The role of Stalinism in betraying the anti-colonial movements in
Asia was also vital to the global restabilisation of capitalism. The end of
the war generated an anti-imperialist movement of the masses throughout
the region of unparalleled scope and intensity. The crushing Japanese
defeat of the old European powers during the conflict had shattered the
basis for their Asiatic empires. In every case, whether that of the French
in Indo-China, the Dutch in Indonesia or the British in Malaya and the
Indian subcontinent, the attempt by the former colonial rulers to resume
control of their possessions met with mass opposition. In China and
Korea, the collapse of Japanese rule gave rise to broad movements against
the dictatorial regimes that US imperialism sought to install.
7-4. In War and the Fourth International written in 1934, Trotsky had
paid special attention to the colonial and semi-colonial countries of the
East, explaining: “Their struggle is doubly progressive: tearing the
backward peoples from Asiatism, sectionalism and foreign bondage, they
strike powerful blows at the imperialist states. But it must be clearly
understood beforehand that the belated revolutions in Asia and Africa are
incapable of opening up a new epoch of renaissance for the national state.
The liberation of the colonies will be merely a gigantic episode in the
world socialist revolution, just as the belated democratic overturn in
Russia, which was also a semi-colonial country, was only the introduction
to the socialist revolution.” Thus the democratic tasks of the post-war
anti-colonial struggles could only be achieved under the leadership of the
working class as part of the broader struggle for socialism internationally:
but that road was blocked by Stalinism.
7-5. Throughout South East Asia, the Stalinist parties were instrumental
in derailing the post-war anti-colonial struggles with far-reaching
consequences for which the working class and oppressed masses are still
paying. None of the states established in the region after World War II has
been able to meet the aspirations of working people for basic democratic
rights and a decent standard of living. In Indonesia, the Indonesian
Communist Party (PKI) subordinated the working class to the nationalist
movement led by Sukarno even as he manoeuvred first with the Dutch,
then the US. In return for Washington’s support for independence,
Sukarno carried out a bloody crackdown on the PKI in 1948 in which
thousands of PKI members were killed. That did not stop the PKI from
renewing its alliance with Sukarno paving the way for the CIA-backed
military coup of 1965–66 that resulted in the deaths of at least 500,000
PKI members, workers and peasants, and three decades of dictatorship. In
Malaya, the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and its Malayan People’s
Anti-Japanese Army openly welcomed the return of British forces and
collaborated with the new British administration as it sought to
re-establish itself. Having consolidated its control by 1948, Britain turned
on the MCP and over the next decade ruthlessly crushed its guerrilla
forces before handing over power to the conservative Malay communal
party—the United Malays National Organisation—that has dominated
Malaysia ever since. The MCP’s support for Lee Kuan Yew and his
People’s Action Party laid the basis for the present-day one-party police
state in Singapore.
7-6. The Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) led by Ho Chi Minh
played an especially criminal role in assisting France to re-establish
control over their colonies. Following the Japanese surrender in August
1945, the Stalinists formed a provisional government with bourgeois
parties and sought to barter with the British and French as their military
forces landed. The Trotskyists of the La Lutte group and the League of
International Communists fought for the independent mobilisation of the
working class and urban and rural poor amid a burgeoning movement for
national independence. Mass demonstrations erupted in Saigon, peoples’
committees began to mushroom and a provisional central committee was
established. As tensions sharpened in September 1945, the Stalinists
disarmed the peoples’ committees, suppressed the provisional central
committee and murdered scores of Trotskyists, including La
Ta Thu Thau. Far from securing independence, the ICP’s collaboration
with the French only helped restore colonial rule in the south. The
Vietnamese people were to pay a horrific price for the betrayal of the
post-war revolutionary upsurge and the subsequent manoeuvring of the
Stalinists with French and then American imperialism. Thirty years of war
left the country devastated and millions dead.
7-7. The Stalinist betrayals in Europe and Asia enabled the United
States, which emerged from the war as the dominant imperialist power, to
implement a series of initiatives to stabilise the world capitalist economy.
The Bretton Woods agreement established the dollar as a stable global
currency by pegging it against gold at a fixed rate; the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade aimed to expand trade and prevent a return to the
disastrous protectionist policies of the 1930s; and the US provided
substantial aid to rebuild the shattered economies of Western Europe and
Japan. Having gained a measure of capitalist stability, US imperialism
launched its “Cold War” counteroffensive against “Communism.” The
opening shots were US support for right-wing regimes in Greece and
Turkey, and the launching of the Marshall Plan that transformed Western
Europe into an anti-Soviet bloc, but these soon extended into a global
confrontation. The US responded to the 1949 revolution in China with a
massive military intervention in Korea to prop up its right-wing dictatorial
regime in Seoul. The 1950–53 Korean War cost the lives of millions and
left the peninsula permanently divided and scarred.
8. The Chinese Revolution
8-1. In China, the political difficulties confronting the working class in
the immediate post-war period were presented very starkly. In the wake of
the defeat of the 1925–27 revolution, the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) retreated to the rural hinterland and increasingly based itself on the
peasantry. While retaining its links with the Third International and the
Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, the CCP’s turn to the peasantry
shifted the party’s class axis away from the proletariat. The CCP’s
Stalinist ideology based on the two-stage theory and class collaboration
with the national bourgeoisie was also infused with peasant populism and
the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare. Mao Zedong, who had always
been on the right-wing of the party, assumed leadership of the CCP in
1935 and accentuated the party’s orientation towards the peasantry. The
Chinese Left Opposition, which formed after 1927, remained in the urban
centres and oriented to the working class despite widespread repression
by the Kuomintang, which was aided by the Stalinists.
8-2. In a farsighted letter to Chinese supporters in 1932, Trotsky warned
of the dangers that the working class could face from Mao’s peasant
armies. Explaining the fundamentally different class orientation of the
peasantry, Trotsky wrote: “The peasant movement is a mighty
revolutionary factor insofar as it is directed against the large landowners,
militarists, feudalists and usurers. But in the peasant movement itself are
very powerful proprietary and reactionary tendencies and at a certain
stage it can become hostile to the workers and sustain that hostility
already equipped with arms. He who forgets about the dual nature of the
peasantry is not a Marxist. The advanced workers must be taught to
distinguish from among ‘communist’ labels and banners the actual social
processes.”[15]
8-3. Trotsky further explained: “The true Communist Party is the
organisation of the proletarian vanguard. But we must not forget that the
working class of China has been kept in an oppressed and amorphous
condition during the last four years, and only recently has it evinced signs
of revival. It is one thing when a Communist Party, firmly resting on the
flower of the urban proletariat, strives through the workers to lead a
peasant war. It is altogether another thing when a few thousand or even
tens of thousands of revolutionists, who are truly communists or only take
the name, assume the leadership of a peasant war without having any
© World Socialist Web Site
serious support
Lutte from the proletariat. This isleader
precisely the situation in
China. This acts to augment to an extreme the danger of conflicts between
the workers and armed peasants.”[16]
8-4. The CCP, following the line dictated from Moscow, formed a
Popular Front alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s regime against the
Japanese armies that invaded China in 1937. Trotsky insisted that the war
by China, an oppressed nation, against Japanese imperialism had a
progressive content and opposed sectarian tendencies that branded his
stance as “social patriotism” and “a capitulation to Chiang Kai-shek.” He
stressed, however, that in supporting the war the working class had to
retain its political independence. Instead, in forging an alliance with the
Kuomintang, the CCP subordinated the interests of the masses to the
bourgeoisie—renouncing its own land reform program and explicitly
abandoning the interests of workers so as not to offend the KMT
landlords and capitalists. Following the Japanese defeat, the CCP, in line
with Stalin’s policy of collaboration with bourgeois parties and
governments in Europe and Asia, sought to continue its wartime alliance
with the KMT.
8-5. Despite obvious signs that Chiang Kai-shek, with US backing, was
preparing for war against the CCP, it was not until October 1947, as the
Cold War was emerging, that Mao finally called for the overthrow of the
KMT regime. Facing the prospect of military annihilation at the hands of
a KMT offensive in Manchuria, the CCP revived its policy of land reform
in order to exploit the widespread ferment among the peasantry. Chiang
Kai-shek’s subsequent defeat had less to do with Mao’s supposed
strategic genius, than the inherent weakness of the thoroughly corrupt and
oppressive KMT regime, which lacked any significant political base, was
besieged by financial crisis and confronted an immense revolutionary
upheaval of the working class and peasantry. Mao’s armies defeated the
KMT troops in Manchuria with the help of captured Japanese weapons
handed over by the Soviet army and encountered no major military
resistance as they swept south. The People’s Republic of China was
proclaimed in October 1949.
8-6. The CCP modelled its new regime on the “bloc of four classes” by
including elements of the bourgeoisie who had not fled to Taiwan and by
initially limiting the extent of land reform and the nationalisation of
industry. However, such was the extent of the revolutionary movement
and the popular expectations of the CCP, which many identified, falsely,
with the heritage of the Russian Revolution, that the Stalinists were
compelled to go further than they intended. Confronted with the danger of
imperialist intervention as a result of the Korean War, the regime was
forced to make concessions to workers and peasants as it mobilised the
population for war. In rural areas, the expropriation of the landlord class
was completed. As part of its “three anti” and “five anti” campaigns in
1951–52, the CCP targeted industrialists and merchants for their
“corrupting influence” on the party and the state. In 1953, the first
five-year plan was drawn up and subsequently most remaining private
businesses were nationalised. None of the complex economic and social
problems facing the government, however, could be resolved on the basis
of the reactionary Stalinist theory of “Socialism in One Country.” The
CCP created a series of disasters as it lurched from one pragmatic,
nationalist policy to the next—including a devastating famine in the late
1950s produced by the “Great Leap Forward.”
8-7. The bureaucratic CCP regime acted at every point as a brake on the
revolutionary movement of the masses, especially the working class. As
Mao’s troops entered the cities and towns in 1949, the CCP imposed
severe restrictions on any activity by workers. Strikes were suppressed by
force with instances of workers being gunned down by troops or arrested
and executed. The CCP’s organic hostility to the independent political
mobilisation of the proletariat found its highest expression in the ruthless
crackdown on Chinese Trotskyists, which began in 1949 and continued
down to the mass detentions of 1952.
 8-8. In the international arena, the CCP continued its alliance with the
Soviet Union and relied heavily on Soviet experts and aid in the 1950s to
expand the economy, particularly to develop heavy industry. The CCP’s
economic management of nationalised industries was closely modelled on
Stalinist bureaucratic planning in the Soviet Union. The Sino-Soviet split
in 1962 reflected the competing national interests of the two Stalinist
bureaucracies. The Soviet Union backed India against China in the 1962
Sino-Indian border war. The CCP, which was critical of Khrushchev’s
exposure of Stalin’s crimes in his 1956 secret speech, never broke with
the basic conceptions of Stalinism and continued to defend all of its
betrayals. The CCP’s advocacy of the two-stage theory and an alliance
with the bourgeoisie in backward countries produced catastrophes for the
masses of Asia, including the bloody 1965–66 Indonesian coup.
To be continued
Footnotes:
13. Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939–40), pp. 31–32.
14. Quoted in Tomorrow is Ours, p. 171.
15. Leon Trotsky on China, p. 528.
16. Ibid., p. 525.

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World Socialist Web Site
The Historical and International Foundations
of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 4
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
29 March 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in
Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011. It appears in 12 parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
9. The partition of India
9-1. In India, Congress, with the support of the Stalinist CPI, played the
central role in aborting the mass anti-imperialist movement that emerged
immediately after the war and in restabilising capitalist rule across South
Asia. Terrified that a renewed Quit India movement would slip out of
their control and increasingly apprehensive before a rising tide of working
class and peasant struggles and growing unrest in the princely states, the
Congress leadership moved as quickly as possible to reach a settlement
with Britain, which had already recognised the unviability of clinging on
to its Indian empire. In doing so, Congress jettisoned key aspects of its
own program and sought a deal not only with the British but also with the
communal parties—the Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha—and with
the zamindari landlords and the princes, who formed the conservative
base of the colonial state.
9-2. The Muslim League, which represented the interests of the Muslim
landlords and capitalists in India had put forward its demand for a
separate Pakistan comprising the Muslim majority provinces in 1940. The
Muslim elites, whom the British had organised and cultivated as a
separate political force through the use of communal categories as a key
instrument of their imperial rule, feared both their marginalisation within
a unified Indian state and growing social unrest. The demand for a
separate Muslim state was the means for the Muslim elite to stake its
claim to a substantial share of political power in the anticipated post-war
reorganisation of South Asia and to whip up communalism so as to divert
and divide the increasingly restless masses. The Hindu Mahasabha, based
among sections of the Hindu princes, landlords and big business, justified
their own collaboration with the British in communal terms as the means
of resisting Muslim “domination.” The Hindu Mahasabhites railed against
the Congress for “appeasing” the Muslims and argued that Muslims were
alien to the “Hindu nation” and should be denied full citizenship rights.
The only means of politically combating communalism was through the
mobilisation of the workers and rural masses around their common social
needs. Organically hostile to such a strategy, as it threatened the
fundamental interests of the Indian bourgeoisie as a whole, Congress
increasingly adapted to communalism while containing and suppressing
social struggles in which the masses implicitly challenged the communal
divide. In the 1945–46 elections, the Congress flirted with an electoral
pact with the Hindu Mahasabha in Bengal and elsewhere welcomed
© World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
Hindu Mahasabhites into its ranks.
9-3. The post-war anti-imperialist upsurge initially took the form of
opposition to the brutal repression of the Quit India movement and the
trials of leaders of the Indian National Army (INA). INA leader Subhas
Chandra Bose, a militant Congress leader, had opposed Gandhi, but
sought to fight British rule not by turning to the working class, but to a
rival imperialist power. He agreed to head the INA, formed from Indian
soldiers who had been captured by the Japanese army, and to fight against
the British under Japanese leadership. Despite their misguided aims, the
INA leaders were widely regarded as heroes and patriots, and protests
calling for clemency began to mushroom across India, in the process
unifying Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. In November 1945 and again in
February 1946, the BLPI was closely involved with student organisations
in leading mass demonstrations in Calcutta against the INA trials. The
protests were violently suppressed by police and troops, while the CPI
joined hands with the Congress to disperse the crowds in the name of the
struggle against indiscipline and disorder.
9-4. In February 1946, sections of the Indian navy in Bombay and
Karachi mutinied over pay and conditions, while raising a series of radical
political demands, including the release of all political prisoners, the
withdrawal of British Indian troops from Indonesia and the slogan of
“Quit India.” Their action triggered displays of solidarity and mutinies in
other Indian military units and ultimately gave rise to mass worker actions
and street fighting in Bombay. The Congress and Muslim League fully
supported the British use of force in putting down the rebellion. Gandhi
was especially virulent in his denunciations of the Royal Indian Navy
mutineers and the cross-communal unity that characterised their struggle,
saying he “would rather perish in the flames” than see the triumph of “the
rabble” and declaring that a “combination between Hindus and Muslims
and others for the purpose of violent action is unholy.” While the BLPI
spearheaded calls for protests and a general strike in support of the
mutineers, the Stalinist CPI denounced the “mass hysteria”, and sought to
break up popular support for the mutiny. As on every other occasion that
Congress reined in the mass movement, communalism erupted in the
wake of the mutiny’s defeat. A Muslim League call for “direct action” in
support of its “Pakistan” demand in August 1946 resulted in violent
clashes with Hindus in Calcutta that left 6,000 dead and triggered Hindu
communal atrocities on Muslims in return.
9-5. The post-war upsurge also produced a wave of industrial action into
which the BLPI intervened aggressively and made significant inroads. In
June 1946 and again in March–June 1947, the BLPI, which had won the
leadership of the Madras Labour Union (MLU), led major strikes
involving the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills in Madras, one of the
largest factories in India. The 1947 strike was a bitter three-month
struggle during which mass rallies and a hartal involving more than
100,000 workers and small businesses took place. In June, the union was
declared illegal, its funds seized and leaders arrested, but government
attempts to reopen the B & C Mills failed. The MLU eventually called off
the strike but forced management to grant significant concessions.
9-6. The BLPI took a principled stand against communal politics and
the call for a separate Muslim Pakistan. A resolution at the 1944 BLPI
conference declared: “The [Pakistan] slogan is politically reactionary and
theoretically false. It is politically reactionary in that it constitutes an
effort through an appeal to communal sentiments to divert rising
discontent of the Moslem masses away from its true enemy, namely,
British imperialism and its native allies, against the Hindus. It is
theoretically false in that it proceeds from the indefensible contention that
the Moslems in India constitute a Nation, which is declared to be
oppressed (equally false) by a Hindu nation. There is no basis, whether of
common historical tradition, language, culture, or race, or in respect of
geographical and economic factors, for the arising of a distinct Moslem
nationality. Religion (together, of course, with any common element of
culture which that may entail) is the only unifying factor, and is clearly
insufficient, on the basis of all historical experience, to produce any
sentiment which can constitute a national consciousness.”[17]
9-7. Congress, however, was rapidly moving to a settlement with
Britain and its princely and landlord allies. While the Congress leadership
exploited its association with the Quit India upheaval to rally support, the
radical turn that the Quit India movement had taken following the arrest
of Gandhi and the other Congress leaders and the growth of post-war
social struggles made it loathe to lead any popular challenge to British
rule and determined to get its hands on the colonial state so as to stabilise
bourgeois rule as quickly as possible. Consequently, the Congress leaders
abandoned their demand for complete independence and accepted
Dominion status with continuing ties to Britain. They also gave up their
call for a Constituent Assembly based on universal suffrage and sought to
prevent a radical challenge to the rule of the princes and landlordism.
Most fundamentally, Congress abandoned its program for a unified,
secular India and accepted and implemented the communal partition of
the subcontinent. While the Muslim League pressed for the full inclusion
of Bengal and Punjab in Pakistan, Congress advocated the communal
division of these two provinces and had no compunction about working
with rabid communalist elements, including S.P. Mookerjee, an ex-Hindu
Mahasabha president and future founder of the Jana Sangh (later the
Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]). The Congress’ campaign to “save” the
Hindus and Sikhs of the Punjab and Bengal from Muslim “domination”
was a key factor in the unleashing of communal violence during the 1947
partition in which up to two million people perished and another 12–14
million were rendered refugees.
9-8. This betrayal was aided and abetted by the Stalinist CPI which
subordinated the anti-colonial movement to the Indian bourgeoisie—firstly
in the form of Congress, then, adapting to the rise of communalism in the
final years of British rule, also to the Muslim League. The CPI lent
political credibility to the Pakistan slogan, calling it the legitimate
expression of Muslim self-determination, and sent its members into the
Muslim League to help it build a social base among the Muslim masses.
Between 1945 and 1947, as the Congress and the Muslim League stoked a
communal conflagration, the CPI issued futile calls for the rival bourgeois
parties to come together and lead the national revolution.
9.9. Partition defined and defines the “freedom” and “independence”
incarnated in bourgeois India and Pakistan. The communal pogroms that
accompanied the birth of India and Pakistan, were only the most bloody
and immediately apparent consequence of the abortion of the democratic
revolution. The new states defended the wealth and property of the
zamindars, princes and big business and retained the key institutions and
laws of the British colonial state, adopting at most a handful of meagre,
piecemeal reforms aimed at facilitating capitalist development. Six
© World Socialist Web Site
decades on, none of the burning democratic and social problems of the
masses have been resolved. On the contrary they have grown ever more
malignant as landlordism, caste oppression and other feudal vestiges have
become ever more intertwined with capitalist exploitation.
9-10. Far from resolving the “communal problem”, partition has greatly
compounded it by enshrining communal divisions in the state structure of
South Asia. Addressing students in Calcutta following Gandhi’s murder
in January 1948 by a follower of Hindutva ideologue V.D. Savarkar,
BLPI leader Colvin R. de Silva explained: “The tragedy of the partition
flows particularly from the declared objects of its architects. This
gruesome cutting up of the living body of India on the one hand and of
two living ‘nationalities’ (the Punjabi and the Bengali nationalities) on
the other was put forward as a solution of the communal problem on the
one side and as a means of opening up the road to freedom on the other.
Both pleas have proved false. Partition has proved in the one respect only
a means for reforging chains for the imperialist enslavement of the masses
... In the other respect, it has proved but a means of beguiling two states to
thoughts of mutual war as the only means of canalising internal
communal feelings away from civil convulsions. The war by the way may
yet come (if indeed, it has not already come in Kashmir and Junagadh).
But the civil convulsions have come meanwhile in catastrophic fashion.”
9.11. De Silva’s warnings proved prophetic. Partition has given rise to a
reactionary geo-political struggle between India and Pakistan that has
resulted in three declared wars and countless war crises, squandered vital
economic resources, and today threatens the people of South Asia with a
nuclear conflagration. The first Indo-Pak war of 1947–48 resulted in a
divided Kashmir that has cruelly split the Kashmiri people and has proven
to be an intractable political problem within the framework of the
communally-divided subcontinent. Incapable of resolving any of the
myriad social tensions, the ruling elites in both countries have routinely
resorted to communal demagogy to deflect opposition at home. Partition
has facilitated imperialist dominance of South Asia by frustrating rational
economic development, including the use of water resources, and by
providing a political mechanism for the US and other great powers to play
one state and ruling elite against the other. Today South Asia is home to
the world’s greatest concentration of poor and is the least economically
integrated region in the world.
10. Formal independence in Sri Lanka
10-1. The British decision to grant self-government to Sri Lanka was
not the product of any popular campaign waged by the Ceylon National
Congress. As a result of its pivotal strategic position in the Indian Ocean,
the island became the headquarters for the Allied South East Asian
Command during World War II. D.S Senanayake, as leader of the Board
of Ministers, used the CNC’s fulsome support for the war to haggle
behind closed doors for post-war self-government. Senanayake and his
colleagues never set their sights higher than Dominion status—that is, a
junior partner to British imperialism in which London would still
determine the island’s overall foreign and defence policies. Senanayake’s
chief aim in the negotiations was to preserve the political domination of
the Sinhala elites in any settlement. He did not object to Britain’s overall
control of foreign policy, but insisted that Sri Lanka had to be in charge of
negotiations with India over the fate of the island’s Tamil speaking
plantation workers. When London established the Soulbury Commission
in 1944 to map out a new constitution, Senanayake objected to its
members holding discussions with the representatives of Tamils and
Muslims. After the Soulbury Commission recommended limited
self-government but delayed even Dominion status, Senanayake and the
CNC leaders voted, in September 1945, to accept the report.
10-2. The BLPI leaders in Sri Lanka emerged from prison with
considerable prestige as the only political figures who had opposed the
war and campaigned for independence. However, the opportunist
orientation elaborated by Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera during the
war quickly manifested itself in an open split in the party. Gunawardena
and Perera refused to accept the authority of the BLPI’s regional
committee in Sri Lanka and formed their own party, using the pre-war
name—the LSSP. The party reverted to the LSSP’s 1941 program for
Ceylon and repudiated all documents and decisions made by the BLPI at
and after its founding in 1942. Gunawardena and Perera opened the doors
of the LSSP to ex-members and renegades and sought alliances with
various bourgeois formations. The LSSP declared itself “for the Fourth
International” but made no effort to seek affiliation. The nationalist
orientation of the LSSP marked a fundamental break from Trotskyism and
a return to the pre-war petty bourgeois radicalism of Samasamajism. In a
1947 statement entitled “The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India: A
Sectarian Dead-end,” Gunawardena made clear that he regarded the
whole BLPI project and Trotskyism as nothing but a failed romantic
adventure.
10-3. A resolution of the BLPI Central Committee in India expelling
Gunawardena and Perera concluded that “the split is no accidental
phenomenon but the clear manifestation of a non-proletarian tendency
which has developed under the pressure of petty bourgeois forces.... The
differences today clearly visible on the plane of organisation, are bound to
develop on the plane of politics.” A tentative reunification in 1946 rapidly
collapsed, underlining the fundamental character of the political
differences.
10-4. The BLPI (Ceylon unit) and the LSSP played the leading role in
the militant strike movements that emerged after the war, undermining the
influence of the Communist Party that had used its position as wartime
strikebreaker for the British to build a trade union apparatus. A general
strike that erupted in August 1946 with a stoppage by clerical bank
workers, spread to other sections of the working class over the next two
months and compelled the British governor to accede to some of the
workers’ economic demands. The strikers also made the political demand
for independence from British rule. The CNC ministers, who were deeply
hostile to any concessions to the working class, violated the terms of the
1946 settlement provoking a second general strike in May–June 1947 that
was met with violent repression. Thousands of government and private
sector workers were victimised and lost their jobs. The government
rammed through a Public Security Bill in the final days of the strike,
giving sweeping powers to the police.
10-5. In June 1947, in the wake of the strike, the British government
announced that the island would be granted full Dominion status—in line
with India and Burma. As one historian put it: “At Whitehall, there was a
clear understanding that Senanayake and the [CNC] moderates were
facing increasing pressure from left-wing forces, apart from other critics,
and that the immediate grant of Dominion status was now an urgent
necessity as a means of ensuring their political survival.”[18] In the State
Council elections later in 1947, the newly formed United National Party
(UNP) established by Senanayake from the CNC and other bourgeois
organisations won a plurality and formed a coalition government. The
LSSP and BLPI each won a significant number of seats.
10-6. The LSSP’s opportunist adaptation to the Sinhala bourgeoisie
became immediately apparent in its manoeuvring to form a ruling
parliamentary coalition under the leadership of the United National Party
(UNP) politician S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. Bandaranaike had headed the
Sinhala Maha Sabha, formed in 1919 to unite the majority Sinhalese on an
explicitly racial and religious basis. In 1939, Colvin R. de Silva warned
that the Sinhala Maha Sabha was “a dangerously reactionary body” that
had the potential to become “a local variant of brown Fascism”[19] The
LSSP’s efforts to back a ruling coalition under Bandaranaike were the
first steps in a dangerous trend to dress up Sinhala populism as a
progressive alternative to the UNP. The LSSP’s manoeuvring fell apart
after the BLPI refused to participate in this reactionary charade.
© World Socialist Web Site
10-7. The fundamental differences in the class orientation of the BLPI
and LSSP were even starker over the issue of “independence” during the
British handover on February 4, 1948. In a powerful statement entitled
“Independence Real or Fake” issued on the day, BLPI leader Colvin R. de
Silva declared that the masses of Ceylon had nothing to rejoice about in
the “independence” celebrations. “For the new status of their obtaining is
not ‘independence’ but actually a refashioning of the chains of Ceylon’s
slavery to British imperialism. It is a continuation of British
imperialism’s method of exercising that rule ... Only fools would contend
that there is ‘no change’ in Ceylon’s ‘status’. There is a change. But the
essence of this change lies not in any passage of Ceylon from colonial
status to the status of independence, but in the change-over of British
imperialism in Ceylon from methods of direct rule to methods of indirect
rule.”[20] The BLPI not only voted against the government’s motion on
independence in the parliament; it organised a mass rally of around
50,000 on Galle Face Green in central Colombo in opposition to the
official ceremonies. The LSSP, by contrast, declared “independence” a
limited step forward, abstained on the vote in parliament and refused to
attend the BLPI rally, which it denounced as “exhibitionism, ultra-leftism
and adventurism” by “parlour Bolsheviks.”
10-8. The anti-democratic character of the “independence” settlement
reached between British imperialism and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie
became apparent in one of the first actions of the UNP government—its
decision to pass laws that stripped the vast majority of Tamil-speaking
plantation workers of their basic rights as citizens. The BLPI
unequivocally opposed the anti-democratic legislation. In a speech in
August 1948, Colvin R. de Silva declared that the assumption that “the
state must be coeval with the nation and the nation with the race” was “an
outmoded idea and an exploded philosophy.” He continued: “It is
precisely under Fascism that the nation was to be made coeval with the
race, and race the governing factor in the composition of the state ... If
this Government approaches this question from the angle of the capitalist
class, our party—we of the Fourth International—approach this question
from the angle of the proletariat—the working class. That is to say, we
approach it from a class angle independent of racial questions and above
racial questions. We are not ready as amongst the labouring population of
this country to distinguish between man and man on the ground of his
racial origin. We say a worker is, first and foremost, a worker.”
Significantly, the Tamil elites of the North and East of the island,
represented by the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), demonstrated
their class allegiance, in opposition to the rights of the Tamil-speaking
plantation workers, by voting for the bill. An ACTC minority opposed the
legislation and split to form the Federal Party.
10-9. The BLPI’s far-sighted analysis of the character of the post-war
independence settlements, based as it was on Trotsky’s Theory of
Permanent Revolution, has stood the test of time. While the United States
supplanted Britain as the predominant imperialist power, and the
existence of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and
China allowed some room for manoeuvre, the newly “independent”
bourgeois states in Asia and Africa remained subordinate to imperialism
and the post-war economic framework established by the United States.
The ability of leaders such as India’s Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno,
Egypt’s Nasser and Tanzania’s Nyerere to posture as “anti-imperialists”
or “socialists” depended firstly on uncritical support from the Soviet or
Chinese Stalinists, and secondly the policies of national economic
regulation—import substitution, limited nationalisations and economic
planning. The illusory character of independence was to become apparent
with the end of the post-war boom and the collapse of the Bretton Woods
system that had sustained national reformist policies. As in India and Sri
Lanka, the national bourgeoisie in country after country has proved
incapable of carrying out basic democratic tasks. The borders have
remained those that were established by the former colonial rulers, whose
economic interests have continued to be protected, cutting across
pre-existing ethno-linguistic and cultural ties. Within the new states, the
ruling cliques have invariably based themselves on the anti-democratic
dominance of one ethnic, tribal or religious group at the expense of
others.
To be continued
Footnotes:
17. Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, “Resolution on Pakistan,” in New
International, Volume 12, No. 10, December 1946, pp. 300-301,
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol12/no10/blpi.htm.
18. K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1981) p. 460.
19. Britain, World War 2 and the Sama Samajists (Colombo: Young
Socialist Publication, 1996) p. 63.
20. Blows against the Empire, p. 127.

