From The Pages Of Spartacist-The Fight for Trotskyism in South Asia

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Spartacist English edition No. 62
Spring 2011

Edmund Samarakkody and the Legacy of the Ceylonese LSSP

The Fight for Trotskyism in South Asia

“The struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth International promises to be difficult, long, and, above all, uneven. But it is an indispensable and central task facing those who would win proletarian power and thus open the road to the achievement of socialism for humanity.”

—“Declaration for the Organizing of an International Trotskyist Tendency,” July 1974, Spartacist (English edition) No. 23, Spring 1977

Our relations with the Revolutionary Workers Party (RWP) of Edmund Samarakkody in the 1970s constitute a significant chapter in that difficult, long and uneven struggle. By the time of his death in January 1992, Samarakkody’s revolutionary days were well behind him. But at one time, this founding member of the Ceylonese Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) represented a rare breed: a militant won to Trotskyism in the late 1930s who had not been utterly compromised and corrupted by homegrown popular-frontism or by the revisionist current of Michel Pablo, which had destroyed the Fourth International in 1951-53. In outlining the prospects for revolutionary regroupment, the 1974 declaration of the international Spartacist tendency, now the International Communist League, took particular note of Samarakkody’s RWP as having “emerged with integrity from the welter of betrayals perpetrated by the old LSSP” and abetted by the Pabloite United Secretariat (USec) of Ernest Mandel and the craven “International Committee” (IC) of Gerry Healy (ibid.).

For many years, the LSSP stood at the head of a section of the labour movement and was at times the official parliamentary opposition in Ceylon. Its importance extended beyond that small island, as Ceylon provided a staging area for socialist revolution throughout the region, crucially India. In fact, the LSSP played a decisive role in forging the first authoritative Trotskyist organisation in India in the crucible of interimperialist war and anti-colonial struggle. Samarakkody himself was jailed during World War II for revolutionary antiwar activities in Ceylon, and later became a Member of Parliament. But the dominating political event of his life, the apex and the limit, was the parliamentary vote cast in 1964 by him and his comrade, Meryl Fernando, that brought about the downfall of the capitalist coalition government led by the bourgeois-nationalist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), a popular front that included the LSSP, which had degenerated by then into rank reformism. The SLFP was committed, above all, to furthering the domination of the island’s Sinhala Buddhist majority over the besieged Tamil national minority.

We saw in Samarakkody the principled best of old Ceylonese Trotskyism, which was not very good. In the course of our discussions, it became clear that he and his group had not broken from the parliamentarist framework that defined left-wing politics in Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka, to stress the country’s Sinhala “identity,” in 1972). We learned, for example, that by the early ’70s Samarakkody had repudiated his courageous 1964 vote against the popular front. A projected fusion with the RWP at the First International Conference of the iSt in 1979 fell apart as Samarakkody made it clear that he intended to maintain his provincial operation on the left fringe of the Lankan popular-frontist swamp and would not allow his organisation to be subjected to the scrutiny and correctives of international democratic-centralism. In drawing a balance sheet of our attempts to find sufficient programmatic agreement with the RWP to constitute a common international organisation, we observed:

“Our long fraternal experience with the Ceylonese comrades of the Samarakkody group was our most notable effort to find, in the words of James P. Cannon, ‘the initiating cadres of the new organization in the old.’ This grouping’s last decisive revolutionary act took place in 1964, just at the time of the founding of the organizationally independent Spartacist tendency in the U.S. Had we been capable of forcefully intersecting the Ceylonese comrades at that time, it is conceivable that they might have been won to authentic Trotskyism. But the 40 or so Americans who made up our tendency at that time would have had little authority in the eyes of former leaders of a mass-based party.”

—“Toward the International Trotskyist League!” Spartacist (English edition) No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80

The iSt/ICL originated as the Revolutionary Tendency of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the early 1960s, formed in opposition to the SWP’s abandonment of the fight for a Trotskyist party in Cuba. Having broken with Pablo in 1953 to form the anti-Pabloite International Committee—a bloc centrally with the Healy group in Britain and the French group led by Pierre Lambert—in 1960 the SWP leadership embraced the same liquidationist methodology as Pablo in response to the Cuban Revolution. As elaborated by Pablo in the years after World War II and continued by his chief lieutenant, Mandel, this tendency rejected the struggle to forge Trotskyist parties, essential to the victory of proletarian revolutions internationally, and instead acted as a pressure group on various petty-bourgeois, non-revolutionary forces (see “Genesis of Pabloism,” Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972). The RT was bureaucratically expelled from the SWP in late 1963 after the latter reunified with the Mandelites to form the USec.

At its inception and for several years thereafter, the RT stood in political solidarity with the IC of Healy and Lambert. We split definitively from the IC in 1967 when the Healy group came out for support to a classless “Arab Revolution” and a number of other anti-Marxist positions. Our 1979 conference report noted:

“The Samarakkody group is the concretization of the observation that no national revolutionary current can pursue an authentic revolutionary course in protracted isolation from the struggle to build a world party. From the time of our inception as a tendency, the American nucleus of the iSt struggled to break out of enforced national isolation. Through this lengthy process we came to see that the main international currents of ostensible Trotskyism were fundamentally programmatically moribund.”

However, even after the split with Healy, we were aware that there existed local groupings that had not been firmly bound to the liquidationist politics of Pabloism. We looked the longest at the Lambert group, which had broken with Pablo in 1952, because it was the largest repository of cadre dating back to the Trotskyist movement of Trotsky’s time, in the hope that some section of that cadre would break on essentials from that organisation’s rightward course. There followed our protracted engagement with the Samarakkody group in Ceylon. But all these efforts were unsuccessful in winning over a layer of older Trotskyist cadre.

A significant part of our early history as an international tendency was written on the small island of Ceylon. From 1971, when Samarakkody first contacted us, through to the negative resolution of our fraternal relations with the RWP in 1979 and in the subsequent years when a left split from the RWP was established as the Spartacist League/Lanka, we had sporadic, but sometimes intense, contact with Samarakkody and his group. Samarakkody’s “The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon,” which we published in Spartacist (No. 22, Winter 1973-74), was one of the documents upheld in our 1974 declaration as part of the programmatic heritage of the iSt; and for a number of years our press carried articles by Samarakkody reporting on the situation in Sri Lanka. The inability of the RWP to find a road to fusion with our Trotskyist international constituted a crucial test of its left limits as an opposition to the LSSP’s class collaboration.

To describe Samarakkody’s life is to describe the rise and fall of Ceylonese Trotskyism. There are many details of the history of the LSSP which remain obscure to us. The internal life of the early LSSP is poorly documented, much of it having played out informally within a small coterie of the leadership. And much documentation, notably that in Sinhala and Tamil, is presently inaccessible to us. Nonetheless, that history merits serious study if a new generation of revolutionaries is to revive Trotskyism in Lanka and India as part of the struggle to reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.

Origins of the LSSP

As a founding member of the LSSP, Samarakkody belonged to a layer of militants who might make better claim to be the founding fathers of their country than the venal pro-imperialist capitalists to whom the British handed power in 1948. Born into a wealthy and aristocratic low-country Sinhalese family in 1912, he was politically active in the early 1930s amid a rise in anti-colonial sentiment and joined the Colombo South Youth League. Young Ceylonese returning from study overseas brought to the Youth Leagues notions of internationalism, socialism and revolutionary change. One of these was Philip Gunawardena, who while abroad had come into contact with various leftist currents, including the Trotskyist International Left Opposition. Many of these young men and women came from a section of the newly prosperous rural bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie; Samarakkody himself qualified as a lawyer in Ceylon and continued to practise law until he died.

The Youth Leagues grew rapidly through their anti- imperialist agitation in the Suriya Mal (an indigenous flower) movement, a protest against the “Poppy Day” commemoration of British military veterans of the first imperialist world war, and also through their social relief efforts in impoverished villages during a malaria epidemic in 1934-35. In 1932-33, the young militants directly challenged the traitorous role of established labour leader A.E. Goonesinha, who had become increasingly communalist, when they gained leadership of a strike by 1,400 workers, mainly Malayalis from the Indian state of Kerala, at the Wellawatte Weaving and Spinning Mills, the largest textile plant on the island.

Samarakkody was one of 20 or so leftists who founded the LSSP under Gunawardena’s leadership in December 1935. A variety of influences affected these talented and energetic young men and women: Stalinism, Trotskyism, Harold Laski’s Labourite “socialist” reformism and Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian National Congress.

The LSSP was born against the backdrop of an all-sided vacuum of leadership on the island. The native bourgeoisie was weak and venal: the tame Ceylon National Congress was a pale reflection of its Indian analogue. Especially with the implementation in 1931 of the reforms recommended by the British Donoughmore Constitutional Commission, the Ceylonese bourgeoisie enthusiastically collaborated with the British imperialists, accepting ministries in the new State Council, a “parliamentary” adjunct to the colonial administration. The militant labour movement of the ’20s had been dissipated by the economic depression of 1929-1935. The leaders of that movement, such as Goonesinha, had moved decisively toward class collaboration with the employers and racism against workers of Indian origin.

A character in a Romesh Gunesekera short story evokes the situation:

“In those days I was equally dismayed by our political leadership: at the time it seemed to me so uninspired. I wished we were in India where there was so much more of a struggle. Some fight, some idealism. Gandhi, Bose. You know, men who were doing something for their country. But Ceylon seemed full of lackeys. Everyone wanted to be Head Boy in the Governor’s House. How could they? Only when the leftists started up in ’thirty-five did we begin to see a real future. They went out into the villages during the malaria to help our people. And the people recognized their concern. When the elections finally came they responded. I joined up.”

—Romesh Gunesekera, “Ullswater,” Monkfish Moon (New York: The New Press, 1992)

The LSSP was founded as a broad party fighting for independence, reform and socialism (sama samaja, coined from the Sinhala for “equal society”). It was modernising and secular, though with a soft underbelly in regard to the Buddhist revivalism that was an early response to British rule. The party’s influence grew rapidly, and pretty soon it was the recognised leadership of the struggle for national independence. In 1936, Gunawardena and fellow LSSP member N.M. Perera were elected to the State Council. Though they often sounded like liberal social democrats, they were nonetheless denounced as the “honorable members for Russia, or the Communist members for Ruanwella and Avissawella” by one vehement right-wing opponent, Samarakkody’s own older brother, Siripala (quoted in George Lerski, Origins of Trotskyism in Ceylon [Stanford, California: Hoover Institution, 1968]). The LSSP succeeded in establishing a mass trade-union base, particularly in Colombo. Samarakkody was active in the LSSP-led strikes and unionisation drives, and was arrested in Colombo in 1937 for these activities.

As in Bolivia and Indochina, working-class political consciousness arrived sufficiently late in Ceylon that Stalinism was unattractive to militant anti-colonial fighters. In 1935, the Stalinised Communist International (CI) embraced the “popular front,” a new label for the old, social-democratic programme of class collaboration with a supposedly progressive wing of the bourgeoisie. Its application for colonial countries was to build “national united fronts” with the native bourgeoisies. Originally promulgated as a confused and implicitly stagist slogan at the CI Fourth Congress in 1922, by 1927 the “anti-imperialist united front” had become synonymous with the liquidation of the Chinese Communist Party into the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang and the betrayal of the Second Chinese Revolution. The slogan’s revival under the signboard of the popular front with a “democratic” wing of the bourgeoisie was unambiguously class-collaborationist. And with Stalin’s wartime alliance with the Allied imperialists following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, it became evident that the working class was to be subordinated not just to the venal local capitalists but to the “democratic” imperialist overlords. Thus the vanguard section of the proletariat became at least nominally Trotskyist in a number of colonial and semicolonial countries.

The LSSP’s Contradiction

At the heart of this development toward Trotskyism in the LSSP was what became known as the “T group.” Initiated by Gunawardena, this was an informal network with features of both a political tendency and a Young Turks clique. The arrival of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, published in English in 1937, had a significant impact among the educated leaders of the T group who could read it. In December 1939, the LSSP Executive Committee passed a motion by 29 votes to five declaring, “Since the Third International has not acted in the interests of the international revolutionary working-class movement, while expressing its solidarity with the Soviet Union, the first workers’ state, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party declares that it has no faith in the Third International” (quoted in Origins of Trotskyism in Ceylon). At the next meeting of the Executive Committee, those opposed to this line were peremptorily expelled, without any attempt to take the struggle to the membership.

In good part, the LSSP’s adherence to Trotskyism was nominal and never went very deep. What was lacking was a flesh-and-blood struggle to cohere a revolutionary cadre in opposition to the nationalists and reformists for whom Trotskyism was but a superficial convenience, a talisman against support to the local colonial power. Yet authentic Trotskyism, and the theory of permanent revolution, did provide the revolutionary answers for a party faced with national-democratic tasks of colonial liberation and with leading the workers class struggle to victory.

A central question in this regard was (and is) the national oppression of the largely Hindu Tamil people, the most significant among a number of national, ethnic and religious minorities on this majority Sinhalese and Buddhist island. (Among other minorities were Christians, Muslims and Burghers, the latter being descendants of intermarriages with European colonists.) Linguistically and culturally linked to the people of Tamil Nadu in southern India, the Tamils were divided into two distinct groups. The Ceylon Tamils—concentrated in the Jaffna peninsula and in the northeastern region including Trincomalee, as well as in Colombo—had been established on the island for many centuries and were favoured by the British for positions in the colonial administration. The so-called Indian Tamils had been brought over beginning in the late 19th century to do backbreaking, low-paid work in the highly profitable British-owned tea plantations. The strategic Tamil plantation workers were of triple importance: as key producers in the economy, as a vital element in the struggle against Sinhala chauvinism and as a potential bridge to the Indian revolution.

As long as these heavily low-caste and women workers remained quiescent and isolated in the hill country, possessing neither political nor trade-union rights, they were not seen as a threat. But as soon as they began to assert themselves, they confronted the class-based fears of the bourgeoisie combined with chauvinist prejudices that fed on the majority Sinhalese notion of being a beleaguered minority in the region as a whole.

The LSSP generally stuck to a line of class unity against ethnic division, and throughout this period LSSP meetings were attacked by communalist goondas (thugs). Its developing influence in the working class no doubt played a role in forestalling outbreaks of communalist violence, as had occurred in 1915 with anti-Muslim riots. However, the LSSP was clearly not immune to the prevailing Sinhalese prejudices: for example, in September 1937 it presented a motion to the State Council aimed at a ban on Indian labour immigration. Unlike Lenin’s Bolsheviks, the LSSP did not see the struggle against national oppression as a motor force for the proletarian revolution. The party’s failure to establish a mass base among the strategic Tamil plantation workers was exacerbated by the peremptory manner in which the 1939 split with the Stalinists was carried out, allowing the latter to easily retain leadership of important areas of work, such as among low-caste Tamils in the Jaffna peninsula.

Nonetheless, when an unprecedented strike wave broke out among the plantation workers in late 1939 and early ’40, the LSSP played a leading role in these struggles in Uva Province, and Samarakkody was a key organiser. In May 1940, the LSSP organised a huge rally in Badulla. Staged in defiance of a ban by the authorities, the rally was a spectacular show of strength. This promising work was cut off by the wartime crackdown by the British colonial rulers. The way was left open for the growth of exclusively Indian Tamil formations, pre-eminently the Ceylon Indian Congress (which became the Ceylon Workers Congress in 1950), to gain control of this historically key section of the proletariat. The LSSP’s own later account of this work is revealing:

“The militant leadership provided by the party made a deep impression among the plantation workers. But the party was never able to build on this goodwill because firstly, repression descended on the party immediately afterwards leaving the trade union field in the plantations free to the Ceylon Indian Congress; and secondly because even after the war, the measures of the Government against workers of Indian origin drove these workers quite naturally in the circumstances into the arms of the Ceylon Indian Congress.”

