theSocialist.lk republishes the following statement by the WSWS Editorial Board published on WSWS.org on 10 August 2026. We call upon our readers to join the fight to ensure the immediate and unconditional release of Syrotiuk.
Bogdan Syrotiuk
On August 10, Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist and opponent of the US-NATO war against Russia, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The verdict, handed down by a district court in the Nikolaev region, also orders the confiscation of his property and electronic devices and the destruction of the socialist books, leaflets and programmatic documents taken from him.
The World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International denounce this verdict and call on workers, young people and all defenders of democratic rights around the world to demand Bogdan’s immediate release.
The verdict will be immediately appealed. Under Ukrainian law, the appeal must be filed within 30 days. We call on all supporters of democratic rights to back these legal actions and call for the annulment of the sentence.
Bogdan, a leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), was convicted of “high treason … under martial law.” But the record of the case contains no act of treason—no espionage, no sabotage, no collaboration with any military force. The sole evidence presented against him consisted of his writings, published on the World Socialist Web Site, and his communications with the editors who published them.
The state’s experts examined 14 of Bogdan’s writings and included seven in the indictment. The court was then forced to drop one of the seven—an article on the military commissariats’ violent seizure of draft dodgers—after its own forensic commission could find nothing criminal in it. Bogdan has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for six articles.
What was the subversive content? According to the court, the articles contained “non-recognition of Ukraine’s legitimately elected political leadership and democratic processes,” “comparisons with fascists and Nazis,” “negative assessments of Ukraine’s Armed Forces” and “reinterpretation of national heroes and historical figures.”
In fact, everything written by Bogdan is politically and historically accurate. The “legitimately elected political leadership” is a president whose term of office expired in May 2024. Zelensky remains in power more than two years past his legal mandate, ruling by decree under a state of permanent martial law. Elections have been canceled and basic democratic rights suspended. Bogdan has been convicted of failing to recognize “democratic processes” in a country where no democratic processes exist. His is a verdict handed down by a regime of illegality.
As for the “national heroes” whom Bogdan is accused of “reinterpreting,” they are Stepan Bandera and the leaders of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the Waffen-SS Galicia Division—Nazi collaborators who supported Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and were implicated in the mass murder of Jews and Poles. The court’s complaint about “comparisons with fascists and Nazis” refers to Bogdan’s exposure of the official rehabilitation and celebration of these forces.
Among the “proofs” of treason cited by the court are Bogdan’s article “The crimes of the Banderovites against the Ukrainian people: Notes by a Ukrainian Trotskyist” and his 2023 May Day speech, “For the Unity of the Working Class of Russia and Ukraine!” In any country where democratic rights retain the slightest meaning, such writings are protected speech. In Ukraine under Zelensky, they carry a 15-year sentence.
When Bogdan was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on April 25, 2024, the state claimed he was functioning as an agent of the Russian government. In the more than two years since, nothing was produced to substantiate that libelous allegation. In fact, the articles that are cited in the conviction make explicit Bogdan’s opposition to the Russian invasion and the Putin regime.
The verdict refers several times to the “socially dangerous consequences” of Bogdan’s positions. This exposes the fact that the prosecution of Bogdan is not about the manufactured pretext of support for Russia. Rather, it is aimed at the growing opposition to war and the Zelensky regime among Ukrainian workers and youth.
The evidence presented in Bogdan’s defense was never answered. A 65-page report by Yuri Irkhin, one of Ukraine’s leading criminologists, found in Bogdan’s writings no “statements, phrases, sentences, or word combinations that have signs of propaganda aimed at supporting the armed aggression of the Russian Federation.” Rather than respond to it, the court ordered a new examination from a state forensic institute—which, even so, found in the articles no calls for the overthrow of the state, the seizure of power, subversive acts or the alteration of Ukraine’s borders.
The defense established that nothing in the record made out the elements of treason, and that Bogdan’s writings were political speech protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The court swept all of this aside.
The verdict was not the outcome of a legal proceeding but the execution of a political directive from the Zelensky dictatorship. It states that Bogdan acted “on instructions from a representative of the World Socialist Web Site, under the pseudonym ‘David’”—identified in the judgment itself as David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS. The Ukrainian state is asserting the power to declare international socialist and antiwar publications criminal enterprises, and collaboration with them treason.
The decision to destroy the YGBL’s program, its brochures, leaflets and folders of printed articles exposes the real content of the verdict. The methods are those of fascist regimes: imprison the opposition, confiscate its materials, burn its writings. The court even ordered Bogdan to pay more than 178,000 hryvnia to cover the cost of the forensic “examinations” used to convict him.
The sentencing of Bogdan takes place in a country in which left-wing politics has been outlawed. Communist parties and symbols have been banned in Ukraine since the “decommunization” laws of 2015. In 2022, the Zelensky government suspended 11 opposition parties, including the largest opposition party in parliament, which was subsequently banned outright.
Some 20,000 criminal cases have been opened under Ukraine’s treason and collaboration statutes, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office, which reported in September 2025 that it “continues to document cases of torture and ill-treatment” of detainees held by the Ukrainian state. Human Rights Watch describes the collaboration laws as “overly broad and vague”; among those prosecuted are people who carried out “emergency services, construction, humanitarian relief and garbage removal” in occupied territory.
The World Socialist Web Site has been banned in Ukraine since June 6, 2024, six weeks after Bogdan’s arrest.
All of this has been buried and concealed from the public by the government and media outlets that claim the war is being waged in defense of Ukrainian democracy.
The frame-up of Bogdan is the act of a desperate regime. Opposition to the war is mounting within Ukraine itself. More than 300,000 criminal cases have been opened against soldiers for desertion or absence without leave since 2022, the majority of them in the past year. In 2025, 69 percent of Ukrainians told Gallup that the country should seek a negotiated end to the war, a complete reversal of opinion since 2022. Terrified of the growth of antiwar sentiment among workers and soldiers, the Zelensky government is intensifying repression at home while working to create the framework for the direct entry of the NATO powers into the war.
A sentence of 15 years in a Ukrainian prison is the equivalent of a death sentence. The conditions in Ukraine’s penitentiary system are well documented. At the United Nations Committee Against Torture’s review of Ukraine in April 2025, experts cited overcrowding, inadequate access to food and water, the absence of independent medical examinations and a rising toll of deaths in custody. The Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee, reporting on its October 2023 visit to Ukraine, described decaying facilities in which remand prisoners are confined to their cells for up to 23 hours a day and found conditions in one pretrial detention center so degraded that it judged them potentially “inhuman and degrading.”
Bogdan, whose health was already poor at the time of his arrest, has been denied urgently needed medical treatment for over a year, despite repeated promises from the prison administration. Every day behind bars is a threat to his life.
His fate cannot be left to the courts of a state that has just demonstrated its fascist contempt for democratic rights. Bogdan’s freedom will be won by the mobilization of the international working class, youth and all progressive organizations and individuals dedicated to the defense of democratic rights. We appeal to workers, trade unions, student and youth organizations, civil liberties groups, and socialist and anti-war movements in every country: Take up Bogdan’s case. Pass resolutions in your workplaces, unions, schools and universities demanding his release. Issue public statements of protest.
Send statements demanding the overturning of the verdict and Bogdan’s immediate release to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua, with copies to the World Socialist Web Site at freebogdan@wsws.org.
The fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk is a fight against imperialist war, dictatorship and fascism. Fill out the form below to get involved.
Relatives of the inmates demand not to shoot the prisoners, outside Mahara Prison on 1 August 2026. Photo credit: Ishara S. Kodikara
On August 1-2, 2026, a riot erupted at Mahara Prison, north of Colombo, causing severe damage to its already unlivable infrastructure and reportedly resulting in the death of one inmate. This is the second prison riot in less than a month and followed the massacre in the Negombo prison early last month.[1] The vast majority of detainees at Mahara — as throughout Sri Lanka’s prison system, where approximately 75 percent of inmates are unconvicted remand prisoners — are held in indefinite judicial limbo, warehoused in facilities built for 11,762 that now hold more than 42,000. The conditions are, by any objective standard, a form of systematic torture: prisoners forced to sleep standing, defecate into shopping bags, survive on food that “even cats and dogs” would reject, confined to as little as 1.2 square metres of space.[2] In 2023, 67.8 percent (31,822) of those imprisoned were jailed due to their inability to pay fines — a form of criminalization of poverty. A recent National Audit Office report finds that over 15,000 remain in prolonged remand custody due to delay in government analyst reports. The riot was not an act of criminality. It was an explosion of outrage of human beings subjected to torturous conditions that the capitalist state has deliberately created and deliberately maintains.
But it is not the riot itself that most starkly reveals the political trajectory of Sri Lankan society. It is the response — both of the state and of a significant and vocal section of the public.
In the hours following the Mahara unrest, as was in the aftermath of the Negombo prison incident, a significant segment of society — concentrated in the Sinhala middle class of the south and amplified across social media — began openly proposing measures that belong to the lexicon of fascism. “Break their limbs.” “Shoot them in the head.” “Exterminate the drug residue.” These are not the mutterings of isolated cranks. They are the publicly expressed, socially sanctioned political proposals of a layer of the population that has been systematically prepared over decades to regard certain categories of human beings as unworthy of life. The comments sections of mainstream news outlets and the feeds of social media platforms have become open forums for the advocacy of extrajudicial murder, for the vilification of grieving families, for the glorification of the STF and the military, deployed by the JVP/NPP government, to crush prison riots. The corporate media has done nothing to challenge this — because it cannot, because the media itself has been a primary vehicle for the ideological preparation that has produced it.
Military deployed at the Mahara prison on 1 August 2026. Photo credit: Ishara S Kodikara
Following the Mahara unrest, in a video of an elderly mother of a remand prisoner, published on Dasatha News facebook page, she demanded the release of the names of inmates affected by the riot and subsequent military crackdown — including those killed, transferred to other prisons, or hospitalized. In the video, she holds the ruling class and the police accountable for creating a society dominated by drug lords who prey on the sons of impoverished mothers. She explains that her son was framed through drug planting — a widespread practice by the Sri Lanka Police, a routine mechanism for criminalizing poverty and filling the remand prisons with the sons and daughters of the poor.
Military deployed at Mahara prison to crush the riot and intimidate the relatives and the working class.Image Credit: Ishara S. Kodikara
The video attracted hundreds of scathing, inhumane, and morally bankrupt comments. Commentators vilified her for giving birth to her son, blamed her entirely for his drug addiction, and condemned her for failing to raise him properly. The same hostile barrage was directed at parents, siblings, and other relatives who gathered outside the Mahara and Negombo prisons during the riots and crackdowns to demand the safety of their loved ones — mothers weeping at the gates while gunfire echoed within, wives and children pleading for information, families who had traveled from distant villages only to be met with the deployment of armed drones, armored vehicles, and the Special Task Force.
Facebook commentsSocial media reporting and comments
This is the face of the fascistic ideology now brewing in sections of the Sri Lankan middle class. It is not merely a political tendency expressed in abstract slogans about “law and order.” It is a social practice of systematic cruelty directed at the most vulnerable — at an elderly mother pleading for her son, at families demanding to know whether their loved ones are alive or dead. The same social media users who demand that prisoners be shot in the head are the ones who mock a mother’s grief, who blame her for the poverty into which her son was born, who insist that the state’s lethal violence is not merely justified but righteous.
This reaction reflects a profound moral decay. It is the ideological harvest of a society that has been taught, systematically and over generations, that lethal violence against the “enemy within” is not merely justified but heroic — and that those who love the enemy, who plead for the enemy, who gave birth to the enemy, are themselves contemptible. The elderly mother who demands to know whether her son is alive is not a grieving parent to be treated with compassion. She is an obstacle to the state’s campaign of terror, and the social media mob has been trained to treat her accordingly.
No public figure has yet gone on record in a formal media statement advocating the extrajudicial execution of prisoners. This tendency has not yet crystallized into an organized movement with a large social base. But it does not need to. The historical lesson of fascism — as demonstrated by the international resurgence of the far right — is that fascist movements are not mass movements from their inception. They begin as ideological currents within sections of the petty bourgeoisie, nurtured by the state and the media, that are activated and expanded when the ruling class requires a battering ram against the working class. The social media comments calling for prisoners to be shot, the mockery of a mother’s anguish, the vilification of families at the prison gates — these are the early ideological indicators of a tendency that the JVP/NPP government, facing mounting social opposition to IMF austerity, will seek to cultivate and mobilize.
The Genealogy of a Fascistic Ideology
The calls to shoot prisoners in the head did not emerge from nowhere. They are the latest expression of an ideological trajectory that can be traced with precision.
The 26-year communal war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), concluded in 2009 with the slaughter of an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians in the final months alone, was not merely a military campaign. It was a project of ideological mobilization on a mass scale. The state, Sinhala-Buddhist saffron forces, and the media jointly constructed a narrative in which the Tamil population — and by extension any population that could be designated as an internal threat — was dehumanized. The war was presented not as a conflict between the Sinhala and Tamil ruling classes, each seeking to exploit “their” workers, but as a civilizational struggle for the “Sinhala motherland” against a barbaric enemy. The Sri Lankan military mercilessly pounded the no-fire zone with artillery shells, deliberately targeting hospitals, aid centres and designated civilian areas. Grisly video evidence later emerged of Sri Lankan soldiers executing naked, bound and blindfolded men in cold blood. [3] When the LTTE defences collapsed, the military murdered surrendering LTTE leaders and herded some 300,000 civilians into army-controlled detention camps.
The Sri Lankan military was glorified as the savior of the nation. War heroes were celebrated in state ceremonies, their images plastered across billboards, their “sacrifices” invoked in political speeches. The military budget was expanded, not contracted, after the war ended. Military “leadership training” was imposed on university students. [4] The armed forces were integrated into the civil administration, including in schools, with retired and serving generals appointed to key government positions. The glorification of the military was inseparable from the cultivation of Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism, which presented the Sinhala majority as the authentic nation and all others as threats to its integrity.
This ideological campaign did not end with the war. It was repurposed. As the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) warned in 2021: “The military and its brutal methods developed during the war are now being prepared for use against the working class, as unrest grows over the worsening social conditions facing working people.” [5] The “war on terror” became the “war on drugs,” which became the “war on the underworld.” The enemy was no longer the Tamil separatist but the drug dealer, the criminal, the “underworld figure” — categories that, in practice, encompass the poorest and most marginalized layers of the working class.
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) explained the logic of these campaigns as early as 2009: the “war on the underworld” was launched “to divert growing popular discontent and to justify the further strengthening of the state apparatus in preparation for social unrest.”[6] The same analysis applies with equal force today. The JVP/NPP government’s escalating “war on drugs” is a rehearsal for police-state measures, the main target of which is the working class that come into struggle.
The middle-class social media users who now call for prisoners to be shot in the head are the products of this decades-long ideological conditioning. They have been taught to see the state’s lethal violence as legitimate, to regard due process as an obstacle to “security,” and to view certain categories of the poor as subhuman.
The Same Tendency, the Same Targets
But this tendency is not new. It is the same social layer, animated by the same ideology, that has for the past few years populated the comments sections of mainstream media with the glorification of the military and the dehumanization of its victims. When the daily excavations of skeletal remains at the Chemmani-Siththupaththi mass grave are reported — the bones of Tamil men, women, and children who were “disappeared” by state forces, buried in unusual positions, and dumped together in shallow pits — this same social media mob posts comments calling to “make soup out of their bones and have it.” When Tamil communities in the North and East protest the military’s continued occupation of their lands — a permanent network of army camps established during the war and never dismantled — this same tendency demands the deployment of the army to crush them. When Tamil families who have spent decades searching for their loved ones demand accountability for the tens of thousands slaughtered in the final months of the war, this same social layer mocks their grief and insists the killings were justified. When the skeletal remains of 136 individuals were unearthed in Mannar after 74 days of excavation, the same voices jeered, defending the military.
The calls to shoot prisoners in the head are not a departure from this chauvinist culture. They are its extension. The ideological machinery that was built to dehumanize the Tamil “terrorist” has been repurposed to dehumanize the Sinhala “criminal.” The mechanism is identical: construct a subhuman category, mobilize revulsion against it, and demand that the state kill without process, without mercy, without accountability. The war against the LTTE provided the template. The “war on drugs” provides the new target. The underlying logic — that certain categories of human beings may be killed by the state with impunity, without trial, without process, without mercy and that those who call for their killing are patriots — is the same.
The decades-long campaign of militarization and Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism has prepared this social layer to serve as the shock troops of reaction. The glorification of war heroes, the celebration of military “victory,” the refusal to acknowledge war crimes, the mockery of mass graves — all of this has cultivated an ideological disposition that regards lethal state violence not as a crime to be prosecuted but as a virtue to be celebrated. The middle-class youth who posts “shoot them in the head” on Facebook is not expressing an idiosyncratic opinion. He is expressing the logical endpoint of an ideology that has been systematically inculcated through the education system, the media, and the political culture of the post-war period. He is the product of a society that has never held its killers to account and has instead elevated them to the status of national heroes.
The same social layer revealed its moral character with unmistakable clarity during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which since October 2023 has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians — men, women, and children slaughtered under the banner of “fighting terrorism.” Across social media, this section of the Sinhala middle class expressed vociferous indifference to the genocide and open support for Zionist Israel’s crimes. The same dehumanization mechanism was at work: Palestinians were “terrorists,” their deaths were “necessary,” their suffering was deserved. That the JVP/NPP government itself has conspicuously failed to condemn Israel’s planned seizure of Gaza, pointedly omitting any mention of genocide or ethnic cleansing from its official statements, is no coincidence. The ideological framework that justifies the slaughter of prisoners at Mahara or Negombo, the mockery of Chemmani’s dead, and the indifference to Gaza’s murdered children is one and the same: the conviction that lethal state violence against a dehumanized enemy is not a crime but a form of justice. This is the moral universe that decades of militarization and chauvinism have built.
The social base that the JVP/NPP government is cultivating is this. The party that opposed UN human rights investigations into war crimes, that integrated retired military officers into its political apparatus, that retains the Prevention of Terrorism Act and expands police-state powers — this party governs with the tacit support of the social media mob that demands bullets for prisoners and mocks the bones of the disappeared. It does not need to issue formal statements endorsing such sentiments. It needs only to continue what it is already doing: glorifying the security forces, refusing accountability for past and present massacres, and framing its “war on drugs” as a civilizational struggle against subhuman enemies. The social media tendency will do the rest, providing the popular ideological cover that the state requires to escalate its violence — against prisoners today, against striking workers and protesting youth tomorrow.
The JVP/NPP: Architects of Militarization
The present leaders of this militarization campaign are the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the National People’s Power (NPP) government. This is a fact of immense political significance that must be stated without equivocation.
The JVP campaigned for the 2024 elections on a platform of “systemic change.” It made promises to workers, peasants, and youth across every corner of society. It presented its program as a vision of social righteousness, of clean government, of a break with the corrupt and violent past. It rode to power on the back of the massive Aragalaya uprising of 2022, in which about a million working people rose up against the Rajapaksa regime and the unbearable social conditions produced by the crisis of Sri Lankan capitalism and the 2022 sovereign default.
Today, that same JVP/NPP holds power while actively driving militarization forward. It has retained the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which it explicitly promised to abolish. It has invoked essential services laws to criminalize strikes across key sectors. It has introduced the Protection of the State from Terrorism Act (PSTA), vastly expanding state repressive powers. It has announced a plan to recruit 10,000 retired military personnel into the police force — many of whom have combat experience from the 26-year anti-Tamil communal war. It has established over 14,000 Public Safety Committees across all village officer divisions, institutionalized as a force operating under the police — a revival of the intelligence-gathering committees set up by Gotabhaya Rajapaksa during the war, with JVP members reportedly appointed to them in almost all areas.[7]
The JVP’s collaboration with the military apparatus is not new. During the war, the Sinhala chauvinist JVP was a virulent advocate of the military campaign against the LTTE, demanding an all-out military solution and vehemently opposing any concessions to Tamils. [8] [9] [10] In 2010, it formed a sordid electoral alliance with former army commander Sarath Fonseka, the general who oversaw the final military offensives. In 2023, as it prepared for government, the JVP/NPP established formal collectives of retired military and police officers — the Retired Tri-forces Collective and the Retired Police Officers Collective — integrating figures most likely including individuals connected to crimes and human rights abuses during the war into its political apparatus.
The betrayal of the Tamil population of the North and East is among the most damning indictments of the JVP/NPP government. During the 2024 presidential and parliamentary election campaigns, Dissanayake and the JVP/NPP made explicit promises to Tamil voters: the release of all political prisoners, the return of civilian land seized by the military, and the provision of information to families of the tens of thousands of missing persons. On the basis of these pledges — and driven by deep disaffection with the traditional Tamil bourgeois parties that had betrayed them for decades — a significant section of Tamil voters swung behind the JVP/NPP in the November 2024 parliamentary election, handing the party a plurality of votes in all but one district in the North and East. Every one of these promises has been broken. The government now claims that political prisoners were convicted on criminal charges and therefore cannot be released. Some land has been returned, but an estimated 2,600 acres still remain under military control, and tens of thousands of acres seized from ordinary working people during the war remain in the hands of the armed forces. Instead of revealing the fate of the disappeared, the government proposes limited financial reparations to victims’ families while protecting the perpetrators. The JVP/NPP has categorically rejected United Nations Human Rights Council resolutions calling for investigations into war crimes. Its opposition to any human rights investigation flows from its Sinhala chauvinist politics and ardent support for the protracted anti-Tamil civil war and is insisting on the lie that the military committed no war crimes. The Tamil masses who voted based on promises of “systemic change”— in spite of the long record of JVP’s anti-Tamil chauvinism — have instead received the same military occupation, the same denial of justice, the same criminalization of their dead.
Now, the JVP Justice Minister visits the Sittupattu mass grave site (on 19 June), faces hundreds of protesters demanding truth and accountability, and walks past them to promise justice “within two years.” But the obscenity does not end there. After standing at Sri Lanka’s largest mass grave — over 400 skeletal remains, including the bones of infants — the minister, answering questions from people at a meeting held at the Jaffna Divisional Secretariat Office publicly cast doubt on whether Chemmani is even a mass grave at all, suggesting it may simply be a normal graveyard. He stated, “first of all, it is a cemetery, cause of death of bones should be inspected, and complaints are required before we can proceed with DNA identification”. In another press statement, the Minister raised doubts as to who the perpetrators were, attempting to discredit strong allegations against the armed forces.[11] This is not confusion. This is not ignorance. This is the language of cover-up. It is the language of impunity spoken aloud.
This is the party that now governs Sri Lanka. This is the party that presides over the prison massacres at Negombo and Mahara. This is the party whose media allies portray dead prison guards as “heroes” who “sacrificed their lives” — the right-wing Island newspaper declaring: “The drug mafia has flexed its muscle again. The government has embarked on an ambitious campaign to rid the country of narcotics, and rightly so.” [12] On August 3, its Sinhala language daily, Divina named the military-STF intervention in the Mahara prison as a “humanitarian mission”, which echoed the term used to refer to the military onslaught in the final phase of the civil war. This is the party that is precisely accountable for the massive inhumanity, savagery, and moral decay represented by the calls to shoot prisoners in the head.
The Middle Class and the Fascist Mobilization
The social media posts proposing the extrajudicial execution of prisoners are not evenly distributed across the population. They emanate disproportionately from the Sinhala middle class of the south — the petty bourgeoisie, the lower-level professionals, the small business owners, the university-educated and unemployed youth who have been traditionally taught to see themselves as the guardians of the nation’s moral order. This is the classic social base of fascist movements, and its emergence in Sri Lanka follows a pattern that Marxism has long understood.
The middle class occupies a contradictory position in capitalist society. It is not part of the bourgeoisie — it does not own the means of production on a scale that frees it from the necessity of work. But it is terrified of falling into the proletariat, of losing its precarious status, of being swallowed by the poverty that surrounds it. In periods of capitalist crisis, when its economic position is threatened by inflation, unemployment, and the collapse of small enterprises, the middle class becomes politically volatile. It can be mobilized either in alliance with the working class against the bourgeoisie — or, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, as the shock troops of reaction against the working class.[13]
The decades-long campaign of militarization and Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism has prepared the Sri Lankan middle class to choose the latter path. The glorification of war heroes, the demonization of internal enemies, the constant invocation of “national security” — all of this has cultivated an ideological disposition that sees violence as the solution to social problems. What is developing among sections of the disgruntled Sinhala middle class is not a diffuse or generalized social conservatism. It is a far-right political current, bearing all the essential characteristics of fascism as the Marxist tradition has understood it: the glorification of lethal state violence as a social good, the systematic dehumanization of designated internal enemies, the contempt for due process and legal norms, and the conviction that extrajudicial killing is a legitimate instrument of “law and order.”
This tendency may not yet have a large social base. It is concentrated among a significant section of social media users — particularly youth and the middle class — who wage this militaristic, demoralized, inhumane campaign as a matter of defending law and order and security. The JVP/NPP government is its political beneficiary and its tacit patron — because it understands that when working-class resistance intensifies, this far-right current will be available for mobilization as the street-level enforcers of state terror.
The government and the ruling class are aware of these developments and are tacitly encouraging them. This is the decisive political point. The social media mob that calls for bullets in prisoners’ heads is not acting against the state. It is acting in harmony with a state that has itself just carried out a shoot-to-kill operation at Negombo, that has deployed the STF and the military against unarmed prisoners, that has subjected transferred inmates to retaliatory torture resulting in at least two post-transfer deaths.[1] The state kills; the social media mob applauds; the government appoints a committee of retired judges to bury the truth. Each element reinforces the others.
SLPP as the direct institutional patron of the far-right
This far-right current is not an amorphous social mood. It is being politically organized. Its most direct institutional patrons are the Rajapaksa family’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), which has installed Namal Rajapaksa — the son of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa — as its national organizer, and the Buddhist clergy that vociferously backs him.
The SLPP and its clerical allies portray the JVP/NPP government as betraying the Sinhala nation by granting concessions to Tamils in order to secure the support of the Tamil diaspora. This is a calculated distortion, but it contains a kernel of political reality. The JVP/NPP was indeed fully supported by sections of the Tamil diaspora — Tamil capitalist expatriates, the wealthy, and the elite — and continues to seek their backing. These layers in turn expect the government to deliver the full implementation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution, including the devolution of police and land powers, as the price of their political loyalty. The JVP/NPP, however, has no intention of fulfilling these expectations. It has released only an insignificant extent of occupied lands, while military occupation of the North and East continues unabated.
The SLPP exploits this contradiction to posture as the savior of Buddhism and the Sinhala nation, directly encouraging far-right fascistic elements who wage Sinhala-Buddhist racist provocations in the North — such as the illegal expansion of the Tissa Viharaya temple on seized Tamil land, the erection of Buddha statues as deliberate communal provocations in Trincomalee, and the ongoing campaign by Buddhist chauvinist groups to assert Sinhala-Buddhist supremacy over Tamil and Muslim communities. The SLPP’s aim is transparent: to outflank the JVP/NPP from the right, to mobilize the most backward and violent sections of the Sinhala middle class, and to position itself as the political leadership of the fascistic tendency now brewing in Sri Lankan society.
The JVP/NPP, for its part, has repeatedly demonstrated that it will not confront this reactionary mobilization but will accommodate and appease it — because it shares its fundamental ideological premises and will require its services when working-class resistance intensifies. The middle-class social media mob that demands bullets for prisoners and mocks the Chemmani dead is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the raw material of a political movement that already has its leaders, its institutions, and its patrons — and that is being prepared for deployment against the working class.
The Trajectory: From Prisoners to Workers
The critical political question is: where does this trajectory lead?
The government will in due course direct these fascistic tendencies against working-class struggles. The middle class that today demands bullets for prisoners will tomorrow demand bullets for strikers. The social media mob that dehumanizes “drug residue” will be mobilized to dehumanize workers who defy essential services orders, youth who protest IMF austerity, peasants who resist land grabs. The ideological machinery that was built to prosecute the war against the LTTE and then repurposed for the “war on drugs” will be repurposed again for the war on the working class.
As the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) warned in November 2024, The JVP/NPP government is already preparing the ground. [14] The 14,000 Public Safety Committees, staffed with JVP members and operating under police supervision, are mechanisms for surveillance, intelligence gathering, and repression against political opponents and workers engaged in struggle. The recruitment of 10,000 retired military personnel into the police force is a direct preparation for the violent suppression of social unrest. The government expects strong resistance from youth and students and has already deployed the police to violently suppress teachers’ protests and student demonstrations. School Development Officers were beaten and detained by police in December 2024 for demanding their rights. Allied health science graduates were violently suppressed and arrested in March and April 2025.
The JVP/NPP is implementing the IMF austerity program to the letter. Dissanayake retains the main portfolios of finance and defence to ensure the government’s foremost task of ruthlessly implementing IMF austerity measures is directly in his hands. For 2026, the allocation of funds to the Ministry of Defence is 530 billion Rupees. On the very first day the majority-JVP/NPP parliament convened, the government jettisoned its election pledge to renegotiate the IMF bailout. The measures include significant tax increases targeting workers, the lowering of the income-tax threshold directly affecting the middle class, the slashing of vital public services and a fire-sale of state-owned enterprises, destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs. Parliament unanimously approved these IMF austerity measures in December 2024. Dissanayake’s budgets were fully dictated by the IMF. The working class and the poor suffer heavily due to sky-rocketing prices of consumer items, including essential food items, while the JVP-controlled majority trade unions have artificially suppressed the working class struggles.
The government knows it sits on a social powder-keg. The austerity measures it implements will generate mass opposition. It is haunted by the 2022 Aragalaya. Its response is to build the repressive apparatus in advance, to cultivate the ideological climate in which lethal violence against protesters will be accepted, and to prepare the middle-class shock troops who will condemn and vilify the worker, hail the military-police crack-down and provide the political cover for state terror.
The JVP’s general secretary Tilvin Silva has declared that “there will be no other governments after this government.” President Dissanayake has said the government “cannot be shaken for decades.” These are not expressions of democratic confidence. They are threats. They announce that the JVP/NPP will not peacefully surrender power, that it is preparing to rule through force, that the fascistic ideology now being cultivated in the middle class is an essential component of its political strategy.
The Crisis of Sri Lankan Capitalism
The prison system — and the fascistic ideology that demands its victims be shot — is a concentrated expression of the broader social catastrophe produced by Sri Lankan capitalism. According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the country was among the most unequal in the Asia-Pacific region by 2023. The Super-Rich comprise just 1 percent of the population but command a massive 31 percent of the total personal wealth in the country. The Working Class and the Poor comprise half of the entire population but collectively own less than 4 percent of the overall national wealth.
The plantation workers of the central hill country — the descendants of indentured laborers brought from India by British colonialism — continue to live in conditions of abject poverty. The urban poor of Colombo’s slums, the rural farmers crushed by debt and the removal of fertilizer subsidies, the youth who face permanent unemployment — these are the social layers from which the prison population is drawn.
They are the human products of a system that subordinates human need to private profit. And when they resist — when they protest, when they strike, when they explode — the state answers with bullets. When the middle class applauds those bullets, it is not expressing a pathology. It is expressing the logic of a system that requires the dehumanization of its victims in order to sustain itself.
The Warning and the Task
Workers must recognize this danger. The calls to shoot prisoners in the head are not a temporary aberration. They are a political warning. The same forces that today demand the extrajudicial execution of remand prisoners will tomorrow demand the same for striking workers, for protesting students, for anyone who threatens the “stability” that the ruling class requires to continue its exploitation. The social media tendency that mocks the bones of the Chemmani dead, vilifies a remand prisoner’s grieving mother, and calls for bullets in the heads of prisoners is being cultivated as the ideological battering ram of a government preparing for class war.
The revolutionary party must be conscious of these subtle developments in the social consciousness and expose the growing dangers. This means neither exaggerating the tendency into something it is not yet — a mass fascist movement — nor dismissing it as the harmless venting of online cranks. It means identifying it precisely for what it is: an emergent ideological current, rooted in the material crisis of the middle class, cultivated by decades of militarization and Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism, and tacitly encouraged by a government that will require it when working-class resistance to austerity intensifies. It means exposing the continuity between the dehumanization of Tamils, the mockery of mass graves, and the demand for bullets in prisoners’ heads — because all three are expressions of the same logic, nurtured by the same state, and aimed at the same ultimate target: the working class.
The working class must defeat the ruling class’s militarization program and ideology. This requires an independent political mobilization, organized through action committees in every workplace and neighborhood, that breaks decisively with all capitalist parties — including the JVP/NPP — and their trade union appendages. It requires the building of a revolutionary party, armed with the program of socialist internationalism, that fights for the unity of Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers across ethnic divisions and builds an alliance of the working class with all oppressed layers, the peasantry and the youth against the ruling class that foments divisions among them to strengthen capitalist class rule.
The fight against fascistic ideology cannot be separated from the fight against the capitalist system that produces it. The middle class that calls for prisoners to be shot is itself a product of a society in crisis — economically threatened, ideologically disoriented, politically manipulated by a ruling class that requires it as a battering ram against the working class. The only force capable of defeating this reactionary mobilization is the organized working class, united across all communal lines, advancing its own socialist program as the alternative to the barbarism of capitalism in decay.
The Negombo dead, the Mahara brutalized prisoners, the tens of thousands slaughtered at Mulliwaikkal, the tens of thousands of rural youth killed in 1988–89, the skeletons still being unearthed at Chemmani and Mannar, the forcibly disappeared, the tortured and the warehoused — The blood of the Sri Lankan working class and oppressed cries out against a system that produces only death and misery. The task of the SLLA is to build the revolutionary party to organize the working class, in alliance with the middle class, the petty-bourgeoisie, the rural poor and the urban impoverished, to put an end to it — through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a workers’ state, in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally, as part of the world party of socialist revolution, the International Committee of the Fourth International.
[11] “We are currently exhuming bodies in Chemmani. First, we need to determine whether those deaths occurred naturally or due to trauma. The other issue is that within a very short period in that area, the LTTE was in control, the Indian Army was there, and other paramilitaries from that time were also there. The army came much later. Therefore, an investigation is underway to identify the relevant individuals. We will conduct it properly.” Adaderana Facebook on 29 July 2026. [“චෙම්මනි මිනී ගොඩගනිමින් අපි ඉන්නෙ. ඒව සමහරවිට ස්වභාවිකව වෙළා ද, එහෙම නැත්නම් ට්රොමා එකකින් උනාද කියල ඉස්සෙල්ල බේරගන්නට ඕන. අනික් ගැටලුව ඔය ප්රදේශයේ ඉතා කෙටි කාලයක් තුළ LTTE එකත් පාලනයේ ඉඳළ තියෙනව, ඉන්දියන් හමුදාවත් ඉඳළ තියෙනව, ඒකාලෙ හිටපු අනිත් පැරාමිලිටරිස් ඉඳළ තියෙනව. හමුදාව එන්නෙ ඊට ගොඩාක් පස්සෙ. ඒ නිසා අදාළ පුද්ගලයො හොයාගැනීමට විමර්ශන කටයුත්තක් තිබෙනව. ඒක අපි හරියට කරනව.”]
Tonight marks the 45th anniversary of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in May 1981. If we, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party of Sri Lanka, were present at a commemoration event before the Jaffna Public Library today, and asked to address an audience of our Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, we would have delivered the following speech.
By Sanjaya Jayasekera, member SLLA.
Jaffna Public Library after Arson. Image courtesy of CPA X.
Friends, comrades, brothers and sisters — 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!
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.
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]
Fire and plumes of smoke rises after a drone struck a fuel tank forcing the temporary suspension of flights. near Dubai International Airport, in United Arab Emirates, early Monday, March 16, 2026. [AP Photo/AP Photo]
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.
