[page 16]
SRI LANKA MOVES The eclipse of parliamentary democracy in Sri Lanka and the proclamation of a bonapartist constitution herald a period of sharp class conflict within an island in the Indian Ocean which at one time seemed an idyllic shelter from the ravages affecting the rest of the colonial world. But the long-prized democratic rights of the Sri Lanka people were eroded and chipped away during the previous regime, in "Comwhich two workers' parties, munist"
"Trotskyist"
and respectively, participated! These paradoxical events must be seen in the context of the stagnation of the world economy, and particularly the terrible convulsions that have racked the Indian sub-continent over the last decade: the revolutionary upsurge in West Bengal in 1967-71 and the overthrow of Ayub Khan in Pakistan, in a vast Northern belt of strikes, demonstrations and gheraos (workers' sieges); the genocide and bloody war leading to the liberation of Bangladesh, and the downfall of Yahya Khan; tightening repression in India, the massacre in Bengal and the Indian railway strike culminating in the imposition of emergency rule by Congress; the collapse of Congress and the advent of tremendous class struggles in an India gripped in a pre-revolutionary situation; four coups, a revolutionary mutiny, and a counter-revolution within a few months in Bangladesh, followed by new mutinies and mass executions; the collapse of Bhutto and the return of a barbarous dictatorship to Pakistan. In the background were the defeats of US Imperialism in Vietnam, Cambodia TOWARDS DICTATORSHIP By Roger Silverman Laos, and a new and bloody dictatorship in Thailand, the end of the Japanese 'miracle'...The capitalist class has proved incapable of fulfilling its own mission. At a time of recurrent slumps, it has had to intervention. Despite important differences within each of the countries sub-continent, a of similar cycle of flamboyant windbags with a flair for "socialist' rhetoric, and openly reactionary regimes has continued to unwind Decay of LSSP Events in Sri Lanka have followed the same general pattern, but the Labour Movement is so highly developed that a socialistic tinge to all the parties' demagogy is all the more obligatory in deference to its traditions. The lessons of current events in Sri Lanka are important in understanding the impotence of the capitalist class to carry through its historic tasks, the key role of working class in drawing the struggles of the oppressed masses to a successful conclusion, instability of every capitalist government, no matter how repressive, in Southern Asia. But that is not They illuminate the contradictory effects of a Popular Front regime on the different layers of society and outline the chain of events likely to be set in motion by the coming to power of similar governments in France, Italy, Spain, Greece and other European countries.
Between 1970 and 1977 a Popular Front government was in power, dominated by the 'peasant party' the 16 Freedom breakaway from the bourgeois United National Party), in harness with the Communist Party and (up to late 1975) the Lanka Samaja Party, the main traditional workers' party formed in the 1930s as a Trotskyist party.
The degeneration of the leadership of this party was partially the result of decay over a period of relative peace while Sri Lanka remained in a fairly sheltered position, through their parliamenttary positions, social contacts, trade union posts, a formidable party apparatus, etc., which allowed a bureaucracy to crystallise-the same process that corrupted, for example, the German Social-Democracy before 1914. But it was reinforced and accelerated by the abandonment of Marxism by the leaders of what was left of Trotsky's Fourth International. It was not the fault of those who diluted and distorted Trotsky's ideas that the only mass Trotskyist party was by a historical accident the LSSP. But their opportunism and adventurism discredited their authority and reduced Trotskyism outside Sri Lanka to scattered and squabbling petty bourgeois cliques. Given the quiescence of the working class in the metropolitan countries and the isolation and irrelevance of the International even among the vanthe working class, the leaders of the mass party of Sri Lanka workers grew increasingly sceptical of the ideas of internation- ¡alism and the tion. Giving perfunctory lip-service to these ideas on May Days, they lost all •faith in the capacity of the world
[page 17]
working class to change society. Naturally they turned to seek allies elsewhere, and became classic retormists, eventually reaching a point of no-return in 1964 by signing an agreement with the bourgeois populist SLFP. In arguing the merits of the Popular Front they vied with the CP and drew very close to it. The 'Financial Times' in its recent Supplement on Sri Lanka (31.5.78) commented that the two workers' parties "are far less radical than their names imply...Mr Colvin R de Silva the LSSP spokesman has a love of parliamentary rhetoric reminiscent of Burke and was the author of the last constitution."
