English
International Committee of the Fourth International
Fourth International 1991: Oppose imperialist war and colonialism!

Repression and the State in Sri Lanka

This statement by the Political Committee of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) was issued in December 1990. The RCL is the forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party in Sri Lanka.

The past two years of UNP rule, since December 1988 when R. Premadasa was installed in the executive presidency, will go down as the most savage period of bourgeois rule in Sri Lanka. This brutality conforms to the recent draconian transformation of bourgeois rule in general, with the most extreme forms of barbarism on a world scale.

The previous UNP and SLFP capitalist governments, directly and indirectly supported by the Stalinists and the reformists of the LSSP, CWC and the right-centrist NSSP, imposed great repression on the working class and the rural poor. But the bloody repression and pogroms now conducted throughout the country by the regime of President Premadasa by far surpasses even the genocidal policies carried out by President Jayawardene in his 11-year rule from 1977-88.

The present state repression has taken the form of a racist war against the oppressed Tamil nation in the North and East of the country, and of military-police operations with unrestricted orders to shoot on sight the youth in the South. It is already on record that more than 100,000 youth have been killed during the year ending November 1990 alone.

In November 1989 the UNP brought to an end the blood-soaked process of bargaining with the fascist JVP and murdered its leaders, including Wijeweera and Gamanayaka. This was carried out after the failure of their desperate attempt to make the JVP partners of the repressive capitalist state machine against the workers and the oppressed masses. Since then, under the pretext of curbing the activities of the JVP, a genocidal terror campaign has been unleashed in the rural areas, especially against the youth.

One out of every 160 human beings has been killed, including newborn infants. In some families, all the males have been killed, from the grandfather down to sons, sons-in-law and grandsons.

More than 12,000 youth, both male and female, are held in concentration camps in different parts of the country, while 5,000 of them are condemned to lifelong detention. The parents and relatives of many of these detainees are not being informed about the arrests, and even in the cases where they are informed, they are not allowed to see them while in detention.

Many complaints are leaked out continuously, not only about the inhuman torture, but also about the frequent killings that go on within these camps. The government press releases themselves speak of many instances where detainees are killed “while they were attempting to escape.”

Unidentified, decomposed dead bodies are regularly seen floating in the rivers. The connection between youth being dragged out of their houses in the thick of the night by the death squads, who parade around the villages in military uniforms, and these corpses floating in the rivers is not hard to establish.

After male members of a family are killed or taken away by the military and the police, the personnel of these forces cynically take it as their unchallenged right to invade the houses of these victims and rape their mothers and sisters.

This continuous terror campaign of the UNP regime against the rural masses expresses the unbridgeable polarization which has now developed between the oppressed masses and the pro-imperialist ruling class. It is out of the desperation created by the vast changes in social relations, as a result of the breakdown of the postwar world order, that the bourgeois regime in Sri Lanka resorts to these barbaric methods.

These conditions tear to shreds the demagogic pretenses of the national bourgeois regimes, established following World War II, about a national road to progress. They at the same time explode the reactionary myth peddled by the Stalinists, reformists and Pabloite revisionists that these so-called independent states and the national bourgeois regimes of the backward countries are destined to play a progressive role and therefore must be supported by the masses.

The double irony of the position of these bureaucracies in the service of the ruling class is that these so-called nation-states were established and the national bourgeois regimes within them were maintained solely by the imperialists, as part of the reactionary postwar settlement. With the breakup of this postwar imperialist world order, and in the midst of the gruesome, reactionary attempt by the imperialists to establish a “new world order,” these national bourgeois regimes are forced to shed all their fraudulent anti-imperialist masks and fall in line completely with the imperialist drive towards a nuclear world war.

This indisputably vindicates the prognosis made by Leon Trotsky, in his theory of permanent revolution, that only the working class, which wins over to its side the oppressed masses in opposition to the national bourgeoisie, can solve the belated tasks of the democratic revolution in the backward countries, as a component part of the socialist revolution.

During the postwar boom, the national bourgeois regimes in these backward countries, in order to maintain the parliamentary facade of their pro-imperialist bourgeois dictatorships against the working class and the oppressed masses, pretended to be the saviors of the rural petty bourgeoisie and sections of the middle class. They spoke in the name of the nation, whipping up racial and religious chauvinism for their own advantage, while at the same time dismembering some nations and oppressing others, as in the case of the Indian subcontinent. However, during this period, they could rally to their side a considerable section of the rural petty bourgeoisie, making use of the betrayals of the Stalinist, reformist and centrist leaderships of the working class, and making some meager concessions to those petty-bourgeois sections out of the loans derived from the imperialist banks in order to make them a counterweight to the working class.

