We repost below the World Socialist Web Site statement published on wsws.org here on June 13, 2025
Damages are seen in a building after an explosion in a residence compound after Israel attacked Iran’s capital Tehran, Friday, June 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi) [AP Photo]
On Thursday evening, under the cover of darkness, Israel launched a massive air and missile assault on Iran, striking air defenses, nuclear facilities, key military personnel and command centers.
At least 78 people were killed and over 300 injured in the largest attack on Iran since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Israel assassinated six nuclear scientists and 20 high-ranking military personnel, including the Chief of Staff of Iran’s military and the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns Israel’s illegal and unprovoked assault on Iran as a brazen act of imperialist aggression. The increasingly unhinged Israeli regime—already carrying out a genocide against 2 million people in Gaza—has now deliberately provoked war with a country 10 times its size, threatening catastrophic consequences for the entire region.
Israel’s claim that it acted in “self-defense” against an alleged Iranian nuclear program is an absurd and transparent fraud. It is well known that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, acquired in violation of international law.
Prior to the assault, Iran was engaged in negotiations with the White House over its nuclear program. In the days leading up to the strike, every major imperialist government—including the United States—made statements saying they opposed an Israeli attack on Iran, calling instead for a negotiated settlement.
The United States even went so far as to announce a new round of talks with Iran on Sunday just hours before Israel, with US foreknowledge and complicity, began raining missiles down on Tehran. Within the span of 24 hours, the White House went from vocally proclaiming it opposed an Israeli attack on Iran to publicly gloating about it.
Asked by the Wall Street Journal Friday whether the US got a “heads-up” of the attacks, US President Donald Trump replied, “Heads-up? It wasn’t a heads-up. It was, we know what’s going on.”
In reality, the so-called “negotiations” were a treacherous charade, designed to provide Israel with the opportunity to kill Iran’s military leaders in their homes. Among those targeted and killed in Israel’s Thursday night attack was top Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Shamkhani.
Citing US and Israeli officials, Axios reported Friday that “Trump and his aides were only pretending to oppose an Israeli attack in public—and didn’t express opposition in private. ‘We had a clear U.S. green light,’ one claimed. The goal, they say, was to convince Iran that no attack was imminent and make sure Iranians on Israel’s target list wouldn’t move to new locations.”
The fact that Iran allowed a significant portion of its leadership to be killed—apparently while they were in civilian dwellings vulnerable to missile strikes, even as the American press openly telegraphed an Israeli attack—is a devastating exposure of the Iranian regime’s strategic bankruptcy. The regime placed immense confidence in the good faith of the Trump administration. Ignoring and forgetting all that has happened, including Trump’s authorization of the murder of General Suleimani in January 2020, the Iranian leaders were convinced that the United States would restrain Israel while negotiations were pending. They fell for a simple trick, like a child taking candy from a stranger.
But there are politics behind the Iranian regime’s astonishing naivete. Terrified of its own working class, the Iranian capitalist elite is desperately seeking an agreement with the imperialist powers, who have demonstrated their full commitment to Iran’s destruction and subjugation.
Israel’s attack on Iran has also exposed where the European imperialist powers really stand, despite their recent criticisms of aspects of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The German government announced that Netanyahu had informed Chancellor Merz of the planned assault. Both the French and German governments issued statements affirming Israel’s “right to defend itself” and condemning retaliatory strikes by Iran.
The attack on Iran is the direct outcome of the longstanding US-Israeli drive to create a “new Middle East” under imperialist domination, intensified in the wake of the events of October 7, 2023. It was made possible by the immense political, military and intelligence support Israel has received from the United States for decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
The Pentagon and Israeli military have long planned and war-gamed an assault on Iran and its nuclear program—an attack that Trump has repeatedly vowed to authorize.
US imperialism has never accepted the outcome of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a key American ally in the Middle East. Washington backed Iraq in its brutal war against Iran throughout the 1980s. Even as it turned on Iraq—waging war in 1990–91 and invading in 2003—the installation of a US-aligned regime in Tehran remained a central objective.
Today, Iran is grouped with Russia, China, and North Korea as a major obstacle to US global hegemony—one that Washington is determined to eliminate at any cost.
The ultimate aim of this assault is the imperialist domination of the Middle East—the world’s most important oil-exporting region and home to critical trade routes and strategic chokepoints, including the Persian Gulf. By subjugating Iran, a key ally of both Russia and China, the United States aims to strengthen its global position in preparation for direct confrontation with its principal strategic rivals.
History has shown that imperialist wars lead to unforeseen and catastrophic consequences. Just as the US invasion of Iraq unleashed a regional disaster, so too will Israel’s assault on Iran. The people of the Middle East will not remain passive as their countries are turned into battlegrounds for imperialist domination.
The international working class must respond by building a conscious movement against imperialist war and the capitalist system that gives rise to it.
The World Socialist Web Site calls for the defense of Iran from imperialist violence and subjugation. But this can not be waged through the support of any bourgeois government. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class of the Middle East and the whole world, in opposition to all ethnic, racial and religious divisions, on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program.
We re-post here the World Socialist Website perspective article published on June 01, 2025.
Palestinians after an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip [Photo by UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]
On Wednesday, 1,200 Israeli university academics and administrators issued an open letter protesting the “war crimes and even crimes against humanity” committed by the Israeli military in Gaza.
The letter—addressed to the Association of University Heads in Israel, the Board of Academic Public Colleges, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and Academics for Israeli Democracy—is a reaction to the launching of “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” in March, which is employing the mass starvation of the Palestinian population in pursuit of what is now the open policy of the Israeli government: the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
The statement declares:
Since Israel violated the ceasefire on March 18, almost 3,000 people have been killed in Gaza. The vast majority of them were civilians. Since the start of the war, at least 53,000 people have been killed in Gaza, including at least 15,000 children and at least 41 Israeli hostages. At the same time, many international bodies are warning of acute starvation—the result of intentional and openly declared Israeli government policy —as well as of the rendering of Gaza into an area unfit for human habitation. Israel continues to bomb hospitals, schools, and other institutions. Among the war’s declared goals, as defined in the orders for the current military operation “Gideon’s Chariots,” is the “concentration and displacement of the population.” This is a horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity, all of our own doing.
As academics, we recognize our own role in these crimes. It is human societies, not governments alone, that commit crimes against humanity. Some do so by means of direct violence. Others do so by sanctioning the crimes and justifying them, before and after the fact, and by keeping quiet and silencing voices in the halls of learning. It is this bond of silence that allows clearly evident crimes to continue unabated without penetrating the barriers of recognition.
The letter signifies the emergence of public opposition within Israel to the war. It is not yet clear how broadbased this opposition is. Recently published polls indicated that there still remains widespread support for the regime’s onslaught against the Palestinians, which—if the polls are accurate—reflects the deep social disorientation produced by decades of reactionary Zionist policies and propaganda.
However, given the relentless barrage of lies to which Israelis are subjected, the fact that more than 1,000 academics have denounced the policies of the government as criminal is a significant development.
The letter is a devastating indictment not only of Netanyahu’s government but of its international backers in Washington, London, Berlin and other capitals, who have denounced criticisms of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a form of “antisemitism.” The New York Times and other major imperialist media outlets have not reported on the letter, despite prominent coverage in Haaretz and Al Jazeera.
The letter contrasts the vocal role that Israeli universities played in the 2023 mass protests against the Netanyahu government’s attempt to suppress the judiciary with their relative silence on the ongoing genocide. It declares:
Israeli higher education institutions play a central role in the struggle against the judicial overhaul. It is precisely against this backdrop that their silence in the face of the killing, starvation, and destruction in Gaza, and in the face of the complete elimination of the educational system there, its people, and its structures, is so striking.
There are other signs of growing opposition in Israel to the Gaza genocide. The publication of the letter followed demonstrations Tuesday at universities throughout Israel, where students and lecturers protested the ongoing genocide in Gaza. “This is the first action against the ongoing denial and the silent support for crimes being committed in our name,” the organizers told Haaretz. At Tel Aviv University, students and lecturers protesting the genocide were assaulted by campus police officers.
One of the organizers of the protest told Haaretz, “There’s a sense of a breakthrough, that from now on, it won’t be possible to hold back.” She added, “There’s a whole community living under a kind of censorship, feeling stifled, with a scream lodged in their throats. The message we got from the students is clear: they need us to stop staying silent.”
Ayelet Ben-Yishai, a professor at the University of Haifa, told Al Jazeera that for some participants, the decision to publicly oppose the genocide was in response to “the breaking of the ceasefire in March. That was a watershed moment for many, plus witnessing the starvation we’ve been forcing on Gaza ever since then.”
The group organizing the publication of the letter is known as the “Black Flag Action Network.” Professor On Barak of Tel Aviv University told Haaretz that the group’s name is a reference to the term “coined by [then Jerusalem Magistrate Court] Judge Benjamin Halevy following the 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre, in which 48 innocent Palestinians were killed by the Israeli Border Police.” Judge Halevy wrote in his ruling, “The hallmark of manifest illegality is that it must wave like a black flag over the given order, a warning that says: ‘forbidden!’ Not formal illegality … but rather, the clear and obvious violation of law.”
Barak added, “The widespread indifference [toward Gazans] among many Israelis is the result of an intensive dehumanization campaign that must be actively resisted.”
Professor Yael Hashiloni-Dolev of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev told Haaretz, “Anyone with even a shred of responsibility or humanity can no longer buy into the propaganda. We must recognize that war crimes and crimes against humanity are openly being committed in Gaza. We’re in the midst of a moral collapse.”
Al Jazeera noted that “the academics’ letter is unique in that it places Palestinian suffering at the heart of its objections to the war.”
Professor Ben-Yishai told Al Jazeera, “we wanted to make Palestinian suffering central. We wanted to say that we stand alongside and in solidarity with Palestinians. This was also about taking responsibility for what we are doing in Gaza and opening people’s eyes to it.”
