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The LTTE Ban is a Weapon against All of Us: The Arrest of Sangeethsan and the Real Logic of State Repression

art & culture, art and culture, class struggles, english, lead article, Living Conditions, Marxist Theory, Militarism, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, Sri Lanka, War, War Crimes / June 11, 2026

By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Member, The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka. SEP is the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which publishes the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).

On a day (June 2) that should have passed unremarkably in Kilinochchi, the Jaffna District Crime Detective Bureau, acting through Chavakacheri police, arrested a 24-year-old musician. His name is Ganesh Kumar Sankeethan (Sangeethsan) — known by his stage name “HipHop Sangee” (YouTube Channel name) — and his crime, according to the state, was uploading songs that the police allege indirectly glorify the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). He was remanded for two weeks under Section 3(h) of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), his lawyer K. Sayanthan verified.

Sangeethsan, a rapper, has earned widespread recognition within the local Tamil hip-hop community for compositions that combine social commentary with cultural storytelling. Many of his works are available through his social media accounts. Before we go any further, let us consider what one of those songs contains. It is not vague cultural expression or ambiguous artistic metaphor. It invokes அண்ணன் — Elder Brother — the term used in Eelam Tamil political culture to refer to Velupillai Prabhakaran. It speaks of the Tiger flag arriving in triumph. It honors the மாவீரன் — the Great Heroes, the fallen LTTE cadres — by name and by the imagery of their sacrifice. It calls on them to return and build the nation. It invokes கார்த்திகை — November — the month of Maaveerar Naal, the annual mourning of the LTTE dead, as its emotional and symbolic landscape: flowers are brought to the fallen, their weeping families cry out to them, and the dead are called back to build the nation.

These are the lyrics of a young man from a war-ravaged district who grew up surrounded by grief, who found in music a way to articulate what his community has been undemocratically forbidden to say openly since May 2009.

We state these facts not to hand ammunition to those who want Sangeethsan kept in a cell. We state them because this article is committed to a principle that the Sri Lankan state and its chauvinist supporters on social media are equally committed to destroying: that honest politics must begin with the truth, not with convenient omissions. The question before us is not whether Sangeethsan’s lyrics express a political program we endorse. They do not — and we will explain why, plainly and without condescension, in the paragraphs that follow. The question before us is a different and more fundamental one: does any democratic society have the right to imprison a 24-year-old for the political content of his songs?

The answer is no. Unequivocally, no.

Freedom of political expression — including the freedom to express a politics that is wrong, mistaken, or even one that others find deeply objectionable — is a right that the working class defends with the greatest vigilance, with one principled and non-negotiable exception: fascist speech and fascist organization. We defend such expressions not because all political ideas are equally correct, but because the repressive legal machinery constructed to silence Tamil grief today is the same machinery that will be turned on striking workers, protesting students, and anyone else who challenges the authority of the capitalist state tomorrow. This is not a theoretical warning. It is the documented history of the PTA, other security laws and essential services laws in Sri Lanka, which have been used against Sinhala rural youth, students, Muslim youth, Tamil journalists, plantation workers, electricity workers and port workers with equal and indiscriminate brutality.

This article is not written primarily for those for whom what we discuss here is their daily experience. It is written for Sinhala youth, for middle-class families in Colombo and Kandy and Galle, for workers on plantations and in factories, who have been told their entire lives that the Tamil question was settled in May 2009, that “terrorism” was defeated, and that any sympathy for Tamil political expression is a conspiracy against the nation. It is written for those who, upon seeing Sangeethsan’s lyrics circulated on social media, may have felt the trained reflex: Tiger flag, Prabhakaran, Tamil Eelam — this is exactly what the PTA is for.

It is written to ask: who taught you to feel that reflex? Who benefits from it? And what has it cost you — not as a Sinhala person, but as a worker, as a young person, as someone whose living standards are being destroyed by the same state that is filling its remand prisons with Tamil youth and artists?

A Ban Designed Not to Fight Terror, But to Manufacture It

The formal proscription of the LTTE has been maintained continuously since the government of Mahinda Rajapakse banned it by gazette in January 2009, just months before the military’s final offensive ended the civil war. A final gazette in 2011 consolidated and extended this proscription to cover “related activities.” Every government since — Sirisena’s, Wickremesinghe’s, Gotabaya’s, and now Dissanayake’s JVP/NPP government — has maintained this framework intact.

When the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) opposed the original 2009 ban, it explained with precision what the ban was actually for. The statement issued at the time noted that the ban “has no direct bearing on the LTTE — the government is already waging war against the Tamil separatist organisation.” It warned that the decree’s sweeping powers to proscribe organisations “connected with or representing” the LTTE could “immediately be used against the Tamil National Alliance, a parliamentary political party.” And it predicted, with complete accuracy, that “such broad definitions, however, could be applied to any organisations, including political parties, trade unions or student bodies, that are regarded as opponents of the government.”[1]

Seventeen years later, those warnings have been borne out in case after case. The PTA has been used to imprison Tamil detainees for years without trial, to torture a young Muslim poet named Ahnaf Jazeem for writing verse that condemned ISIS and imperialist war, and to harass Tamil journalists. The JVP/NPP government — elected on a promise to abolish the PTA — has already used the Act against Muslim youth who expressed opposition to the Gaza genocide. In August 2025, the Counter Terrorism and Investigation Division (TID) questioned a Tamil journalist who reported on mass graves in the North. The new Protection of the State from Terrorism Act (PSTA) being drafted to replace the PTA reproduces its essential features while expanding the scope of what can be defined as a “terrorist act” to include actions that “intimidate the public” or “compel the government to do or abstain from doing any act” — language that could criminalize strikes, protests, and any form of organized resistance.

The instrument changes. The purpose remains identical: to place in the hands of the capitalist state an infinitely elastic legal weapon that can be pointed at anyone, at any time.

The Criminalization of Memory is Not an Accident

To understand why a 24-year-old rapper from Kilinochchi sits in a remand prison for singing about Tamil Eelam, you have to understand what kind of region Kilinochchi is, and what kind of wound the state is insisting must never be named.

Kilinochchi was the administrative capital of LTTE-controlled territory. It was also the site of some of the most intense fighting and civilian displacement in the final years of the war. The surrounding region of the Vanni was the theater of the last stages of a conflict in which, according to United Nations estimates, tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed. The survivors of that catastrophe — the families who lost fathers, mothers, husbands and children, who spent months in detention camps, who rebuilt lives from rubble — now live in a society where any public expression of that experience can be treated as a criminal act.

Sangeethsan is not a terrorist. He is a young man who grew up in the aftermath of that catastrophe, processing it in the only way artists know how: through music. To understand what is really at stake — politically and morally — we must read what he actually sang, and then ask not whether we agree with every word, but whether any democratic society can justify locking a young person in a remand cell for singing them.

This is not incidental to the logic of the PTA. It is the logic of the PTA. The state knows perfectly well that a military revival of the LTTE is structurally impossible and virtually non-existent. There is no evidence of serious LTTE organizational infrastructure, no military command, no armed force in the field. The proscription is maintained not because the LTTE poses a threat, but because the legal apparatus of the proscription remains extraordinarily useful — for precisely this: to convert political grievance into criminality, to transform memory into evidence, and to force the Tamil population into a permanent condition of political silence under pain of imprisonment.

This is what the SEP observed in August 2022, when the Wickremesinghe government, in the very same extraordinary gazette in which it delisted some Tamil diaspora groups for diplomatic purposes, continued to maintain the proscription framework: “The continued proscription of Tamil and Muslim groups is part of ongoing efforts by one government after another to whip up Sinhala chauvinism and discrimination against the country’s oppressed minorities. Facing the mass opposition of workers and the poor, the crisis-ridden Wickremesinghe regime is determined to keep communal tensions alive and deepen the repressive measures.” [2]

The pattern is consistent across every government of the post-independence era. The names change — UNP, SLFP, PA, UPFA, SLPP, JVP/NPP. The policy does not. This is not an accident. This is the function that communalism has always served in Sri Lanka: as the SEP noted in its analysis of 60 years of post-independence history, “Six decades of independence have brought ordinary working people nothing but communal conflict, deepening social misery and increasingly anti-democratic methods of rule.” The beneficiaries of that dynamic have never been ordinary Sinhala working people. They have been the ruling class, which has used ethnic division to rule a fractured country and impose economic policies that serve capital at the expense of all working people, regardless of their ethnicity.[3]

Read the Lyrics — Then Ask the Right Question

Let us be honest about what Sangeethsan sang in the song that we referred to above. His lyrics are not ambiguous cultural nostalgia. They invoke அண்ணன் — Elder Brother — a term that in the context of Eelam Tamil political culture refers unambiguously to Velupillai Prabhakaran. They speak of a Tiger flag arriving in triumph. They use the term மாவீரன் (Maaveeran) — Great Hero — the specific honorific reserved for fallen LTTE cadres. They invoke the month of கார்த்திகை (Karthikai/November), which is the month of Maaveerar Naal, the annual commemoration of the LTTE’s dead. They call upon the heroes to “come back” and “build the nation.” They speak of warriors whose “sulfur-scented bodies blended into the wind” — the gunpowder of the battlefield rendered as the smell of sacrifice. This is explicitly a song of mourning for, and celebration of, the LTTE’s slain fighters and their leader. The lyrics read, in part:

The Tiger flag of our Elder Brother is arriving, make way and clear the path!

Tamil Eelam dances in roaring triumph, his name echoes in every direction!

O great heroes who died protecting the soil, time shall never forget you!

Come back, come back, please come back again, to display your bravery and to build the nation! [most approximate English Translation]

These sentiments, as expressed, justify no arrest. We understand the content of it because any serious political analysis must begin with reality. But we unequivocally say that the 24-year-old youth from Kilinochchi should not be imprisoned for writing and singing this song.

Sangeethsan’s song is not fascist speech. The working class does not defend fascist speech — it demands the prosecution of fascist outfits and their financial backers. This distinction is not arbitrary. It is rooted in the nature of fascism itself: unlike any other political tendency, however wrong, fascism does not seek to win political argument — it seeks to annihilate the very conditions under which political argument is possible. Sangeethsan’s song is the very expression of a grief-stricken and oppressed people rendered in music. But this legal machinery, constructed to silence Tamil grief and working-class resistance, is never — without a single exception in the entire post-independence history of Sri Lanka — the machinery turned against the Sinhala chauvinist and communalist outfits that the ruling class courts, funds, and shelters precisely when the class struggle sharpens. The fascist JVP’s death squads of 1988–1990, the Bodu Bala Sena’s anti-Muslim pogroms, the Sihala Urumaya’s ethnic incitement — none of these drew the ferocity of the PTA. The state does not point its anti-terror machinery at the forces of communalism. It points it at the forces of class struggle. That asymmetry is not incidental. It is the entire point.

To genuinely serve Tamil youth — and to speak honestly to Sinhala workers who need to understand what is happening — we must ask the harder question that state repression is designed to prevent anyone from asking: What does it mean that a generation of Tamil youth in Kilinochchi and Jaffna and Mullaithivu genuinely love Prabhakaran and genuinely mourn the LTTE’s dead?

It means something real and painful. As already said, these young people grew up in the rubble of a bloody war. They grew up in a region under continuous military occupation, where soldiers still control Tamil lands, where surveillance is a fact of daily life, where their elders were disappeared, where mass graves continue to be discovered. They grew up in districts where, even before the 2022 economic collapse, poverty levels in Mullaithivu district reached 40 percent. In this reality, Prabhakaran is not a political program to them. He is a symbol of the idea that someone, once, stood up and fought back.

The grief is real. The anger is legitimate. The desire for dignity is not only human — it is politically necessary. And the passion that Tamil youth pour into songs like Sangeethsan’s is the raw material of a generation searching desperately for something to believe in.

The question that our revolutionary movement poses is therefore not: “How do we suppress this passion?” The question is: “Why is this passion flowing into Tamil nationalism instead of socialist politics?” And the answer to that question leads us directly back to the Colombo ruling class — and to the specific responsibility of the Sinhala working class and its potential for genuine solidarity with Tamil workers and the poor. The state that criminalizes Sangeethsan’s song is not only persecuting Tamil youth. It is actively working to ensure that their passion never finds its correct political destination.

Who is being Deceived, and Why

Here we must speak directly to the Sinhala readers of this article — especially to young people who, when Sangeethsan’s arrest was discussed on social media, may have felt that instinctive reaction: he shouldn’t have been singing about Tamil Eelam, that’s LTTE territory, what did he expect?

That reaction is not yours. It was installed in you.

For decades, the Sri Lankan ruling class and its corporate media have conducted a systematic program of militarization of the society and political conditioning. Sinhala children grew up with a version of national history in which the Tamil struggle for democratic rights was, from its very origins, portrayed as a foreign conspiracy and a terrorist project. The legitimate grievances that produced the Tamil national movement — the systematic language discrimination of 1956, the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1958, 1977, and 1983, the deliberate exclusion of Tamils from state employment and university admissions — were erased from public consciousness. In their place was substituted a permanent security narrative of fear mongering: we are under threat, we must be vigilant, any sympathy for Tamil identity is sympathy for terrorism. War has been rationalized as necessary, and the military has been glorified as “war heroes” (Rana Viru), ready to be deployed against any struggle of the working class united across ethnic divisions.

This communalist project was never a natural outgrowth of Sinhala culture or Buddhism. It was a deliberate political construction, launched by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party in 1956 as an electoral strategy to outbid the conservative UNP, and then reproduced by every faction of the ruling class because it served a vital class function: it prevented the Sinhala and Tamil working class from recognizing their common interests and uniting against the system that exploited them both.

The result can be seen today on TikTok, Facebook, and X. The moment a Tamil artist, journalist, or ordinary citizen uses the vocabulary of their own history — “Tamil Eelam,” “homeland,” “genocide,” “accountability”, “war crimes”, “commemoration” — sections of Sinhala social media erupt in denunciation. These users do not consider themselves tools of the state. Many of them are themselves suffering from the same economic devastation — unemployment, inflation, the IMF’s austerity measures, collapsing public services — that Tamil workers in the North and East are suffering. They have been successfully redirected. The enemy they have been given is not the class that rules them, but the neighbor who speaks a different language and carries a different wound.

Here is the dialectic that the ruling class has maintained for seven decades, and which it is essential for Sinhala workers and youth to understand: Sinhala chauvinism produces Tamil nationalism, and Tamil nationalism, in turn, reinforces Sinhala chauvinism. Each tendency is the mirror image and the fuel of the other. When Colombo discriminated against Tamil language rights in 1956, it created the conditions for Tamil political mobilization. When that mobilization was met not with redress but with pogroms, it created the conditions for Tamil armed separatism. When Tamil separatism launched attacks on Sinhala civilians, it was used by the Sinhala ruling class to justify yet more state terror against Tamils — and to intimidate Sinhala workers who might otherwise have seen through the charade. And when the state now arrests a 24-year-old for singing about Prabhakaran or Tamil Eelam, it ensures that another generation of Tamil youth will conclude — understandably, though incorrectly — that there is no path forward except through Tamil nationalism.

The LTTE’s political program was the program of an aspiring Tamil bourgeoisie, not the Tamil working class. As the ICFI analysis of the LTTE’s defeat made clear, the LTTE was utterly incapable of making a political appeal to Sinhala workers precisely because its perspective was based on ethnic struggle rather than class struggle — and its denunciations of the entire Sinhala population for the crimes of the Colombo government ensured that the very working-class unity that could have changed everything was permanently foreclosed.[4] The LTTE’s violent attacks on ordinary Sinhalese civilians served the same reactionary purpose as the government’s Sinhala supremacism: to divide the working class along ethnic, religious and linguistic lines and thereby strengthen the hand of Sinhala chauvinist forces in Colombo. The LTTE’s military defeat in 2009 resolved nothing. It left the Tamil masses with their democratic rights still denied, their land still occupied, their poor still impoverished — and their youth still searching for a political direction.

That is the political vacuum into which songs like Sangeethsan’s speak. They should not be criminalized and suppressed. They should be answered — with a socialist program that offers Tamil workers what Prabhakaran could never offer: genuine unity with the Sinhala and Muslim working class in a common fight against the capitalist state that oppresses all of them.

The State that Imprisons Sangeethsan will come for You Next

This is the point that must be grasped most clearly by Sinhala workers and youth who might be tempted to view Sangeethsan’s arrest as a Tamil problem, not their problem.

The PTA was enacted in 1979 to suppress Tamil militant organizations. But, it was never only about Tamils. It was used to bloodily suppress the JVP uprisings of 1988–1990 — killing tens of thousands of oppressed Sinhala rural youth. It has been used against Sinhala journalists, trade unionists, and political opponents. And under the JVP/NPP government that came to power promising to abolish it, the PTA has been invoked against Muslim and Tamil youth and it has used the Essential Public Services Act against electricity workers who protested and postal workers who struck.

The logic is identical in every case: the same state apparatus that defines Tamil cultural expression as “terrorism” will define your strike, your protest, your social media post criticizing the IMF as “terrorism” whenever it becomes convenient. The elastic definitions being written into the new PSTA — acts that “intimidate the public” or “compel the government to abstain from doing any act” — are not aimed at a nonexistent LTTE or any other such outfit. They are aimed at the working class. All of it. Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim.

The infrastructure of surveillance and military occupation maintained in the North and East since 2009, nominally to prevent an LTTE revival, serves a second function that should be legible to any honest observer: it is a standing model and template for the kind of state control that the ruling class intends to extend southward as the social and economic crisis deepens. A state that has kept an entire population under military surveillance for seventeen years after the end of a war, that imprisons a 24-year-old musician for his song lyrics, is a state that has long since abandoned any pretense of democratic governance.