But the polarization of social forces which takes place continuously under the capitalist system not only could not be smothered by the massive loans pumped into these countries, but the very implementation of the demands of the imperialist banks aggravated the economic and social conditions of the rural masses in a devastating way, especially in the 1970s and the 1980s.

The coalition government (1970-77) of the LSSP and the CP leaders, who shared power with the pro-imperialist capitalist SLFP of Mrs. Bandaranaike, drastically attacked the social welfare benefits which were vital for the rural poor, after the massacre of about 15,000 youth in the JVP uprising in 1971. It cut down the rice ration and slashed the free health services and education. Its policies affected rural agriculture, which involves millions of poor farmers and landless peasants, to such an extent that the country faced near-famine in 1974-75. At the peak of these attacks came the imposition of curbs on the transport of rice from the rural areas, which antagonized the rural masses so much that it destroyed any support among the rural masses for the parties of the coalition, which they have never been able to patch up again.

Although the UNP profited from the treachery of the LSSP-CP leaders who joined the coalition and prevented the working class from giving independent political leadership to the rural poor, the 11 years of rule by President Jayawardene drove an irrevocable wedge between the rural masses and the bourgeois regime, more than ever before. The national bourgeoisie was completely exposed in the eyes of the masses for its pro-imperialist reactionary policy, counterposed to the interests of the “nation” which they falsely claimed to defend. The introduction of the 100,000-strong Indian army in the North and East of Sri Lanka, invited by President Jayawardene under a plan hatched in a conspiracy among the ruling classes of the USA, India and Sri Lanka against the Tamil liberation struggle, stands as a monumental example of the hypocritical pose of the national bourgeois regimes as defenders of their own nations.

The growth of the petty-bourgeois JVP at the expense of the completely exposed national bourgeois parties, the UNP and the SLFP, soon turned out to be a reactionary fiasco. In elaborating the treacherous role played by all the bureaucracies and the LSSP leaders in particular, in supporting the Indo-Lankan accord, the ICFI in its statement, “The Situation in Sri Lanka and the Tasks of the RCL,” stated:

“By tying the LSSP cart to the UNP horse, Da Silva has immeasurably aided the most reactionary chauvinist forces on the island. Against the wishes of the working class, which has no interest in defending the Sinhala state, the LSSP has assumed co-responsibility for the worst crimes of the Jayawardene regime.

“Moreover, in endorsing the Indian presence in the North and the East, it callously ignores the legitimate national sentiments of the oppressed Sinhalese peasantry and thus strengthens the hand of the ultra-reactionary JVP and its SLFP mentors. This policy serves only to discredit the workers movement in the eyes of the petty-bourgeois masses and assist the growth of a fascist movement based on Sinhala chauvinism” (Fourth International, January-March 1988).

The JVP soon showed its true fascist character by openly coming into physical clashes with the working class organizations and gunning down their leaders in its terror campaign. It did this in order to gain the recognition of the big bourgeoisie and the imperialist masters for a regime of its own, to defend the capitalist racist state. This marked a high point in the degeneration of the petty-bourgeois nationalist movements throughout the world under the conditions of the present world crisis of imperialism.

The political line of the LTTE, to tie the aspirations of the oppressed Tamil nation to the policies of the pro-imperialist, counterrevolutionary regime of the Indian bourgeoisie while at the same time working out a deal with the Sri Lankan racist regime over the heads of the Tamil masses, similarly brings into focus the utter prostration of such petty-bourgeois movements. In the Tamil liberation struggle, the degeneration of the LTTE is seen alongside many other groups such as PLOTE, EPRLF, TELO, EROS, ENDP, etc., which have gone over completely to the side of the longstanding oppressor state and become mercenary squads in its armies.

These developments reaffirm powerfully the vital importance of the struggle of Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International, and the protracted struggle of the ICFI against Pabloite revisionism, to establish the political independence of the working class from all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois movements, win over the oppressed masses to the side of the working class and lead them in the socialist revolution. It is the only way forward for the working class in the backward countries, to a victorious struggle for its own dictatorship and for the rural poor and the oppressed nationalities to achieve their own liberation.

