(The following interview appeared in the March 17 issue of Inprecor, a fortnightly news bulletin published by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.]
We are publishing below an interview with Bala Tampoe, general-secretary of the Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU, originally a white-collar union which has since gained a base among other sectors of workers) and one of the leaders of the Revolutionary Marxist party (RM), Ceylonese section of the Fourth International. In this interview, which was taken February 2, 1977, Comrade Tampoe draws the first lessons of the strikes that swept Sri Lanka between December 1976 and January 1977. The government crisis has worsened since then, and the situation is evolving rapidly. Faced with the danger that the Communist party and the opposition might make a motion of censure in parliament, Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike has suspended National Assembly sessions until May 19, three days before the parliament's term runs out. Concurrently, the cabinet decided to lift the state of emergency that has been in effect since March 16, 1971. The reemergence of about twenty publications banned since 1973 has also been authorized, and the universities, closed since November 1976, are to reopen on February 21. It was difficult for the government to maintain the state of emergency while suspending the parliament sessions which are supposed to ratify the extension of the emergency on a monthly basis.
But this combined resort to the carrot and the stick did not enable Bandaranaike to avert aggravation of the government crisis. The Communist party (pro-Moscow) has resigned from the government, in which it had been represented by its secretary-general, P. Keuneman.
Five members of parliament and the minister of industry and scientific research, Subasinghe, have quit the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom party (SLFP). The government coalition formed with the elections of 1970 has thus ceased to exist. In fact, the departure of the CP had been preceded in September 1975 by the expulsion of the Lanka Sama Samaja party (LSSP- Ceylon Equal Society party, a party of Trotskyist origin which has since become reformist), so Bandaranaike's SLFP thus remains in the government alone. And this party itself seems to be suffering great internal tensions.
On February 25 Bandaranaike announced that the next legislative elections would be held in six months. The CP, even though it is now in the opposition, is putting forward a very moderate line. It defends its previous participation in the government in the name of solidarity against the right, declares that it is prepared to support any "progressive" measures the cabinet may take, and is issuing appeals to the "left" of the SLFP. The CP may participate, along with the forces that have split from the SLFP, in the "Socialist United Front" that has been called for by the LSSP.
The development of the situation during the month following the end of the December-January strike wave thus confirms that the masses were not beaten, despite the failure of the mobilization for their demands, and that the Bandaranaike cabinet is now on the defensive politically.
Question. Can you give us an overall view of the events of December 1976 and January 1977, of the context in which the transport strike took place?
Answer. The strikes started in mid- December, in a railway repair shop, and quickly turned into a general strike of all the main categories of workers in this industry. Rail transport was completely paralyzed from December 21-22 to January 13, that is, for about three weeks. (See Inprecor, No. 66, January 27, 1977)!
At first the strikes were essentially spontaneous. But for reasons relating to the structure of the Ceylonese workers movement, to which I will return later on, three parties were especially involved in the development of these strikes: the LSSP the CP, and the UNP (United National party-the rightist bourgeois party- Inprecor). Each of these parties reacted differently to the confrontation that shaped up between the workers and the government after the strikers rejected the government's proposal for a compromise on their demand for bonuses of 500 rupees, which was the original demand of the strike. The LSSP decided to help in hardening up the strike in order to put pressure on the government, to weaken it by forcing the CP to quit. The CP tried to avert the broadening of the movement, but was forced to follow the stream while waiting for a more favorable moment to impose a compromise. The UNP also played a double game and was forced to declare support for the workers in struggle.
In fact, discontent among the workers of the public sector had been building up for a long time. They had many unsatisfied demands, including wage problems and their demand for a sliding scale guaranteeing wage increases of 2.50 rupees for every one-point increase in the cost of living index (this measure was won in the private sector many years ago mainly thanks to the action of the CMU). In the private sector, as well as in some state companies to which the advantages of the private sector have been extended, bonuses are distributed at the end of the year on the basis of the profits made. In the absence of the sliding scale and these bonuses, most workers in the public sector suffer heavily from inflation, even though they can be considered relatively privileged compared to the rest of the working class in that they benefit from greater job security and various other advantages such as pensions, transport cards, and so on.