The Way Forward: Unity of the Working Class against the Capitalist State

Sangeethsan must be released immediately and unconditionally. The charges against him must be dropped. The PTA should be abolished, and its successor legislation, the PSTA — which is the same weapon with a new label — should not pass. The military occupation of the North and East must end. All political prisoners held under these laws must be freed.

These are not Tamil demands. They are the demands of the entire working class, because the democratic rights of any section of the working class are the democratic rights of all of it.

The Socialist Equality Party, in which we, the SLLA, represent a revolutionary tendency, has maintained this position without deviation since its founding as the Revolutionary Communist League, through the entire 26 years of the civil war and its aftermath. We opposed the communal war when the JVP was supporting it. We defended Tamil democratic rights when the trade union bureaucracies were silent. We campaigned for the release of Tamil detainees held without trial under the PTA when no other political party would. And we have always done so on the basis of a clear class analysis: not because we gave political support to the LTTE’s separatism — which program represented the interests of a section of the Tamil bourgeoisie, not Tamil workers and farmers — but because the defense of democratic rights is inseparable from the unity of the working class, and because Tamil workers and farmers could defend their own interests only by uniting with Sinhala working people in a common struggle against capitalism.

To Tamil youth who love these songs, who light candles in November and weep for the Maaveerar: your grief is not misplaced, and your passion for dignity is a political resource, not a pathology. But Prabhakaran’s program failed — not because he was betrayed by the international community or outgunned by the army, but because a separate Tamil capitalist state could only ever reproduce the poverty and exploitation that Tamil workers already endure, in a new flag’s colors. The answer to discrimination and communal oppression is not to be found in a separate state, but in the unification of the oppressed in a common struggle for socialist revolution. The state that murders Tamil aspirations with the PTA is the same state that destroys Sinhala workers’ living standards with IMF austerity. Your enemy is not the Sinhala worker in a factory in Colombo. Your enemy is the class that rules them both. The revolutionary tradition that actually fought for your rights — that opposed the communal war when the JVP was cheering it on, that campaigned for Tamil political prisoners when no other party would, that demanded the withdrawal of the military from the North and East — is the Trotskyist tradition of the Socialist Equality Party. That is the tradition worthy of your passion and your fight.

The arrest of Sangeethsan is not an isolated incident. It is the latest manifestation of a strategy that has defined Sri Lankan capitalism since independence: divide the oppressed along ethnic lines, criminalize the memory of the oppressed, and use the machinery of anti-terrorism law to suppress any movement that threatens the rule of capital. Every government has played this game. The JVP/NPP, which rode to power on the wave of the 2022 Aragalaya uprising with promises of democratic reform, is playing it now.

The answer to this strategy is not Tamil separatism, which has proven a dead end that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Nor is it Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism, which has served as the ideological cover for every act of state terror. [5] The answer is the political unity of Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers, organized independently of all factions of the capitalist class and all its parties, fighting for the common program of socialist internationalism that addresses the interests of all working people against the IMF’s austerity, against militarism, against the entire apparatus of communalist state repression. This unity demands an unconditional and outright refusal to be trapped by the communal divisions that the ruling class has imposed on all of us.

Free Sangeethsan Now! Abolish the PTA—No Replacement! Build the united socialist movement of the working class!

[1] SEP opposes Sri Lankan government’s ban on LTTE, The Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka), 24 January 2009 <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/01/sril-j24.html>

[2] Sri Lankan government continues proscription of Tamil and Muslim groups and individuals, Saman Gunadasa 17 August 2022 <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/17/wfcd-a17.html>

[3] Sri Lankan independence: 60 years of communalism, social decay and war, The Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) 4 February 2008 <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/02/sril-f04.html>

[4] Sri Lanka: the defeat of the LTTE and the dead-end of nationalism, Bill Van Auken, 21 May 2009 <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/05/pers-m21.html>

[5] Tamil separatism, however mistaken its program, arose as a response to systematic national oppression. Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism is the ideology of the oppressor nation’s ruling class — it is supremacist in its very foundations, asserting the primacy of Sinhala Buddhist identity over all other communities as a justification for state discrimination, pogroms, and military terror. “Chauvinism” is the Marxist term of art for aggressive, supremacist nationalism deployed in the service of a ruling class — named after Nicolas Chauvin, the symbol of blind, belligerent national superiority. It carries the correct political charge that “nationalism” does not, in relation to Sinhala Buddhist class hegemony.

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The Mawpiya Sevana Fire: Twelve Dead because Capitalism has no use for the Elderly

Democratic Rights, economics, english, Inequality, lead article, Living Conditions, News, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, Social Murder, Sri Lanka / June 8, 2026

By Sanjaya Jayasekera, Member, The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.

On the evening of June 3, 2026, fire consumed the Mawpiya Sevana care facility in Batagoda, Anguruwatota, near Horana in the Kalutara District. Twelve residents — elderly men and women, people living with mental illness, people with intellectual disabilities — died. Eight more were severely injured. Seventy-one human beings were packed into a building designed for fifteen. The first instinct of the bourgeois press, the political establishment, and the state apparatus is to render this a story about regulatory failure: the home was unregistered, the owner has been arrested, the Defence Secretary visited the ruins. Officials speak of stricter enforcement, mandatory inspections, and compliance frameworks. A proprietor sits in remand custody. The machinery of bourgeois law performs its theatre of accountability.

We reject this framing entirely. The deaths at Mawpiya Sevana are not a regulatory scandal. They are a systemic indictment — the concentrated and visible expression of what capitalist society does to human beings who can no longer be profitably exploited.

The Fundamental Logic: Discarded Lives

To understand this tragedy scientifically, one must begin with the logic of capital itself. Under capitalism, the value of a human being — in the brutal calculus of the system — is indexed to their capacity to generate surplus value. The worker sells their labour power; capital extracts from that labour power more value than it returns in wages; the difference constitutes profit, the lifeblood of the system. This is the elementary truth established by Marx in Capital and confirmed by every hour of every working day across the planet.

What, then, of those who can no longer labour? What of the elderly, the severely disabled, those living with serious mental illness? In the language of capital, they are unproductive. They generate no surplus value. They are, from the standpoint of the system, a cost — a drain on resources that could otherwise be directed toward accumulation. Capitalism does not produce sentimentality toward those it cannot exploit. It produces neglect, abandonment, and, at the sharp end of underdevelopment, mass death.

This is the political truth behind the twelve corpses at Mawpiya Sevana. These were human beings whom the system had already written off. They had no social security worth the name. They had no public institutions capable of housing and caring for them with dignity. They were deposited — warehoused — in an overcrowded, unregistered private facility, in a building designed for fifteen, because their families, themselves workers ground down by decades of austerity, had no alternative. The capitalist state knew this was happening. It tolerated it, because the alternative — a publicly funded, adequately staffed, universally available system of elder care and disability support — would require precisely the kind of social expenditure that the ruling class and its international creditors have placed beyond political possibility.

The IMF and the Deliberate Dismantling of Social Provision

This brings us to the immediate political context, which is inseparable from the structural one. Sri Lanka is presently in the grip of one of the most savage austerity programs in its history, administered under the direct supervision of the International Monetary Fund. The 2022 foreign debt default and the social explosion that swept former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa from power opened the door to an IMF bailout — and with it, the full subordination of Sri Lankan economic and social policy to the demands of international finance capital.

Every government since — from Wickremesinghe to the present JVP/NPP administration of Anura Kumara Dissanayake — has functioned as a transmission belt for IMF dictates. The 2026 budget allocates a staggering 4.5 trillion rupees (450,000 crores Rupees. Approximately US $13 billion) for debt servicing alone — money extracted from the labour of Sri Lankan workers and the rural poor and transferred to international bondholders, banks, and multilateral creditors. To meet this obligation, the government has slashed public expenditure across every social domain: health, education, welfare.

The health system is collapsing under the pressure of these cuts. Public hospitals run out of essential medicines — insulin, antibiotics, cancer drugs, psychiatric medications. Patients wait over a year for MRI scans and die during the wait. Nurses are so overworked and under-resourced that they have no chairs to sit on. The government’s own health minister, confronted with the medicine shortage, told patients to “buy them from the cheapest places.” This is not negligence. This is deliberate policy, enforced under IMF conditionality and praised by international financial institutions as evidence of “fiscal discipline.”

Into this landscape of deliberate social destruction, the question of elder care and disability support does not even register as a policy priority. The JVP/NPP government moved in late 2025 to slash the Aswesuma welfare program — a meagre cash transfer scheme paying between 5,000 and 17,500 rupees per month (approximately US$16 to $57) to the disabled, the elderly, kidney patients, and the extreme poor. Even this minimal safety net is under attack, with the World Bank pressing for a reduction in the number of beneficiaries and a JVP minister publicly declaring that welfare recipients should “feel ashamed” — calling it “legal begging.” As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has noted, this language carries chilling historical echoes: it frames the destitute not as victims of a system, but as parasites upon it.

It is in this context that Mawpiya Sevana existed. The state did not build, fund, or staff adequate public residential facilities for the elderly and the disabled — not because it lacked the administrative capacity to do so, but because the entire fiscal framework of Sri Lankan capitalism, as restructured by the IMF, prohibits such expenditure. The government allocates debt repayments nearly nine times the health budget. There are simply no resources directed toward the systematic, universal care of those who cannot work. In their place, a black market of unregistered, unregulated, overcrowded private facilities fills the vacuum — precisely because working-class and poor families, themselves crushed by falling real wages, rising prices, and the destruction of social services, cannot provide the full-time care that the state refuses to provide.

The State Knew, and the State Did Not Care

It would be politically dishonest to attribute what happened at Mawpiya Sevana to ignorance or inattention on the part of state authorities. The Director of the National Secretariat for Elders has confirmed that the facility was known to the authorities, that it was unregistered, and that it had previously been warned to comply with regulations. Officials knew. They did not act, not because the machinery of enforcement was insufficiently developed, but because the state had no institutional alternative to offer the residents. To shut down Mawpiya Sevana without providing a publicly funded substitute would have been to condemn seventy-one people to destitution or homelessness. The state permitted the facility’s continued operation because the alternative — genuine social provision — is structurally excluded by the political and economic priorities of the ruling class.

This is the functioning logic of the capitalist state in an underdeveloped country operating under IMF tutelage. It is not an aberration from the normal functioning of the system. It is the system functioning normally. The capitalist state in Sri Lanka — as in every neocolonial country — is not an instrument of social welfare. It is an instrument of capital accumulation, debt repayment, and the maintenance of the conditions necessary for the exploitation of labour. Those who cannot be exploited — the elderly, the severely disabled, those with serious mental illness — fall outside this framework entirely. They are residue. They are waste. The system does not know what to do with them except minimize the cost of their existence and, when they die in preventable fires, process the deaths through the criminal justice system to defuse political pressure.

The Feudal Supplement and Its Limits

In the absence of any meaningful social security system, the burden of care for the elderly and disabled in Sri Lanka — as throughout the countries of the periphery — falls on the feudal-cultural obligations of family and kinship networks. Sons and daughters are expected to provide, to sacrifice their own economic lives, to absorb the cost that the state refuses to bear. This system of informal social reproduction (provision of public goods — healthcare, education, social security — necessary to maintain a productive workforce) does not represent cultural high standards. It is a structural necessity for capital: it permits the ruling class to avoid the costs of social reproduction that workers in more developed capitalist countries extracted through generations of struggle — pension systems, public health systems, residential care facilities, disability support.

But this feudal supplement is itself being eroded by the same forces of capitalist development and austerity that make it necessary. As real wages collapse — down 24 percent in the public sector and 14 percent in the private sector since 2022, according to World Bank data — working-class families have fewer resources to provide informal care. Emigration, driven by economic desperation, separates families across continents. The nuclear family unit, under the pressure of capitalist commodity (property) relations and austerity, cannot substitute for the collective social infrastructure that only a socialist society can build and sustain.

The result is the proliferation of informal, unregistered, unregulated private facilities like Mawpiya Sevana — a catastrophic market response to a catastrophic social failure. People with nowhere to go, and nowhere else to put their relatives, are concentrated in buildings not designed to hold them, run by proprietors operating outside any regulatory framework, because the regulated, publicly funded alternative does not exist. The owner of Mawpiya Sevana now faces criminal charges. He may be guilty of negligence. But the system that created the conditions in which he operated — the IMF, the successive Colombo governments, the entire apparatus of neocolonial austerity — faces no charges at all.

The Question of Political Responsibility

The JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake bears direct political responsibility for the conditions that produced this tragedy. This is a government that came to power presenting itself — fraudulently — as a movement of the working people, invoking the language of “people’s power” and social transformation. Its actual record is one of ruthless implementation of IMF directives, attacks on welfare recipients, the deployment of the military against striking postal workers, the invocation of Essential Services legislation to suppress workers opposing privatization, and the systematic underfunding of health and education.

But responsibility does not end with the current government. Every government that has administered Sri Lankan capitalism since independence — the SLFP, the UNP, the SLPP, and now the JVP/NPP — has presided over the gradual destruction of whatever social provision existed and its replacement with the “free market”: privatization, commercialization, the withdrawal of the state from any domain of social reproduction that cannot generate profit for capital. The entire political establishment is complicit. The opposition parties — the SJB, the SLPP, the UNP — offer only “token criticisms” while accepting the IMF framework in its entirety.

The trade union bureaucracies, which claim to represent the interests of working people, are equally implicated. They have systematically suppressed independent workers’ action, called off strikes on the basis of empty promises, and functioned as transmission belts for the very governments and institutions that are dismantling social provision. Their loyalty is to the capitalist system, not to the workers they nominally represent.

The Only Answer: Socialist Transformation

The twelve people who died at Mawpiya Sevana on June 3, 2026, cannot be brought back. But the conditions that killed them can, and must, be ended — not through regulatory reform, not through stricter enforcement of existing laws, not through the arrest of a single proprietor, but through the socialist transformation of society.

The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), in solidarity with the programme of the International Committee of thenFourth International (ICFI), insist on this with complete clarity: there is no solution to the crisis of elder care, disability support, public health, or any other domain of social reproduction within the framework of capitalism and IMF austerity. The resources required to build a genuine, universal, publicly funded system of care for those who cannot work — the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill — exist. They are being extracted from the labour of Sri Lankan workers and transferred to international creditors in the form of 4.5 trillion rupees in annual debt repayments. They are being accumulated by the corporate elite whose tax rates the JVP/NPP government has left intact. They are being hoarded in the offshore accounts and investment portfolios of those who profit from the exploitation of Sri Lankan labour.

These resources must be expropriated — through the repudiation of the foreign debt, the nationalization of the banks and major corporations under democratic workers’ control, and the reorganization of production to serve human need rather than private profit. Public residential care, universal healthcare, free education, disability support, and social security for the elderly are not luxuries. They are social rights, achievable only through the defeat of capitalism and the construction of a socialist society.

This requires the independent political mobilization of the working class — against the JVP/NPP government, against the IMF, against the entire capitalist political establishment, and against the trade union bureaucracies that serve as its labour lieutenants. It requires the building of rank-and-file action committees in workplaces, plantations, and communities, independent of all capitalist parties and institutions, coordinating a unified movement for a workers’ and peasants’ government committed to a socialist program.

The deaths at Mawpiya Sevana are a concentrated expression of a social order in terminal crisis. The answer to them is not to manage that crisis more humanely — it is to end it, through the international socialist revolution that the Fourth International was founded to advance.

We, the SLLA demand: full public accountability for the deaths at Mawpiya Sevana; immediate public funding for a universal system of residential care for the elderly and disabled; the cancellation of IMF debt obligations and the reallocation of all debt-servicing funds to social provision; and the expropriation of the major banks, corporations, and private hospital networks under democratic workers’ control.

The Mawpiya Sevana Fire: Twelve Dead because Capitalism has no use for the Elderly Read More »

“Never Again” — 45th Commemoration of the Jaffna Public Library Arson

class struggles, Democratic Rights, english, Far Right, Fascism, history, lead article, Militarism, News, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, Sri Lanka, War, War Crimes / May 31, 2026

Tonight marks the 45th anniversary of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in May 1981. If we, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party of Sri Lanka, were present at a commemoration event before the Jaffna Public Library today, and asked to address an audience of our Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, we would have delivered the following speech.

By Sanjaya Jayasekera, member SLLA.

Jaffna library arson — Jaffna Public Library after Arson. Image courtesy of CPA X.

Friends, comrades, brothers and sisters — Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, and all who cherish the meaning of human dignity,

Forty-five years ago today, in the dead of night, flames consumed one of the greatest cultural treasures of South Asia. The Jaffna Public Library — home to over 97,000 volumes, to irreplaceable ola leaf manuscripts, to ancient chronicles and living memory, to the intellectual heritage of the Tamil people accumulated across centuries — was reduced to ashes. Not by accident. Not by nature. But by deliberate human hands: uniformed police and organized thugs, dispatched from the south under the protection and direction of the United National Party government of J.R. Jayawardena. Ministers Gamini Dissanayake and Cyril Mathew — who boasted in print that the Sinhalese must rise to “protect Buddhism” — arrived in Jaffna to oversee the operation. Four Tamil men were dragged from their homes and killed. Homes, shops, offices, and the press of Tamil newspaper Ealanadu were burned. Statues of Tamil cultural figures were demolished at road junctions.

This was not a spontaneous eruption. It was a political decision, made in Colombo, carried out in Jaffna, and covered up in silence by an entire political establishment and a compliant media. No official inquiry was ever held into the destruction of the library. No one was prosecuted. No minister faced justice. The fire that burned on the night of May 31, 1981 was lit by the ruling class of this island — and it was fueled by decades of communalist poison that every major political party, UNP and SLFP alike, had been injecting into the bloodstream of Sri Lankan society since independence.

