THE Sri Lankan working class, both Tamil and Sinhalese, is suffering under the ‘iron heel’ of the Rajapakse dictatorship.
This has killed tens of thousands of Tamils and annihilated the entire Tamil Tiger leadership which had gathered under a flag of truce, which the regime had negotiated. It has subjected the Sri Lankan working class and rural poor to huge attacks, through the growth of mass unemployment, and a great leap in the inflation rate that has deeply cut wages.
The Rajapakse family regime even halted, for a moment, its division of the commercial spoils of victory to arrest their ‘victorious’ chief of staff Fonseka, who was deemed to be a potential rival.
He is now being court martialled and threatened with execution. The Rajapakse regime is a tool of the US and UK imperialism which armed it and politically supported its war against the Tamil people.
The regime has just received a major IMF loan, which the Sri Lankan masses will have to pay back with interest. Among Rajapakse’s many visits to the UK was one on May 27 2010 when he was the chief guest at the passing out parade at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth where his son Yositha was studying!
However, in these times of grave crisis, Rajapakse has adopted the policy of trying to get the most out of the situation for the Sri Lankan ruling class, by balancing between the contending powers of the Indian Ocean region, who all have eyes for Sri Lanka’s strategic position.
These are the ‘anti-imperialist regimes’ of India, Iran and China which all support his regime and his assaults on the Tamil people and the Sri Lankan working class.
India has a bourgeois regime that is an ally of the US. It has ambitions to be the major capitalist power in the area. Iran is under attack by imperialism, but the Iranian bourgeoisie has a record of attacking ruthlessly the Iranian working class.
China, a deformed workers state, where capitalism was overthrown in 1948, is ruled by a degenerate Stalinist bureacracy that has deliberately handed over Special Economic Zones to the world’s big capitalist monopolies, where they super-exploit Chinese workers, literally working them to death or driving them to suicide. It is only the strength of the Chinese working class that prevents this Stalinist regime from completely restoring capitalism.
Internationally, the Chinese Stalinist policy is an extension of their home policy of making the working class available for super exploitation.
They have no qualms about allying themselves with the butcher Rajapakse since, they did the same at Tiananmen Square themselves. Neither do they have any problems with the super-exploitation of the Sri Lankan workers.
Their foreign policy is to seek friends amongst the ruling classes of the world, no matter what role they play in the class struggle, so as to be able, all the better, to bargain with the US imperialists, who they already keep from going bankrupt by the purchasing of billions of dollars of US debt.
While we defend China and Iran against imperialism, we denounce their support for the blood-soaked Sri Lankan regime which is killing and super-exploiting the Sri Lankan workers.
We condemn the efforts that are being made to officially gain the support for the Rajapakse regime of the Venezuelan and Cuban governments (see page 9), on the basis that the Sri Lankan Stalinists and other renegades are in the parliamentary bloc supporting Rajapakse.
We condemn the lie that Rajapakse is anti-imperialist. He is an imperialist agent who is taking advantage of the opportunism of the Iranian bourgeoisie and the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Supporting Rajapakse will only weaken the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions and bring closer the day when the Soviet and Chinese Stalinists leave the Venezuelans and Cubans to their fate, in order to make a deal with the USA.
The working class must organise independently of the Chinese and other Stalinists and also of the bourgeois nationalists such as Chavez, and Morales in Bolivia.
When they fight imperialism we must support them and we must defend them from imperialism at all times. But we cannot leave out of the equation that at some time or other they may make their peace with imperialism, and be willing to sacrifice the working class to get it.
This is the lesson of history. The only really revolutionary class on the planet is the working class. This class is now being driven forward by the world crisis to carry out the world socialist revolution. The Fourth International must be built without delay to lead it to its victory.
