Statement by the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake meeting with a visiting IMF delegation at the Presidential Secretariat on April 2, 2026. Image courtesy of midpoint.lk.
On June 5, 2026, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)/National People’s Power (NPP) government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake published a special gazette notification for a bill to establish the “Chartered Institute of Media Professionals of Sri Lanka (CIMP).” Tabled by the Ministry of Health and Mass Media, the bill is packaged in the soothing language of “introducing and maintaining professional standards” and “elevating quality.” This is a calculated fraud. A close examination of the bill’s provisions â its definitions, its institutional architecture, its disciplinary mechanisms â reveals an instrument of state censorship designed to discipline, silence, and ultimately eliminate independent journalism, above all the social media content creators and anti-government commentators whom the Dissanayake regime views as a mortal threat to its grip on power.
The working class and all defenders of democratic rights must reject this bill in its entirety. It is not a measure to improve journalism. It is a weapon for the suppression of democratic discourse, conceived in direct continuity with the long and bloody history of media repression in Sri Lanka, and fully consonant with the international offensive against press freedom being waged by capitalist governments across the globe.
The Architecture of State Control
The bill establishes a statutory body corporate â the Chartered Institute â whose design is transparently that of a state-controlled gatekeeper over who may legitimately practice journalism. Five features of the legislation expose its authoritarian character beyond any doubt.
First, the Institute introduces a system of state-created accreditation. Section 3(i) declares that one of the Institute’s objects is “to accredit the media professionals in media professionalism at the evaluation of their efficiency.” Section 4(o) empowers the Institute “to take necessary steps to introduce, develop, maintain and monitor professional standards.” Section 4(t) authorizes it “to maintain and publish a register of members.” Taken together, these provisions convert the fundamental democratic right of freedom of expression into a state-sanctioned privilege. The government positions itself as the ultimate arbiter of who may enroll, register, and be certified as a “qualified” media professional. Freedom of the press is an inherent right, not a license to be granted or revoked by the capitalist state. The very premise of the bill is an assault on this principle.
Second, the definition of “media professional” is deliberately vast and all-encompassing. Section 27 defines the term to include “writers, content developers, content editors, anchors, presenters, broadcasters, journalists, editors, publishers, media owners, media managers, media educators, media researchers, media technicians and camerapersons in the field of media.” The inclusion of “content developers” is particularly revealing. This wide net is cast with a specific purpose: to trap independent bloggers, social media commentators, and alternative left-wing media platforms under the disciplinary apparatus of the state. The Dissanayake administration is acutely threatened by unaligned online media. Mainstream corporate media networks in Sri Lanka are tightly controlled by oligarchs or the state itself. Working-class anger, exposures of government compliance with International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity, and socialist political analysis find expression through alternative content creators and independent social media channels. By bringing “content developers” under the heel of a chartered state apparatus, the government is building a weapon to silence precisely these voices.
Third, the bill establishes a state-vetted Disciplinary Committee empowered to investigate “professional misconduct.” Section 12(1)(c) provides for the appointment of a Disciplinary Committee. Section 23(1) mandates that this committee “shall hold an inquiry whenever the Council refers any matter to the Disciplinary Committee in respect of a professional misconduct of a member.” Section 23(2) then defines “professional misconduct” as “an act or omission which shall be determined by rules of the Council made under section 26” â a definition so circular and elastic that it amounts to a blank cheque for the political punishment of journalists who refuse to toe the government’s line. Section 24 empowers the Council to “disenroll any member,” or in the alternative to “warn, reprimand or suspend him from membership for such period not exceeding one year.” The power to strip a media worker of professional credentials is the power to destroy a career â and to send a message of intimidation to every other journalist in the country.
Fourth, the bill creates an “Interim Council” appointed entirely by the state. Section 5(4)(a) provides that until the Governing Council is elected, the Minister shall appoint an Interim Council consisting of “the Secretary to the Ministry of the Minister” and “six other persons who have distinguished themselves with proven knowledge, eminence and at least twenty years’ experience in the field of media, nominated by the Secretary to the Ministry of the Minister.” This Interim Council is granted the power under Section 5(4)(b) to make rules “in respect of the number of members to be selected and the criteria to select such members to the Institute” and “to elect and appoint members and the office bearers to the Council.” The Interim Council thus controls who gets into the Institute in the first instance and who may sit on its permanent Governing Council. The entire institutional architecture â the membership criteria, the internal rules, the definition of what constitutes an offense â will be shaped entirely by political appointees of the capitalist state. The Institute will be, from its inception, an instrument of the government.
Fifth, the bill conspicuously lacks any explicit guarantee that membership in the Institute will never be a prerequisite to practice journalism. This omission is not accidental. It signals that the Institute is designed to become a mandatory gatekeeper. Unregistered or deregistered journalists could rapidly find themselves legally blocked from entering press conferences, obtaining state accreditation, accessing public events, or securing employment. The Institute is a mechanism for the de facto licensing of journalism â and therefore for the de facto banning of journalists the state finds inconvenient.
A Continuum of Repression
The CIMP Bill does not emerge from a vacuum. It is the latest in a long continuum of state attacks on press freedom in Sri Lanka, stretching back decades and across every bourgeois government.
The Press Council Act of No. 05 of 1973, introduced by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party-led coalition government â which included the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Stalinist Communist Party â established a government tribunal with the powers of a district court, empowered to fine and jail journalists. Its chairman and members were appointed by the president. Among its targets was Kamkaru Mawtha, the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist League â the forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party. Last September, the cabinet spokesperson announced that the cabinet has approved to amend the Press Council Act to expand its regulatory scope to encompass modern digital, electronic, and online media platforms. The historical irony is sharp: the JVP, whose own cadres were slaughtered by the thousands after the abortive 1971 uprising, today deploys the same mechanisms of press control pioneered by the regime that repressed them, now directed against the working class and its political representatives.
The Rajapakse regime (2005â2015) escalated media repression to police-state levels. In 2009, it revived the Press Council Act. In 2012, it moved to gag websites, extending the Press Council’s reach to online media. In 2013, it unveiled a “Code of Media Ethics” whose vaguely phrased clauses â banning publications that “offend against the expectations of the public” or “contain information which could mislead the public” â gave the government unlimited scope to suppress criticism. During this period, 16 journalists and media workers were killed by pro-government death squads, and Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge was murdered in broad daylight.
The Online Safety Act brought by the Ranil Wickremasinghe government in January 2024, purporting to counter âfake newsâ, attacked social media activism decisively. It dealt a major blow to freedom of expression by granting a government-appointed commission sweeping powers to police and censor online speech. Under the guise of preventing online harms, the law criminalizes legitimate dissent, investigative journalism, and social media criticism, threatening activists and content creators with severe prison sentences.
The JVP/NPP government is deepening this authoritarian inheritance, not breaking from it. In November 2024, within weeks of taking office, it announced it would not abolish the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), despite having pledged to do so during the election campaign. Instead, it introduced a new “Protection of the State from Terrorism Act” (PSAT) that broadens the definition of terrorism to encompass strikes, protests, and dissent. In November 2025, following Cyclone Ditwah, Dissanayake declared a state of emergency and issued regulations making it a criminal offense â punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment â to communicate or publish any supposedly “false” statements that could allegedly cause “public alarm.” Deputy Minister Sunil Watagala explicitly instructed police to treat social media critics “not merely as suspects but as offenders.” These powers were deployed to enforce deeper austerity under the guise of “rebuilding.” The state of emergency has now been extended six times,[1] giving Dissanayake sweeping dictatorial powers.
On May 28, 2026 â just one week before the Chartered Institute gazette â President Dissanayake issued a special gazette declaring the Government Press and State Media as essential services, effectively outlawing industrial strike action in those sectors. The Chartered Institute Bill is the ideological twin of this hardline measure. Together they form a pincer: the state attacks media workers’ right to withhold their labour, while simultaneously constructing a disciplinary apparatus to control what those workers may write and who may write at all.
The International Offensive Against Press Freedom
The Dissanayake government’s bill forms part of a global offensive by capitalist states to bring the press â and especially online media â under state and corporate control.
