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Rani

The Myth of Common Guilt: ‘Rani‘ as Perversion of Truth in the Form of Art

art & culture, art and culture, class struggles, Democratic Rights, english, Fascism, history, lead article, politics, politics & economics /

By Sanjaya Jayasekera.

In “My Thoughts on Handagama’s Rani,” published in Daily FT on March 281, Jagath Weerasinghe—artist, archaeologist, and cultural commentator—extends, rationalises, and legitimises the central reactionary thesis of Asoka Handagama’s recent film Rani. This is a film whose underlying narrative, presented in the guise of artistic subtlety and aesthetic ambiguity, represents a deeply ideological falsification of history. Weerasinghe’s endorsement of the director’s central proposition2—reproduced in Sinhala translation in Anidda on March 30 by Vidura Munasinghe—is emblematic of a broader trend among the middle-class intelligentsia and the pseudo-left, who serve as ideological apologists for the crimes of the capitalist state.

Rani
A scene in the film “Rani” by Asoka Handagama

The core thesis promoted by both Weerasinghe and the film is that the atrocities carried out during the 1988–90 period—enforced disappearances, state death squads, mass graves, torture camps, and extrajudicial killings, as well as the fascistic violence perpetrated by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)—were not the products of concrete political decisions, class interests, and specific agencies of state and party power. Instead, they were the result of a society in which “violence had become systemic and normalised.” Weerasinghe writes: authoritarian regimes perpetuate brutality “for political gain and self-preservation, creating an environment where violence is not only carried out by those in power but is also internalised, accepted, and even participated in by ordinary citizens. In such a climate, even those with moral integrity can find themselves complicit—whether through silence, fear, or the gradual erosion of ethical boundaries.”

This pseudo-sociological claim—that violence was embedded in the very fabric of society and was collectively enacted by the masses—leads to a profoundly reactionary conclusion: that there is a shared moral guilt for the crimes of the period, borne by everyone, without any class distinction. Rani—the eponymous protagonist, who is portrayed as initially a passive observer of the surrounding terror but who gradually becomes emotionally and psychologically implicated—and every other defenseless rural man and woman, the worker, the unemployed youth, who were terrorized for their lives both by the fascism of the JVP and by state repression, are depicted as responsible for and willing participants in the atrocities.

Was this culpability moral, political, or both? While Weerasinghe leaves no doubt that he intends to assign moral culpability to the masses—an implication clearly shared by the director—this vulgar theory leaves the spectator wondering who bears political accountability. That is precisely the issue at hand. The film and its director’s apologetics place the blame on the “ordinary” masses. Political responsibility follows moral culpability. Consequently, the oppressed are identified with the oppressor, giving rise to a vision of a society that is hopeless, anarchic, and devoid of historical or scientific grounding. This approach is crudely ahistorical, impressionistic, and unscientific—and it serves a definite class interest.

The capitalist state agents of terror, its political leadership, the military-intelligence apparatus, and the misdirected cadre of the JVP are equated, and these contradictory forces are placed on the same grounds as the poor and the working people, constituting a homogeneous society of “ordinary citizens.” They are all morally and indiscriminately dissolved into an amorphous, classless “we.” The final anecdote of the film, which Weerasinghe refers to, is founded upon this proposition and leads to the conclusion that the director wanted the viewers of his film to read into as the alternative narrative: the killing of Richard de Soysa was not necessarily ordered by President R. Premadasa, nor did it serve the interests of the latter or the ruling class. This is a liquidationist proposition that casts doubt upon many other suspected assassinations and abductions of the period, getting the political leadership of the state off the hook. In conclusion, this is where the “broader and more layered exploration of the underlying social and political realities,” which Weerasinghe claims the purported “fiction” allows its viewer to delve into, lands.

Such a political framework is not new. It has appeared time-to-time in bourgeois and petty-bourgeois historiography, where the responsibility for state crimes—pogroms, wars, genocides—is shifted onto “society” or “human nature.” One prominent historical analogue is Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), which absurdly claimed that the Holocaust was not the outcome of a historically developed political program of German imperialism and the fascist state of the Nazi Third Reich, but the result of a deep-seated, inherent antisemitism among the German people3. Thus, the “ordinary” Germans were willing accomplices in the Final Solution, the extermination of over six million Jews. Hitler was only the final executioner of this ideology. This deadly distortion of history has been widely discredited by serious historians, not only for its factual inaccuracy, but for the reactionary political implications it carries4.

Weerasinghe offers no sociological or historical research to substantiate his claims—nor does the director, who admits to conducting little serious investigation prior to the making of the film. However, similar arguments have been advanced internationally through certain psychological and sociological theories that lack rigorous empirical grounding. Chief among these are the studies of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, whose respective experiments on obedience to authority and simulated prison environments have been widely cited to suggest that ordinary individuals can become complicit in acts of cruelty under systemic pressure. Both studies have come under sustained criticism for methodological shortcomings, ethical violations, and issues of reproducibility. More importantly, when abstracted from their immediate experimental context and applied uncritically to complex social phenomena like mass political violence, these theories devolve into a kind of psychological determinism. They obscure the class forces and political programs that shape historical events and instead offer a right-wing, pseudo-scientific narrative in which atrocities are the inevitable result of human nature or diffuse social norms—thereby absolving the state and the ruling elite of political responsibility.

In the Sri Lankan context, this argument has especially reactionary consequences. It leads to the notion that the Sinhalese majority are collectively responsible for the 1983 pogrom against Tamils, and ultimately, for the genocide in Mullivaikkal in 2009. A section of the middle class of the country harbours this ideology, which was once starkly expressed by Pubudu Jayagoda, a leader of the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), who claimed that racism is deeply ingrained in the Sinhalese “society”5, reducing complex political phenomena to abstract moral failures of entire ethnic groups of conflicting classes6. This is not only unscientific and historically false, but it plays directly into the hands of the capitalist state and chauvinist forces, who exploit communalism to divide the working class on racialist lines to prevent unified struggle.

Marxism begins not with moralism, but with the concrete analysis of social relations and historical processes. The essential questions that must be addressed in any serious assessment of the 1988–90 period are the following: What were the objective causes of the JVP-led insurrection and its fascistic methods? What class forces were involved in the repression? What was the role of imperialism, the IMF, and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie in creating the social crisis that produced this violence? And above all, was there an alternative revolutionary leadership that could have mobilized the working class against both the JVP and the capitalist state?

The JVP uprising was not a spontaneous eruption of madness, nor was it the inevitable product of a culture of violence. It emerged from a deep social crisis rooted in the failure of the post-colonial bourgeoisie and the betrayal of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1964, which had entered into a class collaborationist coalition with the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). In the aftermath of this betrayal, tens of thousands of rural youth—disillusioned by the parliamentary left and devastated by the economic liberalization policies of the J. R. Jayewardene regime—were drawn to the radical rhetoric of the JVP.

The JVP, despite its populist posture, was never a Marxist organization. It rejected the class struggle, dismissed the internationalism of the Fourth International, and relied on petty-bourgeois nationalism and adventurist terror. In 1987–89, it launched a campaign of assassinations and fascistic violence that paralyzed the working class and the middle class. The response of the state was a campaign of ruthless repression. Death squads, torture camps such as Batalanda, and state-sponsored terror claimed the lives of an estimated 60,000 youth.

Massacre 1989
A scene of mass killings and daily-life in rural Sri Lanka in September 1989. Photo by Prasanna Hennayake

This was not a case of generalized ”ideology of violence” within society. It was class warfare, waged from above by the capitalist state to defend private property, intimidate the working class, and preserve bourgeois rule. It was facilitated by the political vacuum created by the betrayals of the old left and the inability of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), to politically break the working class and the rural poor from the grip of the petty-bourgeois JVP and other Stalinist and Maoist organizations in time to develop an alternative mass leadership.

However, it was only the RCL, the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world party of the working class, which alone insisted that the fascist violence of the JVP and the state terror could only be opposed by the independent political mobilization of the working class on a socialist and internationalist program. In November 1988, in order to mobilize the independent power of the working class, it called for a united front of working-class organizations to fight both state repression and JVP fascism, as an immediate practical measure. Instead of supporting this effort, the LSSP, the Communist Party (CP), Nawa Sama Samaja Party (NSSP), and Ceylon Workers’ Congress (CWC) aligned themselves with the terror of the UNP regime, which armed them against the JVP. This betrayal aided the state in unleashing mass repression on the rural poor of the South and launching its racist war against the oppressed Tamil people.

None of these dynamics are on the historical balance sheet of those who seek to “push” the contemporary youth “to the very edges of these established frameworks.”

Today, the pseudo-left has once again emerged as a shield for the ruling class, which has endorsed the JVP/NPP as its saviour. The JVP-led NPP is using its parliamentary position not to uncover or prosecute the war crimes of the past, but to bury them. Its recent tabling and debating of the Batalanda Commission report—gathering dust for over two decades—is a cynical gesture meant to divert public attention from IMF austerity measures. The NPP is objectively poised not to challenge the military, nor the UNP, nor the interests of imperialism. It fears that any real reckoning with the crimes of 1988–90 will expose not only the state, but the politics of the JVP itself.

The working class and rural poor must reject the “common guilt” thesis advanced in Rani and promoted by figures like Weerasinghe. They must demand justice based not on emotional reconciliation, but on historical truth and political accountability7.

Neither of these are possible within the capitalist state. It requires the building of a revolutionary socialist movement of the working class to finally break the grip of imperialism, overturn the legacy of terror, and unify the oppressed—Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim—on the basis of a common struggle against exploitation.

The film’s thesis, and Weerasinghe’s article by extension, constitute an aestheticized historical falsification, a rebranding of a reactionary historical revisionism in the garb of “critical reflection.” The function of art, if it is to be progressive, is not to obscure these truths but to clarify them. Rani fails in this most fundamental task. It replaces history with impressionism, class analysis with pseudo-science, and revolutionary clarity with reactionary confusion.

  1. My Thoughts on Handagama’s Rani, Jagath Weerasinghe, Daily FT on March 28, 2025. <https://www.ft.lk/columns/My-thoughts-on-Handagama-s-Rani/4-774887>
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  2. Anidda, February 2, 2025, A discussion with Ashoka Handagama by Upali Amarasinghe, p19.
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  3.  ‘[A]ntisemitism moved many thousands of “ordinary” Germans—and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned—to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.’ Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 9.
    ↩︎
  4. The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners,  David North (April 1997) in The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century (2014). <https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html> 
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  5. <https://www.facebook.com/reel/3824881814291061?sfnsn=wa&mibextid=6AJuK9> ↩︎
  6. Race, class and social conflict in the United States, Niles Niemuth, SEP Summer School Lecture 2021, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/race-s06.html> 
    ↩︎
  7. Batalanda Slaughter Chambers and the Mass Graves: The class roots of crimes against the poor and the working class of Sri Lanka, Sanjaya Jayasekera, March 23, 2025, <https://www.thesocialist.lk/batalanda-slaughter-chambers-and-the-mass-graves-the-class-roots-of-crimes-against-the-poor-and-the-working-class-of-sri-lanka/> 


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Katuwanafamily

Batalanda Slaughter Chambers and the Mass Graves: The class roots of crimes against the poor and the working class of Sri Lanka

class struggles, Democratic Rights, english, Fascism, history, lead article, News, politics /

By Sanjaya Jayasekera

On March 12, Sri Lanka’s National People’s Power (NPP) government tabled the long-buried Batalanda Commission report in Parliament, fixing dates for a parliamentary debate. This sudden move—decades after the report was first compiled—has nothing to do with securing justice for the thousands of youth and workers who were abducted, tortured, and murdered during the late 1980s. Rather, it is a cynical maneuver by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led administration, aimed at deflecting attention from the ongoing economic crisis and reinforcing the credibility of the Sri Lankan state, which bears direct responsibility for the atrocities.

The Batalanda torture chambers and the mass graves scattered across Sri Lanka are grim symbols of the bloody terror unleashed by the ruling class in response to the social unrest caused by the economic collapse of the 1980s. Thousands of youth, primarily from impoverished rural backgrounds, were abducted by the police, the army and the death squads, held in state-run camps, tortured, raped, killed, burned alive on tyre-pyres, or their bodies were thrown to rivers or buried in unmarked graves. The military and police officers invaded the houses of the male victims, raped their wives, mothers and sisters. These were not just isolated crimes but a systematic class war waged against the poor by a ruling elite determined to defend the bourgeois state, capitalist economic reforms and power at any cost.

IMF Austerity and the Social Crisis of the 1980s

The second JVP insurrection (1987–89) did not emerge in a vacuum. The economic devastation of the 1980s, caused by the United National Party (UNP) government’s brutal implementation of IMF-dictated austerity – rural poverty, indebtedness, disease, malnutrition, land grabbing, unemployment, privatization, inflation – created conditions in which insurgent situation grew among the rural disillusioned youth. 

In 1977, the government of J.R. Jayawardene abandoned Sri Lanka’s limited welfare-state model and embraced open-market liberalization. The IMF and World Bank demanded “belt-tightening” measures: currency devaluation, drastic cuts to social spending, and the elimination of subsidies for essential goods. The consequences were catastrophic:

  • By 1988, the overall budget deficit had soared to 12% of GDP.
  • Foreign debt quadrupled, forcing the government into commercial borrowing.
  • Inflation reached 14% in 1988.
  • Official reserves collapsed, falling to six weeks at the end of 1988 and just three weeks of imports by mid-1989.
  • By 1987-88 unemployment reached 15.5%, I.e. 940,000 unemployed, and 75% of them were in the 15-29 age group, according to official surveys.
JRJ
J.R.Jayawardene and Ranil Wickremasinghe (r)

Significantly, military expenditure was also increased for the civil war against the Tamil population in the North and East, the total accumulated cost of which up to 1996 since 1983 was at least Rs. 1,135 billion at 1996 prices (168.5% of the 1996 GDP, equivalent to US$ 20.6 billion).

The young men and women who had been promised economic prosperity under Jayawardene’s “open economy” found themselves jobless and trapped in deepening poverty. With traditional avenues for dissent crushed—particularly after the crushing of the July 1980 general strike— JVP capitalized youth resentment for recruitment. 

JVP’s Treachery

Founded on a reactionary mixture of Maoism, Castroism and petty-bourgeois radicalism, sequel to the “great betrayal” of Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1964, JVP channeled youth discontent over the social crisis, along the line of Sinhala chauvinism, nationalism and to tactics of fascism, in defence of the capitalist state. It exploited the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of July 1987 between Jayawardena and Rajiv Gandhi to wage a chauvinist campaign to recruit cadres. 

JVP was never a Marxist party, and ruled out independent mobilization of the working class for the perspective of socialist internationalism against capitalist rule, counterposing the rural youth against the working class. Its hostility to the working class was manifested in its killings of workers, political opponents of the left and those who opposed it ideologically. 

This fascist conduct of the JVP marked a high point in the degeneration of the petty-bourgeois nationalist movements throughout the world under conditions of the global crisis of imperialism.

State Terror 

In response to the fascist attacks by JVP and its military wing, Patriotic People’s Movement (DJV), the UNP unleashed unspeakable brutality against rural and urban youth and the poor. Jayawardene and his successor, Ranasinghe Premadasa, oversaw a state-sponsored reign of terror against not only JVP cadres but also thousands of working-class youth who had no connection to the insurrection.

Premadasa
Ranasinghe Premadasa (Right) and his Son Sajith Premadasa, now the Leader of the Opposition, who boasts of his father’s “spine”
  • Torture Camps and Killings: Secret interrogation centers were established across the country, with Batalanda and Eliyakanda emerging as the most notorious. Unspeakable torture methods were employed – those who were abducted were hanged, beaten, barb wires were forced into their rectums,  and they were forced into barrels of chili-powder-mixed water, many never emerging alive. Youth were often subjected to rape, decapitation, nails hammered into their heads and into ears, eyes removed and burnt alive on tyre-pyres etc. 
  • Death Squads and Tyre-Pyres: The military, police, and paramilitary gangs abducted suspected “subversives,” who were then executed and burned in public. Sometimes, their families were forced to witness. Many innocent villagers were massacred, kids stabbed, and women raped,  just because someone of their family members was a suspected JVP cadre. 
  • Mass Graves: Thousands of bodies were dumped in shallow, unmarked graves, many of which remain undiscovered (Matale, Sooriyakanda, Wilpita are among the few such identified).

Witnesses and victims’ families have provided horrifying testimonies of the pogrom. Survivors recount hearing the screams of detainees through the night. Mothers were told their sons had “disappeared,” only for their burned bodies to be found days later by the roadside. 

theSocialist.LK talked to a bereaved woman in the Mulkirigala electorate, whose entire family was massacred by the army in late August 1989, because the army could not locate her only brother. Time has hardly permitted her recovery from the trauma. She told as follows: 

“My seven year old daughter (Niranjala), my three young sisters (Nilmini, Sujithaseeli, Mathangalatha), my cousin sister Chandraleka, my mother (Sisiliyana -53) and my father (Edwin-63), all were massacred by the Sinha regiment forces of Katuwana army camp, in that thick of the night. Those devils had bombed our house and, the following day, my husband witnessed the burning flesh under the rubble. We have been told that my sisters were carried away, raped for three days by the soldiers and killed. Beliatta police had later killed and burned my brother (Chulananda -21) too.”

Katuwana-Massacre
Katuwana Massacre victims: From top Left: Mathangalatha, Nilmini, Sisiliyana, Edwin(a traditional ayurvedic doctor), Sujithaseeli. From bottom Left: Niranjala, Chandraleka, Chulananda.

A survivor of government repression told our reporters as follows:

“I was then 16.  I was somehow able to secure my life. One night in mid 1989, Wanduramba Police in Galle abducted the boyfriend of my cousin, Udayakantha, a tuition teacher, said to be on the orders of Udugampola, who was referred to by the villagers as the “Butcher”. One day after, I saw his burning body on a tire by the roadside, among other bodies.”

Over 100,000 people, mostly youth, were massacred by the government during the period. Millions were rendered destitute. To this day, not a single high-ranking official or politician has been held accountable for any of these crimes. 

The JVP’s Complicity in Covering Up the Crimes

Despite having been the primary target and immediate cause of this repression, the JVP has no intention of persuing justice to the families of those murdered. It did nothing to expose these crimes when it previously aligned itself with bourgeois coalition governments, nor will it act now. Like its predecessors, past atrocities will only be capitalized by the government to suppress political opposition, whenever need arises. 

Since the 1990s, the JVP has transformed into a right-wing bourgeois party, repeatedly aligning itself with the same capitalist forces that once massacred its youth cadres.

  • In 2004, the JVP joined a coalition government with Chandrika Kumaratunga, providing political cover for the continuation of state violence, and suppression of the dark record of the ruling class.
  • It later supported Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime, which carried out the genocidal slaughter of Tamil civilians during the final phase of the Sri Lankan government’s racist war against Tamils in 2009.
  • In 2010 and 2015 JVP stood on one platform with Ranil Wickremasinghe and general Sarath Fonseka to consolidate the hand of the oppressor – Wickremasinghe was a cabinet Minister in the Premadasa government, who has been implicated in the Batalanda Commission Report and believed to have overseen the torture, and the latter is the former army commander who supervised killings both in the South and North. 
AKD
Anura Kumara Dissanayake, then a Parliamentarian and now the President of Sri Lanka, being sworn in as Minister of Agriculture, Land and Irrigation by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (r) at the Presidential House in Colombo in April 2004 [Photo Credit: M A Pishpa Kumara/EPA/Shutterstock]

Now, as the leading force in the NPP government, the JVP is once again engaged in a political charade. By revisiting Batalanda in Parliament, it seeks to posture as a defender of democracy while positioning to suppress working-class struggles against the IMF’s new round of austerity measures.

The Class Nature of the Crimes and the Path to Justice

The atrocities committed at Batalanda and across Sri Lanka were the calculated acts of a capitalist state defending itself against the threat of mass working-class resistance. Every ruling class party, from the UNP to the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to the JVP, has participated in suppressing the working class. In the 1971 youth uprising, SLFP-LSSP-CP (CP – Communist Party) coalition government killed about 20000 rural youth to defend the capitalist rule, followed by a series of subsidy cuts and austerity.