However, this degenerated leadership has lost its base in the rank and file and a new leadership is restoring the traditions of the LSSP, as will be shown later in this article. Nevertheless, LSSP leaders like N.M. Perera, Colvin R De Silva and Leslie Gunawardene in 1970 enjoyed enormous prestige as founders of the mass workers' party, brave fighters against British imperialism who were imprisoned during the war, leaders of the great strike movement of 1947 which opened the way to independence, and of the revolutionary hartal (general strike and mass mobilisation of the workers, peasants and urban middle class) of 1953. In the peculiar conditions of Sri Lanka they wrested spectacular concessions and enabled the people to enjoy welfare unparalleled in Asia with the exception of Japan.
Adult suffrage was granted in 1931, around the same time as in the 'Mother Country'! It was the pressure of the working class, transmitted above all through the LSSP, which won a free universal rice ration, generous subsidies to transport, subsidised wheat prices, children's sugar and infant's milk, free medical and dental treatment, artificially low petrol and kerosene prices, easy loan facilities to rice farmers, fertilisers at 25% of cost,
and free education right up to
university level. The SLFP, presiding
over the Popular Front, also enjoyed popularity in undertaking major reforms including nationalisation of
the tea and rubber estates, both locally and foreign-owned, a land
reform and big concessions to
RNATIONALISMI
-TO WORKERS
30,34 DEC1971
London LSSP Meeting 1978 workers including guarantees against dismissal, ete. The process went so far as the nationalisation of up to 80% of the economy, without however qualitatively changing the social basis of the state, which remained at the service of the mudalalhi (racketeers), the landlords and capitalists, and especially the multinational tea companies which despite nationalisation of the plantations continued their ruthless exploitation of Sri Lanka labour through their domination of the profitable tea marketing business. In fact many of the reforms were merely cosmetic, like the Constitution which grandiosely proclaimed "the elimination of the exploitation of man by man" , the "ceiling" on house ownership which "limited" it to one house per member of the family, plus one extra (opening up legal arguments as to the entitlements of pregnant mothers! It is true that a land reform was introduced but the minimum amount of land retained by each family was sufficiently large to allow a layer of rich landlords to retain their wealth and power.
The overall effect of the Popular Front was to disorientate and
ultimately demoralise wide strata of the workers and particularly the peasants, enabling the previously
discredited UNP which had only 19
17
seats in 1970 to sweep to victory with 140 out of 168 seats in last year's elections. The SLFP which had previously held 90 seats, was reduced to 9, and the workers' parties between them gained not a single seat in Parliament! This was the terrible price they paid for their leaders' short-sighted policy of class collaborationism. They were tarnished with the crimes of the SLFP, including the massacre of some 10,000 youth during and after the doomed and adventurist JVP uprising in 1971 expressing the frustrations of the unemployed educated Sinhala peasant youth whose expectations in the SLFP were dashed. They had squandered the trust among the Tamil minority, who were harshly penalised by the SLFP's chauvinistic Sinhala-only language policy. The Tamils became ensnared in the bourgeois nationalist Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), which captured 18 seats in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. Above all, the so-called "Indian Tamils" , shipped over 150 years ago as cheap indentured labour on the tea plantations who with their sweat paid dearly for the welfare concessions to the rest of the population, had been shamefully betrayed by the workers' parties and even by the TULF which regards them as outside the "indigenous"
[page 18]
Tamil community. Cynically stripped of their citizenship rights by the first UNP Government in 1948 because of their support for the LSSP, they were forsaken by all, as victims of the infamous Sirima- Shastri pact of 1965 which provided for their "repatriation" to India-a measure approvingly quoted on British television by NF leader Martin Webster! N.M. Perera as Finance Minister bore special responsibility for the savage cuts in living standards which amounted to 50% over a period of 7 years, for the breaking of the 1972 bank workers' strike, and the general strike-breaking policy summed up in the Slogan "Work, Sacrifice, Struggle Not!"