—Leslie Goonewardene, A Short History of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Colombo: LSSP pamphlet, 1960)

There is more to this fatalistic dismissal than the fact that it was written not long before the LSSP’s parliamentarist degeneration culminated in entry into a capitalist popular-front government. Even in its early years, the LSSP perceived no contradiction in Jack Kotelawala being one of its primary organisers among the tea plantation workers and later holding a position as the legal officer of the Ceylon Estates Employers Federation, in which capacity he would appear in court against the workers. Rather than relying on men of independent means, what might have happened if the LSSP had taken a few of the best plantation worker militants and made them full-time party organisers while training them thoroughly in revolutionary Marxism? Unfortunately, the LSSP’s work methods were far removed from such Bolshevik practices.

From its founding, the LSSP was saddled with a profound contradiction. As Charles Wesley Ervin wrote in a 1988 article on the formative period of Ceylonese and Indian Trotskyism: “The LSSP had a split personality from birth. Its leaders were sophisticated leftists, but the LSSP was deliberately intended to be a very broad, ‘soft’ Socialist party, more nationalist than Marxist” (“Trotskyism in India—Part One: Origins Through World War II (1935-45),” Revolutionary History, Winter 1988-89). In a follow-up article, Ervin described Philip Gunawardena and Perera as “opportunist hustlers” and “slick revisionists” (“Trotskyism in India, 1942-48,” Revolutionary History Vol. 6, No. 4, 1997).

Ervin still showed some sympathy for revolutionary Trotskyism when he wrote those articles. However, he has since moved to the right, joining “death of communism” leftists like the British Labourite Revolutionary History crowd in glorifying “the politics of the possible.” In a recent book, Ervin idolises Gunawardena as “the driving force behind the formation and spectacular growth of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), one of those few Trotskyist parties to ever achieve a mass following for a long period of time” (Tomorrow Is Ours: The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon, 1935-48 [Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 2006]). Acknowledging that “in hindsight, there was much about the early LSSP that might seem ‘Menshevik’ or ‘reformist’,” Ervin apologises for this programmatic and organisational Menshevism by claiming that “context is critical. The LSSP was really the first political party that had ever been formed in sleepy Ceylon” (ibid.).

Ervin was far closer to the mark the first time. Ervin notes in his book that Gunawardena “solidarized with Trotsky” in the early ’30s, after a period in the British Communist Party (ibid.). Yet under Gunawardena’s stewardship, the early LSSP studiously avoided taking a stand on the burning questions of the world revolution posed in Trotsky’s struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy. To the extent it dealt with international questions at all, the resolution adopted at the first annual conference of the LSSP in December 1936 called only for solidarity with the Republican forces fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, with not a word on the decisive question of the popular front.

Instead of fighting for programmatic clarity, Gunawardena set out to build a big party on a small island by cutting corners. He promoted the LSSP as follows: “Our party is not a Communist Party.... It is a party which is much less militant and less demanding” (quoted in Origins of Trotskyism in Ceylon). He viewed as a model the loosely organised Congress Socialist Party (CSP) of J.P. Narayan, which was an organic part of Gandhi’s bourgeois Congress in India. Gunawardena had befriended Narayan as a student in the U.S., and the newly formed LSSP established fraternal relations with the CSP. Notwithstanding its nominal adherence to Trotskyism in late 1939, the LSSP did not really begin to resolve its internal contradictions until it embarked on the profoundly internationalising experience of fighting to build a Trotskyist organisation in India. And at every decisive step, Gunawardena was an obstacle on the road to forging such a party.

The Heroic Period: the BLPI

The LSSP opposed World War II as imperialist from the outset, and the work among the tea plantation workers was concrete proof that it would pursue the class struggle and national independence irrespective of the consequences for the British war effort. With its tea and rubber production and the strategic harbour of Trincomalee, Ceylon was viewed by Britain as a vital outpost. The Trotskyists raised the call to turn the imperialist war into a civil war and directed revolutionary antiwar propaganda at the large British garrisons in Ceylon and India. Faced with the LSSP’s outspoken opposition to the war and its role in the Uva plantation strikes, the British authorities moved to suppress the socialists, shutting down the LSSP press. While Leslie Goonewardene was instructed by the party to evade capture, the other top leaders—Philip Gunawardena, Perera and Colvin R. de Silva—passively courted arrest, perhaps in fatuous expectation of glorious courtroom battles. On 18 June 1940, a few days after the German army marched into Paris, the three were hauled off to prison. The following day, having returned to Colombo to organise protests in their defence, so was Samarakkody. That he was arrested along with the best-known party leaders likely reflected his prominent role in the plantation strikes.

With the LSSP’s top leaders cut off from State Council seats and their legal careers, the party was propelled in altogether healthier directions. If somewhat arbitrarily, a reckoning had been made with the Stalinists, who made it clear after 1941 that they would sacrifice the struggle for colonial freedom to Stalin’s alliance with “democratic” imperialism. In conditions of illegality, the LSSP moved toward becoming more sharply programmatically defined. This development was to the credit of a new layer of leaders who stepped up to the responsibility. The party had hitherto been too dependent on the top leaders and lacked the requisite organisation for revolutionary functioning, let alone under conditions of illegality.

In the context of repression on the island and the massive upsurge of nationalist agitation across the Palk Straits in India, the LSSP was powerfully compelled to the conclusion that the revolution in Ceylon was integrally connected to that in India. At its 1941 conference, the LSSP proclaimed its transformation into a Bolshevik cadre organisation, and simultaneously advanced the perspective of actively fighting to build a Trotskyist party in India. The LSSP had already begun undertaking practical steps to this end. In late 1940, in consultation with a small Trotskyist grouping in Calcutta, the LSSP sent Bernard Soysa to work in India. Others followed, including de Silva, Perera and Gunawardena, who escaped to Madras on fishing boats after the legendary jail break of 7 April 1942; they were later recaptured and returned to Ceylon. Samarakkody remained behind, working underground. He was rearrested and sentenced, along with Perera and Gunawardena, to six months’ rigorous imprisonment in 1944.

Alongside their Indian comrades, the exiled LSSP cadres worked to unify a number of isolated Trotskyist circles into a pan-Indian organisation. The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (BLPI) was formally constituted in May 1942, with functioning groups in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), and the LSSP as its Ceylonese unit. The Draft Programme of the BLPI (which was not formally ratified until 1944) argued for revolutionary defeatism against all the imperialist combatants in World War II while calling for unconditional military defence of the Soviet degenerated workers state. (The draft programme appears as an appendix in Ervin’s book; sections of the programme were initially published in the SWP’s Fourth International, March, April and October 1942.) It gave concrete expression to the Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution, describing Congress as “the classic party of the Indian capitalist class” and comparing it to “the Kuomintang, which led the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 to its betrayal and defeat.” Noting that the CSP and other petty-bourgeois formations (M.N. Roy’s Radical Democratic Party and the Forward Bloc of radical-nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose) within or under the influence of Congress “have repeatedly lent themselves to be used by the bourgeoisie as a defensive colouration before the masses,” the BLPI stressed:

“The leadership of the peasantry in the coming petty bourgeois democratic agrarian revolution that is immediately posed can therefore come only from the industrial proletariat.... The revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and peasantry can mean only proletarian leadership of the peasant struggle and, in case of revolutionary victory, the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship with the support of the peasantry.”

—Draft Programme of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (Colombo: LSSP(R) pamphlet, 1970)

Within months of its formation, the BLPI had the opportunity to intervene with this programme in a mass struggle. On 9 August 1942, the morning after Gandhi proclaimed before a huge crowd in Bombay the call for a non-violent mass campaign to force the British to “quit India,” he and the rest of the top Congress leaders were rounded up and imprisoned. The arrests provoked an immediate upheaval, which spread rapidly. The Communist Party (CPI) and the Royists, backing British imperialism in its “war against fascism,” opposed the “Quit India” movement outright, while Bose lined up with Germany and Japan. The Trotskyists threw their meagre forces into the struggle to bring the proletariat to the fore in the fight for independence and socialist revolution (see “The ‘Quit India’ Movement 50 Years On: Stalinist Alliance with Churchill Betrayed Indian Revolution,” Workers Hammer Nos. 131 and 132, September/October and November/December 1992; reprinted in Workers Vanguard No. 970, 3 December 2010).

Beginning on 9 August, the BLPI issued a number of leaflets aimed at mobilising the workers on a class basis and warning against any reliance on the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois misleaders. With Gandhi & Co. in prison, the Congress Socialists dissolved themselves as a distinct current in order to become the leadership of Congress. The CSP looked to the peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie to engage in guerrillaist clashes with the British forces, urging the workers to simply leave the factories and return to their home villages. As a 1944 BLPI document put it, the CSP’s role in the August struggle “proved completely, in action it was simply unable to outstep the bounds of bourgeois ‘pressure politics’ perspectives, and that, though ‘socialist’ by label, it was merely Congress in fact” (“The Present Political Situation in India,” 4 August 1944, reprinted in Fourth International, October 1944).

The difficult war years in India were the heroic days of the Ceylonese Trotskyists. Many BLPI militants were arrested, including in July 1943 as a result of Stalinist tip-offs. Yet the small BLPI provided a revolutionary working-class pole in the struggles against British imperialism. Though driven underground, the Trotskyists managed to publish a high-grade theoretical journal, Permanent Revolution, whose first issue in January 1943 reprinted Trotsky’s July 1939 “An Open Letter to the Workers of India” (also published as “India Faced With Imperialist War”). The BLPI established a base among sections of the proletariat, winning significant influence in some militant unions in Madras and elsewhere.

The 1942 Split and the Struggle Against Liquidationism

The formation of the BLPI provoked a split among the Ceylonese Trotskyists between a self-styled “Workers Opposition” under Gunawardena and Perera and the Bolshevik-Leninist faction of more junior leaders such as Doric de Souza and Samarakkody. The split was formalised in 1945 with the expulsion of Gunawardena and Perera. Though the dispute was couched in terms of “tactics,” it was clearly analogous to the 1903 split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Samarakkody later observed: “It was the attempt on the part of the Marxist wing to re-organise the party programmatically and organisationally on Bolshevik lines that led to opposition from the Philip Gunawardena/N.M. Perera reformist wing and to the split of 1942” (“The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon”).

Gunawardena and Perera revolted at the prospect of a hard, disciplined, internationalist organisation. As Ervin put it in his earlier article on the BLPI, “The opportunist wing of the old LSSP rebelled, leading to a de facto split.... At bottom, it was a fight over what kind of party would lead the Indian struggle for liberation—proletarian revolutionary or petit-bourgeois radical?” (Revolutionary History, Winter 1988-89). The Workers Opposition railed against allegedly sectarian, petty-bourgeois intellectuals out to “transform the party from a living and growing entity with its deep roots in the masses into a narrow conspiratorial sect” (quoted in “Trotskyism in India, 1942-48”). In effect, Gunawardena sought to return the LSSP to the days when it looked something like the CSP, with a vaguely socialist and anti-imperialist programme and a politically uneducated “mass” membership—and himself calling the shots. It’s notable that on at least two occasions, Gunawardena resorted to physical violence or scurrilous, unsupported cop-baiting against his opponents inside the party, directed in particular at Doric de Souza, a key underground organiser of the Bolshevik-Leninists.

In India, Gunawardena et al. wanted the Trotskyists to enter the petty-bourgeois radical Congress Socialist Party. So long as the proletarian vanguard strictly maintained its programmatic independence from the bourgeois nationalists, work by a small nucleus of Leninist revolutionaries inside a mass bourgeois-nationalist formation in a colonial or semicolonial country in certain circumstances was not ruled out in principle. Trotsky adamantly opposed the liquidationist entry of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) into the Guomindang (GMD) beginning in 1923, which subordinated the proletarian vanguard to the bourgeois nationalists. But he did not in principle reject the CCP’s initial partial entry into the GMD in 1922, as he made clear in a 1 November 1937 letter to Harold Isaacs criticising a passage in Isaacs’ draft of The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1938):

“You invoke the fact that even if the Chinese [Communist Party] leaders opposed the entry they referred not to principles but to their ‘belief that the Kuomintang was defunct.’ This assertion is repeated twice or more. I find it incorrect in this case to oppose principles against the facts. In those times in the past when the bourgeois parties were capable of guiding toiling masses the duty of a revolutionary was to join them. Marx and Engels for instance joined the Democratic party in 1848 (correctly or not is a matter for concrete analysis). ‘The Kuomintang is not capable of leading revolutionary masses. It is from the revolutionary point of view a defunct party. That is why we are against the entry,’—such an argument could have a totally principled value.

“I can go further: the entering in itself in 1922 was not a crime, possibly not even a mistake, especially in the south, under the assumption that the Kuomintang at this time had a number of workers and the young Communist party was weak and composed almost entirely of intellectuals. (This is true for 1922?) In this case the entry would have been an episodic step to independency [sic], analogous to a certain degree to your entering the [U.S.] Socialist Party. The question is what was their purpose in entering and what was their subsequent policy?”

—Trotsky Papers Cataloging Records (MS Russ 13.11), Houghton Library, Harvard University (No. 8558)

The BLPI took a clear stand for the class independence of the proletariat from all wings of the Congress bourgeoisie, rejecting the CSP’s call for mass affiliation of the trade unions and kisan sabhas (peasant leagues) to Congress. The 1942 BLPI programme asserted: “To regard the Congress as a ‘National United Front,’ or to entertain any illusions whether of capturing the Congress from the bourgeoisie or of successfully exposing its bourgeois leadership while remaining loyal to the Congress, would be fatal to the independence of the proletarian movement” (Draft Programme). At the same time, the programme stated:

“This does not of course absolve Bolshevik-Leninists from the task of doing fraction work (of course, in all cases under strict party discipline) within the Congress, so long as there remain within their folds revolutionary and semi-revolutionary elements who may be won away from these organisations.”

But this purpose was at odds with what Gunawardena had in mind, which was certainly not a short-term entry aimed at winning potential revolutionaries in the CSP to Trotskyism. As indicated above, he had always been fascinated with the CSP as a “broad” socialist organisation nestled inside Congress. He saw the effort to forge a hard Trotskyist organisation in India in 1942 as the work of “revolutionary romantics,” as he was to put it later when the question of liquidation into the CSP was revisited (“Bolshevik-Leninists Should Enter Immediately the Socialist Party of India [CSP],” Internal Bulletin [LSSP] Vol. 1, No. 2, March 1947; quoted in Tomorrow Is Ours).

In 1943, Gunawardena and Perera argued that the BLPI should merge forces with the CSP as part of “a scheme to broker a broad regroupment of Congress Socialists and other nationalist parties which had played a prominent role in the ‘Quit India’ struggle,” as Ervin put it in one of his earlier articles (“Trotskyism in India, 1942-48”). Ervin continued: “Their opportunist proposal was couched in terms of ‘tactics,’ a ploy which these slick revisionists would repeat over the next several decades.”

Here, again, the later Ervin contradicts his earlier writings in order to rally to the defence of Gunawardena and Perera, falsely likening their opportunist proposal to the American Trotskyists’ entry into the Socialist Party in 1936-37. That entry was carried out with the aim of intersecting a layer of leftward-moving workers and youth and winning them to the fight for a revolutionary party, not of submerging the Trotskyists in an unprincipled left-nationalist lash-up in a capitalist party. In his book, Ervin sneeringly describes the Bolshevik-Leninists as “purists” for opposing Gunawardena’s opportunist manoeuvres with a pro-imperialist labour bureaucrat in Ceylon in 1945. He then claims:

“The BLPI directed biting propaganda at the Congress Socialists, pointing out their contradiction. The Socialists wanted struggle, but refused to break with the ‘bourgeois’ Congress. But these barbs, fired from afar, carried little sting. If the Trotskyists had been working in the Congress Socialist Party, as Philip Gunawardena had urged all along, they might have been able to influence a chunk of the Congress left.”