The treachery of the petty-bourgeois nationalist movements, which in their political line are nothing but the faded copies of the pro-imperialist national bourgeoisie, neither invalidates the genuine aspirations of the oppressed nationalities for national liberation nor rules out the possibility for these nations to rally to the internationalist proletarian leadership. No more than the betrayals by the bureaucracies write off the historical revolutionary role of the working class, which is destined to lead the oppressed masses in the struggle to overthrow the capitalist system on a world scale. These are historical laws which are much more powerful than the petty-bourgeois leaderships and the bureaucracies. It is the task of the proletarian revolutionary party, which grasps these historical laws of social revolution, to take the necessary initiative to mobilize the working class to come to the defense of the oppressed masses and lead them, based on the program of world socialist revolution.

With the bankruptcy of all the nationalist programs which are the hallmark of every petty-bourgeois leadership throughout the world, vast opportunities are opened up to break the paralysis imposed by these leaderships on the working class and the oppressed masses. The spontaneous striving of the Tamil masses to close down the police stations and the army camps installed after the withdrawal of the Indian Peace Keeping Force, and as a consequence of the capitulationary discussions of the LTTE with the Premadasa regime, bears witness to such a development. The failure of the UNP regime to come to an agreement with the JVP and the consequent murder of its leadership, and the broad-scale repression in the rural areas itself shows that, despite the fascist nature of the JVP, the bourgeoisie was gravely alarmed by the radicalization in the rural areas, which could have destabilized capitalist rule as a whole, opening up the avenue for the political intervention of the working class. The fear of the UNP regime and its imperialist masters was heightened as they saw the new wave of radicalization of the rural masses in Sri Lanka, taking place at a time when the Indian armies were being defeated by the liberation fighters of Tamil Eelam, the regime of military dictator Zia ul Haq of Pakistan was brought down and the Congress regime of Rajiv Gandhi in India and the military regime in Bangladesh were threatened with mass struggles of the working class and the oppressed masses. The peasant agitation which spread in the rural areas against the water tax imposed on the instructions of the World Bank and the student struggles in all the country’s universities indicated the rapid emergence of an insurrectionary mood among the oppressed masses despite the desperate attempt by the UNP-SLFP capitalist parties and the JVP, supported by the treacherous bureaucracies, to divert them into an anti-Tamil frenzy.

The renewal of the racist war against the Tamils and the resort to a genocidal terror campaign against the rural poor have been the two rails on which the Premadasa regime has striven to ride through the gravest crisis which capitalist rule has faced in Sri Lanka since so-called independence in 1948. For these barbaric measures, it depends on the military and the police formed and trained by the colonial masters, on the one hand, and on the grotesque treachery of the LSSP-CP-NSSP-CWC and other centrist leaderships, on the other.

Since the great betrayal of the LSSP in 1964, when it joined the coalition of Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike and brought to a climax the Pabloite downsliding from the Trotskyist program and adaptation to the postwar world imperialist settlement, the LSSP’s record has been one of unending treachery, in close collaboration with the Stalinist CP.

The latest episode of this craven opportunism and capitulation, in line with the wave of renunciationism by every bureaucracy, was the rejection of the call made in November 1988 by the RCL, the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI, to form a united front of the working class organizations in Sri Lanka to fight against the police-military attacks and the JVP fascists. Instead of joining this campaign to mobilize the independent strength of the working class, to organize its own defense against the reactionary forces, these traitors openly lined up with the state forces under the pretext of fighting the JVP.

This directly helped the UNP regime to initiate the racist war against the Tamils and the mass repression against the rural masses. The RCL charges that the hands of these traitors, the LSSP, CP, NSSP and CWC, are soaked with the blood of the Tamil nation and the oppressed rural masses and youth.

The NSSP leaders, who were a component part of the LSSP when it joined the coalition and betrayed the working class and the oppressed masses, later formed their own party, responding to the need of the ruling class to continue utilizing the same poisonous class collaborationist policy of the LSSP and Stalinist leaderships, but now faced with the difficulty of making the workers stomach it after the experience of seven years of coalition rule. So the NSSP leaders started selling this popular front poison under a different label.

