The vote at the Special Conference of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party June 7, authorizing Perera and his friends to enter a bourgeois government, was a blow against the Fourth International and the Ceylonese masses. It was the end result, as we shall see, of the wearing out of a revolutionary leadership.
The Origin of the LSSP
The LSSP always occupied a unique place in the Fourth International. Its origin was completely different from that of all the other sections of our movement. In brief, our movement everywhere else was born in more or less profound struggles within an established labor movement. In Ceylon, the labor movement itself was created toward the end of the thirties by a team of young revolutionaries educated in the English universities, who, attracted toward Communism just as the great struggle of the Left Opposition against Stalinism reached its height, decided in favor of the theory of the permanent revolution.
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It is necessary to add that they came to national prominence in a period when the Ceylonese bourgeoisie did not itself attempt to mount the least struggle against British imperialism, not even by way of imitating their Indian neighbors.
During the war, the leadership of the LSSP expelled the Stalinists, who wanted to collaborate with imperialism. The Trotskyists were persecuted, arrested. Some of them escaped to India and continued their struggle in the underground. Thus, following the war, they returned to their own country with great prestige and at the head of the labor movement.
Like every political formation, the LSSP underwent many internal struggles. Petty-bourgeois currents were eliminated, while the majority of the leadership likewise held in check the well-known opportunist tendencies of N.M. Perera, who gained his authority through systematic trade-union work.
The real leadership of the LSSP, composed of a group of figures that included Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewar-dene, Bernard Soysa, Doric de Souza, and Edmund Samarakoddy, was of high intellectual capacity and great militancy. It was recognized throughout Ceylon as constituting the genuine leading team. This team has now broken up, the majority having gone to pieces politically. This is the real tragedy which the LSSP has just experienced. What were the causes of this event? How did it come about?
It is necessary to say that alongside most excellent qualities, this leadership had weaknesses, the consequences of which have now become fully apparent.
In the first place, on the level of political education there was a big gap between these men, who followed the activities of the international Trotskyist movement, and most of the party rank and file, who knew no English and lacked adequate material in their own language for a political education. This leadership followed the life of the International, but was not sufficiently immersed in it nor inclined to bring the party as a whole into it.
This weakness was well-known among the leaders of the Trotskyist movement on an international scale. Whatever other issues temporarily divided them from time to time, there was common concern about this problem. The general organizational and: financial weakness of the Fourth International made it impossible to bring more vigorous measures to bear such as sending Trotskyists of top capacity for sustained work in Ceylon to help bring up the political level of the party. The split in 1953 did not help, as was recognized by both the International Secretariat and the International Committee; and the reunification undertaken last year was not granted sufficient time to bring new united efforts to bear in a strong healthy way in this situation.
The second weakness of the majority of the LSSP leadership was that the parliamentary successes following the war developed parliamentarian tendencies which were not combatted vigorously from the beginning and the ultimate consequences of which were not visualized. Even the intensive activities of the party centered on struggles for the conquest of seats in parliament
A third weakness was, so to speak, the exclusively "labor" character of the party during its first years. Through their activities, the leaders of the LSSP had won the confidence of the majority of the Ceylonese workers (workers or Colombo, transport workers, white-collar brackets, etc.). But for a long time they have not tackled the most important part of the proletariat of Ceylon, the plantation workers, consisting of Indians "imported" originally by the British and who today have no citizenship—neither Ceylonese nor Indian. The LSSP at one time registered good gains in this field, controlling a strong trade-union organization of those workers. But, with this exception, they scarcely penetrated the rural masses who constitute the majority of the population.
Ceylon, it might be mentioned, does not have a poor peasantry like India or so many other underdeveloped countries. However low the standard of living is among these masses, they do not suffer from famine, from despair. The situation is quite variegated and to our knowledge no serious study has been made of it. In any case, the LSSP never developed a program for these masses. (The Communist Party of Ceylon is in the same boat.)
In Ceylon, as in India, British imperialism granted independence following the second world war. Power passed into the hands of the UNP [United National Party], the party representing the thin layer of the Ceylonese bourgeoisie directly linked through their plantations, their export trade, with British imperialism. The first elections gave the LSSP the leading place among the opposition formations. From this followed not only parliamentary illusions but also the idea that with the wearing out and the bankruptcy of the UNP its hour would come.
But during the fifties another formation developed, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party [SLFP]. To the surprise of the leaders of the LSSP, this new party won an election victory in 1956 that brought it to power. At the time, the leaders of the LSSP characterized the SLFP as a bourgeois party based on wider layers than the UNP, but they thought that this party would also be rapidly worn out in power and that the LSSP would then move forward.