The letter appeals to “all the people of this land, Palestinians and Jews.” It declares, “For the sake of the lives of innocents and the safety of all the people of this land, Palestinians and Jews; for the sake of the return of the hostages; if we do not call to halt the war immediately, history will not forgive us.”
The letter has the character of a moral appeal. Its authors do not address the fundamental historical and political issues that underlie the genocide. But however deeply felt the outrage against the war, the development of an effective opposition to the regime requires a break with the ideology and policies of Zionism. The genocidal character of this war is the culmination of the policies based on the reactionary political foundations upon which the “Jewish state” was erected in 1948.
The opposition of Jewish and Arab socialists, and the Trotskyist Fourth International, to the formation of the Zionist state in 1948 has been vindicated.
The authors of the letter state that “It is our duty to save what can still be saved of this land’s future.” The phrasing leads one to hope that the reference to “this land” rather than to Israel indicates a growing awareness that the existence of the Israeli state, based on the expropriation and annihilation of the Palestinian people, forecloses any future other than one that perpetuates mass murder.
The only viable future is one that achieves the revolutionary dissolution of the existing Zionist state and the unification of the Palestinian and Jewish working class in a socialist republic.
We are posting here a brief obituary of Sri Lanka’s veteran actress Malini Fonseka, written by comrade Sanjaya Jayasekera and published on his personal website and social media on 25 May 2025. This articles was also published by the daily newspaper themorning.lk Here. Nearly six-decade of the cinematic career of actress Fonseka deserves a full and extended review.
Malini Fonseka
The demise of actress Malini Fonseka on May 24, 2025, marks the end of a cinematic epoch. She is undoubtedly the “Queen of Sinhala Cinema,” as she has been often referred to by millions of her fans, aged and young. Nearly six-decade of her career was not a simple arc of celebrity, but a deep and continuous cinematic identification with the lives of ordinary people, especially women, under the weight of history, patriarchy, backwardness and class oppression. In a country where cinema often struggles between the tides of commercialism, populism, nationalism and repression, Fonseka remained a moral and aesthetic lodestar, truthfully imbuing her characters with emotion, quiet resistance, and tragic insight.
To merely describe Fonseka as a beloved actress is to evade the seriousness of her contribution. She was an artist of social consciousness—her performances bore the weight of Sri Lanka’s post-independence traumas, its unfulfilled democratic promises, and the contradictions of a backward capitalist society pressing in from every side.
In Lester James Peries’ Nidhanaya (1972), one of the greatest Sri Lankan films ever made, Fonseka plays the innocent, ill-fated woman preyed upon by a man whose wealth and obsession lead to murder. Her character is not merely a victim but a mirror held up to a crumbling feudal order. Fonseka conveys, through silence and subtle gestures, a person slowly awakening to the forces arrayed against her. Her sacrifice is not just personal—it is metaphorically the death of innocence in a society entrapped by its own past.
In Beddegama (1980), based on Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle, Fonseka as Punchi Menika inhabits a world of colonial exploitation and rural destitution. This is not melodrama but precise, economical realism. Fonseka does not “perform” poverty and female endurance—she lives it. Her face, increasingly lined by anxiety and despair, communicates the pain of a society ground down by injustice, hunger and disease, made worse by the cruelty of an indifferent state.
Equally remarkable is her performance in Dharmasena Pathiraja’s Bambaru Avith (1978). In this film, Fonseka delivers one of her most restrained yet potent performances of the role of a young lady in a coastal village caught in the maelstrom of social disintegration and the predatory arrival of urban outsiders. Fonseka’s portrayal is marked by an acute sensitivity to the class tensions simmering beneath the film’s surface. Her role is not simply a symbol of rural innocence but a deeply aware, emotionally complex figure who senses the destruction bearing down on her community. In a film that critiques both the romanticization of village life and the corrosive effects of capitalist intrusion, Fonseka embodies the silent tragedy of a society being commodified. With minimal dialogue and subtle expressions, she gracefully communicates despair, resignation, and the quiet resistance of a woman rooted in her world but unable to halt its unraveling.
Bambaru Avith: Malini Fonseka with Vijaya Kumaratunga
In Akasa Kusum (2008), directed by Prasanna Vithanage, as Sandhya Rani, a faded film star confronting the ruins of her career and personal life, Fonseka embodies the alienation and disillusionment of an artist discarded by an industry that once idolized her, and without any social insurance. The film alludes to the stardom of Fonseka herself. Vithanage’s film, while ostensibly a character study, inadvertently exposes the broader social decay under capitalism, where cultural memory is short and individuals are reduced to commodities. Fonseka’s restrained yet deeply expressive performance underscores the tragedy of a woman whose labor and talent have been exploited, then abandoned—a microcosm of the artists’ precarious existence in a profit-driven system. The film’s critique of bleak nostalgia and the fleeting nature of fame resonates with the broader crisis of art under conditions where everything, including human creativity, is subordinated to the market. While Akasa Kusum does not explicitly engage with class struggle, Fonseka’s portrayal of Sandhya’s isolation and resilience speaks to the perseverance of ordinary people amid systemic indifference.
Fonseka’s performances in a wide range of other films—including Eya Dan Loku Lamayek (1977), Siripala Saha Ranmenika (1978), Ektamge (1980) and Yasa Isuru (1982) —as well as in teledramas such as Pitagamkarayo (1997), are etched into the collective memory of Sri Lankan audiences. In each of these roles, she brought to life women shaped by their social conditions, investing them with dignity, emotional depth, and a quiet intensity that transcended the screen. Whether portraying the struggles of urban motherhood, the constraints of poverty, caste and patriarchy, or the conflicted desires of village life, the veteran actress was able to truthfully reveal the deeper realities of the society around her.
Like several other leading actors of her generation, Fonseka was a significant historical product of her time. By the 1970s, Bollywood’s musical and melodramatic cinema exerted a powerful influence over Sri Lankan audiences, who flocked to theaters largely drawn by star appeal. Sinhala cinema, still emerging as a serious artistic medium, had to contend with the commercial dominance of Indian films. Fonseka’s rise to stardom was not merely a matter of charishma; her compelling screen presence, combined with the emotional depth and authenticity she brought to nearly every role, enabled her to capture the imagination of a broad audience. In doing so, she played a crucial role in affirming the cultural legitimacy and artistic potential of Sinhala-language cinema, as part of the world cinema.
Fonseka’s popularity, unmatched for decades, was not simply built on glamour but on the deep compassion she earned. For the oppressed, she did not offer escapism; she offered recognition and fight. Her status as “queen” is a title she earned from the sincere presentation of the struggles of those who loved her.
Her art reminds us of what cinema can be: a site of conscience, a record of the oppressed, and a spark of rebellion. She belongs to that rare tradition of film actors—like Smita Patil, Giulietta Masina, and Liv Ullmann—who made of their bodies and voices a battlefield of history.
In the later years of her life, Fonseka became associated with the bourgeois nationalist establishment, serving as a Member of Parliament from 2010 to 2015 under the government of then-President Mahinda Rajapaksa. While no political concessions can be made to her alignment with Sinhala nationalist politics, her profound contributions to cinema—rooted in social realism and the depiction of the oppressed—remain of enduring artistic and historical value. Her body of work deserves to be critically appreciated, drawn inspiration from and preserved as a significant part of both Sri Lankan and world cinema.
Malini Fonseka will be remembered not merely as a great actress, but as an artist of the oppressed masses. Her characters will continue to live, as all genuine art does, not only in memory but in the continuing struggles of those they represented.
Front from left to right: Markus Söder (CSU), Friedrich Merz (CDU) and Lars Klingbeil (SPD) present the coalition agreement [AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi]
On Tuesday afternoon, Friedrich Merz (CDU) was elected in the second round of voting and subsequently appointed as the new German Chancellor by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD).
Merz had initially failed in the first ballot—a unique occurrence in German post-war history. With 621 MPs present, Merz was six votes short of the required majority of 316 votes to become Chancellor: 310 MPs voted for him, 307 against him, there were three abstentions, and one vote was invalid. Nine MPs did not take part in the vote.
Merz’s unexpected non-election had caused feverish nervousness in all Bundestag parties. In the end, the Bundestag parties agreed to schedule a second round of voting on the same day.
Shortly before the vote, the notoriously right-wing CDU/CSU parliamentary group leader Jens Spahn announced that a new ballot would be held with the agreement of the CDU/CSU, SPD, Green and Left Party parliamentary groups. The whole of Europe, perhaps even the whole world, was watching this election. He then thanked everyone who had made a second round of voting possible so quickly.
The role of the Left Party and the Greens as essentially right-wing parties of the state could not be clearer: in the face of a looming political crisis in Berlin, they played a key role in installing Merz and paving the way for his extreme right-wing government.
The Merz government heralds a new stage in the rightward evolution of the ruling class. It is undoubtedly the most reactionary and anti-working class government since the fall of the Nazi regime 80 years ago. Its central aim is to remove the last restraints imposed on German militarism as a result of its unprecedented crimes in the Second World War. With the adoption of war credits amounting to €1 trillion on March 18, the Bundestag has already paved the way for a massive military build-up.
The coalition government of the CDU/Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) will not only rearm like Hitler. It will organise a historic onslaught on social spending to finance rearmament and establish a police state to enforce it against the enormous opposition among the population. Domestically, it will also adopt the refugee policy of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) and help the fascists’ nationalistically charged “cultural policy” achieve a breakthrough.
Leading members of the government, such as Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and State Secretary for Culture Wolfram Weimer, are politically far to the right and could easily be members of the AfD. Chancellor Merz himself embodies the interests of the financial oligarchy like no other. For four years, he headed the German branch of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager.