—Tomorrow Is Ours

To have dissolved the small and largely unjelled BLPI into the Congress/CSP would have led to the abortion of Indian Trotskyism. This became painfully evident in 1948 when, despite widespread initial opposition at the base, the BLPI did carry out a full-scale entry into J.P. Narayan’s Socialist Party, formed after the CSP finally left the Congress, which was now the ruling party of an independent India. Denied the right to form an organised internal opposition by the Socialist leaders, over the course of the next few years the Trotskyists were fully assimilated into Indian social democracy.

In fact, the CSP had long made it clear that it would not countenance organised opposition to Congress within its ranks. When the Stalinist CPI, having entered the CSP in 1936, began winning over significant numbers and entire CSP branches, they were subjected to an anti-Communist witchhunt and finally purged completely in 1940. One-time American Bukharinite Bertram Wolfe recalls how a CSP leader he knew, Yusuf Meherally, explained that he had ordered the purge of the CPI on the grounds that it “had constituted itself as a hostile conspiracy within our movement. They kept up a faction of their own, slandered our movement and its leaders” (quoted in Wolfe, Strange Communists I Have Known [London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1966]). Meherally recalled telling the CPI leaders: “You have proved unworthy of membership in the Congress Party and you have proved unworthy of the moral principles of Ghandhiji” (quoted in ibid.). It is willfully illusory to believe that the CSP leadership would have allowed a small Trotskyist entry faction to engage in a principled struggle based on revolutionary opposition to Congress, the CSP leadership and the Indian bourgeoisie.

Postwar Opportunism and Reunification

The end of the imperialist war saw most of the Ceylonese Trotskyists returning to the island. The Indian connection was steadily abandoned. Weakened by the departure of the Ceylonese cadre and pressured by the emergent Pabloite leadership in the International Secretariat of the Fourth International into a liquidationist entry, a Bombay-centred pro-entry faction ultimately won out and the BLPI collapsed into Narayan’s Socialist Party. The LSSP’s Short History argues that the organisational connection between the Ceylonese and Indian Trotskyists “ceased to have any meaning” after the transfer of power in India in 1947 and Ceylon in 1948. This is a flagrant denial of the necessary interrelation of socialist revolution in India and Ceylon.

The political basis of the split between the Bolshevik-Leninists and the Gunawardena/Perera reformist wing was not clarified and sharpened. As early as late 1946 there was an abortive attempt at reunification, and in 1950 an unprincipled merger of the Bolshevik-Leninists, by then called the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party (BSP), and LSSP was effected, with the blessing of Pablo & Co. Early in our contact with Samarakkody we raised the question: “What would seem to require explanation in the 1950 Ceylonese reunification is the internal incapacity of the left Trotskyists to resist it in favor of their previously overtly principled course” (Letter to Samarakkody, 27 October 1973, reprinted in iSt International Discussion Bulletin No. 3, May 1974). We further observed that from then on, the LSSP, “operating within the limitations of a merely national perspective and with a focus on the parliamentary arena,” was on a downhill slide from tacit reformism to increasingly overt class collaboration, culminating in the 1964 popular-front government.

Certainly, the BSP was itself affected by parliamentarism, and the opportunity for these leftists to become MPs must have played a part in their incorporation back into the LSSP. Samarakkody himself was elected to parliament in 1952. A pattern was set in the LSSP whereby the leftists could say whatever they wanted while the right wing, centred on the parliamentary leaders, determined policy at every crucial juncture. The LSSP lefts, appearing as revolutionaries before the masses, had real value to the reformists in this division of labour. But in the end, the lefts could only act as a pressure group on the rightist leadership core.

The postwar movement for independence took place in the context of a wave of working-class struggles between 1945 and 1947. The spectre of struggles by urban and plantation workers had the capitalists screaming about the “Indian menace” and the “Red Peril.” A series of strikes in 1946 won promises of concessions, but a general strike in May-June 1947 was violently suppressed. Though the United National Party (UNP) won the most seats in the 1947 elections, the LSSP (with ten seats) and the Bolshevik-Leninists (with five seats) did surprisingly well. Samarakkody was chosen to stand in Mirigama against UNP leader D.S. Senanayake, a “kinsman,” through his brother Siripala’s marriage into that notable landlord-capitalist family. In what was meant to be a Senanayake pocket borough, Samarakkody shook the prime minister-to-be by getting nearly 11,000 votes compared to 26,000-plus votes for Senanayake.

In his article in Spartacist, Samarakkody noted the highly indicative fact that LSSP leaders Perera and Gunawardena refused to join the Bolshevik-Leninists in 1946 in rejecting the Soulbury Constitution granted by Britain, which bequeathed formal independence while leaving intact key British institutions, such as the Trincomalee naval base and the monarchy, in the form of a British-appointed Governor-General. Certainly in hindsight the question of the Soulbury Constitution appears less significant than the vicious anti-working-class and anti-Tamil legislation which the government, with the support of Tamil bourgeois politicians, passed in the period immediately after independence. The great majority of the nearly one million Tamils of Indian origin, who made up the bulk of the plantation proletariat, were disenfranchised and deprived of citizenship. Thus, the largest and most powerful section of the working class, whose superexploitation allowed for the educational, medical and other welfarist measures implemented by the capitalists in those years, was made voteless and stateless. While LSSP and BSP MPs spoke eloquently in parliament against these measures as racist and anti-working-class, there is little to no evidence that they did much more.

The 1950 BSP-LSSP unification conference document said nothing about the plantation workers or the removal of their citizenship rights. Yet the merger with the Bolshevik-Leninists was too much for Gunawardena, who led a significant split in the direction of petty-bourgeois Sinhala populism. The following year, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike split from the UNP to form the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party, with its greater emphasis on Sinhala chauvinism and “anti-imperialist” rhetoric. Certainly as viewed through the eyes of the Tamil plantation workers, not to speak of principled Marxists, it was impossible to see Bandaranaike, notwithstanding his verbal radicalism, as a “lesser evil.” Yet the LSSP approached Bandaranaike for a no-contest agreement for the May 1952 elections. No protest against this was registered by Pablo’s International Secretariat, though from the standpoint of proletarian revolution this was already a crime.

Again in 1953-54 the Ceylonese Trotskyists were not well served by the international movement. The LSSP leadership initially rejected Pablo’s line in 1952 fleshing out the perspective of long-term entrism into the dominant Stalinist and social-democratic parties in West Europe. In a 23 February 1954 letter to Leslie Goonewardene, founding American Trotskyist James P. Cannon wrote: “The LSSP—more than any other party, I venture to say—requires an international leadership which will be a source of strength and support to its Trotskyist orthodoxy” (reprinted in SWP Education for Socialists, “Towards a History of the Fourth International, Part 3: International Committee Documents 1951-1954,” Vol. 4). But when Cannon and the SWP majority had belatedly declared war on Pablo’s revisionism in 1953, they did not carry out a hard fight throughout the International. Rather, the International Committee led by Cannon boycotted the Fourth World Congress organised by the Pabloites. As a result, the wavering LSSP was not polarised and was instead allowed to drift with Pablo. We later observed, “Had a hard principled anti-revisionist fight been waged in the Ceylon section in 1953, a hard revolutionary organization with an independent claim to Trotskyist continuity might have been created then, preventing the association of the name of Trotskyism with the fundamental betrayal of the LSSP” (“Genesis of Pabloism,” Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972).

Pablo’s liquidationist perspectives found resonance in the LSSP and encouraged a grouping which was to split away with a sizable minority of the membership, eventually coming to rest either in the Communist Party, Gunawardena’s increasingly communalist group or the SLFP itself. This tendency wanted a “Democratic Government which would have meant, at its lowest level, a Bandaranaike government, and at its highest level, a Government by a Sama Samaja majority” (quoted in “The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon”). Samarakkody further noted, “In fact, all the basic questions of Trotskyism, the program, the application of the theory of the permanent revolution, the character of the Ceylon revolution, the role of the ‘national’ bourgeoisie, questions of strategy and tactics, the Leninist concept of the party, were the issues that were involved in this factional struggle that burst into the open.”

And just as the factional struggle was bursting into the open, events in Ceylon provided clear evidence that the LSSP leadership was incapable of leading a revolutionary upsurge in the direction of a proletarian struggle for power. With the end of the economic boom precipitated by the outbreak of the Korean War (which had led to a sharp increase in world market prices of rubber and other raw materials), the UNP launched new attacks on the working masses—jacking up prices and cutting the rice ration subsidy. The LSSP called a one-day stoppage, the 12 August 1953 hartal (general strike). The strike was greeted with an outpouring of popular support from all ethnic groups, including workers on plantations where LSSP unions remained active. Colombo was shut down, and road and rail transport was halted throughout the South and West; in the town of Moratuwa, near Colombo, women workers halted trains by waving red flags. The Cabinet was forced to hold meetings aboard a British warship, the HMS Newfoundland.

But the LSSP was utterly unprepared for anything but a day of extra-parliamentary pressure. Recognising this, the government rallied and struck back, crushing the ill-organised, fragmented pockets of resistance. Nine people were killed, and though the prime minister was eventually compelled to resign, capitalist rule was restabilised.

The demonstrated incapacity of the LSSP helped lay the basis for the SLFP’s populist, “anti-imperialist” chauvinism to triumph in the 1956 elections and paved the way for anti-Tamil pogroms in 1958. Later, Samarakkody enumerated some powerful lessons of the hartal as vindicating the programme of permanent revolution:

“1. ...The Hartal showed that, given a revolutionary leadership, the masses could soon shed their parliamentary illusions and enter the road of mass struggle leading to the revolution itself.

“2. The masses did not divide the Ceylon revolution into two stages, (a) an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal stage and (b) an anti-capitalist stage....

“4. The alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry, which is basic to the Ceylon revolution, was achieved in action. The struggle showed that it was not necessary for the proletariat to form a political alliance with a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois party in order to win the peasantry.”

—“The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon”

The SLFP and “Sinhala Only”

But the leadership of the LSSP was on another trajectory. In the 1950s, the focus of Sinhalese chauvinism shifted decisively to the Tamils. (The Malayalis had mostly returned to India in the 1940s and the migration of many Burghers made them an increasingly less plausible bogeyman.) In 1955 the SLFP embraced the policy that Sinhalese be the sole official language (as had Gunawardena the year before). Though this was sometimes couched in egalitarian terms directed against the English-speaking elite, the real target of “Sinhala only” was the Tamils. That same year the LSSP cemented a no-contest agreement with the SLFP. While formally maintaining that the SLFP was a bourgeois party, the LSSP put emphasis on the SLFP’s supposedly “progressive” aspects and on the need to defeat the UNP. When the SLFP-led People’s United Front (MEP), which included the Gunawardena group, won a clear majority, the LSSP, now the main opposition party, offered to engage in “responsive cooperation” with the new government.

Several factors intervened to check the full flowering of this popular-frontist capitulation. In contradiction to its abject posture toward Bandaranaike, the LSSP continued to uphold a policy of parity of status for the Sinhala and Tamil languages; in 1955-56, its public meetings were attacked by communalist thugs. One of the SLFP’s first acts was to introduce a Sinhala Only Act. The LSSP opposed this act, but more from the standpoint of some vague anti-imperialist unity—a “common bond of Ceylonese consciousness,” as Leslie Goonewardene put it in 1960 (A Short History of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party)—than that of a class-based tribune of the people. Anxious about its declining influence in the petty-bourgeois Sinhalese electorate, the LSSP was hardly oriented to take advantage of the openings posed by the government’s virulently anti-Tamil policies. While the LSSP’s Lanka Estate Workers Union grew considerably, when the CP embraced “Sinhala only” in 1960, its disillusioned Tamil supporters turned not to the LSSP but to Tamil communal and nationalist politics.

As well, the organised working class rapidly became disillusioned with the new “socialist” government, and a wave of strikes broke out. The LSSP abandoned its cooperation with the government, and Bandaranaike whipped up communalist hysteria, culminating in the May 1958 anti-Tamil riots and a ten-month state of emergency under the Public Security Act. With parliament shut down, the LSSP as a whole did little. Indicatively, it confined its main protest to the Public Security Act to a parliamentary gesture in February 1959, when nine LSSP MPs (including Samarakkody) were forcibly removed by the police from the chambers of parliament.

In 1957, Samarakkody and several other Central Committee members came together in opposition to the policy of “responsive cooperation,” arguing:

“Whatever was the intention of the party, in the eyes of the masses, the key to the understanding of the fundamental position of the party in relation to the government was the offer of co-operation (responsive) by the party. This offer of co-operation to the capitalist government was wrong. The party could have and should have offered support to the progressive measures of the government while stating categorically that the MEP government was a capitalist government.”

—quoted in “The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon”

The opposition grouping also argued:

“The aim of the party in relation to the MEP government is revolutionary overthrow of the government, i.e. by the method of the mass uprising. The masses are not ready now (today) for the overthrow of the government. But in view of the failure of the government to solve the pressing problems of the people, in view of the ever increasing dissension in the MEP, and the demoralisation of its own ranks, in view of the growing militancy of the working class, the situation can change very rapidly, and at any moment from now, the masses could well raise the slogan ‘Down with the MEP government.’ As a bridge between their present consciousness and the stage when they will be ready for the call for the overthrow of the Government, the party will adopt as a central agitational slogan ‘We do not want the capitalist MEP government, we want a workers and peasants government’.”

—quoted in ibid.

Samarakkody assessed the 1957 opposition as follows: “Undoubtedly this group failed to come to grips with the roots of reformism in the party. It only focused attention on some aspects of party policy. Nevertheless, the orientation of this group gave promise of possibilities for the growth of a real revolutionary tendency” (ibid.).

Following Bandaranaike’s assassination in September 1959 by a disgruntled ultra-chauvinist Buddhist monk who had earlier supported the SLFP regime, the LSSP had high hopes of riding to parliamentary power. But the LSSP stagnated at ten seats in the March 1960 elections, and the SLFP failed to secure a majority. Two months later, the reformist wing led by Perera finally won the LSSP to a coalition with the SLFP, and a no-contest pact was signed. The LSSP stopped talking of parity for the Tamil language. As it was, Bandaranaike’s widow, Sirimavo (popularly known as Mrs. B), won an outright victory in a second election, in July 1960, and had no need for coalition partners. The LSSP voted for the Throne Speech, the governing party’s principal policy address to parliament, and outlined its policy as support “so long as the Government in line with its socialist professions, subserves the needs of the mass movement for socialism” (A Short History of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party). Those left MPs, including Samarakkody, who voted against the Throne Speech were censured by the LSSP.

In response to this overt support to a bourgeois government, the Pabloite International Secretariat delivered nothing more than a mild public rebuke to the LSSP over the no-contest agreement and the vote for the Throne Speech. The American SWP, then still affiliated to the International Committee, stated in a letter to the LSSP that the “policy of working for the creation of an SLFP government appears to us to be completely at variance with the course of independent working class political action” and was “a form of ‘popular frontism’” (Letter by Tom Kerry to LSSP, 17 May 1960). When the SWP declined to publicly denounce this betrayal, James Robertson, who was to be a co-founder of the Revolutionary Tendency, strenuously objected to the party’s public silence in an 8 August letter to the SWP Political Committee (see “No to Public Silence on LSSP Betrayal,” page 24). Healy, notwithstanding his later song and dance about opposing the LSSP betrayal, urged the SWP to “proceed with caution—as you have in the past so rightly insisted” (Letter to Joe Hansen, 14 August 1960). Finally, months after the fact, the SWP’s Militant (3 October 1960) carried a limp pro forma statement chastising the LSSP for its support to the SLFP.

Popular Front Consummated

It is important to understand the backdrop to the formation of a coalition government in 1964. In 1961 and 1962, mass struggles erupted among the Tamil minority, led by the bourgeois Federal Party, in defence of their language and democratic rights. The SLFP government sent in the army to crush the protests. While Samarakkody personally joined with Tamil MPs in condemning the army’s actions, his party did nothing. The abandonment of any defence of minority rights was mirrored in the collapse of the LSSP’s Tamil union support on the plantations and elsewhere.