But no sooner did they begin than they have been exposed for their treachery, in some instances even surpassing the virulently opportunist leaders of the LSSP and the CP. They were in the forefront of support for the All-Party Conference of President Jayawardene, which laid the basis for the introduction of the Indian forces in the North and East, allowing the regime to use the full strength of the Sri Lankan armies against the workers, peasants and youth in the South.

These NSSP leaders cynically tried to divert the principled campaign for the united front into the channel of the popular front. They failed ignominiously, as a result of the struggle of the RCL and the ICFI, carried out powerfully on an international scale. But this did not prevent the NSSP leaders from joining the LSSP, CP and the other centrists to support the racist war against the Tamil nation and prop up the military-police repression against the peasant masses and the youth throughout the country. The only NSSP parliamentary MP unashamedly voted in favor of the supplementary estimate of five billion rupees for the racist war, thereby sanctioning further cuts in social services to spend that money on arms and equipment for the armed forces to gun down the workers and the poor. This shows how deep is the abyss into which the Pabloite revisionists have sunk today.

The campaign initiated by the RCL and the ICFI to mobilize the working class in Sri Lanka and internationally in defense of the rural masses, as well as the oppressed Tamil nation, against the pogroms and atrocities of the bourgeois state forces, is aimed at breaking the stranglehold imposed on the workers movement by these treacherous bureaucracies.

This is in no way to sow any illusions in bourgeois democracy. Bourgeois democracy is the same dictatorial rule of finance capital in a different form. It is the facade behind which the ruling class prepares its naked military-police dictatorship, just as peacetime in the epoch of imperialism is always a preparatory period for the next world war. All those who spread false illusions about the ability of imperialism to resolve its contradictions in a peaceful manner become direct accomplices of the bloodbaths on a world scale. Similarly, all those reformists who cultivate false hopes in disciplining and controlling the ruling class and avoiding its repressive excesses through bourgeois democracy play a treacherous role of gigantic proportions in politically disarming the working class and oppressed masses in the face of the growing threat of a military-police dictatorship.

The massacres and repression now carried out in the rural areas aim to create siege conditions against the working class in the cities and the plantations by destroying its genuine rural supporters and by increasing and strengthening the military-police might around the working class neighborhoods.

This is because the ruling class is determined to put an end to the so-called process of free bargaining by the trade unions, as it was carried out during the postwar boom. The ruling class intends to implement the destruction of more than 150,000 jobs in the government and corporate sectors and repatriate 100,000 plantation workers to India immediately, as the world crisis does not allow for any more delay.

The imperialist intervention in the gulf to grab the oil fields through a nuclear war has directly affected the economic conditions in Sri Lanka, in more than one way, intensifying the desperation of the UNP regime to attack the workers and the oppressed masses. The fertilizer subsidy to the peasants has already been taken away, leading to a 400 percent increase in prices, and other welfare benefits are rapidly being attacked. The ruling class, aware that these attacks will be resisted by the masses despite the treachery of the bureaucracies, is unleashing the military-police repression as a preventive war against the rural poor, to render the working class incapable of making the socialist revolution.

Under these conditions, the trade unions must either become corporatist tools in the hands of the capitalist state or become instruments of the socialist revolution. To take the latter road means to urgently forge the revolutionary alliance of the workers and the rural peasants under the hegemony of the working class against the bourgeois and the petty-bourgeois leaderships.

This makes it decisively important for the working class to take the initiative and rise to defend the rural masses against the massacres now being carried out by the state forces and the murderous goons. The workers movement is prevented from taking any step in this direction and thereby is isolated from its vast base of rural supporters by the treacherous leaders of the LSSP, CP, NSSP and CWC. All their political work is directed towards driving the rural masses into the lap of the bourgeois parties, the SLFP and the UNP. Their campaign around “the organization of the parents and the relations of the disappeared” is a trap, only sowing illusions among the masses in imperialist-funded human rights outfits like Amnesty International, at a time when the involvement of the imperialists, especially the murderous Israeli Mossad which has aided these massacres, has been unmasked.

By including in this campaign the men lost in the armed forces in the racist war, the popular frontists make a cynical attempt to whip up racism against the Tamils and tie the masses to the military and the police. It serves also to discredit the working class in the eyes of the masses and further widen the separation of the rural poor from the working class. These bankrupt policies flow directly from the popular front policies of these leaderships, which defend not the masses, but the pro-imperialist bourgeoisie, engaged in preparations for a dictatorship.