During the period when the LSSP was in the government the workers hoped their demands would be met essentially through the action of the LSSP and the CP. But this expectation was not fulfilled; there were only occasional and arbitrary wage increases.
The movement that started in December 1976 was thus the result of six or seven years during which inflation was developing. One of the major lessons of this strike, in fact, is the confirmation of the failure, from the standpoint of defending the interests of the workers, of the long period of government collaboration of the LSSP and CP. This return to class-struggle action was made possible by the expulsion of the LSSP from the government in September 1975. A year after this expulsion, the cumulative effect of the lack of satisfaction of the workers demands reached the breaking point.
The government responded by threatening repression. It brandished the Essential Services Order, which dates from March 1971. This law calls for the automatic layoff of all strikers, but it is not always applied. Generally it is simply brandished to prevent the outbreak of a strike or to make strikers go back to work. In this sense, the December-January strikes were illegal from the outset. But the depth of the mobilization made it difficult for the government to defeat it. On January 6 the government issued an ultimatum enjoining the workers to return to work. Not only did the strikers refuse, but new sectors entered into struggle, among them the government clerical workers.
In addition to the railway workers (about 30,000 of whom were on strike), the government clerical workers (10,000), transport workers in the port of Colombo (5,000), Ceylon Transport Board workers (about 50,000), and many municipal employees (also about 50,000) were involved in the mobilization. Although the figure of 400,000 strikers advanced in the article published in Inprecor was a bit exaggerated, it is true that the strike mobilization was no less broad and militant.
It could have won, even without extend. ing to new sectors. The determination of the workers was great; they showed that. Nevertheless, after a second ultimatum from the government and a hardening of the repression, the strike was stopped. At some point, around January 12, the workers began to understand that victory had passed out of their reach. They lacked effective leadership and were beginning to feel the disintegrating effects of this. This question of the leadership of the strike is essential in understanding the evolution of the battle and its ultimate failure.
Each of the parties controlling major unions in the sectors of striking public employees maneuvered in line with their own objectives. Clear slogans appropriate to a general strike were never raised. They thus left themselves open to government attacks denouncing the strikes as a political operation of the opposition. The participation of the CP in the strike despite its membership in the cabinet convinced the prime minister to hit hard. Felix Bandaranaike, assigned by the prime minister to deal with the strike, made it clear that the CP would have to choose between supporting the government and supporting the strike. And it was obvious that in practice the CP was primarily supporting the government. It was seeking to end the strike and gave the government all the necessary information about the real state of the movement in the workshops and within the leadership. Thanks to this, the government was able to immediately exploit any decline in morale, any division that cropped up.
The orientation of the LSSP and the CP even blocked the formation of a broad united front in defense of the strikers. A trade-union front in fact was constituted in many sectors, often dominated by the LSSP, with the participation of the unions of the CP and UNP. But they never tried to broaden this front to the CMU and other unions that play an essential role in the private sector and the plantations, which are grouped in the Trade Union Coordinating Committee (TUCC). The LSSP sought to draw the CMU into the struggle without making contact with it, without inviting it officially. For our part, we called for a meeting of the TUCC, of which the CMU is one of the motor forces.
Our proposal was to call for a token general strike to respond to the government's threats. But the Maoist leader Sagnmugathasan, a member of the TUCC, opposed this proposal, because, he said, the strike was political. In other words, he
BALA TAMPOE
took the same position as the government. He also believed that the strike was going to fail. The CMU finally decided to call a token general strike with those unions of the TUCC that agreed to express their solidarity with the workers in struggle. But the strike ended before this decision was implemented.