Real justice will not come from parliamentary debates, charades of commissions or through bourgeois “administration of justice”. Justice for the victims of state terror requires the fulfillment of all of the following demands:

  1. Disclose the names of all those who were abducted, forcibly disappeared and/or tortured and/or killed by the government security forces, the police and state sponsored paramilitary death squads,
  2. Disclose all the  police and military records in respect of the places where police stations, army camps and detention centers were located during the period,
  3. Disclose the names of the officers in charge of the police stations, and the names, ranks and regiments of the commanding officers who were in charge of the army camps, located islandwide during the insurgency.
  4. Locate every Mass Grave in all parts of the island, exhume the remains, conduct forensic analysis to identify the victims and disclose to their relatives,
  5. Disclose to the relatives of the victims what happened to their loved ones, and fully compensate them.
  6. Identify, prosecute and punish the perpetrators, including those who provided political cover.

The realization of these demands requires direct political power to the hands of the working class. The ruling class—regardless of which party holds office, including NPP—will never willingly prosecute its own agents. The fight for truth and justice must be connected to the broader struggle against capitalism and the hegemony of financial capital to overthrow capitalist State and dismantle its military-police apparatus.

The Socialist Perspective

The lessons of 1988-90 are clear: the imperialist system survives through the ruthless suppression of working-class struggles. The pogrom effected on the Sinhala youth of the South, the genocide of the Tamils in the North and the East, the ethnic-cleansing of the Palestinians, the loss of millions of lives to COVID-19 pandemic are seen by the ruling class as necessary costs.  

Sri Lanka once again faces economic collapse, and the IMF’s latest demands for austerity will provoke new social explosions. The NPP government, following its predecessors, will respond to mass opposition with state repression. The only way to prevent a repeat of past atrocities is for the working class to take independent political action, break away from all factions of the ruling class, and fight for socialist revolution, with the support of the international working class against the hegemony of the finance capital and their domestic lackeys. This needs revolutionary leadership – the second and the most important lesson.

The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka calls upon workers, rallying behind them the oppressed youth of the North and the South, to reject the false promises of the JVP-led NPP, and to organize independently in committees of industrial action in line with the international socialist program that will end the rule of the capitalist elite and establish a workers’ government of Sri Lanka and Eelam. They should not trust the pseudo-left and the trade unions, who pose as defenders of mass interests while setting political traps against them by proposing an alternative capitalist state. There is no such thing. Only through socialist revolution can the crimes of the past be truly redressed and a future free from oppression and exploitation be secured.

Reference:

  1. The US war and occupation of Iraq—the murder of a society, Bill Van Auken, 22 May 2007, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/05/iraq-m22.html>
  2. Repression and the State in Sri Lanka, Political Committee of the Revolutionary Communist League, December 1990
  3. Sri Lankan Trotskyists Defend Rural Youth, Revolutionary Communist League (Sri Lanka), 23 November 1990.
  4. The Situation in Sri Lanka and the Political Tasks of the Revolutionary Communist League, Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International, David North, Keerthi Balasuriya, 19 November 1987.

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Trotsky

The Fight for the Historical Continuity of Bolshevism: The ICFI as the Political Expression of Socialist Internationalism in the 21st Century

class struggles, english, history, lead article, Marxist Theory, politics /

By the Political Committee of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction (RLF) of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.

The Historical Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership

The opening decades of the 21st century is defined by the deepest crisis of world capitalism since the 1930s. The ruling class, facing economic stagnation, political instability, and mass discontent, is turning once again to militarism, state repression, and fascistic authoritarianism. The United States, leading the imperialist powers, has been escalating its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, preparing for a catastrophic conflict with China, and backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The national bourgeoisies, including those in South Asia, have intensified their attacks on workers’ democratic rights and living conditions, deepening the crisis of global capitalism.

Trotsky
Leon Trotsky

But, what is missing? The objective conditions for world socialist revolution have matured. Mass movements have erupted—from the strikes by autoworkers in the US and Europe to the mass protests in Sri Lanka and the global opposition to Israeli war crimes. However, as Trotsky wrote in The Transitional Program (1938), “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.” The essential question is the construction of a revolutionary leadership that can guide the working class in its struggle against imperialism, national chauvinism, and capitalist dictatorship.

This leadership is embodied in the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Trotskyist socialist internationalism today has no meaning outside of the ICFI, the only movement that defends and develops the historical and theoretical continuity of revolutionary Marxism.

Marxism and Socialist Internationalism: A Question of Program

Socialist internationalism is not a utopian ideal but an objective necessity arising from the nature of capitalist production itself. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels established this principle in The Communist Manifesto (1848): “The working men have no country.” The capitalist system, by developing a globalized economy, has created an international working class whose liberation can only be achieved through the overthrow of capitalism on a world scale.

This fundamental principle found its highest expression in the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. Lenin and Trotsky based their strategy on the understanding that socialism could not be built in one country. The founding of the Third International in 1919 was meant to provide the revolutionary proletariat with an organizational center to coordinate the world socialist revolution.

However, in a note of caution, in “The Draft Programme of the Communist International – A Criticism of Fundamentals”, Trotsky referred to his own explanation rejecting the idea that socialist revolution must begin simultaneously, as follows:

“Not a single country must ‘wait’ for the other countries in its struggle. It will be useful and necessary to repeat this elementary idea so that temporizing international inaction may not be substituted for parallel international action. Without waiting for the others, we must begin and continue the struggle on national grounds with the full conviction that our initiative will provide an impulse to the struggle in other countries” (Trotsky, ‘The Peace Programme’ Works, Vol. III, part 1, pp.89-90, Russian Ed.)

The degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalin, and the adoption of the national-reformist reactionary theory of “socialism in one country,” led to the betrayal of revolutionary movements in Germany (1923), China (1927), Spain (1936-39), and elsewhere. Stalinist counter-revolution gave birth to the bureaucratic apparatuses of the Comintern, which systematically subordinated the working class to bourgeois national interests.

In response, Trotsky fought to preserve the banner of socialist internationalism. The Fourth International was founded in 1938 to carry forward the strategy of world socialist revolution. In The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938), Trotsky wrote:

“Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard.”

The ICFI and the Defense of Socialist Internationalism

Following Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, the crisis of proletarian leadership deepened. Inside the Fourth International, Pabloite revisionists emerged in the early 1950s, arguing that the Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist movements could be pressured to play a revolutionary role. This liquidationist perspective was decisively opposed by the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the US, including James P. Cannon, and the British Trotskyists led by Gerry Healy. The 1953 Open Letter by Cannon and the subsequent split with Pabloism led to the founding of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).

Cannon
James P. Cannon

The ICFI waged an unrelenting struggle against Stalinism, Pabloism, and all forms of opportunism1, in defense of Bolshevik heritage, to unite the working class internationally against the global offensive of imperialism. In The Heritage We Defend (1988), Davith North write as follows:

“[T]the struggle waged by the ICFI against Pabloite revisionism preserved the historical continuity of the Trotskyist movement in the United States.”

Consequent to this principled fight for defence of the international party of the proletariat, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain, under Healy, became a major force in the Trotskyist movement. However, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, opportunist pressures led to the bureaucratic degeneration of the WRP, a process exposed by David North and the leadership of the Workers League (US). North’s critique of Healy’s organizational methods and political deviations was fundamental in the reassertion of Marxist principles within the ICFI.

Heritage
The Heritage We Defend, David North

The definitive break with opportunism came in 1985-86, when the ICFI expelled the WRP leadership. North wrote in The Political Origins and Consequences of the 1982–86 Split in the International Committee of the Fourth International, (03 August 2019, as follows:

“Having the advantage of being able to look back over a period of nearly 40 years, we can recognize that the conflict initiated by this critique [by the Workers League on the course pursued by the WRP], which culminated in the suspension of the WRP from the International Committee in December 1985, and the complete severing of relations in February 1986, was a critical event in the history of the world Marxist movement. The very survival of the Fourth International was at stake. Except for the International Committee, the movement founded by Leon Trotsky had been politically liquidated by the Pabloites. In all the countries where the Pabloites had been able to establish organizational control, they had destroyed the Trotskyist organizations by turning them into political appendages of the Stalinist, social democratic or bourgeois nationalist organizations. By 1985, the Workers Revolutionary Party, which had by that point capitulated to Pabloism, was close to completing the same wrecking operation.2”

Referring to the unrelenting fight waged by the ICFI for the continuity of the heritage of the Fourth International, North explains further as follows3:

“In all this work, the fundamental political principle that guided our efforts was that of Marxist internationalism. We insisted upon the primacy of world strategy over national tactics, and that the appropriate response to problems that arise within the national sphere could be derived only on the basis of an analysis of global processes. On this basis, the International Committee was able to develop a level of international collaboration that had not existed in the entire history of the Fourth International. Actually, the word “collaboration” does not adequately encompass the nature of the interaction between ICFI sections that developed in the aftermath of the split with the WRP nationalist renegades4.”

This definitively showed that international “collaboration” of the working class today has no meaning outside the programmatic and organizational relations between sections of the ICFI to mobilize them for the perspective of international socialism. 

The Form and Content of Socialist Internationalism Today

Socialist internationalism in the 21st century is defined by three interrelated processes:

  1. Imperialist War and Militarism: The US‘s war preparations against China and NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine is part of a broader strategy for global hegemony by the financial oligarchy, stemming from an unprecedented historical crisis of the global imperialist system. The genocidal assault on Gaza is an integral part of imperialist war.
  2. The Crisis of Bourgeois Democracy: The rise of fascist movements globally, from Trumpism in the US to Hindutva in India, is part of the ruling class’s turn to authoritarianism to crush mass opposition. The so-called “democratic” regimes, including those in South Asia, are themselves dismantling democratic rights to impose austerity and military-police rule.
  3. The Globalization of Class Struggle: The working class is entering into struggle against capitalism. General strikes, mass protests, and workers’ uprisings in Sri Lanka, India, France, the US, and beyond signify the deepening radicalization of the international proletariat. However, without a revolutionary leadership, these movements can be suppressed,  co-opted and betrayed by pseudo-left forces.

In this context, the ICFI remains the only Marxist organization that fights for a revolutionary socialist program on a global scale. It is the only legitimate form that socialist internationalism must take today. Every attempt to substitute spontaneous movements, Stalinist parties, or nationalist formations for the Fourth International leads to political disaster.

Dialectics of Content and Form in Marxist Theory

The relationship between content and form is a key dialectical problem in Marxist philosophy, aesthetics, and political economy. Marxist dialectical method insists that content and form are interrelated and cannot be restricted to dichotomies and separated mechanically. This dialectic is crucial in understanding historical materialism, class struggle, and revolutionary strategy.

Content and Form in Historical Materialism

Marx and Engels developed their materialist conception of history (historical materialism) based on the dialectical relationship between content and form. Marx explained that the content of a given society is determined by its mode of production—the forces and relations of production—while the form is expressed through the superstructure (political, legal, and ideological institutions).

In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx states:

“The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”

Here, the content (economic base) determines the form (superstructure), but this relationship is dialectical—form can react upon content, reinforcing or modifying it over time.

Content and Form in Dialectical Materialism

Dialectics, as developed by Marx and Engels from Hegelian philosophy, sees content and form as a unity of opposites. Content refers to the inner essence or substance of a phenomenon, while form is its external expression. However, this is not a static relationship—content and form interact dynamically, sometimes in contradiction.

Engels, in Dialectics of Nature, and in Anti-Dühring, discusses how scientific and social phenomena undergo quantitative to qualitative transformations when content outgrows its old form, leading to revolutionary changes.

Lenin, in Philosophical Notebooks, applies this dialectic to revolutionary situations, showing how, when the content (working-class radicalization) reaches a breaking point, old forms (bourgeois democracy or reformist organizations) become obsolete and must be replaced.

The Role of Content and Form in Revolutionary Politics

Trotsky, in The History of the Russian Revolution (1930), applies the dialectic of content and form to revolutionary movements in explaining the dialectics of social revolution. He explains that in revolutionary epohs, the old political forms (parliamentary democracy, trade unions, reformist parties) become barriers to the new content (working-class revolutionary consciousness).

Trotsky explained that the fundamental law of revolution is the substitution of one class’s domination over another, and that means the creation of new forms of state power to express this changed content. This means that socialist revolutions require a new political form, i.e., the soviets (workers’ councils), to replace bourgeois parliamentary structures.

Content and Form as a Guide to Revolutionary Action

The dialectic of content and form is not just a theoretical issue—it is a guide to revolutionary action. In every social and political struggle, the key task is to develop new forms that correspond to the evolving content of class relations. Today, the old forms of bourgeois democracy and trade unions are incapable of addressing the global crisis of capitalism. Only through the building of new revolutionary forms—the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the successor and defender of historical continuity and heritage of Bolshevism, as the conscious leadership of the working class—can the content of world socialist revolution be realized.

This dialectical understanding, rooted in Marxist theory, remains the foundation of socialist strategy today.

Fight against Nationalist Opportunism within SEP-Left

The SLLA was formed after a principled fight against a petty bourgeois nationalist opportunist tendency in the SEP-Left, which included comrades who were arbitrarily expelled from the SEP Sri Lanka between late 2022 to early 2023. Shortly after its formation, rifts emerged within the group between a nationalist tendency and those who represented genuine internationalism and fought for the necessity of rejoining the cadre of ICFI by winning the membership of the SEP5.

Our struggle against this petty-bourgeois nationalist opportunist tendency within SEP-Left was fundamentally a battle for genuine socialist internationalism against a clique that sought to redefine internationalism outside the cadre of the ICFI. This opportunist clique rejected the factional struggle6 founded upon defined political grounds, and the necessity for members of the SEP-Left to appeal for and fight for the membership of the SEP Sri Lanka. They rejected a principled factional fight to build the necessary revolutionary leadership within the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI, to lead the working class of Sri Lanka and the region in the next decisive mass struggles. Instead, they proposed a centrist policy of acting as a “pressure group”7 to prevent the SEP leadership from shifting to the right, hoping to place it on the “right track” without engaging in the struggle to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

At the heart of this factional struggle was the dialectical relationship between content and form. The opportunists disregarded the fundamental truth that socialist internationalism is inseparable from its organizational form—the ICFI and its national sections8. They advanced a revisionist formula, arguing that internationalism does not necessarily require membership in the SEP or a fight within its ranks to develop it as the revolutionary party – a rejection of the dialectical unity between class, party and leadership. Instead, they sought to function as an external watchdog, intervening in an attempt to influence the party leadership while evading the historical responsibility of building the SEP as the revolutionary vanguard of the working class.

This orientation amounted to a rejection of Trotskyism in favor of a centrist adaptation to petty-bourgeois layers who were unwilling to undertake the disciplined struggle under the banner of the party to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Lacking a principled basis for factional struggle, this grouping proposed an opportunist formula—attempting to “correct” the SEP while positioning itself to replace it in the future should the party fail to lead the working class in the socialist revolution9. This amounted to a fatal deviation from the necessary political struggle within the party, and this tendency has now relegated into precisely what it wished to be — acting as a “web-group” “promoting the revival of socialist culture”10 outside the revolutionary movement, the ICFI, while posturing as defenders of “internationalism” and the perspectives of the ICFI.

In opposition to this nationalist-opportunist deviation, our struggle was grounded in the fundamental Marxist principle that socialist internationalism has no meaning outside its historical form — the ICFI and its national sections. Only through the conscious struggle to build the SEP as the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI, fighting as a political faction of the SEP against its opportunist leadership, can the working class resolve the crisis of leadership and carry forward the fight for world socialist revolution.

The Tasks of the SLLA: Building the SEP as the Revolutionary Leadership

Our fight for socialist internationalism is the fight to build the International Committee of the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution, and the necessary revolutionary leadership in the SEP Sri Lanka, being a part of it, to lead the working class of the region in the next decisive mass struggles. This requires:

  • Analyzing the dialectics of the historical failures of the nationalist opportunist and sectarian leadership of the SEP Sri Lanka to lead the working class in decisive struggles and resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership in Sri Lanka and South Asia. 
  • Educating the advanced workers and youth in the history of Trotskyism and the betrayals of Stalinism and Pabloism.
  • Intervening in the struggles of the working class with the revolutionary program of the ICFI to transform spontaneous economic and political struggles into a conscious fight for socialism.
  • Opposing all forms of nationalism and identity politics, which divide the working class and subordinate it to bourgeois politics.
  • Exposing the trade unions and pseudo-left parties, which serve as instruments of capitalist rule.

The continuity of revolutionary Marxism depends on the defense of historical truth. Without this, there can be no revolutionary movement, no revolutionary leadership, and no socialist future.

In the preface to his book Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century, (2023), North reminds us as follows:

“The historical experiences of the past century thoroughly tested all political movements, parties, and tendencies that claimed to be leading the struggle against capitalism. But the upheavals of the twentieth century have exposed the counterrevolutionary role of the Stalinists, Social Democrats, Maoists, bourgeois nationalists, anarchists, and Pabloites. Only the Fourth International, led by the International Committee, has met the test of history11.”

The building of the ICFI is the decisive task facing the working class today. It is not a question of choice but of survival. The alternative is world war, fascism, and barbarism. The only way forward is through socialist internationalism, embodied in the International Committee of the Fourth International. We are an essential part of that fight. Join SLLA today! Build SEP!