In December 2010, the Hungarian parliament under Prime Minister Viktor OrbÃĄn passed a comprehensive media law subordinating all public and private media to the control of a state “media council” composed of OrbÃĄn’s partisans. The council was empowered to impose fines of up to âŦ730,000 for reporting deemed “politically unbalanced.” As the WSWS noted at the time [2], OrbÃĄn’s authoritarian course was not a “European oddity” but a preparation for “a new round of brutal social attacks” demanded by the international financial markets. The muzzling of the media and the bolstering of the state apparatus were undertaken in direct anticipation of the social conflicts that austerity would unleash.
Germany’s Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which came into force in 2018, created a legal framework for internet censorship under the pretext of combating “hate speech” and “fake news.” As the WSWS documented, [3] the law was “part of an international offensive to attack free speech online, aimed at suppressing left-wing and socialist views.”
In 2022, Britain’s Ofcom revoked the broadcast licenses of RT, couching the ban in the language of “impartiality” and “freedom.” In 2025, the European Union’s 17th sanctions package against Russia extended to banning pro-Russia and pro-Palestine media, representing what the WSWS called [4] “an open attack on the democratic right to freedom of the press.”
The pattern is unmistakable. Across the world, capitalist governments facing mounting social opposition are constructing legal and institutional mechanisms to police public discourse. The language is always the same: “professional standards,” “ethics,” “combating disinformation.” The purpose is always the same: to suppress working-class opposition and anti-capitalist analysis.
Austerity Requires Repression
The Chartered Institute Bill cannot be understood in isolation from the broader trajectory of the JVP/NPP government. Dissanayake came to power in September 2024 on a wave of popular discontent, posturing as an anti-establishment outsider. Within days of the new parliament convening, the government jettisoned its election pledge [5] to renegotiate the IMF bailout and committed itself to implementing the austerity program in full.
The record since then has been one of relentless attacks on the working class. The government has restructured and privatized state-owned enterprises, sharply increased fuel prices by approximately 40 percent since February 2026, raised electricity tariffs by 32 percent, hiked gas prices by 31 percent, and maintained strict spending limits even as a quarter of the population has fallen below the poverty line. In April 2026, an IMF delegation lavished praise [6] on Dissanayake, commending his “strict adherence to IMF dictates.” The president boasted that “Sri Lanka has met all targets set under the programme.”
The government now faces a deepening crisis [7]: a worsening balance of payments deficit, a sliding rupee, soaring oil import costs driven by the US-Israeli war on Iran, and simmering resistance from workers and the rural poor. It has responded with essential services orders, police violence against protesters, the arrest of student activists, the deployment of the military as strike-breakers, and the repeated extension of emergency rule. The Chartered Institute Bill is the latest escalation in this authoritarian trajectory â a preemptive strike against the dissemination of truth, against the journalism that exposes the real conditions of working people and provides the political analysis necessary for the working class to cohere into a unified revolutionary force.
The JVP: From Death Squads to “Professional Standards”
The JVP’s present role as the enforcer of media censorship must be understood in light of its political history. As the ICFI and WSWS have documented over decades [8], the JVP is not and has never been a socialist or workers’ party. It is a right-wing, nationalist, and communalist movement, steeped in Sinhala populism. In 1988â89, it carried out a campaign of assassinations in which hundreds of left-wing political opponents, trade unionists, and workers â including members of the Revolutionary Communist League â were killed. It was the most trenchant advocate of the racist war against the Tamil minority that culminated in the May 2009 massacre of 40,000 Tamils.
The JVP’s transformation into a party of bourgeois rule â implementing IMF austerity, deploying police-military repression, and now constructing a state apparatus for media censorship â is not a betrayal of its original principles. It is the logical culmination of its class character as a petty-bourgeois nationalist formation. The same party that once physically liquidated its left-wing opponents now seeks to silence them through the bureaucratic mechanisms of a “Chartered Institute.” The methods have been modernized; the objective â the suppression of working-class political independence â remains the same.
The Pseudo-Left and the Trade Unions: Enablers of Repression
The working class cannot look to the pseudo-left organizations or the trade union bureaucracy to defend democratic rights. The Frontline Socialist Party, which falsely postures as a left-wing opponent of the government, collaborates with the union apparatus, whitewashing its betrayals and channeling workers into dead-end negotiations and appeals to parliament. The trade unions affiliated with the JVP/NPP maintain a deathly silence and actively block all anti-government action by their members. Unions tied to opposition parliamentary parties â the Samagi Jana Balawegaya and the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna â call only limited actions aimed at defusing genuine working-class opposition.
None of these forces will mount a principled defense of press freedom, because all of them â government and opposition alike â support the IMF program that is immiserating the working class. All of them fear the independent political mobilization of workers and youth. All of them have an interest in controlling public discourse. The Chartered Institute of Media Professionals Bill is a bipartisan project in its essentials, just as the emergency regulations after Cyclone Ditwah were urged by opposition leader Sajith Premadasa before Dissanayake declared them.
Build the Independent Mobilization of the Working Class
The fight against the CIMP Bill is inseparable from the fight against IMF austerity, against imperialist war, and for the political independence of the working class. Freedom of the press is not a bourgeois luxury to be set aside until “economic demands” are won. It is a vital weapon in the class struggle. The working class needs unfettered access to information, analysis, and political debate â including and especially the revolutionary Marxist perspective advanced by the ICFI, the World Socialist Web Site andthesocialist.lk â to arm itself for the battles ahead.
The SLLA calls on workers, youth, journalists, online content creators, and all defenders of democratic rights to:
Reject the Chartered Institute of Media Professionals Bill in its entirety! This is not a bill to be amended â it is a bill to be defeated!
No to state licensing of journalists! Freedom of the press is a right, not a privilege granted by the capitalist state!
Defend the right of social media content creators and online commentators to publish without state interference!
Abolish the Press Council Act, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the proposed Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill, and all repressive legislation inherited from previous regimes!
No to the essential services ban on Government Press and State Media workers! Defend the right to strike!
For the building of independent action committees across all workplaces to fight IMF austerity and the assault on democratic rights!
For the unity of Sri Lankan workers with their brothers and sisters in South Asia and internationally against the common enemy â global capitalism and its state institutions!
For a workers’ government based on workersâ committees, not the capitalist parties and their trade union appendages!
For the socialist reorganization of society â the only foundation for genuine democracy and press freedom!
The Dissanayake government is constructing the architecture of a police state because it knows that the social crisis it is deepening through IMF austerity will generate mass opposition. The working class must answer by constructing its own independent organizations â action committees in every workplace and neighborhood, democratically controlled and politically armed with a socialist-internationalist program. The fight against media censorship is a fight for the political independence of the working class. It is a fight that can only be won through the building of a revolutionary party and the mobilization of the international working class against the capitalist system in its entirety.
We, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia, wage this fight in solidarity with the international programme of the International Committee of the Fourth International. We urge workers, youth, intellectuals and all defenders of democratic rights to join us in advancing this struggle and building the revolutionary leadership necessary for the fight for socialism.
By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Member, The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka. SEP is the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which publishes the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).
Sangeethsan (Sangeethsan Facebook page)
On a day (June 2) that should have passed unremarkably in Kilinochchi, the Jaffna District Crime Detective Bureau, acting through Chavakacheri police, arrested a 24-year-old musician. His name is Ganesh Kumar Sankeethan (Sangeethsan) â known by his stage name âHipHop Sangeeâ (YouTube Channel name) â and his crime, according to the state, was uploading songs that the police allege indirectly glorify the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). He was remanded for two weeks under Section 3(h) of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), his lawyer K. Sayanthan verified.