New waves of workers strikes also broke out. The bridge between the extraparliamentary workers struggle and the safe channels of parliament was the United Left Front (ULF) with the Communist Party and Gunawardena’s group (which now called itself the MEP), launched by the LSSP in 1963 and enthusiastically promoted by the Pabloite International Secretariat. The ULF was clearly a Sinhala-chauvinist popular front. Whatever question might have existed about the class character of Gunawardena’s group when he split in 1950, the MEP was now a rabidly communalist petty-bourgeois party; Gunawardena insisted that no Tamil organisations be invited to a joint LSSP-CP-MEP May Day rally in 1963. Samarakkody and a minority on the LSSP CC opposed the ULF, correctly noting that it was but the preparatory step to coalition with the SLFP. But wider reservations in the party about a coalition were steadily worn down.

Faced with defections and army coup attempts, Tamil mobilisations and now mass working-class struggle, Mrs. B desperately needed allies. As 40,000 rallied in Colombo on 21 March 1964, the bourgeois press was already reporting talks between Perera and the SLFP. At a special LSSP conference on 6-7 June, the right wing under Perera got a big majority for joining the SLFP in government. A minority resolution presented by 14 CC members stated:

“To agree to accept office in Mrs. Bandaranaike’s Government, either separately or in association with the other parties in the United Left Front would be to agree to join hands with the SLFP Government in staving off the rising tide of working class and mass discontent against it, and to seek to provide working class collaboration with its policy of maintaining capitalism in Ceylon within the capitalist constitutional framework.

“The entry of the LSSP leaders into the SLFP government will result in open class collaboration, disorientation of the masses, the division of the working class and the abandonment of the struggle-perspective, which will lead to the disruption of the working class movement and the elimination of the independent revolutionary axis of the Left. In the result, the forces of capitalist reaction, far from being weakened or thwarted, will be ultimately strengthened.”

—reprinted in (Healyite) Fourth International, Summer 1964

Defeated, most of the 159 delegates who opposed the coalition left to form the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary), declaring that the LSSP decision was “a complete violation of the basic principles of Trotskyism” (Education for Socialists, “Towards a History of the Fourth International, Part 6: Revolutionary Marxism vs. Class Collaboration in Sri Lanka”).

The LSSP(R), which now replaced the LSSP as the USec’s Ceylonese section, retained two MPs, Samarakkody and Meryl Fernando. Beset by further defections, the coalition did not have a parliamentary majority. On 3 December 1964 it was defeated by one vote on an amendment to the Throne Speech by an independent rightist (and one-time LSSP member), W. Dahanayake, which asserted that “the people have no confidence in the government as it had failed to solve the problems of the people, such as employment, high cost of living and housing” (quoted in T. Perera, Revolutionary Trails—Edmund Samarakkody: A Political Profile [Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 2006]). Samarakkody and Fernando voted for the amendment. In a statement issued by Samarakkody, the LSSP(R) declared that it “has no tears to shed whatsoever for the Government” (reprinted in M. Banda, Ceylon: The Logic of Coalition Politics).

The LSSP(R) was not a homogeneous group. A pro-coalition tendency led by V. Karalasingham soon headed back into the LSSP. Moreover, it quickly became evident that Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU) boss Bala Tampoe was intent on making the LSSP(R) the adjunct of his grossly opportunistic trade-union activities. Tampoe later boasted: “Even though I was a member of the LSSP I never allowed the LSSP to control the Mercantile Union. I am proud that I have steered the Union from political entanglements” (Colombo Sunday Times, 22 October 1995). The LSSP(R) also contained supporters of the British Healy group, who engaged in unprincipled manoeuvres with both Karalasingham and Tampoe until the Healyites departed to form their own organisation.

Samarakkody’s main fight was with Tampoe. Having taken over the CMU from A.E. Goonesinha in 1948, Tampoe was, despite various “democratic” trappings, ensconced as head of the union for life, prompting the popular joke that it was easier to change the constitution of the country than that of the CMU. Tampoe’s conduct, opposing joint action with other unions and even hobnobbing with the class enemy and visiting imperialist officials during important class battles, reached scandalous proportions. Repulsed by this, Samarakkody led a split in 1968. His appeal to the United Secretariat to be recognised as its official section was turned down. Subsequently, we collaborated with Samarakkody’s RWP in publicising Tampoe’s impermissible activities (see “The Case of Bala Tampoe” and “USec Covers Up Tampoe Scandal,” Spartacist Nos. 21 and 22, Fall 1972 and Winter 1973-74).

Samarakkody went about as far left as he could within the confines of the United Secretariat. Somewhat attracted to SWP spokesman Joseph Hansen’s seemingly orthodox criticisms of the USec majority’s then-guerrillaist line, Samarakkody stated in a document for the 1969 USec World Congress: “It is time for the whole of the International to consider whether our tactics during the last three decades has taken us along a strategy that is alien to our movement” (“Strategy and Tactics of Our Movement in the Backward Countries” [undated]). After being cast out of the USec, Samarakkody’s critical examination went further:

“During the first two years the revolutionary tendency had the task of drawing up a proper balance sheet of the experience of the LSSP and the LSSP(R) and to cleanse itself of the hangovers of Pabloism, which substituted empiricism and pragmatism for dialectical materialism and which abandoned the task of building the revolutionary party to the participation and ‘integration’ in the so-called living movement of the masses, leading the Pabloites to parliamentarism and syndicalism. The Revolutionary Workers Party cannot but reject the politics of both wings of the United Secretariat—the ultra-left opportunist mixture of Mandel, Livio [Maitan], [Pierre] Frank, as well as the opportunist group of Hansen-Novack.”

—“The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon”

Discussions with Samarakkody

Samarakkody first wrote to us in 1971. For us this was a significant development. Ceylon had considerable importance in the history of the Trotskyist movement and as a staging area for revolution throughout the Indian subcontinent. Samarakkody and Fernando were old, tested cadres with a track record. Cadres represent the accumulated capital of long experience, and Trotsky himself, for example, had spent long years trying to win over the likes of Henk Sneevliet, a veteran of the Communist movement, in the struggle for the Fourth International. In another sense, Samarakkody was important to us in the same way as were Healy, Lambert and the Bolivian Guillermo Lora. We kept probing for elements in and around the United Secretariat and other ostensibly Trotskyist formations, understanding that local groupings might not be firmly bound to Pabloite centrism or Hansen’s reformism. This necessary testing suggested that all such wings, splinters and fragments claiming the mantle of the Fourth International were finished as revolutionary forces, that it was necessary to build anew including by regrouping revolutionary cadres from these organisations through a process of splits and fusions.

Moreover, we were conscious of the mistake that Cannon and the American SWP had made after Trotsky’s death of not accepting the challenge of international leadership and instead waiting for someone else to do it. Consequently, we set out to see if there was a principled basis for us to join together with the RWP in the struggle to reforge the Fourth International. This necessarily involved an attempt to determine to what extent those of the old Ceylonese Trotskyists who had split over the 1964 betrayal had actually succeeded in transcending the “old,” “good” LSSP. Discussions also developed, among other questions, over our propaganda group perspective, the popular front and the national question.

We had learned through hard experience that one could not evaluate a group from a distance simply on the basis of its written propaganda. While the Healyites, for example, produced a number of excellent documents in the late 1950s and early ’60s, we learned through our contact with them that behind these fine words there lurked a wretched history of political banditry and thuggery. Samarakkody’s 1964 vote against the popular front constituted a verifiable demonstration of revolutionary principle. But it was only through painfully expensive visits to Sri Lanka—perhaps half a dozen in as many years—that any real sense was gained of the perspectives and work of the RWP.

An initial focus of our differences on the national question was the Near East. The RWP disagreed with our position of revolutionary defeatism in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, maintaining that Israel was simply an imperialist outpost and thus it was necessary to extend military support to the Arab bourgeois states. The RWP also rejected our contention that in the case of geographically interpenetrated peoples—as in Israel-Palestine and Cyprus—the realization of self-determination for one people could, under capitalism, only come at the expense of the democratic rights of the other. Thus, in a 1975 letter Samarakkody asserted that “the possibility, or probability, of the oppression of the Turkish Cypriot minority, will not deter revolutionary Marxists in supporting the just struggle of the Cypriot people for complete independence” (“National Question: RWP-SL/U.S. Differences,” 31 October 1975, reprinted in iSt International Discussion Bulletin No. 7, March 1977). The problem with this is that there is no single “Cypriot people,” as was demonstrated with the compacting of two mutually hostile statelets under Turkish and Greek suzerainty, respectively, involving mass population transfers. Such conflicting national interests in the case of interpenetrated peoples can only be equitably resolved within the framework of proletarian state power.

The crucial point of difference between us and the RWP was the popular front. In the 1970 elections, the RWP (then the Revolutionary Samasamaja Party) had advocated support to the LSSP or CP, which were part of the SLFP-led popular front, in those constituencies where their opponents were candidates of capitalist parties:

“As a first step in the direction of ending Coalition politics and all form of class collaboration, and for the re-groupment of the working-class under its own independent class banner, in the perspective of the anti-capitalist struggle, the Revolutionary Samasamaja Party calls for support of the candidates of working-class parties only where they are pitted against the candidates of capitalist parties.” [emphasis in original]

—“Revolutionary Samasamaja Party and the General Elections,” May 1970

Our position is that there is no basis for critical electoral support to a bourgeois workers party in a popular front, since any exploitable contradiction between the reformists’ political subordination to capitalism and their claim (implicit or explicit) to represent the interests of the working class is suppressed when they are part of a bourgeois coalition. The popular front violates the principle of proletarian class independence from the bourgeoisie. The history of the workers movement on the island speaks volumes to what is wrong with any form of support to the popular front.

In 1974, a delegation from the RWP was able to visit Canada for extensive discussion with the international Spartacist tendency. There we learned that Samarakkody had lately repudiated the 1964 vote which brought down the popular front. The discussions on this question, then and later, were clouded by tactical questions. The vote for the rightist amendment had been awkward and inept, the comrades falling into a UNP manoeuvre. Nonetheless it was principled, obligatory, courageous and honourable. Sooner rather than later, Samarakkody and Fernando would again have faced the question of voting to bring the government down, likely with their two votes being the decisive ones. Behind all the RWP’s talk of a “tactical mistake” lay the capitulatory conclusion that the preservation of the coalition was more important than Marxist principle. The basis of our respect for Samarakkody was the 1964 vote, and now he deplored it. In the words of one comrade: “He said he was sorry, we thought he was great (before we knew he was sorry).”

The LSSP reaped only disillusion and disaffection from its support for coalitionism, its working-class base delivered up to Sinhala chauvinism. Soon after joining the coalition, the LSSP backed the Shastri-Sirimavo pact signed by Mrs. B and Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, which called for deporting more than half a million Tamils to India. In January 1966, the LSSP, in league with the CP, organised a communalist campaign to protest against limited concessions proposed by the UNP government on Tamil language rights. The 1970 election campaign by the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition reached new heights of anti-Tamil chauvinism. LSSPer Colvin R. de Silva’s crowning triumph is to bear responsibility as Minister for Constitutional Affairs for the 1972 constitution that enshrined “Sinhala only” and abrogated previous formal safeguards for Lanka’s minorities.

From the Velona Mills strike of young women workers in Moratuwa led by the LSSP(R) in July 1964 through the strike waves of the next six years, the LSSP stood with the communalist bourgeois coalition against workers struggles. What emerged as a reaction to coalitionism was the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which began as a rural-based, radical leftist movement inspired by Che Guevara and the revolutionary Vietnamese struggle against U.S. imperialism and its local puppets. Responding to one Ceylonese correspondent in 1972, we noted:

“The main point of our concern with the youth uprising impinges on our principal historical criticism of the Ceylonese Trotskyist movement—that its deep strain of petty-bourgeois impulse found expression in a relatively privileged Ceylonese nationalism rather than in struggle to win the proletariat in Ceylon (and especially the Tamil plantation workers) as a staging area for proletarian revolution on the Indian subcontinent as a whole.”

—quoted in Letter to Samarakkody, 27 October 1973, reprinted in iSt International Discussion Bulletin No. 3, May 1974

In the late 1960s, the JVP was the organisation that subjectively revolutionary youth joined in opposition to the parliamentary shell game and coalition betrayals. JVP leader Rohana Wijeweera presented himself as “a modern Bolshevik.” The JVP’s base included many educated rural youth who spoke only Sinhalese and thus faced bleak prospects in the semicolonial economy. A JVP-led uprising in early 1971 was drowned in blood by the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition government, which slaughtered thousands of young militants. In the aftermath, the JVP’s growing emphasis on Sri Lanka’s “liberation” from the “Indian threat” (as well as its petty-bourgeois, peasant-based strategy) ultimately transformed it into a reactionary communalist organisation intent on destroying the Tamil people. This was the product, in no small part, of the “Sinhala only” education policies pushed by the SLFP and now embraced by the LSSP.

One thing that attracted us to Samarakkody and the RWP was the principled stand they took on the 1971 uprising. While the LSSP and CP coalitionists tried to cover the tracks of their butchery by howling about the JVP being CIA reactionaries, Samarakkody acted as a defence lawyer for imprisoned JVPers while publicly criticising the JVP’s politics:

“In these circumstances, there was no question of the party supporting this struggle. The party did not and could not have supported this struggle nor do anything, nor could have done anything by way of assisting to promote or continue this armed struggle.

“But as this struggle was between the oppressed youth on the one side and the forces of capitalism on the other, the side of revolutionary Marxists is the side of the fighting youth, meaning thereby, that they should defend the fighting youth against the actions of the capitalist state. Concretely, this meant that revolutionary Marxists should oppose and fight the government in its attempt to kill, torture, imprison and harass the fighting youth, their supporters or relatives.”

—“Revolutionary Samasamaja Party & the Armed Struggle,” 1971

The JVP grew on the basis of the failure of working-class leadership, and despite Samarakkody’s principled role in 1971, it is indicative of a preoccupation with the parliamentary coalition milieu that the RWP was never able to attract any militants from among these radicalised youth. Even when fissures later opened up between the Sinhala-chauvinist leadership of Wijeweera and more leftist-inclined elements of the JVP prepared to acknowledge Tamil rights, the RWP ignored our suggestions to have some orientation to these youth.

Emergence of Spartacist League/Lanka

Given the impasse reached in 1974, we were somewhat surprised when, in April 1979, we received a proposal for fusion from the RWP. A special conference of the RWP in February 1979 had voted for this perspective. The impetus clearly came from younger, active elements in the RWP’s Marxist Youth, who wished to break out of stagnancy. We did not know then that the historic leaders of the RWP, Samarakkody and Fernando, were opposed to the fusion perspective. In our reply to the RWP, we wrote:

“As with all sections and candidates for fusion we would need to have a mutual sense of assurance—in a programmatically definable way—that the Ceylonese comrades seek proletarian revolution in Ceylon and in South Asia. If these two considerations exist—the determination to act in concert internationally and the programmatically expressed appetite to seek proletarian revolution—then there is a basis for a valid fusion.”

—quoted in “Toward the International Trotskyist League!” Spartacist (English edition) No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80

Leftists, especially ostensible Trotskyists, in Lanka are attuned to seeking an international connection to enhance their authority, and Samarakkody certainly liked to get off the island, be it on MPs’ junkets to the USSR and Egypt or for international gatherings of ostensible Trotskyists. However, we were not interested in a ceremonial or federated “international” but rather an authentically Leninist, democratic-centralist international party. We gave the RWP access to our internal discussion bulletins, but the RWP never opened up its internal life to us.

Understanding that a fusion would be of incalculable value, we sent an authoritative delegation to Sri Lanka. A unification agreement was signed that noted, despite amendments by the RWP to water down the key formulations, the political obstacles to a valid unification:

“Politically and as an extreme characterisation the RWP could see elements of sectarian ultra-leftism in the iSt, centering upon at best indifference to national struggles of the oppressed, and willful ineffectuality in approaching the masses and in party building. The iSt for its part could perceive, as an extreme characterisation, the RWP as partaking at least in part of a centrism which tails petty-bourgeois nationalism and gives critical support to the worst aspects of revisionism and reformism, while in its own propaganda is largely unable to transcend mere democratic demands.”