  1. “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” The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International: Perspectives Resolution of the IC ICFI (Aigust 1988). <https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/world-capitalist-crisis-tasks-fourth-international-1988/18.html> 
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  2. The Political Origins and Consequences of the 1982–86 Split in the International Committee of the Fourth International, David North, 03 August 2019, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/08/03/icfi-a03.html>
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  3. Ibid.
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  4. North concludes the paragraph referring to his report to the Detroit membership of the Workers League on June 25, 1989, where he has said,
    ”The scope of this international collaboration, its direct impact on virtually every aspect of the practical work of each section, has profoundly and positively altered the character of the ICFI and its sections. The latter are ceasing to exist in any politically and practically meaningful way as independent entities. Upon the foundation of a common political program, a complex network of relationships has emerged within the ICFI which binds together every section. That is, the sections of the ICFI comprise interconnected and interdependent components of a single political organism. Any breaking of that relationship would have devastating effects within the section involved. Every section has now become dependent for its very existence upon this international cooperation and collaboration, both ideological and practical.” Workers League Internal Bulletin, Volume 3, Number 4, June 1989, p. 5.
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  5.  “The main purpose of this document is to bring home to the membership the importance of being the official section of the Fourth International in view of the vital necessity to strengthen the traditional organization of Trotskyism in the great struggle already begun. If we accept the history of “international Trotskyism since 1933 (which is a history of Bolshevik regroupment in the Fourth International), then we must place the question of the International as the most important question before the group. All other questions of group development, such as the press, industrial work or organizational activity are bound up with whatever stand we take on the International. If we accept the political principles of Bolshevism then we must accept the organizational method. It is not sufficient to say that we accept the program of the Fourth International and that we expound it better than the RSL if we do not also accept its organizational method, which means that we must be affiliated to the International, accepting its democratic centralist basis; just the same as it is not sufficient to claim to be a Trotskyist and to be more conversant with the policy of Trotskyism than the organized Trotskyists, unless one joins a Trotskyist party accepting its democratic centralist discipline. That is what is meant by Bolshevik organizational methods.” Our Most Important Task, Gerry Healey, August 10, 1943. 
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  6.  “The present doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of epoch decline. In reality the history of Bolshevism is a history of the struggle of factions. And, indeed, how could a genuinely revolutionary organization, setting itself the task of overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and develop without intellectual conflicts, without groupings and temporary factional formations?” Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky (1936).
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  7. “සසප ජාත්‍යන්තර කමිටුවේ ඉදිරි දර්ශනය්ස් සදහා අරගලය නතර කර ඇත කියා කියනු නො හැකි ය. එය දැනට පෙන්නුම්කර ඇති පරස්පරයන් ජය නොගතහොත් එම ඉදිරි දර්ශනය සදහා අරගලය අත් හරිනු ඇත. අප පක්ෂය තුල දී මෙන් ම දැන් ද සටන් කරන්නේ එය වැලැක්වීමට ය. ඒ සදහා ජාත්‍යන්තර කමිටුව ද වැඩ කරයි. දෙපැත්තේම පීඩනයට පක්ෂය මුහුන දෙන නිසා එහි අවස්තාවාදී නැඹුරුව ශක්තිමත්ව පෙරට ගැනීම අපහසු වී ඇත. ඔබ පවසා ඇති පරිදිම අපගේ වැඩ කටයුතු පක්ෂයට බල පායී. අවශ්‍ය වන්නේ එම අරගලය මූල ධර්මානුකූලව ශක්තිමත් ව ඉදිරියට ගැනීම යි. ක්‍රියාකාරි කමිටුව හෙලා දැකීමට අප ලියූ ලිපිය එහි පියවරක් ප්‍රතිපලදායක බව කිව යුතු ය. එය අප සටන් කරන විදිය ගැන උදාහරනයකි.”  Nandana Nannetti, 15 March 2025, SEP-Left WhatsApp Chat Discussion. 
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  8. The following quote from an article published by this group as part of a series of hysterical  diatribes against us, conveniently reduces socialist internationalism to the content of it – that is to the principle of rejection of socialism in one country – disregarding its historical form:

    “පලමුකොට ම ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදය යනුවෙන් අදහස් කරන්නේ කුමක් ද යන බොහෝ දෙනා දන්නා දෙය යලි මතක් කර ගැනීම උචිත ය. මාක්ස්වාදීන් ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදය යන්නෙන් අදහස් කරන්නේ, සමාජවාදය සඳහා අරගලය සහ ධනවාදය පෙරලා දැමීම, ජාතික සීමාවන් ඉක්මවා යා යුතුය යන මූල ධර්මයයි. ධනවාදයේ අර්බුදය වනාහී, නිෂ්පාදන බලවේගවල වර්ධනය හේතුවෙන් ජාතිකවාදය හා පුද්ගලික දේපල ක්‍රමය, ලෝක ආර්ථිකය හා සමාජ නිෂ්පාදනය සමග ගැටීමේ ප්‍රතිඵලයකි. කම්කරු පන්තිය යනු සිය පැවැත්මෙන් ම, සූරාකෑම මෙන් ම දේශ සීමා ද ඉවසිය නො හැකි පන්තියයි. ධනපති ක්‍රමය යනු ලොව පුරා කම්කරුවන් සූරා කන ගෝලීය පද්ධතියක් බැවින් ද, අද දවසේ නිෂ්පාදනය යනු ලෝක ගෝලීය ක්‍රියාදාමයක් හෙයින් ද, පන්ති විරහිත සමාජයක් සඳහා අරගලය එක් රටකට පමනක් සීමා කල නො හැකි ය. මෙම ඉදිරි දර්ශනය, ජාතීන් පුරා කම්කරුවන් අතර සහයෝගීතාව හා සහෝදරත්වය වෙනුවෙන් පෙනී සිටින අතර, සමාජවාදී සමාජයක් සාක්ෂාත් කර ගැනීම සඳහා එකිනෙකට සම්බන්ධීකරනය වූ ගෝලීය උත්සාහයක අවශ්‍යතාව අවධාරනය කරයි. මෙම මූලධර්ම මත පිහිටා, අවස්ථාවාදයට එරෙහිව කම්කරු පන්තිය බලමුලු ගැන්වීම සඳහා අවංකව ම පෙනී සිටින සංවිධානයක් හෝ පුද්ගලයෙකු ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදී නො වන්නේ කෙසේ ද යන ප්‍රශ්නය මෙතැන දී අදාල ය. අප කන්ඩායම සම්බන්ධයෙන් ගත් විට, ජාත්‍යන්තර කමිටුව හෝ එහි ලංකා ශාඛාව වන සසපය හෝ මෙම ඉදිරි දර්ශනය අත් හැර දැමූ ප්‍රතිජාත්‍යන්තරවාදීන් යයි අප මෙතෙක් කිසිවිටෙකත් කියා නැත.” (emphasis added) සුලු ධනේශ්වර කල්ලිවාදයට එරෙහිව විප්ලවවාදී පක්ෂයක නායකත්වය සහ මාක්ස්වාදී මූලධර්ම – 3, Nandana Nannetti, 19 October 2024. <https://socialist.lk/2024/10/19/pe1-3/>
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  9. “අප දැනටමත් සාකච්චා කර ඇති පරිදි එකිනෙකට සම්බන්ධිත විකල්ප තුනක් සදහා අපි සටන් වදිමු. 
    1) පක්ෂය නිවැරදි මාවතට ගැනීම
    2) එය ජාත්‍යන්තර කමිටුවෙන් බිදී යන තත්වයකදී විකල්ප නායකත්වය ලෙස වැඩ කිරීමට සූදානම් වීම
    3) පන්ති අරගලයේ වෙනස්කම් මගින් ඇති කරන විප්ලවවාදී අරගලයකදී ඒකබද්ධව විප්ලවය සදහා වැඩ කිරීම. විප්ලවවාදී තත්වයකට මුහුන දීමට පක්ෂය සූදානම් නම් වෛෂයිකව අප අතර එකමුතුවකට කොන්දේසි නිර්මානය කරනු ඇත.” Nandana Nannetti, on 16 March 2024, SEP-Left WhatsApp Chat Discussion. ↩︎
  10.  https://socialist.lk/
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  11. Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century, David North, (2023) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/04/05/zuwp-a05.html> 
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The Fight for the Historical Continuity of Bolshevism: The ICFI as the Political Expression of Socialist Internationalism in the 21st Century Read More »

Powell

Fed launches probe into expanding private credit market

economics, english, politics, politics & economics, Trade Unions, Trade War /

Ever since the global financial crisis of 2008, market analysts, regulators and media commentators have been pondering the question of what might be the next sub-prime.

Powell
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell addresses House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, Wednesday, June 21, 2023. [AP Photo/Andrew Harnik]

The crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market was the trigger for the 2008 crisis in which a total collapse of the financial system was only averted by a massive intervention by the US Federal Reserve and the government. It was an expression of rampant speculation and in some cases outright criminal activity by some of the largest American banks.

In the years since 2008, one of the issues of greatest concern has been the rise and rise of the largely unregulated non-banking financial institutions (NBFIs). As so often happens when regulators try to fix a problem in one part of the capitalist system, the supposed solution creates another. This has been the case with regard to NBFIs.

The extraordinary growth of private credit, especially over the past decade, was the result of efforts to more tightly regulate the banks and prevent a recurrence of the bailouts in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Finance capital responded by extending the role of credit outside the traditional banking system.

However, as has been acknowledged by the International Monetary Fund and other international bodies, regulators have very little idea of the activities of these organisations, such as hedge funds, family companies and other funds operating in the world of private credit. The word most often used in reports is “opaque.”

Of particular concern is the connection of private credit to the banking system as a whole. While the private credit markets operate outside the banking system, they depend on it for the supply of funds. This has been increasing at an exponential rate.

According to a report in the Financial Times this week, the amount of lending which the big US banks have provided for private capital firms has risen 30-fold over the last decade, from $10 billion to $300 billion in 2023.

In an attempt to find out what is going on, the US Fed earlier this month announced that it would carry out an “exploratory analysis” to be conducted alongside its stress tests of the major banks with the aim of providing an insight into the “resiliency of the US banking system.” It hastened to assure the large banks that the exploration “would not affect large bank capital requirements.”

The major banks are intensely hostile to any measures that compel them to increase their capital reserves to cover potential losses because this means the withdrawal of funds that would otherwise be employed to make profit.

The Fed statement announcing the investigation, which will report its findings in June, said it would “examine the risks posed to banks” by NBFIs. It noted that US bank exposures to them had grown rapidly over the past five years and that the banks’ credit commitments to them totalled $2.1 trillion in the third quarter of 2024.

“This growth poses risks to banks, as certain NBFIs operate with high leverage and are dependent on funding from the banking sector.”

The exploratory analysis would examine two issues: credit and liquidity shocks in the NBFI sector during a global recession; and the effect of a market shock. The latter was defined as “a sudden dislocation to financial markets resulting from expectations of reduced global economic activity and higher inflation expectation” with distress in equity markets leading to defaults by major hedge funds.

While no one can forecast what exactly might set off a crisis, there are any number of potential triggers. 

The Fed statement pointed to some of them, including a sudden dislocation to markets caused by reduced growth expectations and higher inflation, and an appreciation in the value of the US dollar against other major currencies. Others were a rise in yield on short-term US Treasury bonds, and an increase in expected defaults leading to a widening of credit spreads—a divergence between interest rates for private credit compared to the rate on Treasury bonds.

Potential triggers not mentioned include a rapid fall in the stock market valuation of a major corporation. 

Last month, for example, the market capitalisation of the AI chip maker Nvidia, at one stage the biggest company by this metric in the world, fell by $600 billion in a single day. This resulted from the announcement by the Chinese firm DeepSeek that it had found a cheaper way of developing AI without using top-end chips.

Since then, the total market capitalisation loss by Nvidia has reached $850 billion, sliced off its market high of $3.66 trillion at the beginning of January.

What are initially paper losses for investors who bought at the height of the market frenzy have the potential to translate into real losses if the assets have to be sold to meet debt obligations and to set off a chain reaction.

There are also issues of concern in the very foundations of the bond market. What has been characterised as a conundrum has emerged since the Fed began cutting its interest rate last September. Over a period of three months, the Fed rate fell by 1 percentage point. However, instead of falling, as expected if “normal” conditions prevailed the yield (interest rate) on the 10-year US Treasury bond, the benchmark for the financial system, has risen by a percentage point.

A number of short-term issues have been put forward as the reason, including fears of renewed inflation fuelled by lower interest rates, and the effect of tariffs.

An analysis issued in January by Rashad Ahmed, an economist with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Alessandro Rebucci, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, pointed to deeper processes.

They suggested that it may reflect “waning official demand for dollar-denominated safe assets, possibly driven by geopolitical concerns including fear of sanctions and asset freezes.”

As they pointed out, the “rise in 10-year yields coincides with a substantial reduction in dollar reserve assets held by foreign official institutions.”

The authors said that foreign official buyers may be shifting to fiat currencies other than the US dollar and also into gold, the price of which has risen by nearly 30 percent over the past year.

They concluded by saying the jury was still out on whether the dollar’s status as the dominant reserve currency was being undermined. However, they noted that “it is possible for even a small reduction in the US dollar share of foreign reserves to have a significant short-run impact on US Treasury markets.”

One of those impacts could well be in the private capital markets which have gorged themselves on low rates, building up debt to finance their speculative ventures, but now confronting a higher interest rate environment.

[This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site here on 14 February 2025]

Fed launches probe into expanding private credit market Read More »

Akd

Sri Lanka’s ruling NPP secures a strong parliamentary majority to enforce IMF dictates: Build the SEP to fight the cuts!

class struggles, Democratic Rights, economics, english, Fascism, lead article, News, politics, politics & economics, Trade Unions, War /

Statement of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction (RLF) of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka’s general election concluded with a landslide victory for the ruling National People’s Power (NPP), which secured more than a two-thirds majority in Parliament. The NPP is a coalition consisting of the anti-Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the party of the Executive President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who was elected in the September elections. The result highlights the centripetal power of the executive presidency, which has been central to Sri Lanka’s capitalist rule since the adoption of the 1978 Constitution.

Akd
President Anura Kamara Dissanayake (second from the right) stands with other leaders of NPP at an election rally on November 11, 2024 at Gampaha. Courtesy: X profile of Dissanayake.

Over six million people have opted to vote for the NPP, which is what they viewed as the most pragmatic choice within the country’s presidential-parliamentary system. This decision reflects the people’s choice for a “stable government,” a slogan promoted by the NPP, and was driven by their past experiences of political instability caused by factional conflicts between the interests of a president and a parliament dominated by a different party. People have expressed a preference for a strong NPP government over a strong or “changed” opposition, as no political alternative was presented by the right-wing opposition parties. 

The SLPP-UNP (Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna-United National Party), the previous ruling coalition, and the SJB (Samagi Jana Balawegaya), the former opposition, were thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the electorate. Largely an expression of mass protest over the parasitic elite class that had long ruled the country, people converted the general elections into a platform to translate the 2022 mass struggle’s slogan, “No to the 225” (referring to the 225 members of parliament), into action. The NPP capitalized on this sentiment, framing it as a call for a “cleansing” of Parliament.

However, in spite of all the false promises and popular rhetoric of Dissanayake, the election result does not necessarily indicate widespread trust in the NPP leadership. JVP has a history of partnering with various governments of the capitalist elite since early 1990s, when they entered into parliamentary politics, and supporting their austerity and anti-democratic measures. JVP leaders held ministerial portfolios under former president Chandrika Kumaratunge and fervently supported the renewed communal war of former president Mahinda a Rajapaksa against the country’s Tamils in the North and East, which ended with a massacre of an estimated 40,000 Tamils during the final phase of the war. 

During the elections, the NPP/JVP leadership barred their largely unknown candidates from campaigning for preferential votes, promoting only those the leadership clique has chosen, and claiming that people are encouraged to vote for the party rather than the individuals. The party sought to persuade the people that it would establish a “government of the people” and of all ethnicities. This posture is deceptive. 

The working class, the urban middle class, peasants, small traders, and youth were largely led by the NPP leadership into believing that there was no solution to reviving Sri Lanka’s economy other than implementing the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The NPP/JVP leaders sought to keep the people in the dark over the real implications of this pro-market program: sweeping austerity, renewed commercialization and privatization, shrinking wages, and the suppression of workers’ strikes – measures that the working people rejected under the government of the previous president, Ranil Wickremasinghe. Dissanayake, too, will rely on dictatorial presidential powers, a parliamentary majority, the courts, the prison system, and the military to suppress workers’ struggles.

Dissanayake and his circle within the NPP/JVP have undertaken the task of salvaging the capitalist economy, which was declared bankrupt in early 2022. Once the NPP government is established, it is poised to function as a right-wing and communalist administration aligned with international financial capital and as a subservient partner to American imperialism in its geopolitical conflicts with China, Russia, and Iran in the Middle East. Dissanayake has already signalled his willingness to collaborate with U.S. interests, even expressing support for the fascistic U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has trade and military plans for war with China, and approved actions of the Zionist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which is waging a genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, backed by all Western imperialist powers.

The election also has highlighted the bankruptcy of the programme advanced by the pseudo-left Front Line Socialist Party (FSP), a faction of JVP which broke away in 2012 on purely tactical grounds. The FSP was one of the main stakeholders in the betrayal of the unprecedented mass struggles of 2022, which demanded a “system change”. Staunchly opposed to the independent mobilisation of the working class against the ruling class to take power and implement socialist policies, the FSP supported an interim government proposed by JVP and opposition SJB and campaigned under the slogan of a “power outside the parliament”. Taking a pragmatic turn during the general elections, the FSP called for a “changed opposition”, seeking representation in the parliamentary opposition, while cynically portraying the election of the JVP leader as a fulfilment of the demand of the mass struggles.

In the North and the central hills, the Tamil minority largely voted for the NPP. In the Jaffna District, where Sri Lankan Tamils are the majority, NPP presidential candidate Dissanayake secured only a 7.29% of the votes (27086) in the presidential elections, while in Thursday’s elections the same people propelled the NPP to the top, giving it 24.85% of the votes (80830). This increase of votes partly reflects their discontent with Tamil communalist parties, which were cohabiting with the Sinhala chauvinist governments of the South for decades, and failed to fulfill their promises. Nevertheless, this vote does not signify approval for the chauvinist politics of the JVP, but rather a misguided response to Dissanayake’s false promises and vague threats of marginalization. 

Likewise, in many parts of the country, minority Muslim communities also have placed their hopes in the promises of the new government, only to be bitterly disillusioned sooner rather than later. 

Throughout the last two elections, all the political parties, including the JVP/NPP, FSP, SJB, and various communal parties, were dedicated to misleading the people by focusing on the issues of corruption, mismanagement, or communalism in successive governments, while concealing the global and class roots of the socio-economic crisis. As a class, they were also careful to distract the working people from pressing global geo-political issues: the imminent threat of nuclear war, the genocide in Gaza, the rise of fascism and dictatorship, and the deepening economic crisis in the major capitalist countries in Europe, in USA, and China and the impending health and environmental catastrophe.

The working class will find no solace in the NPP government, which has no connection to Socialist reforms, contrary to the false portrayals by local and international media outlets. With sweeping political power in the parliament, the NPP/JVP government will not hesitate to enact laws curtailing the democratic rights of the working class, including their right to strike. Beyond the traditional mechanisms and methods of state oppression used by successive governments, including communalism, the NPP government will wield two more tools of its own: the trade union bureaucracy and the well-networked petty-bourgeois elements of NPP/JVP, prevalent in the country’s rural and urban areas.  These forces could be mobilized as fascistic forces against political opponents and the working class, replicating their dark history of the late 1980s. This is a stark warning to the working class. 

The world has entered an epoch of nuclear war, dictatorship, fascism and austerity – global issues that workers in countries are confronted with and will be determined to fight against. The everyday problems faced by the people of Sri Lanka and the region are not fundamentally homemade but stem from the contradictions of the global imperialist system, led by the US financial aristocracy.  These issues are global and need international solutions.

The people of the world, including those in Sri Lanka and South Asia, need a mass party of the international working class to lead them against the imperialist system and mobilise their industrial power to win political control from the capitalist class, in order to reorganize the global economy along socialist lines. Establishing independent workers’ committees against the trade union bureaucracy affiliated with the NPP/JVP, other right-wing political parties and the pseudo-left, and uniting these committees democratically across national divisions and international borders is the task before the working class, youth and the oppressed masses today.

It was only the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its Sri Lankan section, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka, that advanced and campaigned for this programme during the elections. To fight for this programme – against austerity, danger of dictatorship, war, and fascism and for socialist policies –  the SEP must be built as the mass revolutionary party of the workers of Sri Lanka and the region. 

Sri Lanka’s ruling NPP secures a strong parliamentary majority to enforce IMF dictates: Build the SEP to fight the cuts! Read More »

Trump

Trump assembles cabinet of fascist repression and imperialist war

Democratic Rights, economics, english, Far Right, Fascism, Global Inequality, News, politics, politics & economics, War, World War /

By Patrick Martin

The two priorities of the incoming administration are preparing for war with China and arresting and deporting millions of migrants.

In a rapid-fire series of appointments and announcements, fascist President-elect Donald Trump is assembling an administration in his own image. There are only two criteria for the nominees so far announced: complete alignment with the fascist policies Trump seeks to put into place and unquestioning personal loyalty to the would-be dictator. 

Trump
President-elect Donald Trump with Florida Senator Marco Rubio [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]

January 20, 2025 will thus mean not merely the re-entry of the former president into the White House but the installation of a regime with his aides and stooges in charge of all the levers of power, committed to using these powers against all domestic opposition from the American people and against whatever countries Trump chooses to target for subversion, blockade or open warfare.

As Trump prepares to rapidly implement his plans, the Biden administration, which is in power for another two months, is doing absolutely nothing to alert the population, let alone take measures to stop the massive assault on democratic rights. Biden, who is welcoming Trump to the White House on Wednesday, is acting as if it is his responsibility not only to guarantee Trump’s succession but to help implement his policies. 

The contours of the new Trump-led regime are demonstrated in the nominations made public or leaked to the media over the past three days. Nearly all of Trump’s top national security appointments have been made public:

  • For secretary of state, US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida
  • For national security advisor, Representative Michael Waltz, also of Florida
  • For Ambassador to the United Nations, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York
  • For CIA director, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, a Republican congressman from Texas before he joined the first Trump administration
  • For secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, former head of the ultra-right Concerned Veterans of America (funded by the Koch Brothers) and longtime co-host of the Fox News program “Fox & Friends”

From a policy standpoint, all are fervent advocates of confrontation with China and giving the US military a “free hand” in any open conflict: opposing any restrictions on the use of violence against targeted populations, including civilians and children.