The initiative of the working class to halt the rural massacres and the arrests must be immediately bound up with the demand to disband all state forces and paramilitary squads. This urgently raises the issue of forming defense committees and defense squads under the leadership of the working class, involving the rural poor and the youth for self-defense. It is of prime importance that these defense committees organize their own independent investigations into the murderous conspiracies and activities of the state forces and the goon squads in order to raise the consciousness of the masses about the necessity of fighting for the overthrow of the capitalist state.

The demand for arming the workers must be raised within every working class organization and the leaders must be forced to agitate for this demand and take the necessary practical steps.

This demand has now become quite legitimate as the UNP regime and the capitalist class itself has openly resorted to organize armed squads outside of the regular state forces. Apart from the fact that every UNP stalwart has his own private goon squad, the UNP publicly uses the Tamil petty-bourgeois groups such as PLOTE, TELO and ENDP, etc., alongside the armies in the racist war.

The use of these private murder squads by the ruling class indicates unmistakably the disintegration of bourgeois democracy. But the sole cry of the treacherous LSSP, CP, NSSP, CWC and other centrist leaders is to bring back this selfsame bourgeois democracy through a popular front government. Every class-conscious worker can understand that this is not only futile, but also criminally disarms the working class.

Trotsky explained the experience of the Russian working class in the following words:

“It was only in czarist Russia that the young proletariat in the first years of this century began to resort to arming their own fighting detachments. This revealed the instability of the old regime in the most vivid fashion. The czarist monarchy found itself less and less able to regulate relations by means of its normal agencies, i.e., the police and the army; and it was forced more and more to resort to the aid of volunteer bands (the Black Hundreds with their pogroms against the Jews, Armenians, students, workers and others). In response to this the workers, as well as various nationality groups, began to organize their own self-defense detachments. These facts indicated the beginning of the revolution” (On the question of workers’ self-defense).

The workers organizations, including the trade unions, must demand that the workers defense squads be armed and the youth and the fighters of the rural poor be trained under those squads. The workers and the oppressed masses know very well that there is no self-defense without properly armed defense squads.

We call upon all working class fighters to raise these issues within their organizations by passing resolutions to demand that their leaderships break their popular fronts with the bourgeois parties and take immediate practical steps. The workers must pass resolutions for the organization of demonstrations and pickets involving all the trade unions and working class parties and for the preparation of a general strike demanding a stop to the racist war and the murders and repression going on in the rural areas.

A delegate conference of all working class organizations and youth organizations must be called to discuss and take the necessary measures along these lines.

The working class can rise up against the attacks of the capitalist state only on the basis of an internationalist program for the unity of the world working class against the reactionary third world war and civil war plans of the imperialists and their lackeys. An international campaign by the World Party of Socialist Revolution, the ICFI, to demand the enforcement of working class sanctions by the international working class against the bloodsoaked regime of Sri Lanka, including a boycott of this country’s exports, will be a powerful lever to raise the internationalist revolutionary consciousness of the world proletariat.

The working class must take the initiative for the unification of the workers of the Indian subcontinent, and especially for the Sri Lankan and Eelam workers to provide political leadership for the multimillioned rural poor and the oppressed nationalities. This is the only way the working class can counter the path taken by the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships to return these countries to the status of colonies, in which they themselves become prison wardens of “free trade zones” designed to produce superprofits for the imperialist monopolies.

The eradication of military-police repression and racist war is indissolubly bound up with the task of overthrowing the pro-imperialist capitalist rule established in 1948. The present dictatorial plans stem from the unprecedented crisis of the bourgeois property system and the nation-state structure, under the conditions of the breakdown of the postwar world order.

This is why all the popular frontist programs which speak of bringing back democracy, while defending the capitalist property system and the bourgeois state, become reactionary fallacies aimed at politically disarming the working class and the masses. Contrary to this treacherous policy, the working class must be mobilized on the program of socialist policies aimed at overthrowing the UNP regime and establishing a workers and peasants government.

