Anura Kumara Dissanayeke, the main leader of the JVP (Sinhala acronym for the People’s Liberation Front), is the new president of Sri Lanka after defeating the other 38 candidates in the recent presidential election. The news has had a major impact in the international media, which has portrayed Dissanayeke and the JVP as “Marxists.” Videos and photos of the day of his inauguration have been circulated showing thousands of JVP supporters marching with red flags and large pictures of Marx and Lenin[1]. What is the meaning of this?
By Alejandro Iturbe
To answer this question, we must first remember that in 2022 the Sinhalese workers and people developed a very powerful revolutionary process with strikes, mass mobilizations, seizures of public buildings and official residences that overthrew the corrupt bourgeois government of the Rajapaksa brothers that dominated Sinhalese politics in the 21st century.
The IWL website published several articles dedicated to the analysis of this process. In them, we presented numerous data on this insular, poor, and semi-colonized country, as well as a review of its rich history of workers’ and people’s struggles since its independence from the United Kingdom in 1948 [2].
At that time, we defined the process in the following way: “There is an ongoing revolutionary process, the force of which has achieved a first triumph (the overthrow of a president), thus creating a deep crisis in the bourgeois political regime. But the mobilization did not lead the workers and masses to take power because of the policies of their leaderships (including the JVP).” We also argued that “this crisis did not reach the level of what we call the ‘vacuum of bourgeois power’ because there continued to exist an institution of that regime (parliament) which, although questioned, is still accepted by the workers and masses and was not attacked in these months of struggle.”
This gap was used by the Sinhala bourgeoisie to take the revolutionary process out of the streets and divert it first to the parliamentary path, and now to these presidential elections. In this sense, the bourgeoisie has so far been able to contain this revolutionary process through the mechanisms of bourgeois democracy.
At the same time, this election result reflects this process of 2022 and its aspirations in a distorted way. By voting for a candidate and a political force that presents itself with red flags and pictures of Marx and Lenin, the Sinhala workers and masses are expressing “we want socialism”. At the same time, as we will see below, the JVP played a very important role in 2022.
The JVP and Dissanayeke
The JVP was founded in 1965 by the union of Maoist, Stalinist, and left nationalist sectors. Its theoretical and programmatic basis was the concept of “gradual revolution”. It is interesting to note that since 1935 there had been a strong Trotskyist party in the country (the LSSP), which even led a general strike in 1953. In 1964 this party became part of the bourgeois government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike and was transformed into a party of the regime [3].
In 1971, the JVP led an armed insurrection against this government which was totally defeated. It tried again in 1987-1989 against another bourgeois government and was also defeated. Despite these defeats, the JVP cemented its reputation as a militant and revolutionary organization in those decades.
In the 1990s, following the path of many similar organizations around the world, the JVP abandoned its policy of “armed struggle” and began a profound shift to focus its activities within the legal and electoral processes. It also abandoned key points of its founding program such as the “abolition of private property” [4]. Nevertheless, it maintained its image of “red flags and socialism”. In the electoral processes, it often intervened in fronts with other (even bourgeois) organizations.
Dissanayeke is 55 years old and has been a militant since his student days in the JVP. He was a very active participant in its “legal turn”. He was elected to parliament in 2000 and served as Minister of Agriculture during the presidency of Mabinda Rajapaksa from 2004 to 2005. In 2014 he was appointed as the supreme leader of the JVP, and as a candidate in the 2019 presidential election he received 418,533 votes (3.16%).
The JVP in 2022
We have seen that the JVP has focused its activities on electoral and parliamentary processes while maintaining its “red face”. In this way, it has built up a militant force of some weight.
It is with this force that it is intervening very actively in the revolutionary process of 2022. Especially in the sector of the mobilizations promoted by the “citizens’ movement” called Janatha Aragalaya (People’s Struggle). This movement began with small events in neighborhoods, grew with the process, and then went on to install the Gota Vete Village permanently near the presidential headquarters. This movement was dominated by young students and young people from the middle-class sectors, with little (or very scattered) presence of structural and unionized workers mobilizing with their unions [5].
The JVP intervened in the People’s Struggle through its youth organization and its weight in the Inter-University Federation of Students. This allowed it to increase its prestige and influence, while at the same time strengthening its militant might. This is another important element in the analysis of its recent electoral triumph.
