https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/11/mqvr-j11.html

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/11/khdq-j11.html

These two articles on the Sri Lankan situation draw on the recent economic problems facing Sri Lanka and compare the situation to the Egyptian coup of 2011. How convenient to use Egypt as an example where the ICFI has no presence, largely as a result of their own Nanobureaucratic organizational policies. When the workers removed the Tsar from power in Russia and had him and his family imprisoned, Lenin immediately declared that the workers should place no faith in the new provisional government. At the same time, Lenin pursued an electoral policy of placing Bolshevik candidates on the ballot and Bolshevik representatives in the Duma. Within the workers´ committees, he made an alliance with the Mensheviks and the Left Social Revolutionaries, which would have won the election had the Left Social Revolutionaries not been denied the right to run separate candidates from the Right Social Revolutionaries. This, combined with the emergency powers granted to the provisional government in the name of fighting the war, along with the majority vote given to the Bolsheviks and their allies in the Soviets, convinced Lenin to sack the Provisional Government and transfer all the power to the Soviets.

In Sri Lanka, partly as a result of the Nanobureaucratic moderation practices of the ICFI itself, the workers´ committees never fully developed into representative organizations of the working class. As a result, no formal organization of the workers can represent an alternative to the bourgeois All-Party government. The party still has a responsibility to place candidates within the All-Party government for the simple purpose of voting down every proposal one by one while making official public statements with an official government office. With strict rules in place to prevent participation from turning into parliamentarianism, the SEP could quickly gain a large national following for a revolutionary political line. They could urge the workers to form their own government through the formation of workers´ committees, followed by a congress of the alliance of workers´ committees. Such calls, however, will not have the backing of the SEP itself since their main attitude to the workers´ committees is to sabotage democracy in contradiction of the Leninist and Trotskyist strategy of working with the Mensheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries to form a government loyal to the interests of the working class and peasants. A few commentators on the WSWS comments´ section breached this topic briefly, calling the sacking of the president and prime minister a ¨February 1917.¨ This ignores, of course, the presence of a Bolshevik party in Russia that brought forward to the workers the experiences of 1905 in Russia, as well as the Paris Commune of 1871 and the 1848 Revolution of Europe. The SEP focuses exclusively on the historical parallel of 2011 in Egypt, where the SEP played absolutely no role, or a negative role through the Economist positions of the Nanobureaucracy. This shows that the SEP has prepared a strategy of trailing behind the masses rather than leading, playing almost no active role in raising the consciousness of the masses to the level necessary for the conquest of power and the establishment of a workers´ state as part of a world revolution against capitalism.

The political demands, furthermore, show that the SEP has focused in on debt at the expense of the basic demands of the socialist movement, historically. These include the redistribution of land, full employment, nationalization of the banks as well as corporations, and the public distribution of food, fuel, and other necessities paid for in full by the government. (No subsidies that do not actually reduce prices while redistributing the money to owners of private capital!) Sri Lanka can afford its debt, and it would benefit from repaying the debt on its own terms to ensure the continuation of the flow of credit. All external debt should be paid to the working class of the lender country rather than to financial institutions under control of the bourgeoisie. The capital for the loans themselves was stolen from the working class in those countries in the form of surplus value and profit. The debts of small farmers can be repaid through direct payments on their behalf from the government so that the finance of agricultural equipment and materials can continue without interruption. Further demands based on the history of the socialist movement should include a living wage, a more strictly enforced 40 hour or 35 hour work week, wages that rise automatically at the same rate as inflation, and free medicine, free public transportation within the cities, free education up to the university level, increased vacation time, as well as state-owned, low-cost housing, and increased investment in communications, social work, and other public goods kept to artificially low standards by the privately owned monopolies.

All political programs should come directly from the historic documents and their public critiques, namely the socialist demands of the Communist Internationals going back to Marx´s First International, the Gotha Program, the Erfurt Program, the Bolshevik Program, and the Transitional Program of the Fourth International. All demands must come from these programs or the criticism made of these programs by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, or in public criticism made by public leaders of the Fourth International of such programs and their demands. To invent all the demands from scratch is an exercise in egotism, as Marx explained, and it divides the working class from its political programs of previous revolutionary movements, making political progress a matter of chance rather than of scientific reasoning, discovery, and application. The revolutionary movement can no longer reach around in the dark. Instead, it must accept the light of the Democratic Power Faction of the ICFI and of Scientific Socialism.