Ceylon: The Centrism of Bala Tampoe

[p010] CEYLON: The Centrism of Bala Tampo ernment Mrs Bandaranaike declared ‘It is only by ttavelling on this path (i.e. coalition) whilst con- sidering the changes that have taken place in our country that we can achieve our purpose.’ Speak- ‘ing definitely on behalf of the capitalist class, although she promised to achieve their purpose she was unable even with the faithful service of her new allies on the left to inflict any major defeat on the working class. The bourgeoisie attempted a new and tougher line. The worsening economic crisis demanded much quicker and firmer action against the rising tide of militancy in the working class. Following a brutal attack on the university students, the UNP government opened its on- slaught on the masses. It proceeded to make a very large cut in the rice subsidy. The cost of living was allowed to rise to exorbitant levels. The foreign exchange regulations introduced by the government were:a go-ahead sign for increases in all imported goods among which the main staple food in Ceylon was included. But this government too failed to strike a major blow on the working class: Proposals for state control of trade unions were met with the threat of industrial action by the workers and the gov- ernment was forced to withdraw. The LSSP and CP leaders openly rejected any attempt to mobilize the workers against this gov- ernment. Their position was not to disrupt the parliamentary method of rule. The LSSP (R) leadership had a very good chance at this moment to intervene in the labour move- ment to win some sections if they had developed a Correct revolutionary line. But they played into the hands of the LSSP and CP leaders with their sterile policies. They became the main force. sup- plying the cover-up for the treachery of the LSSP and CP leadership in the working class. Bala Tampoe has been a trade union syndicalist all his political life, and he remains one. But even with these syndicalist policies he could win some gains for the Ceylon Mercantile Union in the 1950s and early 1960s. The objective conditions permitted such gains. The deliberately created ‘boom’ of the imperialist system after the second world war was a substitute for taking on the work- ing class, as the bourgeoisie emerged out of the war weakened and unable to face up to the mili- tancy of the working class. . In this period of the boom, the working class - could gain reforms through their traditional orga- nizations such as trade unions. This was specially so with regard to the white collar workers in colonial countries. The CMU, which organized mainly the clerical workers in the private sector, was Able to pose as a successful union in this’ res- pect. The inflated economy created to contain the working-class struggles and postpone the confron: - tation, also strengthened the working class with . regard to its living conditions and organizations throughout the world. In the 1963-1964 period the CMU became one of the most militant and power- ful unions in Ceylon. But the objective conditions behind the period - of reforms were rapidly coming to an end in the later part of the 1960s. The devaluation of sterling 7

[p011] (1967) precipitated a series of monetary changes in many parts of the world. _ The Ceylon rupee was devalued as a direct result of the monetary crisis. This was in effect a direct attack on the living standards of the working class as all the basic essentials of the working class were imported goods, and all these imported goods were bound to rise in price. Great unrest grew among the trade unions and the leaders of the LSSP and CP were forced to call a strike of all private sector workers. At this point the CMU completely betrayed the workers who came out on strike by not calling out their members in the same work places in support of the strike. Tampoe’s argument at the time was that the strike was led by LSSP and CP leaders and therefore the strike was bound to be . sold out. Tampoe said he did not want to involve his members in such a struggle doomed to failure. This is the wretched position of the petty-bour- geois syndicalist who has no confidence in the working class and its ability to understand and transform itself to a revolutionary movement by way of its experiences. The task of the revolu- tionary party at a time like this should have been, as pointed out in the Transitional Programme: ‘The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of al! kinds of struggles, even when they : involve only the most modest’ material interests or democratic rights of the working class. He takes active part in mass trade unions for the purpose of strengthening them and raising their spirit of militancy. He fights. uncompromisingly against any attempt to subordinate the unions to the bourgeois __ State and bind the proletariat to compulsory arbi- tration and every other form of police guardianship --not only fascist but also democratic. Only on the basis of such work within the trade unions is successful struggle possible against the reformists including those of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Sec- tarian attempts to build or preserve small “revolu- tionary” unions as a second edition of. the party signify in actuality, the renouncing of the struggle - for leadersnip of the working class.‘ This, the struggle for leadership of the working class, is the precise task which the LSSP (R) has abandoned with the worthy blessings of the US. Tampoe played into the hands of the LSSP and CP leaders by providing them with an excuse to call off the strike. These leaders did not want a strike at all because it would disturb their parlia- mentary alliances and ‘perspectives’. — To cover up for his own role during this period Tampoe writes in his open letter to the LSSP, ‘published in the Intercontinental Press. November : 24, 1969: ‘Even- when LSSP-led trade unions have fought important batties under. the. UNP regime,. they. proved to be ineffective. This is because the LSSP has lost the confidence it previously enjoyed in the field of the class struggle. It is also because it can. no longer secure the. participation of those sections of the working, class that belong to the minorities in the countr:: It must be very pleasant thinking for ‘a trade union syndicalist to assume that all other rival leaders in this field of activity, namely the trade unions, have lost the confidence of the workers. —_ Then it is ‘only one step further for the syndicalist to think that all those workers are going to join him in the next few days. But in actual reality things do not happen this way. How could Tampoe say that the LSSP and CP leaders had simply lost the confidence of the workers when the strikes were called, according to himself, by those very same leaders? How could he explain the victory of those leaders in the working-class areas in the general election of 1970, even though Tampoe had issued a declaration asking the workers not to, vote in the election. This assumption, that the LSSP and CP leaders have lost the confidence of the workers, was for- mulated in order to facilitate Tampoe’s own aban- donment of any struggle against the treacherous LSSP and CP leaders and the government. For the revolutionaries it is not just a question of the reformist leaders losing the confidence of the workers. The Marxist not only fights consciously to break the confidence of the workers in their reformist leaders but also always poses an alter- native to this leadership. Tampoe, and also the Unified Secretariat, have rejected the building of the alternative leadership a long time ago. This is more clearly revealed at the end of the same open letter. His proposal for the LSSP workers was: ‘Let us coniront the capitalist UNP government and the capitalist class now with a United Front of the working ciass forces at the head of the mass movement’. He goes on to ‘say: let us join forces to ‘provide that lendersnip” Why all these calls for ~a united front if the leaders of the LSSP have already lost the confidence of the workers? Why -not ‘ask these workers to come and join the — ~. LSSP (R)? - Evidently the reason why Tampoe did not take 7 part’ in the strike action of 1967 against the de- valuation was not because of the reasoning he did at the time. Tampoe thought that there was still .Toom open for his union as a white collar workers’ union to bargain with the government indepen- dently. Therefore he did not want to disturb his ‘special’ relationship with the government and the employers by joining a strike with the manual _ workers of the same _ industries. Such was the reactionary policy of Tampoe in that period. He called for a united front with the LSSP in 1969 two years after the massive strike against the devaluation. This was once again a move of the ardent syndicalist Tampoe to preserve his bureaucratic position in the leadership of the CMU. Using his position in the strike against the ‘devaluation as well as his more reactionary policy in. the Harbour strike of 1968, the LSSP in 1969 moved in to organize a counter union. to the A CMU. _ Not only did the LSSP penetrate the new indus- - tries where there were no unions at all, they also recruited members from the CMU itself. The call for a united front with the LSSP was only a cowardly manoeuvre by Tampoe to try and stop this development. But the LSSP did ‘not agree. If this is not a complete abandonment of Trot- Fourth International Spring 1973

[p012] skyism, the present-day Marxism, which con- sciously fights for a revolutionary leadership in the working class against the betrayals of reform- ists and Stalinists, what is it? If anybody tries to cover up for this sort of treachery, allowing its” perpetrators to appear as Trotskyists, are they not participants in the same crime of abandoning — Marxism in the most decisive hour of the working class? The Unified Secretariat must be forced to answer these questions before the workers’ movement internationally. The theory of a ‘United Front of the working class forces to go forward for the socialist revolu- tion’ developed by Tampoe in his open letter has to be given lengthy consideration here because it: is the attempt of all the centrists throughout the world to make a fetish out of the United Front. To this end they completely distort the concep- tion of United Front developed by Lenin and Trotsky. This is what the OCI, which split away from the IC, wrote about the United Front: ‘The fight for a national strike committee was the political fight par excellence at the heart of the heart of the general strike, because it was a fight for this solution by centralizing the strength of the working class in struggle against the bourgeois state.’ A National Strike Committee was the United Front advocated by the OCI during the May-June struggles of 1968. Here the complete bankruptcy of centrism is explicit. The OCI assumes that the centralization of working class forces is equal to the political consciousness of the working class objectively in struggle against the bourgeois state. Although the working class is objectively the. destroyer of capitalism that does not mean that workers are able to win power without the struggle of the revolutionary party, within the class itself, fighting for revolutionary consciousness. This is the essence of Lenin’s fight against the revisionists. This is the deep-going essence of the statements of Lenin against ‘spontaneity’ in What Is To Be Done? A central strike committee is not by itself a political challenge to the bourgeois state. If: it. was so we would have seen socialist revolution in Britain in 1926 under the slogan of the Stalinists ‘All power to the General Council’. We would have seen revolution in Ceylon in 1963 when the Jcint Committee of Trade Union Organizations was formed with the 21 demands which objectively. threatened the bourgeois state. The vital importance of the deepest grasp of the theory of knowledge of Marxism is precisely to go beyond these centrist positions and take up the fight for revolutionary consciousness in the working class. The role of the United Front formed ‘by Lora in Bolivia within the Popular Assembly once again made more than clear the inadequacy of the _ centrist conception of the United Front. When. ‘the OCI in 1971 came forward to cover up for Lora, the continuator of Pabloism in Latin Amer- ica, it was not the beginning of the degeneration — of the OCI. It was the end of a whole era of centrism within the OCI, covered up with left demagogy, and in which they encouraged Lora’s opportunism. . CEYLON: The Centrism of Bala Tampo What difference can we see between the Pab- loite position with regard to the United Front and the revisionists of the so-called Committee for the Defence of the IC (the OCI)? There is not even the slightest difference. They take identical revisionist positions against which the IC has been fighting since its origin. The movement for the ‘21 Demands’ in Ceylon in 1964 was a high point of-the development of - working-class struggle in Ceylon. But what was lacking was the independent revolutionary party to raise the question of independent political power of the working class without which the demands would not be met. Since this central question was not raised, the door was left open for the stalinist and Samasamajist traitors to ally themselves with the bourgeois government, spread- ing the illusion that the demands could be won through a coalition government. This lesson of the betrayal by the Stalinists and reformist LSSPers must be burned into the mind of every revolutionary. The word unity is the dearest in the vocabulary of all centrists. Precisely in the periods where the working class starts to move forward against the authority of monopoly capitalism, these centrists try to confuse the workers with their declarations for unity, among their own ranks. The task of revolutionaries is not to by-pass the instant desires of the. working class, but to struggle with the class itself to make the masses understand the objective truth about unity. The hollow call for unity between the reformist class-collaborationist LSSP, Stalinist CP and other centrist parties, is to cover up for the betrayals of those leaders who do not want to challenge the capitalist state. Trotsky analysing the situation in France wrote: ‘Under these conditions to think of being able to unify the trade union movement by the simple preaching of unity would be to nurture illusions, To declare that without the preliminary unifica- tion of the two trade union organizations, not only the proletarian revolution but even a serious class struggle is impossible means. to make the future of the revolution depend upon the corrupted clique of trade union feformists. ‘In fact, the future of the revolution depends not upon the fusien of the two trade union apparatuses, but the unification of the majority of the working . Class around revolutionary slogans and_ revolu- tionery methods. of struggle.’ The bitter truth of these words was explicit in the experiences in Ceylon in 1963 under the United Left Front formed by the LSSP, CP and the MEP. The Unified Secretariat gave its full blessing to this unprincipled unity of working- class traitors of all kinds, which actually paved the way for the foundation of the coalition to . head off the militancy rising among the workers. The Unified Secretariat’s unification conference, just before the formation of the coalition, de- clared that the LSSP ‘correctly raised the ques- tion of a United Left Front, both to arrest the movement to the right and to help these masses to move towards an alternative left’. The IC correctly pointed out at the time that the ULF was the sugar-coating for the bitter pill of coali- tion. It took only a few months to see the vindi- cation of the statement of the IC.

[p013] * Did the US learn anything out of this experi- ence? Of course not. Pierre Frank, trying to supply a crude cover-up for the position of the US with regard to ULF, stated in his History of the Fourth International: ‘With the Ccslonese CP and a petty bourgeois organization with radical colouring (MEP) it formed what was called the United Left Front which found a great response in the Ceylonese masses and but for the insufficiency of its programme, should have been able to form the point of departure of an extra-parliamentary struggle for power.’ - What idiotic rubbish is this?Does not this state- ment admit that the Unified Secretariat believed that the Stalinists and the petty-bourgeois parties were going to develop a struggle for power of the working class. According to them it was just a question of a programme. Can anybody claim this sort of statement has anything to do with Marxism? - Trotskyism developed through ‘a bitter, con- tinuous struggle against Stalinism, realizing that it was the main counter-revolutionary force in the working-class movement. The Unified Secre- ‘tariat rejected this position in 1953 as it adopted the anti-Trotskyist theory of” Pablo which said that sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy could fulfil the tasks of the socialist revolution under ‘certain circumstances’. The US actually believed that the petty-bourgeois nationalist MEP, which had already been in a coalition with the Bandara- naike party from 1956-1959 and consequently - joined the ultra right-wing party in 1965, also would* ‘lead to socialist revolution in Ceylon. — The policy of Bala Tampoe even today con- tinues this same treacherous line. His call, for a - United Front of the working-class forces to provide the revolutionary leadership, did not raise any objecticn from the US. We have seen how the LSSP took the next . logical step from the United Left Front to the - formation of the coalition government. with Mrs Bandaranaike’s SLFP in 1964. Bala Tampoe also extended his call for the United Front of Left Forces. in 1969 to include the capitalist SLFP by the year 1971.: Bala. Tampoe’s interview, ‘published in the monthly journal of the Australian Socialist Youth in 1971, quotes him as saying: . ‘Recently afte. the Commonwealth conference in Singapore the LSSF(R) called for a meeting of ‘various political parties :and trade unions, youth - and other mass organizations to demand that Ceylon quit the Commonwealth. Besides the CMU, only the JVP answered the call . Tampse omits here. to. mention that his call also went to the SLFP of Mrs Bandaranaike! What a fraud it is to call upon the bourgeois party of Mrs Bandaranaike, which today is the direct tool of imperialism, to form a united front to fight imperialism! This was nothing else but actually Tampoc's offer of himself for a place in the coalition.. This did not bear fruit, not . because Tampoc. was not ready to serve Mrs B. along with his predecessors like N. M. Perera and Colvin de Silva. but because of the crisis — of the capitalist system, now more sharp than it was in 1964: The strategy of Mrs B. today is not to include more working-class partners in the coalition but to get rid of the ones she has already in it by making them help her smash the working class at the earliest possible oppor- tunity. The Unified Secretariat is completely silent on these treacherous positions of Bala. Now, when the. Workers. Press raised the ques- tion sharply revealing Bala’s reactionary alliance with the extreme right-wing elements in world: politics, once again the SWP tries to sweep everything under the carpet by saying. this is not the opportune moment to attack Bala, since he is appearing in the courts for some political prisoners in Ceylon. We say in no uncertain terms that Bala Tampoe is responsible more than anybody else for sending these youth to the prison camps. We say that he cannot get away from the responsibility for the crime of misleading the youth in Ceylon, who were very new to politics. We must analyse and see his role with regard to the uprising of 1971. An undated ‘leaflet distributed ‘by the IMG in Britain in May 1971 under the heading ‘Down . with the Workers Press slanders’ states: ‘The facts are that while the SLL sits in Clapham slandering the JVP, the Ceylon section of the ’ Fourth International, the LSSP (R) is defending them and has been working in an alliance with them and the Young Socialist Front, an alliance which thas done much to. strengthen [sic] the JVP’s political maturity.” We shall see what sort of political maturity the LSSP(R) strengthened in the JVP! First we - would like to say a word about the _ defences put up by the IMG's collaborator Bala Tampoe. for the JVP leaders. We take this quo- tation from a letter signed by Bala and sent to the members of- Parliament asking a series of questions. It. states: ‘Is there any justification for the continuing arrests or detention in custody of persons. who may have only attended political classes of the JVP or been _associated with its lawful political activities before it was proscribed on April 6, 1971. and-even before - the present scvernment -tcok office last year: or merely because of the their having been denounced to the police by political, personal or other enemies, "lof Jraving veen ‘connected with insurgent activities?" The letter does not even raise “the question 7 of release. of all- political prisoners. Tampoe carefully avoids mentioning the JVP leaders who have. already been. taken into custody and put under severe harassment and torture. Anybody can sce the completely fraudulent cover up the IMG -supplied. for Bala Tampoe, painting him — as a defender of political prisoners. - How these revisionists impressionistically tail- end bchind any movement. involved in. an up- rising, completely abandoning the responsibilities ‘of Marxists, is revealed in the. statements they -made during the time of the insurgence. The same leatlet condemned the Workers Press for : calling the JVP uprising adventurist. We analysed in a scrics of articles before and during the. time Fourth international Spring. 1973

[p014] of the struggle itself how the JVP was isolated from the working-class movement as a_ whole (native as well as immigrant Tamil working class) not accidentally but because of the policies pur- sued by the JVP itself. Under such conditions the uprising was doomed to failure from the beginning precisely because the JVP did not start from Marxist concepts of the class situation in Ceylon and take up a struggle to break the grip cf the reformist leaders in the working-class movement. While Bala Tampoe did not take up a fight against the positions of the JVP, he con- Sciously strengthened the ‘political maturity’ of the JVP as the IMG leaflet says. ~ The ‘political maturity’ of the JVP was to come out openly against the organizations of the working class, namely the trade unions and the trade union struggles for better living conditions. The JVP adapted to the nationalist sentiments- of the Sinhala peasantry demagogically exagge- rating about an ‘Indian expansionist movement’. Bala himself said in his interview to the Aus- tralian Sccialist Youth Journal that as a result of his legal work in defence of some JVP supporters before the uprising his party had established very friendly political relations with the leadership of the movement. _ This sort of statement can only be made by a centrist. What are these ‘friendly political rela- tions’? Why is it that the friendly relations were oaly with the leadership of the movement? This Shows the real unprincipled nature of the alliance the IMG leaflet talks about. Is it the task of a revolutionary party to establish ‘friendly relations’ with leaderships of the other, counter organiza- tions? Concepts of this nature bring down the role of the revolutionaries to the level of drunken solicitors in a court bar. To cover up for Tampoe’s sham alliance with the JVP, the IMG was forced to draw a false picture of the situation during the time of the uprising. They wrote: ‘Everything that has hap- pened since the fighting began confirms that the JVP has tremendous support, not only in the rural areas, but in every part of Ceylon. Posters supporting them have appeared in the country- side and the urban working class and Tamil speak- ing areas. . . The authors of the IMG leaflet deliberately tried to give the false impression that the JVP had the support of the working class in Ceylon. Hence they tried to equate the support of the workers in struggle, to the appearance of posters in working-class areas. Who are they trying to _fool with these conscious falsifications? Their own counterparts in America, the SWP, wrote in Intercontinental Press two months later (July 14): ‘Even though the plantation workers and the urban working class have not been involved ‘in the uprising . . .. and so on. The IMG as well as Tampoe believed, in the same way as the JVP did, that the working class would join the struggle against the government spontaneously against their existing leadership of LSSP and CP. The theory developed by the JVP was that the workers will join the fight if the ‘fight could be somehow started in the rural areas. "SS GEYLON: The Centrism of Bela Tampo This idealist concept about the development of consciousness is the opposite of the Marxist con- cept. According to the Marxist theory of know- ledge consciousness develops only as a result of a conflict of opposites. It is not a one-sided smooth development. Therefore, to develop the level of consciousness of the working class it is necessary to consciously intervene and create conditions for this necessary conflict. That is the role of the revolutionary party in the working-class move- ment, and precisely this is what all the revision- ists and centrists want to avoid. When the French OCI stated that what the working class needed was only a programme they similarly rejected the concept of the development of consciousness in the working class through the fight of the revolutionary party in conflict with the existing level of thinking in the working class. Tampoe wrote in April 1971: ‘I am sure that the new radicalisation of youth will manifest itself in Ceylon very definitely on a revolutionary basis, not only with university and school-going youth but working-class youth com- bining in more and more positive steps to take Ceylon on a revolutionary road which in our view is the only road to the establishment of a socialist democracy in Ceylon. . .’ Bala. Tampoe today proceeds along the same ‘lines as the LSSP. Under his slogan for a united front today he joins hands with any reactionary tendency. This is what we see in his Human and Democratic Rights Organization. Even the Parlia- mentary members of the extremé right wing party, the UNP, are involved in-it. Prince Gunasekera, a through and through bourgeois SLFP parliamen- tarian and a racialist careerist who was once intro- _duced to the General Council of the Ceylon Mer- cantile Union by Bala to give a ‘realistic’ analysis of the coalition government budget, is also partici- pating in this Human Rights Movement. Everyone can see that this movement has no purpose other than to head off the radicalization now developing among the workers and peasants in Ceylon against the government. The 24-hour hunger strike call made by Bala as the head of the Human Rights Committee is the response of petty-bourgeois pacifism to the severe repression launched by the capitalist class. The complete bankruptcy of the left-talking Bala Tampoe could not have been more explicit than in his activities around the so-called ‘human rights’ organization. All his militant speeches and ultra-left optimism have now dissolved into paci- fism of the worst kind. Trotsky, in his perspective document for the Third International, wrote: ‘Most unstable and untrustworthy is revolutionary radicalism which finds it necessary to keep up its morale by ignoring the dialectic of living forces in economics and politics alike and by construct- ing its prognos sis by means of a pencil and a ruler. A swing in the economic or political conjuncture suffices for such radicals to lose their bearings. At bottom this leftifm secretes pessimism and mis- trust.’ (First Five Years of the Comintern, page 303.) Not only the leadership of the LSSP (R) but that of the petty-bourgeois radicals who dominate every single section of the Unified. Secretariat Nt

[p015] proves very clearly how deep-going this analysis is. There can be no compromise with such centrists who do their best to undermine the role of Marx- ism and the revolutionary party for the coming socialist revolution. It is through a sharp fight against all these revisionists who want to make a living on the spcntaneous radicalization of the masses that the revolutionary parties can and. will be built. But this fight against the revisionists does not mean only a timid criticism of their past betrayals. The betrayals are there for everyone to see. The task of the revolutionary party is to build the alternative leadership to these traitors. This can be done only by assimilating the struggles and experiences of the revolutionary movement. The experiences embodied in the IC in its fight against Stalinism and Pabloism are a vital part of these lessons. Samarakkody’s attempt to criticize the LSSP and Bala and at the same time to avoid the struggles of the IC will undoubtedly lead once again to the same blind alley as the LSSP. The conscious revolutionary practice of the RCL against these new kinds of centrists will be sharp- ened in its struggle to take the theory of know- ledge of Marxism into the working class. The First Five Years of the Available From: Labor Publications - 135 West 14th Sf. New York, N.Y. 10011 Communist Intemational Just Out! $3.75 © Just arrived from England. This new edition of . the first volume of Trotsky’s writings and speeches _ for the Communist International covers the period of its first three Congresses and incorporates previously unpublished material from Volume 13 of his Works, _.