UNP hypocrisy
When the LSSP had outlived its usefulness to the Bandaranaike Government, it was dismissed in late 1975. The rightward shift of the SLFP (supported right up to the bitter end by its sole ally the CP Cabinet Minister Keunemann) led to a student upsurge and a police shooting on the Peradeniya campus which provoked a General Strike, and some weeks later a month-long railway strike which culminated once again in a General Strike. These upheavals stirred up a ferment within the workers' organisations with far-reaching repercussions which will be discussed below.
The balance-sheet of the Sri Lanka Popular Front is analysed in detail in MIR No. 9 and in several subsequent articles in MILITANT.)
The UNP swept to power with the objective of creating a bonapartist regime, "stabilising" Sri Lanka, dismantling the welfare state and the powerful trade union movement, and turning the country into a haven for profiteers. Sirima Bandaranaike was thus condemned to join Indira Ghandi, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Sheik Mujib in the dustbin of tarnished demagogues. However, the degree of cant accompanying the counter-revolutionary policies was correspondingly greater in proportion to the strength and democratic traditions of the working class. Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh took power by tricking the revolutionary soldiers of the great 1975 mutiny, the Indian
Janata by prattling about civil rights. There was to be no Pakistani-style General Zia ul-Haq in Sri Lanka either, with his waxed toothbrush moustache and riding-crop, his floggings, amputations and codes of Islamic law. J.R. Jayawardene (UNP leader was obliged on the contrary to make oily promises of ending unemployment, bringing down inflation, restoring democracy, upholding the socialist tenets of the welfare state, etc. Once having won the election on a programme of "socialism and democracy", he set to work skilfully operating his packed Assembly to change the Constitution arbitrarily and proclaim himself President, thus relieving himself of the time-consuming chore of accounting to Parliament. A sycophantic Press acclaimed him amid the festivities of February 4th as a modern Julius Caesar" * A latter-day Tartuffe would be a more approprate description: posing as a devout Sinhala Buddhist, his picture flaunted everywhere piously kneeling in monastic garb before a shrine, every pore reeking and oozing with hypocrisy. So too in his politics, he asserts that the UNP "goes beyond Marxism". He apologetically shrugs off his pet project of a Free Trade Zone as a "capitalist robber barons area" encircled by Socialism, earnestly discouraging companies "out for a quick buck and then run away"
Thuggery
The ugly reality of the UNP victory was revealed. within days. The SLFP politicians were beaten up by UNP goondas (thugs). 140 people were killed in the August communal riots, and hundreds were the victims of ambushes, rape, looting, horrible mutilation, etc., in a pogrom worse than any in Sri Lanka's history and affecting assimilated Southern Tamils and "Indian Tamil" plantation serfs as well as the Northern and Eastern population. These riots were deliberately stirred up by the police-one of the instigators was promoted to Inspector-General of Police-and provocatively inflamed by Jayawardena and his Ministers in. a calculated and successful decision to frighten the TULF leaders into submission
18
In the workplaces, up to 10,000 workers were dismissed to make room for UNP mercenaries, and families were split up and uprooted by the "punitive transfer" of 17,000 teachers. J.R.'s canting humbug was exposed. Even the 'Financial Times' expressed alarm that the UNP had "let loose its youth movement to beat up Marxist opponents in the universities and to disrupt trade union agitation". An unofficial semi-Fascist thug organisation is organised around the "low-caste" right-wing Prime Minister Premadasa, while the President perches and balances in true bonapartist fashion between the right-wing rabble and a system of appointed Commissions in which he hopes to embroil figures like N.M. Perera and Mrs. Bandaranaike. It was not mere: gentlemanly courtesy which lay behind J.R.'s expression of "regret" at the loss of N.M.'s and Colvin's contribution to Parliamentary life. It is possible that individual renegades can be induced to defect. It has happened in the past with Philip Gunawardena and other LSSP leaders, and it was significant that the old LSSP leaders have agreed to "advise" the President on how to mitigate the effects of the eviction of thousands of peasants to make way for the Mahaweli irrigation project. But the harsh programme which the UNP has to impose means certain and imminent confrontation with the working class.