The SPD, which was founded more than 150 years ago under the banner of Marxism, is now the organiser of this shift to the right as a right-wing state party. Yesterday, it announced that Boris Pistorius (SPD) will remain Minister of Defense under Merz. Pistorius personifies the “new era” in foreign policy ushered in by SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who received a farewell at a militaristic spectacle on Monday evening. Pistorius has set himself the goal of making Germany “fit for war” again and preparing it for a direct war against the nuclear-armed power Russia.
Party leader Lars Klingbeil takes over as Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister. In this role, he will ensure that the costs of horrendous military spending and escalating global trade wars are borne by the working population. He will work closely with the new SPD Labor Minister Bärbel Bas, who, as a nominal “party leftist,” will push through the brutal cuts in close cooperation with the trade unions.
The coalition agreement signed yesterday reflects the reactionary personnel of the new government. The focus is on war policy and the comprehensive militarisation of society. The following goals, among others, are mentioned:
Dominance over Europe and a role for German imperialism as a world power
In the coalition agreement, the CDU/CSU and SPD define the entire globe as a zone of influence for German imperialism. According to the agreement, the German government is striving for an Africa policy that “does justice to the strategic importance of Africa,” declares that the “Indo-Pacific region” is “of elementary interest” and announces that it intends to “continue to show a presence in the region.” The “expansion of strategic partnerships with the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean” is also “of particular importance.” Overall, the aim is to “intensify bilateral relations with the countries of the Global South and expand them into a global network.”
As in the past, this global power politics means German support for genocide and war. The coalition declares the “security of Israel” to be a “fundamental German national security interest”—in the midst of the genocide committed by the far-right Netanyahu regime against the Palestinian population. At the same time, it assures the Islamist forces in Syria of support “in the stabilisation and economic reconstruction of the country”—in order to gain geopolitical influence and deport refugees.
With regard to the war against Russia, the coalition agreement announces that “military, civilian and political support for Ukraine will be substantially strengthened and reliably continued together with partners.” Germany must “for the first time since the end of the Second World War … be in a position to guarantee its own security to a much greater extent.” Germany will assume “a leading role” in the further development of the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP).
Militarisation of schools and universities
“We are anchoring our Bundeswehr [Armed Forces] even more firmly in public life and are committed to strengthening the role of youth officers, who fulfil an important educational mission in schools,” it says on page 130 in the section on “Defence policy.” It continues: “We are committed to dismantling obstacles that impede dual-use research or civil-military research cooperation, for example.” We will “eliminate the deficit that exists in Germany in the area of strategic security research and advocate its promotion in the sense of a networked understanding of security.”
Reintroduction of compulsory military service
“We are creating a new, attractive military service that is initially based on voluntary service,” explain the coalition partners. The design of this service will be based on “the criteria of attractiveness, meaningfulness and contribution to the ability to grow.” In doing so, “the Swedish military service model” is being used as a guide and “the conditions for military registration and monitoring will be created this year.”
Development of a war economy and massive armaments industry
The planning and procurement system will be “reformed” and “new implementation paths” will be enforced for major projects and future technologies. In particular, “future technologies for the Bundeswehr” are to be promoted, including “satellite systems, artificial intelligence, unmanned (also combat-capable) systems, electronic warfare, cyber, software-defined defence and cloud applications as well as hypersonic systems.” This requires “simplified access and increased exchange with research institutions, the academic sector, start-ups and industry.”
The “special infrastructure fund” of €500 billion is also designed to prepare for war. “We are simplifying the definition of requirements and approval for military construction projects and creating exemptions in construction, environmental and public procurement law as well as in the protection and dedication of military land with a Federal Armed Forces Infrastructure Acceleration Act,” it says on page 132. The “concerns and infrastructure measures for overall defence” are to be “established as an overriding public interest and prioritised in implementation over other state tasks.”
The historic rearmament and war policy will be financed by equally historic attacks on the working class. “We will make a considerable contribution to consolidation in this legislative period,” it says in the section on “budget consolidation.” The agreement only mentions a few specific measures—such as cutting citizens’ benefits—but the role model is clear: the US, where the Trump regime is ruthlessly cutting social spending in the interests of the financial oligarchy and destroying all existing social rights.
The deeply anti-worker policy of the new federal government is based on the support of all Bundestag (Federal Parliament) parties. The Greens provided the CDU/CSU and SPD with the necessary two-thirds majority in the Bundestag to pass the war credits. The Left Party backed it in the Bundesrat (Federal Council). And the trade unions are also firmly on the side of the government. They reaffirmed their loyalty to the rearmament course and worked systematically in recent weeks to isolate the wage struggles at the post office, in the public sector and at the Berlin Transport Company, and to prevent a joint all-out strike by the working class.
The broad support for militarism and social spending cuts by all Bundestag parties and trade unions shows that the struggle against fascism, war and social inequality can only be waged through the independent mobilisation of the working class. In its statement on the formation of the government, the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) therefore called for “the establishment of rank-and-file committees in workplaces and neighbourhoods that will allow workers to take the fight against mass redundancies and wage cuts into their own hands and combine it with the fight against war.”
The statement continues:
We counterpose the international unity of the workers to the growth of nationalism, trade war and rearmament. The war can only be stopped and social and democratic rights can only be defended if capitalism itself is abolished and replaced by a socialist society in which people’s needs, not profit interests, take centre stage. The big banks and corporations must be expropriated and placed under democratic control.
This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site Here
The US federal debt [Photo: Federal Reserve Economic Database]
On Saturday, May 3, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org) held the annual International Online May Day Rally. The event took place at a critical juncture in international geopolitics, which determines life-and-death questions of the working class—who, in recent weeks and months, have demonstrated growing militancy in their struggles against the capitalist establishment. WSWS posted both the video and text of the opening speech delivered by WSWS International Editorial Board chairman David North today (May 05). We are reposting the video here and we invite the workers, youth, intellectuals and all those who want to defeat austerity, fascism, dictatorship, genocide, war and social retrogression to seriously study this speech and the other speeches, and resolutely decide to join the international Trotskyist movement and build the ICFI as the only revolutionary leadership of the international working class to fight for world socialism.
At first, it was just a quiet murmur in relatively isolated sections of the financial press. Today, however, the voices are growing louder: the US dollar could lose its role as the world’s global currency amid the breakdown of all the arrangements and mechanisms of the post-war period under the impact of the US economic war against the world initiated by President Trump.
A street money exchanger poses for a photo without showing his face as he counts U.S. dollars at Ferdowsi square, Tehran’s go-to venue for foreign currency exchange, in downtown Tehran, Iran, Saturday, April 5, 2025. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]
This week, the Financial Times (FT) ran a major article under the headline “Is the world losing faith in the almighty US dollar?” The answer was that it is.
The concern has been sparked by an unusual development in financial markets. Under “normal” conditions, financial disturbances bring about a rise in the dollar’s value as investors seek a safe haven and move to acquire US Treasury bonds.
But since so-called “liberation day,” when Trump unveiled his “reciprocal tariffs,” there has been a move out of US government debt, and the value of the dollar has fallen. The price of gold, a real store of value, as opposed to debt and credit, continues to reach record highs.
There was a slowing of this movement when Trump announced a 90-day pause on the reciprocal tariffs, which range between 30 and 50 percent for a wide range of countries, to allow for negotiations. But the question remains: What happens after the pause ends?
Whatever the immediate answer, one thing is certain: There will be no return to the status quo ante, with Trump warning that nobody “gets off the hook.” This week, talks took place between the administration and Japan in Washington. The Japanese trade representative returned home empty-handed.
The implications of the new situation were underscored in a comment by a leading FT columnist, Rana Foroohar, entitled “America the Unstable.”
Foroohar began by saying that her “takeaway” from the tariff chaos and fallout was that America, under Trump, has become an “emerging market.”
In previous periods of political and economic stress, US equities and the currency rose because of the “haven status” of the dollar.
“It didn’t seem to matter that all the things that had bolstered American companies from low rates to financial engineering to globalization itself were tapped out. US asset markets seemed impervious to the notion of the dollar-doomsday scenario that would send both the currency and asset prices tumbling. Trump has finally ended America’s exorbitant privilege.”
She concluded by saying that previously she would have ruled out the possibility that America could become the epicenter of an emerging market-style debt crisis, but “not anymore.”
Trump’s measures—the tariff hikes that will slow the economy and proposed tax cuts for corporations—will add trillions of dollars to what is increasingly being characterized as an “unsustainable” debt mountain, currently at $36 trillion and rising.
In a report issued earlier this month, George Saravelos, global head of foreign exchange research at Deutsche Bank, summed up the growing outlook in leading global financial circles.
“Despite President Trump’s reversal on tariffs, the damage to the USD has been done,” he wrote in a report. “The market is reassessing the structural attractiveness of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and is undergoing a process of de-dollarization.”
However, the crisis is not merely a product of Trump’s actions. It has been long in the making—the outcome of a protracted decline in the economic position of the US.
Trump, as is now openly acknowledged, has taken an axe to the economic, trade, and financial mechanisms set in place after World War II, considering that they have contributed decisively to the weakening of the US.
Of course, Trump, for whom, like Henry Ford, “history is bunk,” never explains why they were put in place and why the US played the leading role in their establishment. It was very much, to invoke the phrase he so often uses in his rampages, due to concerns with “national security.”
The purpose of the post-war measures was to prevent the return to the conditions that had prevailed in the period between the wars, grounded not least on the understanding that this would lead to revolutionary struggles by the working class in the major capitalist countries, including in the US, which had seen enormous eruptions of class battles in the latter years of the 1930s.
The post-war economic order rested on three pillars—the establishment of the US dollar, backed by gold as the international currency, the reduction of tariffs and promotion of free trade to prevent the emergence of the trade and currency wars that had proved so disastrous in the 1930s, and the reconstruction of war-torn Europe under the Marshall Plan. All three were based on the strength and industrial power of the US economy.
