The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka will hold a public meeting entitled “Two Years of JVP/NPP Rule: A regime of Big Business and IMF Austerity” on Tuesday, November 10 at 4 p.m. in the Colombo Public Library Auditorium.
The SEP and IYSSE invite workers, youth and other oppressed layers of society to attend the meeting, which will assess two years of JVP/NPP rule and discuss the way forward for the working class.
Two years ago, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) came to power by exploiting mass opposition to the discredited traditional establishment parties. It conducted a two-faced election campaign, making false promises to workers and the poor to improve their living conditions and uphold democratic rights, while assuring big business and foreign capital that their interests would be protected.
The pseudo-left, led by the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), hailed the election victory and presented the NPP as the “realization of the people’s anticipations.” Today, as workers enter into struggle, these same forces preach that the class struggle must be diverted into pressuring the government to “take the correct path.”
Only the SEP and the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) warned that the JVP, re-branded as the National People’s Power (NPP), was another capitalist party, steeped in Sinhala chauvinism, and that it would prove to be a trap for workers who had been fighting attacks on social and democratic rights under the government of Ranil Wickremesinghe.
Immediately after coming to power, the JVP/NPP government abandoned its election promises concerning living conditions and democratic rights and accelerated the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) brutal austerity measures. Meanwhile, the “rich country” promised by the JVP/NPP is becoming a reality for big business, at the expense of workers and the poor.
The government has drawn Sri Lanka more closely into Washington’s military strategy directed against China and strengthened relations with Israel, which is carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
To suppress growing opposition among workers, the rural poor and youth, the government is strengthening draconian laws, further undermining democratic rights.
While making bogus criticisms of the government’s policies, all the opposition parties share its commitment to IMF austerity. The trade union bureaucracies, including the JVP’s own unions, have acted as an industrial police force, shielding the government from a broad mobilisation of the working class.
The mass uprising of 2022 demonstrated the immense social power of the working class. The lesson that must be drawn from its setback, however, is the urgent necessity for a revolutionary leadership armed with a socialist internationalist perspective to lead the mass movement to victory.
The working class must organise independently of the capitalist parties, their servile pseudo-left apologists and the trade union bureaucracies. It must rally the rural poor and other oppressed layers of society to fight the government’s austerity programme and attacks on democratic rights.
We warmly invite workers, intellectuals, youth and those opposed to austerity and the suppression of democratic rights to attend the meeting and participate in the discussion on the way forward for the working class and the masses.
Venue: Colombo Public Library Auditorium
Date and time: Tuesday, November 10, at 4 p.m.