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© World Socialist Web Site

World Socialist Web Site
The Historical and International Foundations
of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 5
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
30 March 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in
Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011. It appears in 12 parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
11. The liquidation of the BLPI
11-1. The waning of the post-war revolutionary movements and the
granting of formal independence to Britain’s South Asian colonies
generated enormous political pressures on the BLPI to adapt to the new
national framework and state structures. For layers of the middle classes,
“independence” opened up opportunities in the political sphere of
parliament and careers in the expanding state bureaucracy and
state-owned corporations. The stabilisation of global capitalism and the
post-war boom led to rising prices for export commodities and enabled
the bourgeoisie in the former colonies to make concessions, albeit of a
limited character, to the working class. This was especially true in Sri
Lanka where a weak capitalist class confronted a militant proletariat,
sections of which were under the BLPI’s revolutionary leadership.
Temporary economic gains fostered reformist illusions that a socialist
revolution was not necessary and that the lot of workers could be
improved piecemeal through a combination of parliamentary manoeuvre
and militant trade union action.
11-2. Central to the BLPI’s liquidation between 1948 and 1950 was its
retreat into nationalism. The opening section of the BLPI’s “Program for
Ceylon” published in 1946 had argued powerfully that the socialist
revolution in Ceylon and India were intimately entwined. “Even at its
highest point of mobilisation, the revolutionary mass movement in this
island alone could not, unassisted from outside, generate the energies
required to overcome the forces which the imperialists would muster in
defence of their power in Ceylon, which is for them not only a field of
economic exploitation, but a strategic outpost for the defence of the
Empire as a whole … On the other hand, the complete emancipation of
India itself is unthinkable while Ceylon is maintained as a solid bastion of
British power in the East. From this point of view, we may say that the
revolutionary struggle in Ceylon will be bound up with that on the
continent in all its stages, and will constitute a provincial aspect in
relation to the Indian revolution as a whole.” Despite the BLPI’s critique
of the partition of India and the independence of Sri Lanka, the party
began to draw back from its internationalist perspective and accommodate
to the framework of the newly-formed states. While it was not an issue of
principle that the BLPI in India and Sri Lanka remain organisationally
united, the formation of new sections of the Fourth International should
involve intensive discussion on the way in which the unified
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revolutionary perspective would be fought for and close organisational
collaboration maintained. Instead a de facto division emerged as most Sri
Lankan Trotskyists returned to the island, which became the focus of their
political activities at the expense of the party in India. As the political
difficulties created by the post-war restabilisation of capitalism came to
bear, the BLPI was liquidated into petty bourgeois radical parties on the
false assumption that entrism and “left unity” offered a means of growing
quickly.
11-3. It was the opportunists of the LSSP in Sri Lanka who initiated the
push for the BLPI in India to enter into the Socialist Party of India, the
party formed by the Congress Socialists in 1948 after they split from
Congress. The LSSP’s supporters inside the BLPI in India argued their
“entry tactic” corresponded to the method advocated by Trotsky in the
1930s to win over important layers inside the Socialist Party of America
(SPA) and the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) to the
incipient Fourth International. Entry in the 1930s had taken place as a
brief tactical manoeuvre under conditions in which, due to the rise of
fascism and the betrayals of Stalinism, these social democratic
organisations had become a pole of attraction for workers and young
people moving toward revolutionary politics. The Trotskyists retained
significant freedom inside these parties to fight for their revolutionary
internationalist perspective and won over important layers of workers and
youth. None of these conditions applied to the Socialist Party of India,
which was evolving, not to the left, but along a rightward, nationalist
course to parliamentarism. Although the question of entering the
Congress Socialists was debated and defeated at the BLPI’s 1947
conference, supporters of the tactic pressed the issue, arguing for
long-term entry into the Socialist Party in the hope of a future
radicalisation in its ranks. The BLPI ignored the warnings of the
International Secretariat of the Fourth International in Paris against any
precipitous move and voted, at a special convention in Calcutta in
October 1948, to proceed with entry.
11-4. Entry into the Socialist Party was a disaster from the outset. BLPI
members had to apply for membership on an individual basis, could not
form a separate internal faction and could not circulate discussion
bulletins. At the same time, the Socialist Party exploited the talents and
prestige of former BLPI members to build up their party apparatus,
particularly in cities like Madras where none previously existed. As the
Socialist Party leadership shifted further to the right, it increasingly
blocked any criticism or debate. In 1952, the former BLPI members
finally broke away from the Socialist Party, following its poor showing in
the general election of that year and its merger with the bourgeois Kisan
Mazoor Praja Party. By that stage, however, an opportunist current led by
Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel had emerged within the Fourth
International reflecting political pressures similar to those to which the
BLPI had adapted. Pabloism rapidly destroyed what remained of the BLPI
in India.
11-5. In Sri Lanka, pressure mounted on the BLPI to merge with the
LSSP, especially after a by-election in 1949 in which the split “left” vote
enabled the UNP to win the seat. The by-election became an argument for
unity to strengthen the party in the parliamentary and trade union arenas.
The merger of the BLPI and LSSP in June 1950 is presented in the
various LSSP histories as a fusion of two Trotskyist parties. In reality, it
was the liquidation of the BLPI into what was an opportunist formation
that was rapidly accommodating to parliamentarism and syndicalism. As
a result of the merger, N.M. Perera, head of the largest bloc of opposition
seats, became the parliamentary opposition leader. Unwilling to
accommodate to the framework of the merged LSSP, Philip Gunawardena
took a further step to the right, broke from the LSSP completely and
formed his own party—the Viplavakari LSSP or VLSSP.
11-6. The program of the unified LSSP was confined to Sri Lanka. It
was a collection of abstract truisms designed to avoid any examination of
the critical strategic experiences through which the BLPI and the Fourth
International had passed. It made no reference to any of the post-war
political experiences of the working class in Sri Lanka, let alone
elsewhere in Asia or internationally. The Chinese Revolution that had
taken place less than a year before was not mentioned. The program made
no explicit reference to the Theory of Permanent Revolution. None of the
political differences that had emerged in the previous five years were
discussed. The program declared that the party stood “uncompromisingly
opposed to all forms of chauvinism” but did not discuss the LSSP’s
adaptation in 1947 to the communal politics of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.
Likewise it referred to the need for “real national independence” but did
not deal with the LSSP’s abstention on the independence vote in 1948. In
reality, the “fusion” amounted to a return to Samasamajism, that is, to the
national tradition of Sri Lankan radicalism. The failure to discuss these
issues demonstrated the real relations in the new party: the rightwing
headed by N.M. Perera was in charge, while the former BLPI leaders
provided him with “Trotskyist” credentials. Far from intervening to
demand a political clarification and to oppose this unprincipled
unification, the International Secretariat under Michel Pablo gave its
blessing and accepted the LSSP as the Sri Lankan section of the Fourth
International.
12. Pabloite Opportunism
12-1. The political pressures generated by the post-war restabilisation of
capitalism exhibited in the BLPI’s liquidation found their theoretical
expression in the emergence of a revisionist current within the Fourth
International led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. What began with
Pablo’s abandonment of Trotsky’s assessment of the
counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism came to embrace a revision of
all the fundamentals of Marxism, replacing the struggle for the political
independence of the working class with the wholesale liquidation of the
sections of the Fourth International into the agencies of the bourgeoisie
operating within the workers’ movement in every country.
12-2. Only after careful deliberation had the Fourth International
characterised the Stalinist regimes in the so-called buffer states of Eastern
Europe as “deformed workers’ states” in response to their abrupt turn in
1947–1948 to the nationalisation of industry and commencement of
bureaucratic state planning. Unlike the Soviet Union, which was the
product of a proletarian revolution, these states were “deformed” from the
outset. The changes to property relations did not issue from mass organs
of proletarian power, Soviets, led by a Bolshevik-type party, but were
imposed from above by Stalinist parties that suppressed any independent
activity of the working class. Moreover, as the Fourth International
explained: “From the world point of view, the reforms realised by the
Soviet bureaucracy in the sense of the assimilation of the buffer zone to
© World Socialist Web Site
the USSR weigh incomparably less in the balance than the blows dealt by
the Soviet bureaucracy, especially through its actions in the buffer zone,
against the consciousness of the world proletariat.”[21]
12-3. As was later explained: “The use of the term deformed places
central attention upon the crucial historical difference between the
overturn of the capitalist state in October 1917 and the overturns which
occurred in the late 1940s in Eastern Europe—that is, the absence of mass
organs of proletarian power, Soviets led by a Bolshevik-type party.
Moreover, the term implies the merely transitory existence of state
regimes of dubious historical viability, whose actions in every
sphere—political and economic—bear the stamp of the distorted and
abnormal character of their birth. Thus, far from associating such regimes
with new historical vistas, the designation deformed underscores the
historical bankruptcy of Stalinism and points imperiously to the necessity
for the building of a genuine Marxist leadership, the mobilisation of the
working class against the ruling bureaucracy in a political revolution, the
creation of genuine organs of workers’ power, and the destruction of the
countless surviving vestiges of the old capitalist relations within the state
structure and economy.”[22] As early as 1949, however, Pablo
transformed what had been a provisional characterisation of regimes of a
transitory character into a long-term perspective for “centuries” of
“deformed workers’ states” that imbued Stalinism with a historically
progressive role. Adapting to the framework of the Cold War, Pablo
replaced the struggle of the international proletariat against capitalism
with a new “objective reality” that “consists essentially of the capitalist
regime and the Stalinist world.”
12-4. This new “reality” excluded any independent role for the working
class and the Fourth International. At the Third World Congress in 1951,
Pablo drew out the liquidationist implications of his theories, declaring:
“What distinguishes us still more from the past, what makes for the
quality of our movement today and constitutes the surest gauge of our
future victories, is our growing capacity to understand, to appreciate the
mass movement as it exists—often confused, often under treacherous,
opportunist, centrist, bureaucratic and even bourgeois and petty-bourgeois
leaderships—and our endeavours to find a place in this movement with the
aim of raising it from its present to higher levels.”[23]
12-5. In relation to Latin America, Pablo called for the liquidation of the
Trotskyist movement into the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist mass
movements regardless of the class character of their leaderships. To label
such movements, he declared, “as reactionary, fascist or of no concern to
us would be proof of the old type of ‘Trotskyist’ immaturity and of a
dogmatic, abstract, intellectualistic judgement of the mass movement …
Elsewhere, as in South Africa, Egypt, the North African colonies, in the
Near East, we understand that the eventual formation of a revolutionary
party now takes the road of unconditional support of the national,
anti-imperialist mass movement and of integration into this
movement.”[24] This orientation represented a complete repudiation of
the Theory of Permanent Revolution and the struggle for the political
independence of the working class from bourgeois and petty-bourgeois
leaderships in the backward capitalist countries. The implications of this
program were already evident in Sri Lanka and India where Philip
Gunawardena and N.M. Perera had been advancing similar arguments
against the old Trotskyism of the “dogmatic, abstract, intellectualistic”
BLPI to justify their adaptation to Bandaranaike.
12-6. In 1948, Pablo had cautioned the BLPI against entry into the
Socialist Party of India. By February 1952, however, he was advocating
entrism sui generis (entrism of a special type) across-the-board
internationally. As in India, entrism now was not a temporary tactical
manoeuvre, but a long-term perspective, justified on the assumption that
any future radicalisation would and could only take place through the
existing labour organisations. The outcome of entrism sui generis in India
had already resulted in the demoralisation and disorientation of former
BLPI cadres, who were trapped in an organisation that blocked any fight
for a Trotskyist program. The application of this opportunist tactic
internationally resulted in the destruction of more sections of the Fourth
International.
12-7. The theoretical foundation of Pabloite opportunism was the
method of objectivism. As was later explained: “The standpoint of
objectivism is contemplation rather than revolutionary practical activity,
of observation rather than struggle; it justifies what is happening rather
than explains what must be done. This method provided the theoretical
underpinnings for a perspective in which Trotskyism was no longer seen
as the doctrine guiding the practical activity of a party determined to
conquer power and change the course of history, but rather as a general
interpretation of a historical process in which socialism would ultimately
be realised under the leadership of non-proletarian forces hostile to the
Fourth International. Insofar as Trotskyism was to be credited with any
direct role in the course of events, it was merely as a sort of subliminal
mental process unconsciously guiding the activities of Stalinists,
neo-Stalinists, semi-Stalinists and, of course, petty-bourgeois nationalists
of one type or another.”[25]
12-8. The objectivist method transformed the Theory of Permanent
Revolution from a revolutionary guide to action for the sections of the
Fourth International into an external description of an inexorable
historical process that worked itself out through the medium of other
parties and leaderships. Instead of providing the means for building
Trotskyist parties in the working class, the Theory of Permanent
Revolution was converted by the Pabloites into a method for glorifying
movements led by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties.
12-9. The political struggle against Pabloite opportunism culminated in
the publication of the Open Letter to the world Trotskyist movement on
November 16, 1953 by James P. Cannon, the leader of the American
Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The Open Letter was the rallying point
for orthodox Trotskyists and led to the formation of the International
Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) with the support of the
British and French sections. The letter summarised the fundamental
principles of Trotskyism:
1. The death agony of the capitalist system threatens the destruction of
civilisation through worsening depressions, world wars and barbaric
manifestations like fascism. The development of atomic weapons today
underlines the danger in the gravest possible way.
2. The descent into the abyss can be avoided only by replacing
capitalism with the planned economy of socialism on a world scale and
thus resuming the spiral of progress opened up by capitalism in its early
days.
3. This can be accomplished only under the leadership of the working
class in society. But the working class itself faces a crisis in leadership
although the world relationship of social forces was never so favourable
as today for the workers to take the road to power.
4. To organise itself for carrying out this world-historic aim, the
working class in each country must construct a revolutionary socialist
party in the pattern developed by Lenin; that is, a combat party capable of
dialectically combining democracy and centralism—democracy in arriving
at decisions, centralism in carrying them out; a leadership controlled by
the ranks, ranks able to carry forward under fire in disciplined fashion.
5. The main obstacle to this is Stalinism, which attracts workers through
exploiting the prestige of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, only
later, as it betrays their confidence, to hurl them either into the arms of the
Social Democracy, into apathy, or back into illusions in capitalism. The
penalty for these betrayals is paid by working people in the form of
consolidation of fascist or monarchist forces, and new outbreaks of war
fostered and prepared by capitalism. From its inception, the Fourth
International set as one of its major tasks the revolutionary overthrow of
Stalinism inside and outside the USSR.
© World Socialist Web Site
6. The need for flexible tactics facing many sections of the Fourth
International, and parties or groups sympathetic to its program, makes it
all the more imperative that they know how to fight imperialism and all its
petty-bourgeois agencies (such as nationalist formations or trade union
bureaucracies) without capitulation to Stalinism; and conversely, know
how to fight Stalinism (which in the final analysis is a petty-bourgeois
agency of imperialism) without capitulating to imperialism.[26]
12-10. The Open Letter reviewed the role of Pablo in providing a
political cover for Stalinism in the 1953 strike movement in East
Germany and the French general strike. Turning to the fate of the Chinese
Trotskyists at the hands of Pablo, the Open Letter declared: “Particularly
revolting is the slanderous misrepresentation Pablo has fostered of the
political position of the Chinese section of the Fourth International. They
have been pictured by the Pablo faction as ‘sectarians’, as ‘refugees from
a revolution’ ... Pablo’s line of conciliationism towards Stalinism leads
him inexorably to touch up the Mao regime couleur de rose while putting
grey tints on the firm, principled stand of our Chinese comrades.”[27]
12-11. After a thorough consideration of the evolution of the Maoist
regime that the Socialist Workers Party in the US and the ICFI designated
China as a deformed workers’ state. In a resolution adopted at its 1955
national convention, the SWP provided a detailed analysis of the Chinese
revolution: its impact on world politics and the transformation of class
relations within China as well as of the Stalinist CCP and its policies.
Summing up the process, the document concluded that after the 1949
revolution: “The objective dynamics, the inner logic of the struggle
against imperialist intervention forced the bureaucracy to break with
capitalism, nationalise the decisive means of production, impose the
monopoly of foreign trade, institute planning, and in this way clear the
road for the introduction of production relations and institutions that
constitute the foundation of a workers’ state, which China is today, even
though a Stalinist caricature thereof. China is a deformed workers’ state
because of the Stalinist deformation of the Third Chinese
Revolution.”[28]
12-12. The subsequent evolution of the Chinese regime, which restored
capitalist property relations in the 1980s and transformed the country into
the world’s premier cheap labour platform, has fully vindicated the
International Committee’s principled position. In opposition to the
Pabloites, the ICFI insisted that, without the overthrow of the CCP regime
through a political revolution led by the working class, the Maoists guided
by the nationalist perspective of “Socialism in One Country” would
inevitably become the agents of capitalist restoration as was foreseen by
Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed. At the same time, the ICFI opposed
various “state capitalist” tendencies that dismissed the enormous sweep of
the Chinese Revolution, the subsequent nationalisation of private
enterprises and the institution of economic planning, and in doing so,
sided openly or tacitly with imperialism against the deformed workers’
state.
To be continued
Footnotes:
21. David North, The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the
History of the Fourth International (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1988), p.
158.
22. Ibid., pp. 178–9.
23. Ibid., p. 194.
24. Ibid., pp. 194–5.
25. Ibid., p. 188.
26. In Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume One (London: New
Park, 1974), pp. 299-300.
27. Ibid., p.312.
28. The Third Chinese Revolution and its aftermath, Education for
Socialists, Socialist Workers Party National Education Department, 1976,
p. 7.
To contact the WSWS and the
Socialist Equality Party visit:

http://www.wsws.org

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World Socialist Web Site
The Historical and International Foundations
of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 6
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
31 March 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
13. The LSSP’s response to the Open Letter
13-1. The LSSP’s refusal to support the SWP and the ICFI in opposing
Pabloite opportunism was the turning point in its history and greatly
accelerated its political degeneration. While critical of Pablo’s
pro-Stalinist orientation, the LSSP leadership strongly sympathised with
the underlying liquidationist orientation that sanctioned its own adaptation
to national reformist politics—a combination of parliamentarism and trade
union syndicalism. Both parliament and the trade unions are hostile arenas
that the revolutionary party is obliged to use to fight for its perspective but
inevitably they place strong pressures on the party to adapt to reformist
illusions in the working class. Although still espousing Trotskyism in
word, the LSSP leaders increasingly came to measure their success in
terms of the number of their parliamentary seats and the size of their trade
unions. They viewed parliamentary combinations and strikes around
limited economic demands, rather than the independent political
mobilisation of the working class, as the path to socialism.
13-2. The consequences of the LSSP’s opportunist orientation had
already been demonstrated in the events of August 1953—a major crisis for
bourgeois rule on the island. In the 1952 general election, the UNP had
won a convincing majority, the unified LSSP had lost seats and a new
party—the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) formed by
S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike in 1951 made its first modest showing. Within a
year, however, the UNP government all but collapsed under the impact of
a semi-insurrectionary movement of the working class and peasantry
provoked by government measures to stem the economic crisis created by
the end of the Korean War. The LSSP, supported by the Communist
Party, the VLSSP and the Federal Party, called a one-day hartal—a general
strike and closure of businesses—on August 12 to protest against price
rises. The response took all of the parties, including the LSSP, by
surprise. The strike brought Colombo to a halt and protests spread through
the rural areas of the south and west. In many areas protesters defied
police violence, blocked roads and tore up railway tracks. A panicked
UNP government met on a British warship in Colombo harbour, declared
a state of emergency, called out the military, sealed the offices and press
of working-class parties and imposed a curfew. Nine people were shot
dead by police in protests that continued for two more days.
13-3. Subsequent LSSP mythology has seized on the 1953 hartal to
demonstrate the party’s revolutionary character. In reality, the LSSP
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wsws.org
provided no leadership to the mass movement. It failed to take such
elementary steps as to issue a call for action committees in factories,
suburbs and villages to prosecute the campaign and for workers defence
guards against state repression. Instead the LSSP leaders joined the CP
and VLSSP in calling for an end to the hartal, leaving those who
continued to protest to face state violence alone. In a lengthy article,
Colvin R. de Silva declared the hartal to be a new stage of the class
struggle that bore “the imprint of the worker-peasant alliance.” But he
concluded that the fight was now “to compel the UNP government to
resign and hold a fresh general election.” The LSSP had all along viewed
the hartal as nothing more than an adjunct to its parliamentary
manoeuvring. As a result Bandaranaike was able to capitalise on the mass
opposition sentiment and to gain influence, particularly among the
Sinhala rural masses disillusioned by the lack of LSSP leadership.
Bandaranaike’s political rise was further cemented when the LSSP
backed his no-confidence motion in the UNP government. Shocked by the
scope of the hartal, significant sections of the Sri Lankan ruling elite
swung their support behind the SLFP as an alternate means for propping
up capitalist rule. While he had opposed the protests and his SLFP did not
participate, the hartal was the making of Bandaranaike as a pivotal figure
for the Sri Lankan ruling class.
13-4. In the wake of the Hartal, the clamour inside the LSSP for “left
unity” with the Stalinist CP and VLSSP intensified. After the 1952
election, a tendency had emerged that blamed the party’s losses on its
failure to reach a no-contest pact with the CP and VLSSP, which had
demanded the LSSP drop its criticism of the Stalinist regimes in the
Soviet Union and China. Encouraged by Pablo’s pro-Stalinist line at the
Third Congress, the “unity” faction put forward an amendment at the
LSSP congress in October 1953 calling for the party to be “friendly
unconditionally” to the “socialist countries”. After the amendment was
defeated, the pro-Stalinist grouping broke away, its adherents joining
either the CP or VLSSP.
13-5. It was in this context that the LSSP leadership responded to the
Open Letter. Its rejection of Cannon’s appeal and refusal to join the
International Committee were all the more politically criminal as the
former BLPI leaders were well aware of the pro-Stalinist character of
Pablo’s revisions. Moreover, it had just experienced firsthand the impact
of Pabloism in its own ranks. But the LSSP objected in legalistic terms to
the manner in which the Open Letter was issued and refused to take a
political stand. Cannon wrote to Leslie Goonewardene, noting that the
LSSP had expelled its own pro-Stalinist tendency, then pointedly added:
“As internationalists, it is obligatory that we take the same attitude toward
open or covert manifestations of Stalinist conciliationism in other parties,
and in the international movement generally.[29]
13-6. Belatedly, the LSSP Central Committee passed a resolution in
April 1954 recognising the far-reaching consequences of Pablo’s claim
that Stalinist parties could be pushed onto the revolutionary road by mass
pressure. “This concept not only leads to a fundamental revision of the
positions of Trotskyism in regard to Stalinism but also denies to the
Trotskyist movement all justification for its continued independent
existence,” it declared. In practice, however, the LSSP sought to
conciliate and manoeuvre to preserve “unity” with the Pabloites, at the
expense of political clarification and principle, only compounding the
difficulties facing the SWP and ICFI. The LSSP leaders ultimately
capitulated to Pabloism. They attended the Pabloite Fourth Congress later
in 1954, thus lending it legitimacy, supported its resolutions with minor
amendments and remained with the Pabloite International Secretariat. It
was the start of a thoroughly opportunist relationship that was to have
disastrous consequences for the working class. The LSSP could claim
Trotskyist credentials for its reformist politics in the national arena, while
the International Secretariat could boast of having “a mass Trotskyist
party” in Asia. The LSSP’s support for Pabloism was a terrible blow
against Trotskyism and thus the working class, particularly in Asia. If the
LSSP, or a section of it, had taken a principled stand, it would have
immensely strengthened the International Committee, advanced its work
throughout the region, especially in India, and acted as a powerful
antidote to the pernicious influence of Maoism.
14. The LSSP’s political backsliding
14-1. The LSSP degenerated rapidly after 1953, aided and abetted at
every stage by the Pabloite International Secretariat. In the space of just
over a decade, the party abandoned any struggle for Trotskyism,
embraced Sinhala communalism and betrayed the working class by
entering a bourgeois SLFP-led coalition government in 1964, thereby
assuming political responsibility for the management of the capitalist
state. The LSSP’s degeneration was intimately bound up at every step
with its political adaptation to Bandaranaike and the SLFP—that is, to the
communal politics of Sinhala populism that, in the early stages at least,
were laced with anti-imperialist and socialistic demagogy. The inability of
the LSSP to take a firm, principled stand against the SLFP was connected
to its reversion to the petty-bourgeois radical traditions of Samasamajism.
It was no longer a politically homogeneous party. Layers of former BLPI
members were still rooted in the traditions of proletarian internationalism
that had been graphically demonstrated in the huge rally in 1948 against
the fraud of the new “independent” state. However, the increasingly
nationalist orientation was determined by party’s rightwing led by N.M.
Perera, to which ex-BLPI figures such Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie
Goonewardene acquiesced. Step by step, Perera overcame internal
resistance to an open embrace of the SLFP and its Sinhala populism.
14-2. In preparing for the 1956 election, Bandaranaike sought to
mobilise layers of the Sinhala petty bourgeoisie—small businessmen,
Buddhist monks and ayurvedic doctors—aggrieved by their
marginalisation under the British colonial administration. Drawing on the
demagogy of the earlier Buddhist revivalist movement, Bandaranaike
argued that the Sinhalese were “a unique race” that had to be accorded the
dominant position in the country’s affairs. In 1955, the SLFP abandoned
its demand that both Sinhala and Tamil replace English as the country’s
official language. Instead it adopted a “Sinhala only” policy that would
make Sinhala the sole official language—that is, in the courts, public sector
employment, the education system and all official matters. Bandaranaike
also promised to accord Buddhism a special official standing. By
proposing to make Sinhala supremacism the guiding principle of state
policy, the SLFP relegated ethnic Tamils and Tamil-speaking Muslims to
a second-class status. To provide his Sinhala populism with socialist and
anti-imperialist window-dressing, Bandaranaike brought Philip
Gunawardena’s VLSSP into his Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) or
People’s United Front for the 1956 election.
© World Socialist Web Site
14-3. The LSSP opposed the Sinhala-only policy and defended the
democratic rights of the Tamil minority despite violent attacks by Sinhala
racists. The arguments used by LSSP leaders, however, betrayed a marked
shift from the BLPI’s proletarian internationalism. The LSSP not only
accepted the legitimacy of the Sri Lankan state but also argued that the
Sinhala-only policy would undermine the nation. Their opposition was
based on defending the unity of the nation, not on fighting for the unity of
the working class. Speaking in parliament in October 1955, N.M. Perera
warned: “We shall have a perpetual division of the country, we shall
never get a united Ceylon, and we shall have a tremendous amount of
bloodshed which will lead us nowhere, and, in the end, this country will
either become a colony or a plaything of interested big powers.”[30] It
was not a stand taken on principle. Despite Bandaranaike’s
“Sinhala-only” policy, the LSSP struck an electoral “no-contest” pact
with the SLFP—thus giving credence to this bourgeois party as a
progressive alternative to the UNP. After the SLFP won a sweeping
victory, the LSSP adopted a stance of “responsive co-operation” towards
the new Bandaranaike government and in 1956 and 1957 voted for the
Throne Speech outlining government policy for the year. It only became
critical of Bandaranaike with the emergence of strikes from late 1957.
14-4. The thrust of the new SLFP-led government was the assertion of
Sinhala dominance in all spheres, provoking protests by Tamils, and
vicious counter-pogroms by Sinhala extremists who regarded any attempt
on Bandaranaike’s part to reach a compromise with the Tamil elites as a
betrayal. The limited nationalisations carried out by his government
expanded the role of the state and thus job opportunities for the Sinhalese
majority. The extension of public education and health was aimed at
consolidating a base among the party’s Sinhala rural constituency. The
government, however, was incapable of meeting the basic needs of
workers and the rural masses. This led to strikes and protests. The
anti-working class character of the SLFP-led government soon became
apparent in its strengthening of the Public Security Act in March 1958
followed shortly after by the imposition of a 10-month state of
emergency. Having exploited the politics of Sinhala communalism to
develop a rural base for the SLFP and to divide the working class,
Bandaranaike fell victim to his own creation. He was assassinated by a
Buddhist extremist in September 1959. The rightwing of his own party,
who feared that the government was incapable of containing a growing
working class movement, was also implicated. The same rightwing had
already insisted on the dismissal of Philip Gunawardena as government
minister. Gunawardena appropriated the name of MEP for his own new
Sinhala racialist party.
14-5. The year 1960 marked a further shift to the right by the LSSP. In
the first of two elections in March, the LSSP abandoned any semblance of
revolutionary Marxism and embraced the parliamentary road to socialism.
Declaring the UNP and SLFP to be completely discredited, the party
campaigned for “a Samasamajist government”—through parliament. It
significantly watered down its previous stance on the language
issue—dropping its call for parity between Sinhala and Tamil—and on
citizenship—now declaring the issue could be negotiated between the Sri
Lankan and Indian governments, without any reference to plantation
workers. The Pabloite International Secretariat enthusiastically endorsed
the LSSP’s parliamentary cretinism and adaptation to communal politics,
describing its election campaign as “a decisive struggle for power”.
14-6. Far from winning office, the LSSP gained fewer seats than in the
1956 election, provoking a crisis in the party. N.M. Perera took the
opportunity to propose for the first time that the party prepare to enter a
capitalist government with the SLFP. His resolution was passed at a party
congress in May 1960, but was thwarted by the election of a Central
Committee in which his rightwing was in a minority. Nevertheless, when
the short-lived UNP government collapsed and new elections took place
in July 1960, the LSSP reached a no-contest agreement with the SLFP.
With the election of a new SLFP government led by Bandaranaike’s
widow, the LSSP supported its overall policies by voting for its first
Throne Speech and its first budget.
14-7. Only now did the Pabloite International Secretariat (IS) start to
raise tepid criticisms. It had not objected to the LSSP’s previous
no-contest pact and “responsive cooperation” with the SLFP in 1956. The
only IS criticism of the LSSP’s parliamentary road to socialism in the
March 1960 election was that it had not been successful and a “profound
examination” was needed to ascertain the reasons for the electoral defeat.
However, with N.M. Perera proposing to enter a capitalist government,
the IS began a political cover up for its own gross opportunism. It
belatedly declared that “the no-contest agreement” carried the danger of
“creating illusions about the nature of the SLFP among the great masses.”
The Sixth World Congress condemned the LSSP’s support for the Throne
Speech and government budget. But the IS did not rule out giving
“critical support to a non-working class government (whether middle
class or capitalist) in a colonial or semi-colonial country” and, in so doing
endorsed, the LSSP’s rightward drift and provided the rationalisation for
its continuing opportunism.
14-8. Pabloism also sanctioned the LSSP’s accommodation to the
Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and China. In 1957, in the wake of
the 1956 Hungarian uprising, an LSSP delegation including Edmund
Samarakkody and Colvin R. de Silva visited Moscow as official guests
and made no mention of the Soviet army’s suppression of Hungarian
workers. In the same year, the LSSP newspaper published an editorial
entitled “Tribute to Chou En-lai” and hailed the Chinese foreign minister
and his fellow Stalinists for “the tremendous sacrifices made by these
men who led the Chinese Revolution to victory.” The American Socialist
Workers Party criticised the LSSP in an editorial that declared, “Chou En
Lai and the Chinese Communist Party did not lead ‘the Chinese
Communist Party to victory,’ nor can they legitimately be identified with
that victory.” It called on the upcoming LSSP delegation to China to
strongly demand the release of the Chinese Trotskyists, which the LSSP
leaders flatly refused to do.
15. The SWP reunification
15-1. In 1953, SWP leader James P. Cannon had concluded his Open
Letter by declaring: “The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s revisionism
and orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible
politically or organisationally.”[31] Quite quickly, however, the SWP
began to soften its opposition to Pabloism. As early as 1957, Cannon
responded positively to a letter from Leslie Goonewardene sounding out
the prospects of the SWP’s unification with the International Secretariat.
The shift was part of the SWP’s increasing adaptation to American
middle-class radical circles under the pressure of the post-war boom.
15-2. In fact, the gulf between orthodox Trotskyism and Pabloism had
widened, but the SWP was adopting opportunist positions similar to those
of the IS. By late 1960, the SWP, now under the leadership of Joseph
Hansen, was glorifying the Cuban regime, established by Fidel Castro and
his petty-bourgeois guerrilla movement, as a “workers’ state”. Based on
crude empiricism, the SWP asserted that the proletarian nature of the
Cuban state was determined by Castro’s nationalisation of the largely
agricultural economy, ignoring its open hostility to any independent
action by the working class and the lack of any organs of workers’ power.
Moreover, as Castro turned to the Soviet Union for assistance against US
imperialism and fused his July 26th Movement with the Cuban Stalinists,
the SWP insisted that the Castroites were becoming Marxists in the course
of the revolution. The SWP’s veneration of “the first victorious socialist
revolution in the Americas”, which “raised the entire colonial
revolutionary process to a new plateau of achievement” and gave “fresh
confirmation of the correctness of the theory of permanent revolution”,
became the touchstone for its reunification with the Pabloites.
© World Socialist Web Site
15-3. Between 1961 and 1963, the British Trotskyists of the Socialist
Labour League (SLL) led a determined struggle within the International
Committee against the SWP’s opportunism. The SLL rejected the SWP’s
contention that petty bourgeois leaderships could be forced by “the logic
of the revolution itself” to lead the working class to power and
emphasised that the central task confronting the Fourth International
remained the resolution of the crisis of proletarian leadership through the
construction of Bolshevik-type parties. After reviewing the struggle
against revisionism, the SLL concluded in 1961: “It is time to draw to a
close the period in which Pabloite revisionism was regarded as a trend
within Trotskyism.”
15-4. In relation to Cuba, the SWP employed Pablo’s and Mandel’s
objectivist method. In its July 1962 document, “Trotskyism Betrayed: The
SWP accepts the political method of Pabloite revisionism,” the SLL
National Committee declared: “In our communications with the SWP we
provoked a strong reaction by daring to suggest that talk about
‘confirming the permanent revolution’ without the revolutionary parties
was nonsense. In practice, however, both the Pabloites and the SWP find
themselves prostrate before the petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders in
Cuba and Algeria. Our view of this question is not opposed to that of the
SWP simply in terms of who can best explain a series of events. It is a
question rather of the actual policy and program of Trotskyist leadership
in these backward countries. The theory of permanent revolution is, like
all Marxist theory, a guide to action; analysis becomes the pointer to the
need to organise an independent and determined working class and its
allies in the peasantry for their own soviet power. ‘Confirming the
permanent revolution’ is not an accolade to be conferred by Marxists on
approved nationalist leaders but a task for which Marxists themselves
have the responsibility.”[32]
15-5. Moreover, the SLL insisted that the so-called successes
proclaimed by the SWP in Cuba and Algeria had to be assessed as part of
an overall balance sheet of Stalinism and petty bourgeois radicalism in
mass struggles in backward capitalist countries. “Besides Cuba and
Algeria—and in order to understand both of these—the experience of Iraq,
Iran, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Bolivia, Indo-China, and many other
countries must be taken into account. What would emerge from such a
historical analysis is the true role played by those leaders of the working
class who have proceeded from the theory of ‘two stages’. Stalinism, far
from being ‘forced to play a progressive role’, has in fact disarmed and
betrayed the advanced workers in every one of these countries and has
enabled a bourgeois government to establish temporary
stabilisation—which is all imperialism can hope for at the present stage. It
is in this sense and this sense only that the ‘theory of Permanent
Revolution has been confirmed’.”[33]
15-6. The SLL also opposed the SWP’s claim that the 1962 Evian
agreement for Algerian “independence” between the French government
and Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) leadership represented “a major
victory for the Algerian people, for the Arab and colonial revolution”.
The SLL defended the Fourth International’s assessment—clearly
elaborated by the BLPI in relation to India and Sri Lanka—of such formal
post-war independence agreements under which the national bourgeoisie
took on the role of safeguarding imperialist interests. The SLL explained:
“The Algerian petty bourgeoisie seeks to fill the place vacated by French
colonialism, while continuing to be a loyal guarantor of the fundamental
interests of French capital in North Africa. We see the Evian agreements
as the expression of that willingness, in which the FLN leaders remain
true to their nature.”[34]
15-7. Without any discussion of the theoretical and political issues that
had led to the 1953 split, the SWP, and groups in many Latin American
countries that had hitherto been affiliated to the ICFI and traditionally
looked to the US Trotskyists for leadership, formally reunified with the
Pabloites at their Seventh Congress in Rome in June 1963. In what was a
complete rejection of the Theory of Permanent Revolution, the main
resolution of the Pabloite “World Congress” concluded from the Cuban
revolution that “the weakness of the enemy in the backward countries has
opened the possibility of coming to power with a blunted
instrument”—that is, without a Leninist party fighting for the independent
mobilisation of the working class. The Pabloites’ glorification of Castro
and guerrilla “armed struggle” was to prove a disastrous dead-end in
Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and across Latin America, serving to isolate
revolutionary elements from the working class and contributing to historic
defeats. The LSSP leaders, who were investing the capitalist SLFP with
the functions of “a blunted instrument” in Sri Lanka, fully supported the
reunification and the formation of the new United Secretariat. In turn, the
SWP lauded the LSSP as a mass Trotskyist party.
To be continued
Footnotes:
29. Emphasis in the original; Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume
Two (London: New Park 1974), p. 89.
30. Blows against the Empire, p. 169.
31. Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume One, p. 312.
32. Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume Three (London: New Park,
1974), p. 244.
33. Ibid., p. 250.
34. Ibid., p. 248.

To contact the WSWS and the

Socialist Equality Party visit:

http://www.wsws.org

© World Socialist Web Site

World Socialist Web Site
The Historical and International Foundations
of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 7
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
2 April 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
16. The Great Betrayal in Sri Lanka
16-1. The entry of the LSSP into the government of Madame Sirima
Bandaranaike in June 1964 was a watershed in the history of the Fourth
International—for the first time a party claiming to be Trotskyist directly
entered the service of the bourgeoisie. The political responsibility for the
betrayal rested squarely with the United Secretariat (USec) and confirmed
all of the SLL’s warnings about the unprincipled reunification of the
SWP with the Pabloites just a year before. The leader of the British SLL,
Gerry Healy, explained that the LSSP’s betrayal was “the most complete
example” of betrayal by Pablo, Mandel and Pierre Frank. “These people
must take responsibility, since they have been in constant communication
with the LSSP in Ceylon, for the past 18 years. The answer [to the
question of the LSSP’s degeneration] lies not in Ceylon, but in an
international study of the struggle against Pabloite revisionism. The real
architects of the coalition reside in Paris.”[35]
16-2. The road to the LSSP’s entry into the Bandaranaike
government—the United Left Front (ULF) of the LSSP with the Stalinist
CP and Philip Gunawardena’s MEP—was encouraged and sanctioned by
the USec. The International Secretariat had called in 1960 for an electoral
front of “working class parties” and the 1963 unification congress
declared that the LSSP had “correctly raised the question of a United Left
Front, both to arrest the movement to the right and to help these masses to
move towards an alternative left.”[36] The ULF, however, was precisely
the type of Popular Front that Trotsky had opposed in the 1930s.
Moreover, it involved parties with a proven track record of class
collaboration—the racist MEP had participated in the 1956 SLFP
government and the Stalinist CP had been part of the Ceylon National
Congress during the war and would have joined the first UNP government
if the UNP had been willing.
16-3. The ULF platform was formally signed on August 12, 1963—the
10th anniversary of the 1953 hartal—amid great professions of working
class unity. This opportunist formation had nothing in common with the
united front tactic of Trotsky who had insisted on the political
independence of the revolutionary party and no mixing of political
programs, banners and slogans. The joint ULF platform was not “a
genuinely socialist program”, as the Pabloites declared, but a list of
limited reforms to be achieved through parliament and within the
framework of capitalism. Moreover, the program, which the USec
© World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
approved, made major concessions to the MEP’s communal politics.
Having dropped its demand for parity between the Sinhala and Tamil
languages in 1960, the LSSP now agreed to a common platform that
vaguely called for the existing Sinhala-only legislation to be made less
discriminatory. Within the LSSP Central Committee, a minority led by
Edmund Samarakkody correctly condemned the ULF program as popular
frontism but did not call for the LSSP to break from the ULF.
Samarakkody’s stance was a typical centrist evasion—he was capable of
recognising the opportunist character of what was proposed, but not of
drawing the necessary political conclusions and breaking with the Perera
leadership. The only Trotskyist criticism came from the SLL in Britain
which denounced the ULF as opportunist and called on the “hundreds of
devoted communists in the LSSP” to reaffirm the “principles and
program of the FI and purge the party of revisionism and the revisionist
leaders.”[37]
16-4. From its inception in 1960, the SLFP government had been in
crisis. In response to widespread protests by Tamils over the Sinhala-only
policy, Bandaranaike proscribed the Federal Party and imposed a state of
emergency for much of 1961. Amidst a rising strike movement over the
government’s austerity measures, the government banned industrial
action and deployed the army on the docks. A failed coup attempt by
senior police and military officers in January 1962 reflected fears in
sections of the ruling class about Bandaranaike’s ability to contain the
working class. Strikes were given further impetus by the formation of the
Joint Committee of Trade Unions Organisation (JCTUO) in September
1963 unifying all unions, including those of plantation workers, around 21
common demands. A 69-day strike by the LSSP’s Ceylon Mercantile
Union (CMU) defied a government ultimatum to return to work and
forced significant concessions by January 1964. Uncertain of her
parliamentary majority, Bandaranaike prorogued parliament in February.
16-5. With her cabinet in crisis over how to deal with the mass
working-class movement, Bandaranaike opened talks with the ULF
parties. On March 21, as LSSP leaders were addressing a huge rally of the
21-demands movement on Galle Face Green, including large contingents
of plantation workers, N.M. Perera held secret discussions with
Bandaranaike over the formation of a coalition government. When the
talks became public knowledge, Bandaranaike, a class-conscious
representative of the bourgeoisie, justified her actions by openly
explaining the various options: “Some feel that these [strike] troubles can
be eliminated by the establishment of a dictatorship. Others say that the
workers should be made to work at the point of gun and bayonet. Still
others maintain that a national government should be formed to solve this
problem. I have considered these ideas separately and in the context of
world events. My conclusion is that none of these solutions will help to
get us where we want to go … Therefore, gentlemen, I decided to initiate
talks with the leaders of the working class, particularly Mr. Philip
Gunawardena and Mr. N.M. Perera.”[38]
16-6. The LSSP rightwing led by Perera, supported by the so-called
“centre” faction led by Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Goonewardene,
hurriedly convened a party conference for June 6–7 to authorise a
coalition with the SLFP. Gerry Healy, who flew to Colombo on behalf of
the ICFI, was barred from entering the conference, but campaigned
vigorously outside. Inside, the resolution moved by Perera justified the
betrayal by arguing that the SLFP was not a capitalist party, but “a party
based on the radical petty-bourgeoisie and the lower middle class” that
“had shed some of the more reactionary elements” and carried out
“various measures for nationalisation.” While these declarations were a
complete negation of everything that Trotsky had written on political
formations such as the Kuomintang in China, they were fully in line with
the Pabloite glorification of the petty-bourgeois leaderships in Cuba and
Algeria. The resolution also made clear that the LSSP leadership had
completely capitulated to the SLFP’s communalism—the list of 10 policies
agreed upon with Bandaranaike did not refer to the language or
citizenship issues. The resolution of the “centre” laid bare the political
and moral collapse of the former BLPI revolutionaries—de Silva and
Goonewardene. Their only “difference” with Perera was the terms of
surrender to the SLFP—the coalition government, they argued, should
include the other ULF parties, not just the LSSP.
16-7. The resolution of the newly-formed Revolutionary Minority
unambiguously condemned the proposed coalition government as
“treachery to the proletarian revolution”, stating: “The entry of the LSSP
leaders into the SLFP government will result in open class collaboration,
disorientation of the masses, the division of the working class and the
abandonment of the struggle perspective, which will lead to the disruption
of the working class movement and the elimination of the independent
revolutionary axis of the Left. In the result, the forces of capitalist
reaction, far from being weakened or thwarted, will be ultimately
strengthened.” After the vote—501 for Perera’s resolution, 75 for the
“centre” and 159 for the opposition—the Revolutionary Minority faction
left the conference, met separately and formed what became the Lanka
Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary) or LSSP (R).
16-8. The USec played a thoroughly opportunist role throughout. In
April, that is weeks before the conference, it had been declaring that the
ULF in Sri Lanka could “provide another Cuba or Algeria and prove to be
even greater inspiration to revolutionary minded workers throughout the
world.”[39] When news of Perera’s negotiations with Bandaranaike
reached Paris, the USec scrambled to cover up its own political
responsibility by calling for a return to the ULF. But Healy aptly summed
up the ULF as “the sugar coating for the bitter pill of coalition”—it was the
political stepping stone used by Perera into the Bandaranaike government.
There was no fundamental difference between the ULF program and the
LSSP’s deal with Bandaranaike. The USec expelled N.M. Perera and two
others, who became ministers in the SLFP government, suspended those
LSSP members who voted for his motion, but took no action for months,
against the so-called “centre”, which remained within the LSSP.
16-9. The USec suppressed criticism within its ranks of the LSSP
betrayal. Inside the American SWP, supporters of the ICFI led by Tim
Wohlforth, who constituted an official minority, were suspended from
membership for insisting on an internal party discussion on the LSSP’s
entry into the Bandaranaike government—an unprecedented event in the
history of the Fourth International. The minority, which had fought
alongside the SLL since 1961 against the SWP’s reunification with the
Pabloites, formed the American Committee for the Fourth International,
which was transformed into the Workers League in November 1966.
16-10. In a statement issued in July 1964, the ICFI drew the following
far-sighted conclusion: “The entry of the LSSP members into the
Bandaranaike coalition marks the end of a whole epoch of the evolution
© World Socialist Web Site
of the Fourth International. It is in the direct service of imperialism, in the
preparation of a defeat for the working class that revisionism in the world
Trotskyist movement has found its expression.”[40]
17. The formation of the RCL
17-1. Coming in the wake of the LSSP’s betrayal, the formation of the
Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) as the Sri Lankan section of the
ICFI in 1968 was the product of the intersection of the political and
theoretical struggle waged by the International Committee against
Pabloism and a radicalisation of workers and youth in Sri Lanka that
foreshadowed the period of revolutionary upheavals internationally from
1968 to 1975.
17-2. As a small island state vulnerable to global economic and political
shocks, Sri Lanka has tended to be a harbinger of broader international
processes. An acute balance of payments crisis produced by falling tea
prices in the early 1960s, combined with an international downturn,
generated high levels of unemployment. Young people were the hardest
hit, including university graduates. Youth and workers were radicalised
not only through the developing movement against the Bandaranaike
government but by the crimes of American imperialism—including the
murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and the escalating US involvement
in the Vietnam War. Despite the LSSP’s political degeneration, the
Trotskyist traditions of the BLPI that clung to it still proved deeply
attractive. Significant layers of students in schools and universities
regarded themselves as Trotskyists. At the country’s main Peradeniya
university, the Trotskyists predominated.
17-3. The LSSP’s betrayal had a profound impact in Sri Lanka and
internationally. The LSSP, along with the Pabloite leadership, through
their adaptation to Stalinism, and especially the glorification of Maoism,
had allowed the influence of Stalinist parties throughout Asia to go
unchallenged. Now the Stalinists could use the LSSP’s treachery to
deflect attention from their own political crimes. That was particularly the
case in India, where Pabloism had effectively destroyed the Trotskyist
movement and allowed the Communist Party of India (CPI) to develop
unopposed. No intervention was made in the crisis that enveloped the CPI
following the 1961 Sino-Soviet split and the 1962 Indo-Chinese border
war and that, in 1964, resulted in the creation of the breakaway
Communist Party of India (Marxist) ostensibly in opposition to the
“revisionist” CPI. The CPI, the CPI (M), and the Naxalites or Maoists,
who split off from the CPI (M) in 1968–69, all served to politically
subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie during the wave of
worker and peasant struggles that convulsed India for a decade beginning
in the late 1960s. The Naxalites demagogically invoked the LSSP’s
betrayal, in order to buttress all the stock Stalinist lies and slanders about
Trotskyism, while pursuing their strategy of peasant-based guerrilla war.
17-4. In Sri Lanka, the LSSP’s naked abandonment of proletarian
internationalism and embrace of the SLFP’s Sinhala supremacism opened
the door for the unrestrained growth of communal politics that was to
have catastrophic consequences for the island. The unified 21-demands
movement of Sinhala and Tamil workers broke up after the LSSP entered
the Bandaranaike government and withdrew its support. The LSSP’s
support for a pact between Bandaranaike and Indian Prime Minister Lal
Bahadur Shastri in October 1964 providing for the forced repatriation of
half a million Tamil plantation workers led to the immediate collapse of
LSSP support in this pivotal section of the working class.
17-5. Among radicalised youth, various forms of petty-bourgeois
communal politics gained from the LSSP’s betrayal at the expense of
genuine Marxism. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) or People’s
Liberation Front, formed in 1966 by former CP Stalinists and Maoists,
was able to expand among layers of unemployed Sinhala rural youth in
the island’s South. The JVP, which drew eclectically on Maoism and
Castroism mixed with local Sinhala populism, used the LSSP’s betrayal
to demagogically denounce “Trotskyism.” In the 1970s, as the Sinhala
chauvinist policies of the second SLFP coalition radicalised sections of
Tamil youth, various armed Tamil organisations, including the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), cited the actions of LSSP ministers to
justify their opposition to Trotskyism and Marxism. Nearly two decades
after the LSSP’s betrayal, the reactionary communal politics of the Sri
Lankan bourgeoisie erupted in a civil war that convulsed the island for the
next quarter century.
17-6. Against this political tide, a talented layer of radicalised youth,
drawn to Trotskyism and the BLPI’s traditions, founded the RCL in 1968.
This was only possible, however, through the intervention of the ICFI to
clarify the politics of Pabloism that had produced the LSSP’s betrayal and
continued to dominate the breakaway LSSP (R). Foremost among these
youth were Keerthi Balasuriya, who was elected as general secretary at
the age of just 19 and led the RCL until his untimely death in 1987, and
Wije Dias, who took over as general secretary under those difficult
circumstances and has directed the party for the past quarter century. The
ability of the RCL to withstand the immense political pressures generated
by the LSSP’s betrayal and the island’s protracted civil war is testimony
to the soundness of the Trotskyist principles on which it was established
as a section of the ICFI.
17-7. The ICFI’s interventions in Sri Lanka through the SLL—first by
Gerry Healy in June 1964 and then by Mike Banda, editor of the SLL’s
Newsletter, in December 1964—resulted in the formation of a pro-ICFI
grouping inside the LSSP (R). The LSSP (R), however, was a hostile
political environment—the party was formed in a split with the LSSP, but
did not break from Pabloism and remained inside the Pabloite USec. Its
secretary, Edmund Samarakkody, had attended the 1963 World Congress
and voted for the reunification with the SWP. At the first LSSP (R)
conference, the entire leadership combined to block a resolution by an
ICFI sympathiser to debate the “international question”—that is, the
struggle waged by the ICFI against Pabloite revisionism.
17-8. The political orientation of the LSSP (R) flowed from the USec’s
advocacy of the United Left Front. The party’s main task was viewed in
syndicalist terms as the struggle to continue the 21-demands movement
through what remained of the JCTUO. As the RCL later explained: “The
LSSP (R) had become an organisation that was manoeuvring at the top to
pull the ‘left leaders’ into struggle, while denouncing them as traitors
before the working class. By means of this policy, they oriented the small
following they had within the working class to manoeuvres to ‘push the
leaders to the left’ and not towards organising the working class and the
youth independently for a struggle against the [LSSP and CP]
leaders.”[41]
17-9. Dissatisfaction among student youth sympathetic to the LSSP (R)
increased markedly after the party’s two parliamentarians—Samarakkody
and Meryl Fernando—ignored Political Bureau directions and supported a
right-wing amendment to the Throne Speech in December 1964. The
amendment, which relied for its success on the backing of the LSSP (R)
MPs, was in effect a vote of no confidence and brought down the
SLFP-LSSP government. The vote by Samarakkody and Fernando led to
a collapse of support for the LSSP (R) in the March 1965 election and the
loss of both its seats. The UNP won the election and formed a seven-party
coalition, including the MEP and the Federal Party. In this context, a layer
of students hostile to the actions of the LSSP (R) leadership formed a
heterogeneous grouping, broadly supportive of Trotskyism, and began
publishing the Shakthi newspaper in November 1965. Its leaders were, or
had been, prominent in student politics at Peradeniya university. The
Shakthi group led a protest against the Vietnam War and a week-long
student strike in December 1965 to demand improved conditions that was
violently suppressed by police. Wije Dias and several others were
suspended, a former student leader was sacked from his job, and four
students were tried on trumped-up charges of attempting to murder a
© World Socialist Web Site
policeman.
17-10. For all its radicalism, however, the Shakthi group was still based
on the LSSP (R) politics of pressuring the LSSP and CP leaders to the
left. Inside the LSSP (R), Wilfred “Spike” Perera, who had been a BLPI
member during and after the war, challenged the orientation of the
Shakthi group. He wrote a lengthy reply to a September 1965 document
entitled “Lessons of December” by a Shakthi leader, Nimal (Nanda
Wickremasinghe), who criticised the LSSP (R) for not intervening in the
SLFP-LSSP protests of December 1964 that called on Bandaranaike to
ignore the Throne Speech vote. In his “Not the lessons of December, but
the lessons of June”, Spike rejected the document’s impressionist claims
about the revolutionary potential of these “extra parliamentary struggles”,
pointing out that their demands were the maintenance of a capitalist
government and the implementation of the racialist Sirima-Shastri pact.
He insisted that the critical political lessons to be assimilated were those
of the LSSP’s betrayal in June 1964. Spike’s document, however, was
not circulated, as the bulk of the pro-ICFI group, of which he was part,
did not want to disrupt its relations with the LSSP (R) leadership.
17-11. As a result, the Shakthi group came under the influence of V.
Karalasingham, an LSSP (R) Political Bureau member and former BLPI
leader, who as a lawyer had defended the Peradeniya university students.
Karalasingham was also hostile to the LSSP (R) leadership, describing
Samarakkody’s vote to bring down the Bandaranaike government as a
“Himalayan blunder.” This exaggerated criticism of a tactical
parliamentary error betrayed Karalasingham’s orientation, which was not
towards revolutionary Marxism, but back towards the LSSP. In an Open
Letter for May Day 1966 published in Shakthi, Karalasingham argued that
a SLFP-LSSP government would be a progressive alternative to the
existing UNP regime and would be a step on the path to “a real
revolutionary government.” Revolutionaries should not fear such a
development, he wrote, but “should help the emergence of such a
[coalition] government.” Spike subjected the article to an exhaustive
critique, explaining that Karalasingham’s “sequence of intermediate
regimes” was nothing but a sequence of bourgeois governments and
represented “a capitulation to the existing level of consciousness of the
most backward layers of the anti-UNP masses.” In January 1966, the
LSSP had joined the SLFP and CP in overtly racialist protests and strikes
against government legislation for the limited official use of the Tamil
language.
17-12. By October 1966, Karalasingham had declared in a polemic
against Samarakkody that the split with the LSSP had been a mistake and
was advocating for a return to the LSSP. Only Wije Dias and one other
Shakthi group member voted against Karalasingham’s proposal. Others,
beguiled by Karalasingham’s camouflage of his manoeuvre as an “entry”
into the LSSP, initially voted in favour. Rapidly, however, the Shakthi
group split after its left wing, led by Anura Ekanayake, Keerthi Balasuriya
and Nanda Wickremasinghe, established contact with SLL Political
Committee member Tony Banda, who was in Sri Lanka at the time. They
accepted Banda’s advice not to enter the LSSP, were put in contact with
Spike and were able to read his documents for the first time. They
consolidated a group, including Dias, that systematically studied the
documents of the ICFI’s struggle against Pabloism in 1953 and 1961–63.
17-13. Initially under the guidance of Tony Banda, the group began
publishing Virodhaya and intervening in the struggles of the working
class. Spike’s interventions inside the LSSP (R) served to further clarify
the role of Pabloism. During Ernest Mandel’s visit to Colombo in
February 1967, Spike used a membership meeting to challenge the USec
leader. “I make the charge that the leadership of the FI has been directly
responsible for the degeneration and ultimate debacle of the LSSP, and
moreover, that the degeneration had its origin in the leadership of the FI
itself, which included members of the LSSP.” Within weeks, at Mandel’s
instigation, the LSSP (R) launched an “investigation” into a Young
Socialisteditorial written by Spike six months earlier, condemning Castro competence of the ICFI, acquired through its consistent struggle for the
for his rabid attack on the Fourth International at the Tri-Continental program and method of the Fourth International, to meet the new
Conference. Spike launched a spirited defence, declaring that LSSP (R) challenges of building the Fourth International as the centralised
leader Bala Tampoe and the Central Committee were accusing him of proletarian leadership. This Congress dedicates firmly to the task of
“lese-majeste against Fidel Castro for presuming to doubt his building the party of the proletarian revolution in Ceylon as a section of
revolutionary bone fides and criticise him.” In answer he declared: “But I the ICFI in an intransigent struggle against all forms of revisionism and
plead in extenuation that I did criticise Castro not as an ordinary declares that this task is inseparably bound up with active intervention in
individual who is but a cipher in comparison with the ‘Great Cuban the class struggle to the maximum possible extent in every place and
Leader’ but as an individual who is proud to be a member of the Fourth under all circumstances.”
International, the world party of socialist revolution which was founded To be continued
by Leon Trotsky ... I have dared to criticise Castro for trying to deceive Footnotes:
and disorient the international working class and indirectly instigating a 35. Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume Four (London: New Park,
witch-hunt of Trotskyists.” At the April 1968 LSSP (R) Congress, Spike 1974), p. 225.
moved a resolution calling for a complete break from the revisionist 36. Gerry Healy, “Ceylon, the Great Betrayal,” Trotskyism Versus
politics of the United Secretariat, the dissolution of the Central Committee Revisionism, Volume Four, pp. 233–4.
and the establishment of one that would immediately establish relations 37. “The Newsletter,” cited in Y. Ranjith Amarasinghe, Revolutionary
with the ICFI. Shortly afterwards, Spike broke from the LSSP (R) and Idealism and Parliamentary Politics (Colombo: Social Scientists’
publicly condemned the politics of Pabloism. Association, 1998), p. 261.
17-14. The lessons of the Third Congress of the ICFI in 1966 were 38. Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume Four, p. 241.
critical in the education of the Virodhaya group members. The congress 39. Ibid., p. 235.
took place in the wake of the SWP’s reunification, in difficult conditions 40. Ibid., p. 255.
in which Pabloism had liquidated most sections of the Fourth 41. Revolutionary Communist League, “The April Crisis and Party
International. Adapting to this situation, the draft resolution declared that History,” internal resolution adopted at the 1972 conference of the RCL,
the Fourth International itself had been destroyed and had to be p. 20.
“reconstructed.” During the congress, the British SLL insisted that the
continuity of the Fourth International had been preserved through the
political and theoretical struggle of the ICFI against Pabloism and that the To contact the WSWS and the
lessons of that struggle were critical to resolving the crisis of Socialist Equality Party visit:
revolutionary proletarian leadership. The amended document declared:
“The historical continuity of the Fourth International was ensured by the
International Committee, for it alone was able to carry out the theoretical
http://www.wsws.org
and practical fight against revisionism, indispensable for the building of
the revolutionary international.” Two groupings—Voix Ouvrière from
France and James Robertson’s Spartacist tendency from the US—that had
been invited to determine whether political collaboration with them was
possible, denigrated the struggle against Pabloite opportunism. Robertson
flatly opposed “the notion that the present crisis of capitalism is so sharp
and deep that Trotskyist revisionism is needed to tame the workers, in a
way comparable to the degeneration of the Second and Third
Internationals.” Robertson declared that this constituted “an enormous
overestimation of our present significance”, rejecting the lessons of the
LSSP’s betrayal just two years earlier. He quit the congress and formed
the Spartacist tendency, which has always been characterised by its deep
hostility to the ICFI.
17-15. The founding congress of the RCL took place on June 16–17,
1968. In the main report to the congress, Balasuriya drew out the crucial
lessons of the Third Congress of the ICFI and their significance for the
establishment of the RCL. The key issue that emerged during the
discussion concerned the continuity of the struggle for Trotskyism. In
opposition to a tendency that viewed the congress as the unification of a
national Sri Lankan revolutionary current that traced its history through
the LSSP, LSSP (R) and Shakthi with the ICFI, Balasuriya insisted that
the continuity of Trotskyism lay in the ICFI’s struggles against Pabloism.
The founding of the RCL as a section of the ICFI could only take place on
the basis of the lessons of the splits of 1953 and 1961–63 and in a
fundamental break from the opportunist politics of the LSSP, LSSP (R)
and also the Shakthi group.
17-16. The congress unanimously adopted a resolution that declared:
“This Congress declares its full agreement with the resolution
‘Rebuilding the Fourth International’ that was adopted by the Third
Congress of the International Committee of the Fourth International
(ICFI) held in April 1966. This Congress expresses complete faith in the