The disorientation of the movement due to the lack of effective leadership and the maneuvers of the apparatuses had already been felt, in fact. The extension of the strike to the bus drivers failed. On January 12, when the LSSP appealed to the Ceylon Federation of Labor, the major union under its control in the sector of nationalized companies, only one section in an important company went on strike: the union in the Ceylon Tobacco Companyand only for twenty-four hours at that. If the workers of this branch refused to move into action despite the directives of the LSSP and the UNP and the lip-service support of the CP, it was because they knew that the united front had not been realized and that the CMU was not in the movement.
Q. Why did the leadership of this strike fall into the hands of the LSSP, CP, and UNP? Can you go back to the point about the structure of the union movement in Sri Lanka, especially in the public and nationalized sectors affected by the strike?
A. The centralized trade-union organization of the workers of this sector runs into particular difficulties. The workers in the nationalized sector, whatever category they belong to, do not have the legal right to organize in the same unions as the workers of the private sector. This is because of a reactionary law that was maintained by the government of the LSSP, CP, and SLFP, as it had been before by the UNP government. It also bans state employees in any particular sector, such as the railways, from uniting in the same organization. The trade-union movement has to be organized in category structures by profession, which means many unions, one for conductors, one for engineers, one for ticket-checkers, one for signalmen, for white-collar employees, and so on. In the course of this strike, thirty-three different railway unions coordinated their action.
It is thus very difficult for a trade-union current outside this sector to penetrate it. The LSSP's base here goes back thirty years, to 1947, when the first important strike of the employees of the public sector broke out. And in those days the LSSP was not what it is today. Besides, the workers of these sectors affiliate mainly to unions that are controlled by the government parties, as a guarantee. A guarantee that the RMP is far from providing. Right now, it is probable that the SLFP, LSSP, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the CP equally share numerical influence within the public services (about 325,000 employees each). Given that there are also many small unions not officially controlled by any of these parties, it is difficult to make any precise estimate. But the rate of unionization in this sector is clearly very hif would say that in the public services the SLFP is the weakest (generally including workers of backward consciousness). The LSSP would be the strongest, and the CP second. But in the sector of nationalized companies the SLFP controls important organizations and is probably the strongest, while the LSSP and the CP, which seem to be about equal, come in second.
The three trade-union federations controlled by these parties thus include many members, but in a dispersed and not very efficient manner. This deep division of their own ranks prevents them from effectively coordinating a strike. The CMU, although much weaker numerically, is able to organize much greater centralized action. This is the lesson we try to draw for the working class. You need a union leadership that can really unify the workers in struggle and propose central slogans of struggle. I think that the results would have been very different if we had been leading the transport strike.
The UNP has considerable support in the public sectors, because it was in the government for a long time. And also because many government employees are politically conservative. It thus controls a series of unions. They also exist in the nationalized sectors, but as far as I know, nowhere does the UNP represent a force in itself. In some places, though, its support to an initiative can be important for the development of a struggle.
In the private sector the TUCC is far ahead of the SLFP, LSSP, CP, and UNP in terms of action capacity, thanks to the presence of the big central plantation unions and the CMU. The main base of the CMU is in import-export, among the whitecollar workers, the industrial workers, and in some nationalized companies such as the Port Cargo Corporation (dockers).
The TUCC was formed last year and became a reality of the union movement last November 16, when a meeting was held by the seven unions that compose it. Among these seven unions are the very important Ceylon Workers' Congress (main union of the plantation workers) and Ceylon Estate Staff Union (main united union of plantation employees). Also in the TUCC is the Ceylon Trade Union Federation, led by Maoists (not to be confused with the CFTU, which is pro- Moscow). This union is very weak right now, but its principal leader, Sagnmugathasan, remains a figure in the workers movement. (He was the secretary-general of the CP until 1963, when he split over the Sino-Soviet conflict).
