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