Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Image courtesy of www.aa.com.trn
The January 3, 2026 U.S. military assault on Venezuela and the forcible seizure of President Nicolás Maduro constitute a watershed in the degeneration of American imperialism and the collapse of the post-1945 juridical order. This was not a rogue “raid” or law-enforcement operation but a war of aggression conducted to impose control over strategic resources and geopolitical space. As the World Socialist Web Site emphasized, the operation represents “a total repudiation by the Trump regime of any semblance of legality… an unprovoked war of aggression launched in flagrant violation of international law.”[1] The deployment of over 150 aircrafts launched from 20 bases across the Western Hemisphere, heavy bombardment across Caracas and surrounding states, a naval blockade, and at least 100 deaths—including 32 Cuban military personnel—underscore the operation’s character as large-scale military conquest rather than counter-narcotics action.
Material Foundations: Oil, Finance Capital and Geopolitical Rivalry
The assault must be understood through the material interests driving contemporary imperialism. Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves alongside substantial deposits of gold, bauxite, diamonds, copper, nickel, manganese, coltan and uranium. Control of these resources is central to U.S. finance capital and the oil majors’ strategic aims. Trump made the predatory motive explicit, declaring that “we’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars.”[2] Reportedly,Trump briefed oil executives about the assault before it occurred while deliberately withholding information from Congress and the American people.
The operation simultaneously aims to reverse China’s and Russia’s deepening economic penetration of Latin America. U.S. demands to interim President Delcy Rodríguez revealed the geopolitical objectives: Venezuela must “kick out China, Russia, Iran and Cuba and sever economic ties,” then “agree to partner exclusively with the US on oil production and favor America when selling heavy crude.”[3] Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed this explicitly: “Why does China need their oil? Why does Russia need their oil? They’re not even in this continent. This is the Western Hemisphere.”[4] The raid therefore expresses both the search for surplus value through direct plunder and the sharpening geo-political rivalry born of US imperialism’s systemic crisis.
This crisis has deep historical roots. As Lenin analyzed in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, monopoly capital’s need to secure sources of raw materials, investment outlets and markets drives the violent redivision of the world among rival powers. The contemporary period witnesses this process in acute form: decades of financialization, debt expansion and speculative excess have failed to resolve capitalism’s fundamental contradiction—the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The globalization of production from the late 1970s represented a temporary response based on accessing cheap labor and strategic territories, but that framework is now disintegrating as American imperialism confronts eroding economic dominance and intensifying competition from rival powers.
From Juridical Pretense to the “Iron Law” of Force
The assault signifies American imperialism’s abandonment of postwar legal constraints—UN Charter norms, sovereignty protections, diplomatic process—which had served as inter-imperialist settlement for the ‘peaceful’ neocolonial plunder of former colonies, their resources and cheap labor. Historically, US imperialism never wanted to be restrained by these international limitations. Today US administration officials dismiss such constraints with unprecedented candor. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller declared: “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” dismissing international law as mere “international niceties.”[5] Miller made explicit that “the United States of America is running Venezuela… we are in charge, because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions.”[6]
This represents government doctrine enacted through military operations, not rhetorical excess. The WSWS correctly characterized Miller’s formulations as “the language of the Nazis, drawn from Hitler’s Mein Kampf and its talk of ‘iron laws of Nature’ in relation to races and racial-state conflict.”[7] The Manhattan spectacle of parading Maduro in chains before federal courts—a sitting head of state declared a “prisoner of war” and denied even the opportunity to complete his statement of identity—aims to legitimize seizure through pseudo-legal theater while humiliating a sovereign nation.[8]
The postwar institutions that once helped regulate inter-imperialist rivalry and provided a veneer of legitimacy for neocolonial extraction have become, under conditions of acute capitalist crisis, obstacles to plunder. That order has collapsed. Trump’s invocation of what he terms the “Donroe Doctrine”—superseding the Monroe Doctrine—and his declaration that “this is OUR hemisphere” make explicit that Washington treats Latin America as colonial property. The willingness to threaten even NATO ally Denmark over Greenland, combined with explicit orders to expel foreign economic partners from Venezuela, demonstrates that the U.S. oligarchy now regards legal constraints as impediments to be swept aside. The long-standing fiction that American policy is shaped by principles other than naked imperialist interests is now being openly set aside.
An Escalation Built on Prolonged Aggression
The assault on Venezuela followed shortly after the release of the December 2025 National Defense Strategy, which explicitly designated the Western Hemisphere as an “American sphere of influence” where Washington would reject any involvement by “extra-hemispheric powers.” This strategic document identified China as the primary adversary and demanded U.S. military control over “energy dominance” by securing strategic resources across Latin America and the Middle East. The Venezuelan intervention represents the doctrine’s inaugural execution.
The Maduro abduction completed a sustained campaign of military pressure and economic strangulation. Throughout 2025, the U.S. assembled a massive naval armada in the Caribbean, conducted repeated deadly strikes on Venezuelan vessels, seized oil tankers, and imposed an effective naval quarantine—measures constituting acts of war and a de facto blockade. In late December 2025, the CIA conducted the first strike on Venezuelan territory, targeting a port facility. By early January, the military buildup had reached culmination point, with special forces rehearsing the raid using models of Maduro’s compound while Trump approved the final operation before Christmas.
This trajectory followed a deliberate escalation ladder: designation of the “Cartel of the Suns”—which the state department alleged was helped manage and ultimately led by Maduro—as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, expansion of sanctions targeting Maduro’s family and oil shipments, demands for the return of nationalized assets seized from U.S. corporations in 2007, and finally direct military assault. The pattern reveals systematic preparation for regime change and resource seizure, with direct military intervention undertaken only after attempts to orchestrate a political coup failed due to lack of popular support for the opposition.
The Bankruptcy of Bourgeois Nationalism and the Pink Tide
The raid exposed with surgical precision the class character and political bankruptcy of Latin America’s national bourgeoisies. Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and other “Pink Tide” leaders offered tepid condemnations that carefully avoided breaking with imperialism or mobilizing popular opposition. As the WSWS documented, “the rotten and reactionary response of all sections of the Latin American bourgeoisie to the US invasion of Venezuela must be taken by the working class as a testament to the inadequacy of all nationalist perspectives in the epoch of imperialism.”[9]
The same pattern of cowardice and betrayal emerged across South Asia. In Sri Lanka, while the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) issued a statement on January 4 condemning the U.S. assault and declaring that “powerful countries do not have the right to violate this principle” of sovereignty, the NPP government adopted a markedly different position. Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath, a politburo member of JVP, explicitly distinguished between the party and NPP government, stating that while “political parties can have their own opinions,” the government “represents all sides” and must work through UN mechanisms. The official Foreign Ministry statement expressed mere “deep concern” while urging “dialogue” and “peaceful resolution”—the language of diplomatic evasion that refuses to name the aggressor or mobilize popular opposition. This split exposes the fundamental contradiction at the heart of bourgeois nationalist governance: the party that once postured as anti-imperialist now defends defense cooperation agreements with Washington and New Delhi, fearful of jeopardizing its integration into imperialist economic and military frameworks.
India’s Modi government demonstrated even more abject servility. The Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement over 24 hours after the assault expressing “deep concern” but conspicuously avoiding naming the United States or condemning the military strikes. India’s response on 04 January carefully avoided naming Washington, instead calling vaguely for “all concerned to address issues peacefully through dialogue.” The Modi government’s calculation is transparent: trade negotiations with Trump, potential access to Venezuelan oil payments owed to ONGC, and strategic partnership with Washington take precedence over any principled opposition to imperialist aggression.
Pakistan’s military-dominated regime and Bangladesh’s U.S.-backed interim government maintained predictable silence, offering no statements of condemnation. Across South Asia, bourgeois nationalist parties and governments—whether presenting themselves as left-progressive, Hindu-chauvinist, or Islamist—demonstrated their organic incapacity to resist imperialism when confronted with its naked assertion of force.
This confirms Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and his analysis of the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie in dependent countries to carry forward anti-imperialist or democratic tasks. In Results and Prospects (1906) and The Permanent Revolution (1928), Trotsky demonstrated that the belated development of capitalism in backward countries produces a bourgeoisie organically tied to imperialism and landed property, terrified of independent working-class mobilization, and therefore incapable of leading struggle against foreign domination. The Pink Tide represents merely the latest chapter in Latin American bourgeois nationalism’s history of accommodation and betrayal.
Right-wing and fascistic governments went further, openly celebrating the assault. The Brazilian far-right, architects of the January 8, 2023 coup attempt in Brasília, seized on the operation to advance their own dictatorial aims under newly favorable international conditions. Trump’s threats against Colombian President Petro—“He has to watch his ass”—and declarations that Cuba and Nicaragua “will not survive” his administration signal that the Venezuela operation establishes precedent for unlimited violence throughout the hemisphere.[10]
The Counter-Revolutionary Role of the Pseudo-Left
Pseudo-left currents, reformist parties and NGOs that locate opposition to imperialism in international law, diplomatic institutions or alliances with rival capitalist powers play an objectively counter-revolutionary role. They funnel popular anger into impotent appeals and national strategies that leave capitalist property relations—and imperialist domination—fundamentally untouched.
Germany’s Left Party exemplified this tendency. While formally condemning Trump’s actions as “state terrorism,” the party directed its criticism not against imperialism but toward demanding that Europe assert its own great-power ambitions more aggressively. As the WSWS analyzed, the Left Party “criticises Chancellor Merz not from the left, but from the right,” calling for sanctions against the United States and “a concrete European plan” to counter American actions—thereby functioning as “aggressive apologists for German and European imperialism.”[11] Similar patterns emerged across pseudo-left organizations internationally, each subordinating working-class opposition to their respective national bourgeoisies’ geopolitical interests.
These tendencies propagate fatal illusions: that imperialism can be restrained through appeals to bourgeois institutions, that “multipolar” capitalist competition offers progressive alternatives, that identity politics or reformist parliamentarism can substitute for independent class struggle. As the WSWS emphasized, “the struggle against war is inseparably linked to the struggle against its cause: the capitalist system. It must be led by the working class, with the aim of building an independent political movement, overcoming capitalism and reorganising society on the basis of social needs rather than private profit.”[12]
The Domestic Dimension: War Abroad, Dictatorship at Home
The turn to militarism overseas proceeds inseparably from authoritarian consolidation domestically. The WSWS identified this essential connection: “the same illegality, the same ruthlessness, the same criminality that is expressed in the kidnapping of Maduro is expressed in the assault on democratic rights at home—the mass deportations, attacks on the press, purging of the civil service, deployment of the military against the population.”[13] Perpetual war finances and is employed to legitimize police-state measures while directing social anger outward rather than against the ruling class itself.
This pattern reflects objective necessity for the oligarchy. As Marx demonstrated, capitalism’s internal contradictions generate both external expansion and internal repression. Trump represents “a criminal oligarchy that has amassed its wealth through fraud, speculation and plunder… the chosen instrument of the American ruling class, a gangster vomited up by the oligarchy to enforce policies that can no longer be pursued through democratic or legal means.”[14] The simultaneous assault on Venezuela and acceleration of authoritarian measures domestically express unified class interests of finance capital confronting deepening crisis.
Revolutionary Tasks and the Road Forward
The assault on Venezuela demonstrates that the fight against imperialist war is inseparable from the fight against capitalism itself. Defensive measures are urgent: mobilize mass anti-war action, build rank-and-file committees in workplaces to oppose military preparations, forge international links of workers’ solidarity—especially between U.S. workers and their Latin American class brothers and sisters.
But defensive measures must connect to revolutionary perspective. The expropriation of the banks and multinationals, formation of workers’ councils and workers’ governments, construction of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to lead an international socialist alternative—these constitute the only realistic defense of oppressed nations and working people everywhere. As the WSWS stated: “The answer must be to make 2026 a year of class struggle and the development of a mass movement for socialism. The fight against war is a fight against the capitalist system that breeds it.”[15]
The objective conditions for revolutionary struggle are maturing with extraordinary rapidity. Across the United States, the kidnapping of Maduro has provoked widespread anger and concern among workers in factories and workplaces. This opposition must be organized on independent class foundations, rejecting all factions of the bourgeoisie and pseudo-lefts that secure capitalism’s rule. Latin American workers must orient not toward their “own” national bourgeoisies but toward their class brothers and sisters internationally in unified struggle to overthrow imperialism.
Only through the independent political mobilization of the international working class and the oppressed masses, armed with a Marxist program and the historical lessons embodied in the ICFI, can the descent into barbarism and annihilation be halted and the conditions created for genuine human emancipation through world socialist revolution.
References:
[1] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela! Release Maduro!” WSWS, 4 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/04/avdu-j04.html>
[2] “US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,” WSWS, 6 January 2026
[3] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/erjx-j07.html>
[4] “After Venezuela attack: White House threatens Venezuelan acting president, Cuba and Greenland,” WSWS, 5 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/05/crzb-j05.html>
[5] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] “US imperialist bandits parade kidnapped Maduro in show trial,” WSWS, 6 January 2026 , <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/zyve-j06.html>
[9] “Latin America’s bourgeois governments bow to US attack on Venezuela,” WSWS, 6 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/06/slwp-j06.html>
[10] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela!” WSWS, 4 January 2026
[11] “After Trump’s attack on Venezuela: Germany’s Left Party supports European imperialism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026, <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/07/sfqt-j07.html>
[12] Ibid.
[13] “Trump and Miller’s ‘iron law’ of imperialist barbarism,” WSWS, 7 January 2026
[14] Ibid.
[15] “Oppose Trump’s criminal invasion of Venezuela!” WSWS, 4 January 2026
US imperialism rings in the New Year with a new war
By the WSWS Editorial Board.
Reposted below is the statement of the Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, published on the same website on the 04 January 2025.
U.S. F-35 fighter jets are parked on the tarmac as military personnel walk among the aircraft at José Aponte de la Torre Airport in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Alejandro Granadillo)
The World Socialist Web Site, the Socialist Equality Party in the US and the International Committee of the Fourth International unequivocally denounce the invasion of Venezuela and the criminal abduction of President Nicolás Maduro in the early hours of Saturday morning. We demand the immediate release of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and the full withdrawal of all US troops and military forces from the region.
The invasion, which included the killing of at least 40 people, is a total repudiation by the Trump regime of any semblance of legality. It is an unprovoked war of aggression launched in flagrant violation of international law and carried out to reimpose colonial control over Venezuela and all of Latin America. This imperialist assault must be opposed by the working class in the United States and throughout the world.
Speaking at Saturday’s press conference, Trump’s “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, declared, “Welcome to 2026.” Only three days into the New Year, the assault on Venezuela is an unmistakable signal that the imperialist violence that marked 2025—in the Gaza genocide and the bombings of Lebanon, Syria and Iran—will escalate in 2026.
There is no concrete wall between foreign and domestic policy. Imperialist gangsterism beyond the borders of the United States will be accompanied by the acceleration of the conspiracy to impose a fascistic presidential dictatorship within the United States.
In his remarks at Saturday’s press conference, Trump declared that the United States would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” In the past, American imperialism sought to legitimize its wars with hypocritical invocations of democracy and human rights. Trump dispensed with pretenses. The purpose of the assault on Venezuela, he declared on Sunday, was to seize control of the country and its oil resources.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars,” Trump declared. If there is any resistance, Trump threatened a more brutal military onslaught. “We are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” Trump warned.
The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that top hedge funds and asset managers are preparing to send a delegation to Caracas in March to assess what one investor called $500–$750 billion in “investment opportunities” over the next five years.
The invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of its president are meant, as Trump put it on Saturday, as a “warning” to “anyone who would threaten American sovereignty.” Referring to his new National Security Strategy, Trump declared that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” hailing the assault as a reassertion of the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”
The immediate targets are governments in Latin America that may act against US imperialist interests. Speaking of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Trump warned in the language of a street thug, “He has to watch his ass.” The fascist Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, added: “America can project our will anywhere, anytime,” drawing a direct parallel between Venezuela and last year’s US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. “Maduro had his chance,” he sneered, “just like Iran had their chance—until they didn’t.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio—Trump’s Ribbentrop—issued his own gangster threat to the Cuban government, saying that if he were the leader of the island nation, “I’d be concerned.”
But the threats are not confined to Latin America. In addition to Venezuela and Iran, the United States bombed five additional countries last year: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and, most recently, Nigeria in December. Trump has issued threats of war against Mexico, floated the annexation of Greenland and Canada, and declared the Panama Canal “non-negotiable” for US control.
The aggressive message to China was unmistakable. Just hours before the assault, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro met with a high-level Chinese delegation led by Beijing’s Special Representative for Latin American and Caribbean Affairs, Qiu Xiaoqi, to discuss joint energy cooperation. The US raid, timed to coincide with this meeting, was an act of aggression aimed at disrupting growing ties between China and Latin America.
The actions taken by the Trump administration are not only criminal, they have the character of sheer madness. In 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, the World Socialist Web Sitewarned that American imperialism had entered into a “rendezvous with disaster. It cannot conquer the world. It cannot reimpose colonial shackles upon the masses of the Middle East. … It will not find, through the medium of war, a viable solution to its internal maladies.”
That warning was confirmed. What is now being set into motion is even more reckless—a rendezvous with catastrophe.
Trump declared on Saturday the intention to impose a dictatorship over Venezuela, proclaiming that the country will be “run” by Rubio, Hegseth and other officials in the Trump regime, as though this colonial fantasy could be imposed with a press conference. In reality, such an occupation would require the deployment of hundreds of thousands of US troops and a brutal campaign of urban warfare amid mass resistance. Trump said as much when he said he was not afraid of “boots on the ground.”
It should be recalled that the 2003 invasion of Iraq required approximately 180,000 coalition troops, including 130,000 from the United States. In total, nearly half a million US personnel were deployed across the region in support of the war effort. And Iraq, with a population smaller than Venezuela’s, was already devastated by a decade of sanctions. The scale of military occupation required to enforce the subjugation of Venezuela would rapidly spiral into a bloody, protracted conflict across all of Latin America, and indeed throughout the world.
The recklessness of the Trump government can only be understood in the context of the crisis of American imperialism. Politically, there are no doubt many calculations behind Trump’s actions, including an effort to distract from the explosive revelations surrounding the Epstein network, which has implicated top figures within the financial aristocracy and state apparatus.
But more basic issues are at stake. The United States is attempting to reverse the long-term decline of American capitalism through militarism and war. The economic foundations of US global dominance have dramatically eroded. Gold has surged past $4,300 an ounce, a de facto measure of the collapse in confidence in the dollar as a global reserve currency. The national debt has soared past $38 trillion. The seizure of Venezuela’s oil and the reassertion of American control over the Western Hemisphere are seen by the ruling class as essential to the survival of its economic and geopolitical position.
The realization of this policy will require a massive escalation of the assault on the working class. The astronomical costs of militarism and global conquest will be borne through an intensification of austerity and the destruction of what remains of vital social programs. To impose neocolonial domination abroad, the administration must also overcome mass opposition at home. The inevitable disasters flowing from this strategy will be met with even greater violence, both internationally and within the United States.
At Saturday’s press conference, Trump’s erratic remarks shifted seamlessly from boasting about the “snatch and grab” abduction of Maduro to threatening major American cities. Praising the National Guard deployments to Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Memphis and New Orleans, he declared, “They should do it with more cities.” The same “iron laws” of violence that govern US conduct abroad will be imposed on the population at home.
It is necessary to understand that Trump does not act as an individual. He is the chosen instrument of the American ruling class, a gangster elevated to power by the oligarchy to enforce policies that can no longer be pursued through democratic or legal means.
In 2025, US billionaires—roughly 900 individuals—amassed an 18 percent increase in their net worth, bringing their combined holdings to nearly $7 trillion. Ten individuals alone accounted for $750 billion of this total. Just as the German ruling class brought Hitler to power to implement policies that could not be carried out except through dictatorship, Trump serves the same function.
Notably, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, published an editorial exalting the abduction of Maduro as “one of the boldest moves a president has made in years.” The paper hailed the “unquestionable tactical success” of the military operation, called Maduro’s downfall “good news,” and praised Trump’s willingness to “follow through” where previous administrations hesitated.
The Democratic Party represents the same class and defends the same system as Trump. There will be no serious opposition from its ranks. Their differences with Trump are purely tactical, not strategic. This was made clear in the muted response to the assault on Venezuela. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries grumbled about the lack of congressional notification, while reaffirming that Maduro was “not the legitimate head of government.”
Just weeks ago, Democrats and Republicans joined together to pass a $900 billion military spending bill, in an unambiguous endorsement of the imperialist agenda now being ruthlessly enforced.
For his part, anticipating broad popular opposition, Senator Bernie Sanders issued a statement calling the action against Venezuela “illegal and unconstitutional,” but he did not propose any strategy to stop the war or call for a popular mobilization against it.
There will be a response in the working class, and not only in Venezuela and Latin America. The reimposition of colonial domination will confront immense resistance throughout the world. In the United States, polls show overwhelming opposition to a war against Venezuela. Trump’s approval rating, at just 36 percent at the end of his first year back in office, is the lowest of any president at the same point in their term in more than half a century.
Demonstrations broke out within hours of the assault on Venezuela, an initial indication of popular opposition that will expand and grow. However, the experience of the mass protests against the Gaza genocide has shown that demonstrations alone are not enough. Without a program and leadership, popular outrage is funneled back into the political structures of the capitalist state.
What is required is the conscious intervention of the working class into political struggle. The conditions for such a struggle are rapidly maturing. The war abroad is inseparable from a social counterrevolution at home—soaring inflation, AI-driven job destruction, deepening poverty, and the systematic dismantling of every democratic and social right.
The oligarchy sits atop a social powder keg. The world volcanic eruption of American imperialism will set into motion a global tsunami of class struggle. Both arise from the same contradictions of the capitalist system.
And while it is expressed most violently in the US, the same basic tendencies exist throughout the world. All the imperialist powers are now engaged in a global redivision of the world. In Europe, the major capitalist governments are undertaking the most massive rearmament campaigns since the Second World War as they clamor for war against and destroy social programs. The German ruling class is nurturing dreams of a Fourth Reich, asserting its military power across the continent and beyond.
The ruling class has made clear what they want 2026 to be: a year of unrestrained military violence. The answer must be to make 2026 a year of class struggle and the development of a mass movement for socialism.
The fight against war is, at its root, a fight against the capitalist system that breeds it. This struggle must be led by the working class, the only social force capable of ending imperialist violence and establishing genuine democracy and equality. The alternative to dictatorship and war is revolution, the building of an independent political movement to overthrow capitalism and reorganize society on the basis of social need, not private profit.
The Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International call on workers, students, and young people across the United States, throughout Latin America, and internationally: Join our ranks. Build the Socialist Equality Party in the US and the sections of the ICFI around the world. Take up the fight to unify the working class across all borders, to abolish capitalism, and to establish socialism as the foundation of a new society.
Statement by the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.
The publication of “The Socialist”, the monthly digital magazine of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), represents a politically significant development in the history of the revolutionary Marxist movement in South Asia. It marks a conscious assertion of the international revolutionary perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and a decisive break from the nationalist and opportunist practices that have undermined the development of the Trotskyist movement in Sri Lanka.
The central task confronting the SLLA is to struggle for the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class in Sri Lanka and South Asia as part of the global fight waged by the ICFI. The launching of thesocialist.lk on March 11, 2023, was an initial step in developing a consistent Marxist analysis of political, economic, and cultural developments, and in educating workers and youth in the principles and program of world socialist revolution. Following the split in the SEP-Left in July 2024 and the expulsion of the nationalist faction that had abandoned the defense of Trotskyist principles and socialist internationalism, thesocialist.lk became the theoretical organ of the SLLA. The subsequent establishment of The Socialist magazine in October 2025 represents the further political and theoretical evolution of this work. As a development beyond the website, the magazine provides a structured, monthly forum for elaborating the perspectives of the ICFI, extending their reach among the urban working class, rural youth, and oppressed masses. It signifies not merely the continuation but the deepening of the fight to build revolutionary socialist leadership in Sri Lanka and South Asia, inseparably linked to the international struggle of the ICFI for world socialist revolution.
The Socialist is not simply a new publication. It represents the crystallization of an internationalist Marxist orientation rooted in the recognition that the fight for socialism in Sri Lanka and South Asia must be grounded in the global revolutionary strategy elaborated by the ICFI. It is the conscious effort of the SLLA to reestablish the Trotskyist political line—based on the historical lessons of the struggle against Pabloism and all forms of nationalist opportunism—and to intervene in the class struggle with theoretical clarity, class independence, and revolutionary optimism.
Historical Continuity: From the WSWS to The Socialist
The launching of The Socialist is historically and politically connected to the founding of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) by the ICFI in February 1998. As David North explained at the time, the WSWS was not merely a new publication but the product of profound theoretical and political clarification that emerged from the ICFI’s struggle against the opportunism of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain.
The WSWS arose from the recognition that the globalization of capitalist production—the integration of the world economy into a single productive system—had rendered all nationally limited political programs reactionary and obsolete. The epoch of globalized capitalism required the building of a world party of socialist revolution, unified by a single international perspective and program, capable of leading the struggles of workers across all national boundaries. The traditional forms of printed party press, limited by the constraints of national distribution, were inadequate to this new historical stage. The Internet, as the most advanced means of global communication, provided the ICFI with a powerful instrument to reach, educate, and politically unify the international working class.
The decision of the SLLA to launch The Socialist as a digital magazine continues and extends this internationalist orientation. It expresses the determination to utilize the most advanced forms of communication to bring Marxist theory, historical analysis, and revolutionary strategy to the broadest layers of workers and youth—particularly those isolated from political education by material deprivation, linguistic barriers, and the decades-long betrayals of Stalinism, Maoism, and trade union bureaucracies.
The Political Meaning of the Digital Form
The digital PDF (portable document format) or other e-book format of The Socialist is not merely a technical convenience but corresponds to profound social and technological transformations. It is rooted in an understanding of the objective changes in the material conditions of communication and the class struggle.
Over the past decade, the spread of mobile Internet technology and smartphones has reached deep into Sri Lankan and South Asian society. Even in remote rural areas, millions—including working-class mothers, students, and rural youth—regularly access and share digital documents through WhatsApp and other social media platforms. Educational materials, government documents, newspapers and instant news are increasingly circulated in digital form. This represents not simply technological change but a transformation in the means by which information and ideas are disseminated and consciousness is formed.
This development provides the material foundation for the SLLA to bring the program of the ICFI directly to workers, rural youth, and the oppressed masses. The Socialist can be read and shared instantly by thousands, overcoming barriers of geography, poverty, workplace restrictions, and the limitations of traditional print distribution networks and high costs. It creates the possibility for the revolutionary program of the international working class to reach social layers that have been politically dominated for decades by bourgeois nationalism, Stalinist and Maoist parties, trade union bureaucracies, and communalist politics.
However, it must be emphasized that technology itself is not politically neutral, until it remains under the control of the bourgeoisie. The spread of digital communication is a product of capitalist development—an expression of the extraordinary productive forces created by human labor under capitalism. But these same forces, which hold immense progressive potential, remain imprisoned within the capitalist system, serving its interests. The revolutionary use of technology requires conscious political directions based on Marxist theory and the fight for the independent interests of the working class.
In this regard, The Socialist bears immense political significance: it harnesses modern technology under the guidance of the Trotskyist program to educate and mobilize the working class and oppressed masses for the socialist transformation of society. In doing so, it directly advances the SLLA’s central strategic task—the building of the Socialist Equality Party to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership—by forging a conscious revolutionary alliance between the urban working class and the rural youth, peasantry, and oppressed middle-class layers1 under the leadership of the proletariat.
The Crisis of Leadership and the Failure of the RCL/SEP
The launching of The Socialist must be situated within the historical experience of the the Socialist Equality Party and its predecessor the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) —above all, their failure to build a genuinely mass revolutionary party rooted in the working class and capable of winning the rural youth and oppressed masses to the revolutionary socialist program of the international working class. This historical deficit, rooted in political retreats and opportunist adaptations, underscores the decisive importance of The Socialist as an instrument for reestablishing the Marxist foundations of the movement and preparing a new generation for the tasks of revolutionary leadership.
During the critical period of 1987–1990—marked by mass youth upheaval in the South, civil war in the North and East, and state terror —the RCL confronted a decisive test. Despite formally defending the international program of the ICFI, the party failed to develop the necessary political and organizational strategy to reach and win over the radicalized rural youth—both Sinhala and Tamil— and oppressed layers to the Trotskyist program.
This failure was not primarily a question of tactical errors or insufficient resources. It flowed from a deeper pragmatic adaptation to the framework of national politics and a fundamental skepticism regarding the revolutionary capacity of the working class and rural masses of Sri Lanka and South Asia as a region of backward countries—a retreat from Leon Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution back toward the very Menshevik conceptions against which that theory had been elaborated. The practice of the party leadership revealed an effective abandonment of the perspective that the working class in a backward, belated capitalist country such as Sri Lanka could lead the democratic and socialist revolution, replacing it with a passive expectation that socialist revolution must first triumph in the advanced capitalist centers before the workers of Sri Lanka, India or Bangladesh, for instance, could seize power—a regression to the pre-1905 schema that Trotsky had decisively refuted through his analysis of combined and uneven development under imperialism.
The theory of Permanent Revolution, verified by the experiences of the Russian Revolution and subsequent struggles in colonial and semi-colonial countries, establishes that in countries of belated capitalist development, the democratic and national tasks historically associated with bourgeois revolutions cannot be achieved under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie in such countries arrives on the historical stage too late, bound by a thousand threads to imperialism and terrified of the revolutionary mobilization of the working class and peasantry. Only the working class, leading the rural poor and oppressed masses, and linking the struggle for democratic rights to the fight for socialism on an international scale, can resolve the fundamental problems facing society.
The RCL’s failure to orient systematically toward the radicalized rural youth—both Sinhala and Tamil—flowed from an unprincipled adaptation to the nationalist political climate dominated by petty-bourgeois movements such as the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in the South and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)2 in the North. The JVP, combining Sinhala chauvinism with violent hostility toward the working class, was able to build a mass base among disoriented and radicalized rural Sinhala youth precisely because the RCL had no sustained orientation or presence in these layers3. From 19834 onward, Sri Lankan politics and the class struggle—both in the North and South—were increasingly dominated and mediated by the unresolved Tamil national question, which the bourgeoisie exploited to divide the working class, militarize society, and suppress independent proletarian struggle. In the North and East, the RCL’s initial sympathizing with the LTTE— under the opportunist patronage of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), which pressured sections of the ICFI to adapt to bourgeois-nationalist movements—constituted a political betrayal of the Tamil youth. By endorsing the LTTE’s claim to represent a ‘liberation movement’ for national self-determination of Tamils, and supporting a separate Tamil Eelam, the RCL ceded the leadership of oppressed Tamil youth to a petty-bourgeois-nationalist organization, which fought for a bourgeois program. The WRP’s uncritical support for the LTTE prevented any examination by the RCL of the politics of the LTTE and other Tamil armed groups and thus helped to strengthen their influence among Tamil youth. Consequently, these political positions led to RCL’s failure to win Tamil youth of the North over to the revolutionary party, and, on the other hand, to earn the wrath of Sinhala rural youth of the South, who joined the JVP. In the early-1990s, the SEP leadership misleadingly claimed the ICFI’s rejection to support separatism—a 180-degree turn from the pre-1986 position—as an abandonment of the defence of the right of nations to ‘self-determination’, thus effectively refusing the essential content of this democratic right of the oppressed Tamil people. This further entrenched the loss of confidence of the Tamil youth, the poor and working people toward the SEP as a revolutionary party that could lead them to solve the national question.
This dual failure—its inability to penetrate the rural Sinhala youth and its capitulation to Tamil bourgeois nationalism—left the RCL unable to politically combat either the JVP or the LTTE, allowing both movements to fill the vacuum created by the RCL’s withdrawal from its revolutionary tasks. The consequences were bloody, and irrevocable. From the early 1990s onward, this crisis deepened, with SEP’s limited interventions—concentrated narrowly on the urban sections of the working class—being largely inadequate to gather a mass base in the working class. The traumatic legacy of JVP fascism and state terror, the massive global impact of the capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, the protracted civil war that the bourgeoisie used to polarize the working class on communal lines, the rise of postmodern and anti-Marxist currents in academia that disoriented a generation of youth, the emergence and increasing influence of petty-bourgeois pseudo-left tendencies, and the consolidation of bourgeois nationalist and racialist parties over the rural masses and oppressed middle classes through electoral and parliamentary manoevers—all of these processes further isolated and demoralized the SEP leadership, leading to a lack of political confidence in the possibility of winning the working class and the oppressed middle-class youth to the program of Marxism, thereby accelerating its drift away from the mass movement of the working class and the oppressed5.
Historical legacy of petty-bourgeois radicalism and its pressure within the FI
This retreat of the RCL—and later the SEP—must be analyzed within the broader world-historical process that prepared the ground for revisionism within the Fourth International (FI) itself.
From the third decade of the twentieth century onward, the international working class suffered a series of catastrophic defeats arising from the betrayals of Social Democracy and Stalinism: the Social Democratic betrayal of August 1914, which drowned the German November Revolution of 1918-1919 in blood; the failure of the German revolution in 1923; the defeat of the British General Strike in 1926; the catastrophic betrayal of the Chinese Revolution in 1927; and above all, the coming to power of Hitler in January 1933—a defeat that signified the definitive transformation of Stalinism into a counterrevolutionary force and necessitated the founding of the Fourth International in 1938.
The post-World War II period witnessed the temporary restabilization of world capitalism through agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam, the Marshall Plan, and the Bretton Woods system, which vastly expanded the field of operation for bourgeois nationalist movements and petty-bourgeois radical tendencies throughout the colonial world. Mao Zedong’s victory in China in 1949, achieved through peasant-based forces rather than the urban proletariat; the waves of decolonization bringing to power figures such as Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, and Nkrumah; the Cuban Revolution of 1959, where Castro’s guerrilla movement nationalized industry without a Trotskyist party or the conscious mobilization of the working class; the Vietnamese defeat of French and American imperialism under Stalinist leadership; and the proliferation of guerrilla movements throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia—all commanded enormous authority among radicalized workers, youth, and intellectuals, creating the illusion that socialism could be achieved through non-proletarian forces and rendering the Fourth International’s patient work of building revolutionary parties apparently sectarian and obsolete.
It was precisely this political climate that generated revisionist pressures within the Fourth International, culminating in Pabloism, which, as David North explains in The Heritage We Defend, represented “liquidationism all down the line”—the repudiation of the hegemony of the proletariat and the reduction of the Fourth International to a pressure group within Stalinist, Social Democratic, and bourgeois nationalist organizations, proclaiming that these forces would be compelled by objective circumstances to play a revolutionary role. The 1953 split led to the founding of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) under James P. Cannon’s leadership in defense of orthodox Trotskyism.
Vladimir Lenin giving a speech in Moscow, Leon Trotsky is in the background (1920)
Although the International Committee waged a principled and historically vindicated struggle against Pabloite liquidationism, defending the theoretical and programmatic foundations of Trotskyism and insisting on the necessity of building independent revolutionary parties of the working class, individual sections within the ICFI— the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the United States, which capitulated to Pabloism a decade later, reunifying with the Pabloites in 1963 on the basis of glorifying Castroism and thereby repudiating the entire historical and theoretical conception of socialist revolution developed by Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky; the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) and subsequently the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Sri Lanka, notwithstanding the political leaps forward achieved by the ICFI in a relentless and principled struggle against the betrayals of the opportunist leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) of Britain in late 1980s—proved vulnerable over time to the nationalist pressures and to the national consciousness of the working class and the petty-bourgeoisie, and resorted to practical adaptations to the existing political framework dominated by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces. This vulnerability manifested itself in RCL/SEP not through explicit programmatic revisionism—the party claimed to formally uphold the theory of Permanent Revolution and the Transitional Program—but rather through a growing disjuncture between the revolutionary principles embodied in official documents and the party’s concrete political practice and orientation.
The SEP leadership profoundly distorted the essential lessons drawn by the International Committee from its protracted struggle against the Workers Revolutionary Party’s national-opportunist degeneration. That struggle established that the political independence of the working class—the foundational principle of revolutionary Marxism reaffirmed through the battles against Pabloite liquidationism—demands the systematic construction of the revolutionary party as the conscious political leadership of the proletariat through active intervention in the class struggle, not the dissolution of that party into Stalinist, social democratic, or bourgeois nationalist formations. The WRP’s betrayal consisted precisely in the liquidation of independent revolutionary perspectives into adaptation to alien class forces: it subordinated sections of the Fourth International to bourgeois nationalist regimes in the Middle East and repudiated the theory of Permanent Revolution as the strategic foundation for building Trotskyist parties in the colonial and semi-colonial world. The SEP leadership, however, inverted the meaning of political independence. Where the WRP liquidated the party through opportunist alliances with non-proletarian forces, the SEP isolated the party from the working class and oppressed masses through sectarian abstention from the concrete work of party-building. They transformed political independence from a perspective demanding bold leadership in workers’ struggles—requiring systematic struggle to establish the party’s authority among workers, rural youth, plantation laborers, and the urban oppressed middle class through theoretical education combined with practical initiative in the class struggle—into a rationalization for passive propagandism divorced from systematic revolutionary work.
This gap between programmatic orthodoxy and revolutionary practice expressed itself in a retreat from the uncompromising struggle against Sinhala chauvinism, Tamil nationalism, and bureaucratic trade unionism within the workers’ movement; a failure to build the party as a genuine mass organization rooted in the factories, plantations, working-class neighborhoods, and among the radicalized rural and unemployed youth of both North and South; and an abandonment of the systematic application of the Transitional Program to the concrete conditions facing the Sri Lankan proletariat and oppressed masses. This sectarian deviation—manifesting as passive commentary upon events rather than fighting for active leadership within them—represented an opportunist adaptation to the immense pressure exerted by decades of bourgeois nationalist hegemony over the Sri Lankan masses and the apparent authority of the petty-bourgeois radical movements and trade unions. The distorted lessons rationalized the party’s retreat from its historical responsibility to forge the political alliance of the Sinhalese and Tamil working class and rural poor under the banner of international socialism, thereby abandoning the struggle to establish the political independence of the Sri Lankan proletariat from the influence of all variants of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism, and preparing the conditions for the party’s transformation into a propaganda circle incapable of leading the revolutionary struggles of the working class and oppressed rural toilers.
The Inverse form of National Opportunism of the RCL/SEP
The retreat from systematic work to build a mass revolutionary party among the rural youth and oppressed masses expressed, at its core, skepticism about the validity and applicability of the theory of Permanent Revolution to the conditions of Sri Lanka and South Asia. This erosion of perspective led not merely to tactical errors but to a profound strategic regression. In place of an active struggle to forge the political unity of the working class with the oppressed rural and middle layers under a single internationalist program, the leadership lapsed into passive propagandism—issuing programmatically orthodox statements in a ritualistic manner that substituted abstract formulations for concrete revolutionary practice—and thereby revealed a fundamentally sectarian character, divorcing Marxist theory and positions from its necessary embodiment in systematic intervention in the class struggle. The opportunist leadership which abandoned theoretical principles in practice, exposed its sectarian character by hiding behind theoretical orthodoxy, while refusing to engage in the concrete work of building the party among the masses.
Such a retreat constituted and opened the door to opportunist adaptations to the political environment dominated by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces—a tendency that can be referred to as the inverse form6 of national opportunism, a type of passive opportunism peculiar to the leadership of a revolutionary party of a country of belated capitalist development. In practice, it meant yielding the initiative to the very revisionist and nationalist tendencies—shaped by decades of Stalinist, Maoist, Pabloite, and petty-bourgeois radical betrayals—that had disoriented and fragmented the revolutionary movement internationally. By abandoning a determined and irreconcilable struggle to apply the theory of Permanent Revolution to the concrete conditions of Sri Lanka, the SEP leadership steadily isolated itself from the working class and the oppressed masses, forfeiting their political confidence and, thereby perpetuating its own stagnation and compounding its political degeneration and internal putrefaction.
The SEP’s inadequate intervention in working-class struggles— in the backdrop of growing intensification of class struggles in Sri Lanka and South Asia as part of an international phenomenon—flowed from its retreat from systematic struggle to build independent revolutionary organization in the factories, plantations, and workplaces. The trade union bureaucracy—controlled by bourgeois and reformist parties that subordinate workers to nationalist politics—functions as the organizational instrument through which the nationalist political climate dominates the working class. The SEP’s historical failure to build revolutionary alternatives—independent rank-and-file action committees— in the workplaces meant workers remained under the ideological and organizational stranglehold of these bureaucratic apparatuses, which systematically block unified, independent class action and reinforce reformist illusions and ethnic divisions. This is a further manifestation of inverse opportunism: not adaptation to the bureaucracy through collaboration, but accommodation to its dominance through the failure to wage patient, systematic revolutionary work among the workers themselves.
The Theoretical and Political Foundations of the SLLA
The SLLA was formed precisely to overcome this legacy of nationalist opportunism and political passivity. Its work is based on a return to the fundamental principles of Trotskyism—the theory of Permanent Revolution, proletarian internationalism, and the necessity of building the independent revolutionary party of the working class.
Central to this work is the understanding that the socialist revolution in Sri Lanka cannot be completed within a national framework. The Sri Lankan economy, like all economies in the epoch of imperialism, is integrated into the world capitalist system. The crises confronting workers and oppressed masses—economic collapse, social inequality, authoritarian rule—are manifestations of the global crisis of capitalism. Their resolution requires the international unity of the working class and the overthrow of capitalism on a world scale.
This means that the fight for socialism in Sri Lanka is inseparable from the struggles of workers in India, throughout South Asia, and internationally. It requires breaking the working class from all forms of nationalism—Sinhala, Tamil, or any other communal identity—and uniting workers across ethnic, religious, and national lines on the basis of common class interests.
It also requires forging a revolutionary alliance between the urban working class and the rural poor, agricultural workers, impoverished peasants, and oppressed middle-class layers. This is not a question of tailoring the socialist program to accommodate the prejudices or limited outlook of these layers, but of systematically explaining how their fundamental interests can only be achieved through socialist revolution led by the working class.
The rural masses in Sri Lanka and South Asia face deepening immiseration—landlessness, indebtedness, destruction of traditional livelihoods, and rural unemployment. These are not isolated “rural problems” but expressions of the crisis of world capitalism and the subordination of agriculture to the profit interests of agribusiness monopolies and imperialism. The solution lies not in nationalist or populist programs of land reform or rural development within capitalism, but in the socialist reorganization of agriculture as part of a rationally planned economy under workers’ control.
Similarly, educated youth from rural and small-town backgrounds—products of the expansion of public education who confront unemployment, poverty wages, and social dead-ends—represent a potentially revolutionary force. The recent Gen-Z protest movements testified to their revolutionary potential. Without the intervention of a revolutionary party armed with Marxist theory, this discontent and radicalism is channeled into reactionary nationalist, religious fundamentalist, or fascistic movements, as history has repeatedly demonstrated.
The SLLA’s orientation to these layers is not based on romantic glorification of the peasantry or petty-bourgeoisie—the hallmark of Maoist, populist, and Pabloite revisionism. It is based on sober Marxist analysis: these layers, objectively ruined by capitalism and incapable of independent political action, can play a progressive historical role only under the leadership of the working class and its revolutionary party, fighting for a socialist program.
The Socialist as an Instrument of Revolutionary Education
The Socialist is a central instrument in this political reorientation. By systematically disseminating the perspectives of the ICFI, historical analyses of past struggles, and Marxist analysis of contemporary political and economic developments, it aims to educate a new generation of revolutionary cadre and raise the political consciousness of broader layers of workers and youth.
The magazine’s digital format ensures that this material reaches precisely those layers the RCL and SEP failed to reach systematically—rural youth, oppressed middle-class layers, and workers isolated from traditional centers of political organization. Through The Socialist and theSocialist.lk the SLLA works to:
Clarify the class nature of the economic and social crises confronting the masses and expose the bankruptcy of all nationalist, populist, and reformist solutions;
Educate workers and youth in the historical lessons of the struggle for Trotskyism—particularly the fight against Pabloism and the defense of the theory of Permanent Revolution;
Analyze contemporary political developments, mainly of Sri Lanka and other countries of South Asia, from the standpoint of the interests of the international working class;
Counter the influence of bourgeois, Stalinist, and petty-bourgeois pseudo-left ideologies;
Build political bridges between the revolutionary party (SEP) and the broader masses of the oppressed classes.
This is not propaganda in the abstract sense, divorced from the living class struggle. It is education combined with revolutionary intervention—the development of Marxist consciousness as an essential component of building the revolutionary party and preparing the working class for the seizure of power.
Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Revolutionary Education
The rapid development of Internet technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI)—more accurately understood as augmented intelligence— presents both opportunities and challenges for the revolutionary movement. AI systems—products of collective human labor and scientific knowledge accumulated over generations—express the enormous productive capacities developed under capitalism. However, like all productive forces under capitalism, in the hands of the capitalist class, they exist in contradiction with the social relations of private property and are employed primarily for profit extraction, automate jobs to increase unemployment and drive down wages, conduct mass surveillance, and generate sophisticated propaganda. The tech monopolies that control AI development guard their systems as private property, extracting enormous profits while workers who produce the data and perform the labor that makes AI possible are driven into poverty.
For the revolutionary movement, advances in AI technology have opened a new epoch in revolutionary education, translation, archiving, international communication, and organization. These tools make possible the rapid translation of ICFI documents into multiple languages, support deep historical research and rigorous analysis, and vastly expand the capacity to disseminate Marxist literature to workers and youth across the globe.
However, the use of AI technology must be under the conscious direction and intervention of the revolutionary party, guided by Marxist theory, not subordinated to the logic of capitalist technology companies or based on techno-utopian illusions. The decisive factor is not the technology itself but the political program and class perspective that guides its use.
The SLLA’s use of digital publication for The Socialist is thus part of a broader Marxist approach: utilizing advanced productive forces developed by human labor to advance the consciousness and organization of the working class for the revolutionary transformation of society.
It is on this perspective that the SLLA welcomes the launch of “Socialism AI,” the artificial-intelligence platform developed by the ICFI as a decisive and enormous advance in the political education and intellectual arming of the international working class7.
Building the World Party: Internationalism in Practice
The Socialist must be understood as part of the world press of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Its initial publication in Sinhala is another important step in building the revolutionary press that transcends national and linguistic divisions. Future editions in Tamil and English will extend its reach throughout South Asia, strengthening the political unity of the working class across ethnic and national lines.
The fundamental principle remains that stated by Trotsky in ‘Open Letter for the Fourth International: To All Revolutionary Working-Class Organizations and Groups’ (1935): “Under all conditions, especially during a revolution, it is impermissible to turn one’s back upon the toilers for the sake of a bloc with the bourgeoisie. It is impossible to expect and demand that the duped and disillusioned masses will fly to take up arms upon the belated call of a party in which they have lost confidence. The proletarian revolution is not improvised by the orders of a bankrupt leadership. The revolution must be prepared through incessant and irreconcilable class struggle, which gains for the leadership the unshakable confidence of the party, fuses the vanguard with the entire class, and transforms the proletariat into the leader of all the exploited in the city and countryside.”
This means, in accordance with the theory of Permanent Revolution and its application to the conditions prevailing in Sri Lanka and throughout South Asia:
Recognizing that in countries of belated capitalist development such as Sri Lanka, the bourgeoisie has demonstrated its absolute incapacity to resolve the fundamental democratic tasks—the national question, the agrarian/peasant/land question, and the establishment of genuine social and democratic rights. Only the working class, leading the oppressed rural masses, can achieve these historically necessary transformations, which must inevitably grow over into the socialist revolution.
Rejecting categorically all conceptions of intermediate stages between bourgeois rule and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Between the Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe regime and workers’ power, between the bankrupt programs of the JVP, Front Line Socialist Party (FSP) and pseudo-left, and the revolutionary Marxist program of the ICFI, there exists no middle ground. The alliance of the working class with the peasantry, the rural toilers and the oppressed middle-classes can be realized only through irreconcilable struggle against the influence of the national bourgeoisie and all forms of petty-bourgeois nationalism.
Exposing the reactionary and historically exhausted character of all nationalist ideologies—Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism, Tamil nationalism, and every variety of communalism and identity politics—as programmes that subordinate the working class to rival factions of the capitalist class and imperialism, thereby blocking the path to the resolution of both the democratic and socialist tasks.
Understanding that the democratic demands of the masses—for national equality, land reform, an end to autocratic rule, and social justice—cannot be separated from the struggle for socialist revolution. In the epoch of capitalist decay, democratic slogans, transitional demands, and the problems of the socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical epochs but stem directly from one another. The slogans for the democratic aspirations of the masses, must be indissolubly connected to the struggle for workers’ power and the expropriation of capitalist property.
Forging the unity of Sri Lankan workers with Indian workers and the working class throughout South Asia and internationally, on the basis of a common revolutionary program. The tasks confronting the Sri Lankan working class—from resisting IMF austerity to defending democratic rights—are inseparable from the struggles of workers across the region against their own exploiters and the global system of imperialism.
Building the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) and the sections of the ICFI throughout South Asia as genuine mass revolutionary parties—rooted in the working class, leading the rural masses and oppressed middle classes, armed with the programme of Permanent Revolution and the Transitional Programme—capable of leading the coming revolutionary struggles to victory under conditions of deepening imperialist crisis and intensifying class struggle.
The tens of thousands of youth who have recently demonstrated through the Aragalaya in Sri Lanka and similar mass movements in Bangladesh, Nepal and elsewhere their readiness to challenge corrupt regimes must be won to an understanding that their democratic and social aspirations can be realized only through the socialist revolution led by the working class. This requires the patient development of socialist consciousness through systematic political education, theoretical clarification, and the building of revolutionary organization—not capitulation to spontaneism, petty-bourgeois radicalism, or the illusion that the masses can achieve their aims without overthrowing capitalism and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
A Return to Permanent Revolution
The launching of The Socialist marks a conscious political correction of the nationalist deviations that undermined the work of the RCL and SEP. It expresses renewed confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the working class and oppressed masses in these countries, based not on wishful thinking but on Marxist analysis of the objective crisis of world capitalism and the necessity of socialist revolution. The fight against the inverse form of national opportunism requires not simply an organizational turn to intense daily work in the class struggle, but first and foremost a definite and conscious return to the programme of permanent revolution and the principles upon which the Fourth International was founded.
By employing digital technology to overcome barriers between urban and rural, between different linguistic communities, between the working class and oppressed middle-class layers, the SLLA works to realize in practice the Marxist conception that socialist revolution is an international process uniting all oppressed layers under the leadership of the proletariat and its revolutionary party.
The Socialist, along with theSocialist.lk website, thus stands as both a theoretical and practical instrument in the fight to build the ICFI sections in South Asia, educate a new generation of Trotskyist cadre, and prepare the working class for the revolutionary struggles that will decide the future of humanity. It reaffirms the living continuity of Trotskyism in the twenty-first century and represents a decisive step forward in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership in Sri Lanka and South Asia.
Join SLLA! Build SEP!
ICFI Political Chronology 1982-1991, A letter from David North to Keerthi Balasuriya, 25 September 1987. ↩︎
“The LSSP’s degeneration had profound political consequences. By abandoning the struggle to unify workers on a socialist perspective, the LSSP left the working class and oppressed masses with no alternative to communalist politics and directly contributed to the rise of racially-based organisations—petty bourgeois formations such as the LTTE and the Sinhala chauvinist JVP in the south.” Wije Dias, ‘The Socialist Equality Party in Sri Lanka replies to a supporter of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’, WSWS (29 September 2000) https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/09/ltte-s29.html ↩︎
ICFI Political Chronology 1982-1991, Contribution by David North at RCL Congress, 6-9 November 1990. ↩︎
The state-sponsored anti-Tamil pogrom took place at the end of July 1983, which triggered the intensification of racist civil war that lasted till May 2009. ↩︎
A forthcoming series of essays by the SLLA will illustrate these historical truths in greater detal. ↩︎
This retreat into adaptation to the national political climate, in place of building independent revolutionary leadership of the masses, constitutes an inverse form of opportunism because this peculiar tendency manifests specifically in revolutionary leadership of backward countries—countries of belated capitalist development where the bourgeoisie, arriving late to the historical stage under imperialist domination, proves organically incapable of resolving the democratic tasks (national independence, agrarian revolution, democratic rights, resolution of national oppression) that it accomplished in classical bourgeois revolutions. Sri Lanka exemplifies such a backward country in Trotsky’s theoretical sense: capitalist development occurred under colonial subjugation and continues under neo-colonial subordination to imperialism and the world market; the national bourgeoisie, tied to imperialism and terrified of the masses, cannot resolve the Tamil national question, the agrarian/peasant/land question, or establish genuine democracy and independence. These unresolved democratic questions consequently dominate the political terrain, creating conditions where, as Trotsky demonstrated, democratic and socialist tasks interpenetrate rather than separating into historical stages. Under these specific conditions—exemplified throughout South Asia—inverse opportunism emerges as a systematic pattern: the revolutionary party retreats from building systematic organization among radicalized rural youth (allowing the JVP and LTTE to dominate); retreats from systematic intervention in working-class struggles (leaving workers under the stranglehold of trade union bureaucracies controlled by bourgeois and reformist parties that enforce ethnic divisions and reformist illusions); and oscillates between opportunist adaptation to petty-bourgeois nationalist movements and sectarian isolation from the democratic struggles of the masses. In each manifestation, the common thread is the failure to wage patient, systematic revolutionary work to build independent proletarian leadership—a retreat that accommodates the nationalist political climate not through active collaboration with opportunist forces, but through organizational passivity that allows bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendencies to dominate the working class and oppressed masses. National opportunism is the abandonment of proletarian, international strategy in favour of alliances and political reliance upon bourgeois, petty‑bourgeois or nationalist forces inside a given country or region. In the case of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) under Healy, Banda and later Slaughter, degeneration into this took concrete form as a consistent substitution of proletarian independence by collaboration with bourgeois regimes, nationalists and even reactionary state actors. ↩︎
In order to enhance Socialism AI with the complete historical record of the political work of the RCL/SEP, the SLLA proposes to feed the system with digital copies of the complete volumes of Kamkaru Mawatha, the propaganda newspaper of the RCL/SEP published from 1972 to 1998 . ↩︎
WSWS, “A fresh lesson: The end of the Detroit newspaper strike and the crisis of the labor movement”: “The bureaucracy itself is a privileged, upper-middle class social layer. Because it is tied to the capitalist system, it seeks to conceal from the working class the real nature of this system and the position of workers within it.” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2001/01/iwb-j04.html↩︎
This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site on 13 November 2025.
German Interior Minister Boris Pistorius (second left) and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier view recruits taking part in the ceremonial pledge, as a central event to mark the 70th anniversary of the Bundeswehr (German army) in front of the Federal Chancellery in Berlin, Germany on Wednesday, November 12, 2025. [AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi]
The solemn oath-taking ceremony in front of the Reichstag (parliament) and the speeches by Defence Minister Boris Pistorius and Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (both Social Democrats, SPD) on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) recalled the darkest days of German militarism. They underscored the disastrous traditions and war aims to which German imperialism is once again returning.
Significantly, on the very same day, the governing parties agreed on a new military service law providing for the compulsory registration of all young men—aimed at drafting the necessary cannon fodder for new imperialist wars.
Eighty years after the downfall of the Third Reich and the greatest crimes in human history, the military once again dominates the German capital. In a martial display—shielded from the public—280 recruits marched between the Reichstag and the Chancellery and were solemnly sworn in. The spectacle was shown live on state broadcaster ZDF and celebrated in the news programmes, with the obvious goal of spreading the poison of militarism throughout the population. Public oath-taking ceremonies like this have their origins in Prussian militarism, which were expanded under the Kaiser’s Empire and then elevated to a quasi-religious cult under the Nazis.
In their ceremonial addresses, Pistorius and Steinmeier sought to obscure the historical roots of the Bundeswehr. “From the shadows of our history has emerged an army, a special army that is fundamentally different from all its predecessors,” claimed Pistorius, describing the force as “firmly anchored in democracy, committed to law and freedom.”
This portrayal is as false today as it was at the Bundeswehr’s official founding on November 12, 1955—only 10 years after the capitulation of Hitler’s Army, the Wehrmacht, the greatest killing machine in history. Tellingly, at that time the army was still called the “new Wehrmacht.” It was not until 1956 that it was officially renamed the Bundeswehr—and the name reflected its purpose. Of the 44 generals and admirals appointed by 1957, all came from Hitler’s Wehrmacht, most from the General Staff of the Army. By 1959, of 14,900 career officers, 12,360 were from the Wehrmacht and 300 even from the SS leadership corps.
Military historian Wolfram Wette wrote in 2011 that this personal continuity had “heavily burdened the internal life of the army” and that “for a long time there existed not an unbroken, but nevertheless dominant tendency to orient itself toward the traditions before 1945.”
This development intensified after German reunification 35 years ago. As early as 1991, a general declared: “Everything must be oriented toward the Bundeswehr’s warfighting capability.” What followed were worldwide military interventions—in Kosovo, Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa—which, in alliance with the leading NATO powers, reduced entire regions to rubble.
Today, the orientation to the traditions of the Wehrmacht is no longer a “tendency” but official policy. German imperialism is systematically preparing for a major war against Russia and has launched the largest rearmament programme since Hitler. Pistorius made the direction unmistakably clear during the anniversary ceremony: Germany must now “act decisively and without hesitation,” radically expanding “finances, equipment, and infrastructure” and aligning the Bundeswehr with “national and alliance defence”—a euphemism for the creation of an army for total war.
At the Bundeswehr Conference a week earlier, Chancellor Friedrich Merz (Christian Democrat, CDU), Pistorius and General Inspector Carsten Breuer, the most senior military brass, left no doubt about their megalomaniacal plans, which workers and youth will be made to pay for—with their social and democratic rights, and ultimately with their lives.
Merz once again demanded that the Bundeswehr become “the strongest conventional army in the European Union, as befits a country of our size and responsibility.” Breuer spelled out the dimensions this would entail: “460,000 soldiers—that is the framework we ultimately have to reach.” This would not only make Germany’s army the largest in Europe but would openly break the Two Plus Four Treaty, in which Germany pledged to limit its military to a maximum of 340,000 soldiers and to renounce nuclear weapons—something now openly questioned in government and media circles.
Breuer made unmistakably clear where this path leads: toward war, destruction and death. It is about soldiers “fighting at the front line. That’s what it’s about. It’s about the sharp end.” At the end of his war speech, he declared: “For a Bundeswehr that fights successfully … for Fight Tonight, for 2029 and 2039, for a combat-ready Bundeswehr.”
The new/old bogeyman is Russia—the same power against which the German military waged two world wars in the 20th century. Under the Nazis, it carried out a barbaric war of annihilation that killed at least 27 million Soviet citizens and culminated in the Holocaust. It is the declared aim of Breuer and the government to once again be ready by 2029 to wage war against this strategically central, resource-rich nuclear power.
Pistorius reaffirmed plans to raise the defence budget to “around €153 billion by 2029.” Added to this are hundreds of billions in war-ready infrastructure from the €1 trillion in war credits already approved. “Infrastructure is essential for our defence capability,” emphasised the defence minister, calling for “reinforced transport routes,” “efficient depots, barracks, training grounds and logistical hubs.”
The central task is the deployment of NATO and Bundeswehr troops to the eastern flank. Pistorius proudly announced the permanent stationing of Panzer Brigade 45 in Lithuania: “The message must be: Germany leads the way—as a pace-setter among European nations.” For the 5,000 soldiers stationed there, he said, “we need modern equipment and capabilities in all dimensions—not for storage, but for our men and women on the ground.”
This has nothing to do with “freedom” or “democracy” but with the old imperialist great-power interests: German dominance over Europe and the violent enforcement of its economic and geopolitical goals in Eastern Europe and against Russia. The reactionary Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was deliberately provoked by the leading NATO powers to push through an agenda of total militarisation and war preparation.
Pistorius stated openly that militarisation must encompass society as a whole: “We wanted and still want to make the Bundeswehr more visible throughout the country.” For the 70th anniversary, he said, this visibility was being brought “back to the capital as an expression and recognition of 70 years of readiness, performance, and loyalty.”
That German militarism can once again raise its head so aggressively is due to the fact that all the establishment parties support the war course. Alongside the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose militarist agenda the government is in practice implementing, the Greens and the Left Party have also demonstratively backed the Bundeswehr.
Left Party spokesperson Ulrich Thoden thanked the troops for their contribution to the “stability and defence of democracy.” Green Party politician Sara Nanni enthused about a new “warmth” between the army and the population and wished the troops “courageous politicians who want to hear plain speaking—who stand by the troops and this country.” The Left Party and the Greens had already joined the governing parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, in approving the war credits in both chambers of parliament.
The only party that opposes German militarism and the pro-war policy, and which gives expression to the widespread opposition among workers and youth, is the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP). It advances the only realistic perspective to prevent a third world war: the building of an independent socialist movement of the international working class, which will overthrow the capitalist profit system—the root of war and fascism.
Class Foundations—The Objective Crisis and the Betrayal of fake Leaderships
By Sanjaya Jayasekera.
We publish here Part 2 of a series examining the global wave of Gen Z protests, the deepening crisis of revolutionary leadership, and the necessity of fighting for the program of socialist internationalism on the basis of Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.Part 1 was published on November 6, 2025 here.
The social crisis driving these predominantly youth-led uprisings is rooted in objective contradictions of global capitalism that no regime change can resolve.
Social Crises
Youth unemployment has reached catastrophic levels: 67 percent in Kenya, 20 percent in Nepal, with similar or worse figures across the former colonial world. In Bangladesh, even university graduates faced a quota system designed to limit access to the few available government positions, which was proposed to privilege Awami League political patronage networks. This educated but jobless generation confronts a future of permanent precarity, unable to secure even the modest middle-class existence their degrees once promised. Reportedly, by end of the 2022 fiscal year, more than 1,700 young Nepalis left the country daily to seek work in the Middle East or Southeast Asia, with peak periods seeing over 2,300 daily departures. Between 2008–09 and 2021–22, a total of 10,666 Nepali migrant workers died in foreign labour destinations, according to the Nepal Labour Migration Report 2022.1
Thousands of protesters gather at the EDSA People Power Monument to rally against government corruption, in suburban Mandaluyong, east of Manila, Sunday Sept. 21, 2025. [AP Photo/Basilio Sepe]
The cost-of-living crisis has made basic survival a daily struggle for hundreds of millions. Food, fuel, and medicine prices have exploded, driven by supply chain disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic warfare accompanying the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine, and the austerity policies dictated by international finance capital. In Sri Lanka, families waited in kilometer-long queues for rice and cooking gas. In the Philippines, catastrophic flooding—itself a product of climate change and the profit-mad real estate speculation that has created sprawling shantytowns without infrastructure—killed scores in 2025, one of the deadliest typhoon seasons on record. The flooding, and the human misery that it causes, are fundamentally the fault of capitalism, not corruption, which is undoubtedly widespread in the ruling circles. Corruption is the product of the nexus between big business, government and the state apparatus, the components of capitalism.
Behind these catastrophic conditions for the masses stands an obscene concentration of wealth at the opposite pole of society. While hundreds of millions confront destitution, billionaire wealth surged by $2 trillion in 2024 alone—equivalent to $5.7 billion per day—growing at triple the rate of 2023. The combined wealth of the world’s billionaires reached $15 trillion, with four new billionaires “minted” every week. In the United States, the ten richest individuals saw their wealth increase six-fold since March 2020, with Elon Musk’s fortune exploding from $33 billion to $469 billion—a fourteen-fold increase that recently culminated in a $1 trillion pay package placing his compensation at $50 million per hour, or three million times the starting wage at a Tesla factory2. This accumulation is inextricably bound to the systematic plundering of the low-and middle-income countries. Most damning is the systematic transfer of value from the poorest countries—the centre of Gen-Z protests—to the super-rich of the major imperialist countries: the financial system extracted $30 million per hour in 2023 from these countries to the richest 1 per cent of the imperialist centers3. Global public debt reached $102 trillion in 2024, with low-income countries—predominantly in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean—paying out a record $921 billion in interest to banks, hedge funds and asset managers, a net outflow that exceeded new income by $25 billion4. Some 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest payments to financial parasites than on health and education combined, with 61 countries devoting at least 10 percent of government revenues to servicing debt. The mechanisms of extraction have shifted: private creditors—BlackRock managing $10 trillion, Vanguard $8 trillion, State Street $4 trillion—now hold 61 percent of the external debt of low- and middle-income countries, extracting 39 percent of all external debt payments between 2020-2025, while borrowing costs for poor countries remain two to four times higher than for the United States.5
As David North observed as early as in 19926, “Not even at the height of its glory did the British Empire possess even a fraction of the power over its colonial subjects that the modern institutions of world imperialism such as the World Bank, the IMF, GATT and the EC routinely exercise over the supposedly independent states of Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.”7 Meanwhile, according to World Bank data, the number of people living in poverty—approximately 3.5 billion—has barely changed since 1990, and at current growth rates with persistent inequality, ending poverty will take over a century8. This vast polarization is not the result of “policy choices” that could be reversed within capitalism, as liberal reformists claim, but expresses the fundamental law of capitalist accumulation that Marx identified 150 years ago: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.9” The Gen-Z uprisings erupt from this irreconcilable contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation—a contradiction that can be resolved only through the expropriation of the financial oligarchy and the reorganization of economic life under workers’ control.
Trapped in debt burden
As stated, behind the immediate social crises stands the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the primary instrument through which imperialism (domination of finance capital) enforces debt peonage on former colonies. The IMF’s structural adjustment programs, supported by the World Bank, demand the same savage prescriptions everywhere: tax increases on workers and the poor, slashed spending on education and healthcare, privatization of public assets, deregulation to benefit foreign corporations, and currency devaluations that enrich finance capital while impoverishing the masses. When Kenya’s Finance Bill 2024 proposed new levies and taxes, when Sri Lanka’s government defaulted on foreign debt, when Bangladesh’s government cut subsidies—these were not isolated national decisions but directives from Wall Street and the IMF.
The debt crisis afflicting countries where Gen-Z protest movements sprouted reveals the IMF’s hand in systematic extraction of wealth from the former colonial world. Sri Lanka stands at the precipice with a government debt-to-GDP ratio of 96.1 percent in 2024, which is projected to be at 102 percent by the end of 202510, following its 2022 default and subsequent IMF-mandated restructuring that reduced living standards catastrophically, under both presidents, Wickremasinghe and Dissanayake. Kenya’s public debt burden reached 67.8 percent of GDP ($91.3 billion) by June 202511, substantially exceeding the IMF’s average 50 percent threshold for developing countries12, with debt service consuming 67.1 percent of revenues as of May 202413—a staggering burden that directly precipitated the Finance Bill 2024 protests. Bangladesh’s relatively lower government debt ratio of 31.6-32.2 percent of GDP (2023-2024)14 masks the structural adjustment pressures that drove the 2024 uprising, while Nepal’s debt stood at 47.87 percent of GDP in 202415, with projections showing continued increases driven by infrastructure spending and limited revenue mobilization.
The Philippines exemplifies how debt peonage operates even in so-called “emerging economies,” with government debt reaching 60.7 percent of nominal GDP in December 202416, and interest payments rising to 6 percent of GDP in the first Quarter of 202517. Peru maintains a lower debt ratio of 32.7-32.8 percent of GDP as of 202418, yet faces IMF pressure for fiscal consolidation despite economic contraction. Madagascar’s debt burden is estimated to be 51.27 percent of GDP in 2025 and projected to be at 54.64 percent by 2028, with nearly 70 percent of public debt being external and held by official creditors19. Morocco’s debt declined from a pandemic peak 71.5 percent to 67.7-70 percent of GDP in 202420 through aggressive fiscal consolidation that has squeezed living standards.
The African nations of Tanzania, Cameroon, and Nigeria show debt ratios of 41.8 percent, 39.6 percent, and 41.3 percent of GDP respectively in 202421. These figures obscure the reality that Africa’s median public debt stands at 65 percent of GDP, with 25 African countries carrying excess debt or facing high risk of debt distress, and over 60 countries spending more than 10% of government revenue on interest payments alone22. More critically, the composition of African debt has shifted dramatically, with commercial debt now accounting for 43 percent of total debt, up from 20 percent in 2000, meaning debt service costs have exploded even as headline ratios appear manageable23. This debt architecture—whether the crushing burdens in Sri Lanka and Kenya or the “moderate” levels in Sub-Saharan Africa—serves a single function: the subordination of national economies to imperialism’s financial diktat, enforced through IMF structural adjustment programs that demand austerity, privatization, and the destruction of social programs while debt service claims an ever-larger share of government revenues.
Class Composition
The class composition of the Gen-Z movements reveals both their revolutionary potential and the mechanism of their betrayal. University students and unemployed youth provide the initial spark and often the most militant contingent. Their energy, courage, and willingness to confront state violence are undeniable. In Bangladesh, students faced down military units, confronting ruthless government attacks that killed close to a thousand and five hundred protesters; in Kenya, youth stormed parliament; in Nepal, protesters set government buildings ablaze. Yet this student vanguard, drawn predominantly from middle-class backgrounds, cannot provide independent political leadership for the fundamental transformation of society.
The decisive social force is the working class, whose participation in these movements demonstrates its latent power. In Sri Lanka, two one-day general strikes showed worker solidarity with the protesting youth, for whose defence the workers rushed to the main protest site in Colombo when they were attacked by government sponsored thugs on May 9, 2022. In Kenya, following the initial Gen-Z protests, wave after wave of strikes erupted: teachers, civil servants, healthcare workers, airport staff, university lecturers—all protesting low wages, precarious conditions, and privatization. Bangladesh’s garment workers, who produce billions of dollars in exports under brutal exploitation, participated in the protests even as their trade unions worked to demobilize them.
Union Treachery
Yet the working class was systematically prevented from transforming these uprisings into a conscious revolutionary movement for socialism. The critical mechanism of this betrayal was the role of trade union bureaucracies and pseudo-left organizations that function as police forces for the bourgeois order within the workers’ movement.
In Kenya, the trade union federations—the Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU), the Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT), and the Kenya Union of Post-Primary Education Teachers (KUPPET)—all worked to isolate and defeat strikes that followed the Gen-Z uprising.24 When teachers launched strikes demanding salary increases and opposing austerity, KNUT and KUPPET leaders negotiated sellout agreements with the Ruto government, accepting minimal wage increases while abandoning demands around privatization and working conditions. These same union bureaucrats had maintained their positions through the entire period of IMF-dictated austerity, revealing that their function is not to represent workers but to police their struggles within limits acceptable to capital.
In Sri Lanka, the trade unions played an even more directly counterrevolutionary role. During the 2022 uprising demanding Rajapaksa’s resignation, they called two limited one-day general strikes on April 28 and May 6, a response to mass protests and to contain worker discontent over the labor bureaucracy. But having allowed millions of workers to demonstrate their strength, the union leaders worked frantically to prevent this power from being consolidated into an independent political challenge to capitalism. They refused to call further strikes, opposed the formation of action committees independent of union control, and channeled the movement toward demands for an “interim government” promoted by the bourgeois parliamentary opposition—the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), and supported by FSP, that would stabilize bourgeois rule. When health workers launched militant strikes,25 the unions worked with the government to suppress them.
In Bangladesh, where garment workers constitute a massive proletarian force producing billions in exports, the trade union federations collaborated26 directly in suppressing worker mobilizations. Even as tens of thousands of garment workers joined the protests against the Hasina government, their unions worked to prevent factory occupations, general strikes, or any independent working-class political intervention. After Hasina’s fall, when garment workers demanded wage increases and better conditions, the unions collaborated with the military-backed Yunus regime to enforce “order” in the factories.27
This pattern reflects the class nature of the trade union bureaucracy. These officials enjoy salaries, privileges, and positions far above those of rank-and-file workers.28 They are integrated into the capitalist state apparatus through labor ministries, tripartite commissions (union-company-government), and corporatist structures.29 Their material interests lie not with the working class they nominally represent30 but with preserving the system that grants them their privileged position.31 The WSWS analysis is definitive: “On these economic and political foundations—financial investments and direct subsidies from the capitalist state—rests a very privileged petty-bourgeois layer which constitutes the bureaucracy of the official unions. The invocation of definitions such as ‘workers organization’ in relation to this corrupt apparatus only serves to conceal its real social character and the deep-going class antagonisms between it and the working class.”32
The Reactionary Left
Alongside the union bureaucracy operates a network of reactionary left organizations whose function is to provide political cover for this betrayal. These groups—Stalinist, Maoist, various ex-Trotskyist renegades and the pseudo-left tendencies33—present themselves as radical alternatives while systematically blocking the emergence of genuine revolutionary working-class leadership.
In Kenya, the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) and the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya (CPM-K) played critical roles in containing the radicalized Gen-Z uprising.34 The RSL, while using revolutionary rhetoric, promoted the very “leaderless”, “no banners”, “no politics” character of the movement that only prevented working-class independent political intervention. Giving left cover to political confusion that benefited the bourgeoisie, Ezra Otieno, a leader of the RSL, said “…this is a good tactic not to have leaders emerging for now, because the government is actively looking for leaders. […] As the RSL, we go there with a purpose, because we must be in solidarity with the masses—we fully agree with what they say. So we go to the streets, we try to organise our people. When joining in, we do not carry banners as people just go without anything, to move around.”35
CPM-K Politburo [Photo: @CommunistsKe]
The CPM-K’s core political orientation centers on defending Kenya’s 2010 Constitution—a document its predecessor, the CPK, helped to draft—while promoting the reformist illusion that implementing its supposedly “progressive articles” will somehow ‘inevitably’ lead to socialism.36 This constitution was drafted by the ruling class with extensive funding from Britain and the United States precisely to stabilize capitalist rule after the 2007 post-election violence. By channeling mass anger into defense of this bourgeois legal framework, the CPM-K ensures that the struggle remains confined within capitalism.
In the Philippines, the pattern of fake-left betrayal reaches its most explicit and politically instructive form. The Stalinist umbrella organization BAYAN (est. in 1985) and the pseudo-left Akbayan party (Citizens’ Action Party) , which emerged out of a merger of a section of the Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and various Social Democratic organizations in the 1990s37—though historically rivals representing different trajectories of petty-bourgeois politics38—are “coming into ever closer alignment with each other out of their shared orientation to sections of the Philippine bourgeoisie hostile to China”39. When 100,000 people rallied in Manila on September 21, 2025—the 53rd anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s declaration of martial law—these two organizations led separate anti-corruption demonstrations that were, as the WSWS noted, “markedly middle-class” in their political character. However, significantly, the masses who thronged the streets were “not drawn to the protests by an orientation to a particular faction of the bourgeoisie”. In contrast, both BAYAN and Akbayan collaborated openly with bourgeois parties, both worked systematically to prevent the emergence of an independent working-class movement, and both channeled mass anger into the dead-end of bourgeois factional warfare between the Marcos and Duterte camps. The ultimate orientation of these demonstrations, “despite some anti-Marcos slogans and banners” was “towards an alliance against the forces of Duterte,” “which seeks to moderate Philippine ties to the United States in order to secure greater economic investment from China”.
Akbayan partylist nominees—front from left: Dadah Kiram Ismula, Attorney Chel Diokno and House Representative Percival “Perci” Cendaña. Image from akbayan.org.ph
The treacherous role of BAYAN and Akbayan must be understood not as an aberration but as the logical outcome of their fundamental political orientation toward class collaboration. BAYAN, being one of Maoist CPP’s front organizations,40 has for decades promoted the “two-stage theory” that subordinates the working class to a supposed “progressive national bourgeoisie” in a prolonged “national democratic” struggle that perpetually postpones socialist revolution.41 Akbayan, which bills itself as a “social democratic” alternative, has fully integrated into bourgeois parliamentary politics, holding seats in Congress and supporting imperialist-aligned bourgeois politicians. Its nationalist, opportunist and class collaborationist politics are the continuation of the Stalinist politics of the CPP.42 Once again, these forces unite in a shared function: blocking the independent political mobilization of the Philippine working class and subordinating it to bourgeois factions aligned with Washington’s strategic objectives in the Indo-Pacific. Their increasing alignment reflects not personal reconciliation but the inexorable logic of their petty-bourgeois politics in the epoch of imperialist war. As the Philippines is positioned on the “frontlines of Washington’s preparations for war with China,” both BAYAN and Akbayan have effectively become instruments for integrating mass opposition into imperialism’s war agenda, despite whatever anti-imperialist rhetoric they may occasionally deploy for tactical purposes.43
Anti-Corruption Campaign
The anti-corruption framework promoted by both BAYAN and Akbayan party represents a contemporary disguise for the class-collaborationist politics that Stalinism has peddled globally for a century. Where Stalin’s “two-stage theory” openly called for a “bloc of four classes” including the “progressive national bourgeoisie,”44 today’s pseudo-left calls for unity of “the people” against “corrupt elites”, as part of “completing democratic tasks”. Both formulations divide the bourgeoisie into progressive and reactionary camps, subordinate the working class to a bourgeois faction, and systematically block the fight for socialist revolution. WSWS explained, “The banner of an anti-corruption campaign is a political dead-end. It is politically amorphous and can serve as an umbrella for bringing together a wide range of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties and organisations, including those of the far-right.”45 In the Philippines, this takes the concrete form of supporting bourgeois investigations into the Duterte camp while aligning with the Marcos government’s integration into US military structures. The strategic function becomes clear: ruling-class factions weaponize corruption charges against each other—Marcos launching investigations to preempt Duterte attacks, Duterte forces using the Senate to expose Marcos allies—while BAYAN and Akbayan provide a pseudo-radical veneer to what is fundamentally a reshuffling of positions within the capitalist ruling elite. The working class, which faces catastrophic unemployment, climate disasters, falling wages, and the prospect of being used as cannon fodder in a US war against China, is thereby prevented from organizing independently and advancing its own class interests.
This analysis of the Philippines protests applies universally. Indeed, in Sri Lanka, it was on the basis of an anti-corruption platform that the JVP/NPP exploited the overwhelming public hostility to all the traditional capitalist parties to come to power and implement the IMF’s austerity program. Nepal’s military-installed technocratic government justified itself through promises to combat corruption. Bangladesh’s banker Yunus positioned himself as above the corrupt political establishment.
But corruption is not an aberration from the system but an inherent feature of the property relations of monopoly capitalism. Private ownership of the means of production creates the material conditions for officials to enrich themselves. The bourgeois state exists precisely to defend the interests of the capitalist class, making “clean capitalism”, advocated by IMF, a contradiction in terms. As with all other democratic tasks, the protection of public assets against official corruption rests on the working class as part of its revolutionary act of expropriating the financial aristocracy, capitalist oligarchy and the abolition of the state itself.
Regime change serves imperialism
The wave of Gen-Z protests succeeded in a couple of countries effecting regime changes, replacing one set of representatives of the bourgeoisie in power with another. The mass uprisings, born from genuine rage at intolerable conditions, are channeled through anti-corruption frameworks into support for “clean” administrators who implement the same or worse policies. Bangladesh’s Yunus, with his Western connections, promises “robust economic reforms.” Kenya’s Ruto-Odinga coalition continues austerity while designating the country a US “major non-NATO ally.”
Wickremesinghe in Sri Lanka used police-state repression to enforce IMF demands, while, his successor, president Dissanayaka’s government is employing the whole state machinery, the parliament, media and usual rhetoric of deception, and its trade union bureaucracy to contain and suppress class struggles against its continued implementation of the IMF dictates to the letter. Nepal’s technocrats position themselves above politics while preserving capitalist property relations.
The working class and rural masses bear the full weight of this betrayal by the pseudo-left and trade union bureaucracies. New regimes perpetuate austerity programs and serve imperialist interests under fresh political banners—“progressive” coalitions, “anti-corruption” governments, or military-backed technocrats—while preserving capitalist property relations intact. Workers who risked their lives confronting state violence now face renewed demands for “belt-tightening” and “fiscal discipline” to achieve “economic stability”—the identical rhetoric that drove them into the streets. The revolutionary energy that toppled governments dissipates into exhaustion and demoralization as the pseudo-left channels mass anger back into support for one capitalist faction against another. This political disorientation creates fertile conditions for right-wing and fascistic forces to exploit mass disillusionment. Demagogues channel legitimate rage of the working class and sections of the oppressed middle-class toward scapegoats—immigrants, ethnic minorities, “corrupt politicians”, “corrupt public officers” and “drug menace” or the underworld—while leaving capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination untouched. Parliament and elections function as the critical mechanisms through which the bourgeoisie reconsolidates its rule, channeling mass opposition into safe constitutional frameworks that subordinate the working class to bourgeois factional warfare.
The historical experiences of Italy (1920-22)46, Germany (1933)47, and France (1936-39)48 demonstrate with tragic clarity how betrayed revolutionary movements can be transformed into their opposite. In each case, the political betrayals of Social Democracy and Stalinism—the refusal to fight for workers’ power, the subordination of the working class to the “democratic” bourgeoisie through Popular Fronts, the suppression of independent working-class political organization—paralyzed and demoralized the masses, clearing the path for fascism’s brutal consolidation. As Trotsky emphasized in analyzing these catastrophes, “Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society,” made possible only by the prior betrayal of revolutionary leadership.49 The same dialectic operates in contemporary Gen-Z uprisings: pseudo-left organizations systematically prevent independent working-class mobilization under socialist leadership, creating the conditions for bourgeois reaction to reassert itself through both parliamentary mechanisms and, where necessary, authoritarian consolidation.
These outcomes constitute a stark warning: regime change within the framework of capitalism represents a strategic dead-end for the working class. The fundamental lesson of the Gen-Z uprisings is neither that mass movements can overthrow governments—they demonstrably can—nor that overthrowing governments without overthrowing the capitalist system produces only a reshuffling of personnel within the same exploitative structure: but that the lack of independent revolutionary workers’ leadership that can rally the youth, the poor and oppressed middle class around a socialist internationalist program leads the mass struggles to deadly betrayals. The task confronting workers and youth is not to stop their struggle at the doors of parliament or the presidential palace, but to carry it forward to the expropriation of the capitalist class and the establishment of workers’ power. Only the conquest of political power by the working class, organizing the rural masses and the oppressed middle class under its leadership, can overcome the dead-ends that preserve the very system responsible for exploitation, mass unemployment, climate catastrophe, and imperialist war.
WSWS, “A fresh lesson: The end of the Detroit newspaper strike and the crisis of the labor movement”: “The bureaucracy itself is a privileged, upper-middle class social layer. Because it is tied to the capitalist system, it seeks to conceal from the working class the real nature of this system and the position of workers within it.” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2001/01/iwb-j04.html ↩︎