This perspective was demolished by the outcome of the elections of March 1960. The majority of the leading team of the LSSP lost their bearings and began to vacillate. At the same time Perera, with his reformist concepts, began to press forward more and more. At the time he proposed a coalition government with the SLFP. This was rejected, but the parliamentary group of the LSSP did cast a vote of confidence in the government. The Fourth International publicly disavowed this vote.1
With the evolution of the Bandaranaike government towards the right, the LSSP resumed its opposition, without, however, undertaking any serious self-criticism of its previous stand. It raised the slogan for a genuine socialist government. Then, together with the Ceylonese Communist Party and the MEP [Mahajana Eksath Peramuna—People's United Front], a petty-bourgeois formation, it constituted what was called the United Left Front [ULF]. This was a political combination with an insufficient program, which did not bring in the trade-union formations involving the citizenless Indian workers, and this combination did not conduct itself as a candidate for power, in opposition to the SLFP government, although the broad Ceylonese masses gave the ULF a warm welcome precisely in anticipation of this perspective.
Finally, about three months ago, Perera secretly opened personal negotiations with the prime minister. While the left wing of the LSSP, organized about a year ago, firmly opposed any suggestion of a coalition, the majority of the leadership favored a coalition, not with the LSSP alone, but with all the formations of the ULF.
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To justify this position, they argued that the SLFP was a petty-bourgeois formation, although it had already governed the country within the framework of capitalism for eight years; and they made a false analogy with the examples of Cuba and Algeria. But they did not want the LSSP to carry out the operation alone. As in the case of Perera, what was involved here was a gross error characteristic of all reformists. To reach the petty-bourgeois masses, the rural masses of Ceylon in this instance, they hoped—instead of winning them through a fighting program—to gain them through a combination with a bourgeois party that does not represent these masses but exploits them, playing on their reactionary sentiments, especially against the minorities of the country, in order to maintain the capitalist regime.
The Conference of the LSSP
Perera became all the more audacious in the LSSP as the vacillating, indecisive attitude of the majority of the leaders caused them to lose ground in a party which they had stopped educating for some time. The party conference, hastily called it is true, provided a striking illustration of this.
Three resolutions were offered. After a two-day debate, it was decided to present the Samarakoddy-Tampoe motion first because it was opposed in principle to any coalition. It received 159 votes, about 25 percent of the party.
Then, in second place, the de Silva-Goonewardene motion was presented; that is, the motion of the men who had actually led the organization for more than twenty-five years. It was presented by Goonewardene as in "the nature of an amendment" to Perera's motion. It got 75 votes, some 10 percent of the party.
This was not all. Perera's resolution received 65 percent; but among the 75 votes for the de Silva-Goonewardene motion, about two-thirds voted for the Perera resolution. Thus, the men who had played such an eminent role in the past, who had won so much prestige, found themselves, after a quarter of a century of leading the party, with around 25 votes, less than 4 percent.
During the debate, while the other two tendencies displayed confidence in their positions—the Perera group in their reformism, the Samarakoddy-Tampoe faction in their program of revolution—the centrist tendency could only express their own uncertainties, their demoralization. Forgetting what they had written with regard to the permanent revolution, they did not see that a bourgeoisie which failed to struggle for national independence would do everything possible to maintain its social domination. They no longer saw the SLFP as a bourgeois party.
The most tragic aspect of this crack-up was that it occurred in the face of the most brilliant opportunity yet provided the leadership of the LSSP. The governmental crisis in Ceylon is one of the signs that the colonial revolution that has rocked the world all the way from China, across Africa to Cuba, is ripening in this island. The very necessity felt by the bourgeoisie to seek a coalition with, the leaders of the labor movement is an indication of how close these same leaders stand to the possibility of establishing a workers and peasants government in Ceylon. The tragedy consists in their failure to see this and their readiness to give way to the demand that the opening for which they had prepared for a quarter of a century should be converted into the small change of posts in a bourgeois government.
Ceylonese Trotskyists Continue the Struggle
With this conference, a team of revolutionary leaders came to an end. Perera won the vote for his reformism and the majority of the old leaders decided to follow in tow. The banner of the socialist revolution in Ceylon passed into the hands of the comrades of the left wing, who left the conference following the tally and at once proclaimed the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary Section).
This organization, which constitutes the continuing body of the Ceylonese section of the Fourth International, begins in a difficult situation, inasmuch as illusions in the politics of Perera exist among the masses. The overall conditions, however, are not unfavorable. First of all, the split was made in the full light of day over a decisive political issue and all of Ceylon was aware of it. The leadership of the organization contains figures known to the whole country: Edmund Samarakoddy, one of the earliest leaders of the LSSP, as well as another member of parliament, Meryl Fernando; Bala Tampoe, one of the main leaders of the trade-union movement in Ceylon; and other well-known leaders such as Karalasinghe and O. Jayaratne. The organization includes many trade-union cadres plus the biggest part of the young militants, including the students.
After solving its immediate organizational problems, the young party will face important political tasks. The situation in Ceylon was marked not only by the split in the LSSP, but also by splits in two other formations of the United Left Front. The Ceylonese Communist Party split into a rightist, pro-Khrushchevist organization which supports the coalition government and a pro-Chinese organization that is opposed to it. The MEP also split over the issue of supporting or opposing the coalition government.