Sangeethsan, a rapper, has earned widespread recognition within the local Tamil hip-hop community for compositions that combine social commentary with cultural storytelling. Many of his works are available through his social media accounts. Before we go any further, let us consider what one of those songs contains. It is not vague cultural expression or ambiguous artistic metaphor. It invokes āŽ āŽŖā¯āŽŖāŽŠā¯ â Elder Brother â the term used in Eelam Tamil political culture to refer to Velupillai Prabhakaran. It speaks of the Tiger flag arriving in triumph. It honors the āŽŽāŽžāŽĩā¯āŽ°āŽŠā¯ â the Great Heroes, the fallen LTTE cadres â by name and by the imagery of their sacrifice. It calls on them to return and build the nation. It invokes āŽāŽžāŽ°ā¯āŽ¤ā¯āŽ¤āŽŋāŽā¯ â November â the month of Maaveerar Naal, the annual mourning of the LTTE dead, as its emotional and symbolic landscape: flowers are brought to the fallen, their weeping families cry out to them, and the dead are called back to build the nation.
These are the lyrics of a young man from a war-ravaged district who grew up surrounded by grief, who found in music a way to articulate what his community has been undemocratically forbidden to say openly since May 2009.
We state these facts not to hand ammunition to those who want Sangeethsan kept in a cell. We state them because this article is committed to a principle that the Sri Lankan state and its chauvinist supporters on social media are equally committed to destroying: that honest politics must begin with the truth, not with convenient omissions. The question before us is not whether Sangeethsanâs lyrics express a political program we endorse. They do not â and we will explain why, plainly and without condescension, in the paragraphs that follow. The question before us is a different and more fundamental one: does any democratic society have the right to imprison a 24-year-old for the political content of his songs?
The answer is no. Unequivocally, no.
Freedom of political expression â including the freedom to express a politics that is wrong, mistaken, or even one that others find deeply objectionable â is a right that the working class defends with the greatest vigilance, with one principled and non-negotiable exception: fascist speech and fascist organization. We defend such expressions not because all political ideas are equally correct, but because the repressive legal machinery constructed to silence Tamil grief today is the same machinery that will be turned on striking workers, protesting students, and anyone else who challenges the authority of the capitalist state tomorrow. This is not a theoretical warning. It is the documented history of the PTA, other security laws and essential services laws in Sri Lanka, which have been used against Sinhala rural youth, students, Muslim youth, Tamil journalists, plantation workers, electricity workers and port workers with equal and indiscriminate brutality.
This article is not written primarily for those for whom what we discuss here is their daily experience. It is written for Sinhala youth, for middle-class families in Colombo and Kandy and Galle, for workers on plantations and in factories, who have been told their entire lives that the Tamil question was settled in May 2009, that âterrorismâ was defeated, and that any sympathy for Tamil political expression is a conspiracy against the nation. It is written for those who, upon seeing Sangeethsanâs lyrics circulated on social media, may have felt the trained reflex: Tiger flag, Prabhakaran, Tamil Eelam â this is exactly what the PTA is for.
It is written to ask: who taught you to feel that reflex? Who benefits from it? And what has it cost you â not as a Sinhala person, but as a worker, as a young person, as someone whose living standards are being destroyed by the same state that is filling its remand prisons with Tamil youth and artists?
A Ban Designed Not to Fight Terror, But to Manufacture It
The formal proscription of the LTTE has been maintained continuously since the government of Mahinda Rajapakse banned it by gazette in January 2009, just months before the militaryâs final offensive ended the civil war. A final gazette in 2011 consolidated and extended this proscription to cover ârelated activities.â Every government since â Sirisenaâs, Wickremesingheâs, Gotabayaâs, and now Dissanayakeâs JVP/NPP government â has maintained this framework intact.
When the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) opposed the original 2009 ban, it explained with precision what the ban was actually for. The statement issued at the time noted that the ban âhas no direct bearing on the LTTE â the government is already waging war against the Tamil separatist organisation.â It warned that the decreeâs sweeping powers to proscribe organisations âconnected with or representingâ the LTTE could âimmediately be used against the Tamil National Alliance, a parliamentary political party.â And it predicted, with complete accuracy, that âsuch broad definitions, however, could be applied to any organisations, including political parties, trade unions or student bodies, that are regarded as opponents of the government.â[1]
Seventeen years later, those warnings have been borne out in case after case. The PTA has been used to imprison Tamil detainees for years without trial, to torture a young Muslim poet named Ahnaf Jazeem for writing verse that condemned ISIS and imperialist war, and to harass Tamil journalists. The JVP/NPP government â elected on a promise to abolish the PTA â has already used the Act against Muslim youth who expressed opposition to the Gaza genocide. In August 2025, the Counter Terrorism and Investigation Division (TID) questioned a Tamil journalist who reported on mass graves in the North. The new Protection of the State from Terrorism Act (PSTA) being drafted to replace the PTA reproduces its essential features while expanding the scope of what can be defined as a âterrorist actâ to include actions that âintimidate the publicâ or âcompel the government to do or abstain from doing any actâ â language that could criminalize strikes, protests, and any form of organized resistance.
The instrument changes. The purpose remains identical: to place in the hands of the capitalist state an infinitely elastic legal weapon that can be pointed at anyone, at any time.
The Criminalization of Memory is Not an Accident
To understand why a 24-year-old rapper from Kilinochchi sits in a remand prison for singing about Tamil Eelam, you have to understand what kind of region Kilinochchi is, and what kind of wound the state is insisting must never be named.
Kilinochchi was the administrative capital of LTTE-controlled territory. It was also the site of some of the most intense fighting and civilian displacement in the final years of the war. The surrounding region of the Vanni was the theater of the last stages of a conflict in which, according to United Nations estimates, tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed. The survivors of that catastrophe â the families who lost fathers, mothers, husbands and children, who spent months in detention camps, who rebuilt lives from rubble â now live in a society where any public expression of that experience can be treated as a criminal act.
Sangeethsan is not a terrorist. He is a young man who grew up in the aftermath of that catastrophe, processing it in the only way artists know how: through music. To understand what is really at stake â politically and morally â we must read what he actually sang, and then ask not whether we agree with every word, but whether any democratic society can justify locking a young person in a remand cell for singing them.
This is not incidental to the logic of the PTA. It is the logic of the PTA. The state knows perfectly well that a military revival of the LTTE is structurally impossible and virtually non-existent. There is no evidence of serious LTTE organizational infrastructure, no military command, no armed force in the field. The proscription is maintained not because the LTTE poses a threat, but because the legal apparatus of the proscription remains extraordinarily useful â for precisely this: to convert political grievance into criminality, to transform memory into evidence, and to force the Tamil population into a permanent condition of political silence under pain of imprisonment.
This is what the SEP observed in August 2022, when the Wickremesinghe government, in the very same extraordinary gazette in which it delisted some Tamil diaspora groups for diplomatic purposes, continued to maintain the proscription framework: âThe continued proscription of Tamil and Muslim groups is part of ongoing efforts by one government after another to whip up Sinhala chauvinism and discrimination against the countryâs oppressed minorities. Facing the mass opposition of workers and the poor, the crisis-ridden Wickremesinghe regime is determined to keep communal tensions alive and deepen the repressive measures.â [2]
The pattern is consistent across every government of the post-independence era. The names change â UNP, SLFP, PA, UPFA, SLPP, JVP/NPP. The policy does not. This is not an accident. This is the function that communalism has always served in Sri Lanka: as the SEP noted in its analysis of 60 years of post-independence history, “Six decades of independence have brought ordinary working people nothing but communal conflict, deepening social misery and increasingly anti-democratic methods of rule.” The beneficiaries of that dynamic have never been ordinary Sinhala working people. They have been the ruling class, which has used ethnic division to rule a fractured country and impose economic policies that serve capital at the expense of all working people, regardless of their ethnicity.[3]
Read the Lyrics â Then Ask the Right Question
Let us be honest about what Sangeethsan sang in the song that we referred to above. His lyrics are not ambiguous cultural nostalgia. They invoke āŽ āŽŖā¯āŽŖāŽŠā¯ â Elder Brother â a term that in the context of Eelam Tamil political culture refers unambiguously to Velupillai Prabhakaran. They speak of a Tiger flag arriving in triumph. They use the term āŽŽāŽžāŽĩā¯āŽ°āŽŠā¯ (Maaveeran) â Great Hero â the specific honorific reserved for fallen LTTE cadres. They invoke the month of āŽāŽžāŽ°ā¯āŽ¤ā¯āŽ¤āŽŋāŽā¯ (Karthikai/November), which is the month of Maaveerar Naal, the annual commemoration of the LTTEâs dead. They call upon the heroes to âcome backâ and âbuild the nation.â They speak of warriors whose âsulfur-scented bodies blended into the windâ â the gunpowder of the battlefield rendered as the smell of sacrifice. This is explicitly a song of mourning for, and celebration of, the LTTEâs slain fighters and their leader. The lyrics read, in part:
The Tiger flag of our Elder Brother is arriving, make way and clear the path!