The UNP, representing the ruling class of Sri Lanka and world imperialism, wants to turn Sri Lanka into a profiteers' paradise like Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia or the Phillipines. A vain hope! Those countries could offer a docile and cheap labour force to foreign investors, but it needed also a growing world market to justify the capital investment. Jayawardene is too late. Nevertheless, he is determined to lift all restrictions on capitalism and take on the working class in the interests of profit and the world's moneylenders. The legacy of the Popular Front is a system which enrages the capitalists while still grinding down the workers and peasants. The total value of the welfare programme about Rs 7
[page 19]
billion (£250 million). Industry is heavily protected and an elaborate system of import controls and foreign exchange regulations led to black marketeering and starved it of spare parts and raw materials. Plant is operating at 40-50% of capacity. During the period of 1970-76, industry grew at a rate of less than 2% a year. Manufacturing industry has not grown for 20 years-it accounts for 12.6% of output and employs only 115,000 workers. The economy as a whole slowed down from 4.6% p.a. growth in the 1960s to 3% p.a. in the 1970s. Investment is deterred by such measures as the Business Acquisitions Act (which is a nationalisation Enabling Act) and legislation making it illegal to sack a worker without his consent and permission from the Labour Department. These are excellent measures, but they demonstrate that it is suicidal to carry through half a revolution. It led to an "investment strike" , particularly as the high interest rates of 15-18% attracted money elsewhere. Without state ownership of industry and finance, the nationalisation or collectivisation of land, a state monopoly of foreign trade, capitalism can recover and take back these reforms.
IMF blackmail
The result is that 1,200,000 of the labour force of 4½ million are unemployed, especially young people. Already once their intolerable position has led to the gesture of despair of 1971. 27,000 qualified candidates are scrambling for 4,800 university places. Those who gain entry may not find work after graduation. 2,000 arts graduates are unable to find suitable work. Meanwhile, despite the educational facilities, there is actually a shortage of skilled and semi-skilled labour, owing to low wages. Thousands every month are flocking to jobs in Africa and the Middle East.
The UNP Government plunged inflation up sharply te a current rate of 30%, by cutting subsidies and devaluing the rupee by 50%. Taking advantage of the high tea and rubber prices, the prospects aroused by the Free Trade Zone, and the level of remittances from workers abroad,
they relaxed import controls, thus opening up markets to foreign companies and leading to the possibility of thousands more workers being thrown out of work.
But the main targets of the new Government are a massive diversion of resources from welfare schemes to capital projects, at the expense of the masses, and together with this the crushing of the workers' organisations. UNP demagogy is woven around the theme of shifting funds out of uneconomic and "extravagant" welfare and turning them into investment which would create jobs and wealth. However, the grandiose schemes announced will have very little effect in boosting the economy. Their main purpose is apparently to divert attention from the real "shift of resources"— away from the poor to the rich.
Amid a fanfare of publicity, Jayawardene announced four major projects: the Greater Colombo Development Plan, a new housing programme, above all the Mahaweli irrigation scheme and the Free Trade Zone.
Bandaranaike
The Mahaweli scheme has been speeded up, to achieve completion (on a reduced scale) within six instead of thirty years, to irrigate 900,000 acres and produce over 2,000 megawatts of energy. At its peak of construction it is said that it will create 400,000 new jobs. On the other hand it will destroy many villages, it will be crippled by the shortage of skilled labour, and can only be financed if half the capital is provided by the consortium of foreign creditors with their hooks on Sri Lanka.
