Colombo Action Committee for People’s Struggles.
On August 14, the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reported an incident in which the trade union bureaucracy of the Cankaya Municipality in Turkey threatened and attacked the workers when they protested against the betrayal of the trade union leadership.
Workers were attacked when they went to the union office to question the fraudulent way the unions are concealing from the workers the agreement signed between the union and the management. Workers accused them of having agreed to a meager salary and not including in the signed agreement the terms agreed upon with the workers.
Colombo Action Committee for People’s Struggles (CACPS) strongly condemns the brutal attack by the bureaucrats of the Genel-İş trade union affiliated to the Turkish DİSK trade union, against the workers of Cankaya municipality and extends its fraternal arms of solidarity with the workers.
The thuggery of Turkey’s treacherous union bureaucracy against its members, is a part of the conspiracies of union bureaucrats, who have aligned themselves with governments and corporations around the world to quell workers’ struggles. CACPS, convinced that the only way the workers can fight against these regressive movements around the world is through a conscious fight for the unity of the working class around the world, calls on the working people to march forward to mobilize the support of the international working class.
The CACPS was built during a struggle to build a genuine workers’ movement, independent of the right-wing, within the people’s movement that ousted the former Executive President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka. It is built on the foundation of the calling of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to build rank-and-file committees of workers, as centers of workers’ power, independent of all capitalist class organizations and trade unionism.
Our committee stands in defense of the Turkish workers as an organization with experience in fighting for the social and democratic rights of the working people against the attacks of the capitalist class in Sri Lanka.
The crisis of the Turkish ruling class, which has been exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, is being burdened onto the shoulders of working people through inflation, job slashings and welfare cuts. Against this assault, tens of thousands of working people across Turkey have started a counteroffensive through protests and strikes. It is in such a backdrop that bourgeois lackyes and pseudo leftists including trade unions have launched rounds of physical attacks against the workers.
The workers of Sri Lanka too are experiencing the same conditions. The austerity measures of the Ranil Wickremesinghe government and their beastly attacks on the democratic rights are being intensified on a daily basis, enjoying the generous assistance from trade unions who do not raise even a finger against them. Earlier this year, more than half a million petroleum, electricity, water and health care workers responded to cuts and privatization with strikes and protests.
The government’s day-to-day response to these protests by workers and students has been to impose court bans and disperse them with the use of the military police. The brutal crackdown by the government shows that they are not prepared to allow even a shade of democratic rights to the working class.
Trade union bureaucracies are more and more aligning themselves with the plans of their governments. This experience is shared by workers in Turkey as well as in Sri Lanka. The Ceylon Electricity Workers’ Union (CEWU), facing the privatization of the Ceylon Electricity Board, demands that the “restructuring should be done to suit the current situation of the country”. The CEWU is not alone in their assistance offered to the government’s plans for privatization. Everywhere the government institutions are threatened with privatization, including in the Colombo port and Petroleum Corporation, the Trade Unions are extending their hands of assistance to the ruling class.
The trade union movement is unable to lead the working class to face the deadly attacks of the capitalist system, immersed in a grave crisis of international proportions. Before the 1980s, when production was relatively confined to national boundaries, the trade union movements around the world were in a position to lead struggles to win certain reforms for the working class, acting as mediators between the capitalist class and the working class. That era is now gone and an era of globalized production has dawned, hence pushing all national programs, including those of national trade unions, into an irrevocable crisis. Now, the attacks on the working class, though they are launched on a national scale, have their roots in the global crisis of the productive forces and the workers all over the world are facing them. In the absence of any national program capable of countering these attacks, the trade unions are now forced to abandon their role of mediation and winning ‘relief’ for the working class, and largely becoming a defensive bulwark of capitalist rule. Thus, the workers worldover are experiencing the readiness of their unions to go to any length against them, as the co-partner of the capitalist order, in its deadly struggle for survival. This is the objective truth behind the attacks on the workers of Cankaya Municipality.
The CACPS understands that safeguarding workers’ jobs, wages and rights can only be achieved through a struggle against Capitalism and its guardians in the form of trade unions. It recognizes that it is crucially important to establish independent action Committees of the working class (Rank-and-file committees), based on working class democracy, that would expose the unholy and treacherous alliance maintained by the trade unions and middle class organizations with the capitalist state and companies. These committees, representing the economic, political, social interests and all basic needs of the working class and the oppressed people, and operating under their democratic will, spares no room for capitalist class and its agents including trade union bureaucrats. Such independent, genuinely democratic organizations of the working class are mandatory in defeating betrayals and carrying out the struggle to the final victory.
For this reason, CACPS extends its fullest support and expresses its adherence to the call of ICFI through WSWS, to build independent rank-and-file workers’ committees and establish an international alliance among such committees around the world to strengthen the objective unity of the working class. In recent times, there were several occasions in which the ICFI affiliated Socialist Equality Party (SEP) activists have been physically assaulted, verbally threatened and obstructed by the trade unionists, when the SEP activists were campaigning for this very program. CACPS always defended the SEP and independent workers against such attacks.
CACPS calls upon Turkish workers, as well as workers in Sri Lanka and all over the world, to build rank-and-file committees as their own centers of political power, independent of the trade unions who are acting as a labor police force of the corporates and capitalist governments. It also calls upon all such committees to unite on both national and international spheres, and to join hands in the struggle to establish their own control on the matters. The working class has no other path to freedom.
Turkish workers, form independent Action committees!
Build the democratic and socialist congress of workers and the poor of Sri Lanka!
Forward to build the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees!
