Source: What’s Next?
First Published: This article was first published in the Sri Lankan Sunday Observer, 23 November 1997.
Markup and Edited: D. Walters for the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line in 2009
REACTIONARIES AND renegades alike of all shades and hues might scoff and mock at the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), now a pale reflection of its former revolutionary self, but the LSSP does have its historians and archivists.
Some time ago two LSSPers, Wesley Muthiah and Sydney Wanasinghe, brought out a collection of its early papers, including secret documents from the Colonial Office which have been released for public scrutiny. Now Revolutionary History, a British publication which still keeps the flame of Trotskyism alive, has brought out this volume which covers the golden age of the LSSP. The years covered are from 1935, when the party was founded, to 1964 when the party entered into a coalition government with the SLFP – the Great Betrayal in the eyes of the purists.
The LSSP, however enfeebled it might be, can be happy that it still evokes such devotion from Trotskyists, for clearly this publication is a labour of revolutionary love. It is one of a series covering Trotskyist movements in Greece, Vietnam and Bolivia, and the editors claim that this covers four-fifths of the countries where the creed of Leon Trotsky flourished.
The editors have drawn extensively from both the publications of the LSSP and the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (BLPI) and their internal publications, as well as from Trotskyist publications in Britain and the USA. What this demonstrates is that, whereas in Sri Lanka the only publications about the LSSP that are available are Leslie Goonewardene’s short histories, there is quite a considerable collection scattered abroad.
To read this book is to be reminded that the LSSP in its prime was a singular phenomenon. It was not only Sri Lanka’s first genuinely radical political party but by some historical quirk also assumed the status of the largest and most powerful Trotskyist party in the world. This itself is ironic because later it was claimed that its principal leader for most of its lifetime, Dr N.M. Perera, was not even a Marxist, let alone a Trotskyist.
The origins of the LSSP are well known, so we will not recapitulate that part of this history. Rather what is of interest to us here is the first split in the LSSP in 1945, which saw Philip Gunawardena and Dr N.M. Perera retaining the original name of the LSSP while Dr Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Goonewardene, among others, appeared as the Ceylon Unit of the BLPI. The BLPI was of course the Indian party which all LSSPers joined. However, back in Ceylon after the war, the party split on the above lines, a split which was never really healed, as we shall see, although the party was unified in 1950. At every point of crisis in the party, the LSSP-BLPI split has come to the surface.
According to Y.R. Amarasinghe, himself an LSSPer on whose unpublished doctoral thesis the editors freely draw: "Being Trotskyist, the two parties naturally had no fundamental differences, yet they were not without mutual hostility and petty squabbles. The Bolshevik Samasamajists criticised the LSSP’s line as ‘organisational Menshevism’. The basis for their contention was the advancement by Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera of the need to broaden the base of their party by associating with other radical groups in the country. Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera had put forward such views whilst in exile in India. The militants who had then rejected this idea and opted for a well-knit revolutionary organisation were the same men who later came to lead the Bolshevik section."
The differences between the two parties then were on method rather than principles, although the BLPI was the more rigidly doctrinaire of the two. In fact, Dr Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Goonewardene were the theoreticians of the LSSP even after the party’s unification and after Philip Gunawardena openly rejected Trotskyism, dubbing them "potheguras" ["doctrinaires" – literally, "book-teachers"]. While the LSSP stood for a broad mass party, the BLPI adopted the position of a cadre party, a well-knit revolutionary organisation with an advanced political consciousness.
It is also interesting to study the positions which the two parties adopted towards the Independence granted to Ceylon in 1948.
Both parties had contested the first general election in 1947 separately, the LSSP winning ten seats to the BLPI’s seven. Here, again, there is an important clue to the mind of the two parties. The LSSP which stood for mass politics gained more seats than the more exclusivist BLPI. It is also worth noting that the LSSP’s seats were in the countryside (Philip from Avissawella and N.M. from Ruwanwella), while the BLPI’s were in and around Colombo (Colvin from Dehiwela-Galkissa and Leslie from Panadura).
This is perhaps the most important clue, for Philip and N.M. may have realised that if the party was to stand a chance as a parliamentary proposition (an idea to which the party as a whole was to be increasingly attracted later), they had to shed the exclusivist position. Theoreticians of the BLPI such as Doric de Souza (Philip’s accusation against Doric that he was a police spy was the bitterest source of the split), who were insulated from the demands of mass politics, felt no such urge.
Anyway, the BLPI took up the more radical position, calling Independence a fake, voting against the motion in parliament and boycotting all celebrations including the opening of parliament by the Duke of Gloucester, the King’s brother. On the other hand, N.M. Perera wrote: "None but opportunists and the purblind will deny that the masses in Ceylon are faced with a period of reaction. The flag-waving and syncopated chauvinism of the Senanayakes and Kotelawalas have thrown to the surface the worst kind of ultra-nationalist sentiments. The petit-bourgeois masses are beginning to rally round these sentiments pushing to the background the weakened proletariat, weakened after the May-June general strike of 1947. Class issues have temporarily got blurred."
Again, it would appear that the LSSP, while seeing that there were serious shortcomings in the Independence which had been granted, saw that the mass tide was against them and sought to recognise this reality, while the more theoretical BLPI thought that there was a mood of revolutionary ferment in the air. The BLPI, and the Communist Party which was then collaborating with them, organised a mass rally against the "fake Independence" which the LSSP did not join, although it boycotted the first sitting of parliament.
The greatest moment of the now unified LSSP was admittedly the Hartal of 1953. There is no dispute that this was entirely organised, led and executed by the LSSP, with the VLSSP-CP* [note] only in a subordinate role. What was significant about it was the enthusiasm shown by the masses, who not only struck work but brought transport to a standstill by squatting on roads and railway lines, the women baking hoppers [rice pancakes] on them.
