The enduring significance of the life and work of Comrade Keerthi
Balasuriya
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and
the World Socialist Web Site today mark 25 years since the death of
Comrade Keerthi Balasuriya, the General Secretary of the Revolutionary
Communist League (RCL), forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party of
Sri Lanka.
Comrade Keerthi was among the most outstanding representatives of
Trotskyism in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. His death on the
morning of December 18, 1987 was both sudden and tragically premature.
He was felled by a heart attack little more than a month after his 39th
birthday.
|
Comrade
Keerthi Balasuriya |
Keerthi Balasuriya emerged out of the rich Trotskyist tradition in
Sri Lanka. As a teenager, he aligned himself with those who opposed the
1964 entry of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), the Sri Lankan
affiliate of the International Secretariat of Michel Pablo and Ernest
Mandel, into a bourgeois coalition government led by the Sri Lanka
Freedom Party.
The turning point in Comrade Keerthi’s life arose from an
intervention by the British Trotskyists in Sri Lanka, as a result of
which he recognized that the issues involved in the LSSP’s betrayal—the
first time a party claiming to be Trotskyist had joined a bourgeois
government—went far beyond the LSSP’s adaptation over the previous
decade to syndicalism, parliamentarism and Sinhala populism. The “Great
Betrayal of 1964” had been aided and abetted by Pablo and Mandel.
It was the outcome of the development within the Fourth
International, under conditions of the post-war restabilization of
capitalism, of a virulent opportunist tendency which sought to transform
Trotskyism into an appendage of the counterrevolutionary Stalinist and
social democratic bureaucracies and, in the colonial countries, the
national bourgeoisie. To answer the LSSP’s betrayal and build a
revolutionary working class party based on the program of Permanent
Revolution required assimilating the lessons of the struggle waged by
the ICFI, founded in 1953 expressly to oppose Pabloite liquidationism,
and entering its ranks.
In 1968, at the age of 19, Keerthi was chosen by the founding
congress of the RCL to be its general secretary. The RCL immediately
sought affiliation with the ICFI.
Marxist movement
Even more decisive was the role Comrade Keerthi played in the
successful struggle to reassert Trotskyist control over the
International Committee of the Fourth International through the split
with the British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in 1985-86.
As David North, chairman of the WSWS editorial board, explains in a
lengthier examination of Comrade Keerthi’s life that we are republishing
today, the RCL leader brought to bear his vast knowledge of the
strategic experiences of the working class and the history of the
Marxist movement in contributing to the ICFI’s detailed exposure of the
WRP’s descent into opportunism.
Comrade Keerthi’s entire political life unfolded in a period when the
working class and oppressed masses, for complex reasons bound up with
the betrayals of Stalinism and Social Democracy and the temporary
restabilization of world capitalism after World War II, gave their
allegiance to organizations other than the ICFI.
Basing himself on the scientific perspective developed by the
classical Marxists and the Fourth International, Comrade Keerthi was
utterly opposed to those who looked to the Stalinist bureaucracy as a
surrogate for the working class or were mesmerized by the apparent
success of Mao’s nationalist programme of peasant-based “people’s war.”
|
Leon
Trotsky |
He was convinced that the only force upon which the struggle for
socialism could be based was the international working class, and that
the principal task of revolutionary Marxists was to forge the political
independence of the working class by saturating it, to use the
well-known expression of Lenin, with socialist consciousness.
Nationalist leaders
At Keerthi’s funeral, a representative of the ICFI predicted that it
would be Keerthi Balasuriya, not the various Stalinist and bourgeois
nationalist leaders—the Maos, Ho Chi Minhs, Nehrus, and Castros—who
would emerge in the coming period as the teacher of revolutionary-minded
workers and youth.
A quarter-century ago that prognosis would have struck all but a very
few as not merely audacious, but hyperbolic. History, however, has more
than vindicated it.
Within less than five years of Keerthi’s death, the USSR and the
Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe had been liquidated, as the
Stalinist bureaucracy restored capitalism.