Tamil Eelam dances in roaring triumph, his name echoes in every direction!
O great heroes who died protecting the soil, time shall never forget you!
Come back, come back, please come back again, to display your bravery and to build the nation! [most approximate English Translation]
These sentiments, as expressed, justify no arrest. We understand the content of it because any serious political analysis must begin with reality. But we unequivocally say that the 24-year-old youth from Kilinochchi should not be imprisoned for writing and singing this song.
Sangeethsanâs song is not fascist speech. The working class does not defend fascist speech â it demands the prosecution of fascist outfits and their financial backers. This distinction is not arbitrary. It is rooted in the nature of fascism itself: unlike any other political tendency, however wrong, fascism does not seek to win political argument â it seeks to annihilate the very conditions under which political argument is possible. Sangeethsan’s song is the very expression of a grief-stricken and oppressed people rendered in music. But this legal machinery, constructed to silence Tamil grief and working-class resistance, is never â without a single exception in the entire post-independence history of Sri Lanka â the machinery turned against the Sinhala chauvinist and communalist outfits that the ruling class courts, funds, and shelters precisely when the class struggle sharpens. The fascist JVP’s death squads of 1988â1990, the Bodu Bala Sena’s anti-Muslim pogroms, the Sihala Urumaya’s ethnic incitement â none of these drew the ferocity of the PTA. The state does not point its anti-terror machinery at the forces of communalism. It points it at the forces of class struggle. That asymmetry is not incidental. It is the entire point.
To genuinely serve Tamil youth â and to speak honestly to Sinhala workers who need to understand what is happening â we must ask the harder question that state repression is designed to prevent anyone from asking: What does it mean that a generation of Tamil youth in Kilinochchi and Jaffna and Mullaithivu genuinely love Prabhakaran and genuinely mourn the LTTEâs dead?
It means something real and painful. As already said, these young people grew up in the rubble of a bloody war. They grew up in a region under continuous military occupation, where soldiers still control Tamil lands, where surveillance is a fact of daily life, where their elders were disappeared, where mass graves continue to be discovered. They grew up in districts where, even before the 2022 economic collapse, poverty levels in Mullaithivu district reached 40 percent. In this reality, Prabhakaran is not a political program to them. He is a symbol of the idea that someone, once, stood up and fought back.
The grief is real. The anger is legitimate. The desire for dignity is not only human â it is politically necessary. And the passion that Tamil youth pour into songs like Sangeethsanâs is the raw material of a generation searching desperately for something to believe in.
The question that our revolutionary movement poses is therefore not: âHow do we suppress this passion?â The question is: âWhy is this passion flowing into Tamil nationalism instead of socialist politics?â And the answer to that question leads us directly back to the Colombo ruling class â and to the specific responsibility of the Sinhala working class and its potential for genuine solidarity with Tamil workers and the poor. The state that criminalizes Sangeethsanâs song is not only persecuting Tamil youth. It is actively working to ensure that their passion never finds its correct political destination.
Who is being Deceived, and Why
Here we must speak directly to the Sinhala readers of this article â especially to young people who, when Sangeethsanâs arrest was discussed on social media, may have felt that instinctive reaction: he shouldnât have been singing about Tamil Eelam, thatâs LTTE territory, what did he expect?
That reaction is not yours. It was installed in you.
For decades, the Sri Lankan ruling class and its corporate media have conducted a systematic program of militarization of the society and political conditioning. Sinhala children grew up with a version of national history in which the Tamil struggle for democratic rights was, from its very origins, portrayed as a foreign conspiracy and a terrorist project. The legitimate grievances that produced the Tamil national movement â the systematic language discrimination of 1956, the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1958, 1977, and 1983, the deliberate exclusion of Tamils from state employment and university admissions â were erased from public consciousness. In their place was substituted a permanent security narrative of fear mongering: we are under threat, we must be vigilant, any sympathy for Tamil identity is sympathy for terrorism. War has been rationalized as necessary, and the military has been glorified as âwar heroesâ (Rana Viru), ready to be deployed against any struggle of the working class united across ethnic divisions.
This communalist project was never a natural outgrowth of Sinhala culture or Buddhism. It was a deliberate political construction, launched by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party in 1956 as an electoral strategy to outbid the conservative UNP, and then reproduced by every faction of the ruling class because it served a vital class function: it prevented the Sinhala and Tamil working class from recognizing their common interests and uniting against the system that exploited them both.
The result can be seen today on TikTok, Facebook, and X. The moment a Tamil artist, journalist, or ordinary citizen uses the vocabulary of their own history â “Tamil Eelam,” “homeland,” “genocide,” “accountability”, âwar crimesâ, âcommemorationâ â sections of Sinhala social media erupt in denunciation. These users do not consider themselves tools of the state. Many of them are themselves suffering from the same economic devastation â unemployment, inflation, the IMFâs austerity measures, collapsing public services â that Tamil workers in the North and East are suffering. They have been successfully redirected. The enemy they have been given is not the class that rules them, but the neighbor who speaks a different language and carries a different wound.
Here is the dialectic that the ruling class has maintained for seven decades, and which it is essential for Sinhala workers and youth to understand: Sinhala chauvinism produces Tamil nationalism, and Tamil nationalism, in turn, reinforces Sinhala chauvinism. Each tendency is the mirror image and the fuel of the other. When Colombo discriminated against Tamil language rights in 1956, it created the conditions for Tamil political mobilization. When that mobilization was met not with redress but with pogroms, it created the conditions for Tamil armed separatism. When Tamil separatism launched attacks on Sinhala civilians, it was used by the Sinhala ruling class to justify yet more state terror against Tamils â and to intimidate Sinhala workers who might otherwise have seen through the charade. And when the state now arrests a 24-year-old for singing about Prabhakaran or Tamil Eelam, it ensures that another generation of Tamil youth will conclude â understandably, though incorrectly â that there is no path forward except through Tamil nationalism.
The LTTEâs political program was the program of an aspiring Tamil bourgeoisie, not the Tamil working class. As the ICFI analysis of the LTTEâs defeat made clear, the LTTE was utterly incapable of making a political appeal to Sinhala workers precisely because its perspective was based on ethnic struggle rather than class struggle â and its denunciations of the entire Sinhala population for the crimes of the Colombo government ensured that the very working-class unity that could have changed everything was permanently foreclosed.[4] The LTTEâs violent attacks on ordinary Sinhalese civilians served the same reactionary purpose as the governmentâs Sinhala supremacism: to divide the working class along ethnic, religious and linguistic lines and thereby strengthen the hand of Sinhala chauvinist forces in Colombo. The LTTEâs military defeat in 2009 resolved nothing. It left the Tamil masses with their democratic rights still denied, their land still occupied, their poor still impoverished â and their youth still searching for a political direction.
That is the political vacuum into which songs like Sangeethsanâs speak. They should not be criminalized and suppressed. They should be answered â with a socialist program that offers Tamil workers what Prabhakaran could never offer: genuine unity with the Sinhala and Muslim working class in a common fight against the capitalist state that oppresses all of them.
The State that Imprisons Sangeethsan will come for You Next
This is the point that must be grasped most clearly by Sinhala workers and youth who might be tempted to view Sangeethsanâs arrest as a Tamil problem, not their problem.
The PTA was enacted in 1979 to suppress Tamil militant organizations. But, it was never only about Tamils. It was used to bloodily suppress the JVP uprisings of 1988â1990 â killing tens of thousands of oppressed Sinhala rural youth. It has been used against Sinhala journalists, trade unionists, and political opponents. And under the JVP/NPP government that came to power promising to abolish it, the PTA has been invoked against Muslim and Tamil youth and it has used the Essential Public Services Act against electricity workers who protested and postal workers who struck.