Contrary to the claims of various bourgeois economists and not a few self-styled Marxists that the post-war economic capitalism boom which followed had refuted the Marxist analysis of the historically inevitable economic breakdown of the capitalist system, the post-war framework did not overcome its fundamental contradictions—above all, that between the world market and its division into rival nation-states and great powers.
And within the space of 25 years—a short period of time from the standpoint of history—these contradictions emerged. On August 15, 1971, President Nixon, in the face of a growing balance on trade and balance of payments deficit in the US, removed the gold backing from the US dollar—unilaterally abrogating the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944.
It was a sign that the power of American capitalism, the basis of the post-war order, was starting to markedly weaken.
The scrapping of the Bretton Woods system ushered in a new global financial system. In the 1950s and 1960s, currencies had exchanged at fixed rates. Maintenance of those fixed rates and the prevention of currency wars required that finance and investment flows were subject to tight regulation.
But with the ending of the dollar-gold connection, currencies started to float freely, which meant that capital and financial controls had to be increasingly scrapped. A new international economic order developed based on credit creation and the free flow of money around the world.
The US dollar continued to function as the basis of the international financial system, but it underwent a major transformation. It was now a fiat currency, no longer backed by gold, that is, real value, but solely by the American state. A new global monetary order emerged.
As the FT article noted: “Despite Nixon’s severing the dollar’s link to gold in 1971, the greenback has remained at the center of the monetary universe. In fact, thanks to the dollar’s importance in the expanding and increasingly interconnected global financial system, its importance has only grown. Far from eroding the dollar’s importance, the Nixon shock entrenched it in many ways.”
The freeing of the dollar from the restrictions due to its being tied to gold and the concomitant government regulations aimed at maintaining a fixed exchange system unleashed finance from the constraints imposed on it under the previous regime, opening up vast new avenues for profit accumulation.
Increasingly, above all in the US economy, this gave rise to what has been called financialization, the accumulation of profit via speculative and parasitic methods.
The more these methods developed, the more regulations on finance capital introduced in response to the crisis of the 1930s were scrapped, culminating in the repeal of the last remaining piece of Depression-era legislation, the Glass-Steagall Act, by the Clinton administration in 1999.
In 1991, the liquidation of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy, coupled with the restoration of capitalism in China and the junking of national development policies by the bourgeois national regimes in the former colonies, opened up new profit opportunities through the globalization of production.
Eager to grasp them, the US called for the entry of China into the new world order. The Clinton administration pushed for its admission to the World Trade Organization, which was subsequently ratified by the US under the presidency of George W. Bush.
The US saw the cheaper labor of China as a profit gold mine and that within the new order, China would remain subordinate to it. But the capitalist economy has its own relentless logic, which operates behind the back of imperialist leaders, no matter how powerful.
The Chinese capitalist oligarchy, now confronted with the transformation of the country from a nation of peasants to one with hundreds of millions of workers, as well as an aspiring middle class, recognized it had to move up the value chain.
It could not simply function as the supplier of cheap consumer goods but had to expand production into more sophisticated commodities based on advanced technology if it was to sustain economic growth and maintain what it called “social stability.”
However, this development has posed an existential challenge to US hegemony. This was recognized by the Obama administration in 2011 when it launched its pivot to Asia. His trade representative Michael Froman wrote an article in Foreign Affairs in 2014 recognizing the weakened position of the US and that the global trading system had to be “revitalized” to allow it to play the leading role.
Such efforts, however, came to naught as the balance of trade and payments continued to widen. And the US government debt has continued to escalate at what is acknowledged as an “unsustainable” rate.
The US has only been able to continue on the debt path because of the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency. So long as investors, domestic and international, as well as other governments, kept money flowing into the debt market, the US imperialist state, with its vast military spending, has been able to continue to function.
Back in 2023, CNN and News commentator Fareed Zakaria set out this relationship.
“America’s politicians have gotten used to spending seemingly without any concerns about deficits—public debt has risen almost fivefold from roughly $6.5 trillion 20 years ago to $31.5 trillion today. The Fed has solved a series of financial crashes by massively expanding its balance sheet twelvefold, from around $730 billion 20 years ago to about $8.7 trillion today. All of this only works because of the dollar’s unique status. If that wanes, America will face a reckoning like none before.”
In the face of this crisis the view is being advanced in some circles that whatever the dollar’s travails, it will continue to operate as the world currency.
The FT article on the dollar crisis cites the remarks of Mark Sobel, a former Treasury official and now US chair of OMFIF, a financial think tank.
“The dollar’s dominance will remain in place for the foreseeable future because there are no viable alternatives,” he said. “I question whether Europe can get its act together, and China is not opening its capital account soon. So what’s the alternative? There just isn’t one.”
Sobel’s assertions about the inability of Europe and China to provide as alternative to the dollar are no doubt true.
But his analysis is incomplete because it is based on a faulty logic which ignores the lessons of historical experience. It rests on the assumption that since global trade and finance requires an international currency, the dollar must therefore continue to play that role because there is nothing to replace it.
However, the logic of the present situation is neither that the dollar’s role can continue nor that another national currency will replace it. Rather, it is that the world economy will increasingly fracture into rival trading, financial and currency blocs—a conflict of each against all—as it did between the two world wars with all the disastrous consequences that produced.
For all their irrationality and outright madness there is a logic to Trump’s policies. Every statement and executive order he imposes is justified on the basis of national security—that the present economic order has undermined the military capacity of the United States to fight wars, and this must be rectified at all costs.
The crisis of the dollar therefore signifies that the conditions for a new world war are rapidly developing in which for the US, China—the existential threat to its hegemony—is the chief target.
With tariffs set at 145 percent, and still more hikes to come, and restrictions imposed on the export of high-tech goods to China, the US has imposed a virtual economic blockade against Beijing. How long before that leads to outright military conflict? History suggests sooner rather than later.
The ruling classes in the US and internationally have no solution to the crisis of the capitalist system over which they preside. Everywhere their response to the breakdown is economic warfare, increased military spending and the evisceration of democratic rights through the imposition of fascist and authoritarian regimes.
The international working class is the sole social force which has the capacity to resolve the historic crisis of the capitalist system, exemplified so sharply in the crisis of the dollar, in a progressive manner. But for that power to be actualised it must take up and fight for the perspective of socialist revolution.
This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site on 18 April 2025 Here
In “My Thoughts on Handagama’s Rani,” published in Daily FT on March 281, Jagath Weerasinghe—artist, archaeologist, and cultural commentator—extends, rationalises, and legitimises the central reactionary thesis of Asoka Handagama’s recent film Rani. This is a film whose underlying narrative, presented in the guise of artistic subtlety and aesthetic ambiguity, represents a deeply ideological falsification of history. Weerasinghe’s endorsement of the director’s central proposition2—reproduced in Sinhala translation in Anidda on March 30 by Vidura Munasinghe—is emblematic of a broader trend among the middle-class intelligentsia and the pseudo-left, who serve as ideological apologists for the crimes of the capitalist state.
A scene in the film “Rani” by Asoka Handagama
The core thesis promoted by both Weerasinghe and the film is that the atrocities carried out during the 1988–90 period—enforced disappearances, state death squads, mass graves, torture camps, and extrajudicial killings, as well as the fascistic violence perpetrated by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)—were not the products of concrete political decisions, class interests, and specific agencies of state and party power. Instead, they were the result of a society in which “violence had become systemic and normalised.” Weerasinghe writes: authoritarian regimes perpetuate brutality “for political gain and self-preservation, creating an environment where violence is not only carried out by those in power but is also internalised, accepted, and even participated in by ordinary citizens. In such a climate, even those with moral integrity can find themselves complicit—whether through silence, fear, or the gradual erosion of ethical boundaries.”
This pseudo-sociological claim—that violence was embedded in the very fabric of society and was collectively enacted by the masses—leads to a profoundly reactionary conclusion: that there is a shared moral guilt for the crimes of the period, borne by everyone, without any class distinction. Rani—the eponymous protagonist, who is portrayed as initially a passive observer of the surrounding terror but who gradually becomes emotionally and psychologically implicated—and every other defenseless rural man and woman, the worker, the unemployed youth, who were terrorized for their lives both by the fascism of the JVP and by state repression, are depicted as responsible for and willing participants in the atrocities.
Was this culpability moral, political, or both? While Weerasinghe leaves no doubt that he intends to assign moral culpability to the masses—an implication clearly shared by the director—this vulgar theory leaves the spectator wondering who bears political accountability. That is precisely the issue at hand. The film and its director’s apologetics place the blame on the “ordinary” masses. Political responsibility follows moral culpability. Consequently, the oppressed are identified with the oppressor, giving rise to a vision of a society that is hopeless, anarchic, and devoid of historical or scientific grounding. This approach is crudely ahistorical, impressionistic, and unscientific—and it serves a definite class interest.
The capitalist state agents of terror, its political leadership, the military-intelligence apparatus, and the misdirected cadre of the JVP are equated, and these contradictory forces are placed on the same grounds as the poor and the working people, constituting a homogeneous society of “ordinary citizens.” They are all morally and indiscriminately dissolved into an amorphous, classless “we.” The final anecdote of the film, which Weerasinghe refers to, is founded upon this proposition and leads to the conclusion that the director wanted the viewers of his film to read into as the alternative narrative: the killing of Richard de Soysa was not necessarily ordered by President R. Premadasa, nor did it serve the interests of the latter or the ruling class. This is a liquidationist proposition that casts doubt upon many other suspected assassinations and abductions of the period, getting the political leadership of the state off the hook. In conclusion, this is where the “broader and more layered exploration of the underlying social and political realities,” which Weerasinghe claims the purported “fiction” allows its viewer to delve into, lands.