A basic task of such a government is to ensure the democratic rights of the peasant masses and the oppressed Tamil nation which bourgeois rule has trampled upon for such a long time. In the case of the oppressed nations, the working class has to commit itself to defend the right of self-determination, including the right to a separate state. In the case of the rural peasantry, this commitment must essentially include the guarantee of land to the toilers under a plan of nationalization of landed property, while retaining big plantations under workers control. The bourgeoisie, which in its progressive days took over land from its previous feudal owners to make capitalist farming possible, is today completely opposed to the fulfillment of the needs of the landless peasantry.

The annulment of all previous debts of the rural poor is also a burning necessity. Subsidies and other things needed by the peasantry such as loans on easy terms and cheaper fertilizer, seeds, agrochemicals and tractors, as well as a guaranteed price for the produce of peasant agriculture, can be provided only under a socialist program which nationalizes the banks, industries, wholesale trade and transport without compensation and under workers control. This is the only program through which the problem of more than two million unemployed can be solved and social welfare benefits defended.

All these socialist measures, along with the establishment of a monopoly of foreign trade for the benefits of the masses, require a workers and peasants government to be brought into power, through the overthrow of capitalist rule.

This emphatically proves how closely the solutions to the burning problems of the rural masses are linked today with a socialist program and the taking of power by the working class. This is a result of the vast transformation that has taken place in the methods of peasant cultivation itself. The unfailing political conclusion which must be derived from these changed conditions is the redoubled historic necessity of the working class to provide its independent leadership to the peasant masses in the struggle for socialism.

The fight for the calling of a constituent assembly to annul the present bourgeois presidential constitution, which is nothing but an amended version of the constitution granted by the British imperialists in 1947 to divide and repress the masses, takes on a burning relevance. The citizenship acts of 1948-49, the Public Security Act of 1947, the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, the constitution of 1972, which made Buddhism the state religion, the 1983 sixth amendment, banning political parties which support the right of self-determination of Tamils, and the Prevention of Terrorism Act are only a few parts of the present notorious reactionary constitution. A constituent assembly must be called to do away with all these reactionary laws and formulate a constitution which guarantees the democratic rights of the working class and of the oppressed masses, including the citizenship rights of the plantation workers and the right of self-determination of the Tamil nation.

To realize this program, the working class must be mobilized to form its soviets, rallying the oppressed masses. The soviets, composed of workers and peasants, must begin their work to politically guide the work of the factory committees fighting to defend the jobs and other workers rights and also of the defense committees and defense squads involved in protecting the masses from the attacks of the state forces. This is the vital preliminary work of the soviets to prepare for their transformation into organs of working class power.

What this program decisively calls for is the revolutionary party of the working class. It is only the leadership of such a party, based on proletarian internationalism and the fight for the world socialist revolution, that can mobilize the destructive and creative power of the working class to provide a way out for the workers and the oppressed masses from the blind alley to which they are driven by the treacherous bureaucracies and petty-bourgeois leaderships of the Eelam struggle. The RCL is the revolutionary party of the workers of Sri Lanka and Eelam fighting for the revolutionary alliance of the workers and the oppressed masses to implement the above program.

The working class, in its struggle to achieve this program, will unavoidably come into conflict with the straitjacket imposed on them by the misleaderships of the LSSP, CP, NSSP and CWC and the centrists, and must rise in rebellion to overthrow all those treacherous leaderships. Such a rebellion is essential, as no amount of appeals by the workers will change the course of these class compromisist leaderships. They are bound hand and foot to capitalist property relations and the racist nation-state structure.

The RCL, the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI, calls upon the workers and the oppressed masses and the youth to join the party of World Socialist Revolution. The RCL and the Socialist Labour League in India fight for a program of the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of the Indian subcontinent, including the Socialist Republics of Sri Lanka and Eelam, which would give solutions to the democratic demands of the oppressed nationalities and the rural peasants and go forward to implement socialist policies.

Organize a general strike to:

  • Halt the massacre of rural poor and release all political prisoners!
  • Stop the racist war against the Tamil nation and withdraw the armies from the North and East!
  • Smash the World Bank plans to destroy jobs and social services.
  • Build the workers defense committees and defense squads! Arm the workers!
  • Call a constituent assembly to do away with all repressive laws.
  • Nationalize the banks, estates, industries and wholesale trade under workers control and without compensation.
  • Land to the peasants! Annul the rural debt!
  • For the international unity of the working class!
  • For a workers and peasants government in the form of Socialist Soviet Republics of Sri Lanka and Eelam!
  • Build the RCL, the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI