Only communism can end starvation here ♦ Build the ICWP internationally here ♦ Garment workers: India to Sri Lanka here ♦
Sri Lanka Crisis: Only Communism Can End Starvation and Meet Workers’ Needs
CHENNAI (India), July 11— “I want to join the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) but tell me: How is it going to immediately affect millions of workers who are on the verge of starvation?” Masses in the industrial areas of Chennai have asked this question and many more.
When more workers join ICWP, they can organize to seize and share food from stores and warehouses. As we saw with the massive Langars during the farmers’ protests in India, communist relationships with farmers will lead them to provide food for the masses.
Cross-border communist relationships with longshore and maritime workers will liberate the grain that imperialist conflicts hold back. Wherever and whenever the ICWP leads masses to seize power, communist production will immediately mean sharing food and everything else based on need.
The sooner we make communist revolution, the more workers and their children we will save from starvation.
News and social media messages have touched the workers here. Every day we witness the struggle to get fuel, food, and transport in Sri Lanka. At the same time, there are ferocious rebellions. Some in the military are refusing orders to suppress the workers and many more look the other way.
ICWP comrades are working to channel the angry workers into a struggle for communism, to recruit them into collectives. Our collectives must organize the masses to show that only the working class with a communist vision can put an end to greedy capitalism.
In communism, we will organize a mass ICWP without nations or borders that will rely on the workers to provide food and other necessities. Only the workers create the food we need, not the bosses. The bosses give us wages to make more money by selling the products of our labor. We will put an end to this cycle of money. That will free the working class from exploitation.
The masses in Sri Lanka have shown their power. Despite crushing poverty and a shortage of fuel, they rose in every corner of the country to demand the ouster of the corrupt President and his Prime Minister. However, our job is to eradicate the capitalist class that owns all the means of production while workers toil day and night to make them richer. The twenty richest men in Sri Lanka control 86% of the wealth.
The largest conglomerate in Sri Lanka is LOLC group with interests in banking, shipping, consumer credit, and supermarket chains. Last month LOLC signed a deal with China Harbor Engineering to promote the Chinese imperialists’ Belt and Road Initiative. India and Japan lost their bids.
Another very powerful group of millionaire capitalists is in the garment industry. The entire garment industry in Sri Lanka is for export only, earning over $18 billion a year from the toiling masses of mostly women workers. This segment of the garment economy is controlled mostly by British, US, and European companies.
This crisis in Sri Lanka makes it clear that there is no room for reform. We cannot beg the rich capitalists to provide us with food, housing, or health care. They are trying everything possible to rob us of our necessities. The ongoing ‘bailout’ worked out by IMF, the Chinese rulers, and Indian banks is to deprive the working class of our future.
The local capitalists in Sri Lanka, in alliance with imperialist countries like the US, China, and India, are on a collision course to capture markets. Their conflicting interests are limiting their ability to expand. As the war between Ukraine and Russia has shown, capitalists must find markets for their commodities. If they are restricted, wars become inevitable.
Sri Lanka, like Ukraine, is crucial in global shipping. Strategically located Colombo, one of the most efficient ports in the world, is the largest port in South Asia.
ICWP comrades in Chennai, with garment worker comrades in Bengaluru, are making serious efforts to organize our party in Sri Lanka. We are in contact with scores of workers in Colombo and Kandy. We are trying to contact shipping workers.
But we must also organize a larger base among workers in India. The crisis in Sri Lanka is going to affect the workers here. The doors for the communist revolution are open. We must seize the moment.
Sri Lanka Uprising Calls Masses Worldwide to Mobilize for Communist Revolution
July 10—”What we have seen in Sri Lanka will look like a Sunday picnic compared to what will happen in this country,” commented a comrade in South Africa.
Masses stormed the Presidential Palace in Colombo on July 9. They forced President Rajapaksa to flee and resign. They burned the private home of Prime Minister Wickremesinghe (in office only since May) and stormed his official residence. He, too, had to resign.
Police and soldiers are defecting. People from across the island are descending on the capital to join the insurrection. They are traveling on foot or in whatever vehicles they can find.
Many are garment workers. Sri Lanka’s export garment industry employs 400,000 workers directly and another two million indirectly, mostly women.
Skyrocketing prices and dire shortages of food and fuel are driving Sri Lankan workers to absolute disaster. They realize that they have nothing to lose but their chains. And they have a communist world to win.
Workers Need Revolutionary Communism, Not the Revisionist Electoral Left
Rajapaksa and his long-ruling family have outraged the masses by shamelessly stealing public funds to increase their already obscene wealth.
Rajapaksa’s party, Sri Lanka Podujana Permuna (Sri Lanka People’s Freedom Alliance) is a coalition of seventeen social-democrat, socialist, so-called communist, nationalist, and anti-imperialist groups. The current uprising exposes the bankruptcy of the electoral left in all its forms. We call this revisionism.
The whole international working class should celebrate and support this revolt. But the Sri Lankan masses desperately need the revolutionary communist vision and organization of the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP). And we need them.