Such a political framework is not new. It has appeared time-to-time in bourgeois and petty-bourgeois historiography, where the responsibility for state crimes—pogroms, wars, genocides—is shifted onto “society” or “human nature.” One prominent historical analogue is Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), which absurdly claimed that the Holocaust was not the outcome of a historically developed political program of German imperialism and the fascist state of the Nazi Third Reich, but the result of a deep-seated, inherent antisemitism among the German people3. Thus, the “ordinary” Germans were willing accomplices in the Final Solution, the extermination of over six million Jews. Hitler was only the final executioner of this ideology. This deadly distortion of history has been widely discredited by serious historians, not only for its factual inaccuracy, but for the reactionary political implications it carries4.
Weerasinghe offers no sociological or historical research to substantiate his claims—nor does the director, who admits to conducting little serious investigation prior to the making of the film. However, similar arguments have been advanced internationally through certain psychological and sociological theories that lack rigorous empirical grounding. Chief among these are the studies of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, whose respective experiments on obedience to authority and simulated prison environments have been widely cited to suggest that ordinary individuals can become complicit in acts of cruelty under systemic pressure. Both studies have come under sustained criticism for methodological shortcomings, ethical violations, and issues of reproducibility. More importantly, when abstracted from their immediate experimental context and applied uncritically to complex social phenomena like mass political violence, these theories devolve into a kind of psychological determinism. They obscure the class forces and political programs that shape historical events and instead offer a right-wing, pseudo-scientific narrative in which atrocities are the inevitable result of human nature or diffuse social norms—thereby absolving the state and the ruling elite of political responsibility.
In the Sri Lankan context, this argument has especially reactionary consequences. It leads to the notion that the Sinhalese majority are collectively responsible for the 1983 pogrom against Tamils, and ultimately, for the genocide in Mullivaikkal in 2009. A section of the middle class of the country harbours this ideology, which was once starkly expressed by Pubudu Jayagoda, a leader of the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), who claimed that racism is deeply ingrained in the Sinhalese “society”5, reducing complex political phenomena to abstract moral failures of entire ethnic groups of conflicting classes6. This is not only unscientific and historically false, but it plays directly into the hands of the capitalist state and chauvinist forces, who exploit communalism to divide the working class on racialist lines to prevent unified struggle.
Marxism begins not with moralism, but with the concrete analysis of social relations and historical processes. The essential questions that must be addressed in any serious assessment of the 1988–90 period are the following: What were the objective causes of the JVP-led insurrection and its fascistic methods? What class forces were involved in the repression? What was the role of imperialism, the IMF, and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie in creating the social crisis that produced this violence? And above all, was there an alternative revolutionary leadership that could have mobilized the working class against both the JVP and the capitalist state?
The JVP uprising was not a spontaneous eruption of madness, nor was it the inevitable product of a culture of violence. It emerged from a deep social crisis rooted in the failure of the post-colonial bourgeoisie and the betrayal of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1964, which had entered into a class collaborationist coalition with the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). In the aftermath of this betrayal, tens of thousands of rural youth—disillusioned by the parliamentary left and devastated by the economic liberalization policies of the J. R. Jayewardene regime—were drawn to the radical rhetoric of the JVP.
The JVP, despite its populist posture, was never a Marxist organization. It rejected the class struggle, dismissed the internationalism of the Fourth International, and relied on petty-bourgeois nationalism and adventurist terror. In 1987–89, it launched a campaign of assassinations and fascistic violence that paralyzed the working class and the middle class. The response of the state was a campaign of ruthless repression. Death squads, torture camps such as Batalanda, and state-sponsored terror claimed the lives of an estimated 60,000 youth.
A scene of mass killings and daily-life in rural Sri Lanka in September 1989. Photo by Prasanna Hennayake
This was not a case of generalized ”ideology of violence” within society. It was class warfare, waged from above by the capitalist state to defend private property, intimidate the working class, and preserve bourgeois rule. It was facilitated by the political vacuum created by the betrayals of the old left and the inability of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), to politically break the working class and the rural poor from the grip of the petty-bourgeois JVP and other Stalinist and Maoist organizations in time to develop an alternative mass leadership.
However, it was only the RCL, the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world party of the working class, which alone insisted that the fascist violence of the JVP and the state terror could only be opposed by the independent political mobilization of the working class on a socialist and internationalist program. In November 1988, in order to mobilize the independent power of the working class, it called for a united front of working-class organizations to fight both state repression and JVP fascism, as an immediate practical measure. Instead of supporting this effort, the LSSP, the Communist Party (CP), Nawa Sama Samaja Party (NSSP), and Ceylon Workers’ Congress (CWC) aligned themselves with the terror of the UNP regime, which armed them against the JVP. This betrayal aided the state in unleashing mass repression on the rural poor of the South and launching its racist war against the oppressed Tamil people.
None of these dynamics are on the historical balance sheet of those who seek to “push” the contemporary youth “to the very edges of these established frameworks.”
Today, the pseudo-left has once again emerged as a shield for the ruling class, which has endorsed the JVP/NPP as its saviour. The JVP-led NPP is using its parliamentary position not to uncover or prosecute the war crimes of the past, but to bury them. Its recent tabling and debating of the Batalanda Commission report—gathering dust for over two decades—is a cynical gesture meant to divert public attention from IMF austerity measures. The NPP is objectively poised not to challenge the military, nor the UNP, nor the interests of imperialism. It fears that any real reckoning with the crimes of 1988–90 will expose not only the state, but the politics of the JVP itself.
The working class and rural poor must reject the “common guilt” thesis advanced in Rani and promoted by figures like Weerasinghe. They must demand justice based not on emotional reconciliation, but on historical truth and political accountability7.
Neither of these are possible within the capitalist state. It requires the building of a revolutionary socialist movement of the working class to finally break the grip of imperialism, overturn the legacy of terror, and unify the oppressed—Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim—on the basis of a common struggle against exploitation.
The film’s thesis, and Weerasinghe’s article by extension, constitute an aestheticized historical falsification, a rebranding of a reactionary historical revisionism in the garb of “critical reflection.” The function of art, if it is to be progressive, is not to obscure these truths but to clarify them. Rani fails in this most fundamental task. It replaces history with impressionism, class analysis with pseudo-science, and revolutionary clarity with reactionary confusion.
Anidda, February 2, 2025, A discussion with Ashoka Handagama by Upali Amarasinghe, p19. ↩︎
‘[A]ntisemitism moved many thousands of “ordinary” Germans—and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned—to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.’ Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 9. ↩︎
On March 12, Sri Lanka’s National People’s Power (NPP) government tabled the long-buried Batalanda Commission report in Parliament, fixing dates for a parliamentary debate. This sudden move—decades after the report was first compiled—has nothing to do with securing justice for the thousands of youth and workers who were abducted, tortured, and murdered during the late 1980s. Rather, it is a cynical maneuver by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led administration, aimed at deflecting attention from the ongoing economic crisis and reinforcing the credibility of the Sri Lankan state, which bears direct responsibility for the atrocities.
The Batalanda torture chambers and the mass graves scattered across Sri Lanka are grim symbols of the bloody terror unleashed by the ruling class in response to the social unrest caused by the economic collapse of the 1980s. Thousands of youth, primarily from impoverished rural backgrounds, were abducted by the police, the army and the death squads, held in state-run camps, tortured, raped, killed, burned alive on tyre-pyres, or their bodies were thrown to rivers or buried in unmarked graves. The military and police officers invaded the houses of the male victims, raped their wives, mothers and sisters. These were not just isolated crimes but a systematic class war waged against the poor by a ruling elite determined to defend the bourgeois state, capitalist economic reforms and power at any cost.
IMF Austerity and the Social Crisis of the 1980s
The second JVP insurrection (1987–89) did not emerge in a vacuum. The economic devastation of the 1980s, caused by the United National Party (UNP) government’s brutal implementation of IMF-dictated austerity – rural poverty, indebtedness, disease, malnutrition, land grabbing, unemployment, privatization, inflation – created conditions in which insurgent situation grew among the rural disillusioned youth.
In 1977, the government of J.R. Jayawardene abandoned Sri Lanka’s limited welfare-state model and embraced open-market liberalization. The IMF and World Bank demanded “belt-tightening” measures: currency devaluation, drastic cuts to social spending, and the elimination of subsidies for essential goods. The consequences were catastrophic:
By 1988, the overall budget deficit had soared to 12% of GDP.
Foreign debt quadrupled, forcing the government into commercial borrowing.
Inflation reached 14% in 1988.
Official reserves collapsed, falling to six weeks at the end of 1988 and just three weeks of imports by mid-1989.
By 1987-88 unemployment reached 15.5%, I.e. 940,000 unemployed, and 75% of them were in the 15-29 age group, according to official surveys.
J.R.Jayawardene and Ranil Wickremasinghe (r)
Significantly, military expenditure was also increased for the civil war against the Tamil population in the North and East, the total accumulated cost of which up to 1996 since 1983 was at least Rs. 1,135 billion at 1996 prices (168.5% of the 1996 GDP, equivalent to US$ 20.6 billion).
The young men and women who had been promised economic prosperity under Jayawardene’s “open economy” found themselves jobless and trapped in deepening poverty. With traditional avenues for dissent crushed—particularly after the crushing of the July 1980 general strike— JVP capitalized youth resentment for recruitment.
JVP’s Treachery
Founded on a reactionary mixture of Maoism, Castroism and petty-bourgeois radicalism, sequel to the “great betrayal” of Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1964, JVP channeled youth discontent over the social crisis, along the line of Sinhala chauvinism, nationalism and to tactics of fascism, in defence of the capitalist state. It exploited the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of July 1987 between Jayawardena and Rajiv Gandhi to wage a chauvinist campaign to recruit cadres.
JVP was never a Marxist party, and ruled out independent mobilization of the working class for the perspective of socialist internationalism against capitalist rule, counterposing the rural youth against the working class. Its hostility to the working class was manifested in its killings of workers, political opponents of the left and those who opposed it ideologically.