This is particularly apparent in the surprise selection of Hegseth, who went unmentioned in media speculation about Trump’s potential pick to head the Pentagon. Now a major in the Army Reserve, Hegseth deployed to the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba during the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” then volunteered for the war in Iraq, where he commanded platoons in Baghdad and Samarra. He later served as a counterinsurgency instructor for the Army in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Having previously led groups of 50 to 100 soldiers, Hegseth is now being tasked to run the Pentagon, the largest military organization in the world, with 3.5 million people, including 2.1 million active duty and reserve soldiers, 750,000 civilian staff and 650,000 contractors. His qualification, however, is his role as an advocate for military war criminals.

In 2019, while on the “Fox & Friends” talkshow, the ultra-right program of which Trump is an avid viewer, Hegseth led a campaign for the exoneration of three soldiers convicted or awaiting trial before military courts for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The crimes included the summary execution of unarmed prisoners and the murder of children and old men. 

After meeting with Trump, Hegseth summarized the president’s approach as follows: “The benefit of the doubt should go to the guys pulling the trigger.” Trump issued pardons, called each murderer personally to commiserate with the “injustice” done to them, and boasted publicly of overriding the decisions of top military commanders, who had felt it necessary to mount a few token prosecutions to offset revelations of the avalanche of atrocities committed by US forces in both wars.

This will be the administration’s approach, not just to individual soldiers who commit war crimes but to policies that require war crimes for their implementation. The incoming president signaled this by announcing the appointment of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as US Ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is a Christian fundamentalist, who has provided religious justification for the crimes committed by the state of Israel, declaring in the past, “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” He is an all-out supporter of the genocidal policies of the Netanyahu government, which seeks to make “no such thing as a Palestinian” a brutal reality.

The other group of nominees announced this week will be tasked with carrying out Trump’s planned war at home, which involves the rounding up of millions of undocumented immigrants, imprisoning them in concentration camps and deporting them as quickly as possible. The principal perpetrators of this dictatorial policy include:

  • For “border czar,” a new White House position, Thomas Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the first Trump administration and a longtime advocate and defender of mass deportations
  • For deputy White House Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller, who was responsible for immigration policy in the first Trump administration. Miller spearheaded such measures as separation of children and families, mass detention, and the “Remain in Mexico program,” which effectively blocked asylum seekers
  • For Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. The Republican governor, a one-time hopeful to become Trump’s running mate, is a vehement advocate of violence against migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, once sending dozens of South Dakota National Guard troops to Texas at the request of that state’s governor. She will be in overall charge of repressive agencies, such as the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Secret Service.

The regime that Trump and Miller are devising and that Homan and Noem will enforce will make the detention camps used against Japanese Americans during World War II look like child’s play. According to Homan, the problem of separating children and their parents, which aroused fierce popular opposition during Trump’s first term, will be solved by deporting entire families, whether or not some of the family members are American citizens.

Trump aides were already reportedly drafting executive orders that he will sign on January 20, 2025, as soon as he is inaugurated, to establish a terror regime directed against migrants. This will include revoking Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Haiti and Central America, many of them longtime residents of the United States with American citizen children.

The incoming administration plans to use military resources in the anti-migrant campaign, meaning that migrants could be detained by military personnel on military bases, and that military flights could become a major factor in transporting migrants to their countries of origin or other countries willing to accept them.

Trump is also seeking to push through his appointments without Senate confirmation. The New York Times reported that “Mr. Trump insisted on social media that Republicans select a new Senate majority leader willing to call recesses during which he could unilaterally appoint personnel, a process that would allow him to sidestep the confirmation process.”

A report Tuesday in the Washington Post, headlined, “Trump is planning a border crackdown. Biden already started one”, traces the continuity between the two administrations:

Trump stands to inherit enforcement tools from the Biden administration that are even more powerful than the policies at his disposal last time. Biden administration officials, for example, have implemented emergency border controls this year that essentially ban asylum for migrants who enter unlawfully. While Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy provided asylum seekers with access to U.S. courts, President Joe Biden’s asylum restrictions afford no such process, allowing US officials to summarily deport migrants and threaten them with criminal prosecution if they return.

Just four years ago, the Republicans responded to the defeat of Trump with ferocious denunciations, followed by an attempted coup. The Democrats, in contrast, are doing everything they can to chloroform the population and prevent at all costs a popular mobilization against the incoming administration. On Tuesday, the day before Trump’s visit to the White House, Biden issued a few anodyne tweets on Veterans Day, while saying nothing about the fascists Trump is planning on putting in charge of the state apparatus.

From the standpoint of the Democratic Party, what Obama referred to as the “intramural scrimmage” within the ruling class is over, and it is the task of the Democrats to ensure, as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it in an interview with the New York Times, the “success” of the new president. 

There is no suggestion that the Biden administration should take any action to defend the rights of the more 70 million people who voted against Trump, or for that matter the more than 70 million people who voted for him. Their sole concern is to ensure the continuation of the central policy of the Biden administration itself: the escalation of war against Russia in Ukraine. 

Indeed, according to White House aides, the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine will be the sole focus of the meeting between Biden and Trump in the White House. The Democrats want to ensure that the pipeline remains open for billions in US military and economic aid, and continuing to permit the Kiev regime to engage in provocative strikes with US and NATO weaponry on targets deep within Russia, including Moscow, despite the risk of a widening and even nuclear war.

In the final weeks of the failed presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats would make noises about Trump as a threat to democracy, and highlight the threats of mass roundups, the targeting of political opponents, and the policy measures outlined by the Trump-backed 2025 Project, a 900-page manual for social counterrevolution.

Now that Trump is moving rapidly to implement these plans and has appointed two top aides, Stephen Miller and Thomas Doman, who actually contributed to the 2025 Project, the Democrats have dropped such protests and declared themselves committed to a “peaceful transfer of power.” This really means: We will do nothing to oppose the implementation of dictatorship against the American people.

There must and will be mass opposition to the policies Trump is preparing. But this opposition must not be straitjacketed by the Democratic Party, which like the fascist Republican Party, is an instrument of Wall Street and American imperialism. The opposition to Trump must be led by the working class, based on a socialist program, and spearheaded by the building of a new revolutionary leadership, the Socialist Equality Party.

[This article was originally published in wsws.org here Here on October 13, 2024]

Trump assembles cabinet of fascist repression and imperialist war Read More »

CS

Opportunism and Empiricism: A Prelude

english, history, lead article, Marxist Theory, politics, politics & economics /

From the Theoretical arsenal of the ICFI. 

Opportunism and Empiricism by Cliff Slaughter.

By Sanjaya Jayasekera.

We invite our readers and comrades of the Trotskyist movement to study one of the most valued pieces of theoretical contributions in the literature of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), “Opportunism and Empiricism” by Cliff Slaughter of the British Socialist Labour League (SLL). This document was written and published in March 1963 as a polemic against theoretical derailments made by Joseph Hansen of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the United States in his piece “Cuba – The Acid Test: A reply to the Ultra-left Sectarians”. The latter, published in  November 1962, was in turn a reply to the document entitled “Trotskyism Betrayed”1 issued by SLL. 

CS
Cliff Slaughter. Courtesy of wsws.org

The developments in the ICFI that led to this document are historically significant as it paved the way for the ICFI to return to the lessons of Trotsky’s struggle in defense of Marxism against pragmatism of the petty bourgeois tendency led by the Burnham- Shachtman-Abern faction of the SWP, in 1939-402.

Though the immediate political issue dealt with in these documents centered on the question of the class nature of the state of Cuba after the 1959 Revolution – whether it was a workers’ state or not – and on the political characterization of the leadership of Fidel Castro, Slaughter’s document is essentially important in regard to the exposition of the Marxist method, dialectical materialism. Written in the backdrop of SWP’s course toward unprincipled unification with Pabloit International Secretariat (IS), ‘Opportunism and Empiricism’ also deals with and rejects Cannon’s pragmatism in respect of the Cuban missile crisis. 

SLL document explains as follows: “Hansen leads the tendency which calls for ‘unification’ with a revisionist tendency on the basis of purely practical political agreement on immediate tasks. From this point of view he rejects an examination of the history of the split [1953] and of the differences between the tendencies. This is only part of his substitution of impressionism for scientific analysis…. What is the methodological basis of Hansen’s approach here? The dominant question for him is always ‘what will work best?’- asked always from the narrow perspective of immediate political appearances. This is the starting point of pragmatism, the ‘American’ development of empiricism by Pierce, James and Dewey. It leads Hansen to advocate unity with the Pablo group because that will ‘work’ better as an attraction for people pushed in a ‘leftward’ direction, even if the causes of the split are never clarified.”

Slaughter points out that Hansen’s contribution shows explicitly the empiricist and anti-dialectical basis in the method adopted by the opportunist tendencies in the SWP, as well as their unprincipled and un-historical approach to the problem of unification and development of the world Trotskyist movement.

Slaughter summarizes the exercise of Marx to extract the dialectical materialist method of thought through the struggle against Hegel’s dialectical idealism: “The ‘materialism’ to which empiricism leads, according to Hegel, is of course mechanical materialism, which remains unable to explain the role of consciousness and the material unity of the world, including human action and thought. This ‘defect of all hitherto existing materialism’, as Marx called it, meant that ‘it could not be consistently carried out, and it left the door open to dualism and subjective idealism. Hegel overcame the dichotomy of subject and object, introducing a unified conception of a dialectically interconnected whole, by making spirit the content of all reality. Marx had only to ‘stand him on his head’ to arrive at dialectical materialism. This is in fact how dialectical materialism developed, through contradiction…”

Acceptance of “surface facts” of a “given circumstances” is the method of pragmatism in philosophy, while for Marxists, “facts” have a class and historical content, because the class struggle and exploitation are the content of all social phenomena. At the political level, it illustrates the capitulation and adaptation to existing forces, existing forms of consciousness in the political movement. “When we attack empiricism we attack that method of approach which says all statements, to be meaningful, must refer to observable or measurable data in their immediately given form.” 

Four Reasons

While this document obtains no specific hierarchical value in the enormous theoretical contributions within the movement, for several reasons, it is an essential reading for the cadre of the ICFI and for any Marxist revolutionary worker and youth, who need to fight under the leadership of ICFI and its sections. First, this document elaborates and practically demonstrates the deployment of the Marxist method of theoretical thinking –  the method of dialectical materialism which analyzes the events on a class basis – against the petty-bourgeois  impressionistic and pragmatic approach to understanding the objective world, the method of empiricism or pragmatism, which essentially has a class role. It is a lucid  expression of the application of dialectical materialism, which only can explain the world, because ”it includes a materialist explanation of the development of our concepts as well as of the material world which they reflect”.

Dialectical analysis requires seeing facts, events in the context of a whole series of interrelated processes, as parts of a “motion picture” 3, not as finished, independent entities about which ‘practical’ decisions have to be made. In the sphere of politics, Slaughter states, such analysis means to see each situation in terms of the development of the international class struggle, global economy and geo-politics, to evaluate the policies of the various political forces towards this situation in terms of their relation to these class forces and to their whole previous course.

This document is an ideal example for any revolutionary fighter to understand what real polemics is – the second reason. This series of polemics between the SLL and the SWP leadership demonstrates the gravity, depth, seriousness and theoretical exhaustiveness that polemics within our movement had contained in its rich traditions. Polemics is the mark of the revolutionary party. To defend this tradition and develop its historical heritage is the primary task of all sections of the International Committee and its cadre, as a precondition for the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class. Building the socialist culture within the working class has no better sense than advancing their consciousness to this higher level of thinking, against the methods of subjective idealism and objectivism, which is the  theoretical foundation of Pabloite pragmatic opportunism4, and backwardness of bourgeois spontaneity. 

Thirdly, this document is important to the working class of this region, specially because it vividly explains the methodical roots of the opportunist politics of the Lanka Sama Samara Party (LSSP) culminating in its “Great Betrayal” sixty years ago, sanctioned by Michael Pablo, Earnest Mandel, their British mentors, and Hansen, entering into a coalition government with Ceylonese bourgeoise, one year after reunification.  This was the disastrous consequence of the SWP’s embrace of Castro’s petty-bourgeois July 26 Movement as a substitute for Trotskyism and its proclamation that a workers’ state had been established in Cuba, leading to the reunification with the Pabloites and the establishment of the United Secretariat. They claimed that the completion of the democratic revolutions in the backward countries did not require the socialist revolution and the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship. These ideologies have been lingering within the labor movement all throughout in multitude of forms, promoted today by the pseudo-left and other middle class tendencies.

Fourthly, Slaughter’s explanation of pragmatic foundations of political opportunism and eventual vindication of these positions within the movement, ironically even through Slaughter himself, has enduring relevance to the present day. Our cadre of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the Sri Lanka section of the ICFI, would find these theoretical foundations helpful for them to understand the long time alienation of the party from proletarian struggles, leading to its current stagnation, for which the party leadership blame the purported insufficiency in the ripening of the objective conditions, and lack of socialist class consciousness within the working class. It has long shown  its opportunist abstentionism from the active class struggle5, founded on their skepticism over the potential of educating an advanced section of the working class in a backward country,  Sri Lanka and in the region, as Marxist revolutionaries.  This approach has been, for over three decades, conditioned by the mass consciousness affected by then-prevalent demoralization and subjugation of socialist culture since the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991 and the brutal suppression of a rural youth uprising in the South, the racial divisions instigated by the ruling classes to divide the working class of the country, the three-decade long civil war in the North and East, the growth of the influence of postmodernist tendencies in academia and in the middle class youth, and the growth of right-wing and left-wing populism, to mention only the most significant “surface facts”6.

Opportunism is the political expression of the methodology of pragmatism, which Slaughter states is the transatlantic younger brother of English empiricism, that serves the interests of the petty-bourgeoise. The opportunists, who abandon the interests of the working class, harbor disbelief in the revolutionary potential of the  independent mobilization of the working class for power7 and reject the Marxist method. Pragmatism is politically reactionary and must be rejected. 

Marxist Method

In Opportunism and Empiricism, Slaughter delves into how empiricism and opportunism within the Marxist movement threaten revolutionary theory and action. He points out that these tendencies undermine the scientific integrity of Marxism by disregarding the method of dialectical materialism.

Opportunism is a political tendency to prioritize short-term, pragmatic gains over the strategic goals of socialist internationalism, which often leads to political compromises and capitulations to bourgeoisie that dilute Marxist principles. By yielding to immediate pressures rather than upholding an orthodox Marxist program, opportunism weakens the working-class movement and opens the door to ideological drift. Opportunists adapt their positions to align with popular sentiment or political expediency rather than the materialist analysis required for revolutionary leadership. This is a serious threat to the revolutionary Marxist movement, as it risks transforming them into reformist entities that merely seek to manage capitalism, not overthrow it.

Empiricism, the method of opportunism, is characterized as a reliance on practical experience and observable facts without a sufficient theoretical framework. Slaughter critiques empiricism for its tendency to neglect the theoretical underpinnings of Marxism, particularly dialectical materialism, in favor of immediate, surface-level observations. This approach can cause a lack of critical depth, as empiricists may fail to grasp the historical and dialectical processes that shape social realities. Without this method, Slaughter warns, Marxists risk being swayed by appearances and thus miss the underlying dynamics of class struggle and capitalist development.

The document emphasizes that Marxism is a scientific worldview that relies on a dialectical understanding of history and society. Dialectical materialism, the foundation of Marxist theory, provides a means of understanding the contradictory forces at play in capitalist society. This approach does not merely observe and react to social phenomena but seeks to uncover the underlying processes that drive historical change. It is through dialectics that Marxists can grasp the interconnectedness of social forces and foresee the potential outcomes of various political strategies. When Marxists abandon dialectical materialism, they lose this analytical power and are left with a fragmented view of reality.

A key point in Slaughter’s critique is that both opportunism and empiricism lead to revisionism, and to passive form of politics. Without a theoretical framework, opportunists and empiricists are less likely to challenge the status quo fundamentally. Instead, they may resort to reactive or reformist strategies, focusing on incremental improvements within the capitalist system rather than the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. This passive stance reflects a retreat from Marxism’s revolutionary aims, as it reduces the role of the working-class party to that of a reactionary mediator, rather than a revolutionary force.

The influence of empiricism and opportunism on party leadership and internal organization is significant, in as much as that such leadership may tend to vacillate in the programme, drifting to centrist standpoints.  Opportunistic leaders may avoid ideological struggle within the party, opting instead to purging or accommodating differing views for the sake of unity or immediate goals. This approach prevents the development of a clear and consistent Marxist program. Empiricist leadership, meanwhile, might prioritize practical tasks over theoretical education, leaving members ill-equipped to understand the broader purpose of their work. The combined effect of these tendencies is a weakened party structure, where members are less capable of engaging critically with Marxist theory and are more susceptible to ideological deviations.

While some philosophical concepts could have been discussed in more depth, the document retains focus on the two tendencies mentioned in the title. Slaughter stresses that the revolutionary party must resist the temptation to adapt to short-term pressures or popular trends, which have their own class base. Instead, the revolutionary party should focus on building a theoretically sound program that can guide the working class in its struggle against capitalism. This means upholding dialectical materialism as the core of Marxist analysis and strategy, ensuring that revolutionary action is informed by a scientific understanding of society and history.

We call upon our comrades, workers and youth to engage in serious debates on these topics and to engage in the practical exercise of understanding the manner the ICFI is exercising this method in their daily action and publications in the World Socialist Web Site. Our platforms are open for such debates. 

Join SLLA (RLF of SEP-SL), Build SEP!

  1. Trotskyism Betrayed, reprinted in Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume Three, (New Park Publications, 1974) p. 235. 
    ↩︎
  2. Leon Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, 1939 <https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/in-defense-of-marxism-leon-trotsky-1939/00.html>
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  3. Leon Trotsky, The ABC of Materialist Dialectics, December 1939.
    <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/12/abc.htm >
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  4. In Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume One (London: New Park, 1974), pp. 299-300.
    ↩︎
  5. In Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume One (London: New Park, 1974), pp. 299-300.
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  6. SLLA will illustrate our analysis on this important subject in the future documents. 
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  7.  ”Underlying all forms of opportunism is a lack of political confidence in the possibility of winning the working class to the program of Marxism, which, in the final analysis, represents a rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class as the gravedigger of capitalism and the builder of a new socialist society.” David North, 1989, Gerry Healy and his place in the history of the Fourth International. ↩︎

Opportunism and Empiricism: A Prelude Read More »

Harris

War, inequality and dictatorship: The critical issues excluded from the 2024 election

Democratic Rights, english, Far Right, Fascism, politics, politics & economics, War, World War /

By WSWS Editorial Board.


The 2024 US presidential election is unfolding under conditions of unprecedented crisis and social breakdown. There is a pervasive sense that the political system is dysfunctional, incapable of responding to the needs of the people and heading toward violent domestic conflict.

Harris
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Memorial Hall at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Monday, November 4, 2024. [AP Photo/Susan Walsh]

With Election Day only 72 hours away, the political climate is rife with rumors of conspiracy. There is widespread expectation that the result of the election will be inconclusive, and—whatever the vote totals—Trump and his fascist co-conspirators will not accept an unfavorable outcome. The level of uncertainty and menace that surrounds the election process reflects the extent of the breakdown of American democracy.

It is evident that the political culture of the United States has hit rock bottom. Trump’s semi-coherent stream of consciousness chauvinist filth is pitched to all that is debased and reactionary in American society. Kamala Harris epitomizes the cynicism and hypocrisy of a party that resorts to the platitudes, clichés and tropes of identity politics as a cover for the interests of the corporate-financial elite and the conspiracies of the intelligence agencies. Her defense of American imperialism, above all, the full support for the genocide in Gaza, exposes her as a representative of a criminal capitalist oligarchy.

The idea of a “lesser evil” in this context is an absurdity. While one candidate promotes fascism, the other is running on a platform that includes support for war and genocide. Under these conditions, the choice is not between greater and lesser evils but between two paths to catastrophe. For all the mudslinging, the divisions between Trump and Harris are insignificant compared to the gulf that separates both parties from the working class.

The profound issues that affect the lives of millions are systematically ignored in this campaign. This is because they all arise from a basic source, unconditionally defended by the entire political establishment: the capitalist profit system. Moreover, none of the central issues confronting workers in the United States can be addressed outside of a global movement of the working class. The 2024 election starkly poses the alternatives: capitalist barbarism or the reconstruction of society on the basis of socialism.

1. The escalation toward nuclear war

The elections are unfolding under conditions of escalating global war. Behind closed doors, there are discussions of massive expansion of war, whoever is in the White House. Prominent members of the oligarchy, like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, are declaring that “World War III has already begun.” The United States is investing an unprecedented $1.7 trillion in upgrading its nuclear arsenal—a bipartisan commitment that will advance regardless of the election’s outcome.

The central priority of the four years of the Biden administration has been war—first, the instigation of the war against Russia in Ukraine, then the genocide in Gaza, both fully backed by Harris. With unlimited US weapons pouring into Israel with the full support of both the Democrats and Republicans, the US is complicit in the slaughter of tens of thousands in Gaza and the West Bank. A major escalation of the war against Iran could take place even in the weeks between the election and Inauguration Day in January. The Pentagon announced Friday that the White House has ordered additional US military forces to the Middle East, including B-52 bombers, fighter jets and Navy destroyers.

The posturing of Trump—who has called for the “obliteration” of Iran and for Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza—as an opponent of war is nothing short of ludicrous.

World war requires the subordination of all of society’s resources to war. The lead article in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, a leading publication of US geopolitical strategy, appears under the headline, “The Return of Total War.” The author, Mara Karlin of the Brookings Institution, writes:

In both Ukraine and the Middle East, what has become clear is that the relatively narrow scope that defined war during the post-9/11 era has dramatically widened. An era of limited war has ended; an age of comprehensive conflict has begun. Indeed, what the world is witnessing today is akin to what theorists in the past have called “total war,” in which combatants draw on vast resources, mobilize their societies, prioritize warfare over all other state activities, attack a broad variety of targets, and reshape their economies and those of other countries.

The “prioritization of warfare over all other state activities” means the ruthless subordination of the working class to war. Everything must be sacrificed on the altar of war and the vast resources required to wage it.

2. Economic crisis, social inequality and oligarchy

A principal factor in the ever more ruthless operations of imperialism is the escalating crisis of American capitalism. US debt has exploded to nearly $36 trillion. The price of gold is at record levels, reflecting intense pressures on the dollar.

The ruling class has sought to stave off the economic crisis through a series of massive bailouts of the banks, including in 2008 and in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. This has only reproduced the crisis at a higher level, while contributing to an enormous increase in social inequality.

Wealth concentration in the United States has reached grotesque levels, with a tiny elite controlling more wealth than the bottom half of the population. The wealth of US billionaires is now more than $5.5 trillion, up nearly 90 percent since the beginning of the pandemic. The extreme concentration of wealth is defended by both parties, and the election campaigns of Harris and Trump are fueled with unprecedented sums of money from the rich.

Inflation has eroded real wages, making essential goods—from food to housing—unaffordable for millions. Close to one-third of all households and one-half of renter households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Total consumer debt stands at nearly $18 trillion, a record high, including $1.75 trillion in student loan debt.

The working class is facing a massive social crisis that includes layoffs, school closures and a healthcare system on the brink of collapse. In education, the recent expiration of emergency funding has led to firings of educators and the shuttering of schools, affecting millions of students.

3. Fascism and the threat of military-police dictatorship

Through the Trump campaign, the Republican Party is developing a political movement that is acquiring a more openly fascist character. Alongside the normalization of genocide and nuclear war, fascism is being normalized in American politics.

Trump
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Albuquerque International Sunport, Thursday, October 31, 2024, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. [AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson]

Indeed, Election Day on November 5 will mark only one moment in an escalating crisis of the entire political system. Trump is already promoting the narrative of a “stolen election.” He is inciting violence and conspiring to reject, through legal cases and actions by state and local governments, any result that does not lead to his victory. If elected, Trump has threatened to deploy the military against “the enemy within” and organize the deportation of tens of millions of immigrants.

In recent weeks, Harris referred occasionally to Trump as a “fascist,” but this was quickly dropped. The Democrats’ focus, as expressed in Harris’s “closing argument”this week, is on maintaining “unity” with the Republicans to suppress opposition at home and wage war abroad. Their central concern is not the growth of the fascist right but the breakdown of the whole political system and the danger of a movement from below. 

Both parties are deeply implicated in the dismantling of democratic rights and the turn to dictatorship. The Biden-Harris administration has itself overseen a wave of arrests and expulsions of students protesting against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Both parties support the militarization of the state to quash dissent, whether that means cracking down on anti-war protests or mobilizing the police against striking workers.

4. The COVID-19 pandemic and environmental collapse

It is now nearly five years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the greatest social and health crisis in the modern period. In the last election four years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic was the central issue—the focus of the fascistic agitation of the Republicans and pledges to “follow the science” by the Democrats. In this election, the ongoing pandemic has been entirely ignored, referred to only in the past tense, even as hundreds of people die every day.

The death toll since the last election is staggering: Over 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID-19-related causes, including over 400,000 deaths under Trump (through January 2021) and more than 800,000 under Biden. This figure is part of a global toll of 24 million excess deaths in the past four years. Tens of millions of people in the US, according to official figures, have been impacted by Long COVID.

This colossal level of death and debilitation is the direct consequence of ruling class policy. The Biden-Harris administration fully implemented Trump’s criminal “herd immunity” policy, and in May 2023 allowed the expiration of emergency funding for COVID-19 relief, leaving hospitals and clinics overwhelmed, understaffed and underfunded.

At the same time, climate change is driving unprecedented ecological disasters, including two major hurricanes that have hit the United States over the past two months, producing devastating floods. Scientists warn of an escalating and existential crisis, but neither party will address the issue in a serious way, as any genuine response to climate change would threaten the interests of the corporations that fund both parties. The Democrats have abandoned even their token gestures, while the Republicans openly dismiss climate change as a hoax.

***

The political system in the United States is thoroughly sclerotic and undemocratic. Every aspect of its structure—from ballot access laws aimed at third parties, to the domination of money, to the role of the corporate media—is designed to systematically exclude any genuine expression of the interests of the working class.

Over the past year, there have been powerful demonstrations of mass social anger and opposition. Millions have protested the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. Workers have launched strike action in critical industries, including the ongoing strike by 33,000 workers at Boeing, a major military contractor and aerospace company, which the trade union apparatus is working desperately to shut down before Election Day.

The central issue is the development within the working class of a socialist political leadership. The crisis must be addressed at its root, and the root of the crisis is the capitalist profit system. And in an era of transnational corporations, global imperialist war and a global pandemic, there is no national solution. The international working class is the most powerful force on the planet, but it must be armed with a political program that articulates its real interests.

The Socialist Equality Party, as part of the International Committee of the Fourth International, is spearheading the fight for the establishment of the political independence of the working class on the basis of a socialist program and policies.

The SEP insists that the only way forward is for the working class to break with the Democratic and Republican parties and build an independent political movement, based on an international, anti-capitalist, and socialist program. Opposition to inequality, war and dictatorship requires the conquest of political power by the working class, in the United States and throughout the world, and the complete reorganization of society.

[The above article was originally published in the WSWS.org here on November 01, 2024]

War, inequality and dictatorship: The critical issues excluded from the 2024 election Read More »

Georgiva

IMF runs into deepening debt crisis and contradictions of global capitalism

economics, english, News, politics & economics, Trade War, War, World War /

By Nick Beams.

The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, has given a downbeat assessment of the global economy in her curtain raiser speech for its meetings, held together with the World Bank, this week.

Georgiva
International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva at the Annual Meeting of World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024 [AP Photo/ Markus Schreiber]

She began by saying that “we should cherish the good news”—that inflation levels were coming down, at least on official figures—because “we haven’t had much of it lately.”

Even this was tempered by the observation that while inflation rates may be falling, the higher prices people feel in their wallets are here to stay and “families are angry, people are hurting.”

In what has become a central preoccupation of the IMF in the recent period, flowing from the rise in global interest rates since 2022, Georgieva directed attention to the rising levels of government debt and the need for action to bring them down.

As always, this was couched in terms of needing to maintain a gradual approach to promote fiscal consolidation and seeking to maintain social safety nets, but words cannot disguise their essential content which is to undertake major attacks on the working class and some of the poorest people in the world.

Georgieva said IMF forecasts pointed to “an unforgiving combination of low growth and high debt—a difficult future.”

The rising levels of borrowing meant that a growing share of government revenue was being used to cover interest payments under conditions of lower growth. The IMF’s Fiscal Monitor Report, a summary of which was released last week, said global government debt was expected to reach $100 trillion by the end of this year. Some $36 trillion of this debt is in the US where one in seven dollars of spending is used just to pay interest bills.

The problem extends across the world as “fiscal space keeps shrinking,” Georgieva said. “Just look at the frightening evolution of interest-to-revenue over time. We can immediately see how the tough spending choices have become tougher with higher debt payments.”

And, she continued, “we live in deeply troubled times” in which military spending may well keep rising “while aid budgets fall further behind the growing needs of developing countries.”

In its report for the meeting, the World Bank warned that global poverty reduction had “slowed to a near standstill” amid economies damaged by the pandemic and war. It noted that poverty levels in low-income countries were “higher than before the pandemic.”

On top of the slowing down of aid, Georgieva noted that major economies, driven by “national security concerns” were “increasingly resorting to industrial policy and protectionism, creating one trade restriction after another.” Trade was not going to be the engine of growth it was before, and the situation was worsening.

In 2019, the number of what the IMF called “harmful new interventions” on trade was below 1000. It has calculated this will rise to more than 3000 in 2024.

Georgieva insisted that budgets had to be consolidated involving “difficult choices” over how to raise revenues and make spending “more efficient”—always a euphemism for cuts—while making sure “policy actions are well explained to earn the trust of the people.” 

Under conditions where their living standards have been hard hit by inflation and cuts in governments services and subsidies that have already taken place, that is not going to happen. This is why there is discussion in ruling circles around the world, including in the US and other major economies, about the need for the use of state forces to impose the financial dictates.

So far as “solutions” are concerned, within the framework of the global capitalist economy, the IMF chief pointed to the advances in technology, saying there was much countries could do as members of an integrated economic community. The forces of trade and technology had delivered a “hugely valuable degree of interconnectedness.”

Then, without recognising it, she ran straight into the central contradiction of the present epoch, intensified to an enormous degree over the past four decades by the globalisation of production, between the integrated world economy and the nation-state system of capitalism.

While integration had taken place, she said: “Yet still, we live in a mistrustful world where national security has risen to the top of the list of concerns for many countries. This has happened before—but never in a time of such high economic co-dependence.” [emphasis in original]

The key issue here is not that this “mistrustful world”—more accurately characterised as a world at war and advancing to World War 3—has arisen despite economic co-dependence. Rather, it is a consequence of that very integration under capitalism.

It is the result of the intensification of the contradiction between this historically progressive process with the outmoded nation-state system, which each of the imperialist powers, with the US in the lead, seeks to resolve by means of war.

It cannot be resolved under capitalism unless world war is considered be a “solution,” but only by the advance to a new and higher form of society, international socialism.

Of course, such a perspective, the only rational solution, cannot be advanced by the head of the IMF, one of the chief defenders of the capitalist order and so Georgieva advanced a totally unattainable perspective.

She said the reality of “fragmentation” should not become “an excuse to do nothing to prevent a further fracturing of the global economy” and that her appeal at the meeting would be “to work together, in an enlightened way to lift our collective prospects.”

A similar, equally bankrupt, perspective marked an editorial by the Financial Times(FT) on the IMF-World Bank meeting. Noting the 80th anniversary of the establishment of the two bodies at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 towards the end of World War 2, it said they had “filled a void where coordination was lacking.”

As the IMF and the World Bank gathered for the annual meeting, they confronted a new set of challenges that risked undoing what has been accomplished.

The conditions of intensifying trade war, a worsening situation in developing countries, problems of climate change, shocks from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and mounting debt problems, the FT said, underscored why global cooperation is such a “precious commodity” and that international problems “require international solutions.”

The world facing the IMF and the World Bank looked very different from today, it concluded, but the “spirit in which they were forged at Bretton Woods remains as important as ever.”

The deepening crisis of global capitalism is not “spiritual.” It is material, rooted in objective structural contradictions deriving from the private ownership of the means of production and the outmoded and reactionary nation-state system. They can only be resolved by the advance to a new and higher form of global society, that is, international socialism.

[This article was originally published here in WSWS on October 20, 2024]

IMF runs into deepening debt crisis and contradictions of global capitalism Read More »

SLLA

Petty-bourgeois Nationalism versus Internationalism: The struggle for the historical continuity of Bolshevism and resolving the crisis of proletarian leadership

art and culture, class struggles, english, lead article, politics, politics & economics /

By Sanjaya Jayasekera.

For Zionist imperialists, the history began on October 07, 2023, and the brutal oppression of Palestinians for 75 years is simply obliterated. Drawing an analogy, for Comrade Nandana Nanneththi, according to his diatribe of October 08, 2024, the history of our principled struggle against their nationalist clique had begun only from our final contribution of July 4, 2024. Nandana shamelessly suppresses the fact that  the discussion in question formally started at least six months ago, on December 25, 2023, when Sanjaya proposed a programme of action to the Aggregate group, titled “The way forward for the SEP Left”. Our struggle consisted of a number of written explanations that followed, a 25-page document written by Comrade Migara before December 25 about the long degeneration of the party, and two submissions of nearly 30 pages written by Comrade Migara clarifying the discussion that broke out after my proposal of December 25. Only one document was submitted by the Nandana’s clique, by comrade Udayaprema, during this whole discussion. This document submitted in mid April largely contained straw-man arguments that distorted the facts. Nandana avoided the main problems that we raised, but his positions were made clear to us. 

Nandana’s behavior shows that he perceives our refusal to respond to his frenzied statements in his own language and style as representing our weakness. He is wrong. Since we are not in the habit of biting like hounds infected with the disease of poisonous subjectivity, and being revolutionaries who have not abandoned the claim to the heritage of the historical continuity of the international socialist movement, we act to grapple with political issues theoretically, attempting the most for the political clarifications and lessons for the working class. That is our approach.

Nandana’s essay/article reeks of the symptoms of the subjective sickness of a petty-bourgeois charlatan, requiring it to be dissected into sentences and phrases and sometimes into words to discuss it in detail. Therefore, we have adopted a method of commenting within the original text of the essay itself and the commentaries are placed just after the relevant section of the texts which are placed within parentheses. This method, we hope, keeps the reader less distracted. 

The Text and the Commentaries

[ජුලි 6 දා, නීතිඥයෙකු වන සංජය විල්සන්] I was called Sanjaya Jayasekera by party comrades. Nandana is using my middle name and profession as an appeal to backwardness. There was no relationship between my profession and my being a member of the revolutionary party, and the reader would understand what Nandana is up to. [මිගාර මල්වත්ත සහ සුනිල් මොරායස්] This is yet again a treacherous betrayal of exposing a comrade’s name against his written opposition. [යන ත්‍රිත්වය සසප වාම කන්ඩායමේ වෙබ් අඩවිය හා සියලු සංනිවේදන මාධ්‍ය පැහැර ගෙන පලා ගියහ.] This is an outright lie. We, the internationalist faction, expelled Nandana-led nationalist clique, and thus they have no politically legitimate entitlement to any of the media organs of the group, which was intended to function as a faction of the Socialist Equality Party of Sri Lanka (SEP). The faction was to be founded in opposition to the party leadership’s reactionary political tendencies that we struggled to identify, discuss, clarify and clearly define. theSocialist.LK website was not even in the dreams of any of the comrades of the group including Nandana, when Sanjaya foresaw the necessity of such a publication organ for the factional struggle and thus registered “theSocialist.LK”domain name under his name and started building a blog. All these were communicated to Nandana later and he agreed with the same. The blog was launched by Sanjaya on his birthday as a gift to all comrades of the group. Sanjaya was Editor of the website, not because he was appointed by any vote, but because he assigned it to himself and everybody accepted the status quo. The group decisions were reached never as an outcome of a so-called majority decision, and the decisions were taken usually by Sanjaya and Nandana during their discussions, and these decisions were approved tacitly by everybody. When Sanjaya suggested developing the blog into a website, he conceded that the other comrades too should contribute financially, so that everybody gets the sense of its significance as the axis of the faction, even though he could have borne the whole cost by himself, if that was necessary, which fact everyone of the group was well aware of. Some funds were taken from the Colombo Action Committee (CACPS) as a loan, as the contributions lying there were solely from the comrades in the group. Comrades Nihal and Punyawardena, the close associates of Nandana, controlled this bank account. Later, Sanjaya opened a Bank account with Parakrama, another long-time friend of Nandana, separately for theSocialist.LK, and Parakrama and Nandana were in control of the Bank ATM card, and they always put off handing it over to Sanjaya, never carrying it out.  They used the website’s bank card to withdraw all funds, after the clique was expelled from the faction. Due to inadvertence, the return of the loan obtained from CACPS had not been effected by Parakrama or Sanjaya, as it was never raised or reminded within the group discussions, even by Nihal, who was CACPS treasurer and was long absconding meetings. Once the funds from the website account were illegitimately withdrawn by Nandana renegades, we demanded the overdue remittance of the loan amount to the action committee’s account, which Nandana has rejected in an email communication. CACPS is dysfunctional as of now, and its Secretary has yet to call a general meeting to elect the new office bearers, while Sanjaya’s Chairmanship has lapsed. [මාක්ස්වාදී මූලධර්මවලට ප්‍රතිපක්ෂව]  Nandana merely utters this without any sort of substantiation, and the reader of this piece will understand what principles our struggle was and is based upon. [සසප වාම කන්ඩායම මෙහෙයවා ගැනීමට තමන් දැරූ උත්සාහය සහමුලින් ම අසාර්ථක වූ නිසා ඔවුහු මෙම තීන්දුවට එලඹුනහ.] The reader of this piece would understand the falsehood of these claims, and other allegations made against us. In fact, it was the N-clique (Nandana’s clique) that renegaded from internationalism, rejected reapplying for ICFI membership and fighting for SEP membership, rejected the Bolshevik method of factional struggle and relegated into an opportunist nationalist pressure group. [සසප වාම කන්ඩායම යනු 2014 සිට සසප වර්ධනයට බාධා වූ තත්වයන්ට එරෙහිව පක්ෂය තුල සටන් වැදී සිටි හා 2022 දී පක්ෂ නායකත්වය විසින් බොල්ෂෙවික් පිලිවෙත නො තකා නෙරපා හරිනු ලැබූ කන්ඩායම යි.] This group was not a ‘faction’, but admittedly a group of individuals later expelled from the Party, who were never organized on the basis of any political agreement. They did not stand, nor stand against any reactionary tendencies in the party leadership. Theirs was, in fact, an agitation group, and their so-called struggle was not against any reactionary tendency of the leadership, but against this or that ‘unprincipled activities’, and was wholly ad hoc, informal and irregular. After 2015 Second National Congress, Nandana, who could secure a place in the Central Committee, and his clique limited their agitation and entered into a tacit compromise with the leadership, only to be compelled to take arms against the party leadership during the mass struggles of 2022. By mid 2023, Nandana enrolled to the group two ex-members of the party, his close friends, who had deserted the party long time ago, and never wished to rejoin the party, but claimed their will to be engaged in the ICFI’s revolutionary politics, without being affiliated to it! [2021 අවසානය කාර්තුව දක්වා ම අප කන්ඩායමට විරුද්ධව සිටි විල්සන්ට පන්ති අරගලයේ වර්ධනය සමග පක්ෂ නායකත්වයෙන් තමන්ට එල්ල වූ පීඩනය නිසා අප අරගලය පිලි ගැනීමට සිදු විය] This is false. I had not expressed to them any opposition to or agreement with their specific political issues, nor I was a member of their group. Their issues were largely unknown to the membership, as that was the way the SEP leadership worked to prevent membership discussions on the political disagreements of members. The SEP leaders preferred faithful yes-men. The first time I expressed my political agreement with a political position taken by Nandana was when a dispute on the ICFI’s stance on the right to self-determination arose in late 2021, in which I was able to clear the confusions long nurtured by the party leadership. In 2015 only I was selected to the PC, and I was largely unaware of Nandana’s specific issues, because they never functioned as a political faction, but just as agitators within a couple of Locals. They never took part in a factional struggle. This was recognized also by comrade David North in his comments made at the start of Party’s Congress in 2015. 