A Popular Front Government
We have said that the triumph of the JVP and its entry into government is a delayed electoral reflection of the 2022 process. In this sense, the masses feel that they have achieved a great triumph and that they are ruling with Dissanayeke and the JVP.
Their expectations are that the new government will take all the necessary measures to solve the very serious socio-economic needs they are suffering from. In this sense, this government can be defined as a “popular front” government with the characteristics analyzed by Trotsky in the 1930s, especially in his works collected in Whither France?
One of the characteristics of a popular-front government is that the left governs in alliance with sections of the bourgeoisie and within the limits of the institutions of the bourgeois regime and the capitalist economic system, without any intention of going beyond or breaking those limits.
In the case of Sri Lanka, we are talking about a bourgeois regime at the service of maintaining the country’s subjugation to imperialism. Today, the center of this subjugation is the payment of the immense foreign debt contracted by the Rajapaksa and the adjustment plans and their consequences to guarantee this payment.
Dissanayeke has said that his main task is to “renegotiate the agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF)”. It is well known what these “renegotiations” mean and the agreements that result from them. It is enough to recall what happened with the Syriza governments in Greece beginning in 2015 [6].
The new government will continue to pay the foreign debt and comply with the IMF’s demands. In this framework, there are other campaign proposals, including “facing the economic crisis exacerbated by the severe austerity measures implemented by the previous government… reducing the cost of living along with the expansion of social welfare programs” which will become empty words to deceive the masses.
At the same time, the JVP is calling on the bourgeoisie and its old parties, which have brought the country and the masses into this situation of economic and social crisis, to govern together. Dissanayeke stated, “We have deeply understood that a complicated country awaits us. We do not believe that one government, one party or one individual can solve this deep crisis.”
What are the possible outlooks?
The first thing we will see in Sri Lanka is the new government and all the bourgeois forces calling on the workers and masses to have “patience and trust” and “let them govern”. So it is possible that the expectations of the people will open a period of waiting and calm, without mobilizations and struggles or with calm processes whose content is to “ask the government” for some measures.
But sooner rather than later, the workers and masses will see that their expectations have been disappointed and will conclude that Dissanayeke and the JVP are “more of the same”. From there, the possibility opens up for them to take to the streets again as they did against Rajapaksa. This would be similar to what happened in Greece with the government of Alexis Tsipras and Syriza [7]. It is the duty of every organization that claims to be left to promote this reaction of the workers and the masses.
Within the framework of this possible process of struggles, the workers and the masses can begin to understand that in order to solve the acute socio-economic problems they suffer, it is necessary to advance in basic measures, within the framework of what we call a Workers’ and People’s Emergency Plan. This would be organized on the basis of the available resources and establish priorities for their use, which would be first and foremost the satisfaction of the urgent needs of the workers and the masses (such as food and fuel). The plan would also be aimed at breaking the country’s subjugation to imperialism, the root cause of the situation in which the people currently live.
This plan must begin with the non-payment of the foreign debt and the end of the “renegotiations” with the IMF. And it must include the expropriation of the goods legally and illegally acquired by the Rajapaksa clan and the other bourgeois clans, the installation of progressive taxes on the bourgeoisie, and put the control of production and the commercialization chain in the hands of workers and the popular sectors.
To advance and carry the struggle for this program to its conclusion, the building of a revolutionary socialist workers party is necessary. The workers and masses of Sri Lanka must take up the tradition and experience of the first decades of the LSSP to which we have already referred. The IWL is putting all its forces at the service of this task.
Notes
[1] Who is Anura Kumara Dissanayeke, the new president of Sri Lanka, and what does he promise to achieve?
[2] See for example Sri Lanka | An ongoing revolution topples President Rajapaksa – International Workers League (litci.org) and Sri Lanka | What are the prospects after the ouster of President Rajapaksa?
[3] The Day Trotskyists Shut Down a Country: The Sri Lankan Hartal
[4] “JVP clarifies policy on abolition of private property”.
[5] For those interested in learning more about this movement and its role in 2022, we recommend reading the article “Sri Lanka: Party over for the Rajapaksa”, written by Balasinghan Skanthakuma, at https://vientosur.info/sri-lanka-se-acaboel-partido-para-los-rajapaksa/
[6] On what happened in Greece, we recommend reading the magazine International Mail N° 13, August 2015.
[7] See Memorandum on Greece: eight years that left no other way out than workers’ struggle (litci.org)
