Repudiate Gota’s debts, for a workers and peasants government!
The current crisis in Sri Lanka is a classic example of a revolutionary situation in its purest conceivable form. At such times a bold decisive approach is crucial.
After decades of deepening turmoil – uprisings, general strikes, insurrections, communal riots, pogroms, ethnic bloodbaths, massacres, coups and a bloodthirsty civil war lasting almost three decades – civilised life in Sri Lanka today stands on a precipice. Exhausted by daily power cuts lasting up to twelve hours, people are forced to stand in eight-hour queues for supplies of kerosene; hospitals are shutting down and patients dying for want of medication; newspapers cease publication and students are unable to sit examinations for lack of paper. Police and hired thugs are savagely attacking defenceless protesters.
While ruling with military support, state power is brittle and disintegrating, its last vestiges of authority bled dry by years of plunder, nepotism and runaway corruption. An explosion of popular outrage has left the country with no government and no coherent parliamentary majority, just a universally reviled president dangling helplessly in mid-air, barely clutching on to office by his fingernails.
Lieutenant-Colonel Gotabaya Rajapaksa is the first military officer to be elected president and also the first to have no previous elected office. He is a classical bonapartist, having risen politically first by crushing the JVP youth insurrection in 1987-9 and then serving as Defence Secretary in his brother’s administration in 2005. In this position he celebrated killing the Tamil Tigers’ leader Velupillai Prabhakaran in 2009 and bringing about a crushing defeat of the Tamil insurgency.
During the war the economy grew by around 5% annually; thereafter it has stumbled along to achieve even 2% growth. Facing low growth, a looming crisis deeper than during the war, the pandemic, a decline in tourism and greater indebtedness, he adopted zig-zag changes in policy, including a sudden burst of tax cuts leading to budgetary pressures, adamant insistence on organic farming when the country was not prepared, and reckless borrowing from China and elsewhere to build the port infrastructure.
These resolute economic policies were manifestations of reckless haphazard roller-coaster free marketeering, adopted against advice with a certainty which rested on his military background, shunning any wheeling and dealing with politicians and seeking to build a lasting family dynasty with his personal stamp on all things. His bonapartism involved rising above society rather than balancing between the classes.
The current endless protests have suddenly been met with blood and iron. Desperate times brought desperate measures. When his brother the prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa tendered his resignation amid the economic crisis, this cleared the way for the use of the iron fist rather than peaceful negotiations. When his house was used as a staging post for violent attacks on protesters, in response it was burned to the ground. A national curfew was enforced by the army, leading to the deaths of protesters and opposition members of parliament. His party offices, shops and politicians’ houses have been set on fire in the provinces.
The policy of the iron fist used by the Gota dynasty show a firmer determination to hang on to power. Evidently this executive president was unwilling to go even when the bourgeois saw that this would be wise. Instead he is unleashing violence and threats of “ethnic conflict” in attempting to crush the resistance. Apparently he is now at the naval base from which the British colonial state had operated and is surrounded with reinforcements. With his own military background, the president is assured of military support until that grip is broken; he commands the loyalty of the military and is turning the guns against the protesters.
This brings a new prospect of rising violence and military brute force, and a possible military coup. If the state is becoming dependent on military force alone, this guarantees that there can be no success in the opposition’s plan to form a new government, as envisaged by the national bourgeoisie. The democratic demand for the abolition of the executive presidency can only be achieved by driving through fundamental constitutional reforms – an objective to which the opposition parties will not commit themselves. There is a parliamentary impasse.
While still keeping the military option open, Gota is playing games with the corrupt political elite in the hope of winning back some political credibility and drawing back from disaster. He has appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe, the five-times prime minister, to try to head a “unity” government with cross-party support. Inevitably, many opposition MPs will be tempted to accept ministerial positions, but they will be crushed between Gota’s demands and the continuing starvation forced on the people.
Wickremesinghe’s first statement was to promise more pain and suffering for at least another year, relieved only by further international loans to the Gota regime. Any loans will depend on the assurance of a “stable” government: a regime with at least thin gloves around its iron fist. “I have clearly told the president and other political party leaders that unless political stability is established in the next two weeks I will step down,” he has said. “Without political stability, it doesn’t matter who runs the central bank; there will be no way to stop the economic deterioration.”