With a mass revolutionary communist party having a mass base of support, the working-class insurrection in Sri Lanka could go beyond toppling a particular capitalist government.
It could take power. It could solve the capitalists’ economic crisis by building a new society from the ground up based on communist principles: From each according to ability and commitment, to each according to need.
But that requires a revolutionary communist party of a new kind. One open to all willing to work collectively to build communist relationships to replace money and markets as the foundation of society. To destroy the wage system that nurtures the competition, racism, sexism, religious hatred, and nationalism that divide and weaken our international working class.
Hundreds in Sri Lanka read Red Flag, thanks to comrades in India. We invite those readers – and all readers! – to organize themselves into ICWP collectives (cells) and help recruit hundreds more.
Inter-Imperialist Conflict Creates More Misery and More Opportunities for Communist Revolution
Sri Lanka, like Pakistan, is a major part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Over half of Sri Lanka’s foreign revenue comes from the garment industry. Garment workers will be forced to bail out its crushing imperialist debt. Argentina, Lebanon, and Turkey are on the brink of a similar collapse.
Communist revolution is the only way for the masses in Sri Lanka and everywhere to escape the clutches of Chinese debt and the rapacious IMF. To end the inter-imperialist competition and wars that increasingly destroy our lives.
Global trade disruptions stemming largely from the US-Russia war in Ukraine have led to mounting unemployment and increasing costs of living. These make survival very difficult for workers around the world. This global crisis opens huge possibilities for us to build an international party.
Unrest has materialized in Pakistan, where ongoing disruptions of electric power have ignited demonstrations and highway blockages in Karachi and elsewhere since June 27. Protests spread in the wake of government suppression. Workers face unprecedented heat waves (temperatures up to 49.5 °C or 121.1 °F) and drought, consequences of capitalist-caused climate change.
And in Nepal, where police violently broke up a June 20 student demonstration against the state-owned monopoly’s double-digit fuel price hikes.
And in Ecuador, where Indigenous workers are fighting cops and blocking streets in the capital. After suffering two years of the pandemic-related crisis, they can no longer bear the burden of rising inflation and unemployment. Leaders of Indigenous organizations are channeling this anger into negotiations with the government over a list of reform demands.
And in Europe. “I have a decent job,” said a worker marching in Ireland. But “halfway through the month and I find my wages are gone. It’s just really tough to survive.” Over 80,000 marched in Brussels against a law that blocks their ability to negotiate wage hikes. Tens of thousands marched in London on June 19 against austerity and in solidarity with striking transportation workers.
European trade unions have corralled mass anger at the cost-of-living crisis into demands for wage increases. But we have seen repeatedly how easy it is for capitalists to erode any gains. Workers need communist revolution to abolish wage slavery!
If not now, when? If not us, who? Join and build the International Communist Workers’ Party to mobilize masses for communism – nothing less will do!
Comrades in Bengaluru (India) Spread Communism to Sri Lanka
Greeting to our comrades all over the world in this time of advancing our party!
The bosses are creating wars, we want to end them with communism. We want to reach out to our readers in Sri Lanka in their desire to demolish the wage system and create a new world of communism without borders, money, and bosses. Your heroic efforts must translate into forming ICWP. We too are doing the same.
In the garment district of Bengaluru, we have been mobilizing the masses for communism. In recent weeks our collectives have been distributing Red Flag every evening for half an hour. We are also including our leaflet, “Open all borders, Fight for Communism.”
More women have joined our struggle for communism. “What is happening in Sri Lanka gives me courage and inspiration,” said one. “I think that communism is possible now. We don’t want to be ruled by a society where there will be women toiling for a few more rupees.”
We approached an NGO in our area that is connected to garment workers in Sri Lanka. We have contacted four women who live near Colombo in the Free Trade Zone and sent them Red Flag. Many of them read Telugu. We also gave them a short version of Mobilize the Masses for Communism in Telugu.
The workers told us that their area has been occupied by the military. They are facing starvation.
The bosses demand more money. They say that the Covid pandemic is over, and we must produce more. Workers are harassed by supervisors who demand sexual favors. Many times they send us to the army.
Our new Red Flag readers in Sri Lanka have said that they have seen dramatic changes with the uprising in Colombo. Many people in the armed forces have joined the marches against the bosses. The unions are calling for a united fight and there are many mass strikes.
Our comrades in Chennai have been distributing Red Flag in other areas of Colombo and Kandy. One reader in Sri Lanka has offered to translate it into Sinhala.
We are struggling to create new collectives of ICWP in Sri Lanka. But it is our struggle as well to massively create our party. We have plans with auto workers in Chennai and garment workers in Bengaluru to have a joint conference about ICWP’s role in advancing mass work for communism. We hope to have comrades from Sri Lanka.
Join us, and let the bosses know that communism is the future, and their days are numbered! Their murderous wars on the working class will be resolutely answered by more communists.
—Comrades in Bengaluru