Nominally, the People’s Republic of China and the Socialist Republic
of Vietnam still exist. But in both states the Stalinist bureaucracy has
restored capitalism and presides over the ruthless exploitation of the
working class on behalf of US, European, Japanese and Taiwan-based
transnational corporations and a new class of indigenous capitalist
parvenus.
And what of the bourgeois nationalist leaders who postured as
opponents of imperialism and spouted socialist phrases?
Deprived of the patronage of the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy,
Castro’s regime has opened its doors to European, Canadian and Latin
American investment and presides over ever deepening social inequality
and poverty. Meanwhile, it allows the free circulation of US dollars and
closes down large parts of the state-owned sector.
The PLO and the Palestinian Authority it heads act as policemen for
the US and Israel.
India’s Congress Party long ago abandoned state-led development,
which it touted as Congress socialism in an attempt to deceive the
masses.
It has embarked on the transformation of India into a cheap labour
sweatshop for world capitalism. In foreign policy, the Indian
bourgeoisie has cast aside non-alignment in favour of a strategic
alliance with US imperialism and the build-up of its own military might.
India’s “mass” Stalinist parliamentary parties have openly supported
the bourgeoisie’s “new economic policy,” propping up a series of
Congress-led governments. In those states where they have held office,
they have pursued what they themselves term “pro-investor” policies.
Within Sri Lanka, the historical verdict of a quarter century has
been no less conclusive. The petty-bourgeois organizations that grew in
strength under conditions where the working class was politically
harnessed by the LSSP and the Stalinist Communist Party to bourgeois
governments have proven to be a blind alley.
The JVP (People’s Liberation Front) has provided parliamentary
support to Sri Lanka’s right-wing UPFA government and enthusiastically
supported the Sinhalese bourgeoisie’s communal war against the Tamil
minority.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was hostile to any appeal
to the only social force that could secure the democratic rights of the
Tamil people—the Sinhalese and international working class. Instead, it
sought to carve out a capitalist state in the north and east by
appealing for the support of India and the imperialist powers.
The perspective advanced by the RCL-SEP—the revolutionary
mobilization of the toilers, Sinhalese and Tamil, under the leadership
of the working class in the fight for the United Socialist States of
Tamil Eelam and Sri Lanka—has been demonstrated to be the only viable
means of realizing the democratic and social aspirations of the masses.
Political struggle
As for the Pabloites, who cynically sought to pass themselves off as
Trotskyists, they have embedded themselves in various state parties,
from the Left Party in Germany to Rifondazione Communista in Italy,
which have imposed capitalist austerity and supported imperialist war.
The NSSP, the current Sri Lankan group aligned with the Mandelite
“International,” is in an alliance for “democracy” with the United
National Party (UNP), the traditional right-wing party of the Sri Lankan
bourgeoisie and the party that in 1977 initiated pro-market reform and
in 1983 launched the anti-Tamil war.
Who can doubt that the ICFI, with its orientation to the political
education and mobilization of the working class, is the authentic voice
of Trotskyism and classical Marxism? Through the World Socialist Web
Site, it fights to arm the working class with an international socialist
perspective, while defining on a daily basis the independent class
standpoint of the working class on all major political, social and
historical issues.
In the light of a quarter century, Comrade Keerthi’s life and
struggle have not only not diminished in significance, they have emerged
enhanced.
Under conditions of the greatest crisis of world capitalism since the
Great Depression and the world war it engendered, workers and young
people will increasingly be impelled into struggle against capitalism.
They will find in the political biography of Comrade Keerthi Balisuriya
an inspiring example of courageous and principled political struggle.
Even more importantly, in the Marxist political conceptions that he
defended and developed they will find the theoretical and political
weapons to guide the struggle for the political independence and
revolutionary mobilization of the international working class.
The International Committee of the Fourth International
Over the coming year, the World Socialist Web Site will make Comrade
Keerthi’s writings accessible to an international audience. This will
include publication of his seminal and prophetic exposure of the
petty-bourgeois JVP,The Class Nature and Politics of the JVP, first
published in 1970.
(Courtesy: The World Socialist Website)
|