—quoted in ibid.

The draft document for our 1979 international conference described the unification as an important opportunity for the extension of the international Spartacist tendency, but a difficult one, especially given the magnitude of the outstanding political differences, the geographical distance and the divergent cultural and living standards. In line with their prevalent notion that the leadership is anointed and eternal, the RWP sent a delegation to the conference consisting of Samarakkody, Fernando and Tulsiri Andrade, another leader who had abstained on the fusion perspective. Hidden from us was the fact that the delegation did not include anyone from the pro-fusion majority, already a sign of bad faith.

At the conference the turning point was a panel discussion on the popular-front question. While the iSt speakers sought to draw on the international experience of Trotsky’s struggles and more recent examples, Samarakkody focused narrowly on Ceylon, more and more turning political differences into questions of personal credibility and the integrity of “Edmund.” Our minimum condition for the unification was that, in the context of international democratic-centralism, the 1964 vote would be defended and supported publicly. The panel discussion underlined that for our part there would be no diplomatic non-aggression pact, but Leninist political struggle for a common international line. The RWP leaders would not accept this.

But the delegation could hardly return to Sri Lanka and report that the unification had broken down over the popular-front question, since most of the pro-fusion majority of the RWP agreed with the iSt position. Instead Samarakkody found his pretext with the trial of Bill Logan, a former leader of our Australian and British sections, for crimes against communist morality and human decency (see ICL Pamphlet, The Logan Dossier). Samarakkody was a member of the trial body and agreed that Logan had had a fair trial and was a “monster” guilty of “a pattern of calculated personal and sexual manipulation.” But he sought to lay responsibility for Logan’s crimes at the feet of other leading comrades, who had been among his main victims, and argued that Logan should not be expelled because he had not acted out of “personal interests.”

Samarakkody’s lawyering for Logan provoked deep anger and disgust among the conference participants. As one comrade noted, the range of unappetising human desires is not exhausted by pecuniary gain or power: “Did Jack the Ripper kill to make money or become the Prime Minister?” Perhaps Samarakkody calculated that the question of sex would elicit a prudish revulsion in the context of the deep sexual repression in Lankan society. Certainly his stance connoted a disregard for the question of women’s oppression. Though women workers constitute a strategic component of the proletariat on the island, the RWP had no women members; one member of the RWP delegation had argued that since women were four or five times more difficult to recruit, it was better to concentrate on recruiting four or five men rather than one woman.

The next day the RWP delegates packed their bags and left, throwing away the opportunity to argue their positions before hundreds of Trotskyists. Significantly, the RWP delegates’ reports to their membership did not even mention the popular-front discussion, but rather consisted of a litany of supposed bureaucratic abuses, often laughable and generally more revealing of their state of mind than the iSt’s alleged bureaucratism. They were not purged, as they alleged, nor intimidated; they simply ran away. Samarakkody was never so concerned about decorous procedures when he was in parliament, but maybe that was all just a bunch of “old boys” play-acting. The experience at the 1979 conference proved Samarakkody & Co. to be used-up human material. Our prolonged fraternal experience was resolved in a decidedly negative way. But its clarification had political value.

Nor did the RWP delegation succeed in inoculating their members against the iSt. The fight continued within the RWP itself. Those comrades who upheld the 1964 vote and the fusion perspective formed the Bolshevik Faction. In 1981, the Bolshevik Faction fused with the iSt and formed the Spartacist League/Lanka. The 24 May 1981 fusion document was explicitly based on the lessons of the struggle against “the parochial and vacillating centrism” of the Samarakkody RWP leadership (see “Stepping Stone Toward South Asian Revolution: Spartacist League Formed in Sri Lanka,” Spartacist [English edition] No. 31-32, Summer 1981). A keystone of the SL/L’s programme was the recognition that a consistent, principled line on the Tamil question was integrally related to categorical opposition to the popular front in all its variants: “Coalition politics has meant not only subservience to the capitalists but also Sinhala chauvinism” (ibid.). This went hand in hand with the understanding that Ceylonese Trotskyism could be reforged only on the basis of a revolutionary perspective encompassing the Indian subcontinent:

“The revolutionary intentions of Sri Lankan militants will be proven by their practice on the Tamil question. Across the narrow Palk Straits live many millions more Tamils. The struggle to win Tamil comrades expresses the commitment to helping build a revolutionary party in India.”

—Ibid.

Our comrades’ commitment to the struggle against anti-Tamil chauvinism was put to the test almost immediately. At the initiative of an SL/L supporter at Colombo University, student strikers there raised the demand for admission of Tamil freshmen, cutting against the grain of an islandwide practice barring Tamils from any university other than Jaffna University. This struggle was the first recent instance of Sinhalese students championing Tamil rights. Despite its tiny numbers, the SL/L published journals in both Sinhala and Tamil. And in the face of anti-Tamil terror in the North, the SL/L distinguished itself in raising its voice in protest.

Throughout the 1980s, other sections of the iSt, often uniquely among Western left groups, initiated or participated in protests around the world against escalating anti-Tamil terror in Sri Lanka. Our comrades were invited to address mass Tamil rallies in London’s Trafalgar Square, a measure of the authority accrued as a result of our principled stand in this increasingly nationalist milieu. In 1983, decades of Sinhala-chauvinist popular-frontism culminated in unprecedentedly murderous pogroms orchestrated by the UNP government of J.R. Jayawardene. These pogroms, aimed at eliminating the important Tamil merchant and business layer in Colombo, were a decisive step in destroying the economic interpenetration of the island’s peoples. Thousands were killed and upwards of 100,000 Tamils were forced to flee as refugees to the North or to India; in addition, as many as 200,000 “stateless” Tamil labourers were terrorised into fleeing from the hill country plantations. We recognised that this was a watershed in the island’s history, noting:

“While the rest of the left opposed Tamil self-determination, we were for that right but argued against exercising it, pointing out that economically and in other ways, it would be a catastrophe. Now this catastrophe has happened, national separation is a reality. Thus today we demand: ‘For the right to Tamil Eelam! For a Socialist Federation of Eelam and Lanka!’”

—“Protest Mass State Terror Against Lankan Tamils!” Workers Vanguard No. 361, 31 August 1984

However, in our desperate attempt to find a means to defend the Tamil people against further massacres, we also raised the unprincipled call: “Patriation of Tamils in Sinhala areas to the North under the protection of the Indian army” (see Workers Vanguard No. 336, 12 August 1983, and Spartacist [English edition] No. 35, Autumn 1983). While the articles in question explicitly warned against placing any confidence in the Indian bourgeois state of Indira Gandhi to defend the Tamils in Sri Lanka, in fact the slogan amounted to a statement of confidence in the Indian bourgeoisie and could also be read as a call for forced population transfers of the remaining Tamils in Colombo and elsewhere on the island. In the interest of maintaining our record of Marxist clarity and integrity, the recent Sixth ICL Conference voted to publicly repudiate the 1983 “patriation” slogan.

Another decisive aspect of the SL/L’s repudiation of the legacy of class collaboration and reformist betrayal on the island was its forthright stand in defence of women’s rights. As the 1981 fusion document stated:

“Recent events in Iran and Afghanistan have sharply demonstrated that in the underdeveloped countries of the East the woman question has particular significance. We must raise demands that address the special oppression of women and develop special methods for work among women, for once aroused the working women will provide many of the best fighters for communism, as they did for the Bolshevik Revolution in Soviet Central Asia. The Tamil women plantation workers and as yet unorganized women workers in Free Trade Zone industries like textiles are important sectors of the Ceylonese proletariat and must be won to our cause.”

—“Spartacist League Formed in Sri Lanka”

When strikes broke out among mainly Sinhalese women garment workers in 1984, the SL/L solidarised with the strikers and the iSt launched international fund-raising efforts to support their struggles. In the course of this work, the SL/L won a number of these militants to the revolutionary programme.

Escalating anti-Tamil terror and general repression against the left took its toll on our tiny organisation. In 1984, Vincent Thomas, editor of the SL/L press, was ordered to appear at the notorious fourth floor offices in Colombo of the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) secret police, where his life was threatened. To his credit, Samarakkody assisted in the legal defence of our comrade. The SL/L and iSt were subsequently the target of a scurrilous anti-communist, terror-baiting assault in the reactionary Lankan press.

The 1983 pogroms, the nationalist Tamil insurgency and the intense state repression combined to cut short the possibility of public work on the island. The capacity to assist our small and vulnerable organisation in combating the enormous pressures weighing down on them, through international discussion and collaboration, was decisively undermined by the absence of a common language. Whereas Samarakkody’s first language was English, allowing for real discussion, this was not the case with the comrades who constituted the SL/L. Notwithstanding our efforts to bridge the language gap—with comrades in New York studying Sinhala and comrades in Lanka taking classes in English—our Lankan section was very much a victim of the “Sinhala only” policies pushed through by the popular front.

The Continuing Legacy of Popular-Frontism

With the popular front’s chauvinist treachery played out in full, why did Samarakkody renege on the 1964 vote? It is clear that he switched his position following the emergence within the LSSP of an oppositional tendency, which became the Nava [New] Sama Samaja Party (NSSP) in 1977. Here, it seemed, was an opportunity to revive the old LSSP, to once again be a respected member of the old crowd. One iSt comrade visiting Lanka in October 1975 reported that the RWP “seem to be quite happy with their prospects, especially since the LSSP being thrown out of government has opened LSSP supporters up to them” and that Samarakkody’s appetite to have a weekly paper “seemed too much a matter of replying to what N.M. Perera and Colvin de Silva had just said in parliament.”

In an obituary on Samarakkody in the British Workers Power, the late Al Richardson, then editor of Revolutionary History and a consummate Labour Party entrist, wrote:

“Karalasingham’s contention that they should have undertaken entry work within the old LSSP received full confirmation within a decade when a mass left did indeed split away from it to set up the NSSP led by Vasudeva Nanayakkara. But Edmund preferred to stand by his principles, alone if necessary.”

—Workers Power, February 1992

Contrary to Richardson and all the popular-front apologists, Samarakkody’s failing was that he did not make a sufficient break from that calamitous tradition.

Aside from its complicity in all the crimes of the popular front, the NSSP is a replica of many of the worst features of the old LSSP. It has been repeatedly involved in the never-ending popular-front line-ups, including with the SLFP. NSSP founder Nanayakkara was himself an LSSP MP from 1970 to 1977. In June 1990, the NSSP joined with the SLFP and LSSP in a six-party statement that supported the UNP government’s genocidal onslaught against the Tamils in the name of a fight against “the fascism of the LTTE [Tamil Tigers]” (quoted in Revolutionary Trails).

The NSSP and its offspring continue that treacherous tradition to this day. For a number of years, the NSSP was affiliated to the international tendency led by the late Ted Grant and Peter Taaffe. In the late 1980s, the United Socialist Party (USP) was formed as a putatively left split from the NSSP. The USP sided with Taaffe when he and Grant broke up a few years later, while the NSSP went on to join the USec. During the bloody SLFP government offensive against the Tamils in 2009, the USP built a popular-frontist “Platform for Freedom” with the right-wing UNP. As for the erstwhile Healyites in Lanka, now linked to David North’s World Socialist Web Site, their occasionally orthodox criticisms of the popular-frontism of the NSSP, USP, etc. are belied by their abject refusal to recognise the right of self-determination of the Tamil people.

Bolshevik Methods of Party Building

The conception of party building that Samarakkody carried with him from the LSSP was far removed from Leninism. Lenin explicitly rejected the argument that the differences between backward Russia and the advanced capitalist countries of West Europe rendered the Bolshevik experience inapplicable for these countries. But the lessons of Bolshevism were also patently applicable to countries like Sri Lanka, which have similar features of the combined and uneven development that marked prerevolutionary Russia:

“Russia achieved Marxism—the only correct revolutionary theory—through the agony she experienced in the course of half a century of unparalleled torment and sacrifice, of unparalleled revolutionary heroism, incredible energy, devoted searching, study, practical trial, disappointment, verification, and comparison with European experience. Thanks to the political emigration caused by tsarism, revolutionary Russia, in the second half of the nineteenth century, acquired a wealth of international links and excellent information on the forms and theories of the world revolutionary movement, such as no other country possessed.

“On the other hand, Bolshevism, which had arisen on this granite foundation of theory, went through fifteen years of practical history (1903-1917) unequalled anywhere in the world in its wealth of experience. During those fifteen years, no other country knew anything even approximating to that revolutionary experience, that rapid and varied succession of different forms of the movement—legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and mass movements, and parliamentary and terrorist forms. In no other country has there been concentrated, in so brief a period, such a wealth of forms, shades, and methods of struggle of all classes of modern society, a struggle which, owing to the backwardness of the country and the severity of the tsarist yoke, matured with exceptional rapidity, and assimilated most eagerly and successfully the appropriate ‘last word’ of American and European political experience.”

—“Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder (1920)

Central to the Bolsheviks’ capacity to uphold the revolutionary lessons they had learned and to intervene effectively was Lenin’s struggle for a democratic-centralist vanguard party of professional revolutionaries. In his 1902 polemic against Economism, Lenin argued that it was “our duty to assist every capable worker to become a professional agitator, organiser, propagandist, literature distributor, etc., etc.” (What Is To Be Done?). He stressed: “A worker-agitator who is at all gifted and ‘promising’ must not be left to work eleven hours a day in a factory. We must arrange that he be maintained by the Party” (ibid.).

The LSSP demonstrated features of general social-democratic functioning as well as of the particular bourgeois society in which it operated. The leadership was the educated, English-speaking elite—MPs, lawyers and trade-union officials. They kept their connections to the rest of the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois elite. UNP Cabinet members would attend the weddings of LSSP leaders’ daughters. Samarakkody’s wife would tell the story of running into Mrs. Bandaranaike at her old school girls’ association and being asked how the “old lion” Edmund was.

The caste, family and social structures of Sri Lanka all emphasise status and hierarchy. Ideas are examined not for their merit but according to the status of the presenter. To question or challenge an idea implies disrespect and ingratitude. Thus in political parties or in trade unions, the educated leader becomes a kind of benevolent patron and guardian, to whom deferential loyalty should be extended. What full-timers the LSSP had were often ill-educated activists, unemployed volunteers or workers in the party press, while the lawyers and MPs acted as public spokesmen for the party. And while the English-speaking leaders could read Trotsky, virtually nothing was translated into Sinhala or Tamil. The division was between anointed and informed leaders and the followers who voted LSSP. LSSP conferences were tests of the oratorical skills of the established leaders and not a struggle of the whole membership for a common revolutionary line. Our own debates with Samarakkody over the popular front and the national question were not taken to the RWP membership nor were translations made for RWP internal bulletins.

How can a revolutionary party recruit and develop, not least, women members if it adheres to these practices, which serve only to maintain the traditional subordination of women? This is not the way of Bolshevism, and is antithetical to the struggle to become the revolutionary vanguard of the working class and the tribune of the people. In the ICL we struggle for the membership as a whole to participate in the life of the organisation, including at the international level.

Samarakkody’s last years were mostly downhill. Personal grief came from the suicides of his son and daughter-in-law. The RWP formed a lash-up with the Italian Gruppo Operaio Rivoluzionario (GOR), the rump of a youth grouping that had fused with the iSt in 1980. The GOR’s wimpy lider minimo had distinguished himself by volunteering information on his group to the police. Only an old charlatan could have kept such company. In 1983, Meryl Fernando and Tulsiri Andrade split from Samarakkody amid recriminations over who would make an international trip, charging that “his method of party building was highly egoistic & individualistic. Any political criticism of him was regarded by him as a personal insult” (“Why We Split From the Revolutionary Workers Party,” 5 February 1984). According to Fernando and Andrade, Samarakkody had also advocated an entry into the NSSP. That split confirmed the moribund character of the RWP, the best elements having gone to the iSt; by the time Samarakkody died little else was left of the RWP.

Among some 2,000 people who turned out to Samarakkody’s funeral in January 1992 were prominent spokesmen of the LSSP, NSSP, CP and other thoroughly reformist organisations. This in itself spoke to the ambiguity of the legacy Samarakkody left behind, and the fact that he remained to the end within the orbit of the popular-frontist, parliamentarist milieu. Yet the fact that in 1985 a Tamil militant group proposed Samarakkody, a Sinhalese, for a cease-fire monitoring committee, was an abiding testimony to his reputation. Around the same time we posed internally the following evocative scenario for the island of Lanka and Tamil Eelam: that there be a Tamil prime minister, that Trincomalee be occupied by a couple of divisions of Vietnamese veterans of the taking of Saigon wearing pith helmets with red stars, and that Edmund Samarakkody be president.

In our 27 October 1973 letter to Samarakkody we observed:

“When the Third International was conclusively finished as a revolutionary force and Trotsky set about to build a Fourth, there were a number of outstanding Communist leaders who emerged uncorrupted from the Stalinized Comintern. Sneevliet, Rosmer, Chen Tu-hsiu, Andres Nin (Christian Rakovsky was a special case) come to mind. But even in concert with a great leader of the stature of L. D. Trotsky (and history has permitted no Trotskys among us today), these comrades were unable to find the road to, or unable to persist in, the highest level of communist struggle under the new and sharply altered conditions. They fell away.”

Samarakkody, too, fell away.

From The Pages Of Women And Revolution-A New Translation-Communist International Theses on Work Among Women

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League (ICL) website.

Spartacist English edition No. 62
Spring 2011

A New Translation-Communist International Theses on Work Among Women

(Women and Revolution pages)

Spartacist is proud to publish a new English translation from the Russian-language text of the “Theses on Methods and Forms of Work of the Communist Parties Among Women,” passed by the Second International Conference of Communist Women and adopted by the Third World Congress of the Third (Communist) International (CI, or Comintern) in 1921. The Theses are a key document of the early, revolutionary years of the CI under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks, inspired by the world-historic overthrow of the capitalist order in Russia in the October Revolution of 1917. Drawn from hard-fought lessons, the document is a systematic exposition of how communists carry out work among women, based on decades of experience in the international revolutionary movement. This new translation by the International Communist League, based on archival research into the political origins of the document, underlines our commitment to the fight for the emancipation of women as a crucial part of our struggle for international proletarian revolution.

In 1971 and 1972 Women and Revolution printed the Comintern’s official 1921 English translation of the Theses as a tool of intervention into the radical feminist milieu that emerged out of the New Left in the United States (W&R Nos. 2 and 3, September-October 1971 and May 1972; excerpts from the Theses appear in W&R No. 22, Spring 1981). As against the feminists, who promoted the notion of separate, male-exclusionist organizations for women, we argued that the line that must be drawn is not one of sex but of class. As revolutionary Trotskyists, we sought to win over subjectively revolutionary women to the communist worldview and to the necessity of destroying the capitalist system as a prerequisite to the emancipation of women. In 1972, W&R became the journal of the Women’s Commission of the Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee. After 25 years as a Marxist journal of women’s liberation, in 1997 Women and Revolution was incorporated into quadrilingual Spartacist and articles also appear occasionally under the W&R masthead in the ICL sectional presses.

We stand on the shoulders of our forebears of the Communist International during the period of its first four congresses, when the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat was at its height and the betrayals of Stalinism were yet to come. Since that time the working class has suffered many setbacks and defeats, not least the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union. Today bourgeois pundits speak of the “death of communism,” but the irreconcilable class struggle continues and with it the need to fight for a communist society in which all forms of exploitation and oppression are things of the past. Several years ago, seeking to study and learn from the crucial lessons of history, we decided to republish the Theses, understanding that the work of the Bolsheviks and the Communist International shows the way for the future generations of Marxist fighters.

In order to reconstruct an authoritative version of the document and its history for a new translation, we conducted extensive research in the Comintern and Bolshevik Party archives of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow; the German Communist Party (KPD) and Comintern files at the Berlin Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichterfelde, Germany; the Hoover Institution library and archives at Stanford University and the libraries of the University of California at Berkeley, as well as our own Prometheus Research Library. Insofar as the surviving documentary record allows, we uncovered how, and by whom, the Theses were written. While much remains unknown, we determined that the original language of the document was Russian. Significant differences exist between the German and Russian texts: For example, the 1921 German text, the version most widely disseminated by the Comintern, does not include two sections on the primary methods of work among non-party women, delegate meetings and non-party women’s conferences, which may be a reflection of the political debates among the leading women cadres. The German text also gives the party a limited role in overseeing the work. Thus we have based our translation on the official Comintern Russian text as reprinted in 1933.

The Struggle for the Communist International

The founding congress of the Third International took place in 1919. However, Lenin launched the fight for a new international in August 1914, when most parties of the Second International betrayed the proletariat by supporting their own capitalist masters in the bloody imperialist slaughter of World War I.

This betrayal was prepared by years of political degeneration. The Second International had become infused, as Leon Trotsky said of its leading party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), with “an adaptation to parliamentarism and to the unbroken growth of the organization, the press, and the treasury” that “ended by stifling the revolutionary will of the party” (The New Course, 1923). By 1914 evolving differences had resulted in two distinct wings of the social democracy, left and right, as well as a broad centrist current represented by Karl Kautsky. In the main, the social-democratic European party leaderships saw work among women as a subordinate matter. The trailblazing work among women before 1914, including publication of Die Gleichheit (Equality), was initiated and carried out by determined and tenacious women cadres, led by prominent SPDer Clara Zetkin, in the face of the hostility or indifference of the rightist party leadership.

Under the impact of the Russian Revolution, the left wing of the Second International flocked to the Bolshevik banner, bringing in its wake some opportunist carryovers. Forging new, Leninist vanguard parties as sections of a revolutionary international required a series of political fights to break aspiring revolutionaries wholly from social-democratic practice and program and to purge the centrist waverers. As part of this struggle, in 1920 the Second CI Congress adopted the “Conditions of Admission to the Communist International,” known as the “21 Conditions,” which provided an organizational and political form for separating the revolutionaries from the reformists and centrists and carrying forward the fight against “indirect agents of the bourgeoisie within the working-class movement,” as Lenin put it (“A Letter to the German Communists,” August 1921).

The Bolshevik Fight for the Women Toilers

In 1919 the Communist International affirmed the necessity for work among women at its founding congress with a brief “Resolution on the Need to Draw Women Workers into the Struggle for Socialism.” The same year, the Russian Communist Party established a special department of the Central Committee for work among women, the Zhenotdel, and appointed Bolshevik leader Inessa Armand as its first head. From Lenin and Trotsky to Yakov Sverdlov and Nadezhda Krupskaya, virtually every leading Bolshevik was concerned with this work. The Bolsheviks recognized two leading principles: Because of women’s special oppression, their relative political backwardness and, for those who did not work, social isolation in the home, special work among women was necessary to rally them behind the Communist banner. Second, this work must take place under the leadership of the party as the work of the whole party.

Drawing on their work in publishing the journal Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) beginning in 1914, the Bolsheviks advocated special methods of work by which non-party women would be mobilized, educated and drawn into political work through the press and by organizing conferences, discussion and reading groups and clubs, as appropriate, for women whose social and political isolation otherwise put them beyond the party’s reach. (See “How the Bolsheviks Organized Working Women—History of the Journal Rabotnitsa,” W&R No. 4, Fall 1973.) Two key methods were delegate meetings and non-party women’s conferences, both explained in detail in the Theses. The party advocated a division of labor within all leading party bodies, from the Central Committee to local trade-union fractions, to establish commissions whose special task was to oversee the work among the masses of toiling women.

The Bolsheviks began with the Marxist premise that the oppression of women, the oldest social inequality in human history, goes back to the beginning of private property and cannot be eradicated short of the abolition of class-divided society, requiring abundant resources on an international scale. The fundamental social institution oppressing women is the family. Its function of raising the next generation must be superseded: women’s household labor and childcare will be replaced by collective institutions in a socialist society. After taking power in 1917, insofar as they were able under the conditions of extreme economic and social backwardness, civil war and imperialist invasion, the Bolsheviks mobilized toiling women as the advance guard to begin constructing collectivized childcare centers, communal kitchens and laundries to replace the individual household economy. (For a history of work among women in early Soviet society, see “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” Spartacist [English edition] No. 59, Spring 2006.) As written in a summary report of a speech by Inessa Armand:

“The struggle for the liberation of women is an inseparable part of the general struggle for the dictatorship of the working class and must give to the final fight millions of reserves from the most backward, most forgotten and oppressed, most humiliated layers of the working class and the toiling poor from the women’s army of labor.”

— Otchet o Pervoi mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii kommunistok (Report on the First International Conference of Communist Women) (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1921) (our translation)

By early 1924, a bureaucratic caste under Stalin usurped political power from the working class in a political counterrevolution. The consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy over a number of years went hand in hand with the abandonment of the fight for international revolution, and of the cause of women’s emancipation. The Stalinists had so besmirched the great ideals of communism with bureaucratic distortions and lies that, in the end in 1991-92, the working class did not fight against the revolution’s final undoing and the restoration of capitalism under Boris Yeltsin.

The First International Conference of Communist Women

The Theses on Work Among Women as voted by the Comintern came out of a year-long debate in the CI in 1920-21 between the Soviet comrades on the one hand and leading West and Central European comrades on the other. The First International Conference of Communist Women, which met in Moscow from 30 July to 2 August 1920, was initiated and organized by Inessa Armand, whose tragic death from cholera shortly thereafter deprived the CI of one of its leading cadre. Motivating draft theses submitted by Soviet comrades, Armand addressed controversies that continued to be debated throughout the following year. Her report severely criticized the Second International for being a “brake on the revolutionary proletarian movement” and “an opponent of the liberation of all toiling women”:

“Besides its general incapacity for revolutionary struggle for socialism, the leading elements of the Second International themselves were to their core suffused with philistine prejudices on the woman question, and because of that, in addition to its general betrayal of the proletariat in its fight for power, the Second International is responsible for a number of shameful betrayals of toiling women in the area of the most elementary general democratic demands. For instance concerning the question of universal women’s suffrage—the representatives of the Second International either did nothing at all (France, Belgium), or sabotaged it (Austria) or distorted it (England), etc.”

—Ibid.

This critique encountered stubborn opposition from the West and Central European delegates, including the Austrian and German comrades, who objected to polemics in the theses and argued that the theses expressed insufficient appreciation of Clara Zetkin’s work.

A second area of debate centered on the Russian comrades’ insistence on establishing detailed, firm organizational guidelines for the work so that the Theses did not remain mere paper platitudes, as had been the case in the Second International. The third major area of difference was the applicability and adaptation of the delegate system and non-party women’s conferences to advanced capitalist countries, particularly in Europe, which remained a contentious issue for some time. Perhaps reflecting these differences, delegates from the First International Conference of Communist Women submitted two sets of draft theses to the Second CI Congress. Time pressures led the Congress to refer the debate to the CI Executive (ECCI).

After Clara Zetkin arrived in Moscow for the first time in September 1920, the draft theses were taken up at a Zhenotdel plenum. In light of Zetkin’s strong criticisms of the theses proposed by the Soviet comrades, centering on her contention that their draft did not properly address the conditions of work in the West and Central European countries, she was assigned to produce another draft with Bolshevik leaders Alexandra Kollontai and Sofia Smidovich. This resulted in the “Guidelines for the Communist Women’s Movement,” a significant step in the development of the Third Congress Theses, though marked by softness on the work of the Second International. This document was published in the CI theoretical journal, Communist International, in the Russian (No. 15, December 1920) and German (No. 15, 1921) editions. (An English version was printed as an appendix in Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920 [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991].)

The documentary record shows that the CI Theses on Work Among Women were finalized for submission to the ECCI and the Third Congress by an editorial commission working in Russian and consisting of leading comrades of the Zhenotdel and the International Women’s Secretariat. The resulting draft, the “Preliminary Theses,” was then further amended in Russian and voted at the Congress. Amendments to the Preliminary Theses, written in Russian and marked as “corrections to the Theses by cde. Kollontai,” are filed in the Comintern archive in Moscow. These amendments are indicated by endnotes numbers 1, 2 and 6 to the Theses.

The Third World Congress

The CI Third World Congress met in Moscow from 22 June to 12 July 1921, as the revolutionary wave that swept Europe after World War I, sparked by the Russian Revolution, was receding. The lack of steeled and tested vanguard parties had proven to be a decisive factor in the defeat of proletarian revolutions in Germany, Hungary and Italy. The international Social Democracy still claimed the allegiance of substantial proletarian forces and had shown itself to be an indispensable tool of bourgeois rule. As Lenin repeatedly emphasized in the early years of the Comintern, forging vanguard parties meant much more than wielding the rhetoric of revolution: the parties must fully assimilate the Bolshevik experience. Sterile ultraleftism was also a serious problem. This point is made most powerfully in Lenin’s seminal work, “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder (1920), where he wrote:

“Would it not be better if the salutations addressed to the Soviets and the Bolsheviks were more frequently accompanied by a profound analysis of the reasons why the Bolsheviks have been able to build up the discipline needed by the revolutionary proletariat?”

At the 1921 Third Congress, a school for revolutionary strategy, debates hammered out resolutions on tactics, party organization, and Communist work in the trade unions and among youth and women. A key document was “Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work” (published in Prometheus Research Series No. 1, August 1988). Lenin proclaimed that the Third Congress had begun “practical, constructive work, to determine concretely, taking account of the practical experience of the communist struggle already begun, exactly what the line of further activity should be in respect of tactics and of organisation” (“A Letter to the German Communists”). The purpose of the Theses on Work Among Women was to carry forward the “practical, constructive work” of the Communist parties in their quest to win the oppressed female masses to the side of the revolution.

A central debate with the ultraleftists at the Third Congress was over the “theory of the offensive.” Often identified with Béla Kun, the leader of the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1919, the “theory of the offensive” inspired the disastrous March Action in Germany in 1921. As Trotsky wrote: “only a traitor could deny the need of a revolutionary offensive; but only a simpleton would reduce all of revolutionary strategy to an offensive” (“The School of Revolutionary Strategy,” 1921, First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. II [New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1953]). Commenting later on the danger posed by the ultraleft minority, he wrote: “the change achieved at that time under the leadership of Lenin, in spite of the furious resistance of a considerable part of the congress—at the start, a majority—literally saved the International from the destruction and decomposition with which it was threatened if it went the way of automatic, uncritical ‘leftism’” (The New Course).

The Second International Conference of Communist Women

The Second International Conference of Communist Women met in Moscow from 9 to 14 June 1921, immediately before the Comintern Third World Congress. There the ultraleftist current took the form of denigrating the struggle for the political equality of women (women’s suffrage) and of work in the parliamentary arena as “reformist” in principle, reflecting the broader struggle in the International.

As Trotsky emphasized in his address to the final session of the women’s conference, a central task before the Third Congress was to recognize the ebb in the class struggle and to turn the International to the task of winning the masses. While the Theses do not explicitly acknowledge this key turn, the document lays out in detail a method to find the road to the masses of toiling women. At the same time, references to the “imminence” of the proletarian revolution reflect the outlook of the prior period.

On 8 July 1921 Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai addressed the delegates of the Third Congress to motivate the adoption of the Theses on Work Among Women. According to the official proceedings of the Third Congress, two resolutions and two sets of theses were adopted by the Congress, all referred by the Second International Conference of Communist Women. We have not been able to identify any second set of theses on the woman question. Of the two resolutions adopted, one addressed the forms and methods of work among women; the second sought to strengthen the international connections between the sections and with the International Women’s Secretariat, a body subordinate to the ECCI.