© World Socialist Web Site

World Socialist Web Site
The Historical and International Foundations
of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 8
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
3 April 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
18. The RCL’s struggle against petty-bourgeois radicalism
18-1. The founding of the RCL took place at the onset of a wave of
revolutionary struggles of the international working class that convulsed
much of the world from 1968 to 1975. The tumultuous May–June strike
movement in France and the 1968 “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia
were followed by a succession of upheavals including the 1969 “hot
summer” in Italy, the 1974 British miners’ strike that brought down the
Heath government and the collapse of the fascist regimes in Portugal and
Greece. These struggles were a product of the economic turmoil produced
by the end of the post-war boom and the breakup of the Bretton Woods
monetary system signalled by the termination of US dollar-gold
convertibility in August 1971. The chief role in betraying these
revolutionary movements was played by the social democratic, Stalinist
and trade union bureaucracies. However, as the ICFI had rightly
recognised from the LSSP’s earlier betrayal in 1964, the various Pabloite
organisations proved to be a vital secondary prop for capitalism in
blocking a political struggle by the working class against the treachery of
its old parties and organisations.
18-2. In Sri Lanka, the capitalist class depended directly on the LSSP,
which provided the vital “Trotskyist” camouflage for the second
Bandaranaike government that took power after a landslide election
victory in May 1970 and ruled until its ignominious defeat in 1977. LSSP
leaders N.M. Perera, Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Goonewardene all
became ministers. Throughout this period, the LSSP (R) and its various
fragments—following their Pabloite counterparts internationally—assisted
in propping up the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition government in the face of
mounting working class opposition by promoting, in various guises, a
renewal of the United Left Front and the illusion that the LSSP and CP
could be pressured to defend workers’ interests.
18-3. In the 1970 election, amid overwhelming hostility in the working
class to the previous UNP government, the RCL called for a critical vote
for the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition. This serious tactical error was criticised
by Michael Banda in a letter to the RCL, explaining that the policy was
“an unwarranted concession to the reformists and the radical
bourgeoisie.” He continued: “Certainly, now the task must be not to open
the door for another coalition (how many more coalitions do we need!)
but to reject any support to the SLFP and to attempt to free the working
class from the capitalist trap by demanding the LSSP-CP leaders to break
© World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
from the SLFP.”
18-4. The response of Keerthi Balasuriya and the RCL provides a
classic example of how a Marxist party makes a principled correction.
The party leadership first initiated an exhaustive inner party discussion of
Banda’s correspondence and the political implications of the error. In a
statement published in July 1970 correcting the error, the RCL explained:
“A party capable of taking power can be built only in opposition to the
LSSP-CP leaders. Without a struggle against the coalition perspective of
the LSSP-CP leaders on the basis of a perspective of a workers’ and
peasants’ government, we cannot mobilise the working class
independently. To force the Samasamajist and Stalinist leaders to break
from the coalition government and the coalition front is the form that the
fight for class independence of the working class takes.”
18-5. The RCL’s new tactical orientation was not to encourage illusions
in the LSSP and CP but was the political means for exposing their class
collaborationist politics as part of the independent mobilisation of the
working class and rural masses for the seizure of power. As the
Transitional Program of the Fourth International stated: “Of all the parties
and organisations which base themselves on the workers and peasants and
speak in their name we demand that they break politically from the
bourgeoisie and enter upon the road of struggle for a workers’ and
farmers’ government. On this road we promise them full support against
capitalist reaction. At the same time, we indefatigably develop our
agitation around those transitional demands which should in our opinion
form the program for a workers’ and farmers’ government’.”[42]
18-6. However, the RCL did not stop at correcting the immediate
mistake. As a Marxist, Balasuriya understood that this error had to be the
product of considerable political pressures being brought to bear on the
party—particularly via the agencies of petty-bourgeois radicalism and
opportunism. The RCL statement declared that it was necessary to grasp
“the roots of this error because the same hostile class pressure that acted
on the RCL can emerge in another form in other circumstances.” In the
wake of the discussion, Balasuriya turned to a book-length critique of the
party that was the epitome of middle-class radicalism—the JVP. The
program of the JVP drew from the fashionable theories of the day—the
peasant guerrillaism of Castroism and Maoism, which were also being
promoted by the Pabloites. In subjecting the JVP to detailed critical
examination, Balasuriya deepened the class differentiation of the RCL
from radical Sinhala populism and from all those parties, including the
LSSP and LSSP (R) that adapted to it.
18-7. In the preface to his book, Balasuriya declared: “Many elements,
claiming to base themselves on the experiences of Mao Zedong and the
Chinese revolution, try to reduce the question of the revolution simply to
one of carrying out, in one way or the other, a protracted ‘peoples war’ or
some other form of armed struggle. These attempts have nothing in
common with Marxist positions on revolution. The question of revolution
cannot even be posed without a genuinely objective evaluation of the
inter-relationships between the classes and their dynamics ... The Marxist
conception that emphasises that the working class cannot come to power
by peaceful means has nothing in common with the stupid formula that
victory is assured by simply getting armed. Anyone with the slightest
respect for the experience of the revolutions where the working class,
even though it had arms in hand, was beaten and crushed by the
bourgeoisie, will not advocate such conceptions.”[43]
18-8. As Balasuriya explained, the JVP—like Castro, Guevara and
Mao—was organically hostile to the working class and rooted in
reactionary nationalism. In the JVP’s distorted terminology, the
“proletariat” referred to the oppressed layers of the peasantry. The
organisation belittled the economic struggles of workers as “struggles for
cups of porridge” that distracted from the “patriotic” struggle against
imperialism. Modelling itself on Castro, the JVP declared that “an
uprising staged by a group of patriots could undermine the power of the
ruling class.” Like the Stalinists, the JVP fostered dangerous illusions in
the progressive nature of the national bourgeoisie. In what amounted to a
repetition of Stalin’s formula for the 1925–27 Chinese revolution, it
declared that “anti-imperialist hatred among all social classes” is “pooled
together” and “amounts to patriotism.”
18-9. From the outset, the JVP’s propaganda had a communal
character: patriotism meant Sinhala patriotism; the anti-imperialist
struggle included a fight against “Indian expansionism” and “privileged”
Tamil-speaking plantation workers were declared the enemy of Sinhala
workers. Balasuriya prophetically warned: “In a period where British
imperialism and the Lankan bourgeoisie are driven by their own class
interests to devastate the conditions of the plantation workers, petty
bourgeois hostility to the same workers turns into a weapon in the hands
of monopoly capitalism. This racism is one that leads to fascism. The JVP
is creating an anti-working class movement in Lanka which could well be
utilised in the future by a fascist movement.” JVP leader Rohana
Wijeweera responded to the book’s publication by threatening to hang
Balasuriya if the JVP came to power.
18-10. The RCL’s principled correction of its tactical error was the
essential preparation for the huge political tests that lay ahead. Within
months, the JVP put into practice its theory that “an uprising staged by a
group of patriots could undermine the power of the ruling class.” In April
1971, its cadre launched a series of attacks on police stations in the south
of the island. The Bandaranaike government, with the full support of the
LSSP and CP, responded with a ferocious campaign of state repression.
More than 15,000 rural youth were killed by the army and police and over
30,000 detained. A state of emergency was proclaimed and draconian new
legislation passed establishing special courts to try the JVP leaders on
conspiracy charges.
18-11. Occurring just three years after the formation of the
Revolutionary Communist League, the period was a baptism of fire for
the RCL. Despite its fundamental political differences with the JVP, the
RCL took a principled stand in opposition to the murderous campaign of
state repression against the JVP and rural youth. As a result, the
government banned the RCL’s publications and the party was forced
underground. It continued its political activities in defiance of the
emergency regulations and paid a terrible price. Two RCL
members—Central Committee member Lakshman Weerakoon and L.G.
Gunadasa—were arrested and killed in police custody.
18-12. The RCL, however, was not destroyed by the ordeal, but
emerged with its political stature considerably enhanced. In conditions of
illegality, it sought to mobilise the working class against the state
repression. As restrictions were eased, the RCL conducted an island-wide
campaign in defence of the detained rural youth. Based on the
fundamental conceptions of the Theory of Permanent Revolution, the
© World Socialist Web Site
party explained to workers that they had a political responsibility to
defend the rural masses as part of the process of forging an alliance with
the peasantry against the capitalist state. The RCL warned that the attacks
on the rural youth foreshadowed attacks on the working class itself. The
RCL’s demand to “Free the political prisoners” became one of the
slogans raised by workers in the developing strike movement in the
mid-1970s. After his release in 1978, JVP leader Wijeweera visited the
RCL headquarters to personally thank the party for its campaign.
18-13. One aspect of the RCL’s defence campaign deserves particular
mention. The party intervened vigorously to defend the democratic rights
of artists threatened under the emergency powers imposed in the wake of
the JVP uprising. The RCL’s campaign and its publication of reviews of
new drama, cinema and literature attracted a broad audience, especially
among youth. The RCL translated Trotsky’s seminal pamphlet, Culture
and Socialism, and elaborated a Marxist approach to the arts that
contradicted the dominant bourgeois ideologies as well as theories based
on Stalinist “social realism.” So influential were the RCL’s writings that
a leading academic, Professor Ediriweera Sarachchandra, felt impelled in
1985 to publicly attack the party’s work. In response, Keerthi Balasuriya,
in collaboration with Suchiratha Gamlath, then an RCL Central
Committee member, wrote a book elaborating the historical materialist
foundations of Marxist literary criticism. Piyaseeli Wijegunasinghe
contributed to this theoretical development through many reviews in the
party’s press and three books—the last one directed against Professor
Gamlath who left the RCL in 1989 and bitterly attacked the party and
Marxism.
18-14. The period during and immediately after the April 1971 uprising
generated considerable political difficulties inside the party. Several
leading RCL members deserted the movement, including Anura
Ekanayake who had helped win Balasuriya to Trotskyism. As he had done
in relation to the earlier tactical error, Balasuriya responded to the crisis
by seeking to clarify its political roots. In order to understand the
renegacy of Ekanayake and others, he turned to an examination, from the
standpoint of the struggle against Pabloite opportunism, of the history of
the RCL and the various layers that had forged it. Like his previous
analysis of the JVP, this internal party history was to deepen the RCL’s
break from all forms of middle-class radicalism.
18-15. When he went to Britain in 1972, Balasuriya presented an
English translation of this analysis, “The April Crisis and Party History,”
to SLL leader Gerry Healy and sought his opinion. By 1972, however, the
SLL was in the process of abandoning its previous struggle against
Pabloism. Far from providing sympathetic advice to the 23-year-old
Trotskyist leader, as would have been the case in the past, Healy
dismissed the document, declaring that the RCL needed a perspective not
a history. In a letter to an RCL member in Britain, Balasuriya replied to
this false counter-position of history to perspective: “This document is not
a substitute for a perspectives document, but a precondition for it. We
have adopted a perspectives document which we will send you as soon as
the translation is completed. But to draft a perspectives document we
must first understand our relationship to the past struggles of the working
class and of the Marxist movement. Without defining and understanding
this relationship it will not be possible to grasp the role we have to play in
the coming class battles. This is the importance of history.”[44]
18-16. In a sign of the growing political maturity of the RCL leadership,
Balasuriya ignored Healy’s comments and presented two documents—on
party history and on perspectives—to the RCL’s 1972 congress. Over the
next four years, he deepened the party’s differentiation from the various
representatives of Pabloite politics in Sri Lanka—with lengthy series in the
RCL’s newspapers against the politics of Samarakkody, Bala Tampoe
and one of Samarakkody’s associates, Tulsiri Andradi. Samarakkody
broke from LSSP (R) in 1968, and his group joined with the Spartacist
tendency, which shared his centrist politics and deep hostility to the ICFI.
Under Bala Tampoe, who headed the Ceylon Mercantile Union, the LSSP
(R) became an adjunct of his union and a mouthpiece for syndicalism. It,
nonetheless, continued to be recognised by USec as its official section in
Sri Lanka until 1981.
19. The political degeneration of the British SLL
19-1. The disagreement between Balasuriya and Healy over the
significance of the RCL’s history was symptomatic of a broader
international process. The new sections of the ICFI—the Workers League
in the US, the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter in Germany in September
1971 and the Socialist Labour League in Australia in November
1972—were formed on the basis of the lessons of the 1953 and 1961–63
splits. At the same time, however, the SLL was turning away from the
principles for which it had previously fought in the 1950s and early
1960s.
19-2. In the aftermath of the ICFI’s Third Congress in 1966, the French
section of the ICFI, the Organisation Communiste Internationale (OCI),
which had supported the SLL at the time, began raising again the need to
“reconstruct” the Fourth International. Behind this phrase was an
adaptation by the OCI to centrist outfits that denied the fundamental
importance of the ICFI’s struggle against Pabloism. The SLL opposed the
OCI, but was coming under similar class pressures. In his 1966 document
“Problems of the Fourth International”, Gerry Healy argued that the
central task of the SLL was to build a strong political party in Britain that
would “inspire” revolutionists to do likewise in other countries around the
world. This nationalist conception marked a significant retreat from the
internationalism underpinning the building of the Fourth International:
that national sections could only be constructed as part of the international
struggle of the world party against all forms of national opportunism.
19-3. The SLL’s turn away from the struggle against Pabloism led to a
weakening of its defence of Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.
As David North later wrote: “In the late 1960s, [Mike] Banda’s writings
on Vietnam, China and the revolutionary movements in the backward
countries in general rejected two central tenets of the theory of permanent
revolution: (1) that the democratic revolution in the backward countries
can be completed only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and (2)
that the establishment of a socialist society is inconceivable without the
worldwide overthrow of capitalism by the international proletariat.
Banda’s writings assumed the character of an apology for the colonial
bourgeoisie and an acceptance of the Stalinist two-stage theory of
revolution.”[45]
19-4. Writing in the Newsletter in January 1967, Banda uncritically
hailed Mao’s so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, declaring:
“The Mao leadership with the support of the Red Guards is fighting
against this group under the banner of ‘egalitarianism’. They are fighting
against privilege, against autocratic powers, for democracy in China; for
the right to criticise and to act on the criticisms; the right to tell the
judges, the police and the ministers what the people really think about
their policies and to throw them out if they don’t mend their ways.”[46]
Mao’s launching of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 had nothing to do
with egalitarianism, or for that matter, culture or the proletariat. He had
mobilised the Red Guards as part of his factional struggle within the
Chinese Communist Party leadership. As soon as workers became
involved, most notably with the appearance of an insurrectionary uprising
in Shanghai, Mao, who was always fearful of any independent movement
of the proletariat, rapidly turned to the military to bring the protest
movement under control.
19-5. In an editorial in the Fourth International in February 1968
entitled “The Vietnamese Revolution and the Fourth International”,
Banda eulogised the “protracted people’s war” being waged by Ho Chi
Minh in Vietnam and hailed Mao as “the foremost exponent of ‘guerrilla
struggle’ today.” The Virodhaya group in Sri Lanka wrote to the SLL
© World Socialist Web Site
pointing out that this adulation of Maoism could only mislead workers
and youth throughout Asia. The subsequent issue of the Fourth
International published a small note declaring that the editorial had been
the “personal opinion” of Mike Banda, but presented no critique of the
views expressed. The SLL’s live-and-let-live attitude to Banda’s
pro-Maoist positions marked a serious retreat from the principled defence
of the Theory of Permanent Revolution during 1961–63 against the SWP
and an adaptation to the glorification of the “armed struggle” of Castro,
Mao and Ho Chi Minh by the Pabloites.
19-6. The SLL’s shift away from the Theory of Permanent Revolution
was to have a serious impact of the political work of RCL, as a section of
the ICFI based in a backward capitalist country. Sharp differences
between the SLL and the RCL emerged in 1971 over the Indo-Pakistan
war. The SLL published a statement in the name of the IC giving “critical
support” to the Indian army intervention into East Pakistan in the name of
supporting of the Bangladesh liberation movement. The RCL statement,
by contrast, declared that “the task of the proletariat is not that of
supporting any one of the warring factions of the bourgeoisie, but that of
utilising each and every conflict in the camp of the class enemy for the
seizure of power with the perspective of setting up a federated socialist
republic which alone would be able to satisfy the social and national
aspirations of the millions of toilers in the subcontinent.”[47]
19-7. Still working under conditions of state repression, the RCL only
learned of the IC statement proclaiming “critical support” a week after
drafting its statement opposing the Indian military intervention.
Balasuriya immediately wrote to the ICFI secretary Cliff Slaughter
stating: “It is not possible to support the national liberation struggle of the
Bengali people and the voluntary unification of India on socialist
foundations without opposing the Indo-Pakistan war. Without opposing
the war from within India and Pakistan, it is completely absurd to talk
about a unified socialist India which alone can safeguard the right of
self-determination of the many nations of the Indian subcontinent.”[48]
Balasuriya pointed out that the reason for the Indian military intervention
was precisely to suppress a revolutionary struggle to unify East and West
Bengal and to uphold the reactionary state system established in 1947–48.
19-8. Having stated the RCL’s firm opposition to the IC stance,
Balasuriya accepted the political authority of the ICFI and sought a
discussion of the issues involved. After explaining that the RCL had
withdrawn its own statement, he wrote: “It need not be stated that it is
difficult to defend the IC statement. Nevertheless clarity inside the
international is more important than anything else for it is impossible for
us to build a national section without fighting to build the
international.”[49] Far from opening up an international discussion,
however, the SLL did not circulate the RCL’s letter to other sections of
the ICFI and increasingly set out to isolate the RCL.
19-9. The SLL’s refusal to discuss the political issues surrounding the
Indo-Pakistan war was part of a broader turn away from the program of
Trotskyism. In November 1971, the SLL had announced a split with the
French OCI, the only other longstanding section of the ICFI. While the
SLL’s characterisation of the OCI and its political line as centrist was
correct, the SLL made no attempt to clarify the underlying political issues
and instead insisted that the split had taken place over “Marxist theory.”
David North later wrote: “The precipitous split with the OCI in the
autumn of 1971 provided the occasion for [Cliff] Slaughter to argue that
‘the experience of building the revolutionary party in Britain’ had
demonstrated ‘that a thoroughgoing and difficult struggle against idealist
ways of thinking was necessary which went much deeper than questions
of agreement on program and policy’. ... Trotsky had always insisted that
the program, through which Marxist theory finds its expression, builds the
revolutionary party. But Slaughter, setting theory up against the program,
called into question both the validity and viability of the parties produced
by the struggle for the Trotskyist program.”[50]
 19-10. The SLL’s political backsliding was to be expressed in the
transformation of the SLL into the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP)
in November 1973. The WRP was founded without any discussion in the
ICFI or any of the necessary programmatic clarification and on the basis
of a national tactic orientated to the developing mass anti-Tory movement
in Britain. The WRP’s subsequent adaptation to the Labour and trade
union bureaucracy in Britain was accompanied by a complete
abandonment of the Theory of Permanent Revolution and its betrayal of
the fundamental principles of Trotskyism.
To be continued
Footnotes:
42. Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution
(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), p. 134.
43. Keerthi Balasuriya, Politics and the Class Nature of the JVP (in
Sinhalese) December 1970.
44. Fourth International, Volume 14, No 1, March 1987, p. 47.
45. The Heritage We Defend, p. 423.
46. Ibid., p. 425.
47. Fourth International, Volume 14, No. 1, March 1987, p. 37.
48. Ibid., p. 42.
49. Ibid., p. 43.
50. David North, Gerry Healy and his place in the history of the Fourth
International, (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1991), p.58–59.

To contact the WSWS and the

Socialist Equality Party visit:

http://www.wsws.org

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World Socialist Web Site
The Historical and International Foundations
of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 9
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
4 April 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
20. The collapse of the second coalition government
20-1. In the wake of the 1971 JVP uprising, the SLFP-LSSP-CP
government confronted a mounting economic and political crisis and
responded by widening state repression and inflaming Sinhala
communalism. In 1972, Constitutional Affairs Minister Colvin R. de
Silva, who in 1956 had opposed the “Sinhala Only” policy, played the
central role in devising a new constitution that formally enshrined
Buddhism as the state religion and Sinhala as the only official language.
Discriminatory measures were enacted against Tamils in public sector
employment and for university entrance. The Tamil parties—the Federal
Party, the All Ceylon Tamil Congress and the main plantation workers’
organisation, the Ceylon Workers’ Congress—bitterly opposed the new
constitution and formed the Tamil United Front (TUF), which was
transformed in 1975 into the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF).
20-2. The oil shocks and global recession of 1973–74 impacted heavily
on Sri Lanka. Soaring commodity prices, particularly for oil and food
imports, produced an acute foreign exchange crisis. Finance Minister
N.M. Perera extended national economic regulation to include strict
controls on food imports, a state monopoly of rice transport, and a wage
freeze. These policies produced acute economic hardship among the
working class and rural masses. In the plantations, unemployment,
underemployment and soaring prices led to extreme poverty and hundreds
of deaths by starvation. Bandaranaike reacted by accelerating the forced
repatriation of plantation workers through an agreement with Indian
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1974. Widespread hostility to the
coalition government produced a rising tide of working-class militancy.
20-3. The clarification of the RCL’s political line in 1970 proved
critical for the party’s interventions in the developing mass movement. Its
demand that the LSSP and CP break from the SLFP and fight for a
workers’ and peasants’ government and socialist policies met up with the
sentiments of significant layers of workers who were deeply hostile to the
coalition government. The party was able to build significant trade union
factions in the Ratmalana railway workshops, the central bank, the
government press, the state-owned Thulhiriya textile factory, and,
reflecting the RCL’s fight to unify Sinhala and Tamil workers, the
Ceynor factory on the Jaffna peninsula.
20-4. As the government’s crisis worsened, Bandaranaike resorted to
anti-democratic methods. The SLFP-led government had exploited its
© World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
overwhelming majority in the 1972 Constituent Assembly to arbitrarily
extend its term of office by two years to 1977. It kept in place the state of
emergency, imposed during the JVP uprising, and used the emergency
regulations to muzzle the press and political opponents. Amid growing
differences over economic policy, Bandaranaike dismissed the LSSP
ministers in 1975 and began to take the first steps towards opening up the
island to foreign investment.
20-5. The period from the expulsion of the LSSP from the government
in September 1975 to its devastating electoral defeat in July 1977 was one
of acute political crisis for the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie—part of the
revolutionary upheavals that had taken place internationally since 1968.
Bandaranaike’s austerity policies produced a mounting strike wave in
which the RCL played an increasingly prominent role. Concerned at the
RCL’s influence, the government publicly attacked the party in
parliament. The climax came in late 1976. In November, widespread
student demonstrations over the shooting of a student at Peradeniya
university were joined by tens of thousands of workers. From December
1976, a general strike movement began with a stoppage in the Ratmalana
railway workshops that quickly spread throughout the railways. The
government banned the strike but this only fuelled further stoppages by
other public sector workers. For weeks, the fate of the Bandaranaike
government hung in the balance.
20-6. The survival of bourgeois rule in the face of this determined
offensive by the working class rested on the LSSP, CP and LSSP (R)
leaders who blocked any development of the mass movement into a
struggle for power. The CP remained in the government and supported
police state measures against strikers, only leaving the ruling coalition in
February 1977 after the strikes were crushed. The LSSP leaders declared
that the strike movement was “non-political” and refused to support the
striking workers or make any call for the bringing down of the
Bandaranaike government. The Ceylon Mercantile Union, under LSSP
(R) leader Bala Tampoe, refused to take part in the strike and opposed the
RCL’s efforts to mobilise CMU members.
20-7. The LSSP (R) and its various breakaway groups played the critical
role in attacking the RCL’s demand for the LSSP and CP to fight for a
workers’ and peasants’ government and socialist policies. Tulsiri
Andradi criticised the RCL for creating illusions in the reformist
parties—the LSSP and the CP—by demanding they take power. The RCL’s
demand, however, was not aimed at promoting these parties, but rather at
breaking their grip over socialist-minded layers of the working class who
still grudgingly looked to the LSSP and CP for leadership. Andradi’s
left-sounding denunciation was in fact an evasion of the essential political
task of exposing the LSSP and CP and thus left workers in the hands of
these parties. The betrayal of this mass movement by the LSSP, CP and
LSSP (R) paved the way for the UNP to return to power. At the July 1977
election, the coalition parties suffered a crushing defeat: the UNP won
140 of the 168 seats, the SLFP retained just 8 seats, and the LSSP and CP
lost all their seats.
20-8. As the RCL was deepening its political fight against the old
leaderships in the Sri Lankan working class, the WRP was turning away
from such a struggle in Britain. The bringing down of the Heath
government in Britain in 1974 as the result of a determined strike by
British miners led to a minority Labour government. Having founded the
party the year before on little more than militant working-class
anti-Toryism, the WRP faced a political crisis and the loss of hundreds of
members as it now confronted the need to combat residual illusions of
workers in social democracy. These illusions were articulated by an
unprincipled, right-wing faction headed by Alan Thornett, a Central
Committee member and leading trade unionist. It argued that the Labour
government would come into conflict with the bourgeoisie. Rather than
carry out a struggle to clarify the class nature of Labourism for its
members and through them the working class, the WRP expelled the
Thornett group without political discussion. The WRP’s abandonment of
the patient fight to politically educate workers was signalled by its call in
July 1975 for the bringing down of the Labour government in conditions
where the Labour Party still had the allegiance of most workers and the
revolutionary party was in no position to offer an alternative. Behind this
left-sounding ultimatum, the WRP was relinquishing the political struggle
against the Labour leadership and adapting to a section of the trade union
bureaucracy.
20-9. The WRP also attempted to foist a similar stance on the RCL. In a
letter to Balasuriya in September 1975, Mike Banda declared: “I am
afraid that the propagandist tail is wagging the Marxist dog again. This is
reflected in your press where a lot of space is given to exposing the
revisionists (correctly) but not enough is being done to develop, to
concretise the abstractions—through a struggle for power.” Banda called
on the RCL to drop its demands on the LSSP and CP, warning that the
party would “end up capitulating to the centrists”, and to call for the
bringing down of the SLFP government. The RCL persisted with its
exposure of the LSSP and CP through the demand that they fight for a
workers’ government. Moreover, the RCL’s so-called “propagandism”—
Balasuriya’s polemics against the various Pabloite groups, including his
book-length reply to Andradi in 1975 entitled: In Defence of the Fourth
International: A Reply to an anti-Trotskyist Charlatan—were the essential
preparation for the RCL’s intervention into the working class.
20-10. The upheavals of 1975–77 proved to be a decisive political test.
Based on the 1970 clarification of its political line, the RCL emerged with
its standing greatly enhanced among class conscious workers. It had been
the only party that fought to mobilise the working class against the
Bandaranaike government on a socialist program. All the fragments of the
LSSP (R) led by Bala Tampoe, Samarakkody and Andradi had been
found wanting and would all but vanish from Sri Lankan politics in the
next few years. Their place was taken by the Nava Sama Samaja Party
(NSSP) formed in 1978 by ex-LSSP members. The NSSP founders had
supported the 1964 betrayal, the second coalition government and its
communal policies, remained in the LSSP throughout the strike wave and
only left after the 1977 electoral rout. The NSSP, as its name implied, was
simply the old opportunist Samasamajism with a new face. It continued
the LSSP’s politics of class collaboration and coalitionism, and, quite
appropriately, became the Sri Lankan section of the Pabloite United
Secretariat in 1981.
20-11. The rise and fall of the Bandaranaike government in Sri Lanka
found striking parallels elsewhere in South Asia. In the midst of the
economic crisis of the 1970s, the governments of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in
Pakistan and Indira Gandhi in India sought to bind the working class and
oppressed toilers to the bourgeoisie through pseudo-socialist rhetoric and
populist nationalism. Both governments initially enacted very limited
© World Socialist Web Site
reforms then came into headlong collision with the working class and
turned to authoritarian methods to suppress dissent. In Pakistan and India,
the various Stalinist parties played the critical role in preventing the
working class from challenging these supposedly left regimes, thereby
enabling the bourgeoisie to regain the initiative. In the space of five
months in 1977, Bhutto, Gandhi and Bandaranaike all fell from power.
Bourgeois politics then shifted sharply right, although in the case of Indira
Gandhi, she herself came to embody this shift when restored to power in
1980. In Pakistan, Bhutto was ousted in an army coup led by General
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and encouraged by Washington. Bhutto, Gandhi
and Bandaranaike left a reactionary legacy—their “left” populism, laden as
it was with chauvinism, and appeals to national and religio-communal
identities, sowed the seeds for a qualitative escalation of
ethno-communalist politics across South Asia in the 1980s.
21. The UNP government and the descent into war
21-1. The advent of the UNP government in Sri Lanka was part of
broader global economic and political processes. Following the defeat of
the wave of revolutionary struggles in the period of 1968–1975, the ruling
classes launched a counteroffensive against the working class, marked
politically by the coming to power of the Thatcher government in Britain
in 1979 and the Reagan administration in the US in 1980. The following
year Reagan, with the complicity of the AFL-CIO, smashed the PATCO
strike by dismissing 11,000 air traffic controllers. Monetarist, pro-market
policies replaced Keynesian economic regulation as the new benchmark
for governments around the world. Beginning in East and South East
Asia, a turn was made towards the creation of cheap labour platforms.
Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan, which were to become
the “Asian Tigers” of the 1980s, all offered incentives to foreign investors
to take advantage of their low-wage labour. In China, Deng Xiaoping
announced his openly pro-market program in 1978.
21-2. In adopting these policies in Sri Lanka, the UNP government drew
definite conclusions from the 1975–77 upheaval provoked by
Bandaranaike’s tentative turn to a free market agenda. As he began to
encourage foreign investment, cut social spending and carry out
privatisations, Prime Minister J.R. Jayewardene prepared for war against
the working class by strengthening the state apparatus and raising
communal tensions to fever pitch to shore up his own social base and
divide working people. In 1978, the UNP used its overwhelming
parliamentary majority to rewrite the constitution, establishing an
executive presidency with sweeping anti-democratic powers, and to install
Jayewardene as president. In July 1979, the government rammed through
the Prevention of Terrorism Act giving the police powers of arrest and
imprisonment without trial.
21-3. While the UNP had promised during the election campaign to
address Tamil grievances, Jayewardene rapidly turned to anti-Tamil
racialism. In 1976, the TULF had adopted the Vaddukodai resolution
calling for a separate Tamil state of Eelam consisting of the northern and
eastern provinces of the island. Anger among Tamil youth over the
discrimination they faced had led to the formation of various small armed
groups. Jayewardene used a minor attack on police in August 1977 to
order the army into Jaffna and encouraged a vicious pogrom elsewhere.
The government denounced the TULF, which insisted that its electoral
successes gave it a mandate to negotiate a separate Eelam. In parliament,
the prime minister provocatively declared: “If you want a fight, there will
be a fight.” Jayewardene had set the pattern for the rapid descent into civil
war. At each stage, the UNP exploited isolated attacks on police to
respond with massive state repression and pogroms against the Tamil
minority.
21-4. The RCL consistently campaigned for the withdrawal of the
security forces from the North and East and to unite the working class.
The party insisted that the proletariat was the only social force capable of
resolving the outstanding democratic tasks and preventing a rapid slide
into civil war. In the climate of communal reaction created by the UNP
and supported by the SLFP, LSSP and CP, the RCL’s stand required
considerable courage. In 1979, leading RCL member R.P. Piyadasa was
brutally murdered for opposing the government’s policies by
UNP-organised thugs working with the police.
21-5. Opposition to the UNP government’s program of privatisation
and restructuring reached a high point in July 1980 when a broad general
strike movement for higher pay erupted. President Jayewardene
immediately declared the strike illegal and threatened to sack anyone who
joined it. The LSSP and CP declared the strike “non-political” and
refused to challenge the UNP government’s emergency powers or to call
for it to be brought down. LSSP (R) leader Bala Tampoe did not call his
CMU out on strike. The NSSP declared that the strike was simply a pay
dispute and bitterly attacked the RCL campaign to transform it into a
political movement against the government. As a result of the treachery of
these leaderships, the UNP government was able to sack 100,000 public
sector workers virtually unopposed, thereby inflicting a devastating defeat
on the working class.
21-6. The defeat of the 1980 General Strike—the last major strike by the
Sri Lankan working class—opened the door to full-scale civil war. The
UNP’s response to any political challenge or crisis was to resort to
anti-Tamil provocations that culminated in horrific pogroms in July 1983.
After the killing of 13 soldiers by Tamil militants, the UNP government
deliberately inflamed communal sentiment by bringing the bodies to
Colombo. The following day anti-Tamil violence, in which UNP thugs
were prominent, erupted throughout much of the island and on an
unprecedented scale. The homes and shops of Tamils were torched and
hundreds of people were killed. The government and police allowed the
rampage to continue unimpeded for four days and imposed draconian
censorship to block any news.
21-7. The murderous pogrom marked the beginning of a full-scale civil
war that was to devastate the country for the next quarter of a century. On
August 4, in what amounted to a declaration of war, the UNP government
rammed through a constitutional change—the sixth amendment—banning
the advocacy of a separate Eelam and imposing a loyalty oath on all
public servants. For refusing to take this oath, all TULF parliamentarians
lost their seats. By December 1983, the Jaffna peninsula had been
declared a “war zone.” Outraged by the actions of the UNP government,
Tamil youth in their thousands flocked to join the ranks of the various
armed Tamil groups.
21-8. In the course of the pogrom, the RCL was targeted for particular
attack. The home of Kamkaru Mavatha editor K. Ratnayake was burned
to the ground and an attempt to destroy the party print shop was narrowly
averted. The RCL defied government censorship. It published a lengthy
statement indicting the government and opposition parties and calling on
the working class to come to the defence of Tamils. The RCL opposed the
war, exposed the complicity of the LSSP, CP and the Indian government,
and demanded the withdrawal of the military from the North and East. In
May 1984, Ananda Wakkumbura, who was legally responsible for the
RCL newspapers, was arrested for violating the sixth amendment and held
by police for two weeks. Confronted by a vigorous RCL campaign, the
government backed away from prosecuting Wakkumbura.
22. The RCL, the WRP and the national question
22-1. The RCL’s stance on the national question had, since its
inception, been based on the principles of proletarian internationalism as
developed through Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution. The party
consistently fought against all forms of nationalism, communalism and
racism in order to unite workers on a class basis. It courageously opposed
the increasingly blatant forms of official communal discrimination against
Tamils and defended their democratic rights. As early as 1970, the RCL
© World Socialist Web Site
called for the withdrawal of troops sent to the island’s North and would
continue to do so throughout the war. Apart from the Tamil bourgeois
parties, the RCL was alone in opposing the chauvinist 1972 constitution.
When the RCL faction in the government press union proposed a motion,
which was passed, opposing the constitution, LSSP officials carried out a
witch-hunt against party supporters.
22-2. Amid the growing radicalisation of Tamil youth, the RCL
declared in June 1972: “We Marxists recognise the right of the Tamil
nation to self-determination. At the same time, we emphasise that this
right can only be won by mobilising the Sinhalese and Tamil workers for
the establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ government based on
socialist policies and recognising this very same right.”[51] In line with
Lenin’s writings on the national question, the RCL was not advocating a
separate Tamil state, but rather defending the right of Tamils to do so. The
policy was a means of exposing the duplicity of bourgeois Tamil
politicians and winning Tamil workers and youth to a socialist perspective
for Sri Lanka and the Indian subcontinent as a whole.
22-3. However, at a meeting of the ICFI in 1972, the SLL leadership
vehemently opposed the RCL’s stance. Banda argued that support for the
Tamils’ right to self-determination would help the plans of the
imperialists to carve up the island. Like his support for the Indian military
intervention in East Pakistan in 1971, Banda’s opposition to the RCL was
based on accepting the legitimacy of the so-called independent nation
states established by imperialism in South Asia in 1947–48. Balasuriya
later explained: “The position of the WRP inexorably leads to complete
capitulation to the national bourgeoisie and through it to imperialism
because its theory was based entirely on the supposed necessity to keep
these bourgeois states intact. And since these state structures, without
exception, are based on the domination of one nationality—whose
bourgeoisie, allied with imperialism, uses brute force to keep the other
nationalities in subjugation—the defence of these state structures amounts
to the defence of imperialism itself.”[52]
22-4. At that stage, as the Tamil struggle was only in incipient form, the
RCL reluctantly bowed to the experience and political authority of the
SLL leadership. The RCL continued to staunchly defend the democratic
rights of Tamils and fight for the unity of Tamil and Sinhala workers but
was hampered by the fact that it was working throughout most of the
1970s without an important tactical weapon. The party had to combat the
growing influence of Maoists, whose advocacy of the “armed struggle”
was attractive to the radicalised Tamil youth who were hostile to the
TULF’s Gandhian tactics. Like the JVP, the Maoists pointed to the
treachery of the LSSP ministers in the Bandaranaike government to
denounce Trotskyism. Prior to 1977, however, these armed Tamil groups
had marginal political significance and were completely sidelined by the
preceding mass movement of the working class that drew support from
Sinhala and Tamil workers on a class basis.
22-5. In 1979, as the Tamil national liberation struggle achieved
international prominence, the WRP made a 180-degree turn. Banda sent a
letter of apology to the RCL admitting that the WRP had ignored the
importance of the national question in Sri Lanka, but provided no
explanation in the letter or subsequently for its belated advocacy of the
right to self-determination for Tamils. The WRP’s new line on Sri Lanka
was no more based on the Theory of Permanent Revolution than its
previous one. It had flipped from opposition to the Tamil national
liberation struggle to an uncritical embrace. The WRP’s about-face was
bound up with the shift in its class axis following the politically
unclarified split with Thornett in 1974. In 1976, as the WRP encountered
new political problems associated with the international counteroffensive
of the bourgeoisie, it began to turn to other class forces for support—to the
Labour and trade union bureaucracy in Britain and to Arab bourgeois
regimes in the Middle East.
22-6. In parallel with its unprincipled relations with the Arab
bourgeoisie, the WRP established connections with the Liberation Tigers 22-10. During 1983–85, the WRP consciously sought to politically
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The LTTE was one of the more prominent destroy the Sri Lankan section as part of its broader attacks on the
armed Tamil groups, which included the Tamil Eelam Liberation International Committee. At the height of the anti-Tamil pogrom in July
Organisation (TELO), the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation 1983, the News Line published a comment written by Banda that declared:
Front (EPRLF), Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS) “It is possible and even probable, that the police and the army have used
and later the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE). the arbitrary and uncontrolled power granted to them under the emergency
All of the groups had been influenced to one degree or another by laws to kill our comrades and destroy our press.” Writing later, Keerthi
Stalinism and Maoism and, like the TULF, declared that their objective Balasuriya denounced the WRP’s callous indifference to the fate of the
was a socialist Tamil Eelam. The WRP assisted the LTTE’s so-called RCL, explaining: “You did absolutely nothing to mount a campaign in
theoretician Anton Balasingham in providing a more sophisticated our defence and thus gave advance notice to the UNP government that
“socialist” window-dressing for what was a bourgeois program of you will not even lift a finger in the event of the physical destruction of
“national liberation.” our party. Throughout that period, the RCL defended itself and won the
22-7. In 1979 the WRP published Balasingham’s “On the Tamil respect of many sections of the working class and the youth, only because
national question” in its Labour Review and insisted that the RCL do the we never retreated from the theoretical and political foundations of the
same. In the hands of Balasingham, Lenin’s writings on the national ICFI, the world Trotskyist movement. It is precisely this fact which made
question in 1913 were turned inside out. Whilst Lenin had insisted that for our party a constant target of political provocation by Healy, Banda and
Marxists the most important consideration in the national question was Slaughter.”[53]
“the self-determination of the working class,” Balasingham argued that 22-11. While uncritically supporting the LTTE, the WRP had no
Lenin required Marxists to be uncritical supporters of the separatist compunction about maintaining political relations with a group who had
aspirations of the Tamil bourgeoisie. The task of the proletarian split from the RCL and was attacking it in Sinhala chauvinist terms. The
revolutionary, he declared, was “to support the [Tamil] struggle though it WRP pressed the RCL for a reconciliation with these renegades, which
is headed by the bourgeoisie and adopt a strategy to advance the struggle failed, and continued to use their malicious gossip to undermine the RCL.
towards national liberation and socialist revolution.” Balasingham’s On the basis of the group’s “reports”, Healy and Banda moved for the
reference to the “socialist revolution”, devoid of any struggle to unify and expulsion of the RCL from the ICFI at its Tenth Congress in 1985. While
mobilise workers independently of the bourgeoisie, was purely the expulsion was never carried out, the WRP leaders were clearly out to
decorative. In a 1980 polemic entitled “Towards a Socialist Tamil destroy the RCL and the IC.
Eelam”, the LTTE explicitly rejected any turn to the working class, To be continued
declaring: “Tamil people have had enough of the rotten ideology of unity Footnotes:
of the working class and an all-Sri Lankan revolution. A national minority 51. Fourth International, Volume 14, No. 1, March 1987, p.54.
that is under the oppressive clutches of the majority must first fight for its 52. Ibid., pp. 54–5.
liberation.” 53. Fourth International, Volume 14, No. 2, June 1987, p. 111.
22-8. The RCL continued to fight intransigently to unite Sinhala and
Tamil workers around their common class interests. The party carried out
extensive campaigns to defend the democratic rights of Tamils and to To contact the WSWS and the
expose the UNP’s involvement in the 1983 pogroms. But the WRP’s Socialist Equality Party visit:
uncritical support for the LTTE prevented any examination by the RCL of
the politics of the LTTE and other Tamil armed groups and thus helped to
strengthen their influence among Tamil youth. It was only in the
http://www.wsws.org
aftermath of the 1985-87 split with the WRP that the RCL and the ICFI
could re-examine the national question, especially in relation to the
experiences of the working class in Sri Lanka.
22-9. The 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms produced a wave of revulsion in
India, especially in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Indian Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi offered to broker peace talks. At the same time,
the Indian government covertly authorised military training to the various
armed Tamil organisations both to exert control over their activities and to
use them as a bargaining chip in its dealings with the Sri Lankan
government. All of the Tamil groups promoted illusions in the Indian
bourgeoisie as the defenders of Tamils and encouraged greater direct
Indian intervention, as had been done in Bangladesh. The Indian Stalinist
parties—the CPI and CPM—were directly involved in the Indian
government’s machinations, providing “political training” to the Tamil
youth under the supervision of Indian intelligence. The exception was the
LTTE. It maintained somewhat more distance from the Indian
government, but only so as to move more directly into the camp of the
regional Tamil bourgeoisie in India and the Sri Lankan Tamil bourgeoisie.
The LTTE maintained close ties with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. G.
Ramachandran and his bourgeois All India Anna Dravida Munnetra
Kazhagam (AIADMK), which used the LTTE connection to bolster its
own political image. Concerned not to disturb its relations with the LTTE,
the WRP opposed the RCL’s efforts to develop the fight for Trotskyism
in Tamil Nadu and India.