We gather here today not only to grieve. We gather to understand. We gather to draw the lessons that the ruling class — of every party, of every era — has worked hardest to prevent the people of this island from drawing.

What was destroyed that night?

The books that burned were irreplaceable — Yalpanam Vaipavama, the history of Jaffna, existed in only one copy, and it perished in the fire. But the rulers of Sri Lanka were not primarily burning books. They were burning a people’s sense of themselves. They were burning the confidence, the continuity, and the cultural selfhood of the Tamil minority. They were sending a message, written in fire: You do not belong here. Your history does not count. Your culture is disposable. Your lives are contingent on our permission.

This was the language of Sinhala chauvinism — not a fringe ideology, but the official state ideology, entrenched in the very constitution of the republic by the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, by the anti-Tamil university admissions schemes, by Buddhism’s enshrinement as the state religion. And it was the language of a ruling class that used communal hatred as a tool of governance, a weapon to distract the Sinhalese poor and working class from the economic policies — the austerity, the open-market “liberalization,” the assault on wages and public services — that were devastating their own lives alongside the lives of Tamil workers.

The burning of the Jaffna Library was not the beginning. And it was not the end. It was a turning point — a signal flare fired two years before the July 1983 pogrom, in which organized Sinhala mobs, with voter registration lists in hand provided by state institutions, went from door to door, burning Tamil families alive in Colombo and across the island. Black July ignited a civil war that would consume nearly three decades, claim tens of thousands of lives, shatter entire communities — Tamil and Sinhalese — and culminate in the final military assault of May 2009 at Mulivaikkal, where tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were massacred in what the United Nations itself acknowledged as potential war crimes, while the world looked away.

Standing today here facing the once flame-engulfed walls of this magnificent monument, we should say loudly, “Never Again”. Never again must mean: never again a burned library. Never again a Black July. Never again a Mulivaikkal.

But “never again” cannot be a wish. It must be a program.

Seventeen years have passed since the guns fell silent in May 2009. What has changed? The war is over — but the conditions that produced the war are not. The military still occupies the North and East. Tamil lands remain seized under military control. Mulivaikkal commemorations — the most basic act of mourning the dead — are physically disrupted by state-backed mobs and security forces. Tamil protesters are harassed by racist mobs and are arrested. A vicious social media hate campaign, coordinated and deliberate, brands every Tamil who speaks of their history, their grief, or their rights as a terrorist, an LTTE sympathizer, a separatist. Tamil writers find their books blocked by government censors under the cynical banner of “national unity.” And presiding over all of this today is the JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake — a party that built its political career on enthusiastic support for the anti-Tamil war, that opposed every concession to Tamil democratic rights, and that now poses as a government of “national unity” while allowing Sinhala chauvinist propaganda to circulate freely.

We must say this plainly: the militarization of the North has not ended with the war. It has continued and deepened. Successive governments — from Rajapaksa to Wickremesinghe to Dissanayake — have maintained the military stranglehold on Tamil life because the military is the iron fist of a capitalist state that rules in the interests of the Sinhalese bourgeoisie and serves as the instrument of communal oppression. The glorification of the military — the victory parades, the war monuments, the cult of the soldier — is not incidental. It is how the ruling class educates the Sinhalese masses into accepting militarism as their national identity, while ensuring that no united struggle of Tamil and Sinhalese workers can challenge the social order.

The moral disorientation you see in Sinhalese society today — the celebration of soldiers over teachers, the tolerance of racist social media, the passive acceptance of Tamil humiliation and even calls for the repeat of the historical violence, massacres and vandalism — is not the natural condition of the Sinhalese people. It is a manufactured condition. It has been manufactured, across decades, by a ruling class that needed Sinhalese workers to see Tamils as their enemy rather than their comrades. It is the deliberate product of a political culture built on militarism, chauvinism, fear, and lies — because a Sinhalese worker who hates Tamil workers is a worker who will never turn to face his actual oppressor.

It is in this context that we should turn to the lessons of seven decades of betrayal

The tragedy of Sri Lanka is inseparable from the history of betrayal by the parties that once claimed to speak for the working class. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party — which emerged from the Trotskyist tradition — was once the largest workers’ party in South Asia. It had, within its hands, the political means to unite Tamil and Sinhalese workers on the basis of socialist internationalism, to oppose communalism at its roots, and to fight for a government of the working class that guaranteed equal rights for all national minorities. Instead, in 1964, the LSSP leadership capitulated to class collaboration, joined the bourgeois coalition of Sirima Bandaranaike — and sealed Tamil oppression into the very constitution of the republic. Colvin R. de Silva, once a fighter for the Fourth International, presided as a minister over the entrenchment of Sinhala-only language policy. This was not a minor error. It was a world-historical betrayal. It opened the road to every pogrom, every war crime, every burned library that followed.

Capitalism cannot solve the national question in Sri Lanka. The ending of the war did not solve the Tamil national question, and the ruling class has been capitalizing this unresolved problem ever since. Throughout the seventy-eight years of independence it has produced only communal war and economic devastation. The Tamil bourgeois parties — the TULF, the TNA and its successors — have failed Tamil workers and youth just as comprehensively, channeling legitimate grievances into parliamentary deals with Colombo and appeals to foreign imperialist powers that have never served Tamil interests and never will. The LTTE’s separatist program, whatever its origins in the just anger of Tamil youth, could not overcome the fundamental reality that a separate Tamil capitalist state would be a small, economically weak entity, dependent on the same imperialist powers that armed and sustained Colombo’s military, unable to guarantee the rights of Tamils who live within and outside the North and East, and incapable of addressing the root class question.

The path forward is not separation. It is not a communal deal brokered between Tamil and Sinhalese elites. It is the unification of the Sri Lankan working class — Tamil, Sinhalese, and Muslim — in a common struggle against the capitalist system that has used communalism as its instrument of rule for seven decades.

What does “Never Again” demand of us?

When we say “never again,” we do not make a sentimental appeal. We make a political commitment.

Never again a Jaffna Library arson means: never again will we allow the ruling class to burn the cultural heritage of any people — because we understand that the hand that lit that fire was the hand of class rule, using racial hatred as its instrument.

Never again a Black July means: never again will Sinhalese workers stand aside while their class brothers and sisters are massacred — because we understand that the pogrom was organized against Tamils to prevent the unity that would threaten the ruling class.

Never again a Mulivaikkal means: never again will the working class accept a “military solution” to what is a social and political problem — because we understand that the massacre of Tamil civilians served not the interests of Sinhalese workers but the interests of a military apparatus and a ruling class that then turned its guns on Sinhalese workers in austerity, repression, and the destruction of democratic rights.

The Sinhalese workers and youth who are told today that their national glory consists in military parades and the suppression of Tamil commemorations — they are being robbed. They are being robbed of their class consciousness, of their solidarity with fellow workers, of their capacity to fight for their own emancipation. The same ruling class that burned the Jaffna Library has imposed poverty, casualized labor, and IMF austerity on Sinhalese workers. The same military that massacred Tamils at Mulivaikkal is the instrument of a state that imprisons striking workers and breaks trade unions. The enemy of Tamil workers is the enemy of Sinhalese workers. His name is not Tamil or Sinhalese. Its name is Capital.

What are we fighting for?

We call upon Tamil and Sinhalese workers, youth, teachers, students, and intellectuals to build a united movement — not a movement of ethnic reconciliation brokered by elites who represent no one but themselves, but a movement of the working class, fighting for:

The immediate end to military occupation of the North and East, and the return of all seized Tamil lands to the rightful owners. The right to commemorate the Tamil dead at Mulivaikkal and all sites of atrocity — without harassment, disruption, or criminalization. Full linguistic, cultural, and democratic rights for Tamils and all national minorities, including the Muslim community which has faced its own waves of racist persecution. An end to the militarist culture that has been poisoned into Sinhalese society — a culture that glorifies killing and suppresses solidarity. The prosecution of those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, from Black July through to Mulivaikkal. And above all — a socialist political program that places the resources of this island — its land, its labor, its productive capacity — under the democratic control of its working people, Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim alike, so that poverty, communal division, and ruling-class manipulation can be swept away at their roots.

The Jaffna Library held the memory of a civilization. It held books that no one can recover. But it also holds, for us, an indelible political lesson: that a ruling class willing to burn a library is a ruling class willing to burn everything — willing to burn villages, willing to massacre civilians, willing to destroy entire peoples — in defense of its power and profit.

We honor the memory of what was destroyed on this night 45 years ago not by grief alone, but by commitment — the commitment to build the political movement that makes such destruction impossible, by ending the system that makes it necessary.

A heritage was rendered ashes. But the struggle lives on!

Never again — through the unity of the working class of the North and the South!

“Never Again” — 45th Commemoration of the Jaffna Public Library Arson Read More »

The NPP/JVP Government’s Assault on Tamil Historical Memory: State Censorship, Class Repression and Intellectual Complicity

art & culture, art and culture, Democratic Rights, english, lead article, News, Perspective, politics, Pseudo-left, Sri Lanka / April 27, 2026

The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia condemns the detention of Theepachelvan Piratheepan’s books and demands their immediate and unconditional release

By Sanjaya Jayasekera.

The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) and thesocialist.lk unconditionally condemn the detention by Sri Lanka Customs of two books by Kilinochchi-based Tamil author Theepachelvan Piratheepan — Elluttal Nan Yuttam Ceykiren (“I Wage War Through Writing”), a collection of interviews, and Ippothum Inge Irandu Thesangalil (“Now Too Here Are Two Nations”), a collection of essays on the war — and demands their immediate and unconditional release. This act of state censorship, carried out with the direct institutional involvement of the Ministry of Defence and under the rubber-stamp of cultural bureaucracies subordinated to the security apparatus, is not an administrative irregularity. It is a political act, rooted in the class interests of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and its state, and it must be understood and combated as such.

The Facts of the Case Expose the Repressive Machinery under the NPP/JVP government

On 18 March 2026, Sri Lanka Customs seized a consignment of books imported from Chennai, India, by Onereach Lanka (Pvt) Ltd, under CusDec No. 47995. The consignment included four books by Theepachelvan Piratheepan. Customs officers, purportedly suspecting a threat to national security, initiated a review process — with the Director General of Customs, Seevali Arukgoda, subsequently stating that the suspicion arose from one book’s cover, which depicted a map of Tamil Eelam separated from the rest of Sri Lanka, and what he described as a “limited inspection of the contents.”

What followed was a cascade of bureaucratic evasion and institutional complicity that lays bare the functioning of the capitalist state. The Defence Ministry recommended that Customs detain all four books, while the Culture Ministry recommended the release of the two novels. Customs then returned to the Defence Ministry seeking a “no objection” for the novels’ release, which was granted. Based on the recommendations of the Arts Council of Sri Lanka, the State Panel of Literature of the Ministry of Buddhasasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs, and the Ministry of Defence, two books — Elluttal Nan Yuttam Ceykiren and Ippothum Inge Irandu Thesangalil — were formally withheld, with Customs citing provisions under section 120 of the Penal Code, a colonial law, read with Schedule B of the Customs Ordinance.

The Defence Ministry did not respond to questions as to how it determined that the books incited “disaffection” or posed a threat to national security. Crucially, the two books that were eventually released were not first editions and had already been distributed and made available at Tamil bookshops across Sri Lanka. The logical absurdity of this position — that books freely circulating in Tamil bookshops nonetheless require Defence Ministry clearance to re-enter the country through customs — exposes the purely political, punitive character of the censorship directed against Theepachelvan’s work on the war and its aftermath.

When The Examiner inquired whether Customs had reached out to the Attorney General for his opinion, Director General Arukgoda replied: “Why should we consult the AG’s department?” — asserting that Defence Ministry observations are sufficient and that “this has been the practice for as long as he can remember.” Here, in the unguarded candour of a senior bureaucrat, is the operating logic of the Sri Lankan security state: the military-intelligence apparatus has, through decades of communal war and “anti-terrorism” legislation, assumed permanent, unaccountable authority over political expression.

The detention of Theepachelvan’s books is not an isolated incident but part of a systematic and sustained campaign by the NPP/JVP government to suppress Tamil literary and political expression through the Defence Ministry’s permanent stranglehold over the circulation of ideas in the north and east. Writer and actor Antonythasan Jesuthasan — known by his pseudonym Shobasakthi — has revealed that copies of his book 1990: Leidenthivu – Mandaithivu Massacres and Mass Graves, documenting the massacres and mass graves of the war, sent from Chennai to poet Karunakaran’s address in Kilinochchi in late 2025, were seized by Customs at the Jaffna Post Office in November 2025 and forwarded to the Defence Ministry where they remain suppressed to this day — a complaint to Jaffna District NPP MP Rajeevan having yielded nothing, confirming that the censorship of Tamil historical memory is not a bureaucratic malfunction tolerated by the NPP government but its deliberate and continuing political policy.

The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka has warned that detaining publications without clear evidence of inciting communal disharmony could violate constitutional protections, including freedom of expression and equality before the law, and that such actions may amount to a misuse of power and a potential human rights violation. These expressions of institutional “concern,” however, will remain toothless so long as the fundamental class character of the state — and the NPP government that now administers it — goes unexamined and unchallenged.

The Class Character of the NPP’s Censorship

The detention of Theepachelvan’s books is not an aberration of the National People’s Power government; it is a manifestation of its essential political character. The NPP, led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, rose to power on the wave of mass popular revulsion demonstrated in the 2022 aragalaya uprising — a spontaneous movement of workers, youth and the oppressed masses against decades of IMF-dictated austerity, official corruption and elite plunder. Having exploited that mass anti-establishment sentiment to win the presidency and parliamentary majority, the NPP has proceeded to do precisely what every bourgeois government before it has done: implement IMF austerity with renewed vigour, maintain and expand the security-state apparatus inherited from the Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe eras, and deploy the machinery of repression against those who challenge its authority.

The JVP’s historical trajectory makes this entirely predictable. The JVP, which twice launched armed insurrections in the south — in 1971 and from 1987 to 1989 — and which conducted savage political violence, including the assassination of trade union leaders and left-wing opponents, subsequently transformed itself into a parliamentary party deeply integrated into the structures of the Sri Lankan capitalist state. Its “left” and “progressive” credentials — always petty-bourgeois in their class content, reformist in their political program and nationalist in their ideological framework — have served as a political cover for its absorption into bourgeois politics. Its “anti-corruption” and “good governance” rhetoric during the aragalaya period and the 2024 election campaign was not the language of class struggle but the language of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia appealing to middle-class frustrations within the framework of capitalist rule.

Now in government, the NPP/JVP administers the very security apparatus whose colonial-era legal instruments — including Section 120 of the Penal Code, the draconian Public Security Ordinance and the Prevention of Terrorism Act — were wielded by Sinhala-chauvinist governments against the Tamil people for decades. Tamil writers in Sri Lanka live under constant surveillance of the security state. In 2024, Theepachelvan himself was summoned and interrogated by the Terrorist Investigation Division (CTID), and was subjected to nearly three hours of questioning over a book launch event. This persecution has not ceased under the National People’s Power government. The NPP’s “change” amounts to the continuation of the communal-security state with a new parliamentary facade and a refreshed managerial personnel.

Theepachelvan Piratheepan — born on 24 October 1983 in Kilinochchi — is one of the most significant Tamil literary voices to emerge from the lived experience of the war and its devastating human consequences. His poetry, essays and interviews document the suffering of the Tamil people through the armed conflict, the mass atrocities of the final military offensive, and the grinding social desolation of the post-war north and east. It is precisely because his work constitutes an act of bearing witness — of preserving the collective historical memory of a people subjected to systematic violence and dispossession — that the state seeks to suppress it. The detained books represent documentary historical testimony from below: the kind of testimony that the bourgeois state, regardless of which party administers it, has an enduring material interest in silencing.

The Intelligentsia’s Capitulation: Performing Criticism, Defending the Capitalist State

I. Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri: The Government Supporter as Critic

No examination of this crisis would be complete without addressing the role played by the layers of academic and intellectual figures who occupy the space of “civil society” dissent in Sri Lanka — and who perform, with cultivated theatrical effect, the function of absorbing and neutralising working-class and democratic opposition to the capitalist state. The case of Professor Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri demands particular attention, because in the Theepachelvan affair his political intervention reveals, with unusual transparency, the precise mechanism by which the pseudo-left intelligentsia serves the class interests of the bourgeoisie.

Nirmal Dewasiri — Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri

On 19 April 2026, Dewasiri published a video statement on his YouTube channel — History with Nirmal — titled in Sinhala: “The greatest political defeat the Malima [NPP] government received in the case of Theepachelvan!” The framing is significant before a single word of analysis is delivered: the detention of a Tamil author’s books about the war is characterised not as a state assault on democratic rights and on the historical memory of the Tamil people — but as a political defeat for the government. The suffering of the Tamil author, the democratic principle of freedom of expression, the class content of the censorship — all of this is pushed to the background. What remains is a problem of government optics, of public relations management, of the NPP’s political credibility.

In the body of that statement, Dewasiri makes three things clear, each of which must be examined with precision.

First, having campaigned for the NPP/JVP electoral win, he asserts himself a supporter of the NPP/JVP government. This is an admission of class alignment. Dewasiri — the former secretary of the X-Group, the one-time FUTA president, the 2010 Cultural and National Heritage Ministry advisor, the key civil-society architect of the 2015 Sirisena “good governance” election victory — has now completed the arc of petty-bourgeois left politics in Sri Lanka: from student politics, through post-JVP academic radicalism, through “civil society” coalition-building for bourgeois electoral formations, to open and declared support for the NPP government that is today implementing IMF austerity and maintaining the security-state apparatus of the Rajapaksa era. This trajectory is not an individual aberration; it is the class trajectory of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia in the epoch of imperialism.