International capital – whether from China, India or the IMF – will insist on acceptance of Gota’s continued rule and on continuing starvation. Any government now will have accepted a poisoned chalice and hatred from the people.
No significant economic concessions are possible, given the deep indebtedness of the state. Existing loans have been defaulted on, and the bourgeois solution – an IMF loan – will necessitate “restructuring the economy”, meaning inevitable cuts in public spending and further attacks on the living conditions of the working class. The battle lines are drawn for an all-out struggle which goes beyond the removal of Gota and the Rajapaksa clan.
Sri Lanka is a country in which the labour movement once had proud socialist traditions, and which in the early years of independence achieved rates of social welfare, literacy, health care, and education unparalleled in the Indian sub-continent and the whole ex-colonial world. This was the outcome of militant campaigning by a mass socialist party with a strong Marxist tradition, which in 1953 led the historic hartal – an island-wide mass uprising. The inspiring traditions of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party in its early days have now dwindled to a faint memory – but now is the time for its heirs to fight to rebuild them.
An indefinite general strike has been called with the support of 2,000 trade unions – a mass uprising on the scale of the 1953 hartal. It is necessary to issue an urgent public appeal, by whatever means possible – in print, online, at meetings and in constant personal discussions – for the immediate formation of joint action committees bringing together trade union representatives, farmers, small business owners, plantation workers, currently unorganised workers, women’s organisations, students, Tamil groups, Muslims and other oppressed minorities, etc., to take over the essential functions of production and distribution. We can reasonably assume that such tasks are already being tackled at least on an improvised makeshift level on a local scale, just as happened spontaneously in the course of the general strikes in Britain in 1926, France in 1968, and in similar circumstances worldwide. All that is needed is to link up these informal manifestations of dual power into an executive organ of revolution.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s days are undoubtedly numbered. “Gota will go”. But how, and through what steps? It is not enough to call merely for the dismissal of the current president; it is necessary to raise the demand for the overthrow of the entire parasitic corrupt ruling class that has brought society to this impasse; to sweep away the whole rotten edifice of the old regime. In April 1917, Lenin urged the insurgent workers, soldiers and peasants to place no trust in the clique of liberal politicians who had hastily occupied the seat vacated by the deposed Tsar, urging no trust in the bourgeois government, and calling for power to be taken into the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants. So too in Sri Lanka today, an immediate appeal should be made to all the trade unions and established mass organisations, and to any informal bodies thrown up in the course of this struggle, as well as to all left and radical parties and groups, with a proposal for joint action to promote this same goal.
Despite the repressive onslaught, it is inevitable that insurgency will grow and squeeze the opposition parties between the masses and the recalcitrant regime. Worker, peasant and youth resistance should be constituted by convening self-defence committees based on popular assemblies in the farms, villages, towns and workplaces to drive Gotabaya Rajapaksa from power and undermine his authority over the army rank and file.
Rather than demanding “power to the people” – a deliberately ambiguous formula which could end in merely replacing the current regime with an equally rotten rival parliamentary clique – it is necessary to fight for power to be taken by the workers who produce the wealth, in alliance with the students and the youth, the peasants, the super-exploited tea plantation workers, the Tamil minority crushed under the military jackboot and the other oppressed minorities; for a democratic socialist Sri Lanka, linking hands with the struggles of workers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and the entire sub-continent for a socialist federation.
Continued autocratic corrupt rule means deepening misery. The struggle for food, fuel and control over the collapsing economy will only be possible through workers’ democracy in Sri Lanka. This is an international struggle as well as one based on national territory. It is already clear that China and India are in firm support of the rising dictatorship, just as they are in the case of the Myanmar military dictatorship.
Solidarity comes from the international working class, not organs of big business, the IMF, or dictators and rising despots. So quite what to say: finance capital from China, India or the IMF will require or demand even greater austerity than the people are suffering now. We have to constitute workers committees of self-defence and control in the villages, town and city centres to ensure the poorest get food and fuel and to force the military back to their barracks.
Our demands:
Gota and his regime to go!
Expropriation of Gota’s wealth.
All Chinese and other debts incurred by Gota to be repudiated.
Workers’ defence committees must be set up immediately to distribute food, run emergency services and provide protection against the attacks of police, military and UNP thugs.
The formation of a mass workers’ and peasants’ party to take power.
Solidarity with the workers of India and the entire sub-continent.
For workers’ power in Sri Lanka and the whole of South Asia.