[විල්සන් කන්ඩායමේ පලා යාම සිදු වූයේ වාම කන්ඩායම සමග වූ මත භේදවලට මුහුන දීමට තමන් අසමත් බව වටහා ගැනීම නිසා ය] Outright falsehood. It was they who failed to respond to our documents and questions. Only we raised the political issues regarding the factional characterization, which then gave way to other issues of nationalism and internationalism as central questions within the SEP-Left. We fought for our explanations based on Bolshevik principles and they never attempted to answer our fundamental questions. These ultimately led to the expulsion of this unprincipled clique from the SEP-Left. [තමන් ජත්‍යන්තරවාදීන් ලෙස හදුන්වා ගත්] We, as genuine internationalists, stood for Bolshevik method of factional struggle and insisted on the struggle for ICFI membership, which they rejected. We also reasonably identified them as a nationalist opportunist clique. [ත්‍රිත්වය වෙනුවෙන්, සංජය විල්සන් ඇග්‍රිගේට් නමින් පවත්වා ගෙන ගිය අපගේ වට්ස් ඇප් පිටුවේ ජුලි 4දා මෙසේ සදහන් කර තිබිනි. “පිටු 65ක ලිපිය ඉහත එවා ඇත. මෙය කියවන්න ඉන් පසු කතා කරමු.“] The discussion, in which they merely kept opposing our views without merit and tried their best to derail it, had lasted close to seven months from December 2023, and the 04th July document was the final piece produced by us as sequel to two other main documents and other extended explanatory notes. In the final round of discussions Sanjaya had made oral submissions via Zoom,  which followed ‘comments‘ from N-clique and then what was remaining was Sanjaya’s counter-submissions. As an aid to these final oral contribution, the written document was prepared in association with Comrade Migara, which was submitted. Therefore, in fact, the discussion had come to its dead end. In fact, our disagreements with Nandana’s positions did not arise just on December 25, 2023, but at the very inception of our engroupment, when 12 members were about to be expelled from the party. Sanjaya along with Migara and Sunil insisted that these comrades should declare a faction and take the fight against the bureaucratic party leadership, which Nandana-Udayaprema (the latter is the former’s brother-in-law) vehemently objected. They even adamantly refused to write to the party leadership against the intended expulsion, saying such a response is undesirable and, even after Sanjaya got almost all other comrades to agree for his proposal, this was not executed by the group due to Nandana’s vehement opposition. It was clear to us later that, in fact, Nandana wanted the expulsion to take effect, so that he can establish his petty-bourgeois pressure group that suits his way of social life. The expulsion removed from the ranks of the party/ICFI the revolutionary and progressive cadre, who were misguided by Nandana. 

[ජුලි 6 දා ඔවුහු “සසප නායකත්වයේ ප්‍රතිගාමීත්වයට එරෙහි ෆැක්ෂන් අරගල ය ප්‍රතික්ෂේප කල, ජාතිකවාදී, එනම් ජාත්‍යන්තර කම්ටුවට හා සසපට බැදී ගැනීමට අරගලය නො කරන, සසප ගොඩ නැගීම සදහා අරගලය නො කරන (සසප ගොඩ නැගීම ලෙස ඔහු සදහන් කරන්නේ එහි ඔහු කියන ප්‍රතිගාමී නායකත්වයෙන් සසප ඩැහැ ගැනීම සදහා සිය අභිප්‍රාය බව  මෙම ලිපියේ තහවුරු කරනු ඇත)….. සසප වම  බහුතර කල්ලිය හා අප අතර කිසිදු සාකච්ඡාවක් ඉදිරියට පලදායී නො වන බව පැහැදිලි ය“ යි  ලියූහ] Nandana desperately attempts to establish a falsehood that we were like going to execute a coup to usurp power from the party leadership! Our struggle is very clearly against the reactionary political tendencies of the party leadership, and not against the individuals in the leadership, which was made clear to the group. It was a factional struggle that we proposed, a fact which they are knowingly suppressing. The full extract of our letter is suppressed in order to raise a blatantly distorted meaning. 

Following is the full text of the underquoted paragraph:

“අපගේ පෙර ලිපි හා බැඳි 2024 ජුලි 04 දිනැති අවසන් දිර්ඝ පැහැදිලි කිරීමේ දේශපාලන ලිපිය ඉදිරිපත් කරමින් සසප–වම බහුතර කල්ලියේ දේශපාලන අනන්‍යතාවය කවරක් ද යන්න අපි නිවැරදිව සනාථ කර ඉදිරිපත් කර ඇත්තෙමු. එම කල්ලිය සසප නායකත්වයේ ප්‍රතිගාමී ප්‍රවනතාවයන්ට එරෙහිව ෆැක්ෂන් අරගලය ප්‍රතික්ෂේප කල, ජාතිකවාදී, එනම් ජා.කට හා සසපට බැදී ගැනීමට අරගල නොකරන, සසප ගොඩනැගීම සඳහා අරගල නොකරන, ඒ අනුව මෙි රටේත්, මේ කලාපයේත් කම්කරු පන්තියේ නායකත්වයේ අර්බුදය විසඳීමට අරගල නොකරන, සසප නායකත්වය වමට තල්ලු කිරීමට පිඩනය යෙදීමේ බාහිර සුලු ධනේශ්වර දේශපාලන ප්‍රවනතාවයක්  බව අප පෙන්වා දී ඇත. ඊට විරුද්ධව, සසප–වම සුලුතරය යැයි හදුන්වන අප,  ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදය අනුයමින්  සසප–වම ෆැක්ෂන් අරගලය බෝල්ෂවික් විධික්‍රමය අනුව ඉදිරියට ගන්නා විප්ලවවාදී කන්ඩායම වෙමු. හජජාක ඓතිහාසික උරුමය ආරක්ෂා කල හැක්කේම එයට බැඳී ගැනීමෙන් හා එසේ බැඳී ගැනීම සදහා අරගල කිරීමෙන්ම පමනි. අපගේ පෙන්වාදීමට පටහැනිව කරුනු ඉදිරිපත් කිරීමට අසමත් වෙමින්, පසුගිය මාස හයකට වැඩි කාලයක් තුල සිදුවූ සංවාදය තුල ඔබ හජජාකට හා සසපට බැදීගැනීමට කල යුතු ෆැක්ෂන් අරගලය පෙරට ගැනීමට නුසූදානම් බව පෙන්වමින් ඔබගේ ජාතිකවාදී ප්‍රවනතාවය තහවරු කර ඇත. මේ හේතුවෙන්, අප කන්ඩායම් දෙක අතර ප්‍රවනතාමය වෙනස හොදින් පැහැදිලිය. ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදය හා ජාතිකවාදය අතර එම ප්‍රවනතාත්මක ප්‍රතිගථිතතාවය සාකච්චාව තුලින් සමනය කල නොහැක්කකි. එය විසදෙන්නේ පන්ති අරගලයේ කොටසක් ලෙස එක් ප්‍රවනතාවයක් දේශපාලනිකිව පරාජය කිරීමෙනි.  කම්කරු පන්තික ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදයේ ජයග්‍රහනය සඳහා ජාතිකවාදය හදුනාගෙන බැහැර කල යුතුය. අප ඔබ කල්ලයේ ජාතිකවාදය නිශ්චිතව හදුනාගෙන  පෙන්වා ඇත්තෙමු. ඒ නිසා සසප–වම බහුතර කල්ලිය හා අප අතර කිසිදු සාකච්චාවක් ඉදිරියට ඵලදායී නොවනු ඇති බව පැහැදිලිය. අප ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදී කන්ඩායමට පමනක් ෆැක්ෂන අරගලය ඉදිරියට ගෙනයාමේ ඓතිහාසික උරුමය  සුජාත ලෙස පැවරේ. අප එම අරගලය පෙරට ගනු ඇත. ට්‍රොට්ස්කිවාදී ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදය, බොල්ෂවිකවාදය පදනමින්ම ප්‍රතික්ෂේප කර ඇති ඔබ කල්ලියට හජජාක නමින් පෙනීසිටීමට කිසිදු සුජාතබවක් නැති අතර, ඒ අනුව සසප–වම නම් ෆැක්ෂනය නමින් පෙනී සිටීමේ, හදුනා ගැනීමේ හිමිකමක් ඔබට නැත.”

[අපගේ සාකච්ඡා සදහා වූ මාධ්‍ය තම නමින් තිබීමේ වාසිය භාවිත කරමින් ඔවුහු මෙසේ නිවේදනය කර තිබිනි. “වෙබ් අඩවියේ සුජාත හිමකම ඇත්තේ අප ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදී කන්ඩායමටයි…ඇග්‍රිගේට් හා කතිකා වට්ස් ඇප් සංවාද ගෘෘප තුල රැදී සිටීමට ඔබට කිසිදු ඓතිහාසික හිමිකමක් නැත. ඒ අනුව එම ගෘෘපවලින් ඔබ කල්ලිය වහා ඉවත් කරනු ඇත.“]

What we quoted above is the first paragraph of the July 06th letter. The rest of the letter is as follows:

“ට්‍රොට්ස්කිවාදී ජාත්‍යන්කරවාදයෙන් පලාගිය ජාතිකවාදී කල්ලියක් ලෙස හදුනාගත් ඔබට අප එවන ලද කිසිම ලේඛනයකින් ඔබට ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදය තුල කිසිදු වලංගුභාවයක් අත්කර දෙන්නේ නැත. එම ලිපි හා සටහන් ඔබට එවන ලද්දේ අප සැබෑ ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදීන් ලෙස ඔබ කල්ලියට පැවති වගවීමේ භාරයක් නිසා නොව, සහෝදරවරුන් අතර දේශපාලන පැහැදිලි කම සඳහා උදවි වීම පිනිසය. අප වගකියන්නේ කම්කරු පන්තියට ය.  ඔබ කල්ලියට සසප ෆැක්ෂනක් ලෙස හදුනාගැනීමට කිසිදු ඓතිහාසික හිමිකමක් නැති බැවින්, ඔබගේ තීන්දු මගින් ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදී කන්ඩායම බඳිනු ලැබිය නොහැකිය. 

thesocialist.lk වෙබ් අඩවිය ආරම්භ කලේ  සසප–වම නම් ෆැක්ෂනයේ ප්‍රකාශන මාධ්‍යය ලෙස ය. එය කොල්ල කෑම සඳහා ජාතිකවාදී කල්ලියකට අවස්ථාව නොලැබෙනු ඇත. ෆැක්ෂන අරගලයේ කොටසක් ලෙස, එනම් ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදයේ කොටසක් ලෙස ආරම්භ කල බැවින් වෙබ් අඩවියේ සුජාත හිමිකම ඇත්තේ ද අප ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදී කන්ඩායමටය. 

මේ කාරනා මත, සසප–වම ෆැක්ෂනයේ වේදිකා ලෙස ආරම්භ කල “ඇග්‍රගේට්” හා “කතිකා” වට්ස්ඇප් සංවාද ගෲප තුල රැඳී සිටීමට ඔබට කිසිදු ඓතිහාසික හිමිකමක් නැත. ඒ අනුව එම ගෲප වලින් ඔබ කල්ලිය වහා ඉවත් කරනු ඇත.  එහෙත්, එහි ඉතිහාස ඔබට බා ගත හැක.  

මේ රටේත්, මේ කලාපයේත් කම්කරු පීඩිත මහජනතාවගේ අරගලවලට නායකත්වය සම්පාදනය කල හැකි විප්ලවවාදී, සමාජවාදී ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදී නායකත්වයක් ගොඩනැගීමට, සසප ෆැක්ෂනයක් ලෙස අපි  බොල්ෂවික ක්‍රමවේදය හා මූලධර්ම මත සටන් වදිනු ඇත. එය අසීරු ආරම්භයක් බව අපි දනිමු. එහෙත්, ඉතිහාසය එම වගකීම වෛශිකවම අප මත පවරා ඇති බව වටහා ගන්නා අපි එම අරගලය අප්‍රතිහත ධෛර්යයකින් යුතුව  පෙරට ගන්නෙමු. 

මීට,

සහෝදරත්වයෙන්,

මිගාර මල්වත්ත,

සුනිල් ප්‍රනාන්දු,

සංජය ජයසේකර.

2024 ජුලි 06”.

[විල්සන්ගේ පලා යාම පුදුමයට කරුනක් නො වේ. සසප පන්ති ව්‍යාපාරය තුල පරීක්ෂනයට ලක් වීමට පෙර ම මොහු මධ්‍යම කාරක සභාවට හා දේශපාලන කමිටුවට පත් කර ගත්තේ ය. 2019 ගොඩ නැගූ කලාව හා ප්‍රකාශනයේ නිදහස ආරක්ෂා කිරීමේ ක්‍රියාකාරී කමිටුවේ සභාපති ධූරය ද ඔහුට පැවරී ය. නායකත්වය සමග ගැටලු මතු වූ වහා ම විල්සන් දේශපාලන කමිටුව හා ක්‍රියාකාරී කමිටුව හැර පලා ගියේ ය. මෙබඳු ධෛර්ය හීන නිවට පුද්ගලයෙකු කම්කරු පන්ති සදාචාරයට බැඳෙන්නේ නැත.]  The circumstances that led to my resignation, as the last option, have to be discussed separately at length. Nandana knows well about these circumstances and even subsequently approved my actions and admitted the leadership’s unprincipled pressure exerted upon me as an unbearable reality. My resignation from the ACDAE (Action Committee) and PC (I did not resign from the CC) were based on serious political issues. I was fighting against a number of retrogressive characteristics that I saw had developed overtime within the membership and in the day-to- day operation of the Party. 

[අප විසින් සාමූහිකව වර්ධනය කෙරුනු-thesocialit.lk -වෙබ් අඩවිය සඳහා රුපියල් 14,500ක් කොලඹ ක්‍රියාකාරී කමිටුවෙන් ලබාගෙන තිබූ අතර එම මුදල කොක්‍රිකට ගෙවීම අප විසින් කල යුතු ය යි කල්ලියේ ප්‍රධාන කොල්ලකරුවා වන සංජය විල්සන් දන්වා එවා තිබිනි.] These are only provocative falsehood and slanders, part of his unsuccessful smear campaign against us, characterizing their middle-class politics. Attending to the settlement of accounts have been neglected by CACPS Treasurer, Nihal, and inadvertently not acted upon by Parakrama, who handled theSocialist.lk funds, as explained above. Nandana is well aware how efficiently Nihal operated. [දැනටමත් වටහා ගත හැකි පරිදි ඒ වන විට විල්සන් සමග අපගේ හවුල් ගිනුමක තිබුනු රුපියල් 30,000ක මුදල බේරා ගැනීම සඳහා වහාම ඉවත් කර නො ගත්තේ නම් එය ද කොල්ල කනු නො අනුමාන ය.] As explained above, N-clique looted money from theSocialist.LK joint bank account, which they did not have any political right of retaining. [කෙසේ වෙතත් අපි මේ ගැන විල්සන්ට දැනුම් දුනිමු. වෙබ් අඩවිය තම භාවිතයට ගත් විල්සන් එම මුදලින් ඒ සඳහා ගත් නය බේරන ලෙස අපට ලියා එවා තිබිනි.]

[මෙසේ පොදු දේපල කොල්ල කෑම,] Which public property he means? Turn to the experience of the history of splits in our movement to see how party property – especially the press and the theoretical organ – was succeeded by those claiming  political legitimacy for the historical continuity of the movement. On the other hand, the renegades of the movement  and those who have been legitimately expelled from the movement have no political right to claim any property rights. [සාකච්ඡා ප්‍රතික්ෂේප කිරීම,] They rejected discussions and we only called for discussions. When discussions were finally carried out, issues were cleared and political lines were distinctly drawn and obviously recognized. Finally, at the dead end, obviously, unending discussions were undeserved and redundant. [බහුතර මතය ගරු නො කිරීම] As explained above there was no majority decision-making as such; Nandana had got a close clique with him in support of his every idea. The group decisions were largely made during discussions between Sanjaya and Nandana and others agreed. The group had no office bearers. Nandana was selected at the very inception to chair the meetings on my proposal, due to his long experience in the Party leadership. [යනු කම්කරු විරෝධී සුලු ධනේශ්වර නිලධාරිවාදයේ ප්‍රකාශනයෝ වෙති. කෙසේ වෙතත් තමන් ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදීන් යයි ඔවුන් කියාගන්නා දෙය ගැන අප කිව යුතු වන්නේ, අප කිසියම් පුද්ගලයෙකු වටහා ගන්නේ ඔහු තමන් ගැන පවසන දෙයින් නො ව ඔහුගේ ක්‍රියාවන්ගෙන් සහ ඔහු ප්‍රචාරය කරන දෙයින් ය යි කාල් මාක්ස් පවසා ඇති බව ] Marx is correct, and we established why they are a nationalist clique, and why we are internationalist, based on asserted political standpoints.  We are not just a web group; we, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction (RLF) of SEP, inherit the legitimate claim for the historical continuity of Bolshevism and fight for resolving the crisis of proletarian leadership, which task they have expressly rejected. We abandoned using the term “SEP-Left” as they had illegitimately used it even after their expulsion from it in a diatribe published against us on 12 July 2024, which is full of distorted quotations and false allegations.

[විල්සන් කල්ලියේ කැරැල්ල]

The revolt referred to here is our expulsion of the Nandana-led reactionary clique from the SEP-Left. Nandana covertly finds another reason for our “revolt”.  The truth is otherwise. The most recent circumstances for the expulsion of these renegades  arose when our final submissions were made and we did not let theSocialist.LK to succumb to their nationalist lines. The clique then assembled and decided to take control of the website and impose their nationalist politics forcefully upon us, based on a never-existed or accepted “majority decision” of their never-formed “committee”. Their ostensible hatred against us is fuelled by this political wisdom of ours that prevented them from executing an organizational coup against the internationalist tendency, subjugating it under their clique’s control. 

[මෙම ඊනියා ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදීන් සහ සසප වම අතර දේශපාලනික පිපිරීමට තුඩු දුන් ආසන්නතම සිද්ධිය වූයේ, “පොලීසිය, තමන් නින්දාවට පත් කරන කරුනු පත්‍රිකාවක අඩංගු කල නො හැකි බව කියමින් කොලඹ ක්‍රියාකාරී කමිටුවට (කොක්‍රික) කඩා පනී“ යන හිසින් ලෝක සමාජවාදී වෙබ් අඩවියේ සිංහල අංශය 2024 පෙබරවාරී 29 දා පල කල ලිපිය සම්බන්ධයෙන් අපගේ ප්‍රතිචාරය පිලිබඳ පැන නැඟුනු මතභේදය යි]

This is an outright lie. The differences arose only at least from the date of December 25, 2023, when Sanjaya made a programme proposal to the group in a document titled “The Way Forward for SEP-Left”, which Nandana shamelessly suppresses. This significant document suggested as follows:

“Comrades should note that our expulsion by the Political Committee of the SEP is subject to the approval of the Congress [Party Constitution Clause 10(f)]. Congress is the final appeal body, only which we can place our trust upon, and we should appeal to the Congress for the revocation of our expulsion. Trotsky did the same, when he was expelled by the leadership of the Russian Communist Party. As Cannon says, Trotsky did not just get up and walk away from the Party. In 1928, when the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern was held in Moscow, Trotsky, at the first opportunity he got, appealed to the Congress against his expulsion. He at the same time submitted a criticism of the Draft Program prepared by Bukharin and Stalin. This commentary only paved the way for the establishment of a section of the Trotskyist Left Opposition in the United States, under the leadership of Cannon.

