Statement of the Editorial Board of theSocialist.LK
Workers, comrades, friends,
We are pleased to inform you that theSocialist.LK – Global Socialist Reviews, the online publication that started as a blog on March 11 and brought revolutionary knowledge closer to you, will be launched today (25) as a website. In accordance with international standards, it has been upgraded in format, and is dedicated to bringing wide ranging, accurate and timely knowledge to the workers and the oppressed masses in the fields of politics, economy, class struggle, history, art-culture and science in the three languages, Sinhala, Tamil and English.
It is our intention to make theSocialist.LK a platform of systematically educating and preparing the workers and oppressed people of Sri Lanka and the South Asian region, who are an organic part of the international working class, for the socialist revolution, guided by the international socialist perspective.For about two months, through the blog, we worked to analytically bring you the international political-economic experience from a working class standpoint. The number of articles, including Sinhala translations of selected articles from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), published during this short period, is 66. The readership attraction it received day after day testified to the objective impulse to search for new knowledge that penetrates social reality. It is a stimulant for revolutionary politics.
The working class, youth, artists and genuine intellectuals need more and more independent media to democratically discuss and share their ideas and to prepare and coordinate their counter-attack against the attacks of capitalist governments that have taken up arms to suppress freedom of expression and assembly. They have a lot to listen to, query, search for and find out, as well as say and write. Opportunities to credibly communicate what is appropriate for the unity of the working people’s struggles are extremely rare. In that sense, theSocialist.LK is a product of class necessity.
Based on the dialectical materialist method, analysis and program of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the WSWS, theSocialist.LK will stand for the anti-imperialist unity of the national and international working people. It is obliged to continue its work in accordance with the firm program spearheaded by ICFI to restore the socialist culture, destroyed by opportunistic politics with Stalinism in the lead.
The imperialist system, facing the deepest economic and financial crisis in the world economy since the Great Depression, has brought humanity to the brink of a nuclear world war, with the proxy war launched in Ukraine against Russia by NATO, led by the US, which is the barbaric representation of imperialism. The provocations against China, the world’s second most powerful economy, are taking the entire Asia-Pacific region to the grip of cataclysmic war. The ruling classes who oversaw over twenty million people around the world falling victims to a preventable pandemic, and who converted the heaping up of corpses as a blessing, are extracting the cost of war from the working people and the downtrodden.
War and austerity must and can be ended. Democratic rights must be protected. But, it can only be done by building a conscious revolutionary global movement of the working masses. It should be initiated against the respective national ruling classes. As Leon Tretsky brilliantly analyzed, “The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena.”
These truths confirm the need to understand precisely the socio-economic dynamics that have paved the way for the present crisis, to separate their revolutionary tendencies from the other tendencies, and to commit ourselves to develop the working class counter-attack with indomitable courage and selfless dedication. Anything less than that will not make room for the current class struggles to march forward. It demands ruthless exposure of all its enemies. We, theSocialist.LK, bear that responsibility.
We fraternally request you to read the website regularly, send your ideas and comments to it, join us in opening spaces for essential political discussions, and give your maximum financial support to the website
[This Statement was initially published in Sinhala on the 25 May 2023]