This fascist conduct of the JVP marked a high point in the degeneration of the petty-bourgeois nationalist movements throughout the world under conditions of the global crisis of imperialism.
State Terror
In response to the fascist attacks by JVP and its military wing, Patriotic People’s Movement (DJV), the UNP unleashed unspeakable brutality against rural and urban youth and the poor. Jayawardene and his successor, Ranasinghe Premadasa, oversaw a state-sponsored reign of terror against not only JVP cadres but also thousands of working-class youth who had no connection to the insurrection.
Ranasinghe Premadasa (Right) and his Son Sajith Premadasa, now the Leader of the Opposition, who boasts of his father’s “spine”
Torture Camps and Killings: Secret interrogation centers were established across the country, with Batalanda and Eliyakanda emerging as the most notorious. Unspeakable torture methods were employed – those who were abducted were hanged, beaten, barb wires were forced into their rectums, and they were forced into barrels of chili-powder-mixed water, many never emerging alive. Youth were often subjected to rape, decapitation, nails hammered into their heads and into ears, eyes removed and burnt alive on tyre-pyres etc.
Death Squads and Tyre-Pyres: The military, police, and paramilitary gangs abducted suspected “subversives,” who were then executed and burned in public. Sometimes, their families were forced to witness. Many innocent villagers were massacred, kids stabbed, and women raped, just because someone of their family members was a suspected JVP cadre.
Mass Graves: Thousands of bodies were dumped in shallow, unmarked graves, many of which remain undiscovered (Matale, Sooriyakanda, Wilpita are among the few such identified).
Witnesses and victims’ families have provided horrifying testimonies of the pogrom. Survivors recount hearing the screams of detainees through the night. Mothers were told their sons had “disappeared,” only for their burned bodies to be found days later by the roadside.
theSocialist.LK talked to a bereaved woman in the Mulkirigala electorate, whose entire family was massacred by the army in late August 1989, because the army could not locate her only brother. Time has hardly permitted her recovery from the trauma. She told as follows:
“My seven year old daughter (Niranjala), my three young sisters (Nilmini, Sujithaseeli, Mathangalatha), my cousin sister Chandraleka, my mother (Sisiliyana -53) and my father (Edwin-63), all were massacred by the Sinha regiment forces of Katuwana army camp, in that thick of the night. Those devils had bombed our house and, the following day, my husband witnessed the burning flesh under the rubble. We have been told that my sisters were carried away, raped for three days by the soldiers and killed. Beliatta police had later killed and burned my brother (Chulananda -21) too.”
Katuwana Massacre victims: From top Left: Mathangalatha, Nilmini, Sisiliyana, Edwin(a traditional ayurvedic doctor), Sujithaseeli.
From bottom Left: Niranjala, Chandraleka, Chulananda.
A survivor of government repression told our reporters as follows:
“I was then 16. I was somehow able to secure my life. One night in mid 1989, Wanduramba Police in Galle abducted the boyfriend of my cousin, Udayakantha, a tuition teacher, said to be on the orders of Udugampola, who was referred to by the villagers as the “Butcher”. One day after, I saw his burning body on a tire by the roadside, among other bodies.”
Over 100,000 people, mostly youth, were massacred by the government during the period. Millions were rendered destitute. To this day, not a single high-ranking official or politician has been held accountable for any of these crimes.
The JVP’s Complicity in Covering Up the Crimes
Despite having been the primary target and immediate cause of this repression, the JVP has no intention of persuing justice to the families of those murdered. It did nothing to expose these crimes when it previously aligned itself with bourgeois coalition governments, nor will it act now. Like its predecessors, past atrocities will only be capitalized by the government to suppress political opposition, whenever need arises.
Since the 1990s, the JVP has transformed into a right-wing bourgeois party, repeatedly aligning itself with the same capitalist forces that once massacred its youth cadres.
In 2004, the JVP joined a coalition government with Chandrika Kumaratunga, providing political cover for the continuation of state violence, and suppression of the dark record of the ruling class.
It later supported Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime, which carried out the genocidal slaughter of Tamil civilians during the final phase of the Sri Lankan government’s racist war against Tamils in 2009.
In 2010 and 2015 JVP stood on one platform with Ranil Wickremasinghe and general Sarath Fonseka to consolidate the hand of the oppressor – Wickremasinghe was a cabinet Minister in the Premadasa government, who has been implicated in the Batalanda Commission Report and believed to have overseen the torture, and the latter is the former army commander who supervised killings both in the South and North.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake, then a Parliamentarian and now the President of Sri Lanka, being sworn in as Minister of Agriculture, Land and Irrigation by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (r) at the Presidential House in Colombo in April 2004 [Photo Credit: M A Pishpa Kumara/EPA/Shutterstock]
Now, as the leading force in the NPP government, the JVP is once again engaged in a political charade. By revisiting Batalanda in Parliament, it seeks to posture as a defender of democracy while positioning to suppress working-class struggles against the IMF’s new round of austerity measures.
The Class Nature of the Crimes and the Path to Justice
The atrocities committed at Batalanda and across Sri Lanka were the calculated acts of a capitalist state defending itself against the threat of mass working-class resistance. Every ruling class party, from the UNP to the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to the JVP, has participated in suppressing the working class. In the 1971 youth uprising, SLFP-LSSP-CP (CP – Communist Party) coalition government killed about 20000 rural youth to defend the capitalist rule, followed by a series of subsidy cuts and austerity.
Real justice will not come from parliamentary debates, charades of commissions or through bourgeois “administration of justice”. Justice for the victims of state terror requires the fulfillment of all of the following demands:
Disclose the names of all those who were abducted, forcibly disappeared and/or tortured and/or killed by the government security forces, the police and state sponsored paramilitary death squads,
Disclose all the police and military records in respect of the places where police stations, army camps and detention centers were located during the period,
Disclose the names of the officers in charge of the police stations, and the names, ranks and regiments of the commanding officers who were in charge of the army camps, located islandwide during the insurgency.
Locate every Mass Grave in all parts of the island, exhume the remains, conduct forensic analysis to identify the victims and disclose to their relatives,
Disclose to the relatives of the victims what happened to their loved ones, and fully compensate them.
Identify, prosecute and punish the perpetrators, including those who provided political cover.
The realization of these demands requires direct political power to the hands of the working class. The ruling class—regardless of which party holds office, including NPP—will never willingly prosecute its own agents. The fight for truth and justice must be connected to the broader struggle against capitalism and the hegemony of financial capital to overthrow capitalist State and dismantle its military-police apparatus.
The Socialist Perspective
The lessons of 1988-90 are clear: the imperialist system survives through the ruthless suppression of working-class struggles. The pogrom effected on the Sinhala youth of the South, the genocide of the Tamils in the North and the East, the ethnic-cleansing of the Palestinians, the loss of millions of lives to COVID-19 pandemic are seen by the ruling class as necessary costs.
Sri Lanka once again faces economic collapse, and the IMF’s latest demands for austerity will provoke new social explosions. The NPP government, following its predecessors, will respond to mass opposition with state repression. The only way to prevent a repeat of past atrocities is for the working class to take independent political action, break away from all factions of the ruling class, and fight for socialist revolution, with the support of the international working class against the hegemony of the finance capital and their domestic lackeys. This needs revolutionary leadership – the second and the most important lesson.
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka calls upon workers, rallying behind them the oppressed youth of the North and the South, to reject the false promises of the JVP-led NPP, and to organize independently in committees of industrial action in line with the international socialist program that will end the rule of the capitalist elite and establish a workers’ government of Sri Lanka and Eelam. They should not trust the pseudo-left and the trade unions, who pose as defenders of mass interests while setting political traps against them by proposing an alternative capitalist state. There is no such thing. Only through socialist revolution can the crimes of the past be truly redressed and a future free from oppression and exploitation be secured.
By the Political Committeeofthe Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction (RLF) of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.
The Historical Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership
The opening decades of the 21st century is defined by the deepest crisis of world capitalism since the 1930s. The ruling class, facing economic stagnation, political instability, and mass discontent, is turning once again to militarism, state repression, and fascistic authoritarianism. The United States, leading the imperialist powers, has been escalating its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, preparing for a catastrophic conflict with China, and backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The national bourgeoisies, including those in South Asia, have intensified their attacks on workers’ democratic rights and living conditions, deepening the crisis of global capitalism.
Leon Trotsky
But, what is missing? The objective conditions for world socialist revolution have matured. Mass movements have erupted—from the strikes by autoworkers in the US and Europe to the mass protests in Sri Lanka and the global opposition to Israeli war crimes. However, as Trotsky wrote in The Transitional Program (1938), “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.” The essential question is the construction of a revolutionary leadership that can guide the working class in its struggle against imperialism, national chauvinism, and capitalist dictatorship.
This leadership is embodied in the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Trotskyist socialist internationalism today has no meaning outside of the ICFI, the only movement that defends and develops the historical and theoretical continuity of revolutionary Marxism.
Marxism and Socialist Internationalism: A Question of Program
Socialist internationalism is not a utopian ideal but an objective necessity arising from the nature of capitalist production itself. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels established this principle in The Communist Manifesto (1848): “The working men have no country.” The capitalist system, by developing a globalized economy, has created an international working class whose liberation can only be achieved through the overthrow of capitalism on a world scale.
This fundamental principle found its highest expression in the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. Lenin and Trotsky based their strategy on the understanding that socialism could not be built in one country. The founding of the Third International in 1919 was meant to provide the revolutionary proletariat with an organizational center to coordinate the world socialist revolution.
However, in a note of caution, in “The Draft Programme of the Communist International – A Criticism of Fundamentals”, Trotsky referred to his own explanation rejecting the idea that socialist revolution must begin simultaneously, as follows:
“Not a single country must ‘wait’ for the other countries in its struggle. It will be useful and necessary to repeat this elementary idea so that temporizing international inaction may not be substituted for parallel international action. Without waiting for the others, we must begin and continue the struggle on national grounds with the full conviction that our initiative will provide an impulse to the struggle in other countries” (Trotsky, ‘The Peace Programme’ Works, Vol. III, part 1, pp.89-90, Russian Ed.)
The degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalin, and the adoption of the national-reformist reactionary theory of “socialism in one country,” led to the betrayal of revolutionary movements in Germany (1923), China (1927), Spain (1936-39), and elsewhere. Stalinist counter-revolution gave birth to the bureaucratic apparatuses of the Comintern, which systematically subordinated the working class to bourgeois national interests.
In response, Trotsky fought to preserve the banner of socialist internationalism. The Fourth International was founded in 1938 to carry forward the strategy of world socialist revolution. In The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938), Trotsky wrote:
“Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard.”
The ICFI and the Defense of Socialist Internationalism
Following Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, the crisis of proletarian leadership deepened. Inside the Fourth International, Pabloite revisionists emerged in the early 1950s, arguing that the Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist movements could be pressured to play a revolutionary role. This liquidationist perspective was decisively opposed by the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the US, including James P. Cannon, and the British Trotskyists led by Gerry Healy. The 1953 Open Letter by Cannon and the subsequent split with Pabloism led to the founding of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
James P. Cannon
The ICFI waged an unrelenting struggle against Stalinism, Pabloism, and all forms of opportunism1, in defense of Bolshevik heritage, to unite the working class internationally against the global offensive of imperialism. In TheHeritage We Defend (1988), Davith North write as follows:
“[T]the struggle waged by the ICFI against Pabloite revisionism preserved the historical continuity of the Trotskyist movement in the United States.”
Consequent to this principled fight for defence of the international party of the proletariat, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain, under Healy, became a major force in the Trotskyist movement. However, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, opportunist pressures led to the bureaucratic degeneration of the WRP, a process exposed by David North and the leadership of the Workers League (US). North’s critique of Healy’s organizational methods and political deviations was fundamental in the reassertion of Marxist principles within the ICFI.
The Heritage We Defend, David North
The definitive break with opportunism came in 1985-86, when the ICFI expelled the WRP leadership. North wrote in The Political Origins and Consequences of the 1982–86 Split in the International Committee of the Fourth International, (03 August 2019, as follows:
“Having the advantage of being able to look back over a period of nearly 40 years, we can recognize that the conflict initiated by this critique [by the Workers League on the course pursued by the WRP], which culminated in the suspension of the WRP from the International Committee in December 1985, and the complete severing of relations in February 1986, was a critical event in the history of the world Marxist movement. The very survival of the Fourth International was at stake. Except for the International Committee, the movement founded by Leon Trotsky had been politically liquidated by the Pabloites. In all the countries where the Pabloites had been able to establish organizational control, they had destroyed the Trotskyist organizations by turning them into political appendages of the Stalinist, social democratic or bourgeois nationalist organizations. By 1985, the Workers Revolutionary Party, which had by that point capitulated to Pabloism, was close to completing the same wrecking operation.2”
Referring to the unrelenting fight waged by the ICFI for the continuity of the heritage of the Fourth International, North explains further as follows3:
“In all this work, the fundamental political principle that guided our efforts was that of Marxist internationalism. We insisted upon the primacy of world strategy over national tactics, and that the appropriate response to problems that arise within the national sphere could be derived only on the basis of an analysis of global processes. On this basis, the International Committee was able to develop a level of international collaboration that had not existed in the entire history of the Fourth International. Actually, the word “collaboration” does not adequately encompass the nature of the interaction between ICFI sections that developed in the aftermath of the split with the WRP nationalist renegades4.”
This definitively showed that international “collaboration” of the working class today has no meaning outside the programmatic and organizational relations between sections of the ICFI to mobilize them for the perspective of international socialism.
The Form and Content of Socialist Internationalism Today
Socialist internationalism in the 21st century is defined by three interrelated processes:
Imperialist War and Militarism: The US‘s war preparations against China and NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine is part of a broader strategy for global hegemony by the financial oligarchy, stemming from an unprecedented historical crisis of the global imperialist system. The genocidal assault on Gaza is an integral part of imperialist war.
The Crisis of Bourgeois Democracy: The rise of fascist movements globally, from Trumpism in the US to Hindutva in India, is part of the ruling class’s turn to authoritarianism to crush mass opposition. The so-called “democratic” regimes, including those in South Asia, are themselves dismantling democratic rights to impose austerity and military-police rule.
The Globalization of Class Struggle: The working class is entering into struggle against capitalism. General strikes, mass protests, and workers’ uprisings in Sri Lanka, India, France, the US, and beyond signify the deepening radicalization of the international proletariat. However, without a revolutionary leadership, these movements can be suppressed, co-opted and betrayed by pseudo-left forces.
In this context, the ICFI remains the only Marxist organization that fights for a revolutionary socialist program on a global scale. It is the only legitimate form that socialist internationalism must take today. Every attempt to substitute spontaneous movements, Stalinist parties, or nationalist formations for the Fourth International leads to political disaster.
Dialectics of Content and Form in Marxist Theory
The relationship between content and form is a key dialectical problem in Marxist philosophy, aesthetics, and political economy. Marxist dialectical method insists that content and form are interrelated and cannot be restricted to dichotomies and separated mechanically. This dialectic is crucial in understanding historical materialism, class struggle, and revolutionary strategy.
Content and Form in Historical Materialism
Marx and Engels developed their materialist conception of history (historical materialism) based on the dialectical relationship between content and form. Marx explained that the content of a given society is determined by its mode of production—the forces and relations of production—while the form is expressed through the superstructure (political, legal, and ideological institutions).
In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx states:
“The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”
Here, the content (economic base) determines the form (superstructure), but this relationship is dialectical—form can react upon content, reinforcing or modifying it over time.
Content and Form in Dialectical Materialism
Dialectics, as developed by Marx and Engels from Hegelian philosophy, sees content and form as a unity of opposites. Content refers to the inner essence or substance of a phenomenon, while form is its external expression. However, this is not a static relationship—content and form interact dynamically, sometimes in contradiction.
Engels, in Dialectics of Nature, and in Anti-Dühring, discusses how scientific and social phenomena undergo quantitative to qualitative transformations when content outgrows its old form, leading to revolutionary changes.
Lenin, in Philosophical Notebooks, applies this dialectic to revolutionary situations, showing how, when the content (working-class radicalization) reaches a breaking point, old forms (bourgeois democracy or reformist organizations) become obsolete and must be replaced.
The Role of Content and Form in Revolutionary Politics
Trotsky, in The History of the Russian Revolution (1930), applies the dialectic of content and form to revolutionary movements in explaining the dialectics of social revolution. He explains that in revolutionary epohs, the old political forms (parliamentary democracy, trade unions, reformist parties) become barriers to the new content (working-class revolutionary consciousness).
Trotsky explained that the fundamental law of revolution is the substitution of one class’s domination over another, and that means the creation of new forms of state power to express this changed content. This means that socialist revolutions require a new political form, i.e., the soviets (workers’ councils), to replace bourgeois parliamentary structures.
Content and Form as a Guide to Revolutionary Action
The dialectic of content and form is not just a theoretical issue—it is a guide to revolutionary action. In every social and political struggle, the key task is to develop new forms that correspond to the evolving content of class relations. Today, the old forms of bourgeois democracy and trade unions are incapable of addressing the global crisis of capitalism. Only through the building of new revolutionary forms—the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the successor and defender of historical continuity and heritage of Bolshevism, as the conscious leadership of the working class—can the content of world socialist revolution be realized.
This dialectical understanding, rooted in Marxist theory, remains the foundation of socialist strategy today.
Fight against Nationalist Opportunism within SEP-Left
The SLLA was formed after a principled fight against a petty bourgeois nationalist opportunist tendency in the SEP-Left, which included comrades who were arbitrarily expelled from the SEP Sri Lanka between late 2022 to early 2023. Shortly after its formation, rifts emerged within the group between a nationalist tendency and those who represented genuine internationalism and fought for the necessity of rejoining the cadre of ICFI by winning the membership of the SEP5.
Our struggle against this petty-bourgeois nationalist opportunist tendency within SEP-Left was fundamentally a battle for genuine socialist internationalism against a clique that sought to redefine internationalism outside the cadre of the ICFI. This opportunist clique rejected the factional struggle6 founded upon defined political grounds, and the necessity for members of the SEP-Left to appeal for and fight for the membership of the SEP Sri Lanka. They rejected a principled factional fight to build the necessary revolutionary leadership within the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI, to lead the working class of Sri Lanka and the region in the next decisive mass struggles. Instead, they proposed a centrist policy of acting as a “pressure group”7 to prevent the SEP leadership from shifting to the right, hoping to place it on the “right track” without engaging in the struggle to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
At the heart of this factional struggle was the dialectical relationship between content and form. The opportunists disregarded the fundamental truth that socialist internationalism is inseparable from its organizational form—the ICFI and its national sections8. They advanced a revisionist formula, arguing that internationalism does not necessarily require membership in the SEP or a fight within its ranks to develop it as the revolutionary party – a rejection of the dialectical unity between class, party and leadership. Instead, they sought to function as an external watchdog, intervening in an attempt to influence the party leadership while evading the historical responsibility of building the SEP as the revolutionary vanguard of the working class.
This orientation amounted to a rejection of Trotskyism in favor of a centrist adaptation to petty-bourgeois layers who were unwilling to undertake the disciplined struggle under the banner of the party to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Lacking a principled basis for factional struggle, this grouping proposed an opportunist formula—attempting to “correct” the SEP while positioning itself to replace it in the future should the party fail to lead the working class in the socialist revolution9. This amounted to a fatal deviation from the necessary political struggle within the party, and this tendency has now relegated into precisely what it wished to be — acting as a “web-group” “promoting the revival of socialist culture”10 outside the revolutionary movement, the ICFI, while posturing as defenders of “internationalism” and the perspectives of the ICFI.