We too can and must use this opportunity and be ready to appeal to the next Congress of the Party. But, in the meantime there is a tremendous bulk of work to be done. We work continuously as the SEP-left faction – which we continue to claim ourselves to be – with our full might with the goal of building a new leadership in the party, and this requires fighting for political clarity on the degeneration of the Party leadership and the party as a whole. These documents will enlighten the party membership mainly, and also the working class at large. We will continue to publish our documents on our publication organ, theSocialist.LK.”

Even long prior to this proposal of the programme of action, comrades Sunil, Migara and Sanjaya were pointing out the necessity of defining the group as a faction of the party, so that our struggle is well programmed and we would be able to recruit new comrades to the faction. This document and our explanations to the group proposed a factional struggle to fight against to-be-defined reactionary tendencies of the party leadership and to appeal for our membership (along with a Congress perspective resolution), all of which Nandana rejected. In January and early February 2024, the group had two days of discussion on this proposal, and further discussions in this regard were effectively rejected, falsely claiming that issues have been resolved and Nandana was going to draft and finalize a long-awaited and assigned document explaining the Party’s degeneration, which he never did.  Thereafter, the ensuing discussion was centered on Nandana’s proposal, made on March 16, to form SEP-Left as a group that pressures the party leadership against its shifting toward the political right. He proposed a new formulation of programme, consisting of alternative options:  the SEP-Left shall struggle to put the party on the right track, and join with them in the revolution when they lead and do it, and if they fail and derail itself from ICFI programme, then the SEP-Left will step in and lead the masses! We rejected this opportunist and pragmatic formulation that abandoned the task of the revolutionary Party of resolving the crisis of the proletarian leadership. We stood for the factional struggle to build the SEP as the revolutionary leadership of the working class of Sri Lanka and the region. [ආන්ඩුවේ මර්දන හස්තයක් වන “යුක්තියේ මෙහෙයුමට“ එරෙහිව කොක්‍රික දියත් කල අරගලයට පොලිසියේ තාඩන පීඩනවලට මුහුන දීමට සිදු වුනි. සසප ලිපිය පැහැදිලිව ම එම පොලිස් මර්ධනයට එරෙහිව කම්‍කරු පන්තියට අනතුරු හැඟවූයේ ය.]

[ඒ අතර සසප, කොක්‍රික කෙරෙහි මහජන අප්‍රසාදය කැඳවන ප්‍රකෝපකාරී ප්‍රකාශයක් ද තම ලිපියේ අඩංගු කලේ ය. “සමාජවාදී සමානතා පක්ෂය (සසප) මෙම කොලඹ ක්‍රියාකාරී කමිටුව සමග ගැඹුරු දේශපාලන වෙනස් කම් තිබිය දී ඔවුන්ට එල්ල කර ඇති මෙම රුදුරු ප්‍රහාරයට විරුද්ධත්වය පල කරයි. කොලඹ ක්‍රියාකාරී කමිටුව පිහිටුවාගෙන ඇත්තේ විනය චෝදනා මත සසපයෙන් නෙරපා හරින ලද කන්ඩායමකි,“ යනුවෙන් එහි සඳහන් විය. මෙම ප්‍රකාශය කම්කරු පීඩිත ජනයා කිහිප අතකින් ම නො මග යවනසුලු වන අතර සසප නායකත්වය කවර කලෙකවත් පවතිනවාය කියන මෙම දේශපාලන ප්‍රශ්න පැහැදිලි කිරීමට මැදිහත් වී ද නැත. එසේ මැදිහත් වීමේ හැකියාවක් ද ඊට නැත. සත්තකින්ම එය ලැබුනු සෑම අවස්ථාවකම කොලඹ ක්‍රියාකාරී කමිටුව අප්‍රසාදයට ලක් කර විනාශ කිරීමේ අරමුනින් වැඩ කර ඇත. නමුත් සසප වම බහුතරය මෙම විකෘතියට විරුද්ධව එය නිවැරදි කිරීමට උත්සාහ කලා මිස සසප නායකත්වය අනුගමනය කල පිලිවෙතින් ම ප්‍රතික්‍රියා නො කලේ ය.]

[රටේ සියලු පක්ෂ හා සංවිධානවල විවෘත හෝ නිහඬ සහාය (සසප මේ පෙරමුනට එක් නො කල යුතු ය) ලැබ  ක්‍රියාත්මක වූ රාජ්‍ය මර්දන ව්‍යාපාරයට විරුද්ධව මූලිකත්වය ගෙන ක්‍රියාත්මකව මැදිහත් වූ එකම සංවිධානය කොක්‍රිය යි. ත්‍රිත්වය මෙයින් ලද ප්‍රසාදය මත දෙපා පිහිටුවා ගෙන මුලු වැර යොදා සසපට පහර දීමට යෝජනා කලහ. මාර්තු  2දා සංජය විල්සන් මෙසේ යෝජනා කලේ ය. “සැබෑව නම් සසප නායකත්වයේ කට්ටිවාදය (sectarianism), නිලධාරීවාදය (Bureaucratism) හා අපෝහක විරෝධී සංස්ථිතිකවාදය  (conservatism) යන දේශපාලන ප්‍රවනතාවයන් හෙලි දරව් කිරීමට කටයුතු කරමින් ලංකාවේත්  මෙම කලාපයේත් විප්ලවවාදී පක්ෂය ආරක්ෂා කිරීමට අඛන්ඩව කටයුතු කරමින් සිටින්නේ සසප වාම කන්ඩායම යි.“] The faction and the factional fight obtain political legitimacy when our factional fight is based on defined political lines as against another faction and, therefore, defining SEP-Left in opposition to reactionary tendencies of the party leadership is a political necessity. Our characterization of the party leadership was thus to serve this purpose. The characterization we arrived at was drawn from the common understanding, historical experience and knowledge of the members of the group and upon the general perspective of the membership of the party. We, party comrades, knew how these tendencies manifested in the party leadership, and we were required to place that understanding in a historical, internationalist and class analysis, which is an enormous task they refused, even as a group work, and we undertook. N-clique never expressly rejected this characterization – though we could construe their refusal of the same – nor suggested their own characterization of the reactionary tendencies of the leadership, because they recognized no such tendencies within the party leadership. 

[හාස්‍යජනක කරුන නම්, යුක්තියේ මෙහෙයුමට එරෙහිව අප ගෙන ගිය අරගලයට මුල සිට ම විරුද්ධව සිටි මිගාර මල්වත්ත සහ සුනිල් මොරායස් යන ත්‍රිත්වයේ සාමාජිකයින් දෙදෙනා] They never opposed, but raised valid concerns.  [වහාම සංජය විල්සන්ගේ සහායට පැමිනීම ය. ඔවුනට වැදගත් වූයේ රාජ්‍ය මර්ධනයට එරෙහි ව මහජනයා බලමුලු ගැන්වීම පසෙක තබා ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේ එකම කම්කරු පන්තික විප්ලවවාදී පක්ෂය වන සසපයේ නායකත්වයට මුලධර්ම විරහිත ප්‍රහාරයක් එල්ල කිරීම බව සනාථ කිරීමට ඉහත උපුටනය වුව ප්‍රමානවත් ය.] This conclusion shows Nandana’s ahistorical approach to the significance of the correctness of the leadership of the revolutionary party in the class struggle. Readers would note that this allegation that we wanted to mount an ‘unprincipled attack on SEP’ is totally unfounded and dishonest, given that the very quotation Nandana cites proves the advanced and theoretical struggle we were supposed to take. [රාජ්‍ය මර්ධනයට ඉඩ දෙමින්] We gave way for state repression! This is again a malicious lie. [දකුනු ආසියාවේ එක ම කම්කරු පන්තික විප්ලවවාදී පක්ෂයට මූලධර්ම විරහිත ප්‍රහාරයක් ඉල්ලා සිටීමේ ක්‍රියාව] We demanded a factional struggle to build the party, which is Bolshevik method, and they rejected it. [වෛෂයිකව සැලකූ විට, ඒ කම්කරු පන්තියට ද්‍රෝහි වීමක් හැර එහි අන් අර්ථයක් තිබේ ද?.] A vile, Goebbelsian lie again. 

[මාර්තු 13 සසප වම වෙනුවෙන්  නන්දන නන්නෙත්ති  ලියූ, “රාජ්‍ය මර්දනයට එරෙහි කොලඹ ක්‍රියාකාරී කමිටුව හා ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේ සමාජවාදී සමානතා පක්ෂයේ භාවිතය“ යන ලිපිය බහුතරයේ අනුමැතියෙන් thesocialist.lk හි පල කෙරින] This is a distortion of facts. Not just the N-clique, but all group members tacitly approved the article. It was edited and approved by website’s Editor, Sanjaya for publication.

[සංජය විල්සන්ගේ යෝජනාව ප්‍රතික්ෂේප කල එය] It could not reject the proposed characterization of the SEP leadership, nor elaborate on it, simply because the characterization was just tabled for discussion, and the article only did not go to the extent of discussing the disputed issue. [සසප ලිපිය කොක්‍රිකට එල්ල කල ප්‍රහාරයේ  අර්ථය පැහැදිලි කිරීමෙන් ඉක්බිති මෙසේ අවසන් කලේ ය. “සසප මෙම තත්වය බැරෑරුම්ව සලකා බැලිය යුතු ය. වෛෂයික සත්‍යය යටපත් කිරීමට අවස්ථාව සැලසූ කොන්දේසි එකිනෙක බිඳ වැටෙමින් පවතී. වර්ධනය වන පන්ති අරගලය සත්‍යය ඉස්මත්තට ගෙන එනු ඇත.“]

[මෙම ලිපිය නිසා උරන වූ විල්සන් කල්ලිය,] A false claim. If there was such a dispute, the article would not have been published at all. [සිය මූලධර්ම විරහිත ප්‍රයත්නය ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදයේ නමින් ඉදිරිපත් කරමින් සිටින අතර ම, කන්ඩායමේ සතිපතා රැස්වීම් හා ක්‍රියාකාරි මැදිහත් වීම් කඩාකප්පල් කිරීමට වැඩ කලේ ය.] The issues to be resolved were now about the faction’s fundamental existential issues and, so, the regular discussions or activities of the group and of the Editorial meetings had lost their political validity and legitimacy, until those fundamental existential issues, the political characterization of the group, were resolved. [විල්සන් කොක්‍රික සභාපති ලෙස ඔහුට පැවරුනු වගකීම්  නො තකා එය අක්‍රීය කිරීමට ද ක්‍රියා කලේ ය.] Nandana was trying to employ his clique and convert CACPS into an organization of his impressionistic and middle-class pressure politics, away from the working class struggles, which endeavours Sanjaya was careful to guard against. [තමන්ට ප්‍රශ්න ඇති නිසා ඒවා විසඳෙන තෙක් කිසිවක් කල නො හැකි යයි කී විල්සන් කල්ලිය විසින්, මාර්තු සිට ජුලි දක්වා මාස පහක කාලයක් ඒවා විසඳා ගැනීමට ලබා දුන් සියලු අවස්ථා මගහරින ලදී.] This is again falsehood and an outright lie. We waged a principled struggle in carefully preparing our documents, submitting explanations, and engaging in the discussion, which Nandana shamelessly suppresses.

[විප්ලවවාදී ව්‍යාපාරය වර්ධනය වන්නේ පරස්පර විරෝධය මග හැරීම තුල නො ව පරස්පර විරෝධයන් ජය ගැනීමට ගෙන යන අප්‍රතිහත අරගලය තුල ය. විල්සන් ත්‍රිත්වය අපෝහක භෞතිකවාදයේ මෙම මූලධර්මයට හතුරු වූහ.] Nandana habitually uses the phrases “dialectical materialism”, “dialectical method” or “dialectics” as rhetoric.  [අපි වට්ස්ඇප් ගෘෘපය තුල ලිඛිතව ගෙන ගිය සාකච්ඡාවට අමතරව විශේෂ සාකච්ඡා දෙකක් මැයි 3 හා මැයි 12 දෙදින තුල ත්‍රිත්වය සමග සිදු කලෙමු] This was the final round of discussions referred to above. [ඔවුන් දිගින් දිගටම අවධාරනය කරමින් කියා සිටින, සසප නායකත්වයේ ඇතැයි කියන ප්‍රතිගාමීත්වය අවස්ථාවාදය යනාදිය වෛෂයික, ඓතිහාසික පදනමක පිහිටා විශ්ලේෂනය කර සනාථ කරන මෙන් අපි ඔවුන්ගෙන් ඉල්ලා සිටියෙමු.] This claim is bogus. This discussion never materialized fully.  They even never expressly agreed or disagreed with our characterization of the SEP leadership’s reactionary tendencies, nor did they propose any other characterisation. Immediately after our arbitrary expulsion from the party, it was agreed between Sanjaya and Nandana, known to other comrades of the group, to write a document explaining the party’s long-time degeneration, which he neglected and never did. It was only we who from the very inception demanded a characterization of the SEP-Left,  in relation to the party leadership, which thereupon only ignited all disputes, and Nandana delayed and even rejected clarifying this fundamental question of the nature of the ‘faction’ claiming such question was non- existent. Then the discussion was directed toward the fundamental form of our ‘faction’, as Nandana rejected the factional struggle, while refusing to appeal to the party Congress under its Constitution for our membership of the party and to fight for our party membership. He proposed our group should act as a pressure group to redirect/realign SEP leadership to the left from shifting further to the right. Nandana even tried to mislead the comrades of the group by falsifying the history of the Bolshevik movement and asserting that you don’t need to be a member of ICFI/SEP to be a Trotskyist internationalist! He further maintained that the SEP-Left does not need any ‘official’ affiliation to the ICFI to be identified as ‘internationalist’! This is a complete rejection of internationalism, the fundamental principle of Bolshevism. We rejected to accept this nationalist perspective. [එවිට ඔවුහු එම ප්‍රශ්නයට ප්‍රතිචාරය ලෙස ලිඛිත ප්‍රකාශයක් ලබා දීමට පොරොන්දු වූහ. ඉන් අනතුරුව සාකච්ඡාව ගෙන යා හැකි බව ඔවුහු යෝජනා කලහ.] This is false. We did undertake to produce, before my final submissions, a conclusive document, not dealing with our characterization of the reactionary tendencies of the party leadership, which was not the issue at that stage of discussions, but on the fundamental nature of our group’s struggle, refuting their nationalist formulations. Also, even during this period WhatsApp discussions were going on and we were making necessary contributions. [ඒ අනුව මාස දෙකකට පසු  එකම දේ පුනරුච්චාරනය කරමින් ඉවබවක් නැති චෝදනා හා ඕපාදූපවලින් පිර වූ පිටු 65ක් අපට භාර දුන් ඔවුහු ඉන් දින දෙකකට පසු සාකච්ඡා කිරීමට දෙයක් නැතැයි පලා ගියහ] As explained above, this is a shameful suppression of important events in the development of the discussion. The last document titled, “The Way Forward for SEP-Left against the Nationalism of Nandana-Udayaprema Group”, preceded two other major documents dated 08.04.2024 and 03.05.2024, cumulatively comprising of another 30 odd pages titled “The way Forward for SEP-Left: Essential Political Questions”, written by comrade Migara, and several other essential notes made by comrade Sanjaya clarifying the political issues. (These documents and notes are accessible to those comrades who wish to study our struggle and join SLLA to fight to build SEP)

[වගකීම් විරහිත චෝදනා

ලිපියෙන් ඔවුහු මේවා ගෙන හැර දක්වති: “සිංහල බෞද්ධ ස්වෝත්තමවාදය සමග වාස්තවිකව පෙල ගැසීම,“ “2015 සම්මේලනය ව්‍යවස්ථා විරෝධී ලෙස කැඳවීම,“ “සාමාජිකත්වය දෙගුනයක් කිරීමට 2020 යෝජනාව කඩාකප්පල් කිරීම මගින් ඓතිහාසික මට්ටමේ දේශපාලන අපරාධයක් සිදු කිරීම,“ 2021 ගුරු අරගලය තුලදී  “මහා වර්ජනයකට මුහුන දීමේ නුසූදානම පෙන්නුම් කරමින් කම්කරු පන්තිය තුල විශ්වාසය බිද ගැනීම,“ “විප්ලවවාදී ප්‍රවනතාවය සම්පූර්නයෙන් ම විප්ලවවාදී පක්ෂයෙන් මෙන් ම හජාජාකවෙන් ප්‍රජාතන්ත්‍ර විරෝධී ලෙස පලවා හරිමින් ඓතිහාසික අපරාධයක් සිදු කිරීම,“ “2022 විප්ලවවාදී නැගිටීමේ දී ඓතිහාසික පරීක්ෂනයෙන් අසමත් වීම.“

මෙහි සඳහන් අතිශයෝක්ති නො තකා, ඒවා  ඒ හැටියට ම සත්‍යය යයි අප මොහොතකට පිලිගත්තත් මේවා එම චෝදනාවල යථා සම්බන්ධතා පැහැදිලි නො කරයි. ප්‍රශ්න හුදෙක් දමා ගැසීම හෝ ඒවා මග හැර සිටීමේ ප්‍රතිඵලය වන්නේ, ඒවාට හේතු වන ධනේශ්වර සමාජ පරස්පර විරෝධයන් හඳුනා ගැනීමට ඇති අවස්ථාවන් අහිමි කර දමා පවත්නා විඥානයට තවතවත් වර්ධනය වෙමින් පැවතීමට ඉඩ හසර විවර කිරීම ද, ඉන් නො නැවතී තමන්මත් ඒවායේ ගොදුරක් බවට පත් වීම ද බව ඉතිහාසයේ අත් දැකීමයි.] Our readers would note that these documents were written as internal documents to the former members of the party, who were well aware of these matters, and had a tacit agreement with. To explain these to a larger working class audience, we are required to write extensively, which Nandana delayed continuously and later abandoned, exposing his dishonesty in the undertakings he had given, failing to mobilize the group for the task, in spite of major contributions made by Migara in that regard. We, SLLA, are continuing this struggle. 

[මොවුහු දිගින් දිගටම සසප නායකත්වය ප්‍රතිගාමී ය යන තමන්ගේ නීර්නය පිලිගන්නා ලෙස අපට බලපෑම් කලහ. ලිපියේ පිටුවක් පාස ප්‍රතිගාමී යන වචනයෙන් සසප නායකත්වය හදුන් වන අතර එහි 10 ((XXXI) ඡේදයෙන් “ප්‍රතිගාමී සසප නායකත්වය විස්ථාපනය කරමින් ව්ප්ලවවාදී පක්ෂය තුල නිවැරදි නායකත්වයක් පිහිටු වීමට උදයප්‍රේම -නන්දන කන්ඩායම සූදානම් නැත“ යි අපට චෝදනා කරයි. අපි එම චෝදනාව නො පැකිල පිලි ගනිමු.] Exactly! They admit it expressly now, showing they have nothing to do with a factional struggle. Nandana clique is not waging a struggle for the resolution of the crisis of the leadership of the working class of this country and the region. For them, the SEP leadership, for years, have only shown their hostility to principles from their this or that actions, and these expressions of hostility to principles do not represent any development of identifiable reactionary tendencies within the  leadership. Therefore, what is necessary is to exert pressure from outside upon the leadership against their shifting to the political right. For this, they do not need membership of the party or the International Committee. There is no necessity of a factional struggle too, as the party leadership has not shown any reactionary tendencies in their practice. When we asked this specific question from them, whether they considered these ‘unprincipled’ practices to have developed into the status of reactionary tendencies, they just avoided the question. But, we were correct in the analysis of their positions, and we clearly identified that they have no grounds or intention to claim to engage in a factional struggle.