Second, Dewasiri invokes the argument that in the digital age, banning physical books is an act of political absurdity — that in an era of internet access, detaining a printed consignment at customs only amplifies the work’s reach and drives readers to seek out the censored material. On the surface, one may see it as a critique of the government. In reality, it is something far more insidious: it is the argument of a government supporter advising his preferred government on how to conduct its affairs more effectively. The “digital age” argument does not challenge the ‘right’ of the state to suppress political literature; it argues that this particular act of suppression is tactically counterproductive. It is the counsel of a sympathetic advisor, not the principled opposition of a democrat.

Third, and most revealing, Dewasiri’s video statement conveys that he is worried about the NPP government losing credibility in public perception, and urges it to act quickly to resolve the problem. Here the contradiction at the heart of his entire political trajectory is exposed with unusual clarity — and it is a contradiction that deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed.

It would be a political error to characterise Dewasiri as someone indifferent to Tamil democratic rights. The record is otherwise. He has written at length on the ideological mechanisms by which Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist hegemony suppresses Tamil historical claims, on the illegitimacy of post-war “reconciliation” frameworks that deny devolution and Tamil political agency, and on the dangers of allowing dominant historical narratives to erase the lived experience of the Tamil people. These are not trivial positions — they represent a formal intellectual recognition of the very injustice that the detention of Theepachelvan’s books embodies. However, this critique is made entirely within the service of “post-war reconciliation” — a framework that accepts the Sri Lankan unitary capitalist state as the boundary within which Tamil political claims must be accommodated. Dewasiri argues for a more pluralist, less chauvinist bourgeois order — not for the right of the Tamil nation to self-determination, and certainly not for a class analysis of the national question that would expose the bourgeois state itself as the structural source of national oppression. His formal intellectual defence of Tamil historical memory therefore operates within the very political framework that generates the suppression he critiques.

This contradiction is precisely what makes his intervention in the Theepachelvan case so revealing — and so politically instructive. A man who has written extensively on how Sinhala-Buddhist historical consciousness suppresses Tamil historical memory, who has argued that post-war reconciliation is impossible without confronting that suppression, and who has documented in analytical detail the JVP’s own degeneration into Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist politics, now urges swift action by the NPP/JVP government that is suppressing Tamil historical testimony — not in order to vindicate the principle he has spent years articulating, but in order to protect the government’s political standing with the electorate. The defence of Theepachelvan Piratheepan’s books — of the Tamil people’s right to possess, circulate and build upon their own historical testimony of the war — is subordinated entirely to the political management needs of a bourgeois government Dewasiri has openly declared he supports. What his academic framework identifies as an ideological injustice demanding structural confrontation becomes, in the moment of concrete political decision, a governmental embarrassment requiring swift damage control. The principle survives in the academic publications; it dissolves entirely when the government he supports is the one doing the suppressing.

This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary personal sense. It is the structural logic of petty-bourgeois left politics in the epoch of imperialism. What must be stated with precision is the distinction between historical acknowledgement and political principle: Dewasiri’s academic credentials as a critic of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism make his political function as a government defender more effective rather than less — allowing him to perform the role of principled critic while the substance of his intervention is the protection of a capitalist government that continues the security-state suppression of the very historical memory he has written about. The writings establish his credentials; his political conduct reveals his class allegiance.

The SLLA does not question the sincerity of Dewasiri’s academic work on Tamil historical oppression. We question its political value in the absence of the class independence that alone could give it practical force. Academic recognition of Tamil historical suffering, combined with political support for the bourgeois government that perpetuates it, does not advance the democratic rights of the Tamil people by a single degree. It provides intellectual legitimacy to the political management of their oppression.

This is not the first time Dewasiri has played this role. His trajectory — from X-Group intellectual and cultural radicalism, through ministerial advisor in 2010, to key civil-society architect of the 2015 Sirisena “good governance” coalition, to declared NPP supporter in 2026 — is the biography of the Sri Lankan pseudo-left intelligentsia’s absorption into the structures of bourgeois political management. At every stage, the rhetorical register changes — radical academic, trade union activist, “civil society” democrat, progressive government supporter — while the underlying political function remains constant: to channel mass discontent into safe institutional waters, to dress bourgeois politics in the language of popular aspiration, and to prevent the emergence of an independent, class-conscious political movement of the working class.

The SLLA’s critique of Dewasiri is not personal. It is the application of historical materialism to the concrete political role of a social layer. The pseudo-left intelligentsia does not invent the positions it holds; those positions are determined by its class position, its institutional dependencies, and its material and ideological integration into the structures of bourgeois society. Understanding this is essential to building the independent working-class political alternative that the Theepachelvan case — like every case of state repression before it — demands.

II. Jayathilaka Kammellaweera: The Literary Establishment as Cultural Gendarme

The response of figures like Dewasiri represents one mode of capitulation to the bourgeois state among those aligned with the NPP/JVP. The intervention of renowned Sinhala author and literary critic Jayathilaka Kammellaweera represents something qualitatively different and more openly reactionary: not the management of political embarrassment dressed in progressive credentials, but the direct rationalisation of censorship in the language of Sinhala cultural nationalism itself — a position that does not merely fail to defend Tamil democratic rights but actively argues for their suppression.

Kammellaweera’s position is unambiguous. He argued that books containing ideas damaging to “national reconciliation” could legitimately be detained on the grounds that they harm “social cohesion.” He knows — from what he “heard” about the books — precisely what they contain: the historical memory of the Tamil oppressed nation, the testimonies of the war, the mass atrocities, the dispossession of a people subjected to decades of Sinhala-chauvinist state violence. It is on this basis that he endorses their suppression. His acknowledgement that he has not read the exact text is therefore entirely marginal to his political position — reading the books would not alter his stance by a single degree, because his position is not formed from the specific arrangement of words on specific pages but from what those pages represent: Tamil historical testimony that the Sinhala cultural establishment, aligned with the NPP government, requires to be silenced.

The terms Kammellaweera deploys — “national reconciliation,” “social cohesion” — require class analysis, not liberal restatement. In the political vocabulary of the Colombo establishment since the military defeat of the LTTE in 2009, “national reconciliation” has functioned consistently as a euphemism for Tamil acquiescence to the terms of the Sinhala-Buddhist state’s military victory. “Social cohesion” refers not to the freely expressed unity of equal peoples but to the managed coexistence of unequal communities within the framework of the unitary Sinhala-Buddhist state — a framework in which Tamil historical memory is treated as a threat to stability precisely because it is true. Kammellaweera’s argument is therefore not a liberal position on the limits of free expression made in good faith. It is a Sinhala chauvinist argument made in the language of social harmony: it subordinates the right of the Tamil people to preserve and circulate their own historical memory of national oppression to the political requirements of a Sinhala-dominated state’s management of post-war ethnic relations.

The SLLA states this directly and without qualification: Kammellaweera’s position is objectively racist in its political content and consequences. It assumes the right of the Sinhala cultural establishment — aligned with a Sinhala-chauvinist government of the South — to determine what Tamil writers may say about the Tamil people’s experience of the war, and legitimises the suppression of Tamil historical testimony as a public service. When the NPP state detains Tamil books through the Defence Ministry and aligned literary intellectuals rationalise that act in the language of social cohesion, we witness the complete operation of bourgeois ideological control: the state provides the coercive instrument and the cultural intelligentsia provides the legitimising discourse. These two functions are inseparable. Kammellaweera’s statement is a cultural expression of the JVP/NPP’s deep roots in Sinhala chauvinism — the WSWS has warned that true to its vile record and the reactionary traditions of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie, the JVP/NPP government will whip up anti-Tamil Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism in an attempt to divide and weaken the working class — and it confirms that this tendency finds its reflection not only in the state apparatus but in the literary establishment that serves it.

The SLLA condemns Kammellaweera’s statement in the strongest possible terms. The defence of Theepachelvan Piratheepan’s right to write, publish and circulate his testimony of the war is not merely a Tamil democratic demand. It is a demand of the entire working class — Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim — for the right to know its own history, free from the censorship of any state and any literary establishment that has traded its critical independence for proximity to bourgeois political power.

Equally revealing is the conduct of the Arts Council of Sri Lanka, whose chairperson, Keerthi Welisarage declared — with breathtaking cynicism — that “there are no restrictions on freedom of expression in Sri Lanka” even as his institution’s recommendations formed part of the bureaucratic chain that kept Theepachelvan’s books in Customs detention. Cultural institutions subordinated to the state and its security apparatus do not defend artists; they police them — and the liberal intelligentsia that staffs and defends such institutions performs the same function in the domain of “civil society.”

The Continuity of State Repression and the Lessons of the SEP’s Record

The detention of Theepachelvan’s books must be situated within the pattern of sustained state repression against artists, writers and political dissenters in Sri Lanka that has intensified under every successive government. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and its affiliated Action Committee for the Defence of Freedom of Art and Expression (ACDAE) (now defunct) have fought consistently against this repression — defending writer Shakthika Sathkumara when he was imprisoned on trumped-up blasphemy charges; campaigning for the release of Tamil poet Ahnaf Jazeem, held for months by the Terrorism Investigations Division under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for the content of a poetry collection; and standing with film director and playwright Malaka Devapriya when he was subjected to intimidatory investigation by the Criminal Investigation Department. These were not isolated or tokenistic acts of solidarity. They expressed a principled, politically grounded understanding that the defence of democratic rights — including freedom of expression and artistic freedom — is inseparable from the struggle of the working class against the capitalist state.

The SLLA, as the Revolutionary Left Faction of the SEP, grounds its response to the current attack on Theepachelvan in the same political foundation. The defence of his books is not a matter of abstract liberal principle. It is a class question. The suppression of Tamil literary testimony about the war is an attack on the democratic rights of the Tamil masses and on the ability of the entire working class — Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim alike — to form independent political consciousness, to know its own history, and to build the movement necessary to defend its interests against austerity, communalism and authoritarianism.

What Must Be Done

The SLLA and thesocialist.lk demand:

1. Immediate and unconditional release of both detained books — Elluttal Nan Yuttam Ceykiren and Ippothum Inge Irandu Thesangalil — by Theepachelvan Piratheepan, with no conditions, no ongoing surveillance and no further harassment of the author. We also demand immediate release of all books of other authors including those of writer and actor Antonythasan Jesuthasan.

2. Abolition of the practice whereby the Ministry of Defence — an institution of military-intelligence power — exercises authority over the import and circulation of literary works. The subordination of cultural institutions and customs procedures to the security apparatus must be ended. The repeal of all colonial-era and post-independence legal provisions — including parts of the Schedule B of the Customs Ordinance and its invocation of Section 120 of the Penal Code — used to suppress political literature and artistic expression is an urgent democratic necessity.

3. Full public accountability: the Defence Ministry must be compelled to explain publicly, on the record, on what specific grounds it determined that these literary works constituted a threat to national security. Secret, unaccountable determinations by the military-intelligence apparatus over the domain of political and artistic expression are fundamentally incompatible with democratic rights.

4. Mobilisation of workers, artists, students and youth: the SLLA calls for the broadest possible mobilisation in defence of Theepachelvan and of freedom of expression. Writers, publishers, academics, teachers, trade unionists and students must come together in independent democratic committees — in workplaces, universities and communities — to coordinate this defence outside and against the institutions of bourgeois civil society, which have proved incapable of providing principled opposition to state censorship.

5. Link the defence of democratic rights to socialist politics: the struggle against censorship, against the suppression of Tamil historical memory, and against the NPP government’s continuation of the security state cannot be separated from the struggle against IMF austerity, against the exploitation of the working class, and against the capitalist system that generates communalism and repression as instruments of class rule. The SLLA calls on workers and youth to break with the NPP, the JVP and all parties of the bourgeoisie, and to build an independent socialist political movement grounded in the program and perspectives of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

The SLLA and theSocialist.lk stand in unconditional solidarity with Theepachelvan Piratheepan. His work — bearing witness to the anguish, the loss, the resistance and the aspirations of the Tamil people — belongs to the historical memory not only of the Tamil nation but of the international working class. No security ministry, no colonial-era customs ordinance, and no NPP government that has betrayed the masses who trusted it can legitimately suppress that testimony.

The defence of art and free expression is the defence of the working class. The struggle for democratic rights is the struggle for socialism.

The NPP/JVP Government’s Assault on Tamil Historical Memory: State Censorship, Class Repression and Intellectual Complicity Read More »

Stop the impending Genocide — Before it is too late: Condemn Trump’s Threat to Annihilate Iranian Civilisation

class struggles, english, Fascism, Imperialism, lead article, Militarism, News, Oligarchy, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, War, War Crimes, World War / April 7, 2026

Emergency Statement by the Editorial Board of theSocialist.lk and the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)

Today, 7 April 2026, US President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

This is not political bluster. This is the public declaration of genocidal intent by the head of state of the most heavily armed military power in history — a power that possesses thousands of nuclear weapons and has already been bombing Iran for forty days.

As the World Socialist Web Site stated today in its emergency perspective: “Every word Trump said implicates the government of the United States in a crime of Hitlerian proportions. He says openly what the Nazi leaders discussed behind closed doors.” Trump has already threatened to destroy every power plant, every bridge, every desalination facility — the entire infrastructure of civilised life for 93 million people. He has declared this will be accomplished “over a period of four hours.” He was asked by a reporter whether this constitutes war crimes. His answer: “No, not at all.”

Iran is the heir to one of the oldest and most profound civilisations in human history. Thousands of its civilians — including 168 children killed in a US missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school on the first day of the war — have already been slaughtered. Hospitals, universities, residential districts and schools have been systematically bombed. The logic of escalation, as the WSWS has warned, is inexorable: from intensified bombing to ground invasion, to the occupation of Iranian cities, and ultimately — in the face of mounting US casualties and military failure — to the resort to nuclear weapons.

This is not a hypothetical. This is the trajectory of a war that has been underway for forty days, escalating each week, with no serious force within the capitalist political system placing any brake upon it.

The Democratic Party of the United States — which funded the war with its own vote for the $839 billion defence budget — now calls Trump a “madman” and “unhinged.” But not a single Democrat has proposed concrete action to halt the war. They are complicit. They are terrified that any genuine mass mobilisation against the war would not stop at the war — it would raise the entire question of the distribution of wealth, the power of the financial oligarchy, and the social order both parties exist to defend.

The parliaments of Europe, the governments of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom — all are implicated. Australia has secretly deployed SAS commandos, Wedgetail battle-management aircraft and its Pine Gap intelligence station to the war. Britain hosts the Hormuz summit. Germany rearming. The United Nations Security Council paralysed. International law demolished.

The capitalist state system has proved, beyond any doubt, that it cannot stop this war. Only the international working class can.

theSocialist.lk and the Socialist Lead of Sri Lank and South Asia (SLLA) aligned with the International Committee of the Fourth International, calls on workers, youth and all those in opposition to this criminal war:

Strike: Workers in the United States, Britain, Australia, Germany and across the world must take immediate industrial action — in ports, airports, logistics hubs, defence manufacturing plants and transport networks — to deny the war machine the means to function. The AFL-CIO, the UAW, the TUC and every major trade union federation has maintained criminal silence. Workers must act through their rank-and-file committees, independently of the bureaucracy, to halt the flow of arms, fuel and supplies to this war.

Occupy: Workers and youth must occupy workplaces, campuses and public spaces — not to petition governments that have proven themselves servants of the war, but to assert the independent political power of the working class. The eight million who marched on 28 March in the United States alone must be transformed from a protest movement into an organised political force with a program, a strategy and a leadership.

Organise internationally: The war on Iran is not a national question. It is a world question. Workers in Sri Lanka, workers in South Korea, workers in Japan — whose governments are cutting separate deals with Iran to secure oil supplies even as the bombs fall — must join this struggle. The IRGC’s warning that it will “deprive the US and its allies of the region’s oil and gas for years” is a measure of how close the world stands to an economic and military catastrophe of civilisational proportions. The only answer is international working-class solidarity, organised through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).

Trump’s threat today must be understood for what it is: a declaration of war not merely against Iran, but against all the accumulated gains of human civilisation — against international law, against the prohibition on targeting civilian infrastructure, against the most fundamental norms of humanity that were codified after the horrors of World War II and the Nazi Holocaust. As David North stated at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice: this war meets every legal and political criterion established at the Nuremberg Trials for a “crime against peace” — the supreme international crime.

If today, 7 April 2026, becomes the date on which Iranian civilisation is destroyed, it will also be the date that the capitalist world order signs its own death warrant in the eyes of humanity. It must instead become the date on which the international working class rises to say: Not in our name. Not with our labour. Not with our silence.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) sections of the ICFI are organising this resistance. We call on all workers, youth and socialist-minded people in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally to join them.

Demand the immediate, unconditional cessation of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Demand the withdrawal of all imperialist forces from the Middle East.

Build rank-and-file committees. Strike. Organise. Fight for socialism.

Solidarity With the people of Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Cuba — International Working Class Unity!

Hands Off Iran — Stop Imperialist War!

No More Genocide — Stop Trump’s War Machine!

Workers’ Power Against War and Austerity!

Ports Closed to War — Workers Unite!

Not One Penny for War — Fund Hospitals, Schools, Jobs!

Imperialist and Zionist Troops Out from the Middle East!

Stop the War Criminals — Nuremberg for Imperialist Aggression!