Several points in the final Theses are worthy of special comment. Of particular note is the attention the Theses give to the question of the liberation of the deeply oppressed women of the East, for the first time raised as a crucial task of the revolutionary workers movement. On another point, the Theses rejects “any collaboration or agreements whatsoever with bourgeois feminists.” Today, the International Communist League does not rule out, and in fact has participated in, joint actions with bourgeois feminists to defend abortion clinics, for example.

The “sorry role” played by the mass of women in the Hungarian Revolution of 1919 refers to the mass reactionary working-class demonstrations against the short-lived Soviet government headed by Béla Kun. The counterrevolution was able to mobilize toiling women in part because of the party’s failure to address their special needs.

About the New Translation

Our goal was to provide a text of the Theses that is as complete as possible and that represents early Comintern work among women as accurately as possible. In translating the document from the Russian, we discovered difficulties with the text itself. As Witold S. Sworakowski noted in The Communist International and its Front Organizations (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution, 1965):

“The user of Comintern publications must be aware of the fact that the same item when published in Russian, English, German, French, or any other language, although seemingly identical with its counterparts, is not necessarily so in its content.... In most cases it is practically impossible to establish which item is in the original language and which is a translation. Texts of the same item, e.g., of the same speech, report, or resolution, may differ in editions in different languages.”

The 1921 English translation that we reprinted in 1971-72 includes the entirety of the Russian version, but suffers from poor English and intermittent omissions of phrases and sentences. We found other, subsequent English translations to be seriously defective.

We have used as a basis for our translation the Russian edition published in 1933 in Kommunisticheskii Internatsional v dokumentakh; Resheniia, tezisy i vozzvaniia kongressov Kominterna i plenumov IKKI 1919-1932 (The Communist International in Documents; Decisions, Theses and Declarations of Comintern Congresses and ECCI Plenums, 1919-1932) (Moscow: Partizdat, 1933) edited by Béla Kun. We compared the 1933 text to the Russian Preliminary Theses, as well as to the Russian text of the Theses distributed by the Comintern Press Bureau to the Third Congress delegates for voting. In addition we considered the German text of the Theses published in 1921 by the Comintern and distributed in Germany by Carl Hoym (Hamburg), and V.I. Lenin i Kommunisticheskii Internatsional (V.I. Lenin and the Communist International) (Moscow: Politizdat, 1970), translated from the German, edited by Kirill Kirillovich Shirinia, a scholar of Comintern history. We found that the Press Bureau Theses introduced typographical errors and omissions in retyping from the Preliminary Theses that in a few cases rendered the Russian text ambiguous or even nonsensical. Unfortunately, these errors and small omissions were carried forward in the 1933 edition of the Theses. In these obvious cases we have restored the original text from the Preliminary Theses. In two cases we included short paragraphs that appeared in the 1933 Moscow edition that do not appear in either the Preliminary or Press Bureau Theses.

Our research deepened our own understanding of the importance of the Theses. In the past, working with the historical resources we had at the time, Women and Revolution incorrectly presented the history of the “proletarian women’s movement” as if there were a direct continuity from the work among women of the Second to the Third International. For example, in “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” we wrote, “Before World War I the Social Democrats in Germany pioneered in building a women’s ‘transitional organization’—a special body, linked to the party through its most conscious cadre.” In fact, the idea of a special party apparatus to conduct work among women was pioneered by the Bolsheviks in their endeavor to draw the masses of toiling women to the side of the vanguard party and can be undertaken only by a programmatically hard Leninist party.

The Bolshevik Revolution was a beacon of hope to the world’s oppressed, not least to those slaves of slaves, the oppressed women workers and peasants, who at last were to take their place in history through the transformation of class society, looking toward a new, socialist world. As the report of Inessa Armand’s speech at the First International Conference of Communist Women said:

“Soviet power cannot defend the dictatorship of the proletariat against the attacks of the imperialists without the recruitment of the broadest masses of women workers and peasants to participation in the civil war, without the education and involvement, to speak in comrade Lenin’s words, of the last woman cook in the task of governing the state.”

—“Report of First International Conference of Communist Women” (our translation)


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Theses on Methods and Forms of Work of the Communist Parties Among Women

Basic Principles

1. The Third Congress of the Communist International, together with the Second International Conference of Communist Women, reaffirms once again the decision of the First and Second Congresses on the necessity of strengthening the work of all the Communist Parties of the West and the East among the female proletariat, educating the broad masses of women workers in the spirit of communism and drawing them into the struggle for Soviet power or for constructing the Soviet toilers republic.

Throughout the entire world the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat has been squarely posed before the working class, and thus before women workers as well.[1]

The capitalist economic system has reached a dead end: there is no room for the further development of the productive forces within the framework of capitalism. The universal immiseration of working people, the inability of the bourgeoisie to revive production, burgeoning speculation, decaying production, unemployment, fluctuating prices out of step with wages—all lead to the inevitable intensification of the class struggle in all countries. In this struggle the question will be decided: by whom and under what system will production be led, directed and organized—by a handful of capitalists or by the working class on a communist basis.

The new, rising proletarian class, in accordance with the laws of economic development, must take the productive apparatus into its own hands and create new economic forms. Only this will create the necessary impetus for the maximum development of the productive forces, hitherto held back by the anarchy of capitalist production.

As long as power is in the hands of the bourgeois class, the proletariat will be powerless to revive production. As long as power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie, no reforms, no measures carried out by democratic or socialist governments of the bourgeois countries can save the situation and alleviate the heavy, unbearable torments suffered by female and male workers—torments born in the collapse of the capitalist economic system. Only the seizure of power by the proletariat will make it possible for the class of producers to take hold of the means of production and thus enable them to direct economic development in the interests of the working people.

To hasten the inevitable hour of the decisive clash of the proletariat with the moribund bourgeois world, the working class must uphold the firm and resolute tactics outlined by the Third International. The dictatorship of the proletariat—the basic immediate goal—determines the methods of work and the battle line for the proletariat of both sexes.

The struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat is imminent for the proletariat of all capitalist states and the construction of communism is the immediate task of those countries where the dictatorship is in the hands of the workers. Therefore, the Third Congress of the Communist International affirms that both the conquest of power by the proletariat and the achievement of communism in a country which has already thrown off the yoke of the bourgeoisie cannot be realized without the active participation of the mass of the female proletariat and semi-proletariat.

On the other hand, the Congress once again directs the attention of all women to the fact that without the support of the Communist Parties in all the tasks and undertakings promoting the liberation and emancipation of women, a woman’s full personal rights and her actual emancipation are impossible to achieve in real life.

2. At the same rate as the worldwide economic devastation becomes ever more acute and unbearable for all urban and rural poor, the interests of the working class, especially in the present period, require bringing women into the organized ranks of the proletariat that is fighting for communism.

As a result, the question of social revolution is inescapably posed before the working class of the bourgeois-capitalist countries, just as the task of rebuilding the economy on new communist foundations arises before the working people of Soviet Russia. The more actively, consciously and resolutely women take part in both these tasks, the more easily they will be accomplished.

Wherever the question of the conquest of power is squarely posed, the Communist Parties must take into account the great danger posed to the revolution by the inert masses of women workers, housewives, office workers and peasant women who are not freed from the influence of the bourgeois worldview, the church and superstitions, and who are not in one way or another connected to the great liberating movement for communism. Unless the masses of women in the West and the East are recruited to the movement, they inevitably become a bulwark for the bourgeoisie, a target for counterrevolutionary propaganda. The experience of the Hungarian Revolution, where the lack of consciousness of the mass of women played such a sorry role, should serve in this sense as a warning to the proletarians of all other countries setting out on the path of social revolution.

Conversely, the policies pursued by the Soviet Republic showed in concrete experience the importance of the participation of women workers and peasants—in the Civil War, in the defense of the republic and in all spheres of Soviet construction. The facts prove the importance of the role already played by women workers and peasants in the Soviet Republic in organizing defense, strengthening the rear, in the struggle against desertion, and in the battle against every sort of counterrevolution, sabotage, etc. The experience of the toilers republic must be learned and put to use in other countries.

From this derives the task of each Communist Party to spread its influence to the broadest layers of the female population of its country by means of organizing special, internal party apparatuses and establishing special methods of approaching women to free them from the influence of the bourgeois worldview or the influence of the compromiser parties, and to develop among them resolute fighters for communism and hence fighters for the all-sided education of womankind.

3. By placing before the Communist Parties of the West and the East the immediate task of strengthening the work of the party among the female proletariat, the Third Congress of the Communist International at the same time points out to the women workers of the whole world that their liberation from age-old injustice, enslavement and inequality can be realized only through the victory of communism. What communism gives to women can by no means be provided by the bourgeois women’s movement. As long as the rule of capital and private property exists in the capitalist countries, the liberation of woman from dependency on her husband can go no further than the right to dispose of her own property, her own earnings, and the right to decide equally with her husband the fate of their children.

The most decisive efforts of the feminists—the extension of women’s suffrage under the rule of bourgeois parliamentarism—do not solve the problem of the actual equality of women, especially of the non-propertied classes. This can be seen in the experience of women workers in all capitalist countries where in recent years the bourgeoisie has granted the formal equality of the sexes. Suffrage does not eliminate the primary cause of women’s enslavement in the family and society. Given the economic dependence of the proletarian woman on her capitalist master and her breadwinner husband, and in the absence of broad protection in making provision for mother and child and socialized education and care of children, replacing indissoluble marriage with civil marriage in capitalist states does not make the woman equal in marital relations and does not provide a key to resolving the problem of the relation between the sexes.

Not formal, superficial, but actual equality of women can be realized only under communism when women, together with all members of the laboring class, become the co-owners of the means of production and distribution, participate in managing them and bear their work responsibilities on the same basis as all members of toiling society. In other words, it is possible only by overthrowing the system of the exploitation of man’s labor by man under capitalist production and by organizing the communist form of economy.

Only communism will create the conditions under which the natural function of women—motherhood—will not come into conflict with their social responsibilities and interfere with their creative work for the benefit of the collective. On the contrary, communism will enable the development of a well-rounded, healthy and harmonious individual, closely and inseparably bonded with the tasks and life of the toilers collective. Communism must be the goal of all women who fight for the liberation of women and the recognition of all their rights.

However, communism is also the ultimate goal of the entire proletariat. Therefore, the struggle of working women for this common goal must, in the interest of both sides, be waged jointly and inseparably.

4. The Third Congress of the Communist International affirms the fundamental proposition of revolutionary Marxism that there is no “special woman question,” no special women’s movement. Any kind of unity of working women with bourgeois feminism, just like the support by women workers of the halfway or openly treacherous tactics of the social compromisers—the opportunists—leads to the weakening of the proletariat’s strength. This postpones the social revolution and the advent of communism—and thus the great hour of the all-around emancipation of women.

Communism is achieved not through the united efforts of women of different classes, but through the united struggle of all the exploited.

In their own interests the masses of proletarian women are duty-bound to support the revolutionary tactics of the Communist Party and to participate most actively and directly in mass actions and in all aspects and forms of the civil war that arise on a national and international scale.

5. The struggle of women against their double oppression (by capitalism and by domestic family subservience) in the highest stage of its development must take on an international character, transforming itself into the fight of the proletariat of both sexes for the dictatorship and for the Soviet system under the banner of the Third International.

6. Warning women workers against any collaboration or agreements whatsoever with bourgeois feminists, the Third Congress of the Communist International also points out to women workers of all countries that any illusions in the idea that proletarian women can, without damage to the cause of women’s liberation, support the Second International or opportunistically inclined elements close to it will inflict colossal harm to the liberation struggle of the proletariat. Women must firmly remember: all the roots of women’s enslavement grow out of the bourgeois system. In order to put an end to the enslavement of women, it is necessary to pass over to the new communist mode of society.

Support by women workers to the groups and parties of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals puts a brake on the social revolution, delaying the coming of the new order. The more decisively and irreversibly the broad masses of women turn away from the Second and the Two-and-a-Half Internationals, the more certain will be the victory of the social revolution. It is the duty of women Communists to condemn all who fear the revolutionary tactics of the Communist International, and to stand firmly for the expulsion of the latter from the exclusive ranks of the Communist International.

Women must remember that the Second International did not create and did not attempt to create a body whose task would have been to bring about a struggle for the all-sided emancipation of women. The beginning of the international association of women socialists was outside the framework of the Second International on the initiative of women workers themselves. Women socialists who carried out special work among women had neither a place, nor representation, nor a decisive vote in the Second International.

Already at its First Congress in 1919 the Third International clearly formulated its attitude on the question of recruiting women to the struggle for the dictatorship. For this purpose a conference of Communist women was convened by the First Congress. In 1920 the International Secretariat for Work Among Women was founded, with permanent representation on the Executive Committee of the Communist International. It is the duty of conscious women workers of all countries to irrevocably break with the Second and the Two-and-a-Half Internationals and firmly support the revolutionary line of the Communist International.

7. Support to the Communist International by women workers, peasants and office workers must be demonstrated by their joining the ranks of the Communist Party of their respective country. In those countries and parties in which the struggle between the Second and the Third International has not yet been consummated, it is the duty of women workers to support with all their strength that party or group that stands for the Communist International and to wage a ruthless struggle against all vacillating or openly traitorous elements, irrespective of their authority. Conscious proletarian women who are striving for their liberation cannot remain in parties that stand outside the Communist International.

Whoever opposes the Third International is an enemy of the emancipation of women.

The place of conscious women workers of the West and East is under the banner of the Communist International—in the ranks of the Communist Parties of their countries. Any vacillation on the part of women workers, any fear of breaking with traditional compromiser parties, any fear of breaking with recognized authority figures—all these have a ruinous impact on the successes of the great struggle of the proletariat that is taking on the character of an open and merciless civil war on an international scale.[2]

Methods and Forms of Work Among Women

Proceeding from the aforementioned propositions, the Third Congress of the Communist International establishes that the Communist Parties of all countries must conduct their work among proletarian women on the following bases:

1) The inclusion of women as party members with equal rights and responsibilities in all fighting class organizations—the Party, trade unions, cooperatives, factory shop steward committees, etc.

2) The recognition of the importance of involving women in all areas of active struggle by the proletariat (including the military self-defense of the proletariat), the construction of the new foundations of society and the organization of production and everyday life on a communist basis.

3) The recognition of the function of motherhood as a social function and the implementation or safeguarding of measures that will defend and protect womankind as the bearer of the human race.

While most decisively opposing any segregated, separate women’s associations within the Party, the trade unions or special women’s organizations, the Third Congress of the Communist International recognizes the necessity of adopting special methods of work among women and affirms the effectiveness of forming special apparatuses within all Communist Parties for carrying out this work. In light of the above, the Congress draws attention to the following:

a) The everyday enslavement of women, not only in bourgeois-capitalist countries, but also in countries that are going through the transition from capitalism to communism under the Soviet system;

b) The great passivity and political backwardness of the mass of women, explained by their age-old exclusion from social life and by their age-old enslavement in the family;

c) The special functions that nature itself has placed upon women—childbearing—and the resulting special needs of women for greater protection of their strength and health in the interest of the whole collective.

Therefore, the Third Congress of the Communist International recognizes the importance of creating special bodies for carrying out work among women. Such Party apparatuses must be Departments or Commissions organized in all Party Committees, from the CC [Central Committee] of the Party to the City District or County Party Committees. This decision is binding on all Parties belonging to the Communist International.

The Third Congress of the Communist International decrees that the tasks the Communist Parties carry out through the Departments will include:

1) developing the masses of women in the spirit of communism, drawing them into the ranks of the Party;

2) waging a struggle against anti-woman prejudices among the mass of the male proletariat, strengthening the consciousness among male and female proletarians of their common interests;

3) steeling the will of women workers by involving them in all forms and aspects of civil war, awakening their activism through participation in the struggle against capitalist exploitation in bourgeois countries using mass mobilizations against high prices, housing shortages, unemployment and other revolutionary issues of civil war; by the participation of women workers in communist construction of society and of everyday life in the Soviet Republics;

4) placing tasks on the Party’s agenda and introducing into legislation questions that serve to directly liberate women, asserting their equal rights and defending their interests as the bearer of the human race;

5) waging a systematic struggle against the power of tradition, bourgeois habits and religion, thus clearing the way for healthier and more harmonious relations between the sexes, and providing for the physical and moral vitality of toiling humanity.

