Sri Lankan singer, Umaria Sinhawansa performing on stage. Photo from Sinhawansa’s Facebook
The ongoing conflict between Sri Lanka’s singers, lyricists, and composers over royalties and copyright is not a personal quarrel or a legislative oversight. It is the music industry colliding with the irreducible logic of capitalist property relations — and the Intellectual Property Act No. 36 of 2003 lays that logic bare with brutal clarity.
The Act defines the “author” of a musical work as the physical person who created it — the composer of the melody and the writer of the lyrics. To the author belong the economic rights: the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, perform, broadcast, and commercially exploit the work. To the author also belong the moral rights: the right to be named, the right to object to distortion or mutilation prejudicial to honour or reputation.
The singer is not the author. The singer is a “performer,” relegated to a separate chapter on “Related Rights.” Under Section 17, the performer has limited exclusive rights over the broadcasting and fixation of an unfixed performance. But Section 17(2) extinguishes even these: once the singer authorises the incorporation of the performance into a recording, those exclusive rights cease. The singer’s sole remaining entitlement is Section 19 — a right to “a single equitable remuneration” whenever the recording is broadcast or publicly performed, shared with the producer. No moral right. No copyright. No ownership of the finished product.
The voice that gave the song its soul has no claim. The law can grasp what is fixed on paper — notation, words — as property. What is embodied in performance — the timbre, the phrasing, the breath, the interpretative intelligence that transforms marks on a page into music — is not recognised as “creative” in the legal sense. It is labour rendered unto the property of others.
This is the correct logic of bourgeois law. It is not a mistake awaiting correction. The law does what capitalist property law must do: disaggregate a collaborative artistic whole into assignable, tradable units of ownership. The composer and lyricist own the melody and the words. They can sell them — separately. Other singers will perform them. The lyrics can be set to a new melody. The melody can be synchronised with different words. Content creators will feed both into artificial intelligence to generate new works. The singer who first gave the song life has no legal standing to object, because the singer owns nothing.
And here Marxists must be precise. This recombination, this improvisation, this ceaseless transformation of existing cultural material — a song sung by a different voice, lyrics adapted to a new melody, a melody reimagined with new words — is how art has always developed. These are not violations to be legally restrained. They are the processes through which music breathes. Marxists do not oppose this. We do not defend the “moral right” of the original creator to freeze a work in amber. That moral right is itself a bourgeois legal construct. The tragedy is not that songs can be reimagined — it is that under capitalism, reimagination takes the form of dispossession, where one set of artists profits from the labour of another while the law sanctifies the arrangement.
Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution (1924), grasped the fundamental contradiction of art under class society. He observed that art under capitalism “flourished in the abundance and in the leisure of the governing classes, and remained in their keeping.” The artist was, in the final analysis, a dependent of the bourgeoisie — and when the axe of revolution cut down the old props, “the element of keeping which was almost intangible when social relations were undisturbed, was bared in all its crudity.” What Trotsky described for the writer and painter applies with equal force to the musician. The seeming independence of the artist is an illusion sustained by the market. When the market turns, the illusion shatters, and what remains is the brute fact of property.
The Sri Lankan Act merely codifies this dependency with juridical precision. The composer and lyricist may feel themselves secure in their ownership — but they too are dependent on the market, on publishers, on streaming platforms, on the very property regime that temporarily advantages them. The singer is one step further down the chain of dispossession. But the chain itself is the problem.
Trotsky insisted that “culture feeds on the sap of economics, and a material surplus is necessary, so that culture may grow, develop and become subtle.” “Art needs comfort, even abundance.” Under capitalism, that abundance is channelled into private accumulation. The material security that would free artists to collaborate without fear is denied to them, and in its place they are given property rights to fight over. The lyricist sues the composer. The singer sues both. The record label takes its cut. The streaming platform takes the rest. Everyone fights everyone because the system forces them to. Former collaborators become adversaries. Art becomes an asset to be litigated.
A socialist society abolishes this entire framework. By overthrowing bourgeois property relations in art, it eliminates both the commodification that sets artists against one another and the ownership claims that restrict how culture can be reworked and reimagined. The socialist state guarantees the material security of all cultural workers — composers, lyricists, singers, instrumentalists, sound engineers — through public funding and democratic planning. Freed from the anxiety of survival, no artist needs to sue another over royalties. Freed from property claims over melody and verse, no artist can block another from reinterpreting, adapting, or transforming a work. Technology, including AI, becomes a tool of creative liberation for all, not a weapon to dispossess some for the profit of others. Creative energies, liberated from the tyranny of the market, are directed toward the enrichment of human life.
The crisis of Sri Lanka’s music industry is not a legal problem awaiting a better royalty formula. It is a class question. The working class must take up the fight — not to adjudicate between singers and lyricists under the existing property regime, but to overthrow that regime entirely. Only on the foundation of human need, not private greed, can art truly flourish — freely, collectively, without owners and without fences.
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 — its definitions, its institutional architecture, its disciplinary mechanisms — 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 — the Chartered Institute — 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” — 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 — 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 — the membership criteria, the internal rules, the definition of what constitutes an offense — 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 — 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 — which included the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Stalinist Communist Party — established a government tribunal (Press Council) with the powers of a district court, empowered to conduct inquiries that could lead to imposition of fines and jail terms against journalists. Its chairman and members are appointed by the president. Among its targets was Kamkaru Mawtha, the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist League — 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 (2005–2015) 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 — banning publications that “offend against the expectations of the public” or “contain information which could mislead the public” — 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 “fake news”, 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 — punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment — 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 — just one week before the Chartered Institute gazette — 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 — and especially online media — under state and corporate control.
In December 2010, the Hungarian parliament under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán passed a comprehensive media law subordinating all public and private media to the control of a state “media council” composed of Orbán’s partisans. The council was empowered to impose fines of up to €730,000 for reporting deemed “politically unbalanced.” As the WSWS noted at the time [2], Orbán’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 — 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 1988–89, it carried out a campaign of assassinations in which hundreds of left-wing political opponents, trade unionists, and workers — including members of the Revolutionary Communist League — 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 — implementing IMF austerity, deploying police-military repression, and now constructing a state apparatus for media censorship — 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 — the suppression of working-class political independence — 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 — the Samagi Jana Balawegaya and the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna — 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 — government and opposition alike — 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 — including and especially the revolutionary Marxist perspective advanced by the ICFI, the World Socialist Web Site andthesocialist.lk — 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 — 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 — global capitalism and its state institutions!
For a workers’ government based on workers’ committees, not the capitalist parties and their trade union appendages!
For the socialist reorganization of society — 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 — 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.
Mawpiya Sevana Home engulfed in flames. Image courtesy of nagalandpost.com
On the evening of June 3, 2026, fire consumed the Mawpiya Sevana care facility in Batagoda, Anguruwatota, near Horana in the Kalutara District. Twelve residents — elderly men and women, people living with mental illness, people with intellectual disabilities — died. Eight more were severely injured. Seventy-one human beings were packed into a building designed for fifteen. The first instinct of the bourgeois press, the political establishment, and the state apparatus is to render this a story about regulatory failure: the home was unregistered, the owner has been arrested, the Defence Secretary visited the ruins. Officials speak of stricter enforcement, mandatory inspections, and compliance frameworks. A proprietor sits in remand custody. The machinery of bourgeois law performs its theatre of accountability.
We reject this framing entirely. The deaths at Mawpiya Sevana are not a regulatory scandal. They are a systemic indictment — the concentrated and visible expression of what capitalist society does to human beings who can no longer be profitably exploited.
The Fundamental Logic: Discarded Lives
To understand this tragedy scientifically, one must begin with the logic of capital itself. Under capitalism, the value of a human being — in the brutal calculus of the system — is indexed to their capacity to generate surplus value. The worker sells their labour power; capital extracts from that labour power more value than it returns in wages; the difference constitutes profit, the lifeblood of the system. This is the elementary truth established by Marx in Capital and confirmed by every hour of every working day across the planet.
What, then, of those who can no longer labour? What of the elderly, the severely disabled, those living with serious mental illness? In the language of capital, they are unproductive. They generate no surplus value. They are, from the standpoint of the system, a cost — a drain on resources that could otherwise be directed toward accumulation. Capitalism does not produce sentimentality toward those it cannot exploit. It produces neglect, abandonment, and, at the sharp end of underdevelopment, mass death.
This is the political truth behind the twelve corpses at Mawpiya Sevana. These were human beings whom the system had already written off. They had no social security worth the name. They had no public institutions capable of housing and caring for them with dignity. They were deposited — warehoused — in an overcrowded, unregistered private facility, in a building designed for fifteen, because their families, themselves workers ground down by decades of austerity, had no alternative. The capitalist state knew this was happening. It tolerated it, because the alternative — a publicly funded, adequately staffed, universally available system of elder care and disability support — would require precisely the kind of social expenditure that the ruling class and its international creditors have placed beyond political possibility.
The IMF and the Deliberate Dismantling of Social Provision
This brings us to the immediate political context, which is inseparable from the structural one. Sri Lanka is presently in the grip of one of the most savage austerity programs in its history, administered under the direct supervision of the International Monetary Fund. The 2022 foreign debt default and the social explosion that swept former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa from power opened the door to an IMF bailout — and with it, the full subordination of Sri Lankan economic and social policy to the demands of international finance capital.
Every government since — from Wickremesinghe to the present JVP/NPP administration of Anura Kumara Dissanayake — has functioned as a transmission belt for IMF dictates. The 2026 budget allocates a staggering 4.5 trillion rupees (450,000 crores Rupees. Approximately US $13 billion) for debt servicing alone — money extracted from the labour of Sri Lankan workers and the rural poor and transferred to international bondholders, banks, and multilateral creditors. To meet this obligation, the government has slashed public expenditure across every social domain: health, education, welfare.
The health system is collapsing under the pressure of these cuts. Public hospitals run out of essential medicines — insulin, antibiotics, cancer drugs, psychiatric medications. Patients wait over a year for MRI scans and die during the wait. Nurses are so overworked and under-resourced that they have no chairs to sit on. The government’s own health minister, confronted with the medicine shortage, told patients to “buy them from the cheapest places.” This is not negligence. This is deliberate policy, enforced under IMF conditionality and praised by international financial institutions as evidence of “fiscal discipline.”
Into this landscape of deliberate social destruction, the question of elder care and disability support does not even register as a policy priority. The JVP/NPP government moved in late 2025 to slash the Aswesuma welfare program — a meagre cash transfer scheme paying between 5,000 and 17,500 rupees per month (approximately US$16 to $57) to the disabled, the elderly, kidney patients, and the extreme poor. Even this minimal safety net is under attack, with the World Bank pressing for a reduction in the number of beneficiaries and a JVP minister publicly declaring that welfare recipients should “feel ashamed” — calling it “legal begging.” As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has noted, this language carries chilling historical echoes: it frames the destitute not as victims of a system, but as parasites upon it.
It is in this context that Mawpiya Sevana existed. The state did not build, fund, or staff adequate public residential facilities for the elderly and the disabled — not because it lacked the administrative capacity to do so, but because the entire fiscal framework of Sri Lankan capitalism, as restructured by the IMF, prohibits such expenditure. The government allocates debt repayments nearly nine times the health budget. There are simply no resources directed toward the systematic, universal care of those who cannot work. In their place, a black market of unregistered, unregulated, overcrowded private facilities fills the vacuum — precisely because working-class and poor families, themselves crushed by falling real wages, rising prices, and the destruction of social services, cannot provide the full-time care that the state refuses to provide.
The State Knew, and the State Did Not Care
It would be politically dishonest to attribute what happened at Mawpiya Sevana to ignorance or inattention on the part of state authorities. The Director of the National Secretariat for Elders has confirmed that the facility was known to the authorities, that it was unregistered, and that it had previously been warned to comply with regulations. Officials knew. They did not act, not because the machinery of enforcement was insufficiently developed, but because the state had no institutional alternative to offer the residents. To shut down Mawpiya Sevana without providing a publicly funded substitute would have been to condemn seventy-one people to destitution or homelessness. The state permitted the facility’s continued operation because the alternative — genuine social provision — is structurally excluded by the political and economic priorities of the ruling class.
This is the functioning logic of the capitalist state in an underdeveloped country operating under IMF tutelage. It is not an aberration from the normal functioning of the system. It is the system functioning normally. The capitalist state in Sri Lanka — as in every neocolonial country — is not an instrument of social welfare. It is an instrument of capital accumulation, debt repayment, and the maintenance of the conditions necessary for the exploitation of labour. Those who cannot be exploited — the elderly, the severely disabled, those with serious mental illness — fall outside this framework entirely. They are residue. They are waste. The system does not know what to do with them except minimize the cost of their existence and, when they die in preventable fires, process the deaths through the criminal justice system to defuse political pressure.
The Feudal Supplement and Its Limits
In the absence of any meaningful social security system, the burden of care for the elderly and disabled in Sri Lanka — as throughout the countries of the periphery — falls on the feudal-cultural obligations of family and kinship networks. Sons and daughters are expected to provide, to sacrifice their own economic lives, to absorb the cost that the state refuses to bear. This system of informal social reproduction (provision of public goods — healthcare, education, social security — necessary to maintain a productive workforce) does not represent cultural high standards. It is a structural necessity for capital: it permits the ruling class to avoid the costs of social reproduction that workers in more developed capitalist countries extracted through generations of struggle — pension systems, public health systems, residential care facilities, disability support.