Stop the impending Genocide — Before it is too late: Condemn Trump’s Threat to Annihilate Iranian Civilisation Read More »

Weekly Political Report — Week Ending 28 March 2026

class struggles, Democratic Rights, economics, english, Far Right, Imperialism, Living Conditions, Militarism, politics, politics & economics, War, War Crimes, Weekly Political Report, World Economy, World War / March 31, 2026

This political report for the week of March 22–28, 2026, is compiled by theSocialist.lk based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).

I. Imperialism and War: The Iran Catastrophe Deepens

The dominant political development of the week was the further catastrophic escalation of the US-Israeli war against Iran, now entering its fourth week. On Saturday, 22 March, President Trump posted an ultimatum on his social media platform demanding that Iran “fully open, without threat, the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours,” threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power infrastructure, beginning with its largest power plant. The WSWS characterised this as a threat of genocidal violence without precedent in the post-World War II era, comparable only to the Truman administration’s nuclear ultimatum to Japan in 1945.[1]

The scale of the threat was not rhetorical. The Damavand Combined Cycle Power Plant — Iran’s largest, located 35 kilometres from Tehran’s centre — supplies electricity to approximately ten million people. Any strike on the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, Iran’s sole operating commercial reactor, risks catastrophic radioactive release. The IAEA Director General has warned that even severing the facility’s power supply lines could trigger a reactor meltdown. Iran responded by declaring all US and Israeli energy infrastructure across the region as legitimate targets, with Gulf states whose populations depend on electricity-powered desalination plants facing a potential humanitarian catastrophe of their own.

By week’s end, the trajectory had moved unambiguously toward ground invasion. Trump, in an interview with the Financial Times, declared openly: “Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options.” The Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon was preparing for “weeks of ground operations,” and approximately 1,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division were reported to be readying for deployment. The 82nd Airborne’s Immediate Response Force — a 3,000-strong rapid-deployment brigade — was identified by the New York Times as a candidate force for seizing Kharg Island, through which 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports pass.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth provided the clearest statement of the administration’s actual position: “We negotiate with bombs. You have a choice as we loiter over the top of Tehran.” This cynical formulation — coupling public talk of negotiations with accelerating military preparations — exposes the character of US imperialism: diplomacy as a screen for war, with mass violence as both means and end.

In Lebanon, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered a further expansion of the “security zone” in the south. More than 1,238 people have been killed and 3,500 wounded since the Israeli ground assault began on 2 March. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced. Three journalists were killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a marked press vehicle in Jezzine. Human rights documentation through Day 25 of the Iran war recorded at least 6,530 killed, including 640 confirmed civilians.

The WSWS insists that these are not individual acts of militarist excess but the systematic expression of a capitalist imperialist order in deep crisis, using war to secure control of energy resources, chokepoints and global hegemony. The Newroz 2026 statement of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi (Turkey/SEP) — issued on 22 March — placed the war in this broader framework, linking imperialist aggression against Iran, Lebanon and Gaza to the political interests of regional bourgeoisies and the strategic requirements of US world dominance. The statement called for the building of rank-and-file committees across factories, ports, mines, hospitals and schools, the withdrawal of all US forces from the Middle East, the closure of NATO bases including those in Türkiye, and the formation of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.[2]

II. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism

Spain provided the week’s starkest illustration of pseudo-left capitulation to imperialism. The PSOE-Sumar coalition — which weeks earlier had revived the “No to war” slogan associated with the 2003 anti-Iraq War mass movement — announced a €1 billion military aid package for Ukraine following a meeting between Prime Minister Sánchez and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, bringing Spain’s total commitment to approximately €4 billion. The frigate Cristóbal Colón was simultaneously dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean. A token €5 billion social subsidy package — temporary tax cuts and a symbolic rent freeze attempt — was offered as political cover.[3]

The manoeuvre was transparent. The PSOE-Sumar government made this announcement against the backdrop of an unprecedented wave of industrial action across Spain: a nationwide doctors’ strike involving more than 175,000 workers, a three-day national railway strike, airport ground handling stoppages threatening to paralyse Easter travel, regional education strikes — with Catalonia’s culminating in more than 100,000 people on the streets of Barcelona — and general strikes in the Basque Country on 17 March. The working class in struggle was answered with rearmament and tokenism.

The WSWS is unequivocal: PSOE-Sumar’s anti-war posture was never anything other than a political calculation to contain domestic opposition. Its rapid re-integration into NATO war logistics — complementing Spain’s earlier facilitation of US strikes on Iran — exposes the class interests that animate such formations. Sumar, positioned as the “left” partner of the coalition, is identified as a direct instrument of imperialism, channelling dissent into manageable parliamentary terrain while voting through military budgets and suppressing class struggle.

Sri Lanka’s Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) received analogous treatment. Its call for “global people’s power” against the Iran war — superficially radical in rhetoric — was subjected to sharp political critique as pseudo-left opportunism. The FSP’s initiative, the WSWS argued, reflects a nationalist parliamentary logic that accommodates bourgeois parties and dissipates class power through appeals that refuse to break with the capitalist state. The SEP insists that genuine anti-war struggle must be grounded in proletarian internationalism and independent socialist organisation.[4]

III. Authoritarian Consolidation and Democratic Rights

The Trump administration continued its domestic militarisation offensive during the week. ICE deployments to airports in force — framed publicly as immigration enforcement — were characterised by the WSWS as a deliberate erosion of democratic norms and a rehearsal for the normalisation of federal paramilitary presence in civilian public life. The SEP connects this directly to the war drive: the same oligarchic project that prosecutes imperialist war abroad constructs the police state apparatus at home.

Australia’s Labor government provided a parallel illustration of bourgeois democracy’s hollowing out. Having lost a High Court ruling on offshore detention, the Albanese government circumvented the decision by transporting former asylum seekers to Nauru. The SEP described this as demonstrating the capitalist state’s readiness to flout its own legal constraints in order to uphold racist border regimes — which serve both capitalist labour market requirements and imperialist geopolitical alliances.

Cuba’s humanitarian crisis deepened further as a nationwide blackout struck the island amid US restrictions blocking incoming Russian fuel shipments. This is imperialist economic warfare targeting working people directly, using energy denial as a weapon of coercion.

The German city of Duisburg maintained its entry ban against Mohamedou Ould Slahi — the Mauritanian — a Guantánamo survivor and author, in a measure that exemplifies the integration of state repression, anti-democratic precedent and the ongoing brutalisation of those processed through imperialist detention machinery.

IV. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal

Class struggle intensified across multiple fronts, with the trade union bureaucracy consistently functioning as the principal obstacle to the conversion of industrial militancy into political power.

In London, more than 300 Unite members at Stagecoach’s Bow garage struck for four days (19–22 March) against punishing rosters, inadequate rest breaks and dangerous fatigue — conditions forcing drivers to fall asleep at the wheel. Stagecoach mounted a systematic strikebreaking operation, importing replacement drivers from other cities and billeting them in hotels. Unite responded by sabotaging the action: officials called off a coordinated strike at Lea Interchange Bus Company — a Stagecoach subsidiary a few miles away — and declared a “win” based on a three-year deal pegging future increases to CPI rather than the previously demanded RPI, while leaving victimisation of union reps unaddressed. The Rail, Maritime and Transport union simultaneously suspended rolling stoppages by 1,800 London Underground drivers for closed-door talks.[5]

The WSWS analysis is direct: the union apparatus acts not as an instrument of working-class power but as a managerial layer whose function is to contain, fragment and ultimately defeat industrial resistance. The strategic response is the formation of rank-and-file committees that link garages and sectors, set non-negotiable safety demands, coordinate unified action, and raise the demand for democratic workers’ control of public transport.

In Australia, Tasmanian teachers conducted rolling statewide strikes over real-wage cuts and deteriorating conditions — the third round of action since September 2025 — while the AEU bureaucracy deliberately staggered the action by region (northwest on Tuesday, north on Wednesday, south on Thursday) to minimise its impact and prevent coordination with the simultaneous Victorian teachers’ strike. The tactic is well-established: token industrial action that creates the appearance of struggle while preserving the bureaucracy’s role as negotiating intermediary and absorber of militancy.[6]

Spain’s strike wave — the full breadth of which crossed healthcare, transport, rail, education and the public sector — demonstrated the objective depth of class anger. The Catalan education strike, supported by 90 percent of educators and culminating in 100,000 on the streets of Barcelona, is among the most significant educational mobilisations in recent Spanish history. That this emerged simultaneously with the PSOE-Sumar government’s announcement of a billion-euro military package for Ukraine underscores the central political contradiction: the same government which presides over real wage cuts and social austerity now channels resources to militarism while deploying union bureaucracies and its pseudo-left partners to contain the resistance.

V. Economic Warfare and Global Instability

The week’s economic developments were inseparable from the war drive. The Iran conflict’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly one-fifth of global oil passes — continued to generate financial turbulence across Asian markets. The imperialist war is simultaneously a political project and an act of structural economic destabilisation that strikes workers internationally through energy price inflation, supply chain disruption and currency volatility.

Cuba’s energy crisis — intensified by US restrictions on Russian fuel shipments — illustrates how imperialist economic coercion operates as a form of warfare targeting entire populations. The IMF, which had previously lauded Sri Lanka as an austerity “success story,” continued to provide ideological cover for the social devastation its programmes produce. These are not disconnected crises but expressions of the same capitalist order in its period of accelerating decay.

VI. The Revolutionary Tasks

The week’s events collectively underscore the axis of ICFI/SEP political analysis: war, dictatorship, austerity and bureaucratic betrayal are not separate phenomena but interlinked expressions of the capitalist system’s terminal crisis. Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum is not an aberration but the language of a ruling class prepared to obliterate the infrastructure of a nation of 90 million people to secure strategic and economic objectives. The pseudo-left formations — PSOE-Sumar, the FSP, the trade union bureaucracies — function consistently to contain and divert the social opposition that these conditions generate.

The correct working-class response — as the WSWS insists — is the building of rank-and-file committees in workplaces and communities, international coordination through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, political independence from all bourgeois parties, and the construction of sections of the Fourth International to provide the revolutionary socialist leadership that the objective situation demands.

[1] Trump’s 48-hour ultimatum: A criminal threat of mass murder — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/23/wzwz-m23.html

[2] Newroz 2026: Mobilize the working class against imperialist war and for workers’ power in the Middle East! — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/22/hynm-m22.html

[3] Spain’s Socialist Party-Sumar government unveils €1 billion military aid package for Ukraine — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/22/bkdx-m22.html

[4] Sri Lanka: FSP “global people’s power” critique — WSWS coverage, week ending 28 March 2026

[5] East London bus drivers opposing fatigue face strike breaking by Stagecoach — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/22/iprj-m22.html

[6] Australia: Teachers to strike across Tasmania against real wage cuts — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/23/ovkw-m23.html

Weekly Political Report — Week Ending 28 March 2026 Read More »

Weekly Political Report — Week Ending 21 March 2026

class struggles, Democratic Rights, economics, english, Far Right, Fascism, Imperialism, Militarism, News, politics, politics & economics, Pseudo-left, Trade Unions, War, War Crimes, Weekly Political Report, World Economy / March 25, 2026

This political report for the week of March 15-21, 2026, is compiled by thesocialist.lk based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).

I. Imperialism and War: The Escalating Offensive Against Iran and the Middle East

The dominant political fact of the week was the accelerating US-Israeli war against Iran and the wider Middle East, now crossing into qualitatively new and more dangerous territory. The Trump administration formally requested over $200 billion in supplemental war funding from Congress — a figure that exceeds the peak annual cost of the Iraq war and dwarfs the entire US expenditure on arming Ukraine over three years. Defence Secretary Hegseth confirmed the figure could “move” upward. This astronomical request, on top of the existing $839 billion defence budget, is not a contingency measure but a preparation: the administration is actively deliberating ground-invasion scenarios, including the seizure of Kharg Island — the hub for 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports — and the securing of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles.[1]

The USS Tripoli, carrying approximately 2,200 Marines of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, was confirmed steaming through the Strait of Malacca toward the Persian Gulf. Republican senators and congressmen openly called for the seizure of Kharg Island, with Senator Lindsey Graham posting: “He who controls Kharg Island, controls the destiny of this war.” US intelligence official Joe Kent resigned his post at the National Counterterrorism Center, declaring he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran” and stating that Iran had posed no imminent threat — a rare fissure within the ruling apparatus that nonetheless does not alter imperialism’s strategic drive.[2]

The war has already produced mass civilian casualties and cultural devastation in Iran. US-Israeli air strikes struck museums, historical sites and cultural infrastructure alongside residential areas, with Iran’s Red Crescent reporting at least 47,000 residential units destroyed. The bombing of Iran’s cultural heritage is not incidental but structural: a deliberate strategy to break social cohesion and erase national memory in order to facilitate imperial domination.

Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon opened a new and bloody front in this expanding war. Israel moved from intensive air and artillery strikes to a large-scale ground operation across southern Lebanon, with plans — confirmed by Axios — to seize the entire area south of the Litani River. Senior Israeli officials stated openly: “We are going to do what we did in Gaza.” In Lebanon, over 960 people had been killed and at least 2,400 wounded since Israel launched its assault on 2 March, including at least 110 children. The invasion is not a “border security” action but a planned occupation modelled on the genocidal campaign in Gaza, conducted under the full military and political umbrella of Washington.[3]

European powers moved to deepen their complicity. EU governments circulated conditions for participation in operations tied to the Iran war, including “freedom of navigation” missions in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran formally warned the UK that allowing US bombers to use RAF Fairford and other British bases constituted direct participation in aggression. Germany and Canada’s prime ministers attended a massive NATO Arctic exercise explicitly preparing for confrontation with Russia, demonstrating that the drive toward generalised war is not confined to the Middle East.

India’s alignment with the imperialist aggression was also exposed: New Delhi co-sponsored UN language condemning Iran’s defensive responses while refusing to condemn US-Israeli aggression, tightening military and economic ties that reflect India’s own geostrategic ambitions within the imperialist world order.

The WSWS placed the war in its broadest context: military spending on this scale will be paid for through the destruction of social programmes. Within 24 hours of the $200 billion request being confirmed, the Postmaster General warned Congress that the USPS would run out of cash within a year. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” had already imposed $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over a decade, $536 billion to Medicare, and $186 billion to food assistance — the largest cut to food aid in US history. War and social devastation are two arms of a single class offensive.[4]

II. The Rising Class Struggle and the Treachery of the Union Bureaucracy

The week was marked by a powerful upsurge of working-class resistance in the United States and internationally — and by the systematic efforts of trade-union bureaucracies to contain, isolate, and betray these struggles.

The JBS meatpacking strike at Greeley, Colorado entered its third day and remained the focal point of the WSWS’s class-struggle coverage. Approximately 3,800 workers — the overwhelming majority immigrants, speaking over 50 languages — struck the largest beef plant in the US in the largest meatpacking stoppage since the Hormel strike of 1985–86. Workers walked out over poverty wages (starting at $23 an hour), murderous line speeds, dangerous chemical exposures, inadequate PPE, abusive supervision, and housing abuses affecting Haitian workers lured to the plant through TikTok advertisements. As one worker stated: “We cannot continue to be worked like slaves.”[5]

The WSWS documented the central contradiction in the strike: the enormous militant energy of the rank and file, constrained and threatened by the UFCW bureaucracy. UFCW Local 7 had already signalled it would limit the strike to two weeks; the national UFCW had deliberately kept Greeley outside the 2025 national JBS contract to isolate these workers. The company moved immediately to divert cattle to its Cactus, Texas plant, with UFCW Local 540 in Cactus offering no solidarity. The IWA-RFC issued a perspective calling on workers to form independent rank-and-file strike committees, appeal to workers at every JBS facility, and build international solidarity against this Brazilian-owned multinational whose ultimate masters are BlackRock, Vanguard, and the global financial oligarchy.[6]

BP locked out approximately 900 workers at its Whiting, Indiana refinery after workers voted 98.3 percent against the company’s “last, best and final” offer. The proposed contract would have cut hourly wages by $8–$10, eliminated 100 union positions, introduced AI with no job protections, and closed the environmental department. BP moved to operate the refinery with temporary and contract workers — a dangerous provocation in a facility surrounded by residential neighbourhoods on the shore of the world’s largest freshwater body. The WSWS called for national and international solidarity and warned that the USW apparatus would seek to impose concessions.

The UAW bureaucracy’s role as “management’s enforcer” at Columbia University was exposed when Region 9A officials threatened the student workers’ local with “receivership” if it did not narrow its demands, particularly those tied to campus democratic rights. UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman condemned the apparatus’s conduct directly, calling it subordination of worker militancy to managerial and state imperatives.

The betrayal of the Kaiser Permanente strike was confirmed and deepened. The UNAC/UHCP bureaucracy had abruptly ended the 31,000-worker walkout in California and Hawaii without a contract, without a tentative agreement, and without a membership vote. A partial “settlement” cut workers’ wage demands from nearly 30 percent to 21.5 percent over four years — barely keeping pace with inflation — and secured no retroactive pay. Workers at Kaiser subsequently staged a 25,000-strong one-day sympathy strike in defence of mental healthcare. The WSWS called for a decisive “No” vote on the sellout and the formation of rank-and-file committees at every Kaiser facility.[7]

The UAW–University of California tentative agreement was similarly denounced: weak raises, preserved no-strike clauses, and a deal rushed through without adequate membership review for 48,000 UC academic workers. The WSWS called for a “No” vote and independent rank-and-file committees.

