In “My Thoughts on Handagama’s Rani,” published in Daily FT on March 281, Jagath Weerasinghe—artist, archaeologist, and cultural commentator—extends, rationalises, and legitimises the central reactionary thesis of Asoka Handagama’s recent film Rani. This is a film whose underlying narrative, presented in the guise of artistic subtlety and aesthetic ambiguity, represents a deeply ideological falsification of history. Weerasinghe’s endorsement of the director’s central proposition2—reproduced in Sinhala translation in Anidda on March 30 by Vidura Munasinghe—is emblematic of a broader trend among the middle-class intelligentsia and the pseudo-left, who serve as ideological apologists for the crimes of the capitalist state.
A scene in the film “Rani” by Asoka Handagama
The core thesis promoted by both Weerasinghe and the film is that the atrocities carried out during the 1988–90 period—enforced disappearances, state death squads, mass graves, torture camps, and extrajudicial killings, as well as the fascistic violence perpetrated by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)—were not the products of concrete political decisions, class interests, and specific agencies of state and party power. Instead, they were the result of a society in which “violence had become systemic and normalised.” Weerasinghe writes: authoritarian regimes perpetuate brutality “for political gain and self-preservation, creating an environment where violence is not only carried out by those in power but is also internalised, accepted, and even participated in by ordinary citizens. In such a climate, even those with moral integrity can find themselves complicit—whether through silence, fear, or the gradual erosion of ethical boundaries.”
This pseudo-sociological claim—that violence was embedded in the very fabric of society and was collectively enacted by the masses—leads to a profoundly reactionary conclusion: that there is a shared moral guilt for the crimes of the period, borne by everyone, without any class distinction. Rani—the eponymous protagonist, who is portrayed as initially a passive observer of the surrounding terror but who gradually becomes emotionally and psychologically implicated—and every other defenseless rural man and woman, the worker, the unemployed youth, who were terrorized for their lives both by the fascism of the JVP and by state repression, are depicted as responsible for and willing participants in the atrocities.
Was this culpability moral, political, or both? While Weerasinghe leaves no doubt that he intends to assign moral culpability to the masses—an implication clearly shared by the director—this vulgar theory leaves the spectator wondering who bears political accountability. That is precisely the issue at hand. The film and its director’s apologetics place the blame on the “ordinary” masses. Political responsibility follows moral culpability. Consequently, the oppressed are identified with the oppressor, giving rise to a vision of a society that is hopeless, anarchic, and devoid of historical or scientific grounding. This approach is crudely ahistorical, impressionistic, and unscientific—and it serves a definite class interest.
The capitalist state agents of terror, its political leadership, the military-intelligence apparatus, and the misdirected cadre of the JVP are equated, and these contradictory forces are placed on the same grounds as the poor and the working people, constituting a homogeneous society of “ordinary citizens.” They are all morally and indiscriminately dissolved into an amorphous, classless “we.” The final anecdote of the film, which Weerasinghe refers to, is founded upon this proposition and leads to the conclusion that the director wanted the viewers of his film to read into as the alternative narrative: the killing of Richard de Soysa was not necessarily ordered by President R. Premadasa, nor did it serve the interests of the latter or the ruling class. This is a liquidationist proposition that casts doubt upon many other suspected assassinations and abductions of the period, getting the political leadership of the state off the hook. In conclusion, this is where the “broader and more layered exploration of the underlying social and political realities,” which Weerasinghe claims the purported “fiction” allows its viewer to delve into, lands.
Such a political framework is not new. It has appeared time-to-time in bourgeois and petty-bourgeois historiography, where the responsibility for state crimes—pogroms, wars, genocides—is shifted onto “society” or “human nature.” One prominent historical analogue is Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), which absurdly claimed that the Holocaust was not the outcome of a historically developed political program of German imperialism and the fascist state of the Nazi Third Reich, but the result of a deep-seated, inherent antisemitism among the German people3. Thus, the “ordinary” Germans were willing accomplices in the Final Solution, the extermination of over six million Jews. Hitler was only the final executioner of this ideology. This deadly distortion of history has been widely discredited by serious historians, not only for its factual inaccuracy, but for the reactionary political implications it carries4.
Weerasinghe offers no sociological or historical research to substantiate his claims—nor does the director, who admits to conducting little serious investigation prior to the making of the film. However, similar arguments have been advanced internationally through certain psychological and sociological theories that lack rigorous empirical grounding. Chief among these are the studies of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, whose respective experiments on obedience to authority and simulated prison environments have been widely cited to suggest that ordinary individuals can become complicit in acts of cruelty under systemic pressure. Both studies have come under sustained criticism for methodological shortcomings, ethical violations, and issues of reproducibility. More importantly, when abstracted from their immediate experimental context and applied uncritically to complex social phenomena like mass political violence, these theories devolve into a kind of psychological determinism. They obscure the class forces and political programs that shape historical events and instead offer a right-wing, pseudo-scientific narrative in which atrocities are the inevitable result of human nature or diffuse social norms—thereby absolving the state and the ruling elite of political responsibility.
In the Sri Lankan context, this argument has especially reactionary consequences. It leads to the notion that the Sinhalese majority are collectively responsible for the 1983 pogrom against Tamils, and ultimately, for the genocide in Mullivaikkal in 2009. A section of the middle class of the country harbours this ideology, which was once starkly expressed by Pubudu Jayagoda, a leader of the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), who claimed that racism is deeply ingrained in the Sinhalese “society”5, reducing complex political phenomena to abstract moral failures of entire ethnic groups of conflicting classes6. This is not only unscientific and historically false, but it plays directly into the hands of the capitalist state and chauvinist forces, who exploit communalism to divide the working class on racialist lines to prevent unified struggle.
Marxism begins not with moralism, but with the concrete analysis of social relations and historical processes. The essential questions that must be addressed in any serious assessment of the 1988–90 period are the following: What were the objective causes of the JVP-led insurrection and its fascistic methods? What class forces were involved in the repression? What was the role of imperialism, the IMF, and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie in creating the social crisis that produced this violence? And above all, was there an alternative revolutionary leadership that could have mobilized the working class against both the JVP and the capitalist state?
The JVP uprising was not a spontaneous eruption of madness, nor was it the inevitable product of a culture of violence. It emerged from a deep social crisis rooted in the failure of the post-colonial bourgeoisie and the betrayal of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1964, which had entered into a class collaborationist coalition with the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). In the aftermath of this betrayal, tens of thousands of rural youth—disillusioned by the parliamentary left and devastated by the economic liberalization policies of the J. R. Jayewardene regime—were drawn to the radical rhetoric of the JVP.
The JVP, despite its populist posture, was never a Marxist organization. It rejected the class struggle, dismissed the internationalism of the Fourth International, and relied on petty-bourgeois nationalism and adventurist terror. In 1987–89, it launched a campaign of assassinations and fascistic violence that paralyzed the working class and the middle class. The response of the state was a campaign of ruthless repression. Death squads, torture camps such as Batalanda, and state-sponsored terror claimed the lives of an estimated 60,000 youth.
A scene of mass killings and daily-life in rural Sri Lanka in September 1989. Photo by Prasanna Hennayake
This was not a case of generalized ”ideology of violence” within society. It was class warfare, waged from above by the capitalist state to defend private property, intimidate the working class, and preserve bourgeois rule. It was facilitated by the political vacuum created by the betrayals of the old left and the inability of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), to politically break the working class and the rural poor from the grip of the petty-bourgeois JVP and other Stalinist and Maoist organizations in time to develop an alternative mass leadership.
However, it was only the RCL, the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world party of the working class, which alone insisted that the fascist violence of the JVP and the state terror could only be opposed by the independent political mobilization of the working class on a socialist and internationalist program. In November 1988, in order to mobilize the independent power of the working class, it called for a united front of working-class organizations to fight both state repression and JVP fascism, as an immediate practical measure. Instead of supporting this effort, the LSSP, the Communist Party (CP), Nawa Sama Samaja Party (NSSP), and Ceylon Workers’ Congress (CWC) aligned themselves with the terror of the UNP regime, which armed them against the JVP. This betrayal aided the state in unleashing mass repression on the rural poor of the South and launching its racist war against the oppressed Tamil people.
None of these dynamics are on the historical balance sheet of those who seek to “push” the contemporary youth “to the very edges of these established frameworks.”
Today, the pseudo-left has once again emerged as a shield for the ruling class, which has endorsed the JVP/NPP as its saviour. The JVP-led NPP is using its parliamentary position not to uncover or prosecute the war crimes of the past, but to bury them. Its recent tabling and debating of the Batalanda Commission report—gathering dust for over two decades—is a cynical gesture meant to divert public attention from IMF austerity measures. The NPP is objectively poised not to challenge the military, nor the UNP, nor the interests of imperialism. It fears that any real reckoning with the crimes of 1988–90 will expose not only the state, but the politics of the JVP itself.
The working class and rural poor must reject the “common guilt” thesis advanced in Rani and promoted by figures like Weerasinghe. They must demand justice based not on emotional reconciliation, but on historical truth and political accountability7.
Neither of these are possible within the capitalist state. It requires the building of a revolutionary socialist movement of the working class to finally break the grip of imperialism, overturn the legacy of terror, and unify the oppressed—Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim—on the basis of a common struggle against exploitation.
The film’s thesis, and Weerasinghe’s article by extension, constitute an aestheticized historical falsification, a rebranding of a reactionary historical revisionism in the garb of “critical reflection.” The function of art, if it is to be progressive, is not to obscure these truths but to clarify them. Rani fails in this most fundamental task. It replaces history with impressionism, class analysis with pseudo-science, and revolutionary clarity with reactionary confusion.
Anidda, February 2, 2025, A discussion with Ashoka Handagama by Upali Amarasinghe, p19. ↩︎
‘[A]ntisemitism moved many thousands of “ordinary” Germans—and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned—to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.’ Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 9. ↩︎
On March 12, Sri Lanka’s National People’s Power (NPP) government tabled the long-buried Batalanda Commission report in Parliament, fixing dates for a parliamentary debate. This sudden move—decades after the report was first compiled—has nothing to do with securing justice for the thousands of youth and workers who were abducted, tortured, and murdered during the late 1980s. Rather, it is a cynical maneuver by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led administration, aimed at deflecting attention from the ongoing economic crisis and reinforcing the credibility of the Sri Lankan state, which bears direct responsibility for the atrocities.
The Batalanda torture chambers and the mass graves scattered across Sri Lanka are grim symbols of the bloody terror unleashed by the ruling class in response to the social unrest caused by the economic collapse of the 1980s. Thousands of youth, primarily from impoverished rural backgrounds, were abducted by the police, the army and the death squads, held in state-run camps, tortured, raped, killed, burned alive on tyre-pyres, or their bodies were thrown to rivers or buried in unmarked graves. The military and police officers invaded the houses of the male victims, raped their wives, mothers and sisters. These were not just isolated crimes but a systematic class war waged against the poor by a ruling elite determined to defend the bourgeois state, capitalist economic reforms and power at any cost.
IMF Austerity and the Social Crisis of the 1980s
The second JVP insurrection (1987–89) did not emerge in a vacuum. The economic devastation of the 1980s, caused by the United National Party (UNP) government’s brutal implementation of IMF-dictated austerity – rural poverty, indebtedness, disease, malnutrition, land grabbing, unemployment, privatization, inflation – created conditions in which insurgent situation grew among the rural disillusioned youth.
In 1977, the government of J.R. Jayawardene abandoned Sri Lanka’s limited welfare-state model and embraced open-market liberalization. The IMF and World Bank demanded “belt-tightening” measures: currency devaluation, drastic cuts to social spending, and the elimination of subsidies for essential goods. The consequences were catastrophic:
By 1988, the overall budget deficit had soared to 12% of GDP.
Foreign debt quadrupled, forcing the government into commercial borrowing.
Inflation reached 14% in 1988.
Official reserves collapsed, falling to six weeks at the end of 1988 and just three weeks of imports by mid-1989.
By 1987-88 unemployment reached 15.5%, I.e. 940,000 unemployed, and 75% of them were in the 15-29 age group, according to official surveys.
J.R.Jayawardene and Ranil Wickremasinghe (r)
Significantly, military expenditure was also increased for the civil war against the Tamil population in the North and East, the total accumulated cost of which up to 1996 since 1983 was at least Rs. 1,135 billion at 1996 prices (168.5% of the 1996 GDP, equivalent to US$ 20.6 billion).
The young men and women who had been promised economic prosperity under Jayawardene’s “open economy” found themselves jobless and trapped in deepening poverty. With traditional avenues for dissent crushed—particularly after the crushing of the July 1980 general strike— JVP capitalized youth resentment for recruitment.
JVP’s Treachery
Founded on a reactionary mixture of Maoism, Castroism and petty-bourgeois radicalism, sequel to the “great betrayal” of Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1964, JVP channeled youth discontent over the social crisis, along the line of Sinhala chauvinism, nationalism and to tactics of fascism, in defence of the capitalist state. It exploited the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of July 1987 between Jayawardena and Rajiv Gandhi to wage a chauvinist campaign to recruit cadres.
JVP was never a Marxist party, and ruled out independent mobilization of the working class for the perspective of socialist internationalism against capitalist rule, counterposing the rural youth against the working class. Its hostility to the working class was manifested in its killings of workers, political opponents of the left and those who opposed it ideologically.
This fascist conduct of the JVP marked a high point in the degeneration of the petty-bourgeois nationalist movements throughout the world under conditions of the global crisis of imperialism.
State Terror
In response to the fascist attacks by JVP and its military wing, Patriotic People’s Movement (DJV), the UNP unleashed unspeakable brutality against rural and urban youth and the poor. Jayawardene and his successor, Ranasinghe Premadasa, oversaw a state-sponsored reign of terror against not only JVP cadres but also thousands of working-class youth who had no connection to the insurrection.
Ranasinghe Premadasa (Right) and his Son Sajith Premadasa, now the Leader of the Opposition, who boasts of his father’s “spine”
Torture Camps and Killings: Secret interrogation centers were established across the country, with Batalanda and Eliyakanda emerging as the most notorious. Unspeakable torture methods were employed – those who were abducted were hanged, beaten, barb wires were forced into their rectums, and they were forced into barrels of chili-powder-mixed water, many never emerging alive. Youth were often subjected to rape, decapitation, nails hammered into their heads and into ears, eyes removed and burnt alive on tyre-pyres etc.
Death Squads and Tyre-Pyres: The military, police, and paramilitary gangs abducted suspected “subversives,” who were then executed and burned in public. Sometimes, their families were forced to witness. Many innocent villagers were massacred, kids stabbed, and women raped, just because someone of their family members was a suspected JVP cadre.
Mass Graves: Thousands of bodies were dumped in shallow, unmarked graves, many of which remain undiscovered (Matale, Sooriyakanda, Wilpita are among the few such identified).
Witnesses and victims’ families have provided horrifying testimonies of the pogrom. Survivors recount hearing the screams of detainees through the night. Mothers were told their sons had “disappeared,” only for their burned bodies to be found days later by the roadside.
theSocialist.LK talked to a bereaved woman in the Mulkirigala electorate, whose entire family was massacred by the army in late August 1989, because the army could not locate her only brother. Time has hardly permitted her recovery from the trauma. She told as follows:
“My seven year old daughter (Niranjala), my three young sisters (Nilmini, Sujithaseeli, Mathangalatha), my cousin sister Chandraleka, my mother (Sisiliyana -53) and my father (Edwin-63), all were massacred by the Sinha regiment forces of Katuwana army camp, in that thick of the night. Those devils had bombed our house and, the following day, my husband witnessed the burning flesh under the rubble. We have been told that my sisters were carried away, raped for three days by the soldiers and killed. Beliatta police had later killed and burned my brother (Chulananda -21) too.”
Katuwana Massacre victims: From top Left: Mathangalatha, Nilmini, Sisiliyana, Edwin(a traditional ayurvedic doctor), Sujithaseeli.
From bottom Left: Niranjala, Chandraleka, Chulananda.
A survivor of government repression told our reporters as follows:
“I was then 16. I was somehow able to secure my life. One night in mid 1989, Wanduramba Police in Galle abducted the boyfriend of my cousin, Udayakantha, a tuition teacher, said to be on the orders of Udugampola, who was referred to by the villagers as the “Butcher”. One day after, I saw his burning body on a tire by the roadside, among other bodies.”
Over 100,000 people, mostly youth, were massacred by the government during the period. Millions were rendered destitute. To this day, not a single high-ranking official or politician has been held accountable for any of these crimes.
The JVP’s Complicity in Covering Up the Crimes
Despite having been the primary target and immediate cause of this repression, the JVP has no intention of persuing justice to the families of those murdered. It did nothing to expose these crimes when it previously aligned itself with bourgeois coalition governments, nor will it act now. Like its predecessors, past atrocities will only be capitalized by the government to suppress political opposition, whenever need arises.
Since the 1990s, the JVP has transformed into a right-wing bourgeois party, repeatedly aligning itself with the same capitalist forces that once massacred its youth cadres.
In 2004, the JVP joined a coalition government with Chandrika Kumaratunga, providing political cover for the continuation of state violence, and suppression of the dark record of the ruling class.
It later supported Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime, which carried out the genocidal slaughter of Tamil civilians during the final phase of the Sri Lankan government’s racist war against Tamils in 2009.
In 2010 and 2015 JVP stood on one platform with Ranil Wickremasinghe and general Sarath Fonseka to consolidate the hand of the oppressor – Wickremasinghe was a cabinet Minister in the Premadasa government, who has been implicated in the Batalanda Commission Report and believed to have overseen the torture, and the latter is the former army commander who supervised killings both in the South and North.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake, then a Parliamentarian and now the President of Sri Lanka, being sworn in as Minister of Agriculture, Land and Irrigation by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (r) at the Presidential House in Colombo in April 2004 [Photo Credit: M A Pishpa Kumara/EPA/Shutterstock]
Now, as the leading force in the NPP government, the JVP is once again engaged in a political charade. By revisiting Batalanda in Parliament, it seeks to posture as a defender of democracy while positioning to suppress working-class struggles against the IMF’s new round of austerity measures.
The Class Nature of the Crimes and the Path to Justice
The atrocities committed at Batalanda and across Sri Lanka were the calculated acts of a capitalist state defending itself against the threat of mass working-class resistance. Every ruling class party, from the UNP to the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to the JVP, has participated in suppressing the working class. In the 1971 youth uprising, SLFP-LSSP-CP (CP – Communist Party) coalition government killed about 20000 rural youth to defend the capitalist rule, followed by a series of subsidy cuts and austerity.
Real justice will not come from parliamentary debates, charades of commissions or through bourgeois “administration of justice”. Justice for the victims of state terror requires the fulfillment of all of the following demands:
Disclose the names of all those who were abducted, forcibly disappeared and/or tortured and/or killed by the government security forces, the police and state sponsored paramilitary death squads,
Disclose all the police and military records in respect of the places where police stations, army camps and detention centers were located during the period,
Disclose the names of the officers in charge of the police stations, and the names, ranks and regiments of the commanding officers who were in charge of the army camps, located islandwide during the insurgency.
Locate every Mass Grave in all parts of the island, exhume the remains, conduct forensic analysis to identify the victims and disclose to their relatives,
Disclose to the relatives of the victims what happened to their loved ones, and fully compensate them.
Identify, prosecute and punish the perpetrators, including those who provided political cover.
The realization of these demands requires direct political power to the hands of the working class. The ruling class—regardless of which party holds office, including NPP—will never willingly prosecute its own agents. The fight for truth and justice must be connected to the broader struggle against capitalism and the hegemony of financial capital to overthrow capitalist State and dismantle its military-police apparatus.
The Socialist Perspective
The lessons of 1988-90 are clear: the imperialist system survives through the ruthless suppression of working-class struggles. The pogrom effected on the Sinhala youth of the South, the genocide of the Tamils in the North and the East, the ethnic-cleansing of the Palestinians, the loss of millions of lives to COVID-19 pandemic are seen by the ruling class as necessary costs.
Sri Lanka once again faces economic collapse, and the IMF’s latest demands for austerity will provoke new social explosions. The NPP government, following its predecessors, will respond to mass opposition with state repression. The only way to prevent a repeat of past atrocities is for the working class to take independent political action, break away from all factions of the ruling class, and fight for socialist revolution, with the support of the international working class against the hegemony of the finance capital and their domestic lackeys. This needs revolutionary leadership – the second and the most important lesson.
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka calls upon workers, rallying behind them the oppressed youth of the North and the South, to reject the false promises of the JVP-led NPP, and to organize independently in committees of industrial action in line with the international socialist program that will end the rule of the capitalist elite and establish a workers’ government of Sri Lanka and Eelam. They should not trust the pseudo-left and the trade unions, who pose as defenders of mass interests while setting political traps against them by proposing an alternative capitalist state. There is no such thing. Only through socialist revolution can the crimes of the past be truly redressed and a future free from oppression and exploitation be secured.
By the Political Committeeofthe Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction (RLF) of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.
The Historical Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership
The opening decades of the 21st century is defined by the deepest crisis of world capitalism since the 1930s. The ruling class, facing economic stagnation, political instability, and mass discontent, is turning once again to militarism, state repression, and fascistic authoritarianism. The United States, leading the imperialist powers, has been escalating its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, preparing for a catastrophic conflict with China, and backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The national bourgeoisies, including those in South Asia, have intensified their attacks on workers’ democratic rights and living conditions, deepening the crisis of global capitalism.
Leon Trotsky
But, what is missing? The objective conditions for world socialist revolution have matured. Mass movements have erupted—from the strikes by autoworkers in the US and Europe to the mass protests in Sri Lanka and the global opposition to Israeli war crimes. However, as Trotsky wrote in The Transitional Program (1938), “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.” The essential question is the construction of a revolutionary leadership that can guide the working class in its struggle against imperialism, national chauvinism, and capitalist dictatorship.
This leadership is embodied in the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Trotskyist socialist internationalism today has no meaning outside of the ICFI, the only movement that defends and develops the historical and theoretical continuity of revolutionary Marxism.
Marxism and Socialist Internationalism: A Question of Program
Socialist internationalism is not a utopian ideal but an objective necessity arising from the nature of capitalist production itself. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels established this principle in The Communist Manifesto (1848): “The working men have no country.” The capitalist system, by developing a globalized economy, has created an international working class whose liberation can only be achieved through the overthrow of capitalism on a world scale.
This fundamental principle found its highest expression in the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. Lenin and Trotsky based their strategy on the understanding that socialism could not be built in one country. The founding of the Third International in 1919 was meant to provide the revolutionary proletariat with an organizational center to coordinate the world socialist revolution.
However, in a note of caution, in “The Draft Programme of the Communist International – A Criticism of Fundamentals”, Trotsky referred to his own explanation rejecting the idea that socialist revolution must begin simultaneously, as follows:
“Not a single country must ‘wait’ for the other countries in its struggle. It will be useful and necessary to repeat this elementary idea so that temporizing international inaction may not be substituted for parallel international action. Without waiting for the others, we must begin and continue the struggle on national grounds with the full conviction that our initiative will provide an impulse to the struggle in other countries” (Trotsky, ‘The Peace Programme’ Works, Vol. III, part 1, pp.89-90, Russian Ed.)
The degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalin, and the adoption of the national-reformist reactionary theory of “socialism in one country,” led to the betrayal of revolutionary movements in Germany (1923), China (1927), Spain (1936-39), and elsewhere. Stalinist counter-revolution gave birth to the bureaucratic apparatuses of the Comintern, which systematically subordinated the working class to bourgeois national interests.
In response, Trotsky fought to preserve the banner of socialist internationalism. The Fourth International was founded in 1938 to carry forward the strategy of world socialist revolution. In The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938), Trotsky wrote:
“Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard.”
The ICFI and the Defense of Socialist Internationalism
Following Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, the crisis of proletarian leadership deepened. Inside the Fourth International, Pabloite revisionists emerged in the early 1950s, arguing that the Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist movements could be pressured to play a revolutionary role. This liquidationist perspective was decisively opposed by the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the US, including James P. Cannon, and the British Trotskyists led by Gerry Healy. The 1953 Open Letter by Cannon and the subsequent split with Pabloism led to the founding of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
James P. Cannon
The ICFI waged an unrelenting struggle against Stalinism, Pabloism, and all forms of opportunism1, in defense of Bolshevik heritage, to unite the working class internationally against the global offensive of imperialism. In TheHeritage We Defend (1988), Davith North write as follows:
“[T]the struggle waged by the ICFI against Pabloite revisionism preserved the historical continuity of the Trotskyist movement in the United States.”
Consequent to this principled fight for defence of the international party of the proletariat, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain, under Healy, became a major force in the Trotskyist movement. However, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, opportunist pressures led to the bureaucratic degeneration of the WRP, a process exposed by David North and the leadership of the Workers League (US). North’s critique of Healy’s organizational methods and political deviations was fundamental in the reassertion of Marxist principles within the ICFI.
The Heritage We Defend, David North
The definitive break with opportunism came in 1985-86, when the ICFI expelled the WRP leadership. North wrote in The Political Origins and Consequences of the 1982–86 Split in the International Committee of the Fourth International, (03 August 2019, as follows:
“Having the advantage of being able to look back over a period of nearly 40 years, we can recognize that the conflict initiated by this critique [by the Workers League on the course pursued by the WRP], which culminated in the suspension of the WRP from the International Committee in December 1985, and the complete severing of relations in February 1986, was a critical event in the history of the world Marxist movement. The very survival of the Fourth International was at stake. Except for the International Committee, the movement founded by Leon Trotsky had been politically liquidated by the Pabloites. In all the countries where the Pabloites had been able to establish organizational control, they had destroyed the Trotskyist organizations by turning them into political appendages of the Stalinist, social democratic or bourgeois nationalist organizations. By 1985, the Workers Revolutionary Party, which had by that point capitulated to Pabloism, was close to completing the same wrecking operation.2”
Referring to the unrelenting fight waged by the ICFI for the continuity of the heritage of the Fourth International, North explains further as follows3:
“In all this work, the fundamental political principle that guided our efforts was that of Marxist internationalism. We insisted upon the primacy of world strategy over national tactics, and that the appropriate response to problems that arise within the national sphere could be derived only on the basis of an analysis of global processes. On this basis, the International Committee was able to develop a level of international collaboration that had not existed in the entire history of the Fourth International. Actually, the word “collaboration” does not adequately encompass the nature of the interaction between ICFI sections that developed in the aftermath of the split with the WRP nationalist renegades4.”
This definitively showed that international “collaboration” of the working class today has no meaning outside the programmatic and organizational relations between sections of the ICFI to mobilize them for the perspective of international socialism.
The Form and Content of Socialist Internationalism Today
Socialist internationalism in the 21st century is defined by three interrelated processes:
Imperialist War and Militarism: The US‘s war preparations against China and NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine is part of a broader strategy for global hegemony by the financial oligarchy, stemming from an unprecedented historical crisis of the global imperialist system. The genocidal assault on Gaza is an integral part of imperialist war.
The Crisis of Bourgeois Democracy: The rise of fascist movements globally, from Trumpism in the US to Hindutva in India, is part of the ruling class’s turn to authoritarianism to crush mass opposition. The so-called “democratic” regimes, including those in South Asia, are themselves dismantling democratic rights to impose austerity and military-police rule.
The Globalization of Class Struggle: The working class is entering into struggle against capitalism. General strikes, mass protests, and workers’ uprisings in Sri Lanka, India, France, the US, and beyond signify the deepening radicalization of the international proletariat. However, without a revolutionary leadership, these movements can be suppressed, co-opted and betrayed by pseudo-left forces.
In this context, the ICFI remains the only Marxist organization that fights for a revolutionary socialist program on a global scale. It is the only legitimate form that socialist internationalism must take today. Every attempt to substitute spontaneous movements, Stalinist parties, or nationalist formations for the Fourth International leads to political disaster.
Dialectics of Content and Form in Marxist Theory
The relationship between content and form is a key dialectical problem in Marxist philosophy, aesthetics, and political economy. Marxist dialectical method insists that content and form are interrelated and cannot be restricted to dichotomies and separated mechanically. This dialectic is crucial in understanding historical materialism, class struggle, and revolutionary strategy.
Content and Form in Historical Materialism
Marx and Engels developed their materialist conception of history (historical materialism) based on the dialectical relationship between content and form. Marx explained that the content of a given society is determined by its mode of production—the forces and relations of production—while the form is expressed through the superstructure (political, legal, and ideological institutions).
In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx states:
“The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”
Here, the content (economic base) determines the form (superstructure), but this relationship is dialectical—form can react upon content, reinforcing or modifying it over time.
Content and Form in Dialectical Materialism
Dialectics, as developed by Marx and Engels from Hegelian philosophy, sees content and form as a unity of opposites. Content refers to the inner essence or substance of a phenomenon, while form is its external expression. However, this is not a static relationship—content and form interact dynamically, sometimes in contradiction.
Engels, in Dialectics of Nature, and in Anti-Dühring, discusses how scientific and social phenomena undergo quantitative to qualitative transformations when content outgrows its old form, leading to revolutionary changes.
Lenin, in Philosophical Notebooks, applies this dialectic to revolutionary situations, showing how, when the content (working-class radicalization) reaches a breaking point, old forms (bourgeois democracy or reformist organizations) become obsolete and must be replaced.
The Role of Content and Form in Revolutionary Politics
Trotsky, in The History of the Russian Revolution (1930), applies the dialectic of content and form to revolutionary movements in explaining the dialectics of social revolution. He explains that in revolutionary epohs, the old political forms (parliamentary democracy, trade unions, reformist parties) become barriers to the new content (working-class revolutionary consciousness).
Trotsky explained that the fundamental law of revolution is the substitution of one class’s domination over another, and that means the creation of new forms of state power to express this changed content. This means that socialist revolutions require a new political form, i.e., the soviets (workers’ councils), to replace bourgeois parliamentary structures.
Content and Form as a Guide to Revolutionary Action
The dialectic of content and form is not just a theoretical issue—it is a guide to revolutionary action. In every social and political struggle, the key task is to develop new forms that correspond to the evolving content of class relations. Today, the old forms of bourgeois democracy and trade unions are incapable of addressing the global crisis of capitalism. Only through the building of new revolutionary forms—the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the successor and defender of historical continuity and heritage of Bolshevism, as the conscious leadership of the working class—can the content of world socialist revolution be realized.
This dialectical understanding, rooted in Marxist theory, remains the foundation of socialist strategy today.
Fight against Nationalist Opportunism within SEP-Left
The SLLA was formed after a principled fight against a petty bourgeois nationalist opportunist tendency in the SEP-Left, which included comrades who were arbitrarily expelled from the SEP Sri Lanka between late 2022 to early 2023. Shortly after its formation, rifts emerged within the group between a nationalist tendency and those who represented genuine internationalism and fought for the necessity of rejoining the cadre of ICFI by winning the membership of the SEP5.
Our struggle against this petty-bourgeois nationalist opportunist tendency within SEP-Left was fundamentally a battle for genuine socialist internationalism against a clique that sought to redefine internationalism outside the cadre of the ICFI. This opportunist clique rejected the factional struggle6 founded upon defined political grounds, and the necessity for members of the SEP-Left to appeal for and fight for the membership of the SEP Sri Lanka. They rejected a principled factional fight to build the necessary revolutionary leadership within the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI, to lead the working class of Sri Lanka and the region in the next decisive mass struggles. Instead, they proposed a centrist policy of acting as a “pressure group”7 to prevent the SEP leadership from shifting to the right, hoping to place it on the “right track” without engaging in the struggle to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
At the heart of this factional struggle was the dialectical relationship between content and form. The opportunists disregarded the fundamental truth that socialist internationalism is inseparable from its organizational form—the ICFI and its national sections8. They advanced a revisionist formula, arguing that internationalism does not necessarily require membership in the SEP or a fight within its ranks to develop it as the revolutionary party – a rejection of the dialectical unity between class, party and leadership. Instead, they sought to function as an external watchdog, intervening in an attempt to influence the party leadership while evading the historical responsibility of building the SEP as the revolutionary vanguard of the working class.
This orientation amounted to a rejection of Trotskyism in favor of a centrist adaptation to petty-bourgeois layers who were unwilling to undertake the disciplined struggle under the banner of the party to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Lacking a principled basis for factional struggle, this grouping proposed an opportunist formula—attempting to “correct” the SEP while positioning itself to replace it in the future should the party fail to lead the working class in the socialist revolution9. This amounted to a fatal deviation from the necessary political struggle within the party, and this tendency has now relegated into precisely what it wished to be — acting as a “web-group” “promoting the revival of socialist culture”10 outside the revolutionary movement, the ICFI, while posturing as defenders of “internationalism” and the perspectives of the ICFI.
In opposition to this nationalist-opportunist deviation, our struggle was grounded in the fundamental Marxist principle that socialist internationalism has no meaning outside its historical form — the ICFI and its national sections. Only through the conscious struggle to build the SEP as the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI, fighting as a political faction of the SEP against its opportunist leadership, can the working class resolve the crisis of leadership and carry forward the fight for world socialist revolution.
The Tasks of the SLLA: Building the SEP as the Revolutionary Leadership
Our fight for socialist internationalism is the fight to build the International Committee of the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution, and the necessary revolutionary leadership in the SEP Sri Lanka, being a part of it, to lead the working class of the region in the next decisive mass struggles. This requires:
Analyzing the dialectics of the historical failures of the nationalist opportunist and sectarian leadership of the SEP Sri Lanka to lead the working class in decisive struggles and resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership in Sri Lanka and South Asia.
Educating the advanced workers and youth in the history of Trotskyism and the betrayals of Stalinism and Pabloism.
Intervening in the struggles of the working class with the revolutionary program of the ICFI to transform spontaneous economic and political struggles into a conscious fight for socialism.
Opposing all forms of nationalism and identity politics, which divide the working class and subordinate it to bourgeois politics.
Exposing the trade unions and pseudo-left parties, which serve as instruments of capitalist rule.
The continuity of revolutionary Marxism depends on the defense of historical truth. Without this, there can be no revolutionary movement, no revolutionary leadership, and no socialist future.
In the preface to his book Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century, (2023), North reminds us as follows:
“The historical experiences of the past century thoroughly tested all political movements, parties, and tendencies that claimed to be leading the struggle against capitalism. But the upheavals of the twentieth century have exposed the counterrevolutionary role of the Stalinists, Social Democrats, Maoists, bourgeois nationalists, anarchists, and Pabloites. Only the Fourth International, led by the International Committee, has met the test of history11.”
The building of the ICFI is the decisive task facing the working class today. It is not a question of choice but of survival. The alternative is world war, fascism, and barbarism. The only way forward is through socialist internationalism, embodied in the International Committee of the Fourth International. We are an essential part of that fight. Join SLLA today! Build SEP!
“Revolutionary internationalism is the political antipode of opportunism. In one form or another, opportunism expresses a definite adaptation to the so-called realities of political life within a given national environment. Opportunism, forever in search of shortcuts, elevates one or another national tactic above the fundamental program of the world socialist revolution” The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International: Perspectives Resolution of the IC ICFI (Aigust 1988). <https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/world-capitalist-crisis-tasks-fourth-international-1988/18.html> ↩︎
North concludes the paragraph referring to his report to the Detroit membership of the Workers League on June 25, 1989, where he has said, ”The scope of this international collaboration, its direct impact on virtually every aspect of the practical work of each section, has profoundly and positively altered the character of the ICFI and its sections. The latter are ceasing to exist in any politically and practically meaningful way as independent entities. Upon the foundation of a common political program, a complex network of relationships has emerged within the ICFI which binds together every section. That is, the sections of the ICFI comprise interconnected and interdependent components of a single political organism. Any breaking of that relationship would have devastating effects within the section involved. Every section has now become dependent for its very existence upon this international cooperation and collaboration, both ideological and practical.” Workers League Internal Bulletin, Volume 3, Number 4, June 1989, p. 5. ↩︎
“The main purpose of this document is to bring home to the membership the importance of being the official section of the Fourth International in view of the vital necessity to strengthen the traditional organization of Trotskyism in the great struggle already begun. If we accept the history of “international Trotskyism since 1933 (which is a history of Bolshevik regroupment in the Fourth International), then we must place the question of the International as the most important question before the group. All other questions of group development, such as the press, industrial work or organizational activity are bound up with whatever stand we take on the International. If we accept the political principles of Bolshevism then we must accept the organizational method. It is not sufficient to say that we accept the program of the Fourth International and that we expound it better than the RSL if we do not also accept its organizational method, which means that we must be affiliated to the International, accepting its democratic centralist basis; just the same as it is not sufficient to claim to be a Trotskyist and to be more conversant with the policy of Trotskyism than the organized Trotskyists, unless one joins a Trotskyist party accepting its democratic centralist discipline. That is what is meant by Bolshevik organizational methods.”Our Most Important Task, Gerry Healey, August 10, 1943. ↩︎
“The present doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of epoch decline. In reality the history of Bolshevism is a history of the struggle of factions. And, indeed, how could a genuinely revolutionary organization, setting itself the task of overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and develop without intellectual conflicts, without groupings and temporary factional formations?” Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky (1936). ↩︎
The following quote from an article published by this group as part of a series of hysterical diatribes against us, conveniently reduces socialist internationalism to the content of it – that is to the principle of rejection of socialism in one country – disregarding its historical form:
