The Socialist Equality Party is the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Our party fights to build a revolutionary leadership of the working class and to win workers in Australia to the program of socialist internationalism. To all workers fighting to defend their jobs and living conditions, to young people without a future, to the millions who are sick of endless wars, we say: This is your party! Get involved today!
This document was adopted by the SEP (Sri Lanka) at its 2011 founding congress in Colombo. It reviews the 75-year struggle of the Fourth International in South Asia for Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. It is critical for an understanding of the problems of the development of the revolutionary movement on the Indian subcontinent.
The congress unanimously passed two important resolutions: “Socialism and fight against the imperialist war”—a resolution issued by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)—and “The political fight against the war and political tasks of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka).”
The three-day walkout by graphite miners in defiance of their unions indicates the increasing radicalisation of the working class and the rapid break up of illusions in the new government.
The past seven decades of so-called “independence” has seen successive governments viciously suppress the masses and defend capitalist rule.
The attempt to use the presidential commission to interfere in the work of the attorney general is a threat to basic democratic rights and legal norms.
Having previously stated that Gotabhaya Rajapakse had “authoritarian tendencies,” the Tamil National Alliance leadership is offering to help the new president impose his pro-business program.
The working class, the great mass of the world's population, is the revolutionary force in modern capitalist society. In the past two years, the working class has engaged in a growing number of strikes and demonstrations around the world. Repressed and dismissed for so long, the working class is beginning to assert its own independent interests. The outbreak of mass social struggles signals the beginning of a new revolutionary period.
Almost two decades after the United States launched the “war on terror,” the entire world is being dragged into an ever-expanding maelstrom of imperialist violence. Millions have been killed by the wars of US imperialism and its allies in the Middle East and Africa, and tens of millions maimed or turned into refugees. A century after the end of World War I, these conflicts are once again metastasizing toward a catastrophic global conflagration.
The ICFI is fighting to build a new international anti-war movement of the working class. The fight against war is the fight against its source, the capitalist profit system.
The ICFI’s program is is based on the unification of the struggles workers internationally: of all countries, nationalities, ethnicities and languages. We fight against all efforts to divide workers on the basis of gender, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation or various other identities.
The problems workers confront in every country are fundamentally the same: War, attacks on democratic rights, exploitation, unemployment, poverty and environmental destruction. They are world problems that require a global solution: Socialism.
This is the opening report delivered by David North to the 2019 International May Day Online Rally, held annually by the ICFI to celebrate the day of international working-class solidarity and rally the working class to the program of international socialism.
The levels of inequality today are virtually without precedent in history. According to Oxfam, some 26 billionaires collectively control the same amount of wealth as half the global population. In 2018, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $900 billion, or 12 percent, while 3.8 billion people saw their wealth decline by 11 percent.
The growth of social inequality is the deliberate intended aim of governments throughout the world, who have single-mindedly pursued policies to enrich the corporate elite through the impoverishment of the working class.
Unprecedented levels of social inequality, continuous wars and the drive to great-power conflict under capitalism are incompatible with the maintenance of democratic forms of rule.
Around the world, capitalist governments are building up the state apparatus, surveillance and censorship directed at growing political and social opposition in the working class, while fascist forces are being systematically promoted.
Courageous Wikileaks journalist Assange remains in an isolation cell in Britain's Bellmarsh prison, threatened with extradition to the United States. His sole 'crime' is to have exposed the truth about the criminal operations of the US and other governments. The attack against both Assange and Manning is directed against the democratic rights of the entire working class.
A campaign is underway at German think-tanks, the government and political establishment, and on the universities, to promote the return of German militarism by justifying and falsifying the historic crimes of the Nazis. The Sozialistiche Gleichheitspartei is leading the campaign against the return of fascism in Germany.
Capitalist governments in the United States, Europe and around the world are collaborating with social media companies and technology giants to censor the Internet and block access to socialist, left-wing and progressive publications who speak for the working class.
Around the world, capitalist governments are seeking to divert popular anger against the social crisis produced by capitalism against immigrants and refugees, the most vulnerable layers of the international working class.
The Russian Revolution marked a new stage in world history. The overthrow of the capitalist Provisional Government proved that an alternative to capitalism was not a utopian dream, but a real possibility that could be achieved through the conscious political struggle of the working class.
Trotsky founded the Fourth International in 1938 in opposition to the Stalinist degeneration of the Third International. The ICFI has defended the program and principles of genuine socialism and Trotskyism throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries.
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