The logic is identical in every case: the same state apparatus that defines Tamil cultural expression as âterrorismâ will define your strike, your protest, your social media post criticizing the IMF as âterrorismâ whenever it becomes convenient. The elastic definitions being written into the new PSTA â acts that âintimidate the publicâ or âcompel the government to abstain from doing any actâ â are not aimed at a nonexistent LTTE or any other such outfit. They are aimed at the working class. All of it. Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim.
The infrastructure of surveillance and military occupation maintained in the North and East since 2009, nominally to prevent an LTTE revival, serves a second function that should be legible to any honest observer: it is a standing model and template for the kind of state control that the ruling class intends to extend southward as the social and economic crisis deepens. A state that has kept an entire population under military surveillance for seventeen years after the end of a war, that imprisons a 24-year-old musician for his song lyrics, is a state that has long since abandoned any pretense of democratic governance.
The Way Forward: Unity of the Working Class against the Capitalist State
Sangeethsan must be released immediately and unconditionally. The charges against him must be dropped. The PTA should be abolished, and its successor legislation, the PSTA â which is the same weapon with a new label â should not pass. The military occupation of the North and East must end. All political prisoners held under these laws must be freed.
These are not Tamil demands. They are the demands of the entire working class, because the democratic rights of any section of the working class are the democratic rights of all of it.
The Socialist Equality Party, in which we, the SLLA, represent a revolutionary tendency, has maintained this position without deviation since its founding as the Revolutionary Communist League, through the entire 26 years of the civil war and its aftermath. We opposed the communal war when the JVP was supporting it. We defended Tamil democratic rights when the trade union bureaucracies were silent. We campaigned for the release of Tamil detainees held without trial under the PTA when no other political party would. And we have always done so on the basis of a clear class analysis: not because we gave political support to the LTTEâs separatism â which program represented the interests of a section of the Tamil bourgeoisie, not Tamil workers and farmers â but because the defense of democratic rights is inseparable from the unity of the working class, and because Tamil workers and farmers could defend their own interests only by uniting with Sinhala working people in a common struggle against capitalism.
To Tamil youth who love these songs, who light candles in November and weep for the Maaveerar: your grief is not misplaced, and your passion for dignity is a political resource, not a pathology. But Prabhakaranâs program failed â not because he was betrayed by the international community or outgunned by the army, but because a separate Tamil capitalist state could only ever reproduce the poverty and exploitation that Tamil workers already endure, in a new flagâs colors. The answer to discrimination and communal oppression is not to be found in a separate state, but in the unification of the oppressed in a common struggle for socialist revolution. The state that murders Tamil aspirations with the PTA is the same state that destroys Sinhala workersâ living standards with IMF austerity. Your enemy is not the Sinhala worker in a factory in Colombo. Your enemy is the class that rules them both. The revolutionary tradition that actually fought for your rights â that opposed the communal war when the JVP was cheering it on, that campaigned for Tamil political prisoners when no other party would, that demanded the withdrawal of the military from the North and East â is the Trotskyist tradition of the Socialist Equality Party. That is the tradition worthy of your passion and your fight.
The arrest of Sangeethsan is not an isolated incident. It is the latest manifestation of a strategy that has defined Sri Lankan capitalism since independence: divide the oppressed along ethnic lines, criminalize the memory of the oppressed, and use the machinery of anti-terrorism law to suppress any movement that threatens the rule of capital. Every government has played this game. The JVP/NPP, which rode to power on the wave of the 2022 Aragalaya uprising with promises of democratic reform, is playing it now.
The answer to this strategy is not Tamil separatism, which has proven a dead end that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Nor is it Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism, which has served as the ideological cover for every act of state terror. [5] The answer is the political unity of Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers, organized independently of all factions of the capitalist class and all its parties, fighting for the common program of socialist internationalism that addresses the interests of all working people against the IMFâs austerity, against militarism, against the entire apparatus of communalist state repression. This unity demands an unconditional and outright refusal to be trapped by the communal divisions that the ruling class has imposed on all of us.
Free Sangeethsan Now! Abolish the PTAâNo Replacement! Build the united socialist movement of the working class!
[5] Tamil separatism, however mistaken its program, arose as a response to systematic national oppression. Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism is the ideology of the oppressor nation’s ruling class â it is supremacist in its very foundations, asserting the primacy of Sinhala Buddhist identity over all other communities as a justification for state discrimination, pogroms, and military terror. “Chauvinism” is the Marxist term of art for aggressive, supremacist nationalism deployed in the service of a ruling class â named after Nicolas Chauvin, the symbol of blind, belligerent national superiority. It carries the correct political charge that ânationalismâ does not, in relation to Sinhala Buddhist class hegemony.
Tonight marks the 45th anniversary of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in May 1981. If we, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party of Sri Lanka, were present at a commemoration event before the Jaffna Public Library today, and asked to address an audience of our Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, we would have delivered the following speech.
By Sanjaya Jayasekera, member SLLA.
Jaffna Public Library after Arson. Image courtesy of CPA X.
Friends, comrades, brothers and sisters â Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, and all who cherish the meaning of human dignity,
Forty-five years ago today, in the dead of night, flames consumed one of the greatest cultural treasures of South Asia. The Jaffna Public Library â home to over 97,000 volumes, to irreplaceable ola leaf manuscripts, to ancient chronicles and living memory, to the intellectual heritage of the Tamil people accumulated across centuries â was reduced to ashes. Not by accident. Not by nature. But by deliberate human hands: uniformed police and organized thugs, dispatched from the south under the protection and direction of the United National Party government of J.R. Jayawardena. Ministers Gamini Dissanayake and Cyril Mathew â who boasted in print that the Sinhalese must rise to “protect Buddhism” â arrived in Jaffna to oversee the operation. Four Tamil men were dragged from their homes and killed. Homes, shops, offices, and the press of Tamil newspaper Ealanadu were burned. Statues of Tamil cultural figures were demolished at road junctions.
This was not a spontaneous eruption. It was a political decision, made in Colombo, carried out in Jaffna, and covered up in silence by an entire political establishment and a compliant media. No official inquiry was ever held into the destruction of the library. No one was prosecuted. No minister faced justice. The fire that burned on the night of May 31, 1981 was lit by the ruling class of this island â and it was fueled by decades of communalist poison that every major political party, UNP and SLFP alike, had been injecting into the bloodstream of Sri Lankan society since independence.
We gather here today not only to grieve. We gather to understand. We gather to draw the lessons that the ruling class â of every party, of every era â has worked hardest to prevent the people of this island from drawing.
What was destroyed that night?
The books that burned were irreplaceable â Yalpanam Vaipavama, the history of Jaffna, existed in only one copy, and it perished in the fire. But the rulers of Sri Lanka were not primarily burning books. They were burning a people’s sense of themselves. They were burning the confidence, the continuity, and the cultural selfhood of the Tamil minority. They were sending a message, written in fire: You do not belong here. Your history does not count. Your culture is disposable. Your lives are contingent on our permission.
This was the language of Sinhala chauvinism â not a fringe ideology, but the official state ideology, entrenched in the very constitution of the republic by the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, by the anti-Tamil university admissions schemes, by Buddhism’s enshrinement as the state religion. And it was the language of a ruling class that used communal hatred as a tool of governance, a weapon to distract the Sinhalese poor and working class from the economic policies â the austerity, the open-market “liberalization,” the assault on wages and public services â that were devastating their own lives alongside the lives of Tamil workers.
The burning of the Jaffna Library was not the beginning. And it was not the end. It was a turning point â a signal flare fired two years before the July 1983 pogrom, in which organized Sinhala mobs, with voter registration lists in hand provided by state institutions, went from door to door, burning Tamil families alive in Colombo and across the island. Black July ignited a civil war that would consume nearly three decades, claim tens of thousands of lives, shatter entire communities â Tamil and Sinhalese â and culminate in the final military assault of May 2009 at Mulivaikkal, where tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were massacred in what the United Nations itself acknowledged as potential war crimes, while the world looked away.
