This document was adopted unanimously by the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) at its founding congress in Colombo, 27–29 May, 2011. It is vital for a deeper understanding of the problems of development of the revolutionary movement on the Indian subcontinent. It draws the critical lessons of the Fourth International's 75-year struggle for Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution in South Asia.
The founding in 1942 of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI), by leaders of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) who had escaped British jails in Ceylon, marked a decisive advance for the Fourth International in Asia. The document traces the rise, decline and ultimate betrayal of the LSSP, which joined the 1964 coalition government of Madame Sirima Bandaranaike, abandoning the struggle to unify the Tamil and Sinhalese working class, and opening the road to the bloody 25-year civil war from 1983 to 2009.
The SEP’s forerunner, the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), was founded in 1968 to draw the necessary political lessons from the LSSP’s betrayal and to rearm the working class politically on the basis of the Trotskyist program fought for by the ICFI. The document sums up the lessons of the RCL’s principled and courageous struggle against all forms of nationalism and communalism.
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Purchase from Mehring Books- Introduction
- The Theory of Permanent Revolution
- The formation of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party
- The LSSP’s turn to the Fourth International
- The founding of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India
- The Quit India movement
- Stalinism betrays post-war revolutionary upheavals
- The Chinese Revolution
- The partition of India
- Formal independence in Sri Lanka
- The liquidation of the BLPI
- Pabloite Opportunism
- The LSSP’s response to the Open Letter
- The LSSP’s political backsliding
- The SWP reunification
- The Great Betrayal in Sri Lanka
- The formation of the RCL
- The RCL’s struggle against petty-bourgeois radicalism
- The political degeneration of the British SLL
- The collapse of the second coalition government
- The UNP government and the descent into war
- The RCL, the WRP and the national question
- The 1985–1986 split with the WRP
- After the split with the WRP
- The United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam
- The International Perspectives of the ICFI
- The Collapse of the Soviet Union
- The RCL and the United Front
- The RCL and the peasantry
- The National Question
- The Socialist Equality Party
- The World Socialist Web Site
- The Sri Lankan crisis of 2000
- War and militarism
- The crisis of capitalism and the tasks of the SEP