© World Socialist Web Site

World Socialist Web Site
The Historical and International Foundations
of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 10
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
5 April 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
23. The 1985–1986 split with the WRP
23-1. The Tenth Congress of the ICFI in January 1985 was dominated
by two interrelated phenomena: first, a devastating political crisis inside
the WRP and second, the suppression of fundamental political differences
that had been raised by the Workers League of the United States over the
preceding three years. Neither was discussed. As the WRP was
abandoning its previous principled struggle against Pabloism, the Workers
League had been moving in the opposite direction. In 1974, following the
desertion of national secretary Tim Wohlforth, the Workers League made
a deliberate turn to the working class and placed the fight against Pabloite
opportunism at the centre of the party’s work. The Workers League
played the leading role in the “Security and the Fourth International”
investigation, which was bitterly opposed by all Pabloite groups. This
investigation exposed the network of Stalinist agents inside the Trotskyist
movement who had been responsible for Trotsky’s murder. It provided
conclusive evidence that SWP leader Joseph Hansen had been a Stalinist,
then FBI, agent.
23-2. In 1982, Workers League National Secretary David North
presented detailed criticisms of Gerry Healy’s Studies in Dialectical
Materialism, demonstrating that it represented an abandonment of the
dialectical and historical materialism of Marx. North pointed out that “in
the name of the struggle for dialectical materialism and against
propagandism”, there had been a steady drift away from the struggle for
Trotskyism, particularly the Theory of Permanent Revolution. The WRP
leadership responded by threatening to sever relations with the Workers
League unless North withdrew his criticisms. In a letter to WRP General
Secretary Mike Banda in January 1984, North made a further analysis of
the WRP’s positions, particularly in relation to the Middle East, and
stated that the Workers League was “deeply troubled by the growing
signs of a political drift towards positions quite similar—both in
conclusions and methodology—to those which we have historically
associated with Pabloism.” In February 1984, North delivered a political
report to the ICFI that began by analysing the significance of the
American SWP’s unambiguous renunciation of the Theory of Permanent
Revolution in December 1982. He highlighted the WRP’s adaptation not
only to bourgeois regimes in the Middle East but to Labour lefts and the
trade union bureaucracy in Britain. Again the WRP threatened to split
with the Workers League and blocked any discussion. The RCL was not
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wsws.org
represented at the meeting and was not informed about the discussion.
23-3. Following the defeat of the protracted British miners’ strike in
1985, a crisis exploded inside the WRP that rapidly led to its break from
the ICFI and political disintegration. Keerthi Balasuriya travelled to
Britain and learned for the first time of David North’s criticisms of the
WRP in October 1985. Along with representatives of the Australian SLL
and German BSA, he expressed his agreement with North’s analysis. On
October 25, 1985, the ICFI issued two statements: on the expulsion of
Gerry Healy and on the crisis in the British section. The latter statement
identified the source of the political crisis in the “prolonged drift of the
WRP leadership away from the strategic task of building the world party
of socialist revolution towards an increasingly nationalist perspective and
practice.” The ICFI resolved that the WRP register its members on the
explicit recognition of the political authority of ICFI and the
subordination of the British section to its decisions.
23-4. On December 16, 1985, the ICFI received the report of its control
commission on the WRP’s financial dealings. In response to the findings,
it passed a resolution declaring that the WRP had carried out a historic
betrayal of the ICFI and the international working class, which “consisted
of the complete abandonment of the theory of permanent revolution,
resulting in the pursuit of unprincipled relations with sections of the
colonial bourgeoisie in return for money.” The ICFI resolved to suspend
the WRP pending an emergency ICFI Congress following the 8th
Congress of the WRP. A further resolution adopted the following day
reaffirmed the essential programmatic foundations of the ICFI and the
historic correctness of the struggle against Pabloism. The suspension of
the WRP was decisive in reasserting the political authority of the ICFI
and the central importance of the programmatic principles of the
Trotskyist movement. The decision made clear that there would be no
compromise on these fundamental issues and established a principled
basis for the resolution of the crisis within the WRP. Of the WRP
delegates, only David Hyland, who led a minority inside the WRP that
was to later form the British section of the ICFI, voted for the resolutions.
The opposition of the Banda-Slaughter faction demonstrated that, while
they had fallen out with Healy, they shared the same underlying
opportunist and national perspective.
23-5. In a letter to David North, Slaughter opposed the subordination of
the WRP to the ICFI asserting that internationalism consisted of “laying
down class lines and fighting them through.” In its reply, the Workers
League Political Committee asked: “But by what process are these ‘class
lines’ determined? Does it require the existence of the Fourth
International?... The International Committee of the Fourth International
is the historical embodiment of the ‘whole programmatic base of
Trotskyism and the Marxism of Marx and Lenin.’ The subordination of
national sections to the IC is the organised expression of their agreement
with the defence of that program. Those parties which uphold Trotskyism
as the contemporary development of Marxist principles and program are
organised in the Fourth International and accept the authority of the
International Committee. To base one’s definition of internationalism on
the separation of the program from its organisational expression is to
adopt the standpoint of all those revisionist and centrist opponents of
Trotskyism who deny the continuity of Marxism, embodied in the ICFI, in
order to retain freedom of action within their theatre of operations.”[54]
23-6. The WRP split from the ICFI at its rump congress on February 8,
1986 on the basis of Banda’s document “27 Reasons Why the
International Committee Should be Buried Forthwith and the Fourth
International be Built” which renounced the entire struggle of the IC
against Pabloism. All supporters of the IC were excluded from the
congress. Within months, Banda had repudiated Trotskyism, proclaimed
capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union to be impossible and hailed
Stalin as the necessary Bonapartist leader who had defended the gains of
the October Revolution. The ICFI concluded one year later in an
exhaustive study of all those who split with the IC in 1985–86: “The main
orientation of all the anti-ICFI tendencies is towards an out and out
capitulation to Stalinism and Social Democracy, the repudiation of the
political independence of the working class, and ever more pronounced
orientation toward participation in popular front alliances with sections of
the bourgeoisie.”[55]
23-7. The split in the International Committee was a reflection of
profound changes in the economic base and political superstructure of
world capitalism. The global integration of productive processes and the
exploitation of cheap labour platforms in Asia that had begun in the late
1970s had undermined the programs of national economic regulation on
which the social democratic, Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist
leaderships had rested in the post-war period. Pabloism emerged within
the Fourth International as an opportunist adaptation to the dominance of
these bureaucratic apparatuses over the working class. The British SLL
defended the program of Trotskyism but faced growing isolation,
particularly after the SWP’s reunification in 1963 with the Pabloites and
the split with the OCI in 1971. The SLL’s increasingly nationalist
orientation began to diverge from that of the new IC sections formed in
the 1960s and early 1970s that based themselves on the lessons of the
splits of 1953 and 1961–63. This process accelerated with the foundation
of the WRP. As it abandoned the struggle against Pabloism on which its
political authority within the IC rested, the WRP blocked political
discussion inside the international movement and responded to criticism
with organisational threats and political provocations. The victory of the
Trotskyists within the IC and the restoration of Trotskyism to the centre
of its work marked a profound shift in class relations that was to become
more evident with the decay and disintegration of the old bureaucratic
organisations of the working class and the rapid move to the right of all
the Pabloite groupings.
24. After the split with the WRP
24-1. As the ICFI explained: “The 1985–86 split is, without any
question, a historical milestone in the development of the Fourth
International. It is the culmination of the protracted struggle that has been
waged by the Trotskyist movement against Pabloite opportunism since the
founding of the International Committee in 1953. The long period of
disunity and confusion created by Pabloite opportunism is coming to a
close. The conditions have been created for the consolidation of all
genuine Trotskyists, that is, revolutionary Marxists, from all over the
world under the banner of the International Committee.”[56]
24-2. The split with the WRP led to an unprecedented development of
international collaboration between sections of the ICFI and a renaissance
of Marxism within the international movement. The IC produced a
lengthy analysis of the degeneration of the WRP entitled How the
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Workers Revolution Party Betrayed Trotskyismthat 1973–1985
been challenged, let alone refuted, by any of the WRP renegades. David
North replied to Banda’s anti-Trotskyist diatribe in his book The Heritage
We Defend that clarified crucial aspects of the Fourth International’s
history and program. These works plus innumerable other articles and
statements became the basis for the education of the cadre of the
movement and for overcoming the impact of the WRP’s political
degeneration on the sections of the IC.
24-3. The split transformed the work of the RCL. The documents of the
ICFI and the pivotal issues that they raised were thoroughly discussed in
the leadership and membership of the party, which overwhelmingly
supported the IC. Over the next two years, Keerthi Balasuriya
concentrated on the programmatic work of the ICFI, especially in relation
to the Theory of Permanent Revolution. Balasuriya and David North
wrote the editorial of the Fourth International in March 1987 (Volume
14, No. 1) that provided a detailed exposure of Banda’s renunciation of
Permanent Revolution going back to his adulation of Mao and Ho Chi
Minh in the late 1960s. The same issue published the correspondence
between Balasuriya and the SLL leaders on the Bangladesh liberation
struggle. The RCL, in conjunction with the ICFI, also resumed and
expanded its political work in India.
24-4. The split created the conditions for an important discussion of the
national question that confronted the RCL directly in the form of the
escalating civil war against the LTTE. In 1986, Balasuriya wrote a
lengthy article entitled “The Tamil Struggle and the Treachery of Healy,
Banda and Slaughter” that exposed the WRP’s opportunist veering from
complete indifference to the Tamil struggle and backing for the Sri
Lankan nation-state in the early 1970s to its uncritical support for the
LTTE from 1979 onwards. “As this examination of the historical record
of Healy, Banda and Slaughter on the Tamil national struggle makes
clear, this pack of scoundrels masquerading as Trotskyists have
systematically betrayed the Tamil and Sinhalese workers alike. Above all,
they consciously worked, even though unsuccessfully, to destroy the only
party in Sri Lanka which fought for the perspective of the theory of
permanent revolution—the RCL,” he concluded.
24-5. The aftermath of the split coincided with an acute political crisis
for the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie. The UNP government confronted serious
military setbacks in the North and growing social unrest in the South
fuelled by an economic downturn and the impact of its pro-market
policies. President J.R. Jayewardene sought to buy time by agreeing to
India’s appeals for negotiations with the various armed Tamil groups. In
the wake of failed talks in the Bhutanese capital of Thimpu in 1985,
Jayewardene initiated All-Party Round Table talks in Colombo in 1986 to
enlist the assistance of the opposition political parties for “a common
program for peace.” The petty-bourgeois radicals of the NSSP joined the
LSSP, CP and the Sri Lanka Mahajana Party (SLMP)—a leftist grouping
of former SLFP parliamentarians headed by Bandaranaike’s daughter
Chandrika Kumaratunga—in talks with the UNP government. All of them
bear political responsibility for the outcome—the signing of the
Indo-Lanka Accord in July 1987 by Jayewardene and Indian Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi to send Indian troops to the northern and eastern
provinces. In the guise of implementing a peace deal, the real purpose of
the military mission was to disarm the Tamil guerrillas and suppress any
political opposition to the terms of the agreement. The SLFP refused to
take part in the government’s Round Table talks and, along with the JVP,
launched a chauvinist campaign against any peace deal.
24-6. The RCL was the only party to oppose the Round Table talks and
the Indo-Lanka Accord from the standpoint of proletarian
internationalism—calling for the unity of the working class in Sri Lanka
and India against the military intervention. The party warned that the
dispatch of troops stemmed from the crises facing the Jayewardene and
Gandhi governments, was directed against the working class and rural
masses, and was a trap for the Tamil people. It was no accident that amid
the Round Table talks in June 1986, the police arrested three RCL
members—Wije Dias, Brutan Perera and Ruman Perera—for campaigning
for a meeting to defend public education and held them for six weeks.
Shortly after his release, Brutan Perera was detained again, along with
RCL youth leader Viran Peiris. They were released only after an extensive
international campaign involving all sections of the ICFI. This attempt to
intimidate and silence the RCL was clearly provoked by the UNP’s
sensitivity to any criticism of its “peace” machinations.
24-7. The Indo-Lankan Accord was a devastating exposure of all the
armed Tamil groups, including the LTTE, that placed their faith in the
Indian government and army to guarantee the democratic rights of Tamils.
All along their perspective had been to gain the support of the Indian
bourgeoisie for the creation of a separate capitalist Eelam. The
governments of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, however, had not the slightest
concern about Tamil democratic rights; they cynically sought to use the
Tamil struggle to further New Delhi’s ambitions to become the
predominant regional power. In 1987, India intervened militarily to
suppress a Tamil insurgency it had encouraged in order to pressure
Colombo but that threatened to provoke unrest in India and undermine the
reactionary post-war state system in South Asia. Those outfits most
closely tied to New Delhi, including the EPRLF, TELO and PLOTE,
functioned as auxiliaries to India’s army of occupation with EPRLF
leader Vardadaraja Perumal becoming provincial chief minister for the
merged North and East. As it sought to establish its unchallenged control,
the Indian army resorted to widespread arrests, rape, torture and
extra-judicial murders that alienated Tamils and brought it into conflict
with the LTTE. However, even as its fighters were being hunted down,
the LTTE continued to proclaim its faith in India and Rajiv Gandhi.
24-8. The Indo-Lanka Accord produced a political crisis in the ranks of
Tamil organisations in Sri Lanka and the broader international diaspora.
Keerthi Balasuriya addressed several well-attended meetings in Europe of
young Tamil militants who were looking for answers to the perfidy of
their organisations. The most farsighted elements drew the conclusion that
it was only on the basis of the ICFI’s perspective and an orientation to the
working class that the oppression of Tamils could be ended. They joined
the ICFI and have made a powerful contribution to its work in Europe and
South Asia.
25. The United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam
25-1. In November 1987, the ICFI published a comprehensive statement
entitled “The Situation in Sri Lanka and the Political Tasks of the
Revolutionary Communist League” that for the first time raised the
slogan of a United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam. The
statement, based on the Theory of Permanent Revolution, unambiguously
insisted that the democratic rights of Tamils would only be realised
through the struggle of the working class for socialism. In other words,
national self-determination, like other democratic tasks, could not be
resolved by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois movements no matter how
courageous or militant. The slogan clearly demarcated the RCL’s
orientation in fighting to mobilise the working class—Sinhala and
Tamil—to defend basic democratic rights through the struggle for
socialism from any tendency to reduce the party to the role of cheerleader
and political adviser to the Tamil national movement—as the WRP had
done.
25-2. As the ICFI statement explained, none of the so-called
independent states established after World War II had met the democratic
aspirations or basic material needs of the masses. “Invariably,
imperialist-sanctioned ‘independence’ has meant the setting up of bastard
states whose very foundations have been built upon a fatal compromise of
democratic principles. In this process, the national bourgeoisie has
functioned not as the liberator of the oppressed masses, but as a junior
© World Socialist Web Site
partner in imperialist plunder. The type of state created in this process has
been nothing more than a prison ground for putrefying capitalism, upon
which the progressive development of the productive forces has been
impossible ... Arising out of such conditions, with the joyous approval of
the bourgeoisie, are the horrors of intercommunal warfare. This state of
affairs cannot be altered as long as bourgeois rule prevails. The
post-independence history of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh,
Burma—in fact, of every former colonial country in the world—decisively
proves that the bourgeoisie cannot establish genuine national unification
and political independence.”[57]
25-3. Consequently, these bourgeois democratic tasks fall to the
proletariat. While upholding the right to self-determination, the ICFI
statement insisted that national self-determination could only be achieved
through the strategy of socialist revolution and was therefore subordinate
to it. “It [the working class] is the only social force that can realise the
right of nations to self-determination. However, it does this not as an
appendage to the national bourgeoisie, but rather as its implacable enemy.
It fights for self-determination with its own weapons and on the basis of
its own program, rallying behind it all the oppressed masses of the
villages and countryside. Self-determination is achieved as a by-product
of the socialist revolution led by the proletariat which, having established
its dictatorship, guarantees to all oppressed people their legitimate
democratic rights. As the framework for the genuine equality of nations, it
proposes the creation of a voluntarily united socialist federation. While
believing that the voluntary amalgamation of all oppressed nations offers
the best opportunity for economic and cultural progress, the proletarian
dictatorship pledges that those nations which wish to secede shall have the
right to do so. This is the essential content of the program advanced by the
Revolutionary Communist League for a United Socialist States of Tamil
Eelam and Sri Lanka.”[58]
25-4. The ICFI statement also began the process of reassessing the
character of the various national liberation movements in the light of the
LTTE’s political capitulation to the Indian bourgeoisie. In contrast to the
broad anti-colonial movements before and after World War II that drew in
the masses across ethnicity, language, religion and caste, organisations
such as the LTTE were based on national exclusivity. This, as Lenin had
warned, was the outlook of the national bourgeoisie which conceived
self-determination solely in terms of establishing its own national
privileges and the conditions for the exploitation of workers and peasants
within its own “independent” state. In the case of the LTTE, its program
for an independent Eelam was drawn directly from the bourgeois TULF
that represented the meagre aims of the Tamil bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka,
which had no perspective either for the hundreds of thousands of Tamil
plantation workers in the centre of the island or for the Tamil masses
across the Palk Strait in southern India.
25-5. An RCL statement cited in the document explained: “[N]ational
liberation cannot be achieved through a movement based on national
exclusivism and aimed to win one’s own rights only. In our epoch, such a
movement will find itself isolated among capitalist nations, whatever the
strength of the mass movement it may generate. A liberation movement of
a particular oppressed nation can go forward only as part and parcel of a
movement fighting fully and unreservedly for democracy. National
exclusivism prevents the national liberation struggle of an oppressed
nation from becoming part of such a movement. This is because, in the
last analysis, national exclusivism is connected to the attempt made by the
national bourgeoisie to exploit the workers and peasants in its own
country. Herein lies the source from which flows the political impotence
of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.”[59] The ICFI statement laid the
basis for a wider consideration of the support of the Marxist movement
for the right of nations to self-determination.
25-6. Shortly after the statement’s publication, Keerthi Balasuriya died
suddenly and tragically on 18 December 1987 from a coronary
thrombosis. He was just 39 years old and had devoted his entire adult life
to the struggle for Trotskyism. At the age of 19, amid the political
confusion generated by the LSSP’s betrayal, Balasuriya undertook the
huge responsibility of leading the RCL and, in so doing, reknitting the ties
of the Sri Lankan working class to the international Trotskyist movement.
He and the RCL stood against the tide of middle-class radicalism and the
cult of the “armed struggle” that animated movements such as the LTTE
and JVP in the late 1960s and 1970s. He defended the Theory of
Permanent Revolution when it came under universal attack not only from
the Stalinist parties and their various Pabloite apologists, but also from the
WRP within the ICFI. In doing so, Balasuriya made an indelible
contribution to the struggle for Trotskyism in Asia and internationally.
25-7. In his funeral oration, David North explained: “Comrade Keerthi
was profoundly convinced of the scientific validity of the perspective for
which Trotsky had fought. While the petty-bourgeois radicals were
impressed by the ‘successes’ of Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel
Castro, Comrade Keerthi insisted that the political orientation of Marxists
had to be to the proletariat as the sole consistently revolutionary force on
the planet ... In the period immediately ahead, the workers, not only in
Asia but throughout the world, will read and study the writings of
Comrade Keerthi. And we are confident that it will not be the Mao
Tse-tungs, Ho Chi Minhs and Castros that will be the teachers of the
youth. Rather, it will be from Keerthi Balasuriya, the Revolutionary
Communist League and the International Committee that the advanced
elements among the workers and the youth will learn their revolutionary
lessons.”[60]
25-8. Balasuriya’s untimely death was a major political blow to the
RCL, to the ICFI and to the international working class. It came at a
critical time when the process of clarifying and consolidating the RCL in
the immediate aftermath of the split with the WRP renegades was still
underway. It is testimony to Balasuriya and the principles for which he
fought that the cadre he had been instrumental in training was capable of
withstanding the loss, reconsolidating under the leadership of Wije Dias,
and waging a consistent struggle for socialist internationalism under the
difficult conditions of an escalating civil war.
To be continued
Footnotes:
54. Fourth International, Volume 13, No. 2, p. 77.
55. Fourth International, Volume, 14 No. 1, p. 4.
56. The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth
International, (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1988), p. 45.
57. Fourth International, Volume 15, No. 1, January–March 1988, pp.
20–21.
58. Ibid., p. 21.
59. Ibid., p. 20.
60. Ibid., pp. 9–10.

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World Socialist Web Site
The Historical and International Foundations
of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 11
By Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
6 April 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
26. The International Perspectives of the ICFI
26-1. The ICFI’s Perspective Resolution of August 1988, The World
Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International, provided the
first comprehensive analysis of world economy and world politics since
the WRP abandoned such work in the early 1970s. The resolution laid the
basis for the closer integration of all of the sections of the ICFI. Central to
the document was its examination of the implications of the
unprecedented global integration of production processes, which marked a
qualitative shift in world economic relations that objectively strengthened
the international unity of the working class and the basis for a world
socialist economy. The ICFI concluded: “It has long been an elementary
proposition of Marxism that the class struggle is national only in form, but
that it is, in essence, an international struggle. However, given the new
features of capitalist development, even the form of the class struggle
must assume an international character. Even the most elemental struggles
of the working class pose the necessity of coordinating its actions on an
international scale ... The unprecedented international mobility of capital
has rendered all nationalist programs for the labour movement of different
countries obsolete and reactionary. Such programs are invariably based on
the voluntary collaborations of the labour bureaucracies with ‘their’
ruling classes in the systematic lowering of workers’ living standards to
strengthen the position of ‘their’ capitalist country in the world
market.”[61]
26-2. The bankruptcy of nationally-based programs was reflected in the
wave of “renunciationism” sweeping the old leaderships of the working
class. The Stalinist and social-democratic parties and the trade unions
were repudiating “even the elementary conceptions that the proletariat
exists as a distinct class in society and that it must defend its independent
interests against capitalist exploitation.” The ICFI analysed in detail the
advanced degeneration of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union,
Eastern Europe and China. In opposition to all of the middle-class
opportunist tendencies, the ICFI insisted that Gorbachev’s glasnost and
perestroika were the policies of capitalist restoration—as was rapidly
verified. The document established that the crisis of the armed Tamil
groups in Sri Lanka was part of broader international processes stemming
from the inability of the national bourgeoisie to wage a consistent struggle
against imperialism. The LTTE’s capitulation to New Delhi found
diverse parallels in the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s subordination
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wsws.org
of the Palestinian intifada to the reactionary interests of the Arab
bourgeoisie, and in the deal struck by the Nicaraguan Sandinistas with
right-wing Contra rebels.
26-3. The ICFI insisted that the global integration of production, far
from opening up a new golden age of capitalism, had raised the
fundamental contradictions between world economy and the outmoded
nation-state system, and between social production and private ownership,
to a new peak of intensity. The resolution identified the driving forces for
a new period of revolutionary upsurge, including the economic decline of
the United States and the rise of inter-imperialist antagonisms, the
emergence of huge new battalions of the working class, particularly in
Asia, the impoverishment of the backward countries and the crisis of
Stalinism.
26-4. Turning to its strategic tasks, the ICFI summed up the lessons of
the struggle following the 1985–86 split to overcome residual nationalist
tendencies that were the legacy of the WRP’s degeneration.
“Revolutionary internationalism is the political antipode of opportunism.
In one form or another, opportunism expresses a definite adaptation to the
so-called realities of political life within a given national environment.
Opportunism, forever in search of shortcuts, elevates one or another
national tactic above the fundamental program of the world socialist
revolution. Considering the program of world socialist revolution too
abstract, the opportunist hankers after supposedly concrete tactical
initiatives. Not only does the opportunist choose to ‘forget’ the
international character of the working class. He also ‘overlooks’ the fact
that the crisis in each country, having its essential origin in global
contradictions, can only be resolved on the basis of an international
program. No national tactic, however significant its role in the political
arsenal of the party … can preserve its revolutionary content if it is
elevated above or, what amounts to the same thing, detached from, the
world strategy of the International Committee. Thus, the central historic
contribution which the sections of the International Committee make to
the workers’ movement in the countries in which they operate is the
collective and unified struggle for the perspective of world socialist
revolution.”[62]
27. The Collapse of the Soviet Union
27-1. The International Perspectives prepared the IC for the political
crisis of Stalinism that erupted in 1989 with mass protests in China,
followed shortly thereafter by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in
Eastern Europe, that culminated in December 1991 in the formal
liquidation of the Soviet Union. The destruction of the Soviet Union was a
political blow against the international working class that produced
considerable disorientation and confusion. Against the triumphalism of
the bourgeoisie, the International Committee was alone in insisting that
the end of the Soviet Union did not signify the victory of the capitalist
market and the end of socialism. Trotsky in his seminal work The
Revolution Betrayed, published in 1936, had predicted the eventual
liquidation of the remaining social gains of the Russian Revolution and
the restoration of capitalist property relations unless the Soviet working
class carried out a political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy.
The end of the USSR did not represent the failure of socialism but of
Stalinism and its reactionary nationalist perspective of “Socialism in One
Country” under the impact of globalised production. Having long ago
abandoned the struggle for the world socialist revolution, the Stalinist
bureaucracy responded to the crisis of the Soviet economy, and growing
working-class unrest, by integrating it within global capitalism and
anchoring, thereby, its own privileges in capitalist private property. The
collapse of the USSR was a product of the unravelling of the post-war
order and the intensification of the fundamental contradiction of
capitalism between world economy and the bankrupt nation-state system.
Far from opening up a bright new future for capitalism, the end of the
Soviet Union and its autarkic national economy foreshadowed the
transformation or collapse of all parties and institutions based on national
economic regulation. The ICFI explained that the intensification of the
basic contradictions of capitalism would inevitably lead to a new period
of profound economic crisis, wars and revolution.
27-2. The inability of the Soviet and Eastern European working class to
develop its own class response to capitalist restorationism brought into
sharp relief the enormous damage done to the political consciousness of
the international working class by the long domination of the various
Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist bureaucracies and,
above all, by the murder of the finest representatives of revolutionary
Marxism by Stalin and his gangsters in the 1930s. In opposition to any
conception that socialist revolution would emerge spontaneously, David
North in his report to the 12th Plenum of the ICFI explained: “The
intensification of the class struggle provides the general foundation of the
revolutionary movement. But it does not by itself directly and
automatically create the political, intellectual, and, one might add, cultural
environment that its development requires, and which prepares the
historical setting for a truly revolutionary situation.”[63] The report
concluded that the responsibility fell to the International Committee to
re-establish within the working class the great political culture of
Marxism. An essential component of the ICFI’s subsequent work has
been the systematic exposure of the various elements of what it termed
“The Post-Soviet School of Falsification” that has sought to bury the
significance of the Russian Revolution and particularly the work of Leon
Trotsky under a mountain of lies.
27-3. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, the collapse of
the Stalinist regimes led to a rapid opening up to foreign investment, the
wholesale looting of state-owned enterprises by the emerging kleptocracy
and a staggering retrogression in the living standards of working people.
In China, the process of capitalist restoration was more protracted. Just 23
years after the revolution, the Maoist regime reached an accommodation
with US imperialism in 1972 that led to a de facto alliance against the
Soviet Union and re-established China’s economic relations with the
West. The opening of China to foreign investment and the restoration of
capitalist market relations began after Deng Xiaoping came to power in
1978, producing growing resistance in the working class. In the wake of
the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in June 1989, an
ICFI statement entitled “Victory to the Political Revolution in China”
explained: “The mass killings of the past week are the political
culmination of a decade during which the Beijing Stalinists have worked
systematically to restore capitalism to China and reintegrate its economy
into the structure of world imperialism. The main purpose of the terror
unleashed by the Beijing regime is to intimidate the Chinese masses and
crush all opposition to its deliberate liquidation of the social conquests of
© World Socialist Web Site
the Chinese Revolution.”[64] Following the crackdown, foreign
investment flooded into China as transnational corporations concluded
that the Tiananmen Square massacre was a guarantee that the CCP police
state regime would not hesitate to use all methods to suppress the working
class and guarantee private profit. The restoration of capitalism in China
under the CCP has been accompanied by the emergence of a bourgeoisie
in close association with the state bureaucracy, a deepening social divide,
and a return of many of the social evils of pre-1949 China.
27-4. The liquidation of the Soviet Union had political and economic
ramifications throughout Asia, not least in India, which depended heavily
on Soviet markets, economic aid and geopolitical support. In 1991, facing
a balance of payments crisis, the Congress government began the process
of dismantling the edifice of Indian national economic regulation and
opening up to foreign investment. The Indian Stalinist parties not only
supported the new orientation but, in the states of West Bengal and Kerala
where it held power, the CPM led the charge for pro-market restructuring.
The collapse of the Cold War framework ended the ability of the
bourgeoisie in backward capitalist countries to politically balance
between the Soviet and Western blocs and to posture, with the aid of
Moscow and Beijing, as “anti-imperialists.” Again the process was
especially pronounced in India, a leading member of the so-called
non-aligned movement with strong ties to the Soviet Union. New Delhi
began to mend its bridges with Washington and drop its previous support
for national movements such as the PLO.
27-5. The naked embrace of capitalism in the former Soviet bloc and
China compounded the political crisis of the region’s Stalinist parties,
which either collapsed completely like the Communist Party of Thailand,
fractured as in the case of the Communist Party of the Philippines, or
completed their integration into the political establishment as in Japan and
India. The various armed national liberation movements, as epitomised by
the LTTE’s advocacy of a “Tiger economy” for Sri Lanka, rapidly shed
their former “socialist” posturing, embraced the ideology of the market
and sought their own accommodation with imperialism.
28. The RCL and the United Front
28-1. An acute economic and political crisis dominated Sri Lanka
throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. As fighting broke out in the
North between the LTTE and the Indian army, mounting unrest among
the working class and rural poor was derailed by a combination of state
repression and the JVP’s chauvinist campaign against the Indo-Lankan
Accord. JVP gunmen targeted politicians and parties that supported the
Accord. The government imposed martial law in November 1988,
mandating the death penalty for organising or participating in strikes or
protests. The UNP’s Ranasinghe Premadasa—who had opposed the
Accord—won the presidential election in December 1988 and immediately
sought a deal with the JVP in order to stabilise bourgeois rule.
28-2. A de facto alliance between the UNP government and the JVP
confronted the working class with state repression as well as the JVP’s
fascistic attacks on anyone who opposed its orders to join its “strikes” to
“defend the motherland.” The RCL was the only party to fight for the
independent mobilisation of workers against both the Indo-Lankan
Accord and the JVP’s chauvinist campaign. On this basis, the RCL won
the leadership of the Central Bank Employees Union (CBEU) in June
1988. As a result of its stand, the RCL confronted police raids and arrests
as well as JVP attacks. JVP thugs murdered RCL members R.A. Pitawela
on November 12, 1988, P.H. Gunapala on December 23, 1988 and
Gretian Geekiyanage on June 23, 1989.
28-3. In collaboration with its sister parties in the ICFI, the RCL
initiated a campaign in November 1988 for a united front of all parties of
the working class to take immediate concrete measures to defend workers
and their organisations from state repression and JVP attacks. In a letter to
working-class parties, the RCL called for a break from the parties of the
Sri Lankan bourgeoisie—the UNP, SLFP and SLMP—and the mobilisation
of “the class strength of the working class to defend basic democratic
rights.” The RCL called for workers’ defence squads and action
committees, joint picket lines and a general strike, and despite extremely
difficult circumstances, campaigned vigorously for its demands in the
working class. The ICFI’s international campaign for the United Front
included an extensive tour of Australia and New Zealand by two RCL
members in conjunction with the Australian SLL.
28-4. The call for a United Front in no way implied a political amnesty
for the opportunist parties, which unanimously opposed it. Speaking for
all of them, the NSSP denounced the United Front as “sectarian” and
“ultra-left” for refusing to include the SLMP, which the NSSP falsely
described as the “new proletarian reformist mass tendency”. The NSSP’s
own “United Socialist Alliance” with the SLMP, the LSSP and CP was
classic popular frontism, aimed at soliciting protection from the UNP
government and state apparatus. In its reply, the RCL warned: “In the first
place, it [the rejection of a united front] is an act which is absolutely
hostile to the active organisation of practical measures by the working
class against its class enemy. Second, it ties the working class to fronts
formed on bourgeois programs, weakens and politically disarms it, and
creates the opportunity for the class enemy to drown the working class
and the poor peasants in a blood bath.” The “left” parties dropped any
criticism of the government’s repressive measures and received arms in
return, while hundreds of militant workers and trade unionists paid for
this treachery with their lives.
29. The RCL and the peasantry
29-1. Confronting mounting social unrest in the South, President
Premadasa took a pronounced public stand against the Indo-Lankan
Accord, demanding that Indian troops leave Sri Lanka by July 1989. He
signed a ceasefire with, and covertly supplied arms to, the LTTE in June
1989, thereby assisting its armed struggle against the Indian army. Having
failed to reach a deal with the JVP, the UNP turned on it and then more
broadly against its social base—the Sinhala peasantry. In November 1989,
the security forces detained and brutally murdered most of the JVP
leadership, including its top leader Rohana Wijeweera. These murders
were the start of a virtual war waged by the security forces and associated
death squads against the rural masses over the next two years in which an
estimated 60,000 people were slaughtered.
29-2. The abrupt about-face by the Sri Lankan ruling class confronted
the RCL with new political challenges that were discussed extensively
within the ICFI. The RCL had to warn the working class about the grave
dangers of state repression and energetically call on workers to oppose the
violent attacks on rural youth. It was not simply a matter of the fate of the
JVP leaders, but the social base on which the organisation rested. Just as it
had done in the wake of the April 1971 uprising, the RCL had to maintain
an intransigent opposition to the government in all aspects of the party’s
work, champion the defence of the rural masses and, in doing so,
concretely forge the alliance between the working class and the peasantry
necessary for the socialist revolution.
29-3. The RCL issued a comprehensive statement opposing the state
massacre of rural youth in the South and the renewed war in the North
against the Tamil masses in the aftermath of the Indian army withdrawal.
It explained that the defence of the rural masses—Sinhala and Tamil
alike—was indissolubly bound up with the fight to abolish capitalism and
establish a workers’ and peasants’ government in the form of a Socialist
Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam. The RCL indicted the opportunist
leaderships of the working class—the LSSP, CP and NSSP—both for
supporting the war in the North and blocking any independent political
mobilisation of the working class to defend the rural masses in the South.
The statement outlined a detailed program of transitional demands to
address the democratic aspirations and pressing economic needs of
© World Socialist Web Site
workers and the rural peasantry. On this basis, the RCL carried out an
extensive campaign to expose the atrocities being carried out by state
forces and to mobilise workers and students to defend the rural youth.
30. The National Question
30-1. The ICFI returned to a critical re-examination of the national
question following the eruption of separatist movements in the Balkans,
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In his writings of 1913–16,
Lenin had advocated the “right to self-determination” as a means of
uniting the working class and rallying the support of the oppressed
nationalities for the struggle against Czarism and imperialism. As Trotsky
explained: “In this the Bolshevik Party did not by any means undertake an
evangel of separation. It merely assumed an obligation to struggle
implacably against every form of national oppression, including the
forcible retention of this or that nationality within the boundaries of the
general state. Only in this way could the Russian proletariat gradually win
the confidence of the oppressed nationalities.”[65] Yet in the decades
after World War II, the Pabloites and numerous other petty-bourgeois
pseudo-Marxists systematically distorted the “right to self-determination”
to mean that the working class was politically obligated to support
virtually any demand for national-ethnic separatism.
30-2. Lenin’s stance had always been conditional on socio-economic
circumstances and the development of the class struggle. On the eve of
World War I, when Lenin had advocated the right to self-determination in
Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Czarist Empire, these regions were
still predominantly agrarian and capitalism and the national movement
were largely in their infancy. Nearly a century on, conditions in these
regions, as around the world, were vastly different. Small cliques of
ex-Stalinist bureaucrats and capitalists whipped up ethnic and communal
sentiment in the countries of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia, as a
means to carve out their own territory as part of the process of capitalist
restoration. Far from being anti-imperialist, these movements actively
sought the support of the imperialist powers which, as in the case of
Balkans, encouraged separatism as a means of furthering their economic
and strategic ambitions. In Lenin’s day, the national movements in the
colonial and semi-colonial countries of Asia and Africa had barely begun.
Nearly a century later, it was the abject failure of the nationalist
movements that gained “independence” after World War II to resolve
basic democratic tasks that spawned new separatist tendencies based on
ethnicity, religion and language.
30-3. The globalisation of production was a key factor in the spread of
national-separatist movements at the end of the twentieth century. The
processes of globalisation vastly reduced the significance of national
markets and nationally-based production in comparison to the global
market and globally-integrated production. As the International
Committee explained: “The new global economic relations have also
provided an objective impulse for a new type of nationalist movement,
seeking the dismemberment of existing states. Globally-mobile capital has
given smaller territories the ability to link themselves directly to the world
market. Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan have become the new models
of development. A small coastal enclave, possessing adequate
transportation links, infrastructure and a supply of cheap labour may
prove a more attractive base for multinational capital than a larger country
with a less productive hinterland.”[66]
30-4. Summing up the character of the new separatist movements, the
ICFI explained: “In India and China,” the national movements of the first
half of the twentieth century “posed the progressive task of unifying
disparate peoples in a common struggle against imperialism—a task which
proved unrealisable under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie. The
new form of nationalism promotes separatism along ethnic, linguistic and
religious lines, with the aim of dividing up existing states for the benefit
of local exploiters. Such movements have nothing to do with a struggle
against imperialism, nor do they in any sense embody the democratic
aspirations of the masses of oppressed. They serve to divide the working To contact the WSWS and the
class and divert the class struggle into ethno-communal warfare.”[67] In Socialist Equality Party visit:
the interests of unifying the working class, the International Committee
insisted on a critical, even hostile, attitude to the proliferation of national
http://www.wsws.org
separatist movements and their invocation of “the right to
self-determination” to justify the formation of separate capitalist states.
30-5. This analysis has a particular relevance to South Asia where the
national bourgeoisie’s abortion of the democratic revolution and the
failure of its respective nationalist projects has produced a multitude of
divisive bourgeois tendencies based on religion, caste, language and
ethnicity. In India, the turn from the old schemes of national economic
regulation to the embrace of foreign investment and integration in global
production processes has accentuated regional economic disparities and
deepened social inequality. The resulting social crisis and popular anger is
being exploited by various bourgeois tendencies to promote ethnic
separatism, including to press for the creation of separate
ethnically-defined nation-states in Kashmir, Tamil Nadu, Assam and
other parts of the north-east. The ICFI explained: “The central question
here is, how does the revolutionary party of the working class respond to
the breakup of the old bourgeois nationalist movements? Are the masses
in these countries to advance their interests through new separatist
movements based on fragments of the states created through
decolonisation and founded on religious particularism? We categorically
reject such a perspective. Such statelets will provide no way forward for
the working class and the oppressed masses of India or anywhere else. At
best they will create profits for a thin layer of the privileged classes if they
are able to create a free trade zone and cut their own deals with
transnational capital. For the masses, they hold out the prospect only of
ethnic bloodbaths and intensified exploitation.”[68]
30-6. As part of the ICFI discussion, the RCL concluded that support for
the right of “self-determination for the Tamil people”, which in practical
political terms could only mean support for the national separatist project
of the LTTE, no longer had any progressive content. As the war restarted
in 1990, the LTTE took on an even more pronounced anti-democratic and
communal character: outlawing political opposition and murdering
political rivals; denouncing all Muslims as “enemy agents” and driving
them out of Jaffna; killing captured soldiers and police; and
indiscriminately attacking Sinhalese civilians. While rejecting the
LTTE’s separatist program, the RCL continued to intransigently oppose
the Sri Lankan government’s efforts to forcibly maintain the island’s
unity by military means. Its demand for the unconditional withdrawal of
the armed forces from the North and East did not imply support for a
separate Eelam. Rather, in opposing the military oppression of Tamils, the
RCL was seeking to unite the working class and oppressed masses in a
revolutionary struggle for the Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam.
To be continued
Footnotes:
61. The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth
International, pp. 6–7.
62. Ibid., pp. 70–71.
63. David North, “The Struggle for Marxism and the Tasks of the
Fourth International,” Fourth International, Volume 19, Number 1, Fall
Winter 1992, p. 74.
64. Fourth International, Volume 16, Nos. 1–2, p. 1.
65. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Volume 3
(London: Sphere Books, 1967) pp. 41–42.
66. International Committee of the Fourth International, Globalisation
and the International Working Class, Mehring Books, 1998, p. 108.
67. Ibid., p. 109.
68. Ibid., p. 115.