Standing today here facing the once flame-engulfed walls of this magnificent monument, we should say loudly, âNever Againâ. Never again must mean: never again a burned library. Never again a Black July. Never again a Mulivaikkal.
But “never again” cannot be a wish. It must be a program.
Seventeen years have passed since the guns fell silent in May 2009. What has changed? The war is over â but the conditions that produced the war are not. The military still occupies the North and East. Tamil lands remain seized under military control. Mulivaikkal commemorations â the most basic act of mourning the dead â are physically disrupted by state-backed mobs and security forces. Tamil protesters are harassed by racist mobs and are arrested. A vicious social media hate campaign, coordinated and deliberate, brands every Tamil who speaks of their history, their grief, or their rights as a terrorist, an LTTE sympathizer, a separatist. Tamil writers find their books blocked by government censors under the cynical banner of “national unity.” And presiding over all of this today is the JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake â a party that built its political career on enthusiastic support for the anti-Tamil war, that opposed every concession to Tamil democratic rights, and that now poses as a government of “national unity” while allowing Sinhala chauvinist propaganda to circulate freely.
We must say this plainly: the militarization of the North has not ended with the war. It has continued and deepened. Successive governments â from Rajapaksa to Wickremesinghe to Dissanayake â have maintained the military stranglehold on Tamil life because the military is the iron fist of a capitalist state that rules in the interests of the Sinhalese bourgeoisie and serves as the instrument of communal oppression. The glorification of the military â the victory parades, the war monuments, the cult of the soldier â is not incidental. It is how the ruling class educates the Sinhalese masses into accepting militarism as their national identity, while ensuring that no united struggle of Tamil and Sinhalese workers can challenge the social order.
The moral disorientation you see in Sinhalese society today â the celebration of soldiers over teachers, the tolerance of racist social media, the passive acceptance of Tamil humiliation and even calls for the repeat of the historical violence, massacres and vandalism â is not the natural condition of the Sinhalese people. It is a manufactured condition. It has been manufactured, across decades, by a ruling class that needed Sinhalese workers to see Tamils as their enemy rather than their comrades. It is the deliberate product of a political culture built on militarism, chauvinism, fear, and lies â because a Sinhalese worker who hates Tamil workers is a worker who will never turn to face his actual oppressor.
It is in this context that we should turn to the lessons of seven decades of betrayal
The tragedy of Sri Lanka is inseparable from the history of betrayal by the parties that once claimed to speak for the working class. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party â which emerged from the Trotskyist tradition â was once the largest workers’ party in South Asia. It had, within its hands, the political means to unite Tamil and Sinhalese workers on the basis of socialist internationalism, to oppose communalism at its roots, and to fight for a government of the working class that guaranteed equal rights for all national minorities. Instead, in 1964, the LSSP leadership capitulated to class collaboration, joined the bourgeois coalition of Sirima Bandaranaike â and sealed Tamil oppression into the very constitution of the republic. Colvin R. de Silva, once a fighter for the Fourth International, presided as a minister over the entrenchment of Sinhala-only language policy. This was not a minor error. It was a world-historical betrayal. It opened the road to every pogrom, every war crime, every burned library that followed.
Capitalism cannot solve the national question in Sri Lanka. The ending of the war did not solve the Tamil national question, and the ruling class has been capitalizing this unresolved problem ever since. Throughout the seventy-eight years of independence it has produced only communal war and economic devastation. The Tamil bourgeois parties â the TULF, the TNA and its successors â have failed Tamil workers and youth just as comprehensively, channeling legitimate grievances into parliamentary deals with Colombo and appeals to foreign imperialist powers that have never served Tamil interests and never will. The LTTE’s separatist program, whatever its origins in the just anger of Tamil youth, could not overcome the fundamental reality that a separate Tamil capitalist state would be a small, economically weak entity, dependent on the same imperialist powers that armed and sustained Colombo’s military, unable to guarantee the rights of Tamils who live within and outside the North and East, and incapable of addressing the root class question.
The path forward is not separation. It is not a communal deal brokered between Tamil and Sinhalese elites. It is the unification of the Sri Lankan working class â Tamil, Sinhalese, and Muslim â in a common struggle against the capitalist system that has used communalism as its instrument of rule for seven decades.
What does “Never Again” demand of us?
When we say “never again,” we do not make a sentimental appeal. We make a political commitment.
Never again a Jaffna Library arson means: never again will we allow the ruling class to burn the cultural heritage of any people â because we understand that the hand that lit that fire was the hand of class rule, using racial hatred as its instrument.
Never again a Black July means: never again will Sinhalese workers stand aside while their class brothers and sisters are massacred â because we understand that the pogrom was organized against Tamils to prevent the unity that would threaten the ruling class.
Never again a Mulivaikkal means: never again will the working class accept a “military solution” to what is a social and political problem â because we understand that the massacre of Tamil civilians served not the interests of Sinhalese workers but the interests of a military apparatus and a ruling class that then turned its guns on Sinhalese workers in austerity, repression, and the destruction of democratic rights.
The Sinhalese workers and youth who are told today that their national glory consists in military parades and the suppression of Tamil commemorations â they are being robbed. They are being robbed of their class consciousness, of their solidarity with fellow workers, of their capacity to fight for their own emancipation. The same ruling class that burned the Jaffna Library has imposed poverty, casualized labor, and IMF austerity on Sinhalese workers. The same military that massacred Tamils at Mulivaikkal is the instrument of a state that imprisons striking workers and breaks trade unions. The enemy of Tamil workers is the enemy of Sinhalese workers. His name is not Tamil or Sinhalese. Its name is Capital.
What are we fighting for?
We call upon Tamil and Sinhalese workers, youth, teachers, students, and intellectuals to build a united movement â not a movement of ethnic reconciliation brokered by elites who represent no one but themselves, but a movement of the working class, fighting for:
The immediate end to military occupation of the North and East, and the return of all seized Tamil lands to the rightful owners. The right to commemorate the Tamil dead at Mulivaikkal and all sites of atrocity â without harassment, disruption, or criminalization. Full linguistic, cultural, and democratic rights for Tamils and all national minorities, including the Muslim community which has faced its own waves of racist persecution. An end to the militarist culture that has been poisoned into Sinhalese society â a culture that glorifies killing and suppresses solidarity. The prosecution of those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, from Black July through to Mulivaikkal. And above all â a socialist political program that places the resources of this island â its land, its labor, its productive capacity â under the democratic control of its working people, Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim alike, so that poverty, communal division, and ruling-class manipulation can be swept away at their roots.
The Jaffna Library held the memory of a civilization. It held books that no one can recover. But it also holds, for us, an indelible political lesson: that a ruling class willing to burn a library is a ruling class willing to burn everything â willing to burn villages, willing to massacre civilians, willing to destroy entire peoples â in defense of its power and profit.
We honor the memory of what was destroyed on this night 45 years ago not by grief alone, but by commitment â the commitment to build the political movement that makes such destruction impossible, by ending the system that makes it necessary.
A heritage was rendered ashes. But the struggle lives on!
Never again â through the unity of the working class of the North and the South!
This political report for the week of March 29âApril 04, 2026, is compiled by thesocialist.lk based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).