There is thus a rather deep division between trade-union structure in the private sector and plantations on the one hand and in the public sector on the other. But my feeling is that after this strike, for the first time, a new leadership can emerge among the workers of the public and nationalized sector. The relative hegemony of the LSSP in particular is being challenged. It is the LSSP that had preponderant weight in the conduct of the strike, and the strike's failure is thus its failure. Based on thirty years experience the workers are in a position to realize that the leadership of the LSSP is bankrupt.
Q. What relation can you draw between the December-January strikes and the 1976 actions, the general strike in February and the student struggles of November?
A. In fact, it is important to keep the twenty-four-hour general strike that took place on February 20, 1976, in mind. (See Inprecor, No. 49, April 15, 1976.) This strike was organized against a government threat to lay off 2,000 striking workers. The initiatives of the CMU and the decision by the trade-union coordinating committee of the LSSP, SLFP, and CP (the Joint Committee of Trade Union Organisation) to call a token strike guaranteed the success of the action. This strike created a very important feeling of
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confidence and solidarity within the working class—in all sectors, among them, and this is very important, the Ceylon Transport Board. It seemed as though not a single bus was rolling in the country on that day. All public transport was thus interrupted for the day, which helped a lot in spreading the general strike.
The success of this strike forms the background to the university struggles of late November 1976, which broke out after a student was shot down by the police. (See Inprecor, No. 64, December 9, 1976.)2 This was the broadest student mobilization we have ever seen. Not only did all the universities go on strike, but the highschool students also moved, taking to the streets to demonstrate, painting slogans on the buses, and so on. The interuniversity student federation invited the major union federations to meet with it. That was also the first time an initiative like that had been taken. In the past, this student federation was essentially controlled by the CP, through the Ceylon Students Union, and the LSSP. These leaderships had always banned participation by the CMU in such discussions. But this time, after the united experience of the general strike and in face of the scope of student reaction to the murder of one of their own, they could not avert a common meeting. This took place on November 15, and I made a proposal for a token general strike and a general work stoppage (hartal), which is something more than a strike. It means that the students do not go to class, the shopkeepers shut down in protest, and so on. I proposed that the objective of this strike be to condemn police terror against the population. After discussion, we added condemnation of the state of emergency and the demand for its abrogation. There were thus two clear goals to the struggle. All the conditions existed for an even broader mobilization than the February 20 strike. In the meantime, in fact, the TUCC had been formed and on November 16 it held a meeting to demand the end of the state of emergency. This meeting had originally been planned for November 12, before the murder of the student. But holding it just after the police murder attracted the attention of the working class to this event.
My proposal for a general strike was considered during the November 15 meeting, and it was decided to reconsider it on November 18. On the 16th, however, without having mentioned it before, even during the November 15 meeting, the LSSP issued a separate call for a strike on the 19th. This conflicted with the organization of a real general strike. The strike of November 19 failed, which was very significant in regard to what was to happen later, in December and January. Only the LSSP and UNP unions went on strike. The UNP had immediately affirmed its support to the strike call issued by the LSSP, understanding the interest it had in supporting an LSSP strike and averting a general strike. During this strike the LSSP was identified with the UNP. The CP newspaper denounced the strike as a conspiracy of these two parties against the government, thus contributing to creating confusion about the real intentions of the LSSP.
In my view it is this precedent that explains the failure of the call issued by the ISSP and the UNP, this time with the support of the CP, for the broadening of the strike. If a transport strike of the scope of the February 1976 strike had occurred then, I think the government would have been completely defeated and would not have survived this test. The LSSP thus paid a very heavy price for its conduct in November 1976. This is a very important point that has not been stressed enough. It must be added that we called for a general strike for November 26, 1976, and that the LSSP had to associate with it, formally at least, but it did nothing to assure its success.
