Since March of this year, Sri Lanka has been embroiled in the worst crisis since independence in 1948, with most of the population, the petit-bourgeoisie and the proletariat, locked in an increasingly violent struggle against the police, the army, and the ruling nepotistic Rajapaksa family.

But the real culprit of the crisis lies beyond these “figureheads” – the replacement of State leaders, the installment of a “people power” government (eternal watchword of much of the opportunist bourgeois left in the region) composed of all the parties, and any number of reforms cannot even begin to touch the real fundamental cause of the crisis, a capitalism which has entered its agonic decadent phase.

As such, only the revolutionary action of the proletariat, overthrowing the bourgeois State and installing its own dictatorship, can solve the problems caused by capitalism. But despite this, the proletariat has remained remarkably passive in the movement, giving it an overwhelmingly middle-class, petit-bourgeois character.

Why is there a Crisis in Sri Lanka?

Bourgeois economists and the opportunist opposition call the crisis “a result of mismanagement”, as if the crisis is not the consequence of the inherent contradictions of capitalism, but rather, merely the mismanagement of the capitalist economy. They point to the fact that Sri Lanka is a twin deficits economy, i.e. that its national expenditure exceeds its national income, and that it has an inadequate amount of tradeable goods.

Sri Lanka has been in a precarious state for years now. Ever since the civil war ended in 2009, not only was the Tamil minority brutally oppressed, but the State was fully capable of using the insurgency to ensure a state of constant repression, of enacting “disappearances”, and having the ruling Rajapaksa family capable of all the worst corruption and nepotism with its policies of personal patronage and of fueling racial and ethnic tensions in order to keep its control over the population, showing the bourgeois and counter-revolutionary nature of nationalism.

The Rajapaksa family, typical of semi-colonical ruling cliques, simply effected large tax cuts in typical profiteering fashion, which led to gigantic budget deficit increases. This was coupled with an extremely rapidly increasing debt, which more than double between 2010 and 2020. Sri Lanka is due to pay 4 billion dollars to debtors by the end of the year. This was largely the result of Chinese imperialism which engulfed the semi-colonial country in one of its by now well known debt traps, best exemplified by the Hambantota port.

There is also the gigantic food crisis in the country, massively exacerbated by the leap to organic farming, a result of a capitalist adventure that sought out a revaluation of agricultural capital which led to the abandonment of crops. Sri Lankans have called this a “man-made disaster”. Food inflation, hovering around 30% or so at the moment, is only looking worse.

The Bourgeois Government’s Militaristic Response to COVID

The rage of the people in Sri Lanka did not come out of nowhere: at the beginning of 2021, the government deployed more than 20,000 soldiers in schools, instituting a military curfew. This was ostensibly a “COVID lockdown”, a COVID lockdown which mysteriously was never followed with sanitary measures. The fact that this militaristic response was only an excuse to quell class struggle became clear when the “mask came off”, so to say, and the government dissolved parliament in March and called legislative elections to consolidate its power.

According to a UNICEF study, while this happened, urban household income fell by 37%, rural household income fell by 30%, and plantation sector household income fell by 23%. And this was while the leaders of the government spent exorbitant amounts of money on its petty luxuries!

It should be noted that the bourgeois leftist “opposition”, including the leadership of the regime unions and the Tamil nationalist leaders, wholly supported this militarization as well as the government’s choice to send the workers back into the meat-grinder of the workplace, leading to countless deaths, all in the name of the “reconstruction of the national economy”, the watchword of opportunism since the end of the second imperialist world war. It’s clear that the bourgeois opposition does not defend the independent interests of the workers, but rather that they are wholly integrated in the State machinery that they supposedly oppose.

But notable, the workers of Sri Lanka did not take this lying down: in response to these measures, many workers did not show up for work, including teachers and railway workers, and from the first day of deconfinement, the garment workers went on strike, as did oil workers and, a little earlier, the coconut plantation workers.

By November, teachers had been on strike for 4 months against militarization of school and for their own working conditions, and in the same month, the now infamous rise in gas prices made shortages a problem for the whole of the population. The railroad workers’ strikes intensified and in December, the health workers joined in, with large strikes in almost 1,500 facilities over various regions.

Right before the protests started in March this year, in February there was a strike wave in over 500 health facilities, and the government cracked down on it with a ban on strikes. The workers replied with new strikes in March over and above the government decrees.

Between March and April, we saw the eruption of the protests, at first very small but quickly increasing in size, with inflation and shortages threatening outright famine and starvation due to the imperialist conflict in Ukraine.

Imperialist War anywhere affects the proletariat everywhere

Major imperialist conflicts do not just bring death and suffering for the soldiers that are thrown into the meat grinder of combat, or the workers of the combating countries that have their conditions rapidly impoverished and whose struggle for essential needs are brutally crushed by the bourgeois State under the pretext of “saving the fatherland”, the watchword of war repression.