But again, it was a one-day affair. Edmund Samarakkody, although being in the LSSP himself, argues that "the LSSP leadership, despite the unmistakeable moods of the workers and other sections of the masses, decided to keep to their plan of a mere protest action and called off the Hartal, and prevented the masses from continuing the struggle". On the other hand Leslie Goonewardene, advancing the official position, writes: "Finally, and most important of all, it was the considered view of the LSSP (as well as, we believe, the VLSSP-CP United Front) that the mass movement had reached only the stage of protest against the action of the government in imposing the burdens it did on the masses, and not at a stage where it was aiming at the overthrow of the government." In short, in spite of all the organisational work done by the LSSP and the early heroic sacrifices of its leaders the masses were not yet ready for struggle.
What followed then has the ring of inevitability. The LSSP had high hopes of victory at the general election of March 1960 which followed the assassination of Prime Minister [S.W.R.D.] Bandaranaike. In fact, there is a piquant vignette of Leslie Goonewardene, then on a visit to London, telling a group of British Trotskyists and a Tamil Trotskyist in Soho Square that he had to cut short his tour and return immediately because there was a good chance of the LSSP forming a government.
Philip Gunawardena, who had broken with the LSSP by then, nursed the same illusion. But after the short-lived United National Party (UNP) government it was to the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) that the people turned again in July 1960. The LSSP had a no-contest pact with the SLFP and was still nursing illusions about forming a government with the latter, but in the event the SLFP gained a comfortable majority and again the LSSP’s hopes were dashed.
The golden afternoon was decidedly drawing to a close. In 1963 all three left parties, the LSSP, Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) of Philip Gunawardena and the Communist Party, came together in the United Left Front (ULF) in one last spasm of radical energy, but it would appear that even as this burst forth it carried the seeds of its own ultimate dissolution. For, not many moons later, the ULF was carrying out negotiations with the SLFP to form a government and, surprisingly, even the normally intransigent Philip Gunawardena was enthusiastic at the idea.
However, finally, his mercurial temperament came to the surface and he demanded that two SLFP cabinet ministers who had opposed him during his time as agriculture minister in the Bandaranaike government should be removed if he was to join the government. Not surprisingly, Mrs Bandaranaike as Prime Minister was not ready to do this, while she seems to have had reservations also about admitting a Communist Party into her government in the light of international repercussions and Sri Lanka’s friendship with China, which was then embroiled in a bitter ideological dispute with the Soviet Union.
What is interesting, in the light of allegations against the LSSP that it had crept into the government by the back door, is that is that all three parties still stood for an SLFP-ULF government. According to Amarasinghe, the secretaries of the three parties had written to the prime minister saying that a "coalition was not possible" on the lines indicated by the prime minister, that is excluding the MEP and CP.
However, as everybody knows, it was only the LSSP which entered the government. The resolution to that effect was moved [at the LSSP special conference of June 1964] by Dr N.M. Perera and secured an overwhelming majority, while those who opposed it, such as Edmund Samarakkody and Meryl Fernando (both MPs) and Bala Tampoe and V. Karalasingham among others, walked out of the party.
There was, however, a third resolution sponsored by among others Dr Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene and Doric de Souza, which "called upon the conference to authorise the party towards forming a ‘progressive government’ subject to three conditions: an agreement on measures that would enthuse the masses and secure their active participation, capable of being implemented in one year; that the government should be between the SLFP and the ULF; and that the LSSP should obtain the three portfolios of Finance, Nationalised Services and Internal and External Trade". The sponsors of this resolution remained within the LSSP but did not accept cabinet office in the SLFP-LSSP government that was subsequently formed.
The towering figure behind the LSSP’s entry into the government was of course Dr N.M. Perera. N.M. was always the most practical of the LSSP’s leaders and as a longstanding MP and a former Leader of the Opposition had a keen sense of power. He, no doubt, saw that the LSSP had exhausted the possibilities of parliamentary gradualism and that an alliance with the SLFP offered fresh possibilities.
Perhaps, for the LSSP, he saw a possibility of entering the village in alliance with the SLFP, although, as later events were to make clear, this held no benefits for the LSSP. In fact, if the LSSP wished to enter the village it should have done so much earlier when the possibilities for this existed abundantly, but in their obsession with the working class they were to postpone this until it was far too late.
To end on a piquant note – V. Karalasingham, a leader of the left tendency which opposed a coalition and broke away (although he later rejoined) paints a picture of the future which is not so very different paradoxically enough from the romantic vision of a [Sinhala-nationalist novelist] Gunadasa Amarasekera hero. He writes: "Much as the living ruins now languishing in the ranks of the government evoke our ’disinterested sorrow’ the fact is that in conformity with the law of development, the new life has already arisen out of the disintegration of the old leadership of the LSSP. Revolutionary Marxists from the ranks of the swabasha [native language speakers], in particular the Sinhala-educated intelligentsia from the universities of Peradiniya, Vidyalankara and Vidyodaya and the pirevenas [Buddhist schools] of Ceylon. These are the elements who take over from now and they do so on the higher plane of the positive achievements and enduring conquests already made. This is the guarantee that the new revolutionary leadership shall take the movement to its historical goal."
As events were to prove, this was an idle but tragic vision. Neither N.M.’s vision of the LSSP entering the countryside in alliance with the SLFP nor Karalasingham’s vision of a native intelligentsia inheriting the LSSP’s mantle was to materialise. The Sinhala-educated intelligentsia did give the leadership, but that was to the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a story yet to be fully told.
This article was first published in the Sri Lankan Sunday Observer, 23 November 1997.