In Los Angeles, UTLA and SEIU announced a possible April 14 LAUSD strike, with thousands of educators rallying against layoffs, understaffing, and the war on Iran. The WSWS drew the sharpest lessons from the San Francisco teachers’ betrayal, where the union bureaucracy, acting hand in glove with the Democratic Party, shut down a powerful four-day strike on the district’s terms — and within days, preliminary layoff notices were issued.[8]

Other labour flashpoints included: 6,000 DHL Express Teamsters voting overwhelmingly to authorise strike action; the RMT bureaucracy calling off planned driver strikes on the London Underground without a settlement; American Axle workers speaking out against UAW betrayals ahead of contract talks; a Ford worker, Gregory Knopf, killed at the Sharonville Transmission Plant when a press machine activated during maintenance; and Australian educators at the University of Newcastle striking over real pay cuts, with a pivotal Victorian educator strike set for 24 March.

The overall pattern confirms the WSWS analysis: the trade-union bureaucracies function not as instruments of workers’ struggle but as institutional stabilisers of capitalist rule, working systematically to isolate strikes, suppress rank-and-file initiative, and subordinate workers to management and the state.

III. Austerity, Social Catastrophe and the Crisis of Capitalism

The war has not interrupted but intensified the social catastrophe capitalism imposes on the working class. The US Federal Reserve, gripped by uncertainty as the war drives oil prices upward and disrupts supply chains, admitted that its forecasts were unreliable. Fed officials were simultaneously discussing rate cuts and potential hikes — a paralysis that reveals capitalism’s inability to reconcile competing imperatives. The social costs will, as always, be borne by workers through inflation, unemployment, and austerity.[9]

Los Angeles registered six homeless deaths per day — a direct structural product of the commodification of housing and healthcare. Michigan was struck by the worst tornadoes since 1980, killing four, exposing how decades of austerity have hollowed out public infrastructure and emergency preparedness. A meningitis outbreak in the UK, linked to chronic underfunding of public health services, claimed multiple fatalities. In Australia, the central bank raised interest rates again amid recession warnings, punishing workers for inflation. Portugal’s celebrated 2025 economic “miracle” was exposed as a bourgeois construction: corporate profits rose while wages stagnated and public services deteriorated.

These are not isolated incidents but expressions of a single, systemic reality: capitalism generates wealth for the few by imposing social catastrophe on the many.

IV. Authoritarian Consolidation and Democratic Rights

The assault on democratic rights accelerated in multiple forms during the week. In North Texas, activists were convicted under sweeping “material support for terrorism” statutes for political solidarity activities — a landmark case criminalising dissent. Amazon workers were locked out of a warehouse during a tornado warning, footage showing managers denying shelter; the company prioritised property over lives.

In Australia, Queensland police arrested two protesters for displaying the slogan “from the river to the sea” under new LNP “hate speech” legislation. In Germany, cultural censorship intensified: municipal authorities moved to exclude left-wing bookshops from fairs, and the culture minister cancelled presentation of the Booksellers’ Prize at the Leipzig Book Fair under political pressure.

Italy’s Meloni government advanced judicial “reforms” — the Nordio Reform — to separate the careers of judges and prosecutors and weaken checks on executive power. The WSWS identified this not as a “technical” adjustment but as a political preparation for state suppression of mass opposition to war and austerity. Trump’s CDL Final Rule stripped approximately 200,000 immigrant truck drivers of commercial licences — a direct attack on immigrant labour designed to discipline and destabilise worker organisation.

ICE expanded its terror: hundreds of immigrants were illegally detained in Michigan; a Haitian asylum seeker died in Pittsburgh following ICE detention; ICE raids in Vermont and Kansas continued with expanded detention infrastructure.

These measures are not aberrations but the logical expression of a capitalist ruling class preparing to crush the mass opposition it knows is coming.

V. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism and the Defence of Trotskyism

The WSWS devoted significant coverage to exposing the political role of pseudo-left and reformist formations in disorienting the working class at a moment of acute historical crisis.

Kshama Sawant was profiled and critiqued: bold socialist rhetoric combined with repeated accommodation to municipal politics and reformist outcomes that leave capitalist power structures intact. The Australian Greens’ posturing against the Iran war was exposed as performing contained dissent within parliamentary channels, providing no genuine opposition to imperialist aggression. Canada’s NDP and affiliated unions similarly offered rhetorical opposition while remaining subordinated to the framework of the capitalist state. Spanish trade unions watered down anti-war positions to avoid antagonising the PSOE government.

The Morenoite rebrand as the Permanent Revolution Current was dissected as a revisionist manoeuvre: new branding masking continuity with nationalist and opportunist politics that dilute genuine Trotskyism and derail working-class revolutionary leadership.

The London meeting of the SEP (UK)— marking the 40th anniversary of the struggle that led to the expulsion of the Workers Revolutionary Party from the ICFI — was a centrepiece of the week’s political coverage. Addressed by David North, Chris Marsden, and Peter Schwarz, the meeting reaffirmed that the 1985–86 split was a decisive defence of Trotskyism against the petty-bourgeois, nationalist, and opportunist degeneration embodied by the Healy-Slaughter-Banda leadership. The speakers drew the direct connection between the historical struggle against revisionism and the present tasks: as the ICFI argued then and reiterated in London, the survival of revolutionary leadership requires uncompromising defence of the theory of Permanent Revolution, proletarian internationalism, and programmatic clarity. David North warned that the imperialist drive toward war — in the Middle East and beyond — aims to abolish the political gains of the 20th century and can only be answered by the international, politically independent working class.[10]

The week’s events confirm the ICFI’s perspective: the objective crisis of capitalism is driving the working class toward mass resistance. The decisive question is the construction of revolutionary leadership — the building of rank-and-file committees independent of the union apparatus, their international coordination, and the development of mass socialist parties capable of transforming class struggle into a conscious political offensive for workers’ power.

[1] Trump’s $200 billion Iran spending request reveals scale of US war plans — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/20/iuck-m20.html

[2] US ground invasion looms as Iran war escalates — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/21/xaes-m21.html

[3] Israel begins its long-planned ground invasion of Lebanon — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/17/yvdv-m17.html

[4] As Trump demands $200 billion for Iran, USPS announces it will run out of money next year — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/20/myla-m20.html

[5] “We cannot continue to be worked like slaves”: Colorado meatpacking workers strike at JBS plant — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/17/idqv-m17.html

[6] Organize the working class to support the JBS meatpacking strike! — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/18/pers-m18.html

[7] Kaiser strike betrayed: UNAC/UHCP ends 31,000-worker walkout, advances sellout agreement — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/19/coob-m19.html

[8] Lessons from the San Francisco strike: How the unions, Democratic Party and pseudo-left betrayed the teachers — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/21/hbhr-m21.html

[9] Trump’s $200 billion Iran funding request points to massive scale of war plans — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/19/qzqr-m19.html

[10] London meeting marks 40 years since the expulsion of the Workers Revolutionary Party — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/15/rogt-m15.html

Weekly Political Report — Week Ending 21 March 2026 Read More »

Weekly Political Report — Week Ending 14 March 2026

class struggles, Democratic Rights, economics, english, Fascism, Imperialism, Living Conditions, Militarism, News, politics, politics & economics, Trade Unions, War, War Crimes, Weekly Political Report, World Economy, World War / March 16, 2026

This political report for the week of March 8-14, 2026, is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS).

I. Imperialism and War: The US-Israeli Assault on Iran Enters Its Third Week

The dominant political fact of the week was the accelerating and catastrophic escalation of the illegal US-Israeli war against Iran, now in its second and third week. The situation compels the sharpest analysis: this is not a limited military operation but the most dangerous eruption of imperialist aggression since the Second World War.

Image Not Found — The aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the fast combat support ship USNS Supply transit the Strait of Hormuz, Dec. 14, 2023. [Photo: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Keith Nowak]

The week opened with Pentagon statements and press reports confirming that the Trump administration is actively preparing a ground invasion of Iran. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced on 13 March that the Navy would begin escorting commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway just 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, within direct range of Iranian anti-ship missiles — placing American forces on the threshold of open naval combat.[1] Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, in language stripped of all diplomatic pretence, declared the Strait “will not be allowed to remain contested.” By 14 March, the WSWS confirmed preparations for what it characterised as a potential Gallipoli-scale ground campaign that would engulf the entire region and carry a real risk of nuclear escalation.[2]

The human toll already documented is staggering. A Pentagon investigation, corroborated by open-source analysis and reported by the WSWS on 12 March, confirmed that a US Tomahawk missile struck the Shajarah Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab on 28 February during the opening strike package, killing at least 150–175 schoolgirls aged 7 to 12.[3] Trump responded not with accountability but with a brazen lie, telling reporters the school was destroyed by Iran. By 11 March, the total death toll had surpassed 1,255, with over 12,000 wounded and nearly 20,000 civilian structures damaged, including 77 healthcare centres and 69 schools. Iran remains under near-total internet blackout. Israel simultaneously launched a renewed ground incursion into Lebanon, ordered the evacuation of over 100 villages and the entire Dahiyeh district of Beirut, and has killed more than 600 people and displaced 800,000. Gaza’s total siege was intensified on 1 March with the closure of all border crossings.[4]

Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz within days of the war’s outbreak on 28 February. Shipping traffic has plummeted more than 90 percent. Zero LNG tankers passed through in the week under review. The four largest container shipping lines in the world — Maersk, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM — have suspended all operations. Oil surged above $120 a barrel, and the International Energy Agency described it as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.[5] Global financial markets experienced wild swings throughout the week, with oil shocks cascading into bond markets and risk-asset volatility threatening systemic instability.

European imperialism joined the coalition. On 12 March, the WSWS documented how France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy and Greece moved to deploy warships toward the Middle East, with Macron announcing the Charles de Gaulle carrier would ultimately participate in “restoring freedom of navigation” through the Strait — in all but name, a declaration of war against Iran by the European powers.[6] On 12 March, German Foreign Minister Wadephul visited Israel, publicly endorsing US-Israeli war aims. The UN Security Council, on 13 March, passed Resolution 2817 condemning Iran’s retaliatory strikes while entirely failing to condemn the US-Israeli bombardment; Russia and China abstained, allowing the resolution to pass, exposing the imperialist character of all these multilateral institutions.

The WSWS ICFI emergency webinar on 10 March convened thousands internationally to outline a socialist anti-war strategy. The SEP and IYSSE held an urgent public meeting in Colombo on 17 March to explain the geo-strategic roots of the assault and to build the foundations of an independent international working-class anti-war movement.[7] Workers and students across Sri Lanka were interviewed by SEP and IYSSE campaigners, showing deep opposition to the war and Sri Lanka’s own exposure as a conduit for US imperialism, documented by a leaked US State Department cable revealing that Colombo acted at US and Israeli insistence to detain Iranian sailors and restrict their return.[8]

II. Working-Class Opposition to the War and Bureaucratic Containment

The breadth of working-class opposition to the war was documented in a series of significant WSWS reports. London postal workers at Mount Pleasant Mail Centre and bus drivers at West London garages spoke candidly with SEP campaigners. Workers made the direct connection between imperialist war and capitalist exploitation: “We’re fighting this war for the banks,” said one bus driver; “They treat Iran as a petrol pump,” said another.[9] Workers identified the need for a general strike but raised the central obstacle: union bureaucracies and the threat of scabbing.

Thousands marched in central London on 8 March, but the WSWS exposed how the Palestine Coalition — Stop the War, the PSC, CND — directed this mass anti-war energy into futile appeals to Prime Minister Keir Starmer and parliamentary pressure, reproducing the same political dead end that allowed the Gaza genocide to proceed and now facilitates Britain’s participation in the Iran assault.[10] Workers’ testimony at the demonstration expressed far sharper sentiments — “it’s always money and power” — than the platform politics of reformist organisers.

The same crisis of leadership was exposed in the response of British trade union bureaucracies. Eighteen union general secretaries issued a joint statement condemning the war but called only for diplomacy and appeals to government, making no call for workplace action, no strike, no industrial disruption. The TUC similarly confined itself to platitudes. The WSWS identified this as a classical function of the union apparatus: containing and defusing opposition while channelling mass sentiment back toward the very institutions that enable war.

The UK Labour government of Keir Starmer moved simultaneously to ban the Al-Quds Day march in London — an authoritarian measure against mass anti-war protest — and to slash asylum rights and expand anti-migrant enforcement, fusing war policy with internal repression and xenophobia to discipline the working class.

The Jacobin magazine was criticised by the WSWS for publishing commentary that soft-pedalled opposition to the war and subordinated anti-war rhetoric to accommodation with US imperialist strategy — a clear example of the pseudo-left’s function in disarming the working class politically. Similarly, New Zealand pseudo-left forces organised a meeting titled “No War With Iran” that provided platforms to Labour, the Greens and union officials — figures who have actively supported NZ’s integration into US military alliances.[11]

In the United States, Detroit autoworkers interviewed by the WSWS gave expression to a deepening politicisation: workers compared Trump and Hegseth to Nazis and linked rising fuel prices and job insecurity directly to imperialist war. “The working class has to stop the war,” one worker stated, adding that if the Italians could hold a general strike, Americans could too.[12] The bipartisan character of imperialism was starkly confirmed: 21 House Democrats provided the decisive margin to pass a $1.2 trillion spending bill funding the military through September 2026, and leading Senate Democrats expressed the private conviction that Iran “ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily.” The US media simultaneously normalised strikes, massacres and war crimes.

III. Austerity, Corporate Offensive and Class Struggle

The week provided stark evidence that the capitalist offensive against the working class intensifies in direct proportion to the escalation of war.

Volkswagen Group CEO Oliver Blume announced a further intensification of the company’s jobs massacre: 50,000 positions to be eliminated in Germany alone, broken down as 35,000 at the core VW brand, 7,500 at Audi, 1,900 at Porsche and 1,600 at the software subsidiary Cariad. The IG Metall works council chair Daniela Cavallo immediately signalled her support, even floating armaments production as a future for threatened plants.[13] The WSWS draws the necessary conclusion: this is a class offensive in which the trade union apparatus functions not as a defender of workers but as a co-manager of capitalist restructuring, with IG Metall representatives personally enriched for their services as supervisory board members.

In the US healthcare sector, the six-month strike by 750 nurses and case workers at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc, Michigan, continued under intense management strikebreaking and pressure from the Teamsters bureaucracy to settle on employer terms. Simultaneously, approximately 10,000 Corewell Health nurses across Michigan voted on strike authorisation over essentially identical issues of unsafe staffing, wages and patient safety — a potential combined struggle of nearly 11,000 healthcare workers that the Teamsters apparatus has deliberately prevented from forming.[14]

BP Whiting refinery workers overwhelmingly rejected a six-year concessionary contract that would have cut wages by $8–10 per hour, eliminated roughly 100 jobs, expanded contractor use and permitted AI implementation without protections. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees called for national coordination to defeat the employer’s attempt to use Whiting as a pattern for the industry.[15] Colorado meatpacking workers announced a coordinated strike — the largest in the sector in 40 years — over pay, safety and contracts, demonstrating significant industrial leverage in critical supply chains.

At the University of California system, 40,000 academic workers had voted 93.3 percent for strike authorisation but were kept on the job by UAW Local 4811 officials even after contracts expired on 1 March. Around 600 picketers at Berkeley and 300 at UCLA held “last chance” pickets to no avail — the UAW bureaucracy prioritised institutional accommodation over enforcing the democratic mandate of its members. In San Diego, deep education budget shortfalls produced hundreds of classified layoffs; union leaders, having previously authorised strikes, called them off and enabled the cuts to proceed. The UK Labour government’s SEND “reform” — gutting support for children with special educational needs — was exposed as a classical austerity attack dressed in the language of “efficiency.”

Tesla’s Grünheide plant in Berlin saw IG Metall-backed works council candidates defeated in elections, signalling real erosion of bureaucratic control and a potential opening for genuine rank-and-file organisation.

IV. Authoritarian Consolidation and Democratic Rights

The authoritarian dimensions of the ruling class’s response to social crisis deepened across multiple fronts during the week.

The Trump administration nominated far-right Senator Markwayne Mullin to lead the Department of Homeland Security, a move that won tacit bipartisan accommodation including from sections of the Teamsters leadership — a demonstration of how the union apparatus colludes in the expansion of the repressive state. Trump also moved to push federal voter suppression and anti-transgender legislation, using “culture war” pretexts to divide and weaken the working class.

ICE arrested dozens of Amazon Flex couriers — predominantly immigrant gig workers — in southeast Michigan, using enforcement actions to discipline a precarious and fragmented workforce. Letters from detained children at a Texas immigration facility described nine months of abuse and conditions amounting to torture. Canada’s Liberal government maintained the Safe Third Country Agreement with the US, forcing asylum seekers back into a country conducting mass deportations.

The Academy Awards, the BAFTA and Brit Award ceremonies all became sites of cultural censorship: broadcasters cut or bleeped artists’ anti-genocide statements, reflecting coordinated ruling-class pressure to enforce ideological conformity on imperialist war. The Toronto Film Critics Association faced internal collapse over the same censorship of pro-Palestinian speech. In Kazakhstan, authorities demolished a building historically associated with Leon Trotsky — an act of state erasure of revolutionary memory reflecting the reactionary character of post-Soviet nationalist regimes.

Istanbul’s elected Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu faced politically motivated trials in Turkey — instruments of the bourgeois state used to suppress political opposition while maintaining the fiction of democratic legitimacy.

V. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism and Pseudo-Leftism

The week provided abundant evidence of the political bankruptcy of all forms of reformism and pseudo-left politics in the face of imperialist war and capitalist crisis.