19
The Free Trade Zone is also being
built in headlong haste. Already by
the New Year, the infrastructure of
the first 600-acre site for the Investment Promotion Zone outside
Colombo (ultimately encompassing an area of 200 square miles) will be ready, with electricity, water, drain-
age and telecommunications links,
and later on an air cargo terminal and container marshalling yard. Investors are to be offered a five-year tax holiday then a limit of 2% on turnover on foreign sales and 5% on home sales. But the most mouth-watering attraction Sri Lanka is offering, according to the Financial Times' , is "its low wage rates. At US$1.25 a day for skilled workers, $1 for semi-skilled, and 80 cents for unskilled, they are amongst the lowest in the world." But even this will not turn Sri Lanka into a second Singapore. Even if trade union resistance is smashed, even if a stable, tame and also suitably skilled workforce can be guaranteed, even if world markets again expand to justify the capital investment...even then, no more than 10-12,000 workers will be employed there within the first five years.
The "Financial Times', looking at the real prospects with the cold eye of the City banker, commented sceptically on both of these schemes. On the Mahaweli project, it said "there are probably other cheaper methods of raising agricultural output and employment, but the Mahaweli has the advantage of being an eye-catching venture out of which the Government can gain much-needed political mileage to offset the unpopularity of cutting subsidies". And on the Free Trade Zone, it estimated that "foreign exchange earnings are unlikely to be largeperhaps less than could be earned by sending workers to the Middle East."
The emergency November budget did not in any case make any real provision for financing these schemes. Jayawardene is relying on the IMF standby credit of $112 million, the first drawing on a three-year extended fund facility programme. Donor nations have also rallied round, promising $370 million, a rise of 42% on last year. But even after his first tentative attacks on subsid-
[page 20]
ies, they still amount to 34% of Government revenue, or 8.4% of gross domestic product compared to 9% last year. The IMF is gnashing its teeth and howling for real cuts. A new mission arrived in July to press home its ultimatum that subsidies must be slashed by two thirds by 1982.
On his recent visit to his apprentice in Sri Lanka, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore stressed that all the facilities offered by the FTZ will mean nothing unless real permanence and stability can be assured and "business confidence" built. In other words, all opposition must be ruthlessly crushed. Neither the cuts in welfare expenditure nor the attraction of foreign capital are possible without the smashing of the trade unions and the imposition of a bonapartist dictatorship.
Jayawardene has therefore wasted no time in rushing through a new Constitution before the full impact of his programme dawns on the masses, thus preparing the battleground for a confrontation. The IMF is not prepared to tolerate any further delay. Jayawardene has furtively armed himself with a Constitution that gives him personal absolutist powers, and provides for proportional representation in elections for the assembly (thus effectively making it impossible for any party in future to gain the two-thirds majority required to amend the Constitution), and plebiscites (J.R. has already made the ominous suggestion of a possible future referendum to postpone future elections). Most significant of all is the almost unprecedented incorporation into the Constitution itself of recent legislation allowing the proscription of any organisation without right of appeal, the abolition of bail and imposition of mandatory minimum sentences for specified political offences and other arbitrary police powers. The suggestion has even been made that commercial agreements relating to the Free Trade Zone should be embodied in the Constitution!
The most remarkable feature of the situation is the resilience of the workers' organisations and the Government's extreme hesitation and caution even after a year in dragging itself towards the inevitable
showdown. On every front tested the water and then recoiled after seeing the reaction.