The economy of the imperialist epoch is wholly connected, and as such a major imperialist conflict will produce shock-waves everywhere else. The Ukraine conflict has already led to major gas shortages in the US and Europe, is tied to imminent famines in the semi-colonial countries with poor food-production, and Sri Lanka is no different.

The Ukrainian war has resulted with Sri Lanka being hit with massive oil import costs and a gigantic dip in tourism revenue (a very important part of the economy), worsening the fuel shortage even further, making black outs be as long as 7 hours per day. Prices at gas stations have surged almost 50% as a result of the conflict, which, of course, has increased the struggle.

The solution of the bourgeois State has been to turn to the IMF, i.e. to imperialism. This might save the bourgeoisie – it will not save the Sri Lankan people from misery and impoverishment. Only the independent class struggle of the proletariat can save the world from the slaughter of imperialism and the immiseration it brings.

Where is the Proletariat in All of This?

But the Sri Lankan proletariat, despite its previous struggles having paralyzed the country and shown themselves capable of putting the government on the ropes, has not taken the lead in the current uprising, unlike how it did in the Kazakhstan insurrection earlier this year.

The vanguard in the movement is the peasantry and the now impoverished petit-bourgeoisie which has seen all its dreams of a comfortable middle-class existence completely evaporated, with workers merely tagging along with the confused and contradictory slogans and demands of this amorphous inter-class rage.

The responsible for this are, above all, the regime union leaders: for nearly a month, there was no response at all to the movement, to the terrible conditions that crushed the proletariat even worse than they did the petit-bourgeoisie. The workers were simply told to continue back to work, until finally, in April 28, a whole month after this explosion of class struggle, a coalition of 1,000 trade unions finally authorized a “general strike”, which was to merely last one day!

The strike saw massive adhesion, showing that the workers are more than willing and wanting to fight for their needs. But this fight can only conclude with the proletarian uprising, the taking of power from the bourgeoisie, and there is nothing that the leaders of the regime unions, organic successors to the old corporatist fascist regime unions, fear more.

According to the report of a militant Russian trade union on the matter:

- On April 28, the All Ceylon United Teachers Union brought 240,000 teachers and 16,000 school principals to the streets - On April 28, employees of 18 public and private banks joined the strike

- On May 6, 40 unions affiliated with The Railway Trade Union Alliance joined the strikes and halted train traffic in the country for 24 hours

- Members of the Emigration and Immigration Workers Alliance stopped high-ranking officials from entering and leaving the country at airports

The strikers demanded the immediate resignation of the president and prime minister and the formation of a coalition government from all political parties. These demands were supported by 98% of the participants in a poll carried out by the Daily Mirror. Sepala Liyanage, general secretary of the All-Ceylon Transport Workers Union, said that all employees were invited to join the strike to form a people’s government.

It is clear that the regime unions are not leading the proletariat out to fight for its own needs, but rather using the working class for its own politicking, to replace the bourgeois government whose militarization they had previously supported with another, “leftist” bourgeois government which will be unable to to do anything about the crisis, will be just as repressive but perhaps might be better at fooling the struggling Sri Lankan people.

As such, it is of vital importance for the Sri Lankan working class to develop its own organs of combative economic class struggle – militant trade unions – which will attempt to organize as many workers as possible, which will attempt to strike alongside the workers in the regime unions towards a general strike led by the proletarian front of action.

The remarkable endurance of the struggle

The struggle has been going on for months now, and the protesters have not backed down a bit: they have fought the police, they have fought a state of siege and they have fought the army. Declaring itself strictly peaceful at first, the protesters have shown incredible resistance against attempts of violence repressions by the government, assaulting soldiers, police and even attempting to break into the president’s house.

After a harsh crackdown in May 9, where the government cynically used members of the lumpenproletariat as “pro-government protesters” to form a mob which violently assaulted the protesters, the mob was fought off by workers, peasant and petit-bourgeoisie. The movement did not back down afterwards, but continues. It might now know that, in the future, such pacifist illusions will not be enough to win.

What is certain, ultimately, is that at the moment, the movement is still controlled by the middle-classes, with workers being mostly passive and following the regime trade unions, and as such, unless workers take the leadership of the movement, it will not reach the same heights as the uprising in Kazakhstan.

However, as has been noted, there is a remarkable about of non-partisanship in the protesters, with many of the protesters having no affiliation to any of the bourgeois parties, with all of the “opposition” parties failing to control the movement to its own ends and the leadership thus remaining decentralized and independent. The rejection of all bourgeois parties, in any case, is a positive factor that bodes well for future developments.

It is clear that the Sri Lankan working class must form its own organs of class struggle so that, when caught in such crisis, as well as the general bone-crushing grind of capitalism in “peaceful” times, it can defend itself and take the revolutionary offensive when the situation presents for it presents itself. It must form independent militant trade unions for economic struggles and it is necessary to militate in the revolutionary party of the proletariat, the international communist party, for political movements. We see, right before our very eyes, a situation where the solution to a grave economic problem can only be political: the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.