We greet the new formation which is continuing the best revolutionary traditions of the old LSSP. The entire world Trotskyist movement is with it in its task of reconstructing a new revolutionary leadership capable of assuring the victory of socialism in Ceylon.2
July 7, 1964
Footnotes
1. See Quatrieme Internationale, special number on the Sixth World Congress (1961).
2. The crisis in the LSSP was taken by Healy, leader of the Socialist Labour League of Great Britain, as an occasion for an attack against the reunified Fourth International, which he has not ceased to campaign against since he refused to participate in the Reunification Congress held in 1963.
First of all, we will take up a small lie. The June 20 Newsletter asserts that Healy "requested admission" to the conference, "but when it was discussed at the conference presidium, Pierre Frank . . . joined hands with the coalition renegades and urged that Healy's application be rejected." The rejection of Healy's request was made by the entire Presidium, which included left-wing representation. On this point, all the tendencies, for once, were unanimous and my opinion was not asked.
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A second point: Healy does not reveal that he demanded that the revolutionary tendency, after leaving the conference, should break not only with Perera, de Silva, etc., but also . . . with the Fourth International. This happened to be the real aim of Healy's trip to Colombo, where he hoped to fish in troubled waters. He does not mention this, because he met with a rebuff.
We not come to another lie, which has all the appearance of being calculated. According to him, the representative of the Fourth International, who took the floor at the conference of the LSSP to voice the opinion of the world Trotskyist movement, supported the de Silva-Goonewardene resolution advocating a coalition of the whole United Left Front with the SLFP. It happens to be a matter of public record that the Frouth International opposed any coalition whatsoever with the SLFP and supported the left-wing tendency which is now functioning as the Ceylonese section of the Fourth International.
The reasons for Healy's departure from the standards of truthful reporting are clear enough. This is not an instance of The Newsletter'a habitual carelessness with facts. In Colombo Healy announced his support for the left wing of the LSSP. But the left wing has been conducting its struggle for the past year in consultation with the United Secretariat of the Fourth International where it has had direct representation. Healy has been denouncing the United Secretariat as guilty of all kinds of "betrayals." Thus if he were logical, he would have to admit either that he had decided to participate in a "betrayal" perpetrated by the United Secretariat, or admit that he had been mistaken about its politics, at least in the case of Ceylon. In face of this dilemma, proletarian morality lost out to political expediency. Healy chose to amalgamate the position of the United Secretariat with the very proposals which in fact it was battling against! Thus he was free to display himself before the readers of The Newsletter as the champion of the left wing of the LSSP against . . . the United Secretariat!
However deliberate the lie may be, it happens to cast a most revealing light on the nature of Healy's politics. The Fourth International—both before and during the conference—in opposition to the proposal for a coalition with a bourgeois party, advocated the positive slogan of a workers and peasants government, and did this in the concrete instance by suggesting that as against a coalition with the SLFP, the Trotskyists should advance the formula of a government of the United Left Front.
For Healy such a slogan is identical to a coalition with the bourgeoisie, hence constitutes betrayal. This is not one of Healy's passing aberrations; it is part of his general concept, a manifestation of his failure to understand the Transitional Program of the Fourth International and his failure to properly appreciate the colonial revolution. He thus excludes governmental transitional slogans and any possibility of a transitional government coming into existence.
Even without a detailed examination of his policies in England, it is easy to gather, simply from reading his newspaper, that to him the Tories and the Labour Party amount to one and the same. He never comes out in favor of going through the experience of a Labour government.
In the field of the colonial revolution, basing himself on the premise that in the absence of a revolutionary Marxist party, there can be no successful revolution, he denies the triumphs registered by the theory of the permanent revolution in Algeria and Cuba. He likens Castro to . . . Batista, Chiang Kai-shek, and Ataturk. In Zanzibar, he reduces the revolution to a comic opera, and so on.
Healy's politics is very simple. You cannot open any issue of his newspaper without finding the very latest on how someone has betrayed something somewhere. The Newsletter deals in "sellouts" the way some papers deal in sex. It appears to keep standing headlines in which it is necessary only to replace the names of those who have sold out each week. Castro, we are told, has betrayed the Cuban masses; it is necessary to construct a revolutionary leadership. Ben Bella has betrayed the Algerian masses; it is necessary to construct a revolutionary leadership. The Socialist Workers Party has betrayed the American masses; it is necessary to construct a revolutionary leadership. The United Secretariat has betrayed Trotskyism; it is necessary to "reorganize" the Fourth International. On this political level, where—outside of Healy—the whole world is committing betrayals, there is no need for profound analysis, no need even for cerebral effort. Each side in the two camps—Healy and the rest of the world—follows its predestined course. In any case, for such politics, there is no need to belong to an international organization, to take part in its congresses; it is sufficient to turn on the phonograph and place the needle in the groove.
Healy has really invented nothing novel. He simply represents today's version of the insular British sectarianism which Engels and Marx's daughter fought in the nineties and which Lenin scored in the twenties in The Infantile Disease.
A final word: in Colombo Healy sought to debate me on numerous questions, including Marxist "philosophy." The Ceylonese workers movement, obviously, ought not to be denied the opportunity to witness the capacities of such a genius in action.