President Donald Trump arrives from the Blue Room to speak about the Iran war from the Cross Hall of the White House on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool) [AP Photo]
I. Imperialist War on Iran: Escalation Toward Regional Catastrophe
The defining development of the week was the accelerating and increasingly catastrophic US-Israeli war on Iran, now entering its fifth week. On 31 March, as thousands of Marines, paratroopers and additional ground forces arrived in the Gulf region and B-52 bombing missions commenced, President Trump threatened publicly to âobliterateâ Iranâs electric grid, oil wells, desalination plants and bridgesâin his own words, to bring the country âback to the Stone Ages.â The systematic assassination of Iranâs political and military leadership, the destruction of over 61,000 homes, 500 schools, and the killing of more than 6,500 civilians confirm the criminal and genocidal character of this war of aggression.[1]
The escalation reached a new threshold on 4 April, when Iranian forces shot down a US F-15E and an A-10 aircraft, prompting US special forces to conduct a rescue operation inside Iranian territory. The incident took place alongside massive military deploymentsâMarines, airborne brigades and three carrier strike groupsâsignalling preparations for a possible ground invasion.[2] The unspoken strategic aim of the war, as WSWS analysis made clear, extends beyond Iran: the US seeks to strangle Chinaâs access to Gulf oil and shipping routes, targeting Beijingâs economic foundations as part of its broader drive for global hegemony.[3]
The imperialist alliance showed signs of fracture. Italy denied US access to its Sigonella air base, citing parliamentary procedural requirementsâa reflection of domestic anti-war mass sentiment threatening the Meloni government. Britain convened a forty-nation virtual summit on the Strait of Hormuz crisis amid a public breakdown of relations with Washington, as European powers confronted both the economic panic of closed shipping lanes and their own inability to act independently. These manoeuvres are tactical, not pacifist: all European powers remain integrated into the structures of US military imperialism and are accelerating their own rearmament programmes.
The warâs economic reverberations struck Asian economies with a double blow: surging oil prices and currency falls against the dollar, producing capital outflows, inflationary pressure and stock market declines. India, New Zealand, and smaller economies across Asia-Pacific confronted severe social disruption. Australia, meanwhile, was exposed as an active participant. The Albanese Labor governmentâwhile publicly denying any ground involvementâsecretly deployed approximately 90 SAS commandos to the Al Minhad Air Base in the UAE, in addition to an E-7A Wedgetail advanced battle management aircraft, 85 military personnel, air-to-air missiles, and full Pine Gap intelligence integration.[4] The government also banned some 7,000 Iranian nationals holding tourist visas from entering Australia under emergency powersâa cynical deployment of immigration policy to stoke chauvinism.
The ICFI gave powerful political expression to mass opposition. David North, chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board, filmed a statement at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice condemning the war as a crime against peaceâthe same legal category established by the Nuremberg Tribunalâwhich rapidly spread internationally.[5] Northâs subsequent book presentations in Leipzig, Berlin and Nuremberg on Where Is America Going? Fascism or Socialism? drew large, engaged audiences of students and workers, confirming the growing popular openness to socialist anti-war politics.
II. The âNo Kingsâ Protests and the Crisis of Political Leadership
The third round of âNo Kingsâ demonstrations on 28 March drew an estimated eight million people across the United States in what was the largest single-day protest in American history. Rallies in over 3,300 locationsâincluding 350,000 in New York, 200,000 in Chicago, and 180,000 in Bostonâexpressed deep popular opposition to the Trump administrationâs drive toward dictatorship and war. Sixty-two percent of Americans âstrongly opposeâ sending ground troops to Iran. No war in American history has been so unpopular at its outset.[6]
The WSWS drew the essential political lessons: the scale of mass opposition stands in sharp contrast to the absence of independent working-class leadership. Democratic Party politicians and union officials systematically downplayed or ignored the war at the rallies, channelling the movement into electoral remedies. AFT President Randi Weingarten captured the Democratic programme in a single phrase: âNo kings today and we vote in November.â David North was physically barred from speaking at the Nuremberg rally by Democratic Party operatives who refused to allow any condemnation of the Iran war. The Democratic Party, which funded the war with its $839 billion defence budget vote, serves not as an opponent of Trump but as his enabler. Any subordination of the mass movement to the Democratic Party will prove fatal to the struggle against fascism and war.
III. Trumpâs War Budget: Social Counter-Revolution to Finance World War
On 4 April, the Trump administration unveiled its FY2027 budget blueprintâa document of historic class significance. The White House sought congressional approval for approximately $1.5 trillion for military spending, a 40 percent increase over already record Pentagon allocations, to be financed by sweeping cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, childcare and domestic agencies.[7] Trump made the class logic explicit at a White House Easter lunch, declaring that the government could not afford daycare, Medicare or Medicaid because it âneeded the money to wage warââdismissing these programs as âlittle scams.â This is a blueprint for financing world war through social counter-revolution at home.
The structural financial system fragility that will carry this burden was laid bare in a major WSWS analysis on 31 March. Financial markets showed growing instability as the war entered its fifth week: the S&P 500 had fallen 7 percent for the month, with both the NASDAQ and Dow in correction territory. Bond yields spiked. A Bank of America survey of global fund managers found 63 percent identified private equity and private credit as the most likely source of a systemic financial event, echoing pre-2008 alarms. The war is not a market disruption but the accelerant of a structural crisis rooted in overleveraged finance, speculative bubbles and military expenditures that will be paid by the working class through austerity and inflation.[8]
Pete Hegsethâs financial advisor was exposed by the Financial Times as having placed roughly $9.4 million into defence contractors and ETFs in the weeks immediately before the opening strikes on Iranâpositions that surged approximately 38 percent after the war began. The Pentagon replied with denials and threats rather than disclosures. The episode confirms that imperialist war is simultaneously a vehicle for private enrichment and a fusion of state, military and finance capital that expresses the rotten, criminal character of capitalist rule.[9]
IV. Authoritarian Consolidation and the Attack on Democratic Rights
The Trump administrationâs domestic authoritarian consolidation proceeded in parallel with the war. Armed ICE officers were deployed to airports nationwide following the DHS funding crisis; congressional action by both parties moved to fund DHS components while excluding any meaningful restraint on ICE or Border Patrol. The deploymentâfacilitating data-sharing with TSA and normalising armed federal agents in civilian settingsârepresents a rehearsal for the broader militarisation of domestic policing. Trump also advanced measures to restrict citizenship and voting rights, framing these as wartime national security necessities.
The criminalisation of political dissent intensified. In Britain, Palestine solidarity activists Ben Jamal and Chris Nineham were convicted in prosecutions that fit a wider state campaign to suppress anti-genocide protest. In the United States, the assassination plot against Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswaniâa New Jersey man affiliated with a JDL-type network who plotted to firebomb her homeâwas directly connected to months of coordinated harassment, bounties and public incitement by extremist Zionist organisations, conducted in an atmosphere of state-cultivated impunity for political violence.[10] A Chinese postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan took his own life after interrogation by federal agents, in a pattern of xenophobic prosecution and harassment of Chinese scholars that weaponises racism and criminalises scientific collaboration.
In Canada, the Carney Liberal government appealed to the Supreme Court to reverse lower court rulings that had found the 2022 invocation of the Emergencies Actâincluding the freezing of bank accountsâunconstitutional. The appeal is a class political move to preserve a permanent toolkit for suppressing mass dissent. Germanyâs SPD Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil unveiled an âAgendaâ-style programme attacking pensions, welfare and labour protections, echoing SchrÃļderâs Agenda 2010, coordinated with Chancellor Merz to finance rearmament through social cuts. The SPD, historically presented as a workersâ party, acts openly as an instrument of capitalist restructuring and militarism.
V. Class Struggle: Rank-and-File Rebellion and Bureaucratic Containment
The most significant labour development of the week was the 96.2 percent rejection by Nexteer auto parts workers in Saginaw, Michigan, of a UAW-backed concessions contract that would establish a âthird classâ wage tier at $19.05/hour for new hires, expand two-tier pay, and raise healthcare costs.[11] The 1,300 workers produce steering systems for the Chevrolet Silverado, GMC Sierra, Ford F-150 and Dodge Ramâoccupying a strategic node in the global supply chain. UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman called for the immediate formation of a Nexteer rank-and-file committee, strike preparation, and solidarity from Big Three assembly workers refusing to handle scab parts.[12]
Separately, approximately 150 workers at Freudenberg-NOK in Findlay, Ohio, struck for higher wages and healthcare after UAW Local 1327 talks collapsed. The plant supplies GM, Ford and Stellantis; workers hold strategic leverage to disrupt assembly chains. The UAW bureaucracy failed to organise wider support.