Thus, having announced its plan to abolish the rice ration completely, it then conceded that people earning less than Rs 300 a month (a large proportion) would continue to receive it. Its heralded draft law on industrial relations, abolishing "political" unions and replacing them with a single state-controlled company union, was hastily withdrawn in the face of threats of a General Strike. The Government has lamely explained that it will "only" apply to the public sector now-and that the new bodies would function side by side with the old trade unions! The law protecting workers from dismissal has been repealed, but employers still have to pay substantial and sometimes deterrent compensation to them. The promise to investors to make existing labour laws inapplicable to the Free Trade Zone has not yet been implemented. As for the sacking of redundant workers, the Government has made a test case im the Thulhiriya textile mill, where a lockout has been in force for several months. But it has tried to appease the workers by appealing to all employers to expand their workforce by 10%, to soak up some of the unemployed, and has created a sordid "job bank" scheme relying on MP's corruption and patronage. It has even introduced a dole of Rs 50 a month, although this has been rightly regarded with suspicion and boycotted. Even the sharp rise in the price of rice, wheat and bread, and the cuts in welfare, have been partially disguised with a general wage rise of 25%. And since the workers would never accept the denationalisation of the estates or the repeal of the Business Acquisitions Act, the Government has so far only dared to turn certain nationalised concerns (such as the textile corporation) to private management.
The Government is thus stealthily creeping up on the working class like a man approaching a tiger. While trying to conciliate the masses, it is engaged in a war of attrition to pick out and harrass the best front-line fighters in the workers' parties
it has partially
furious
20
without provoking the rank and file. First it tried to neutralise the students before taking on the working class. UNP students were encouraged to "hit back at left-wing domination and bullying" • and gangs of armed goondas stormed the campuses terrorising students. Several times the universities have been closed, and on one occasion the schools too, because of the fighting. Then came the turn of workers' activists. Pickets were visited at night in their homes and beaten up. In particular, the UNP has concentrated its fire on the new Marxist leadership of the ISSP, interdicting (suspending) its General Secretary from his job, framing one of its student leaders on a murder charge, viciously beating up its trade-union leaders on the day of the bank strike, and on several occasions jailing its fulltimers on remand for several weeks, for hoisting black flags on February 4th, the day of Jayawardene's accession as President, and for its poster campaigns calling for a token general strike leading to a full-scale hartal and the overthrow of the Government, etc.
New Marxist leadership
The election of a new leadership for the LSSP-of Vickremabahu Karunarathne, Vasudeva Nanayakkara and other real class fighters who had all been unconstitutionally expelled from the party by the old leadership-and its decisive rejection of class collaborationism and adoption of a revolutionary socialist perspective-was a landmark in the history of Sri Lanka, and potentially of the world Labour Movement.
When the fateful decision was taken in 1964 to join the Popular Front, a crisis was provoked within the ranks of the LSSP and in the initial flush of rage at this betrayal there was a substantial walkout. That was a monumental blunder, which left the leadership a clear field, an outrageous example of emotional impressionism and subjectivism, befogging their perspective and judgement with vague "moral scruples" • The leadership at that time enjoyed massive support among the workers, who had their eyes pinned on the horizon of their
[page 21]
tribalau auda boo coups crabi
VICTORY TO PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALİST
Fl
ISSP Conference 1978—returns back to Marxism leaders with their courageous records actually coming into office and gainining ministerial portfolios. The winning of 80—90% of the Party rank and file today to Marxism despite the vicious resistance put up by the bureaucracy, are testimony to the lunacy of these sectarian "irreconcilables" in 1964 and the patience and endurance of the leaders of the "Vama", , the left opposition tendency which has now taken over the leadership.
Faced with spurious expulsions, and eventually the disaffiliations of whole branches and regions, the left tendency kept its nerve. When it finally became clear that the bureaucracy would prefer to wreck the entire Party rather than submit to a democratic discussion, when it procrastinated through five years of shocks, defeats and betrayals, refusing to hold a Party Congress despite the fact that the rank and file were demanding one, when the working class was faced with the most dangerous threat in its history, the left tendency had no alternative but to convene a Congress itself, ignoring the illegal mass purge that had led to the expulsion of hundreds of members including some of the Party's most respected veterans, and inviting the leadership to come along and defend its position before the rank and file. Since that historic conference in December 1977, the Party has won the support of about a
quarter of the organised working class, a proportion that is growing daily among all strata of the working class from the clerical to the plantation workers, as well as among the students, peasants, intellectuals, Tamils and Muslims, and even Buddhist monks.