[විල්සන් තම ස්ථාවරය සම්බන්ධයෙන් කෙතරම් නිර්දය වූයේ ද යත් උදයප්‍රේම සහෝදරයා  ලියා thesocialist.lk අපගේ වෙබ් අඩවියේ 2024 ජුනි 28 දින පලකල “වැටුප් දීමනා ලබා නො දීමේ ආන්ඩුවේ පියවර හා කම්කරු අරගල“ යන ලිපිය කන්ඩායමේ විරුද්ධත්වය නො තකා තමන්ට අවශය පරිදි වෙනස් කලේ  “සසප නායකත්වයේ ප්‍රතිගාමීත්වයට“ යනුවෙන් පදයක් ඊට එක් කරමිනි. විල්සන් “කතෘ වෙබ් අඩවියේ දේශපාලන පිලිවෙත් අනුව ලිපියට එක් කරනු ලැබූ අවසන් ඡේදයට ලේඛකයා බලවත් නො එකඟතාවය පලකර ඇති බව කරුනාවෙන් සලකන්න.“ යි ලිපියට පහලින් සටහන් කලේ ය.] [වෙබ් අඩවියේ දේශපාලන පිලිවෙත් අප විසින් පත්කෙරුනු කතෘට තීන්දු කල නො හැකි බව කවුරුන් වුවත් පිලිගනු ඇත]  As explained before, Sanjaya was not the appointed editor, but he was the editor. Readers are reminded of the leadership the “The Three Generals”, Cannon-Shachtman-Abern, had assumed in themselves “by a higher law” because they started the fight after they were expelled from the Communist Party of the US in October 1928 and declared a faction, before they were formally formed as a faction of the CP in May 1929.  The edition as quoted above was the most correct political decision. We placed the article in its internationalist perspective and under the Bolshevik method of factional struggle. Correctly quoted, the article was edited to state as follows: “අන් සියල්ලටමත් මත්තෙන්, හජජාක ලංකා ශාඛාව වන සමාජවාදී සමානතා පක්ෂය ගොඩ නැගීමත්, ඒ තුල ඉදිරි මහජන අරගලවලට නායකත්වය සම්පාදනය කල හැකි අව්‍යාජ විප්ලවවාදී නායකත්වය ස්ථාපිත කිරීමත් කම්කරු පන්තියේ ජීවිතය හා මරනය පිලිබඳ ප්‍රශ්නයකි. සසප නායකත්වයේ ප්‍රතිගාමී ප්‍රවනතාවන්ට එරෙහිව නායකත්වයේ මෙම අර්බුදය විසඳීමේ අරගලය සසප–වම ෆැක්ෂනය පෙරට ගනිමින් සිටී”. 

[හුදු වැරදි ගැන නන් දෙඩවීම හැර සසප නායකත්වයේ ප්‍රතිගාමීත්වය (reactionary) සමාජයේ ඉදිරි ගමන වැලැක්වීම හෝ ආපස්සට ගමන් කරවීමට උත්සාහ දැරීම යන එහි නියම අර්ථයෙන් පැහැදිලි කර සනාථ කිරීමට ඔවුන් කිසි දිනක උත්සාහ කර නැත.] This was the task of the faction, and we, the RLF only have undertaken this grand political and theoretical task. Admittedly, Nandana clique has abandoned such a factional struggle. [අනික් අතට ප්‍රතිගාමී නායකත්වයක් විසින් මෙහෙයවනු ලබන පක්ෂයක් ප්‍රගතිශීලී වීමට ද ඉඩක් නැත. මන්ද යත්, ඉතිහාසයේ පාඩම් අනුව පක්ෂ ගොඩ නගනු ලබන්නේ ද, ඒවා විනාශ කරනු ලබන්නේ ද නායකත්වයන් විසින් මිස සාමාජිකයන් විසින් නො වන නිසා ය.]  [එවන් නායකත්වයක් ජාතිකවාදී ප්‍රතිගාමී ධනේශ්වරයේ ම උපකරන, වර්ගවාදී, ආගම්වාදී, ව්‍යාජ වාම වන් ප්‍රපංචයක් ලෙස මතු වී සිටිය යුතු ය.] These are unqualified, grossly simplified and vague historical generalizations in respect of the dialectics between the leadership, the party, the membership and the class. One may asses the interactions of these vectors in the examples of  the following – the circumstances that led Lenin to formulate April Theses, the class formation of the party just after the Russian Civil War that laid the ground for the formation of Stalinist bureaucratism, and Trotsky’s struggle of the Left Opposition against Stalinism. Does Nandana have evidence of such manifestations in the reactionary leadership of the WRP? [තතු එසේ නම්, එය කම්කරු පන්ති ව්‍යාපාරයෙන් පලවා හැරීමට සටන් කිරීම යුක්ති යුක්ත ය.]

[නිලධාරිවාදය] 

Nandana clique never bothered to arrive at any clarification as to our characterization in respect of the reactionary tendencies of the party leadership, nor of bureaucratism too. As explained above, they tacitly rejected any such development of reactionary tendencies in the party leadership, except for admitting the existence of this or that sort of conduct against principles. Were those clarifications attempted by them during the course of our discussions within the group these arguments would have been adequately dealt with by us at that stage of the discussion.

[එසේ ම අප වාම කන්ඩායම පක්ෂයෙන් නෙරපා හැරීම වැනි කරුනු කිහිපයක් සසප නායකත්වයේ නිලධාරිවාදයට (Bureaucratism) සාක්ෂි ලෙස ඔවුන් ගෙන හැර පා ඇත.] SEP Leadership’s toxic subjectivism and bureaucratism that we characterize as a matter of fact have developed due to its long-time isolation from the working class, thus being unprepared to lead the class struggles, which is an enormous challenge posed by the unprecedented upsurge of spontaneous class struggles. This was demonstrated vividly during the historic mass struggles of April-July 2022. This alienation led to sectarianism and conservatism, which aggravated bureaucratism in a vicious cycle.  These, in the final analysis, are the consequences of subjugation to the nationalist pressures of the prevailing bourgeois consciousness of the working class, upon which the leadership has diluted its faith in the potential to educate an advanced section of the working class as Marxist revolutionaries, ultimately leading to skepticism in the revolutionary role of the working class of countries of belated capitalist development like Sri Lanka and those of South Asia.  This goes against the very principles of the Permanent Revolution. Manifested in a multitude of ways, this developed in the leadership a nationalist opportunist tendency. SLLA documents being prepared will explain this analysis further. This development is an objective historical process, and Nandana is not only trivializing the depth and degree of this phenomenon but also fails to recognize this qualitative development. Therefore, it is patently clear why Nandana and the clan cannot move forward an inch beyond simple identification of this or that unprincipled conduct of the leadership. [සසප නායකත්වය තුල නිලධාරීවාදී ප්‍රවනතාවක් වැඩෙන බව ප්‍රදර්ශනය කල බොහෝ අවස්ථා ඇති බව අපි පිලිගනිමු. ඒවා පක්ෂය තුල කුෂ්ටයක් මෙන් වැඩෙන්නට ද උත්සාහ කරයි. පක්ෂයේ පරිහානියට දැනටමත් හේතු වී ඇති මේ තත්වයට පිලියම් නො කලහොත් පක්ෂය විනාශයට බඳුන් වීම නො වැලැක් විය හැකි ය. එහෙත් මේ තත්වය සියලුම විප්ලවවාදී මූල ධර්ම යටපත් කරමින් පරිපාකයට පත් වී ඇතැයි අපට කිව හැකි නො වේ. අපි බිත්තරයට කුකුලා යයි නො කියමු. නිලධාරීවාදය පරිපාකයට පත් වී ඇති පක්ෂයකට තව දුරටත් ජාත්‍යන්තර කමිටුවේ සාමාජිකත්වය දැරීමට ඉඩ ලැබෙනු ඇතැයි සිතීමට හැකි වීම නිලධාරිවාදය තරම් ම භයානක ය.] ICFI has a rich historical experience to learn from about how sections of the ICFI degenerated while still having membership of the IC. This was explained at length by Migara in his final document, and Nandana is tiptoeing to easily avoid dealing with this important explanation. We are also aware that the International Committee has taken steps to hold the mirror of its own history that reflects the rich heritage of the experiences of our struggles against petty-bourgeois opportunism that developed within the movement in 1953 and in 1973-1986 in the British section, so that the SEP leadership sees its dark face in it. Nandana thus confirms that they are not fighting against any reactionary tendencies within the party leadership, therefore denying any legitimacy for SEP-Left to be recognized as a political faction of SEP.

Further, here Nandana says bureaucratism is growing within the SEP which has already degenerated, and left untreated will destroy the party. But, astonishingly, throughout a period of over two and a half years of the existence of the SEP-Left, it was Nandana himself who sabotaged the development of the necessary vital marxist  analysis in that regard by undertaking to do it himself but never doing it.  Even now he is rejecting the same out of hand, while launching into vicious, fraudulent and uncouth attacks upon us, because we have undertaken the task and conduct the struggle in the traditions and methods of our movement.

[කාල් මාක්ස් සහ ෆෙඩ්රික් එංගල්ස් නිලධාරිවාදය යනුවෙන් අදහස් කලේ, සමාජයේ පාලනයෙන් මුලුමනින් ම ස්වාධීන හා සමාජය පාලනය කරන රාජ්‍ය මෙවලමකි. සාමාන්‍ය කාලවල දී එහි පාලනය සූරා කැවෙන පන්තිය මත අධිකාරය දරයි. මෙම ප්‍රශ්නය එලඹෙන විප්ලවය විසින් විසඳෙනු ඇතැයි ඔවුහු විශ්වාස කලහ. වත්මන් පන්ති සමාජයේ ධනපති දේශපාලන පක්ෂ, ව්‍යාජ වාම පක්ෂ හා වෘත්තීය සමිති ධනේශ්වර පාලනයේ නිලධාරිවාදී උපකරන ය.] Raising confusion in the reader/listener is another tactic of Nandana, a desperate and exhausted man trying to influence the reader at any cost. Bureaucracy within the leadership of the revolutionary party is a separate and specific phenomenon, that has a long and a rich literature dealing with it. 

SLLA
V.I. Lenin. 1917

1905 දී ලෙනින් මෙන්ෂෙවික් කන්ඩායම මාධ්‍යමික නිලධාරිවාදී කන්ඩායමක් බව හඳුනා ගත්තේ ය. එය මහජනයාගේ ඓතිහාසික අවශ්‍යතා ප්‍රතික්ෂේප කර ඒ වෙනුවට ධනේශ්වර ප්‍රතිසංස්කරනවාදය හා විප්ලවවාදය අතර වැනුනේ ය. ලෙනින් මෙම කන්ඩායම ක්ෂමා විරහිත ලෙස පිටු දැක්කේ ය. එම තීන්දුව සනාථ කරමින් එම කන්ඩායම රුසියානු විප්ලවයට එරෙහිව ධනපති පාලනයක් වෙනුවෙන් පෙනී සිටියේය. තවත් වරෙක ඉහත ආස්ථානය තව දුරටත් ඉස්මතු කරමින් ලෙනින්, පැහැදිලිකම සඳහා සටන් කිරීම වෙනුවට තේරී පත්වීම උදෙසා සටන් කිරීම නිලධාරිවාදය ලෙස නම් කලේ ය. මෙම ප්‍රකාශයට අනුව පලා ගිය විල්සන් කල්ලිය ද අනුයමින් සිටින පිලිවෙත වන, පැහැදිලිකම සඳහා කෙරෙන සාකච්ඡා හා විශ්ලේෂන පසෙක තබා තම අදහස් කෙසේ හෝ සෙසු අය මත පැටවීමේ බලහත්කාරය, හා පොදු දේපල කොල්ල කෑමේ භාවිතය ද නිලධාරිවාදයේ ලක්ෂනයකි.] Trying to impose his own interpretation of orthodox texts on the listener/reader is Nandana’s tactic. Taking into consideration the aforementioned struggle of ours in defense of Bolshevik method and internationalism, our reader is now able to assess the malicious nature of these allegations. 

[එහෙත් තන්ත්‍රය සහ නිලධාරිවාදය යන වචනවල වෙනසවත් මෙම කල්ලිය නො දනී. ඔවුන්ගේ පිටු 65 තුල සඳහන් වන්නේ මේ දෙක ම එකක් බව ය. විප්ලවවාදී පක්ෂවල තන්ත්‍රයක් නැතැයි ඔවුහු සිතති.] “තන්ත්‍රය” is regime, and it meant SEP’s bureaucratic regime when the group used it, even in the initial discussions within the group, prior to the current disputes ripened. This is another instance of playing word games by twisting the meaning of the words. In our December 25 draft programme too, the term ‘bureaucratic regime’ was used to mean exactly that. Nandana now seems to presume an SEP leadership regime, which is ‘inclined towards opportunism’ (as he has stated), but free from a tendency which is toxically subjective and bureaucratic. Comrade Migara has explained the shift in Nandana’s standpoint on leadership in his last document.

[වෙනත් ඕනෑම සංවිධානයකට මෙන් ම ප්‍රජාතන්ත්‍රවාදී, මධ්‍යගත විප්ලවවාදී පක්ෂකට නිලධාරි තන්ත්‍රයකින් තොරව පැවතිය නො හැකි ය යන කරුනට ඔවුන් අන්ධ ය. සෝවියට් සංගමය පාලනය කල බොල්ෂෙවික් ප්‍රජාතන්ත්‍රවාදී තන්ත්‍රය පැහැර ගත් සෝවියට් රුසියාවේ ස්ටැලින්වාදී තන්ත්‍රය, සමස්ථ ලෝක කම්කරු පන්තියේ ම අවශ්‍යතා සිය අරමුනුවලට යටත් කල නිලධාරිවාදී තන්ත්‍රයකි.] Here is a serious distortion of historical experience, intended to apply a preferred meaning to a word (regime) used for a different meaning in a different context.The leadership of the revolutionary party is not a bureaucratic regime.  Soviet Bolshevik regime under Lenin was not a bureaucracy, but a dictatorship of the proletariat. It was a bureaucratic regime only from the eyes of the imperialists. Lenin took up a struggle against the growing ‘bureaucratization’ of the Soviet state under Stalin. For the loyal party member, the Bolshevik leadership was not a bureaucratic regime, but a leadership held accountable by the organizational principle of democratic centralism. [එහෙත් අවස්ථාවාදය වැලඳ නො ගත්, කම්කරු පන්ති ජාත්‍යන්තර ඉදිරි දර්ශනය සඳහා සටන් කරන පක්ෂයක් තුල නිලධාරීවාදී ප්‍රයත්න ඉස්මතු වීම පරස්පර විරෝධී තත්වයකි. මේ ගැටලුව විසඳා ගැනීම වෙනුවට ‘තමන්ට වාසි පැත්තෙන් අල්ලා ගෙන පොර වදින්නේ, වෛෂයික සත්‍යය වෙනුවට, තමන්ට අවශ්‍යය ප්‍රතිඵලය ලබා ගැනීමේ අරමුන වෙනුවෙන් ක්‍රියා කරන තත්කාර්යවාදීන් ය.] As pointed out before, our discussions within the group did not develop into discussing these  proposed characterizations of the tendencies of the party leadership. The whole essay/article has evaded the central questions around which our discussions developed. The discussion was not about our characterization of the reactionary tendencies of SEP leadership, which we stand upon, but about the form of our struggle – whether as a pressure group, which we pointed out is a nationalist formation or as a faction, which is Bolshevik method of internationalism.

[අනෙක් අතට පක්ෂ නායකත්වය තුල නිලධාරීවාදය මතු කල වෛෂයික කොන්දේසි ගැන ත්‍රිත්වය නිහඬ ය?] As the gist of the analysis above shows, this demands a comprehensive analysis, which is forthcoming, and was prevented to be the subject matter of our discussions within the group, as explained, due to fundamental existential problems of the faction itself. [ඒ වෙනුවට ස්ටැලින්වාදී නිලධාරීවාදය ගැන කරුනු කියයි. මාක්ස්වාදීන් පැහැදිලිව ම වටහාගෙන ඇති පරිදි  ස්ටැලින්වාදී නිලධාරිවාදය වෛෂයික පදනමක් නැති, ඉබේ පහල වූ, හුදු ආත්මීය දුර්වලතාවයන්ගේ ප්‍රකාශනයක් නො ව, අධිරාජ්‍යවාදය විසින් වට කරනු ලැබූ පසුගාමී රටක විප්ලවය, ලෝක විප්ලවය පමා වීමෙන් හුදකලා වීම, ලදරු කම්කරු රාජ්‍යය වසර තුනක සිවිල් යුද්ධයකට මුහුන පෑම, භාන්ඩ හිගය යන තත්වයන්ගේ ප්‍රකාශනයකි.]

[මෙයින් ම පැහැදිලි වන පරිදි, නායකත්වයක බරපතල වැරදි වටහා ගත හැකි වන්නේ, එය වැඩ කරන ජාතික හා ජාත්‍යන්තර ආර්ථික දේශපාලන කොන්දේසි තුලින් ඒවා පැන නැග වර්ධනය වූ ආකාරය පිලිබඳ ව ඓතිහාසික භෞතිකවාදය මත පදනම් ව සිදු කෙරෙන විශ්ලේෂනයකින් පමනි. විල්සන් කල්ලිය, පක්ෂ නායකත්වයේ ප්‍රශ්න හුදෙක් ම එම නායකයන්ගේ සදාචාරය පිලිබඳ ගැටලු බවට සිඳලයි…] As explained above, the whole essay/article has evaded the central questions around which our discussions developed. 

Being part of a dirty smear campaign, Nandana’s essay is far from being a political contribution. The N-clique is unable to show we have gone against any of the fundamental principles of Bolshevism. 

Their Politics and our Struggle

Nandana clique has thus expressly abandoned any factional struggle against reactionary tendencies of the party leadership. They have found a comfortable zone that suits their middle class way of life, specifically as journalists and not as disciplined revolutionaries committed to the revolutionary party, and dedicated to resolving the crisis of proletarian leadership. Thereby, it has lost all political legitimacy of claiming themselves a faction of the SEP, as part of those revolutionaries who defend and develop the heritage of the historical continuity of the revolutionary Bolshevik movement. They have expressly abandoned the revolutionary role of solving the crisis of the leadership of the working class, and claim to operate a website to promote “the revival of socialist culture” devoid of the Party of the working class. This suits their formulation of the characterization of their group to be a pressure group, functioning as a watch-dog of the party leadership, rejecting any attempt to struggle for the membership of the international party of the working class. The whole epistemology of the historical documents of the class, the party and the leadership has been abandoned. 

Against their nationalist orientation, we emphasized and have based ourselves on the principles of the historical traditions of Bolshevik internationalism, as correctly pointed out by Gerry Healey to British Trotskyists in 1943 in his document of August 10, 1943, titled, “Our Most Important Task.” In this document Healey came out against the WIL leadership’s opposition to the unification of British Trotskyists as proposed by the Fourth International. We insisted upon these principles to the N-clique, who never valued their revolutionary significance, and now has rejected them in practice. Healy wrote:

“The main purpose of this document is to bring home to the membership the importance of being the official section of the Fourth International in view of the vital necessity to strengthen the traditional organization of Trotskyism in the great struggle already begun. If we accept the history of “international Trotskyism since 1933 (which is a history of Bolshevik regroupment in the Fourth International), then we must place the question of the International as the most important question before the group. All other questions of group development, such as the press, industrial work or organizational activity are bound up with whatever stand we take on the International. If we accept the political principles of Bolshevism then we must accept the organizational method. It is not sufficient to say that we accept the program of the Fourth International and that we expound it better than the RSL if we do not also accept its organizational method, which means that we must be affiliated to the International, accepting its democratic centralist basis; just the same as it is not sufficient to claim to be a Trotskyist and to be more conversant with the policy of Trotskyism than the organized Trotskyists, unless one joins a Trotskyist party accepting its democratic centralist discipline. That is what is meant by Bolshevik organizational methods.” Excerpt from Gerry Healy and his place in the history of the Fourth International, David North.

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