In Germany, the SPD suffered a major collapse in the Baden-Württemberg state elections — the logical outcome of years of administering austerity and rearmament while posturing as a workers’ party. This is not an isolated setback but a symptom of the organic crisis of social democracy across the capitalist world. The parallel trajectory of the UK Labour Party — waging imperialist war, banning protests, cutting migrant rights and attacking SEND provision — confirms that these parties are instruments of capitalist rule, not vehicles for reform.

Argentina’s President Milei delivered a reactionary congressional address, with pseudo-left forces offering complicity or silence — exposing once again how middle-class “left” formations capitulate before reaction when it is in power. In New Zealand, the Labour Party and Greens issued perfunctory criticisms of the Iran war while continuing every policy that integrates New Zealand into US strategic structures. Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” summit militarised Latin America under US leadership, with comprador regimes across the hemisphere lining up behind Washington.

The six-year anniversary of COVID-19 was marked by the WSWS with a sober reckoning: the pandemic’s enormous ongoing death toll and the media’s near-total silence reflect the ruling class’s deliberate abandonment of public health as a social responsibility — the same logic now governing the conduct of a war that has killed over a thousand civilians and destroyed hospitals, schools and healthcare infrastructure in Iran.

Summing-up

The week ending 14 March 2026 crystallises the historical crisis of the capitalist system with extraordinary clarity. The US-Israeli war on Iran is not an aberration but the concentrated expression of imperialist rivalry, capitalist decline and the drive of the ruling class toward authoritarian rule at home and military barbarism abroad. The massive scale of opposition — in London and Frankfurt, among US autoworkers and nurses, among students in Australia and Sri Lanka — demonstrates the objective social force that exists to stop the war. What is missing is not mass sentiment but revolutionary political leadership. The building of rank-and-file committees in workplaces, independent of union bureaucracies, and the construction of sections of the ICFI as the political leadership of the international working class is not an abstract prescription — it is the urgent requirement of this historical moment.

[1] Treasury Secretary Bessent announces Strait of Hormuz naval escorts: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/13/vpgn-m13.html

[2] Trump is planning a ground invasion of Iran: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/14/zchg-m14.html

[3] Trump threatens ground troops, assassinations in escalating Iran war: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/09/dhei-m09.html

[4] US media and Democratic Party enable Trump’s war of extermination against Iran: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/11/dkif-m11.html

[5] Iran death toll surges past 1,200 as Israel bombs two more schools: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/06/weph-m06.html

[6] European imperialism joins the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/12/lgjr-m12.html

[7] SEP/IYSSE Colombo public meeting announcement: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/09/xwus-m09.html

[8] US memo exposes Sri Lankan “humanitarian” posturing over Iranian sailors: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/11/ocid-m11.html

[9] “We are fighting this war for the banks”: London post and transport workers: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/08/tpoz-m08.html

[10] London demonstration against Iran war deflected into appeals to Starmer: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/08/ntnd-m08.html

[11] NZ pseudo-left meeting promotes Labour, Greens and unions: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/14/tuye-m14.html

[12] “The working class has to stop the war”: US workers denounce war with Iran: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/10/fbnv-m10.html

[13] VW Group increases job cuts to 50,000: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/13/yibx-m13.html

[14] Henry Ford Genesys walkout enters 6th month, Corewell nurses vote on strike: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/11/qjvr-m11.html

[15] BP Whiting workers reject concessions contract: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/12/xxxx-m12.html

Weekly Political Report — Week Ending 14 March 2026 Read More »

Weekly Political Report — Week Ending 7 March 2026

class struggles, Democratic Rights, economics, english, Fascism, Imperialism, Militarism, News, Oligarchy, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, Pseudo-left, War, War Crimes, Weekly Political Report, World Economy, World War / March 11, 2026

This political report for the week of March 1-7, 2026, is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org).

I. Imperialism and War: The US-Israeli War of Extermination Against Iran

The defining political reality of the week ending 7 March 2026 is the continuation and intensification of the criminal US-Israeli war of annihilation against Iran, which entered its second week with a mounting toll of devastation and an explicit escalation of imperialist objectives.

On 7 March, President Donald Trump declared publicly that there would be “no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”—the most extreme formulation yet of American war aims, signalling the intention to wage permanent war until Iranian society is physically destroyed.[1] Trump spelled out the content of this demand in genocidal terms: surrender means either that Iran announces it, “or when they can’t fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.” The White House simultaneously raised the prospect of direct deployment of US ground troops inside Iran. These are not the statements of a government seeking a diplomatic settlement. They are the declarations of an imperialist power pursuing regime change and the neo-colonial subjugation of a nation of 90 million people.

By week’s end, more than 1,200 Iranians had been killed, including 200 children, and over 12,000 wounded. Nearly 30 clinical facilities had been damaged and 10 forced to close. Israeli strikes had reopened a major offensive in Lebanon, with blanket evacuation orders issued for the Dahiyeh district of Beirut and Israeli ground forces crossing into southern Lebanon. The WSWS/SEP statement “Stop the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran!” framed the offensive as an expression of capitalist imperialist rivalry—chiefly the drive by US imperialism to reassert global hegemony against its rivals, above all China, and to seize control of the world’s principal oil-exporting region.[2] The assault was launched while US-Iranian negotiators were still meeting in Geneva—a deliberate deception exposing the pretence of diplomacy as a cover for aggression.

The most egregious single crime of the week was the torpedoing of the unarmed Iranian naval frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean on 4 March—a war crime committed without warning in international waters, thousands of miles from any combat theatre.[3] The vessel had participated in India’s International Fleet Review 2026 and the multinational MILAN 2026 exercises at Visakhapatnam, invited alongside 73 other nations including the United States. The exercise rules prohibited munitions. The IRIS Dena was unarmed and homeward bound when a US submarine attacked it without warning, sending more than 140 sailors to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The crime was then celebrated at a Pentagon press briefing by the Secretary of War himself. Confirmation that Australian naval personnel were aboard the submarine directly implicated the Albanese Labor government in the commission of a war crime.[4]

The complicity of imperialist governments was total. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared support for the assault, stating that Israel was doing “the dirty work… for all of us.” The G7 issued a statement casting Iran as the aggressor and greenlighting further escalation. France’s Emmanuel Macron deployed the carrier Charles de Gaulle and other assets to the eastern Mediterranean without a pretence of parliamentary debate. Britain’s Keir Starmer was exposed by leaked National Security Council documents as having been informed of the initial strikes more than two weeks in advance and as having worked with Washington to craft legal cover for British participation. Spain initially postured with anti-war rhetoric under Prime Minister Sánchez, then rapidly dispatched the frigate Cristóbal Colón to the eastern Mediterranean after Trump threatened to cut off US-Spanish trade—a graphic illustration of how bourgeois anti-war posturing evaporates the moment imperialist pressure is applied. Japan, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia similarly endorsed US and Israeli war aims. Washington announced that the US Navy would begin escorting commercial tankers through the Strait of Hormuz—a dramatic escalation placing American warships directly off the Iranian coast—while the US announced further medium-range missile deployments to the Philippines as part of the broader strategic encirclement of China.

The WSWS warned that oil price surges and shipping disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz would deepen the global economic crisis, imposing severe costs through inflation, job losses, and intensified austerity. Asian markets took major losses, with semiconductor and export sectors particularly hard hit.

II. Authoritarian Consolidation and State Repression

The war abroad proceeded in lockstep with an intensification of repression at home and across the capitalist world.

In the United States, a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing exposed the bipartisan character of anti-immigrant repression: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem defended ICE killings and refused to apologise, while Democratic senators simultaneously resisted calls for the abolition of ICE and CBP. The Trump administration seized immigrant student Ellie Aghayeva from Columbia University, illustrating the militarisation of campuses. A Nashville journalist was detained by ICE while documenting immigration raids—a direct assault on press freedom and the suppression of coverage of state violence. Republicans exploited a shooting in Austin to inflame anti-Muslim hysteria and push for expanded DHS funding. ICE detention conditions continued to claim lives, with the death of immigrant detainee Nenko Gantchev in a Michigan facility exposing the Democratic Party’s “oversight” as a façade sustaining rather than restraining a murderous apparatus. Florida carried out the execution of Billy Leon Kearse, part of a resumed pattern of state executions targeting the poor and racialised. Charges against Chinese researchers at the University of Michigan were dismissed, but the politicised “China spy” witch hunt on campuses intensified—serving as a tool of geopolitical scaremongering.

In Germany, the Cologne Administrative Court handed a legal victory to the far-right Alternative for Germany, demonstrating that bourgeois legalism shields rather than curtails fascist organisation. Germany simultaneously announced plans for the largest military buildup on the European continent since World War II and advanced sweeping new restrictions on migrants and refugees. France’s state moved to designate Mélenchon’s LFI as “extreme left”—deploying legal categories to justify the repression of political opposition. Germany’s government also attempted to police political expression at the Berlinale film festival, censoring critical voices while promoting its own geopolitical line.

In Kenya, President Ruto’s government arrested a popular TikToker for satirical content and detained left activists including Communist Party leader Booker Omole. A Birmingham Labour council secured a High Court injunction to prevent solidarity with striking bin workers—proof that Labour administrations function as instruments of capitalist class power regardless of their electoral base.

III. Austerity, the Global Economy, and Class Attacks

The Iran war triggered immediate and severe global economic shocks whose costs landed on the working class. Oil prices surged sharply. Asian markets fell heavily, with semiconductor sectors and export industries facing supply chain disruptions. These consequences prefigure a deepening global economic crisis to be paid for through inflation, rising fuel costs, and intensified austerity.

In Philadelphia, a $2.8 billion “Master Plan” proposed shuttering 18 schools—the commodification of public education in service of capital. In Australia, the South Australian election exposed billions being funnelled into AUKUS war spending while public education and housing budgets collapsed. The housing crisis deepened as government pledges proved hollow and market-led demolitions displaced working-class communities.

Tech industry executives boasted about AI-driven mass layoffs, celebrating workforce reductions as shareholder value creation—automation deployed to eliminate jobs and intensify exploitation. The United Steelworkers’ refinery contract was exposed as locking in uninterrupted fuel flows benefiting oil company profits and, indirectly, the war itself. Canada Post’s proposed settlement, endorsed by union leadership, sacrificed job security to protect corporate interests. Severe drought in the US Southwest deepened conflicts over water rights, with environmental crisis produced by the capitalist profit drive being weaponised to discipline labour.

The WSWS placed these developments in the framework of capitalist crisis: war and austerity as twin fronts of the same ruling-class offensive, financed by cuts to Medicaid, Social Security, and every social programme workers depend on for survival.

IV. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal

The week documented significant episodes of working-class resistance alongside the systematic effort of union bureaucracies to contain and strangle that resistance.

In Lorain County, Ohio, 140 Job and Family Services workers entered their third week of strike action over wages, staffing, and healthcare.[5] Workers described being paid poverty wages so low that some qualified for the very social benefits they administered to clients. Starting pay was as low as $15 an hour for caseworkers handling Medicaid, SNAP, and childcare assistance. The UAW bureaucracy was exposed as isolating the strike and refusing to call for unified action with JFS workers across Ohio. Contract faculty at New York University announced an official strike date over wages, job security, and academic precarity. Entertainment industry workers continued their walkout against studios over pay, AI-driven job displacement, and conditions.

In Germany, the train drivers’ union leadership agreed to a contract imposing real wage cuts—a textbook act of bureaucratic betrayal, with the union apparatus functioning as a stabilising mechanism for capital against its own members. IG Metall leadership at Bosch moved to suppress internal opposition from workers challenging concessions. The Hanover trial of Deutsche Bahn over the death of rail apprentice Simon Hedemann put corporate cost-cutting on record as directly responsible for a young worker’s life.

Victorian early childhood educators in Australia struck for the second time in a campaign for pay parity and adequate staffing. Turkish miners broke through gendarmerie barricades and seized control of a mine in a militant wildcat action—demonstrating the latent social power of the working class when it acts independently of bureaucratic constraint. Workers’ struggle roundups across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific documented recurring disputes over wages, conditions, and privatisation at every point on the globe.

The US trade union bureaucracy’s silence over the Iran war was the subject of specific WSWS analysis. The AFL-CIO and the great majority of union federations issued no statements against the assault, leaving the working-class majority politically unorganised at the very moment when its industrial power—in ports, logistics, transport, and production—could be decisive in disrupting the war machine. In Quebec, trade union federations renewed their alliance with the Parti Québécois even as the PQ embraced anti-immigrant, pro-business, and far-right positions. The WSWS condemned this as a fundamental betrayal of class independence—channelling working-class anger into bourgeois nationalism that defends capitalist interests and legitimises anti-immigrant scapegoating. Ontario students protested cuts to the Ontario Student Assistance Program, linking educational austerity to the broader class offensive.

V. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism and the Pseudo-Left

The week provided abundant and unambiguous evidence of the political bankruptcy of every reformist and pseudo-left formation.

Germany’s Left Party chairman Jan van Aken celebrated the assassination of Iranian leaders—“May Khamenei rot in hell”—while nominally condemning the war as criminal and illegal. The WSWS exposed this as the characteristic method of pseudo-left politics: verbal criticism combined with legitimisation of imperialism’s aims and outcomes. Spain’s PSOE-Sumar government demonstrated in miniature how the entire social-democratic tradition operates: Sánchez’s “No to war” posture collapsed the moment Washington applied economic pressure, exposing it as a political calculation to contain domestic opposition rather than a genuine break with NATO.

Venezuela’s Chavista leadership reached a diplomatic normalisation with the United States on terms handing Wall Street access to Venezuelan oil, gold, and critical minerals—reproducing dependency under the banner of “stability.” Australia’s Albanese Labor government endorsed the assault within three hours of Trump’s announcement, was directly implicated in the sinking of the IRIS Dena through AUKUS personnel, and used the ASEAN Special Summit in Melbourne to deepen Australia’s integration into US war planning against China. Congress voted down resolutions to restrict war powers, confirming that the US legislative apparatus—across both parties—has become an instrument of imperialist policy. Legalistic remedies within the framework of the bourgeois state cannot stop imperialist war. Baden-Württemberg’s state election campaign offered workers nothing but competing concessions to big business, confirming that electoral competition between bourgeois parties produces only distributional jockeying for capital’s benefit.

VI. The Revolutionary Tasks of the Working Class

The week ending 7 March 2026 demonstrates with stark clarity the inseparability of imperialist war, domestic austerity, state repression, and the betrayal of the working class by union bureaucracies and pseudo-left formations. Every capitalist government—“Labour,” “Socialist,” “social-democratic,” or conservative—is serving the same ruling-class interests: expanding militarism, imposing austerity, repressing dissent.

American workers captured the class consciousness at the heart of the anti-war sentiment: “We have more in common with the Iranian people than we do with billionaires.” Detroit autoworkers declared, “We shouldn’t be bombing people, period.” This sentiment must be developed into a politically conscious, internationally organised movement that breaks decisively from the trade union bureaucracies, Labour and social-democratic parties, and pseudo-left formations that have lined up behind imperialist war.

The WSWS and the ICFI call on workers and youth to build rank-and-file committees independent of the union apparatus, forge international coordination and join the Socialist Equality Parties to fight for the socialist and revolutionary strategy alone capable of stopping the war and overthrowing the capitalist system that produces it.

Footnotes

[1] “Trump demands unconditional surrender from Iran as war enters second week,” WSWS, 7 March 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/07/uxtr-m07.html

[2] “Stop the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran!” WSWS / SEP National Committee, 2 March 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/02/ulqw-m02.html

[3] “Mass murder in the Indian Ocean: The torpedoing of the IRIS Dena,” WSWS, 6 March 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/06/poyw-m06.html

[4] “Australian naval personnel involved in US sinking of Iranian ship: Oppose the pro-imperialist Labor government and war against Iran!” WSWS / Socialist Equality Party (Australia), 7 March 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/07/bckg-m07.html

[5] “Lorain County, Ohio family service workers strike enters third week: ‘We are fighting everyone’,” WSWS, 7 March 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/07/mxws-m07.html

Weekly Political Report — Week Ending 7 March 2026 Read More »

The Gen-Z Uprisings and the Crisis of Leadership: Permanent Revolution against ‘Leaderless’ movements and ‘Left Populism’ – Part 4

class struggles, Democratic Rights, english, history, lead article, Marxist Theory, Perspective, politics, politics & economics, Pseudo-left, Trade Unions / March 7, 2026

By Sanjaya Jayasekera.

We publish here Part 4 of a series examining the global wave of Gen Z protests, the deepening crisis of revolutionary leadership, and the necessity of fighting for the program of socialist internationalism on the basis of Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution. Part 1 was published on November 6, 2025 here. Part 2 was published on November 14, 2025 here. Part 3 was published on February 27, 2026 here.

The Lineage of Gen-Z Revolts: Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and the Yellow Vests — Politics, Tactics, Programme and the Lessons for the Working Class (continued)

Tactics: Direct Action, Digital Organization, and the Irreplaceable Role of Revolutionary Leadership

The three waves exhibit a progression in tactical forms that reflects the changing technological environment of mass struggle without altering its fundamental political requirements.

Occupy pioneered the sustained occupation of public space as a form of political presence, consciously modeling itself on the imagery of Tahrir Square. The “people’s microphone,” horizontal decision-making, and assembly democracy expressed a genuine aspiration to overcome the alienation of bourgeois representative politics. But symbolic occupation could not threaten capitalist production or state power. It could only be tolerated until inconvenient, at which point it was cleared by coordinated federal instruction.