But this feudal supplement is itself being eroded by the same forces of capitalist development and austerity that make it necessary. As real wages collapse — down 24 percent in the public sector and 14 percent in the private sector since 2022, according to World Bank data — working-class families have fewer resources to provide informal care. Emigration, driven by economic desperation, separates families across continents. The nuclear family unit, under the pressure of capitalist commodity (property) relations and austerity, cannot substitute for the collective social infrastructure that only a socialist society can build and sustain.
The result is the proliferation of informal, unregistered, unregulated private facilities like Mawpiya Sevana — a catastrophic market response to a catastrophic social failure. People with nowhere to go, and nowhere else to put their relatives, are concentrated in buildings not designed to hold them, run by proprietors operating outside any regulatory framework, because the regulated, publicly funded alternative does not exist. The owner of Mawpiya Sevana now faces criminal charges. He may be guilty of negligence. But the system that created the conditions in which he operated — the IMF, the successive Colombo governments, the entire apparatus of neocolonial austerity — faces no charges at all.
The Question of Political Responsibility
The JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake bears direct political responsibility for the conditions that produced this tragedy. This is a government that came to power presenting itself — fraudulently — as a movement of the working people, invoking the language of “people’s power” and social transformation. Its actual record is one of ruthless implementation of IMF directives, attacks on welfare recipients, the deployment of the military against striking postal workers, the invocation of Essential Services legislation to suppress workers opposing privatization, and the systematic underfunding of health and education.
But responsibility does not end with the current government. Every government that has administered Sri Lankan capitalism since independence — the SLFP, the UNP, the SLPP, and now the JVP/NPP — has presided over the gradual destruction of whatever social provision existed and its replacement with the “free market”: privatization, commercialization, the withdrawal of the state from any domain of social reproduction that cannot generate profit for capital. The entire political establishment is complicit. The opposition parties — the SJB, the SLPP, the UNP — offer only “token criticisms” while accepting the IMF framework in its entirety.
The trade union bureaucracies, which claim to represent the interests of working people, are equally implicated. They have systematically suppressed independent workers’ action, called off strikes on the basis of empty promises, and functioned as transmission belts for the very governments and institutions that are dismantling social provision. Their loyalty is to the capitalist system, not to the workers they nominally represent.
The Only Answer: Socialist Transformation
The twelve people who died at Mawpiya Sevana on June 3, 2026, cannot be brought back. But the conditions that killed them can, and must, be ended — not through regulatory reform, not through stricter enforcement of existing laws, not through the arrest of a single proprietor, but through the socialist transformation of society.
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), in solidarity with the programme of the International Committee of thenFourth International (ICFI), insist on this with complete clarity: there is no solution to the crisis of elder care, disability support, public health, or any other domain of social reproduction within the framework of capitalism and IMF austerity. The resources required to build a genuine, universal, publicly funded system of care for those who cannot work — the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill — exist. They are being extracted from the labour of Sri Lankan workers and transferred to international creditors in the form of 4.5 trillion rupees in annual debt repayments. They are being accumulated by the corporate elite whose tax rates the JVP/NPP government has left intact. They are being hoarded in the offshore accounts and investment portfolios of those who profit from the exploitation of Sri Lankan labour.
These resources must be expropriated — through the repudiation of the foreign debt, the nationalization of the banks and major corporations under democratic workers’ control, and the reorganization of production to serve human need rather than private profit. Public residential care, universal healthcare, free education, disability support, and social security for the elderly are not luxuries. They are social rights, achievable only through the defeat of capitalism and the construction of a socialist society.
This requires the independent political mobilization of the working class — against the JVP/NPP government, against the IMF, against the entire capitalist political establishment, and against the trade union bureaucracies that serve as its labour lieutenants. It requires the building of rank-and-file action committees in workplaces, plantations, and communities, independent of all capitalist parties and institutions, coordinating a unified movement for a workers’ and peasants’ government committed to a socialist program.
The deaths at Mawpiya Sevana are a concentrated expression of a social order in terminal crisis. The answer to them is not to manage that crisis more humanely — it is to end it, through the international socialist revolution that the Fourth International was founded to advance.
We, the SLLA demand: full public accountability for the deaths at Mawpiya Sevana; immediate public funding for a universal system of residential care for the elderly and disabled; the cancellation of IMF debt obligations and the reallocation of all debt-servicing funds to social provision; and the expropriation of the major banks, corporations, and private hospital networks under democratic workers’ control.
