Resolution of the October 1958 Membership
Conference of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party
(Ceylonese Section of the Fourth International)
FORWARD TO AN LSSP GOVERNMENT!
The New Political Situation and our Task
(Excerpts)
1. THE COMMUNAL EXPLOSION AND THE EMERGENCY
The very widespread communal explosion of the last week of May 1958, the consequent "Emergency," and the results of both have transformed the political situation. The ME P government has received a terrific blow to its popularity ano ts mass position. Popular enthusiasm for it has disappeared ; active support for it has sharply declined; its mass base has visibly narrowed. Internally, it has come under new strains which further weaken it from within and leave it limping along from situation to situation and from crisis to crisis without any clear or defined perspective for the future. The emergency framework of laws and administration has been an important means of propping up this government today. The task therefore arises before the Party not only to step up the struggle against the ME P government immediately and sharply but also to place before the masses as an urgent task to be accomplished at the earliest possible moment the task of replacing the ME P government with a government that can be the efficient and responsive instrument for fulfilling their fundamental immediate needs.
The communal explosion of the last week of May 1958 spread very much wider than the communal explosion of June 1956. The May 1958 explosion also bore to some extent a different character from its predecessor.
A numerically larger section of the population and a wider geographical area were drawn into the disturbances this time. Also more elements from higher up the social scale than the urban and rural poor came in. In particular, many younger bikkhus played a prominent part. So did many youth elements. A noticeable sprinkling of "trousered" elements also participated. of which marked both upsurges, were very extensive in the two days of heavy rioting in May last than they were in the entire period of rioting in June 1956. Very much more damage to persons and property was done in a shorter time in May 1958 than in June 1956.
The May 1958 disturbances also had in many places and on many occasions less of the character of spontaneity and more signs of organization than the disturbances of June 1956. What is more, the activities of the politically serious communalist core among the mass of rioters appeared this time to be directed towards a more drastic objective than mere "punishment" or "revenge." There were signs of an effort by organized communalist groups to direct the upsurge towards driving away the Tamil settlers Sinhalese majority regions and Sinhalese settlers from Tamil majority regions. They apparently aimed to make "interspersed living" psychologically and physically impossible.
In face of the range and intensity of the communal explosion and the consequent breakdown of the civil administration and of normal civilian life, the MEP government found itself compelled, after much hesitation and procrastination, to bring the Public Security Ordinance into operation. An "Emergency" was declared ; the curfew was imposed ;
maintain Extra-ordinary powers were ordinated to themators three morate right and endl liberties of the population were sharply curtailed. In short the country was temporarily brought under dictatorial administration with the executive in complete control and the repressive aspects of the state brought to the forefront of administrative activity.
2. THE SHIFT IN THE ME P POLICY
The communal explosion and the "Emergency" have come in the context of the ME P government reaching a general political impasse. The deterioration of its financial position had brought it to the point of incapacity to continue bringing forward even the mildly ameliorative measures which it had sought to pass off as socialism. Its inability to engage in any planned development of the economy has induced a rapid growth of unemployment, ever-rising prices of essential commodities, and even a back-sliding of the national economy itself. Consequently the M EP government had already come to the point where it could no longer keep up the pretence of a socialist policy. It had to enter into open and direct service of the capitalist class.
Already, before the communal explosion and the Emergency, there were clear signs that the government had taken this road. It not only announced the cessation of wage concessions to its own employees; it also came to the assistance of the private employers resisting wage increases. It beat down strikes with open police violence in both the public and private sectors. It impeded trade unions through the
In relation to foreign capital, the government ran away finally from its hitherto declared policy of nationalization of foreign owned plantations. In May it announced the post-. ponement of such nationalizations beyond the period of its constitutional life. The accompanying guarantees to foreign investors assure the continuance of Ceylon's economic subordination to imperialism and maintenance of Ceylon as a field of exploitation for predatory international capital. Thus the ME P government came out openly in its service
The rightward drift of the M E P government did not go forward without internal crisis. Especially at the beginning of this year this drift enabled considerable intrigue within the government party, leading to a public clash between various ministers. The crisis was surmounted on the basis of an agreed shift to the Right — the Minister of Agriculture and Food withdrew the tea nationalization proposals which he had placed before the cabinet. The way was thus paved for the later abandonment of tea nationalization itself. There not a murmur from the Minister of Agriculture and Food and his associates when the five-years' postponement of this subject was announced.
Events were thus exposing the M EP government's servitorship to the capitalist class when the May communal
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL explosion occurred. The behavior of the government in face of the explosion and after demonstrated clearly that the essential cementing factor of the MEP is Sinhalese communalism.
The May communal explosion did not of course come out of the blue. It derived from the whole previous course of MEP policy in the field of race relations and especially in regard to language. The essential aim of this policy is to relegate the Tamil community in Ceylon to a national status inferior to the status of the Sinhalese community. It is therefore a policy which is bound to evoke Tamil resistance ; and evoke resistance it did. The May explosion constituted an effort to crush Tamil resistance on the one hand and to sustain Tamil resistance on the other by mass direct action outside the bounds of the law.
The May explosion came on the heels of the Federal Party Convention's decision to launch Civil Disobedience by August 20th. Mass direct action undoubtedly began among the Sinhalese ; but it evoked a prompt response of the same character among the Tamils.
The attitude of the ME P government to the developing situation showed up the deep-rootedness of its Sinhalese communalism. In the initial stages when the main scene of the explosion was in the Sinhalese areas, it stood aside, hesitating to clash with the Sinhalese masses in communal action. When under the compulsion of events and of rising public opinion the government did at last intervene, it claimed that it had thereby forestalled a planned Tamil insurrection. Thus did it seek to justify itself and the Emergency repression to the Sinhalese communalists. Indeed, this amounted to an attempt to justify the Sinhalese communalists as a whole to public opinion.
6. THE TASK OF THE PARTY
A fundamental task of the Party in the period immediately ahead is to organize the working class thoroughly and to prepare it politically for the battles that lie ahead. It must be clearly understood by the Party that extending its political base in the working class should be given top priority. In the performance of this task the Party has the advantage that the working class has emerged from the May events substantially free from the communal infection. The sections which succumbed to communalism in the highly infective my environment of the last week of May can be won back to trade-union and political militancy without much difficulty. Further, there is reason to believe that the working class has not lost during the communal upsurge the militancy of the previous period. Held together by their unions in the workplaces at which they congregate, the workers have contrived to preserve their class solidarity and their class consciousness despite sectional lapses. The repressive conditions of the Emergency and the country-wide economic dislocation and decline ensure that this solidarity and consciousness will find militant expression.
An urgent task of the Party is to launch the struggle to win to the working-class banner the mass forces which are turning away from the M EP government or weakening in their adherence to it.
In the accomplishment of this vital task the Party has the advantage of the consequences of the Emergency repressions and the deteriorating economic situation.
The economic situation too is working against the ME P government both in the short-term consequences of the communal upsurge and in the long-term prospects. In the short-term consequences the central feature is the further shooting up of the already rising prices of essential commodities, due to general dislocation of the economy, the disorganization. of distribution, the contraction of credit, and actual shortages ' in production. In the long prospects the decisive fact is that the administrative disorganization and the demoralization of the administrative personnel render the operation of development plans ineffective even if the effort to take them in hand
55 is possible. Ceylon under the ME P government is faced not with economic development but with economic decline.
It is thus the task of the Party immediately to take up actively and militantly the economic grievances of the workers, the general grievances of the masses under the repression, and the questions of price rises, unemployment, refugee rehabilitation, and the like, which can unite the urban and rural masses in action. In agitation around these questions the Party must learn how, despite Emergency restrictions, to keep the idea of direct action alive among the masses; for it must be recognized that the readiness and ven the proneness of the masses for direct action has been a feature of the period of ME P rule. Indeed, the communa. upsurge of May was. in one way a perverse and undesirable expression of this proneness. The task is to harness the readiness for direct action to progressive political aims. In any event it is on the development of the readiness for direct action that depends the strength of the development of the trend to the Left and especially the evocation of a rural mass movement which can fuse with the movement of the working class. This feature in the mass situation is one of the advantages the Party must struggle to preserve and develop in the coming period.
A special task of the Party in the present situation is to struggle for every possible easing of the Emergency laws insofar as they hamper the class struggle, and ultimately to struggle for the removal of the Emergency itself. The Party must grasp and know how to make the masses understand that the Emergency, proclaimed in view of the communal situation, is desirable and convenient to the M EP government in respect of the class situation. It is a way of imposing class peace and preventing hostile political activity to the advantage of the M EP government. The task of the Party in this field is to struggle to clear the way for the excercise of normal democratic rights by the masses (freedom of speech, meeting, assembly, functioning of trade unions and other organizations of the masses; civil liberties, normal legal process, etc etc). It is also a special task of the Party to struggle militantly and directly against communalism and communalist politics on every front.
In the fight against communalism we have many weapons. Of these the most powerful are the disruption of normal life and activity which communalism has already brought and the danger of the splitting of the country into two hostile states which the recent upsurge has made real. There is also the plain fact that the Sinhala Only policy can be forced on • the Tamils only by extraordinary methods which set up the continuing danger of a military police dictatorship. Incidentally, these are also facts which can be used to hinder the drift to the UNP
In connection with the task of fighting communalism it is necessary to prepare the masses to resist the increasingly insistent effort of the Sinhalese communalists to extend the communal struggle violently to another front. Anti-Indianism is being peddled once more by these politicians with the same recklessness that has been shown in conducting the antiTamil campaign. If the anti-Indian campaign is launched, the most compact, numerous, and strategically placed worker mass within the working class and in the country will run the danger of being diverted to a violent communalism of its own. This can only damage the working-class movement and weaken the class struggle of workers. On the other hand the Indian workers are so situated and organized that they can fight back against Sinhalese communal violence with an overwhelming violence of their own. If such resistance is conducted by them along the lines of the class struggle, it will strengthen the working-class movement generally in the fight against communalism and against the capitalist class itself. It will be a Party task of fundamental importance to prepare the non-Indian section of the working class generally to resist anti-Indianism. This will be an important part of the process of politicizing the working class. The politicizing of the Indian workers and the strengthening in them of a consciousness of their Ceyloneseness must of course go
56 : simultaneously forward as part of the process of politicizing the working class.
Although the capitalist class, smarting under the electoral defeat of 1956 and heartened by the weakness of the government still makes the government the principal objects of its attack, nevertheless it should be remembered that at any decisive moment it will, considering the LS SP to be principal enemy, launch a ceaseless offensive against
7. THE CENTRAL AGITATIONAL SLOGAN
The tasks set out above sum up into the overall task of immediately and sharply stepping up the struggle against the M EP government and of directing that struggle determinedly towards the earliest possible replacement of that government by a government which can heal the communal rift, carry through a programme of radical economic measures for the planned reconstruction of the country, and reestablish and deepen the democratic rights of the people and defend the independence of the country. The sharp rightward shift of the government to the open servitorship of local and foreign capital, the turn in its communal policy to the holding down of the Tamils in the interest of Sinhalese communalism, and the threat to the very existence of a single and independent Ceylon which this represents, the fact that government has reached the point where it finds it difficult to maintain a normal democratic administration any more, and the manifest inability of the government to arrest the economic decline of the country and to lift it on to the road of planned economic development, all render this task not only necessary but urgent.
The time has come to call for the overthrow of the ME P government.
the MEP government was installed in April 1956, the L S S P could not realistically pose before the masses the task of the overthrow of the M EP government. Indeed, it incorrect to make such a call. The masses had risen enthusiastically in the elections of 1956 to defeat the UNP and to instal the M EP in its place because they took the latter to be a socialistic coalition which would be the people's instrument in challenging and defeating vested interests. There was also the fact that the communalistic policies commanded widespread support among the Sinhalese masses, who in their majority totally rejected the LSS P proposal to give Tamil parity of status with Sinhalese as an official language. The task of the Party in that situation was to provide the masses with every assistance in progressively recognizing the character of the M EP regime as one which, despite the socialistic demagogy of its propaganda, was bound hand and foot to the capitalist system, neither solve the economic problems of the masses nor even settle the communal problems, which were becoming growing-
To bring the masses progressively to the point where would recognize in the MEP government not their own instrument but that of the capitalists, the LS SP decided: a) to its uncompromising leadership to the class struggles of the masses which were obviously impending, and b) in the parliamentary arena to be in opposition, while offering the ME P government "responsive coöperation" in the implementation of the progressive measures contemplated in their election programme. So far as the language communal problems were concerned, the LS S P decided on a programme of "patient explanation" directed mainly towards the Sinhalese masses infected with communalism.
As time went on, the naïve confidence shown by the broad in the new regime began to give place to some disillusionment regarding the capacity or readiness of the M EP government to tackle economic problems. This was increased by the rise of living costs and the growth of unemployment, particularly as it affected intelligentsia elements who had expected great things from the Sinhala Only policy. Corresponding to this change in the mass situation, LS SP changed the form of its opposition in parliament to
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL one of "generalized criticism" of the MEP government, with support only for specific measures which could be recognized as progressive.
From the latter part of 1957 a new political situation developed, chiefly as a result of the strike struggles of the working class under conditions where the government was embarrassed by its deteriorating financial position and the soaring cost of living for the masses. In this period, which ended with the May 1958 communal explosion, the MEP government showed more and more openly that it was placing all its hopes on foreign loans and on winning the coöperation of the capitalist class. It made decisive moves to cement an alliance with the bourgeoisie; open strikebreaking of the crudest type with the police was by an open renunciation of further nationalization plans and a guarantee to foreign investments.
Already on the eve of the May communal explosion the L S S P recognized that the time had come for a call to the masses to replace the MEP government with an anticapitalist government. Nevertheless, in view of the persisting illusions in the government among sections of the masses, the L S S P regarded a call for the overthrow of the M EP government as still premature. But the May communal explosion, the Emergency that was declared, and the results developments, have so heavily eroded illusions in the government that a call for the overthrow of the ME P government becomes not only necessary but also real. It is a call which can and will evoke a mass response.
The call for the overthrow of the ME P government requires to be accompanied in the present situation with a call to the masses to replace the ME P government with the correct alternative. Further, specific enough to be an agitational slogan : namely, a slogan which defines not only the class nature of the government to be established but also its political composition. Specifically the slogan must answer the question : which party is to be entrusted with the task of governing.
As things stand today, the only national political party which can form a government that can heal the communal rift, carry through a programme of radical economic measures or the planned reconstruction of the country, and reëstablish and defend the democratic rights of the people and the independence of the country, is the LSSP. We must therefore accompany the call for the overthrow of the M EP government with a call for the establishment of an LS S P government.
Regarding the L S S P government slogan two things must be grasped. On the one hand its object is to give a concrete content to the Party's permanent propaganda slogan of a Workers and Peasants Government. On the other hand it must be clearly understood that there is room within an LS SP government for others who are ready to take the course of decisive anti-capitalist measures, including the nationalization of banks, plantations, etc, and the implementation of the Party's language policy.
It is to be stressed that this central agitational slogan
"Down with the MEP government; forward to an L S S P government" - defines a task which is capable of becoming immediate quite suddenly. This possibility flows from the deep-going instability of the general political situation.
This instability is the product of the interplay of several factors. To begin with, the government has not the confidence of either the working class or the capitalist class. Big capital is actively intriguing against it; and capital generally, faced with a decline of profits, is actively discontented with the government. The working class is in active hostility to it. What with the disheartenment of its Sinhalese and Buddhist communalist backers and the general narrowing of its mass base, the government has no firm base from which to manœuvre in the situation. There is then the continued estrangement of the Sinhalese and the Tamil communities, marking the failure of the government's communalist policies. The rapid growth of unemployment and the ever rising
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL prices of essential commodities, reflecting the backsliding of the national economy, introduce an explosive element into the situation which the sharpening struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can spark off suddenly, and conditions of apparent calm can give way precipitately to conditions of storm and upsurge.
The prevailing political instability reaches into the government itself and the government party. Despite outward apearances of a coming together, the group struggle withir oth the government and the government party, which has characterized the M EP government since its inception, becomes acute. Since these groups are guided principally by the pursuit of power and position, they react unpredictably to the pressures and counter-pressures of competing and clashing external forces. It is therefore always possible that, especially in a period of mass action, the government will suddenly fall apart and the government party, containing as it does so many politically unstable and indeterminate petty-bourgeois elements, get blown to pieces.
Of all the possible variants in the further development of he present political situation, there are broadly four o which we should take account. Two of these fall withir the framework of constitutional procedures and two fall
Of the constitutional processes which are possible, one is
57 a general election through the defeat or threat of defeat of the government. The other, which is less likely, is a regroupparties, political groups, and elements within extra-constitutional processes we must take into account one, which is rather remote at present but which is always there as a possibility, especially in the Emergency, i e, a military coup from the right. The other is a mass uprising.
It is impossible to prophesy which one of these outcomes is likely in any particular situation and it is necessary grasp that they not mutually exclusive developments. The situation is such that any one development can merge in the other and be intermixed with it; and each may also alternate with the other in rapid and contradictory succession.
The Party must intervene in these developments view to the resolution a progressive direction of the governmental and political crisis.
To do so effectively, the Party must acquire the necessary flexibility for quick manœuvre. In utilizing bilities of the situation and of every turn of the situation, the Party will drive forward to its objective of the overthrow
From the Archives of Marxism