© World Socialist Web Site

World Socialist Web Site
The Historical and International Foundations
of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri
Lanka)—Part 12
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
7 April 2012
The World Socialist Web Site is publishing The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
which was adopted unanimously at the party’s founding congress in
Colombo, 27–29 May. It appears in 12 parts.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
31. The Socialist Equality Party
31-1. The transformation of the RCL into the Socialist Equality Party
(SEP) in 1996 flowed from the conclusions drawn by the ICFI about the
transformation of all the old organisations of the working class. In
conditions of the post-war stabilisation and economic expansion of
capitalism, the various trade union, social democratic and Stalinist
organisations had, within the framework of national economic regulation,
been able to make limited immediate gains for the working class, while
betraying its long-term historical interests. The IC sections had taken the
form of leagues in recognition that the social democratic and Stalinist
organisations still held the political allegiance of broad layers of
socialist-minded workers, intellectuals and youth. The RCL’s demand
that the LSSP and CP break from the SLFP and take the road to the
formation of a workers’ and peasants’ government based on socialist
policies was aimed at exposing these parties and winning the most
advanced layers of the working class. However, the globalisation of
production had destroyed any objective basis for national reformism and
transformed the old organisations into direct agencies of the national
bourgeoisie in slashing jobs, conditions and living standards in the
never-ending race for “international competitiveness.” In no sense could
these parties and trade unions any longer be considered organisations
based on the working class or speaking in its name.
31-2. The LSSP and CP entered a third SLFP-led coalition government
in 1994 under prime minister, later president, Chandrika Kumaratunga.
The two parties had never recovered from the profound hostility in the
working class generated by their participation in the Bandaranaike
government of the 1970s. By the time they joined the People’s Alliance
(PA), the LSSP and CP were hollow shells. No workers expected either
party to fight for basic social reforms, let alone take up the revolutionary
struggle for socialism. Any lingering illusions were quickly dispelled by
the LSSP and CP’s support for Kumaratunga’s escalating war and attacks
on basic democratic rights and living standards. They have subsequently
functioned as virtual factions of the SLFP, rather than independent
parties.
31-3. The NSSP, whose leaders never opposed the first two coalition
governments, backed Kumaratunga’s election. One faction headed by
Vasudeva Nanayakkara drew the logical conclusion from the NSSP’s
program of class collaboration and joined the PA government. The NSSP
© World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
and its offshoot, the United Socialist Party (USP), have remained as
satellites of the Colombo establishment, entering into a series of
increasingly grotesque political marriages. In the mid-1990s, as hostility
to the PA government grew, the NSSP struck a deal with the JVP, whose
gunmen had been killing its members just a decade previously. The JVP,
which had been legalised by Kumaratunga, used the NSSP as a stepping
stone to establishing a presence in the trade unions then broke off the
alliance. Throughout their various political twists and turns, the NSSP and
USP have maintained one constant: their visceral hostility to the SEP’s
fight for the political independence of the working class.
31-4. The evolution of the trade unions in Sri Lanka paralleled that of
the union apparatuses in the advanced capitalist countries. Under the
impact of globalised production, the union bureaucracies abandoned the
defence of even the most basic rights of the working class and have been
transformed into direct agents of management. In the wake of the unions’
betrayals, particularly after the 1980 general strike, union membership
plummeted. However, unlike their counterparts in the US and Europe, the
unions in Sri Lanka, for the most part, lacked alternate sources of income
and rapidly decayed. As the unions were federated by party affiliation,
disgust with the old party leaderships compounded their precipitous
decline.
31-5. The so-called plantation unions, in the first instance the Ceylon
Workers’ Congress (CWC), form a special case. The CWC always
functioned more as a paternalistic benevolent society than a trade union. It
retained a significant membership and resources due to its control, with
the support of management, over every aspect of life on the
plantations—from housing, health care and schooling to marriages,
funerals and religious celebrations. Using its members as a captive vote
bank, CWC leaders entered parliament and bartered for ministerial
positions and privileges. The various alternative unions such as the Up
Country People’s Front (UPF) operated no differently. None of these
organisations, which together act to suppress one of the most oppressed
sections of the working class, commands any significant positive support
among workers.
31-6. The establishment of the SEP was the pivotal first step in
preparing for new movements of the working class. These movements
will not take place through the old organisations, but in a revolt against
them—a revolt that has to be politically prepared and organisationally led
by the SEP. The Socialist Equality Party was adopted as the new name
after extensive discussion in the International Committee to focus on the
essential aim of socialism—to end social inequality—that had been obscured
by decades of misuse of the term by Social Democracy, Stalinism and
Pabloism. In its 1996 perspectives document, the SEP concluded: “The
recognition of the changed relationship of the working class and the
oppressed masses to all the old parties and bureaucracies demand that the
sections of the International Committee assume the leadership of the
impending revolutionary struggles of the masses.”
32. The World Socialist Web Site
32-1. The establishment of the World Socialist Web Site in 1998 marked
a decisive turning point in the development for the ICFI and the
international working class. The ICFI’s ability to take advantage of the
revolutionary developments in computer technology and to coordinate the
political work of its sections on a daily basis to produce the WSWS was a
product of the programmatic clarity and unity that had been achieved in
the aftermath of the 1985–86 split with the WRP. The World Socialist
Web Site not only allowed the ICFI to greatly extend its audience but
provided the new scaffolding around which the international working
class could integrate its struggles and coalesce into a conscious political
force to abolish capitalism.
32-2. The World Socialist Web Site was not simply a technical or
organisational initiative but was rooted in fundamental political
conceptions. At the 18th Plenum of the ICFI, David North elaborated these
foundations: “(1) The insistence of the ICFI on the primacy of
internationalism as the basis of the political strategy and tactical
organisation of the working class. (2) The uncompromising character of
the struggle waged by the ICFI against the domination of the working
class by reactionary labour bureaucracies. (3) The emphasis placed upon
the revival of a genuine socialist political culture within the working class
as an essential intellectual and, one might add, ‘spiritual’ premise of a
new international revolutionary movement. This is the essential
intellectual substance and precondition of socialist revolution. (4) The
struggle against spontaneism and political fatalism in relation to the
development of the crisis of capitalism, the class struggle, and the
socialist revolution.”[69]
32-3. The launching of the WSWS was a significant break from
previous forms of party work that were focused on the production and
distribution of newspapers. The WSWS enabled the ICFI to regularly
reach an international audience on a scale that was impossible through the
relatively limited sale of newspapers by each of its national sections. The
daily production of the WSWS integrated the work of all sections of the
ICFI to an unprecedented degree and concentrated their work on
developing the Marxist political and theoretical analysis needed to
politically prepare and guide a new revolutionary working class offensive.
In the case of Sri Lanka, collaboration on the WSWS ended the relative
isolation that the RCL/SEP had suffered for many years.
32-4. The effectiveness of the WSWS as an instrument of political
struggle in every country was decisively confirmed in the extensive
campaign waged by the Sri Lankan SEP and the International Committee
in 1998 to release four SEP members detained by the LTTE for agitating
for the party’s program. Confronted by the impact of the broad
international campaign, including among the Tamil diaspora in North
America, Europe and Australia, the LTTE ultimately released the SEP
members unharmed.
33. The Sri Lankan crisis of 2000
33-1. At the turn of the millennium, the Sri Lankan government was in
complete disarray following a series of military debacles starting with the
fall of Elephant Pass to the LTTE in April 2000. Amid what she described
as “the gravest crisis faced by the Colombo rule since 1948”, President
Kumaratunga was desperate for political support. Suddenly, after being
denied official party status for more than two decades, the SEP was
granted formal recognition. A week later, the SEP received a presidential
invitation to attend an all-party conference to discuss the political crisis.
In a statement rejecting the invitation, Wije Dias denounced the talks as
being “to rubberstamp government decisions already made, lend
credibility to its policies and garner support for the continuation of a war
© World Socialist Web Site
that has had disastrous consequences for working people, both Sinhalese
and Tamil, throughout the island.”
33-2. At the June 2000 plenum of the WSWS and ICFI, the significance
of Kumaratunga’s letter and the political lessons for all sections of the
ICFI were exhaustively discussed. In his opening report, David North
explained: “We must recognise as a significant turning point in the history
of the International Committee that a section of our movement has
received an invitation to participate in all-party talks with the national
government. It is not a matter of feeling honoured—we are certainly not.
Rather, it is a significant substantiation of a point we have been making
for some time: that beneath the surface of existing and long-established
political relationships—in which certain parties, organisations, individuals
and relations have dominated and seemed almost immovable, with
nothing appearing to change—a great deal is changing. Beneath the
surface, class relations are changing. The movement of socio-economic
tectonic plates, intensified by the breathtaking transformations in
technology; alterations in patterns of world trade and economic
intercourse—i.e., profound changes in the mode of production and
production relations—are building immense charges into the whole
political superstructure and preparing the way for a sudden, dramatic and
devastating political transformation.”
33-3. The plenum cautioned against any tendency towards complacency
or political passivity. The ICFI had to be ready for sudden political shifts,
which could involve further attempts to draw out of its sections new bases
of support for bourgeois rule as well as the use of state repression. What
was emphasised was the necessity of sustained political and theoretical
work to prepare the party and ensure that it was not caught unprepared.
By constantly working over political questions, the party counteracts the
pressures spontaneously generated by bourgeois society on the working
class and its vanguard and ensures that it does not react to events in a
petty-bourgeois, impressionistic manner. That included an appreciation of
the role of the sections of the IC as the essential ingredient in the
development of a revolutionary, socialist movement of the working class
and rural masses.
34. War and militarism
34-1. The end of the Cold War geopolitical framework led to an
intensification of imperialist rivalries and the eruption of militarism. US
imperialism, as the sole remaining “superpower”, sought to offset its
economic decline through the aggressive use of its residual military
might. Using the pretext of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the US put
into operation longstanding plans to establish its dominance of the
energy-rich Middle East. The 1990–91 Gulf War was backed by every
imperialist power as the means of legitimising its own future predatory
ambitions, as well as by the Soviet and Chinese regimes and the labour
bureaucracies in every country. In its 1991 manifesto entitled Oppose
Imperialist War and Colonialism, the ICFI concluded that a new period of
neo-colonialism had opened up. “This ongoing and de facto partition of
Iraq signals the start of a new division of the world by the imperialists.
The conquests and annexations which, according to the opportunist
apologists of imperialism, belonged to a bygone era are once again on the
order of the day.”[70]
34-2. While the first Gulf War was conducted under the United Nations
banner, the US-led military intervention against Serbia in 1999 had no
such fig leaf. The excuse for NATO’s war in the Balkans—to prevent the
genocide of Kosovars—was generalised to a humanitarian pretext to justify
further neo-colonial operations. In reality, the Balkans war was part of a
broader US strategy to exploit opportunities opening up following the
collapse of the Soviet Union, particularly in the newly-established,
resource-rich republics of Central Asia. The Bush administration seized
on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as the justification for the
invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 in furtherance of US
ambitions to subjugate the Middle East and Central Asia. Bush’s new
doctrine of “pre-emptive war” was identical to the principal crime for
which Nazi leaders were tried after World War II—waging a war of
aggression. The limited opposition to the Iraq war in the UN Security
Council led by France was based solely on fears that the US was cutting
across the vested interests of other powers in the Middle East. The
unprecedented emergence of mass internationally-coordinated protests
against the invasion of Iraq underlined both the objective, revolutionary
potential of the antiwar movement and its political weakness—the fatal
illusion, cultivated by every pseudo-radical organisation, that the war
could be halted through pressure on governments or through the UN. The
failure of the protests underscored the basic lesson of Marxism—that war
can only be averted through the independent mobilisation of the working
class to abolish the underlying cause, the profit system and the outmoded
division of the world into capitalist nation states.
34-3. The explosion of American militarism over the past two decades
has had a profoundly destabilising impact around the world, especially in
South Asia. Tensions between Pakistan and India have intensified as each
has attempted to deflect acute social tensions at home by stirring up
chauvinist sentiment against its rival. The two countries each tested
nuclear weapons in 1998 and almost came to blows in 1999 when
Pakistani troops and Islamic militants infiltrated and occupied the Kargil
region of Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir. After the US compelled
Pakistan to withdraw support for the militants, the military headed by
General Pervez Musharraf seized power. The US further destabilised
Pakistan in 2001 by forcing Musharraf to end support for the Taliban
regime in Afghanistan and assist the US-led military intervention. Taking
advantage of Washington’s bogus “war on terrorism”, New Delhi took an
increasingly belligerent approach to Islamabad. After Islamic militants
attacked the parliament building in New Delhi in December 2001, India
marshalled well over half a million troops along the border with Pakistan.
The two nuclear armed powers were poised on the brink of all-out war for
months before backing off. The decade-long neo-colonial occupation of
Afghanistan has spilled over the border into Pakistan and, under President
Obama, has become the AfPak war. Escalating CIA drone attacks and
devastating US-backed Pakistani army operations in tribal areas inside
Pakistan have compounded the deep political crisis in Islamabad. Nothing
testifies to the political bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie and its agencies in
the working class throughout the Indian subcontinent so much as the lack
of any opposition—other than that of reactionary Islamist groups—to the
AfPak war, the first direct imperialist intervention in South Asia since
1947.
35. The crisis of capitalism and the tasks of the SEP
35-1. The global financial crisis that erupted in September 2008 with the
collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers was not a
conjunctural economic downturn, but a fundamental breakdown of the
capitalist order. Optimism that the trillions of dollars injected by
governments to prop up the financial system and major corporations had
restabilised the economic system has rapidly faded. The bailouts and
stimulus packages effectively transferred the mountains of bad debt of
private swindlers and speculators onto the public books and are now being
imposed on the working class in every country in the form of austerity
measures. The economic crisis is still unfolding and taking more
malignant forms. Australian SEP National Secretary Nick Beams
explained: “A breakdown does not mean that capitalism comes to a halt.
It signifies the opening of a new period of history, in which old structures,
both economic and political, as well as ideologies and ways of thinking,
give way, and new forms of political struggle develop in which the fate of
society itself is up for decision.”[71]
35-2. The worsening economic crisis will further exacerbate
geo-political antagonisms—in the first place between the United States and
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China. The rapid economic rise of China inevitably brings it into
competition with its more established rivals and other emerging powers
such as India, as it scours the world for energy, raw materials and
markets. To protect its shipping lanes, China is expanding its military,
especially naval, power, but this in turn threatens the longstanding US
dominance in the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Now the world’s
largest debtor nation, the United States has already lost its post-war
position as the world’s economic hegemon and is recklessly using its
residual military might to undermine its rivals. The US will not peacefully
relinquish its previous dominance and China, which is wracked by its own
acute economic and social instabilities, cannot allow Washington to
dictate terms. This intensifying rivalry, which is already evident in trade
and currency disputes, inexorably draws in other powers and threatens to
drag humanity into another catastrophic world war.
35-3. Asia as a whole has been transformed into an arena of intensifying
competition between the US and China. To shore up its previously
dominant position in North East Asia, Japan is strengthening its military
alliance with Washington. India, which harbours its own ambitions to be a
global power, has established a strategic partnership with Washington. In
every country, the ruling class confronts a basic dilemma: how to balance
between China, now the largest trading partner of virtually every country
in Asia, and the United States, which is still the world’s largest economy
and strongest military power. The devastating consequences of this
geopolitical struggle are already evident in Afghanistan, which has been
reduced to a US-dominated colonial outpost in Central Asia, and
neighbouring Pakistan, which is convulsed by political crisis and conflict.
35-4. Sri Lanka has been drawn into the vortex of this competition as a
result of its central position astride the Indian Ocean’s major shipping
lanes. The end of the island’s protracted civil war in 2009 intensified the
rivalry between the US, China and India for the dominant position in
Colombo. As the LTTE’s defeat appeared imminent, the US belatedly
recognised that China had greatly expanded its influence by providing
military and economic aid to Sri Lanka. In return, Beijing had been
allowed to develop a major new port in the southern town of Hambantota
as part of its drive for strategic harbour facilities in the Indian Ocean,
including in Burma, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The importance of the
island for Washington was underscored by a US Senate report in
December 2009, which flatly declared that the US “cannot afford to lose
Sri Lanka.” Like its counterparts throughout the region, the Sri Lankan
government is engaged in a precarious balancing act that will not prevent
the island being drawn into a conflict that will have catastrophic
consequences for the working class.
35-5. The war restarted by President Mahinda Rajapakse in 2006 left the
island in ruins. With the backing of all the major powers, the government
and army waged a brutal war of attrition in which tens of thousands of
Tamil civilians were killed and towns and villages reduced to rubble. The
war was accompanied by far reaching attacks on democratic rights and the
imposition of new economic burdens on the working class.
Pro-government death squads working closely with the military killed or
“disappeared” hundreds of people including journalists and politicians.
SEP member Nadarajah Wimaleswaran vanished in March 2007 while
travelling to the navy-controlled island of Kayts. The government, which
blocked any investigation of the case, is politically responsible for his
disappearance and likely murder.
35-6. The end of the civil war has not brought the “peace and
prosperity” promised by President Rajapakse. Having mortgaged the
island to the hilt to pay for the war, the government has been compelled to
make ever deeper cuts to public sector jobs, services and subsidies to the
meet the demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Wages have
been effectively frozen for the past five years while prices, including
those of basic staples, have skyrocketed, creating hardships for large
sections of the working class and oppressed masses. The vast gulf
between rich and poor is underscored by the latest social statistics
showing that the poorest or bottom 20 percent of society receive only 4.5
percent of total household income compared to 54.1 percent for the top 20
percent. None of the pressing needs and aspirations of working people
find political expression in any section of the Colombo establishment. The
opposition parties—the UNP and JVP—fully supported the government’s
war and the pro-market economic agenda being dictated by the IMF on
behalf of international finance capital.
35-7. The political weakness of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie is
highlighted by the Rajapakse government’s dependence on the country’s
huge security forces built up over a quarter century of civil war. Nearly
two years after the end of the war, draconian emergency powers are still
in force and none of the troops have been demobilised. Instead, the
military is intruding into aspects of government previously regarded as
strictly civilian, such as the huge Colombo slum clearance program that
will forcibly displace 60,000 families. The militarisation of life is
summed up in Rajapakse’s exhortations to workers to sacrifice like
soldiers to “build the nation.” Increasingly the Rajapakse regime has
functioned as a politico-military cabal operating with scant regard for
parliament, the constitution or the courts. The police state apparatus is
above all directed at the suppression of any opposition by the working
class and rural masses.
35-8. None of the underlying issues that led to the protracted civil war
has been resolved by the LTTE’s military defeat. Six decades after formal
independence, the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie has only managed to cling onto
power by fracturing the island along communal lines. It has maintained
unity solely by force of arms, currently manifest in the massive military
occupation of the North and East. The legitimate grievances and anger felt
by Tamils over decades of entrenched discrimination will inevitably erupt
in new forms. The necessary political lessons have to be drawn, however.
The LTTE’s defeat was not primarily a military one, but was the product
of the inherent weaknesses of its political perspective. From the outset, its
aim was to carve out a capitalist Eelam on behalf of the Tamil bourgeoisie
with the backing of India or other regional and world powers. When these
same powers decisively turned against it, the LTTE was reduced to
impotent pleading to the “international community” to halt the military
onslaught. The only social force in society capable of waging a struggle
for genuine democratic rights against the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and its
imperialist backers is the working class. However, the LTTE was always
organically opposed to any orientation to unite workers—Tamil and
Sinhala—on a class basis. Its indiscriminate attacks on Sinhalese civilians
played into the hands of the Colombo establishment and deepened the
communal divide. In areas under its control, the LTTE rode roughshod
over the democratic rights and social needs of working people. Thus, as it
made its final stand, the LTTE leadership was completely incapable of
making any broad appeal to Tamil masses, let alone to the working class
throughout the island and region. The LTTE’s collapse is graphic proof
of the bankruptcy of all tendencies based on bourgeois separatism.
35-9. The past quarter century of war has tested out every political
tendency. Only the SEP has proven capable of waging a consistent
political struggle in defence of the democratic rights of Tamils and
working people as a whole, as an essential component of its strategy for a
Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam. The SEP’s ability to
withstand attacks, political and physical, from all sides stems from the
strength of the principles on which it is based. The defence and
development of the theory and strategy of Permanent Revolution is the
only means of fighting for the political independence of the working class
from all factions of the bourgeoisie. In conducting an uncompromising
struggle for Trotskyism over more than four decades, the SEP has struck
deep roots in the working class and established itself as the only party that
defends the historic interests of working people.
35-10. Sri Lanka demonstrates in microcosm the complete failure of the
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national project in all the independent states established throughout South
Asia after World War II. Nowhere have bourgeois governments been able
to meet the aspirations of the masses for decent living standards and basic
democratic rights. Hundreds of millions of people are mired in poverty
and backwardness. The decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka finds its
parallels throughout the region in the reactionary exploitation of
communal, ethnic and language divisions by rival sections of the ruling
elite to further their own narrow interests. As the working class enters a
new period of revolutionary convulsions, it is necessary to draw the
essential political lessons. It is only through the unification of the working
class within and across national borders that the necessary revolutionary
force can be developed for the overthrow of the outmoded system of
capitalism and its replacement by a world planned socialist economy. The
SEP seeks to revive the best revolutionary traditions of the BLPI and
bases itself on the ICFI’s program by fighting for the unity of workers
and the oppressed masses for a United Socialist States of South Asia as an
integral part of the world socialist revolution.
35-11. Persistent economic crises, sharpening inter-imperialist
antagonisms, the growth of militarism, deepening social inequality and
the profound alienation of ordinary people from existing political parties
and structures are all unmistakable signs of a new protracted period of
wars and revolutions. The upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East
are the latest confirmation that the crisis of capitalism is generating
immense class struggles. However, there remains a huge gap between the
advanced character of capitalist breakdown and the present political
consciousness of the working class. That can only be overcome through a
patient and intransigent political struggle by the revolutionary party
against the agencies of Social Democracy, Stalinism and Pabloism that
block the independent mobilisation of the working class. In doing so, the
SEP will encourage and assist the development of new independent
organisations of the working class. Through a consistent political struggle
in the working class, the party will seek to forge the necessary alliance
between the proletariat and peasantry that is essential for the
establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ government.
35-12. The central issue, however, remains to construct a revolutionary
leadership to raise the consciousness of the working class to its
international and historic tasks. Only a party based on the most advanced
scientific theory that has drawn the necessary lessons of the previous
strategic experiences of the international working class is capable of
fulfilling that role. The International Committee of the Fourth
International and its sections alone embody the historical heritage of
contemporary Marxism—that is, of Trotskyism. It is on that basis that the
SEP and its sister parties of the ICFI seek to educate, mobilise and unify
the international working class, confident that the most far sighted and
self-sacrificing workers and youth will be won to its banner and provide
the material forces for carrying out the world socialist revolution.
Concluded
Footnotes:
69. The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist
Equality Party (Australia) (Mehring Books, Sydney, 2010), p. 146.
70. Fourth International, Volume 18, No. 1, Summer–Fall 1991, p. 2.
71. Nick Beams, The World Economic Crisis: A Marxist Analysis
(October 2008) http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/nbe1-o04.html.
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