In opposition to this nationalist-opportunist deviation, our struggle was grounded in the fundamental Marxist principle that socialist internationalism has no meaning outside its historical form — the ICFI and its national sections. Only through the conscious struggle to build the SEP as the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI, fighting as a political faction of the SEP against its opportunist leadership, can the working class resolve the crisis of leadership and carry forward the fight for world socialist revolution.
The Tasks of the SLLA: Building the SEP as the Revolutionary Leadership
Our fight for socialist internationalism is the fight to build the International Committee of the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution, and the necessary revolutionary leadership in the SEP Sri Lanka, being a part of it, to lead the working class of the region in the next decisive mass struggles. This requires:
Analyzing the dialectics of the historical failures of the nationalist opportunist and sectarian leadership of the SEP Sri Lanka to lead the working class in decisive struggles and resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership in Sri Lanka and South Asia.
Educating the advanced workers and youth in the history of Trotskyism and the betrayals of Stalinism and Pabloism.
Intervening in the struggles of the working class with the revolutionary program of the ICFI to transform spontaneous economic and political struggles into a conscious fight for socialism.
Opposing all forms of nationalism and identity politics, which divide the working class and subordinate it to bourgeois politics.
Exposing the trade unions and pseudo-left parties, which serve as instruments of capitalist rule.
The continuity of revolutionary Marxism depends on the defense of historical truth. Without this, there can be no revolutionary movement, no revolutionary leadership, and no socialist future.
In the preface to his book Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century, (2023), North reminds us as follows:
“The historical experiences of the past century thoroughly tested all political movements, parties, and tendencies that claimed to be leading the struggle against capitalism. But the upheavals of the twentieth century have exposed the counterrevolutionary role of the Stalinists, Social Democrats, Maoists, bourgeois nationalists, anarchists, and Pabloites. Only the Fourth International, led by the International Committee, has met the test of history11.”
The building of the ICFI is the decisive task facing the working class today. It is not a question of choice but of survival. The alternative is world war, fascism, and barbarism. The only way forward is through socialist internationalism, embodied in the International Committee of the Fourth International. We are an essential part of that fight. Join SLLA today! Build SEP!
“Revolutionary internationalism is the political antipode of opportunism. In one form or another, opportunism expresses a definite adaptation to the so-called realities of political life within a given national environment. Opportunism, forever in search of shortcuts, elevates one or another national tactic above the fundamental program of the world socialist revolution” The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International: Perspectives Resolution of the IC ICFI (Aigust 1988). <https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/world-capitalist-crisis-tasks-fourth-international-1988/18.html> ↩︎
North concludes the paragraph referring to his report to the Detroit membership of the Workers League on June 25, 1989, where he has said, ”The scope of this international collaboration, its direct impact on virtually every aspect of the practical work of each section, has profoundly and positively altered the character of the ICFI and its sections. The latter are ceasing to exist in any politically and practically meaningful way as independent entities. Upon the foundation of a common political program, a complex network of relationships has emerged within the ICFI which binds together every section. That is, the sections of the ICFI comprise interconnected and interdependent components of a single political organism. Any breaking of that relationship would have devastating effects within the section involved. Every section has now become dependent for its very existence upon this international cooperation and collaboration, both ideological and practical.” Workers League Internal Bulletin, Volume 3, Number 4, June 1989, p. 5. ↩︎
“The main purpose of this document is to bring home to the membership the importance of being the official section of the Fourth International in view of the vital necessity to strengthen the traditional organization of Trotskyism in the great struggle already begun. If we accept the history of “international Trotskyism since 1933 (which is a history of Bolshevik regroupment in the Fourth International), then we must place the question of the International as the most important question before the group. All other questions of group development, such as the press, industrial work or organizational activity are bound up with whatever stand we take on the International. If we accept the political principles of Bolshevism then we must accept the organizational method. It is not sufficient to say that we accept the program of the Fourth International and that we expound it better than the RSL if we do not also accept its organizational method, which means that we must be affiliated to the International, accepting its democratic centralist basis; just the same as it is not sufficient to claim to be a Trotskyist and to be more conversant with the policy of Trotskyism than the organized Trotskyists, unless one joins a Trotskyist party accepting its democratic centralist discipline. That is what is meant by Bolshevik organizational methods.”Our Most Important Task, Gerry Healey, August 10, 1943. ↩︎
“The present doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of epoch decline. In reality the history of Bolshevism is a history of the struggle of factions. And, indeed, how could a genuinely revolutionary organization, setting itself the task of overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and develop without intellectual conflicts, without groupings and temporary factional formations?” Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky (1936). ↩︎
The following quote from an article published by this group as part of a series of hysterical diatribes against us, conveniently reduces socialist internationalism to the content of it – that is to the principle of rejection of socialism in one country – disregarding its historical form:
Ever since the global financial crisis of 2008, market analysts, regulators and media commentators have been pondering the question of what might be the next sub-prime.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell addresses House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, Wednesday, June 21, 2023. [AP Photo/Andrew Harnik]
The crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market was the trigger for the 2008 crisis in which a total collapse of the financial system was only averted by a massive intervention by the US Federal Reserve and the government. It was an expression of rampant speculation and in some cases outright criminal activity by some of the largest American banks.
In the years since 2008, one of the issues of greatest concern has been the rise and rise of the largely unregulated non-banking financial institutions (NBFIs). As so often happens when regulators try to fix a problem in one part of the capitalist system, the supposed solution creates another. This has been the case with regard to NBFIs.
The extraordinary growth of private credit, especially over the past decade, was the result of efforts to more tightly regulate the banks and prevent a recurrence of the bailouts in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Finance capital responded by extending the role of credit outside the traditional banking system.
However, as has been acknowledged by the International Monetary Fund and other international bodies, regulators have very little idea of the activities of these organisations, such as hedge funds, family companies and other funds operating in the world of private credit. The word most often used in reports is “opaque.”
Of particular concern is the connection of private credit to the banking system as a whole. While the private credit markets operate outside the banking system, they depend on it for the supply of funds. This has been increasing at an exponential rate.
According to a report in the Financial Times this week, the amount of lending which the big US banks have provided for private capital firms has risen 30-fold over the last decade, from $10 billion to $300 billion in 2023.
In an attempt to find out what is going on, the US Fed earlier this month announced that it would carry out an “exploratory analysis” to be conducted alongside its stress tests of the major banks with the aim of providing an insight into the “resiliency of the US banking system.” It hastened to assure the large banks that the exploration “would not affect large bank capital requirements.”
The major banks are intensely hostile to any measures that compel them to increase their capital reserves to cover potential losses because this means the withdrawal of funds that would otherwise be employed to make profit.
The Fed statement announcing the investigation, which will report its findings in June, said it would “examine the risks posed to banks” by NBFIs. It noted that US bank exposures to them had grown rapidly over the past five years and that the banks’ credit commitments to them totalled $2.1 trillion in the third quarter of 2024.
“This growth poses risks to banks, as certain NBFIs operate with high leverage and are dependent on funding from the banking sector.”
The exploratory analysis would examine two issues: credit and liquidity shocks in the NBFI sector during a global recession; and the effect of a market shock. The latter was defined as “a sudden dislocation to financial markets resulting from expectations of reduced global economic activity and higher inflation expectation” with distress in equity markets leading to defaults by major hedge funds.
While no one can forecast what exactly might set off a crisis, there are any number of potential triggers.
The Fed statement pointed to some of them, including a sudden dislocation to markets caused by reduced growth expectations and higher inflation, and an appreciation in the value of the US dollar against other major currencies. Others were a rise in yield on short-term US Treasury bonds, and an increase in expected defaults leading to a widening of credit spreads—a divergence between interest rates for private credit compared to the rate on Treasury bonds.
Potential triggers not mentioned include a rapid fall in the stock market valuation of a major corporation.
Last month, for example, the market capitalisation of the AI chip maker Nvidia, at one stage the biggest company by this metric in the world, fell by $600 billion in a single day. This resulted from the announcement by the Chinese firm DeepSeek that it had found a cheaper way of developing AI without using top-end chips.
Since then, the total market capitalisation loss by Nvidia has reached $850 billion, sliced off its market high of $3.66 trillion at the beginning of January.
What are initially paper losses for investors who bought at the height of the market frenzy have the potential to translate into real losses if the assets have to be sold to meet debt obligations and to set off a chain reaction.
There are also issues of concern in the very foundations of the bond market. What has been characterised as a conundrum has emerged since the Fed began cutting its interest rate last September. Over a period of three months, the Fed rate fell by 1 percentage point. However, instead of falling, as expected if “normal” conditions prevailed the yield (interest rate) on the 10-year US Treasury bond, the benchmark for the financial system, has risen by a percentage point.
A number of short-term issues have been put forward as the reason, including fears of renewed inflation fuelled by lower interest rates, and the effect of tariffs.
An analysis issued in January by Rashad Ahmed, an economist with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Alessandro Rebucci, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, pointed to deeper processes.
They suggested that it may reflect “waning official demand for dollar-denominated safe assets, possibly driven by geopolitical concerns including fear of sanctions and asset freezes.”
As they pointed out, the “rise in 10-year yields coincides with a substantial reduction in dollar reserve assets held by foreign official institutions.”
The authors said that foreign official buyers may be shifting to fiat currencies other than the US dollar and also into gold, the price of which has risen by nearly 30 percent over the past year.
They concluded by saying the jury was still out on whether the dollar’s status as the dominant reserve currency was being undermined. However, they noted that “it is possible for even a small reduction in the US dollar share of foreign reserves to have a significant short-run impact on US Treasury markets.”
One of those impacts could well be in the private capital markets which have gorged themselves on low rates, building up debt to finance their speculative ventures, but now confronting a higher interest rate environment.
[This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site here on 14 February 2025]
