[The following article has been taken from La Gauche, the weekly paper of the Ligue Révolutionnaire des Travailleurs (Revolutionary Workers' League, the Belgian section of the Fourth International). The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Ceylon has been ruled since 1970 by a coalition government composed of the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom party [SLFP], led by Mrs. Bandaranaike, and two reformist parties, the Lanka Sama Samaja party [LSSP] and the Communist party. This regime has followed a consistent antiworking-class policy reflecting a steady disintegration of the basis underlying the country's traditional economic and political structures.
Ceylon has experienced a growth in public education, in democratic rights for the workers' movement, and in the standard of living of the masses, quite unlike the other countries in South Asia. Its economy, resting on the one hand on a small-landowning peasantry and on the other, on rubber, tea, and coconut plantations oriented entirely to the export market, provided the material base for this development.
The political life of the country, centered around a parliament divided between a traditional "right" (the United National party) and a "left" dominated initially by the LSSP and later by the coalition, reflected these relatively stable social conditions.
Sharpening economic and social contradictions put an end to this idyll. A rate of industrialization lagging behind population growth resulted in an enormous mass of unemployedmostly educated young people - in the countryside, to whom the successive governments of the "right" and "left" could offer no perspectives.
A chronic deficit in the balance of payments and in the budget led to the disappearance of the basis for financing extensive social services. Ceylon came under the domination of the international credit system. The International Monetary Fund demanded an austerity policy, the price 1274
of which would be paid by the masses, and the present government has persistently carried one out. A process of radicalization has turned the working masses more and more away from electoralist and parliamentary illusions and given them an entirely different perspective for achieving socialism.
In the grip of a deepening crisis of its system, the Ceylonese bourgeoisie has been resorting for ten years to two main weapons-division and repression.
The Ceylonese working masses are divided into four major categoriesthe urban proletariat, the plantation workers, the poor peasantry working their own land, and occasional wageworkers (the unemployed) in the countryside and in the cities. These masses have different ethnic origins and religious traditions; they speak different languages.
For years, while it was a section of the Fourth International, the LSSP educated the Ceylonese proletariat in the principles of internationalist working-class unity, swimming courageously against the chauvinist current. When it broke with Trotskyism in 1964 and entered into a coalition with the SLFP wing of the bourgeoisie, it abandoned this revolutionary tradition, becoming a promoter of ethnic division.
Along with the CP, it supported the government's policy of making Sinhala the only official language and denying the rights of citizenship to the majority of plantation workers, even threatening to deport hundreds of thousands of them back to India.
This policy of division progressively reduced the striking power and the united thrust of the proletariat and the Ceylonese working masses. As a result, a rapid politicization took place among the rebel youth essentially outside the framework of the organized workers' movement and without any organic connection with the urban masses. By a policy of growing repression, the government was thus able to provoke this youth into insurrectionary actions and to crush it in April 1971 in a bloodbath in which
15,000 young persons were massacred and thousands interned without trial, and in which torture and rape were perpetrated on a grand scale.
The coalition government took adine coannon government look duvantage of this opportunity also to proclaim a state of emergency, which it has maintained to the present day (for eighteen months!), to ban strikes, impose a severe censorship on the press, postpone elections for seven years, and introduce a court system considerably reducing the rights of the defense.
For a year the Ceylonese proletariat has seemed stunned by the succession of betrayals, divisions, and repressions to which it has been subjected. But there are increasing signs of a revival in progress. And our comrades of the LSSP (R [revolutionary]), the Ceylonese section of the Fourth International, are playing the preponderant role in paving the way for and organizing the reunification of the masses and the resurgence of mass struggles.
After some small skirmishes, the first strike has defied the government's state of emergency and its ban on all work stoppages. The leader is a member of the LSSP(R). This strike, which has partially paralyzed economic activity throughout the island, could not be broken because of the resistance that arose even in the unions still controlled by government parties, the LSSP and the CP. Its outcome remains uncertain.
The government finally dragged before its tribunals thirty-two leaders of the revolutionary youth organization, , the JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna -People's Liberation Front], including the main leader, Comrade Wijeweera. Our comrade Bala Tampoe, the general secretary of the LSSP (R), is one of the principal defense lawyers. There is a constant stream of : relatives of other prisoners, coming from some of the most remote villages of the island, through the offices of the Ceylon Mercantile Union, which Comrade Tampoe also heads.
Through this cooperation, an alliance is being knit little by little between the Sinhala peasantry and rural unemployed and the urban proletariat.
Since public demonstrations are strictly forbidden, the masses transformed the funerals of Philip and Robert Goonewardena, two founders of the workers' movement in Ceylon, into powerful antigovernment rally. Thirty thousand persons followed the funeral cortege, which ended up in a mass meeting. The audience prevented representatives of the government parties from taking the podium. Only Comrade Bala Tampoe was able to address the crowd.
The struggle against the ferocious repression that has swept down on the youth of the country has been made very difficult by the censorship. Any public mention of the word "repression" is forbidden by the army. Under these conditions, our comrades came up with the idea of organizing a special kind of protest on October 18- a general hunger strike.
This initiative, launched by the CMU, was an enormous success. A million persons took part. It was prepared by a campaign of mass meetings throughout the country organized by the CMU. Three of these rallies, held respectively in Colombo, Jaffna, and Kolonnawa, each had an attendance of about a thousand. Everywhere, moreover, the halls rented were full, despite the fact that in most places the police prevented any distribution of leaflets or written announcements of the meetings.
But the essential thing about the October 18 general hunger strike was its united character, re-cementing the unity of the working masses. In fact, for the first time since the racist turn of the LSSP and the CP in 1964, the powerful union of the Tamil plantation workers, the CWC, participated in a joint action with Sinhala sections of the working class, turning the hunger strike into a strike pure and simple. About 300,000 agricultural workers did not go to work that day. The smallest of the three trade-union confederations on the island, which formerly followed the Sinhala chauvinist line, joined in the movement. Speakers of Sinhala origins spoke before Sinhala crowds; Tamils to Tamil crowds. The JVP prisoners now on trial also participated in the hunger strike.
Thus, the different sectors of the Ceylonese working masses, who for ten years have been divided by the criminal policy of the traditional reformist leaders, are beginning again, under the impetus of our Ceylonese comrades, to join ranks in a mighty bloc.
Forming a new revolutionary leadership for the reunifying masses- that November 20, 1972
is the principal task that remains to be accomplished in Ceylon. The LSSP(R) is still a very weak organization, but this aim must be achieved, if this tortured island is at last to be able to look forward to a victorious anti-imperialist, socialist revolution.