Strike
It is winning sympathisers and recruits from other left parties including the CP, the People's Democratic Party (a split-off from the SLFP), the Maoists, the JVP, the TULF, etc. However, the old leadership still retains an apparatus, money, fulltimers, a daily paper, a large headquarters, some trade unions, and above all a famous name among the politically inert masses. As against that, the new leadership has the enthusiasm of the active ranks of the Party and several key trade unions, joined together in the United Federation of Labour. Its campaigns for a Trade Union Action Committee, to fight the threatened industrial relations laws, are finding an echo within all the workers organisations, along with their demands for a minimum wage of Rs 300 a month and a Rs 4 rise for every point in the cost of living index, restoration of all cuts, reinstatement of sacked workers, etc., along with the setting up of People's Councils to fight communalism and subsidy
Token General
21
cuts, etc., the formation of United Left Front, the call for a token general strike to prepare the way for a revolutionary hartal, etc.
The old leaders, on the other hand, their base among the workers crumbling daily, are responding sluggishly and it is significant that there is turmoil today also within the CP, so much that Keunemann, for seven years the sole CP Minister in the Popular Front, has belatedly condemned the "right-wing opportunist tactics" of the past and warned that attacks on democracy "could drive the left underground towards civil war"
The coming clash
Neither by trickery nor by repression can the class struggle be abolished. The new regime will find it easier to win an election than to wipe out half a century of working class struggle. Huge battles impend. Even if Jayawardene does succeed in temporarily defeating the trade unions and the danger of Tamil separation, then the underlying instability of the situation will still remain to haunt his uneasy and short dictatorship. The Government has determined an improbable target of annual growth in the gross domestic product of 5½%-but simply to absorb new entrants into the labour force and keep unemployment steady at more than 25%, will require an annual growth rate of 7%!
The nightmare of a new explosion among the unemployed youth looms ahead. Jayawardene cleverly released the remaining JVP prisoners on assuming office, thus at a single stroke reinforcing his democratic pretensions, introducing a new element of confusion into the left, and having a handy pretext for intensified repression later. Up to now, the JVP is concentrating more fire on the other left parties than on the UNP. Jayawardene has therefore seized hold of another alibi for repression-the "Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam". Having successfully bribed and blackmailed the TULF MPs, offering them (instead of a separate state houses, cars, money and police protection from their constituents this small guerrilla force has sprung up, already
[page 22]
claiming the lives of 11 officers.
The spectre of a separatist civil war is another disturbing prospect for Jayawardene, despite the fact that India would be very reluctant to encourage its own Tamil separatists (the DMK and AIADMK) intervening in support of a Tamil Elam. But if there was a danger of such a liberation struggle taking a revolutionary political course, then like with Bangladesh it might have no option but to take it over in order Militant RENT FOR JOBS LE-L Name.
Address.
police ces for the workers'
years ahead.
leadership of the LSSP. In the titanic last-ditch battles that are impending, before the nightfall of reaction, they have the chance to earn authority as worthy fighters, to win the confidence of the entire working ORDER Britain 13 issues 26 issues 52 issues.
to neutralise its social effect. In reality, either a futile uprising by the JVP or some similar movement, would have catastrophic consequenstruggle for Socialism, putting victory back for The key is held by the new Marxist A REGULAR COPY NOW .£2.50 .£4.80 ::£9.60 Make cheques payable to MILITANT and return to Circulation Department, MILITANT, 1 Mentmore Terrace, London E8 3PN. 22 class, but also of the unemployed youth, the Tamils, the peasants, the plantation workers and all the other oppressed strata of society. The revolutionary leadership of the LSSP in raising an unsullied red banner today will be well poised to stand at the head of the masses once they reawaken to a new upsurge of struggle, when dawn breaks. In doing so, they could change the face of Asia and the world.
Militant ARGENTINA What the comerc;
[page 23]
ITISH COMMUNIS
PARTY