Q. Can you explain the political implications of the latest events, since legislative elections are to take place soon?
A. It is clear that the opposition parties, directed by the UNP with the collaboration of the LSSP, are seeking to take advantage of this strike. During the strike they addressed the prime minister, supporting the demand for a loan of 500 rupees to be advanced to the workers. But the workers remember the measures taken by the UNP government during the strike of November 28, 1968, and the refusal to negotiate with the bank employees by N.M. Perera, LSSP leader, when he was minister of finance.
After the end of the strike, the government was still on the defensive. In fact, it had to deal with the combined effects of the strike, the attacks of the opposition parties, and the attacks of unions like the CMU
and TUCC. Popular sentiment against the government had become very strong. From this standpoint, it is significant that the population had never manif ested hostility to the strikers, in spite of the discomforts provoked by a prolonged interruption of public transport. It is this latent antigovernment hostility that the UNP and LSSP were counting on when they asserted their support to the struggle.
A series of repressive measures facilitated the defeat of the struggle: press censorship, the banning of meetings in the district of Colombo, dispersion of workers assemblies by the police, arrest of at least 100 workers under charges of inciting to strike in violation of the state of emergency. But because of these measures, the opposition parties were able to denounce the repressive character of the regime. The workers are not demoralized, in spite of the fact that they did not win their demands.
In Ratmalana, where the strike began, the government tried to divide the workers by making a distinction between those who had gone back to work after the first ultimatum, issued January 6, and those who went back after the second, adjusting the wage losses. But the reaction of the workers was immediate: all the workers went on strike again and forced the government to treat all the workers identically. This showed the great reserves that remain in- the working class. It also underscores the responsibility of the union leadership for the failure of the strike.
It was in this context, in which the prime minister and her cabinet had been thrown onto the defensive, that the opposition decided to make a motion of censure before the National Assembly. The government is now discredited among all the social sectors which had supported it in May 1970. The JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna-People's Liberation Front) had supported the government at that time, for its own reasons. The government crushed the JVP a little later. A majority of students had also supported the government. But they have been attacked by the authorities more than once since the elections of May 1970. A student was killed, and the regime lost their sympathy. The workers of the public and nationalized sector, who have backed the ISSP and CP, have given very important support to the government, and their functionaries are very influential, including in the villages and countryside. Now the regime has also alienated them.
That is why the government is on the defensive. I would say that the main beneficiary of the disintegration of the government coalition formed in 1970 is the UNP. From this standpoint, there has been a shift to the right among the voters. I do not think that the real left, that is, the sector in which we locate ourselves and which we call the "new left," will make appreciable gains. The destruction of the JVP has temporarily interrupted any possibility of leftist development among the rural semiproletariat.
Among the students the CP, whose influence had been very strong, has discredited itself because of its participation in the government. The LSSP is discredited too, because of its call for a separate strike on November 19.
The SLFP retains some mass base, even in the working class. But this base has been severely eroded. In the eyes of the masses, the LSSP's expulsion from the government in September 1975 symbolized the end of the "left" period of the SLFP. Now, the UNP appears today as the only credible alternative to an SLFP government. In my opinion we may thus predict the election results as follows: a reduction in the number of seats of the LSSP and the CP (which holds seven seats right now), and a strong reduction in the number of SLFP seats. The Federal party (Tamil) will probably retain the number of seats it has today, and the UNP will considerably expand its parliamentary group and may even win an absolute majority. Legislative elections will thus give rise to a new reactionary government under UNP leadership or a coalition led by a weakened SLFP having to face a very strong opposition party in the UNP.
period helise inhink has entered y
As for the LSSP, I think it has entered a domain as well, and I do not think it will be able to play a decisive role in either political or trade-union life after the general elections. The same goes for the CP. The traditional left, after a decade of open betrayal or confused policies, has lost some of its possibilities for action in the mass movement. It is clearly the right that is profiting from this for the moment, but at the same time this opens a breach through which the "new left" can grow.
Notes
1. See also Intercontinental Press, January 17, 1977, p. 13.-IP
2. See also Intercontinental Press, December 13, 1976, p. 1789.—IP