The Yellow Vests developed a more economically disruptive tactical repertoire: the blockade of circulation nodes, the weekly cadence of national mobilizations, the combination of symbolic and material disruption. France’s tradition of militant industrial action created real—if unrealized—possibilities for converting street protest into generalized strike action. The tactical innovation was real; the political ceiling remained identical. Without independent rank-and-file workplace and neighbourhood committees capable of coordinating strikes across sectors and regions, the disruptive energy could not be converted into sustained, organized industrial action that would have posed a genuine challenge to state power. Such committees, independent of the union bureaucracy, are the organizational precondition for elevating local struggles into a revolutionary movement.[17]

The Gen-Z movements added the rapid mobilizing capacity of social media platforms, enabling the coordination of mass actions across vast geographic areas at speeds that made traditional institutional responses appear slow-footed. This digital dimension introduced new capacities and new vulnerabilities. The same platforms that enabled rapid mobilization also enabled state surveillance, intelligence infiltration, and the algorithmic manipulation of political content. More fundamentally, the substitution of social media coordination for political organization—viral hashtags for programmatic clarity, trending topics for theoretical development—produced movements whose apparent technological strength masked a structural weakness: the inability to translate street power into sustained industrial action through which the working class exercises its decisive social leverage.

The “leaderless” framework promoted by theorists like Zeynep Tufekci and Paolo Gerbaudo performs an ideological function related to the reactionary theory of Chantal Mouffe’s left populism. By celebrating the organizational forms of networked protest—horizontal assemblies, social media coordination, the absence of formal leadership—these theorists elevate into a political virtue what is objectively a political deficit. Lenin’s analysis in What Is to Be Done? (1902) retains its full force against the spontaneism celebrated by theorists of “leaderless” movements: spontaneous working-class anger, however militant, does not generate socialist consciousness; it is the raw material that revolutionary political leadership must organize and direct.[18] The “leaderless” ideology does not liberate movements from leadership; it conceals the leadership that actually operates—whether of NGO-funded coordinators, pseudo-left academics channeling energy into reformist avenues, or the bourgeois politicians who ultimately harvest the political fruit of mass insurgency.

Programme: The Reformist Horizon and its Necessary Transcendence

All three movements articulated genuine and legitimate grievances with concrete “programmatic” demands. Yet all three remained, in the absence of revolutionary leadership, within a reformist political horizon that left the fundamental question—who controls the means of production, and in whose interests?—systematically unaddressed.

Occupy’s demands centered on redistribution, corporate accountability, and the reduction of economic inequality. The Yellow Vests called for lower fuel taxes, higher minimum wages, the restoration of public services, and various forms of direct democracy. The Gen-Z movements demanded the withdrawal of specific IMF-dictated tax measures, the end of corruption, and the removal of individual heads of state. All these demands expressed authentic material needs. None of them, in the absence of a program for working-class political power, pointed beyond the framework of bourgeois rule.

Left-populist tendencies within each movement—drawing on the theoretical framework elaborated by Mouffe in For a Left Populism (Verso, 2018) and given organizational expression by Podemos in Spain and France Insoumise—framed these demands as a struggle of “the people” against “the oligarchy,” a formulation deliberately designed to incorporate sections of the bourgeoisie into a cross-class “progressive” bloc while excluding the perspective of working-class political independence and socialist expropriation.

The WSWS analyzed the bankruptcy of this framework through its comprehensive coverage of the Syriza and Podemos experiences. Syriza’s capitulation to the EU-IMF troika (EC, ECB, IMF) within months of its January 2015 election victory[19] and Podemos’s entry into coalition government with the PSOE to implement the austerity it had promised to oppose[20] are not exceptions to the left-populist rule but its most perfect expressions. History has delivered its verdict: ten years after Syriza’s 2015 betrayal, Greece remains mired in poverty with intensified exploitation; four years after Podemos entered government, the far-right Vox party emerged as a major force in Spanish politics. The pseudo-left’s claim that workers must “go through the experience” of these parties before advancing to socialism has been exposed as a murderous lie whose consequences have been catastrophic for the working class.[21]

The genuinely revolutionary programme is the programme of permanent revolution—the only programme that corresponds to the objective interests of the working class in the epoch of imperialism. No democratic task, no elementary improvement in the material conditions of the working class, can be secured on a lasting basis without the conquest of state power by the working class, the expropriation of the capitalist class, and the extension of socialist revolution beyond national borders. The partial demands of Occupy, the Yellow Vests, and the Gen-Z movements can serve as transitional demands—points of departure for mass mobilization—only if they are embedded in a programmatic framework that identifies capitalism as the enemy and poses the question of workers’ power at the center, as elaborated in the ICFI’s foundational programme documents.[22]

Differences that register: Social Composition, Geography, and Revolutionary Intensity

Having established the essential political homology of the three waves—their common ideological limitations and programmatic deficits—it is necessary to register the differences that carry strategic implications.

Social composition: Occupy was dominated overwhelmingly by urban, often-educated layers of the precarious middle class concentrated in metropolitan centers. It reflected genuine mass discontent but was organized and led largely by socially privileged layers within the broad “99%. The slogan of “99 percent” elided the divisions within that 99 percent between the working class and the upper-middle strata whose class interests diverge sharply from those of workers. The Yellow Vests drew a geographically and socially broader base—provincial workers, commuters, pensioners, small proprietors—reaching deeper into the actual working class outside metropolitan milieux. The Gen-Z movements combined student and youth vanguards with genuine proletarian participation on a scale neither Occupy nor the Yellow Vests achieved: Sri Lanka’s general strikes, Kenya’s successive wave strikes, and Bangladesh’s garment-worker participation despite union-bureaucratic demobilization expressed authentic working-class militancy of a qualitatively higher order.

Geography and the neocolonial dimension: Occupy and the Yellow Vests occurred in imperialist countries—the United States and France respectively—where the immediate political demands did not include the overthrow of IMF debt peonage or liberation from neocolonial exploitation. The Gen-Z movements occurred overwhelmingly in former colonial and semi-colonial countries where this dimension is central: the IMF stands immediately behind the specific tax measures and austerity programs that triggered mass protests, and the question of imperialist domination is inseparable from the question of domestic capitalist exploitation. This adds to the Gen-Z movements a dimension that links national democratic grievances directly to the international socialist revolution, confirming Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution in its twenty-first-century application.

Revolutionary intensity: Occupy was suppressed while still in embryonic form, never forcing a regime change or a serious rupture in state power. The Yellow Vests subjected the French ruling class to sustained pressure but did not threaten the fundamental stability of its political institutions. The Gen-Z movements, by contrast, drove heads of state from office, forced the collapse of governments, and in Sri Lanka generated a general strike drive that showed the potential to shake the entire structure of bourgeois rule. This heightened revolutionary intensity makes the absence of Trotskyist leadership all the more catastrophic in its consequences. The gulf between the objective revolutionary situation and the subjective capacity of the working class to take power—what the ICFI has consistently identified as the crisis of revolutionary leadership—is expressed with particular acuity in the Gen-Z experience.

The Pseudo-Left: An International Political Current, Not a Collection of Local Accidents

Any serious analysis of the three waves must confront the role of pseudo-left organizations not as a collection of locally specific political traps but as the expression of a coherent international political current whose function—whatever the subjective intentions of its participants—is the containment of working-class revolutionary energy within limits acceptable to capitalism.

The ISO in the United States, the various Pabloite networks that promoted Syriza and Podemos across Europe, Kenya’s Revolutionary Socialist League, the Stalinist Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, BAYAN and Akbayan in the Philippines, Sri Lanka’s Frontline Socialist Party—these organizations share a common political method regardless of their specific national contexts. The theoretical genealogy is explicit: Chantal Mouffe directly advised both Podemos and Mélenchon’s France Insoumise; her partner Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxist elaboration of “hegemony” theory has influenced pseudo-left groups across three continents; the International Socialist Tendency provided intellectual legitimation for Syriza’s trajectory while blocking Marxist criticism of its capitulation.

As the WSWS warned in its analysis of pseudo-left containment strategies, these tendencies serve as a “reservoir for capitalist ideology within the ‘left,’” defending trade-union bureaucracy and social-democratic compromises rather than a revolutionary program.[15] Their middle-class composition, their material dependence on foundations and nonprofits, their rejection of working-class revolutionary politics, and their promotion of spontaneity and “leaderlessness” all serve the single function of blocking the emergence of authentic socialist leadership. Workers and youth who participate in mass movements must understand this pattern not as a series of coincidences but as the expression of a determinate class interest.

The Aragalaya in Perspective: Sri Lanka 2022 and the Global Pattern of Gen-Z Revolt

The 2022 Aragalaya — Sri Lanka’s mass uprising of April through July — was not primarily a protest against the Rajapaksa family’s corruption or mismanagement, though popular anger at the regime’s criminality was genuine and explosive. It was the expression of the terminal crisis of Sri Lankan capitalism under conditions of global capitalist breakdown. Decades of foreign debt dependency, subordination to the diktats of the International Monetary Fund, and the utter bankruptcy of every bourgeois political formation — the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, the United National Party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, and their various parliamentary combinations — had produced a social catastrophe in which fuel, medicine, and basic foodstuffs disappeared from the shelves. The COVID-19 pandemic and the economic disruption unleashed by the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine accelerated the collapse of foreign exchange reserves and forced the government to default on its debt. Between April and July, hundreds of thousands poured into the streets across ethnic lines — a fact of profound political significance in a country whose ruling class has systematically exploited Sinhala and Tamil chauvinism for seven decades as its primary instrument of mass division. Two general strikes, on April 28 and May 6, in which millions participated, demonstrated with unmistakable force the potential power of the working class when it moves as an independent social force. Rajapaksa was driven from office and forced to flee the country on July 13, 2022. At that moment, the labor bureaucracy had already isolated the struggle and the working class was without leadership.

The pseudo-left organizations and trade union bureaucracies understood their task with a clarity proportional to the revolutionary danger the uprising posed. Their decisive function was not to advance the movement but to contain it: to ensure that the immense social energy erupting from below was channeled into a political framework that preserved bourgeois rule. The Frontline Socialist Party — Sri Lanka’s principal pseudo-left formation — promoted the demand for an “interim government” as the movement’s central political objective. This demand, however radical it sounded in the mouths of those advancing it, was not a call for workers’ power but an invitation to a section of the discredited parliamentary establishment to replace another under conditions of mass pressure. The trade union confederations called and controlled the two general strikes — limiting them to single-day actions, carefully isolating them from the movement at Galle Face Green, and at no point advancing demands that could challenge the fundamental capitalist order: repudiation of the IMF debt, nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy under workers’ control, or the formation of independent organs of working-class power. The middle-class protest forces concentrated at Galle Face Green, for their part, reproduced in Sri Lankan conditions the identical “no politics, no leadership” framework that characterized Occupy Wall Street and the Yellow Vests — directing mass anger at the persons of the Rajapaksas rather than at the capitalist state and the imperialist domination that had produced the catastrophe. The ICFI warned with precision throughout this period: the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves, and there is no solution to the immense social problems within the existing social order.

The political consequences of this combined betrayal unfolded with an inexorable logic that ICFI analysis had forewarned and precisely identified. With the working class politically disarmed and demobilized within the “interim government” framework advanced by the pseudo-left and trade union bureaucracy, parliament was free to act on behalf of the ruling class. Ranil Wickremesinghe — six-time prime minister, organic representative of finance capital and the comprador bourgeoisie, the politician whom not a single constituency had endorsed for presidential office — was installed as president by parliamentary vote on July 20, 2022. His mandate was explicit and has been executed without deviation: enforce the IMF’s austerity program, restore bourgeois order, and suppress working-class resistance. The Essential Public Services Act was wielded against striking workers. IMF conditionalities — privatization, regressive taxation, cuts to public services — were implemented under conditions of systematic repression of labor rights. The attack on the Galle Face encampment, the criminalization of protest, and the systematic persecution of activists who had led the uprising followed in sequence. What the masses had achieved in revolutionary form — the removal of a head of state — was thus converted through the mechanism of pseudo-left betrayal into its precise opposite: the installation of a more disciplined and more ruthless enforcer of the same IMF program the uprising had sought to overthrow. The Aragalaya confirmed the ICFI’s assessment that “the critical issue is that of political leadership,” and that spontaneity alone — however militant — cannot overcome the organized political capacity of the bourgeoisie and its pseudo-left auxiliaries to contain and divert mass revolutionary energy.

Video shows protesters at Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya mass uprising chanting slogans demanding resignation of president Gotabhaya Rajapaksa in July 2022

The Sri Lankan experience illuminates with particular clarity the global pattern of Gen-Z revolt analyzed throughout this essay, and deserves recognition as the paradigmatic case — the template, as the WSWS established, from which the subsequent uprisings in Bangladesh, Kenya, the Philippines, and elsewhere descended. Every essential element of the global pattern is present in concentrated form: the objective crisis produced by IMF debt peonage and imperialist domination; the explosive intervention of youth and workers across social and ethnic divisions; the decisive role of the two general strikes in revealing the working class as the social force capable of resolving the crisis; the systematic intervention of pseudo-left and trade union bureaucratic forces to channel the movement into a bourgeois-preserving “interim government” framework; the deliberate suppression of demands that could challenge capitalist property relations; and the installation of a new government whose primary task was to enforce the same IMF program the uprising had repudiated. The “leaderless” and “no politics” character of the Galle Face movement — celebrated in pseudo-left and liberal commentary as democratic spontaneity — performed in Sri Lanka the identical ideological function that Tufekci, Gerbaudo, and Mouffe perform in academic registers: it severed the connection between the genuine revolutionary impulse of the masses and the programmatic framework — permanent revolution, independent working-class political mobilization, the building of the ICFI — that alone can carry that impulse to its necessary conclusion.

The question posed by the Aragalaya — and posed with equal urgency by every Gen-Z uprising from Nairobi to Dhaka, from Colombo to Manila — is therefore not whether the masses are capable of revolutionary action. The two general strikes of April 28 and May 6, 2022, and the storming of the presidential residence on July 9, provided a definitive answer to that question. The question is whether the working class possesses the political instrument — the revolutionary Marxist party, armed with the Theory of Permanent Revolution, organized as a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, and fighting for the perspective of international socialist revolution — without which the objective revolutionary capacity of the masses is systematically transformed, through the mediation of pseudo-left betrayal, into its opposite: the consolidation of the very capitalist order the masses sought to overthrow.

Lessons and Strategic Conclusions

The comparative analysis of the Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vests, and the Gen-Z uprisings in the backward countries yields strategic conclusions of the utmost importance.

Extra-parliamentary revolt is a necessary but radically insufficient condition for social transformation: The ruling class has demonstrated—across all three waves—that it can survive even the most massive and determined popular uprisings, provided the working class lacks the political instruments to translate spontaneous street power into social power.

The construction of independent rank-and-file workplace and neighbourhood committees is the decisive organizational advance: Such committees can coordinate strikes across sectors and regions, connect immediate economic demands to broader political objectives, and create the federated structures through which the working class exercises its decisive social leverage. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, built by the ICFI, represents the organizational expression of this strategy on an international scale.

The political independence of the working class from all bourgeois parties and factions is non-negotiable: This means not only rejection of openly pro-capitalist parties but the political exposure and defeat of pseudo-left organizations that channel mass discontent back into bourgeois management.

Internationalization of the struggle is a strategic necessity, not a supplementary aspiration: The simultaneous eruption of mass revolt across multiple countries in the Gen-Z wave—and the common mechanisms of its betrayal across those countries—demonstrates that the crisis is global and the response of the working class must be equally global. Strike actions and defensive measures must be planned to hit the economic and political levers of capitalism simultaneously in multiple countries to break the ability of national ruling classes to isolate rebellions. The construction of genuinely internationalist revolutionary parties, organized as sections of the ICFI, is the precondition for transforming national eruptions into a global challenge to capitalist rule.

The struggle for socialist consciousness in the working class and among revolutionary youth is the precondition for revolutionary success: As Lenin insisted and as a century of revolutionary experience has confirmed, the working class requires not the absence of political leadership but the highest quality of political leadership–disciplined revolutionary parties armed with the program of permanent revolution, organized as sections of the world party of socialist revolution. The “leaderless” ideology does not liberate movements from leadership; it leaves them at the mercy of forces whose interests are inimical to those of the working class.

The common thread running through Occupy, the Yellow Vests, and the Gen-Z wave is a deepening of objective class discontent and the repeated opening of political spaces that the ruling class cannot close merely by repression or token reform. The critical historical task is to convert this recurring insurgency into organized, conscious socialist struggle under independent working-class leadership. That task—the construction of the International Committee of the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution—is the most pressing political obligation of our time.

Concluded.

References:

[17] World Socialist Web Site, ‘What way forward in the struggle to bring down Macron?’ (5 April 2023) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/04/06/pers-a06.html>

[18] Lenin VI, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902) <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/>

[19] World Socialist Web Site, ‘The capitulation of Syriza and the lessons for the working class’ (23 February 2015) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/02/23/pers-f23.html>

[20] World Socialist Web Site, ‘Podemos enters Spanish government: (8 January 2020) “On Tuesday, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez officially formed a coalition government with the pseudo-left Podemos party, the Spanish ally of Greece’s pro-austerity Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”).” <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/01/08/pode-j08.html>

[21] World Socialist Web Site, ‘How Syriza’s betrayals strengthened the extreme political right in Greece’ (27 June 2023) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/27/etlb-j27.html> ; International Committee of the Fourth International, ‘The Political Lessons of Syriza’s Betrayal in Greece’ (13 November 2015) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/11/13/icfi-n13.html>

[22] Trotsky L, The Transitional Programme: The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938) <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/> ; International Committee of the Fourth International, The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Mehring Books 2008) <https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-us/00.html>

The Gen-Z Uprisings and the Crisis of Leadership: Permanent Revolution against ‘Leaderless’ movements and ‘Left Populism’ – Part 4 Read More »