LS SP WARNS AGAINST RIGHTIST COUP, DEMANDS WORKERS' GOVERNMENT
Meeting on November 8, 1959 the central committee of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, Section of the Ith International, reaffirmed its resolution of October 16, 1959 analyzing the present situation in Ceylon and adopted an addendum to the resolution outlining the Party's present tasks. The C C issued the slogans: Down with the usurping Dahanayake government! Down with the conspirators and all their reactionary allies! Victory to a LSSP government!
The assassination of former premier Solomon Bandaranaike, leader of the Shri Lanka Freedom Party (SL FP) of small capitalists and rural petty-bourgeois, has focussed the discontent already widespread among all layers of the Ceylonese masses on the government and person of W Dahanayake, reactionary Sinhalese communalist and renegade from Trotskyism who took office following Bandaranaike's murder. The assassin, a Buddhist monk, was linked politically with communalist and ultra-Right elements in both leading bourgeois Parties (United National Party and SL FP). The masses, horrified at the murder, rightly conclude that the composition and political links of the Dahanayake government preclude it out a genuine investigation of the forces behind the plot.
The government, of a makeshift and thoroughly unstable character, rests on the support of ultra-reactionary and communalist elements of the Buddhist priesthood, on the one hand, and the most Rightist section of the urban the other. The former, enraged by the way, in which Bandaranaike was "dragging in the enforcing of communal legislation, determined on his removal; the latter, tired of the ex-premier's
"socialist" concepts and his failure to deal firmly enough with his "Marxist" wing (the Philip Gunawardena group), are now ready to turn once nore to an alliance with big capital (not necessarily in th form of a coalition with sections of the UNP, the oper Party of big business, though this is not excluded) against the dreaded advance of the mass forces, seeking to extend the anti-Right offensive represented by the or May 56. Bandaranaike's M EP coalition in the elections of May
Throughout the period of the Bandaranaike government Spiss of this, they fee not harpol by of perio and e Sinhalese big bourgeoisie as reliable agents, for three main reasons: they are too obviously the direct beneficiaries of
62 political bloodletting, and as such remain the obvious immediate target of the hostility and fury of the masses, aroused against the assassins; they are too closely tied to the Buddhist lunatic fringe, the Maha Sangha, openly embraced by the new premier as an ally at a time when the popularity of this sect is at its lowest for centuries; and, inally, they lack the basis for any kind of demagogic mass appeal, a basis provided in the first place by the Philip its expulsion from the government in May 1959) and even, to a lesser extent, by the personality of Bandaranaike himself.
The forces of big capital are therefore searching desperately for a political alternative to the crisis-ridden and highly unstable Dahanayake régime, whose internal dissensions and external unpopularity are such that it may at any moment go to the wall. These forces, faced with the (for them) extremely alarming prospect of an early general election, bringing with it the strong possibility of a triumph of the L S SP, have examined, and for the time being seemingly rejected, the propects of a Right UNP government (Sir John Kotelawala) or a coalition of the Dahanayake wing of the SLFP and the "Left" of the UNP (Dudley Senanayake.). For them, the most likely move is the attempt to push through a "cold" (i e "legal" and parliamentary) coup on the de Gaulle pattern, with the ubiquitous Sir Oliver Goonetilleke, governor-general and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, as "constitutional dictator." Goonetilleke, like Kotelawala and Senanayake (and indeed like Bandaranaike himself) was a high-placed civil servant and reliable stooge of the British before ›olitical "independence" was conferred on Ceylon by the Soulbury constitution of 1946. In this he was typical of the Ceylonese bourgeoisie which, unlike that of India, did not at any stage in its history wage even a partial struggle against imperialism. There is no doubt that he still retains the confidence and strong behind-scenes backing of the American and British embassies.
It is against this danger that the LSSP warns. The Party, solidly at the head of the industrial working class and with strong support among other important sections Indian plantation laborers, a big part of the salariat and urban intelligentsia and, above all, broad elements of the Tamil minority, attracted by the bold anti-chauvinist line
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL ary Dahanayake government. For the first time, in effect, there are serious chances of the Party opening a road for itself to the middle peasants and the rural poor, until now the prey of communalist elements of both communities and Manister of Agricture in the remay 1959 ME. ingera- of the Philip Gunawardena grouping (as ment Philip had introduced the popular Land and Paddy
With greater support and wider forces at its disposal then cetion proletariat, enth 5 2, yich from are d of the Party of he Ceylon proletariat, the LS SP, f its founding has so gallantly and unswervingly upheld he banner ot class struggle and international proletariat solidarity, of Marxism, prepares to reap the larvest 0j its years of patient and effective mass work. On the threshold of stormy new events, the Party is preparing its cadres for three eventualities, the most likely in the present conjuncture: a) A Rightist coup by the reactionary forces, fearful of the victory of the LSSP in countrywide elections, against the danger of which the Party continually warns the masses; b) A victory of the LS SP in the general election, imposing on the Party the responsibility of mobilizing the masses in extra-parliamentary action in support of the workers' government and in the defense of that government against the frenzied resistance of all reactionary elements; c) The possibility of an armed uprising of the workers and peasants to prevent the imosition of a Rightist dictatorship of a police-military type on the Burmese and Pakistani pattern, to which imperialism and the bourgeoisie may resort as a last desperate measure.
In the context, first of all, of the L SS P's fight for an electoral victory in March, perhaps on the basis of of partial agreement with other opposition groups Philip, who now calls his group the MEP), it is the task of Trotskyists in every country to begin immediately to mobilize the widest possible knowledge of the situation in Ceylon and support for the LS SP among the broadest layers of the Left.
Norway