The Bath Iron Works naval shipyard strikeâengineers and designers at a key destroyer manufacturerâwas shut down by the UAW bureaucracy, which ratified a multi-year contract while framing concessions as patriotic necessity. The Teamsters pre-empted a threatened strike by 6,000 DHL workers with a last-minute tentative agreement offering a nominal 20 percent wage rise over four years, while leaving automation and precarious conditions largely intact. Germanyâs IGBCE union concluded chemical industry bargaining that freezes wages for nine months and delivers only 2.1â2.4 percent nominal increases from 2027âa real wage cut amid ongoing mass layoffs. Workersâ Struggles roundups documented rising industrial unrest across Asia, Australia and the Americas, reflecting the objective deterioration of living standards under the inflationary impact of the war.
The pattern across all these disputes is identical: workers display readiness and leverage; union bureaucracies act as industrial stabilisers for capital, containing struggles, brokering sellouts and subordinating workers to war production and corporate profit. The formation of democratically controlled rank-and-file committees, independent of the apparatus, is the central organisational task.
VI. The Bankruptcy of Pseudo-Left Reformism
The week furnished further evidence of the political bankruptcy of pseudo-left formations internationally. In Canada, Avi Lewis won the NDP leadership on a âleft populistâ platform promising to âfight the billionaire classââwhile supporting NATO policy on Ukraine and intending to cooperate with right-wing provincial NDP governments, leaving capitalist property relations intact.[13] The NDPâs historical function is to contain working-class struggle within parliamentary reformism and union bureaucratic control; Lewisâ victory will channel worker unrest into parliamentary illusion.
In Mexico, the Movement of Socialist Workers (MTS) and allied organisations channelled a growing strike wave into support for US-backed âindependentâ unions rather than independent rank-and-file organisation, functioning as a pseudo-left cover for pro-imperialist union apparatuses. In Sri Lanka, major Tamil bourgeois parties either tacitly supported or remained silent on the US-Israeli assault on Iran, consistent with their long record of appeals to imperialist powers rather than mobilising working-class struggle.[14] In Turkey, a joint statement by eleven parties calling for âpeace and democracyâ avoided any principled opposition to US-Israeli aggressionâpacifist opportunism that channels workers into elite mediation rather than independent class struggle.
Summation
The weekâs developments reveal, with exceptional clarity, the single political reality confronting the international working class: capitalism in crisis is driving imperialist war, social counter-revolution and authoritarian consolidation simultaneously. The Trump administrationâs genocidal war on Iran, its $1.5 trillion war budget financed by gutting social programmes, the mass criminalisation of dissent, and the parallel militarisation of European and Australian capitalismâthese are not aberrations but expressions of a system in mortal crisis.
The mass anti-war sentiment expressed in the âNo Kingsâ protests of 28 March, the historic rejection of the Nexteer sellout, the strikes spreading across multiple continentsâall reflect the objective conditions for the development of a powerful working-class movement. But the decisive question is that of political leadership. Social democratic parties (SPD, Labor), pseudo-left formations (NDP, MTS, DSA), and trade union bureaucracies act uniformly to contain and betray this movement. Only the building of rank-and-file committees, independent of the apparatus, linked internationally through the IWA-RFC, and guided by the programme of the ICFI, can transform the growing mass opposition into the political force required to end imperialist war and the capitalist system that produces it.
Emergency Statement by the Editorial Board of theSocialist.lk and the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) Â
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Monday, April 6, 2026, in Washington. [AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein]
Today, 7 April 2026, US President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: âA whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I donât want that to happen, but it probably will.â
This is not political bluster. This is the public declaration of genocidal intent by the head of state of the most heavily armed military power in history â a power that possesses thousands of nuclear weapons and has already been bombing Iran for forty days.
As the World Socialist Web Site stated today in its emergency perspective: âEvery word Trump said implicates the government of the United States in a crime of Hitlerian proportions. He says openly what the Nazi leaders discussed behind closed doors.â Trump has already threatened to destroy every power plant, every bridge, every desalination facility â the entire infrastructure of civilised life for 93 million people. He has declared this will be accomplished âover a period of four hours.â He was asked by a reporter whether this constitutes war crimes. His answer: âNo, not at all.â
Iran is the heir to one of the oldest and most profound civilisations in human history. Thousands of its civilians â including 168 children killed in a US missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girlsâ school on the first day of the war â have already been slaughtered. Hospitals, universities, residential districts and schools have been systematically bombed. The logic of escalation, as the WSWS has warned, is inexorable: from intensified bombing to ground invasion, to the occupation of Iranian cities, and ultimately â in the face of mounting US casualties and military failure â to the resort to nuclear weapons.
This is not a hypothetical. This is the trajectory of a war that has been underway for forty days, escalating each week, with no serious force within the capitalist political system placing any brake upon it.
The Democratic Party of the United States â which funded the war with its own vote for the $839 billion defence budget â now calls Trump a âmadmanâ and âunhinged.â But not a single Democrat has proposed concrete action to halt the war. They are complicit. They are terrified that any genuine mass mobilisation against the war would not stop at the war â it would raise the entire question of the distribution of wealth, the power of the financial oligarchy, and the social order both parties exist to defend.
The parliaments of Europe, the governments of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom â all are implicated. Australia has secretly deployed SAS commandos, Wedgetail battle-management aircraft and its Pine Gap intelligence station to the war. Britain hosts the Hormuz summit. Germany rearming. The United Nations Security Council paralysed. International law demolished.
The capitalist state system has proved, beyond any doubt, that it cannot stop this war. Only the international working class can.
theSocialist.lk and the Socialist Lead of Sri Lank and South Asia (SLLA) aligned with the International Committee of the Fourth International, calls on workers, youth and all those in opposition to this criminal war:
Strike: Workers in the United States, Britain, Australia, Germany and across the world must take immediate industrial action â in ports, airports, logistics hubs, defence manufacturing plants and transport networks â to deny the war machine the means to function. The AFL-CIO, the UAW, the TUC and every major trade union federation has maintained criminal silence. Workers must act through their rank-and-file committees, independently of the bureaucracy, to halt the flow of arms, fuel and supplies to this war.
Occupy: Workers and youth must occupy workplaces, campuses and public spaces â not to petition governments that have proven themselves servants of the war, but to assert the independent political power of the working class. The eight million who marched on 28 March in the United States alone must be transformed from a protest movement into an organised political force with a program, a strategy and a leadership.
Organise internationally: The war on Iran is not a national question. It is a world question. Workers in Sri Lanka, workers in South Korea, workers in Japan â whose governments are cutting separate deals with Iran to secure oil supplies even as the bombs fall â must join this struggle. The IRGCâs warning that it will âdeprive the US and its allies of the regionâs oil and gas for yearsâ is a measure of how close the world stands to an economic and military catastrophe of civilisational proportions. The only answer is international working-class solidarity, organised through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
Trumpâs threat today must be understood for what it is: a declaration of war not merely against Iran, but against all the accumulated gains of human civilisation â against international law, against the prohibition on targeting civilian infrastructure, against the most fundamental norms of humanity that were codified after the horrors of World War II and the Nazi Holocaust. As David North stated at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice: this war meets every legal and political criterion established at the Nuremberg Trials for a âcrime against peaceâ â the supreme international crime.
If today, 7 April 2026, becomes the date on which Iranian civilisation is destroyed, it will also be the date that the capitalist world order signs its own death warrant in the eyes of humanity. It must instead become the date on which the international working class rises to say: Not in our name. Not with our labour. Not with our silence.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) sections of the ICFI are organising this resistance. We call on all workers, youth and socialist-minded people in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally to join them.
Demand the immediate, unconditional cessation of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Demand the withdrawal of all imperialist forces from the Middle East.
Build rank-and-file committees. Strike. Organise. Fight for socialism.
Solidarity With the people of Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Cuba â International Working Class Unity!
Hands Off Iran â Stop Imperialist War!
No More Genocide â Stop Trumpâs War Machine!
Workersâ Power Against War and Austerity!
Ports Closed to War â Workers Unite!
Not One Penny for War â Fund Hospitals, Schools, Jobs!
Imperialist and Zionist Troops Out from the Middle East!
Stop the War Criminals â Nuremberg for Imperialist Aggression!