All work of the Departments and Commissions must be carried out under the direct leadership and responsibility of Party Committees. At the head of a Commission or Department must stand a member of the Committee. To the extent possible, comrade-Communists must also enter into the Commission or Department.

All the measures and tasks before Commissions or Departments of women workers must be carried out by them not independently, but rather, in Soviet countries, through respective economic or political bodies (Departments of the Soviet, Commissions, trade unions), and in capitalist countries, with the support of corresponding bodies of the proletariat: parties, unions, soviets, etc.

Wherever Communist Parties exist underground or semi-legally they are required to create an underground apparatus for work among women. This apparatus must be subordinated and adapted to the Party-wide underground apparatus. As with legal, so with underground organizations, all Local, Regional and Central Committees must include a female comrade who is responsible for directing underground propaganda work among women. The main bases for the Communist Parties’ work among women must in the current period be the trade and industrial unions and cooperatives, both in the countries where the struggle for the overthrow of the yoke of capital is still being waged and in the toilers Soviet Republics.

Work among women must be imbued with a spirit of the common purpose of the party movement, of a united organization, of independent initiative and striving for the rapid and full emancipation of women by the Party, independent of the Commissions or Sections. Therefore, the goal should be not parallelism in work, but assisting the work of the Party through the self-development and initiatives of working women.[3]

The Work of the Party Among Women in Soviet Countries

The task of the Departments in a toilers Soviet Republic is to educate the mass of women in the spirit of communism, recruiting them into the ranks of the Communist Party, to awaken and develop activism and initiative among women, drawing them into the building of communism and developing among them stalwart women defenders of the Communist International.

The Departments must attract women to all areas of Soviet construction, from matters of defense to highly complex economic plans of the republic.

In the Soviet Republic the Departments must see to the fulfillment of the resolutions of the Eighth Congress of Soviets on drawing women workers and peasants into the building and organizing of the economy and on their participation in all the bodies that are leading, directing, controlling and organizing production. The Women’s Departments, via their representatives and Party bodies, must participate in drafting new statutes and must bring their influence to bear on changing those laws that require alteration for the sake of women’s actual emancipation. The Departments must take special initiative in developing laws protecting the labor of women and minors.

The Departments must involve as many women workers and peasants as possible in the election campaign for the Soviets and must also make it their concern that women workers or peasants are elected as members of the Soviets and Executive Committees.

The Departments must promote the success of all political or economic campaigns carried out by the Party.

It is the task of the Departments to promote the advance of women’s skilled labor by increasing the technical education of women and by taking action so that women peasants and workers have access to the necessary educational facilities.

The Departments must see to both the entrance of women into the Commissions for the Protection of Labor in enterprises and the strengthening of the activity of the Commissions for the Protection of Mother and Infant.

The Departments must promote the development of the entire network of social institutions such as: communal dining halls, laundries, repair shops, social service institutions, communal housing, etc., which, by reshaping everyday life on a new communist basis, will ease the burden on women during the transitional period, assisting in their emancipation in everyday life and transforming the household and family slave into a free participant, a great master of society and a creator of new modes of living.

The Departments must promote the education of women trade-union members in the spirit of communism with the aid of organizations for work among women set up by the Communist fractions in the trade unions.

The Departments must see to it that women workers duly attend the plant-wide and factory-wide assemblies of delegates.

The Departments are obliged to carry out systematic allocation of women delegate-trainees for Soviet, economic and trade-union work.

In their work, the Zhenotdels [Women’s Departments] of the Party must above all else sink firm roots among women workers, further developing their already existing work among housewives, office workers and poor peasants.[4]

For the purpose of establishing a firm link of the Party with the masses, of extending the influence of the Party over the non-Party masses and of implementing the method of educating the women masses in the spirit of communism by way of initiative and participation in practical work, the Departments convene and organize delegate meetings of women workers.

Delegate meetings are the best means of educating women workers and peasants and of extending the influence of the Party over the non-Party and backward masses of women workers and peasants.

Delegate meetings are formed from factory and plant representatives of a given City District or City, a given Rural District [Volost] (in the case of delegate meetings of women peasants) or by neighborhood (in the case of delegate elections among housewives). In Soviet Russia the women delegates are drawn into all manner of political and economic campaigns, are sent into various Commissions in enterprises, are brought into positions of control in Soviet institutions and, finally, into regular work in the Departments of Soviets as trainees for two months (law of 1921).[5]

Delegates should be elected in shop-wide meetings, in rallies of housewives or office workers, according to a norm established by the Party. The Departments must carry out propagandistic-agitational work among the women delegates, for which purpose the Departments convene meetings at least twice a month. The women delegates are obliged to report to their shops or to neighborhood meetings about their activities. The women delegates are elected for three months.

The second form of agitation among the female masses is to call non-Party conferences of women workers and peasants. The women representatives at these conferences are elected at meetings of women workers by enterprise and women peasants by village.

The Departments of women workers are assigned to convene and lead these conferences.

In order to consolidate the experience that women workers gain in the practical work of the Party or in its mobilizations, the Departments or Commissions carry out systematic oral and printed propaganda. The Departments hold rallies, discussions, meetings of women workers by enterprise, of housewives by neighborhood, and lead delegate meetings and carry out door-to-door agitation.

Programs for work among women must be established in Soviet schools, both in the center and regions, for the training of activist women cadre and for the deepening of their communist consciousness.

In Capitalist Countries

The immediate tasks of the Commission for work among women are dictated by the objective situation. On the one hand, there are the collapse of the world economy; the monstrous growth of unemployment, especially reflected in the slackening demand for women’s labor which feeds the growth of prostitution; rising prices; the acute housing shortage; and the threat of new imperialist wars. On the other hand, there are unceasing economic strikes by workers in all countries and repeated attempts at civil war on a world scale—all this is a prologue to world social revolution.

The Commissions of women workers are obliged to put forward the battle tasks of the proletariat; they must carry out the struggle for the unabridged slogans of the Communist Party and must attract women into participating in the revolutionary mobilizations of Communists against the bourgeoisie and the social compromisers.

In carrying on a struggle against all forms of segregating or weakening women workers, the Commissions must see to it that women are not only included as members with equal rights and responsibilities in the Party, the trade unions and other class organizations, but also that women workers attain positions on the leading bodies of Parties, unions and cooperatives on an equal basis with male workers.

The Commissions must act so that the widest layers of women proletarians and peasants exercise their rights to support the Communist Party in elections to parliament and all public institutions. At the same time, the Commissions must explain the limited character of these rights as a means of weakening capitalist exploitation and emancipating women, counterposing the Soviet system to parliamentarism.

The Commissions must also ensure that women workers, office workers and peasants take a most active part in the election of revolutionary, economic and political Soviets of workers deputies, drawing in housewives so as to awaken their political activity and propagating the idea of Soviets among peasant women. A special task of the Commissions must be the realization of the principle of equal pay for equal work. It is the task of the Commissions to initiate a campaign, drawing in men and women workers, for free and universally accessible vocational education, enabling women workers to attain high-level skills.

The Commissions must see to it that Communist women participate in municipal and legislative bodies wherever women have access on the basis of their electoral rights, and conduct within them the revolutionary tactics of their party. But, in participating in the legislative, municipal and other bodies of bourgeois states, women Communists must resolutely defend the Party’s basic principles and tactics, not concerning themselves as much with the practical realization of reform within the framework of the bourgeois order as with using each living, burning question or demand of women workers as a revolutionary slogan, so as to attract them to active struggle for the realization of those demands through the dictatorship of the proletariat.[6]

The Commissions must be in close contact with the parliamentary and municipal fractions and jointly discuss all questions concerning women.

The Commissions must explain to women the backwardness and inefficiency of the individual household system and the defects of the bourgeois system of child raising, by focusing the attention of women workers on questions put forward or supported by the Party concerning the practical improvement of the everyday life of the working class.

The Commissions must promote the recruitment of women workers, members of trade unions, to the Communist Parties, a task for which the trade-union fractions assign women organizers who work among women under the leadership of the Party or local Departments of the Party.

Women’s Agitation Commissions must likewise direct their propaganda so that women workers in cooperatives strive to spread the ideas of communism and take on a leading role in the cooperatives, since these organizations, as distribution bodies, have an enormous role to play during and after the revolution.[7]

All the work of the Commissions must have as a goal the development of the revolutionary activism of the masses, thus hastening the social revolution.

In the Economically Backward Countries (the East)

In countries with weakly developed industry, the Communist Parties, together with the Departments of women workers, must win the recognition of the equal rights and responsibilities of women in the Party, the unions and other organizations of the toiling class.

The Departments or Commissions, together with the Party, must wage a struggle against all prejudices, morals and religious customs oppressive to women, conducting this agitation likewise among men.

The Communist Parties and their Departments or Commissions must implement the principle of women’s equality in matters of rearing children, family relations and public life.

The Departments must seek support for their work first of all among the broad layers of women workers exploited by capital in the home industries (handicrafts) and women workers on rice, cotton and other plantations. In Soviet countries, the Departments must promote the establishment of artisan workshops. In countries of the bourgeois order, work must be centered on the organization of women plantation workers, enrolling them in common unions with male workers.

Raising the general cultural level of the populace is the best way to fight the stagnation of the country and the religious prejudices among the peoples of the East who live in countries of the Soviet order. The Departments must facilitate the development of schools for adults, which must be freely accessible to women. In bourgeois countries the Commissions must directly wage a struggle against the bourgeois influence of the schools.

Wherever possible, the Departments or Commissions must carry out agitation in the home. The Departments must organize clubs of women workers, drawing in the most backward women elements. The clubs must be centers of cultural enlightenment—institutions that demonstrate through experience what women can achieve through their own initiative for their emancipation (the organization of nurseries, kindergartens, literacy schools under the auspices of the clubs, etc.).

Among nomadic peoples the Departments will organize mobile clubs.

In countries of the Soviet order, the Departments must assist the respective Soviet bodies in the work of transition from precapitalist forms of economy to socialized production, convincing women workers through their own experience that individual housekeeping and the old form of the family hinder their emancipation, whereas socialized labor liberates them.

Among the peoples of the East living in Soviet Russia, the Departments must see to it that Soviet legislation, which recognizes equal rights of women with men and which protects the interests of women, is being implemented in reality. Toward this end, the Departments must promote the recruitment of women as judges and jurors in the people’s courts.

The Departments must also involve women in elections to the Soviets and make it their concern that women workers and peasants are elected as members of the Soviets and their Executive Committees. Work among the proletarian women of the East must be carried out on a class basis. It is the task of the Departments to expose the powerlessness of feminists to resolve the question of women’s emancipation. In the Soviet countries of the East, women in the intelligentsia (e.g., teachers) who sympathize with Communism should be used to advance enlightenment. While avoiding tactless and crude attacks on religious beliefs or national traditions, the Departments or Commissions working among women of the East must definitely struggle against nationalism and the hold of religion over women’s minds.

All organizing of women workers in the East, just as in the West, must be built not along lines of defending national interests but on the plane of uniting the international proletariat of both sexes around unified class tasks.

Note: In view of the importance and urgency of strengthening the work among the women of the East and the newness of the task posed, the Theses are supplemented with special instructions, applying the basic methods of the work of the Communist Parties among women in accordance with the particulars of everyday life of the peoples of the East.[8]

Methods of Agitation and Propaganda

In order to fulfill the main tasks of the Departments—the communist education of the female masses of the proletariat and the strengthening of these fighter-cadres for communism—it is necessary for all Communist Parties of the West and East to master the basic principle of work among women, namely: “agitation and propaganda by deed.”

Agitation by deed means above all the ability to awaken women workers to independent activity, to shatter their doubts about their own power and, by involving them in practical work in the spheres of construction or struggle, to teach them by practical experience to recognize that every conquest of the Communist Party, every action directed against exploitation by capital constitutes a step toward improving the condition of women. From practice and action to the recognition of the ideals of communism and its theoretical principles and, conversely, from theory to practice and action—such is the method by which Communist Parties and their Departments of women workers must approach the masses of women workers.

In order that the Departments be not merely bodies of propaganda of the word, but bodies of action, they must rely upon Communist cells in the enterprises and workshops, seeing to it that every Communist cell designates one organizer for work among women of the given enterprise.

The Departments must be connected to the trade unions through their representatives or organizers who are designated by the [Party] trade-union fractions and who carry out their work under the leadership of the Departments.

In the Soviet countries propaganda of the ideas of communism by deed means attracting women workers, peasants, housewives and office workers into all fields of Soviet construction, beginning with the army and militia and ending with all spheres of women’s emancipation: the organization of socialized dining, networks of institutions for socialized child rearing, the protection of motherhood, etc. Particularly important at the present moment is attracting women workers to all aspects of the work of rebuilding the national economy.

Propaganda by deed in capitalist countries signifies above all recruiting women workers to participate in strikes, demonstrations and all aspects of struggle that steel and strengthen revolutionary will and consciousness; drawing women workers into all aspects of Party work, using women for underground work (especially in the field of communication services), the Party organization of subbotniks or voskresniks [voluntary Saturday or Sunday work sessions], at which women workers sympathetic to Communism, workers’ wives and women office workers serve the Party with voluntary labor, organizing the mending and sewing of children’s clothes, etc.

The aims of propaganda by deed are also served by the principle of attracting women to all political, economic or cultural enlightenment campaigns conducted by the Communist Parties.

The Departments of women workers of the Communist Parties must spread their activities and influence to the broadest circles of proletarian women enslaved and oppressed in the capitalist countries. In the Soviet countries they carry out their work among the masses of proletarian and semi-proletarian women who are fettered by everyday conditions and prejudices.

The Commissions must carry out their work among women workers, housewives, peasant women and women engaged in intellectual labor.

For the purpose of propaganda and agitation, the Commissions organize mass demonstrations, rallies by particular enterprise, rallies of women workers and office workers, either by workplace or by city district, general women’s demonstrations, rallies of housewives, etc.

The Commissions see to it that the fractions of the Communist Parties in the trade unions, cooperatives and factory and plant councils designate an organizer for work among women. In other words, they would have representatives in all bodies dedicated to promoting the development of the revolutionary activity of the proletariat in capitalist countries for the purpose of seizing power. In the Soviet countries they assist in the election of women workers and peasants to all Soviet bodies for leadership, management and oversight, serving as a bulwark of the proletarian dictatorship and enabling the realization of communism.

The Commissions must send responsible women-worker Communists to work as shopfloor or office workers in enterprises employing large numbers of women; the Commissions must send such women workers to major proletarian districts and centers, as is successfully practiced in Soviet Russia.

The Commissions for work among women must make the utmost use of the successful experience of the Zhenotdel of the RCP [Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)] for the purpose of organizing delegate meetings and non-Party conferences of women workers and peasants. They must organize meetings of women workers and office workers from various fields, peasant women and housewives, in which specific demands and needs are raised for discussion and Commissions are elected. These Commissions must stay in close contact with their women electors and with the Commissions for work among women. The Commissions must send their agitators to participate in discussions at meetings of parties that are hostile to Communism. Propaganda and agitation through demonstrations and similar rallies must be complemented by systematically organized door-to-door agitation. Every woman Communist commissioned for this work must have no more than ten apartments in her assigned area and must pay visits to them for the purpose of agitation among housewives not less than once a week, visiting more often when the Communist Party conducts a campaign or announces a mobilization.

In order to carry out their agitational, organizational and educational work by way of the printed word, the Commissions are delegated to:

1) facilitate the publication of a central organ for work among women in every country;

2) ensure the publication in the Party press of “Women Workers Pages” or special supplements, as well as the inclusion of articles on questions of work among women in the general Party and trade-union press; the Commissions must concern themselves with the appointment of editors of the aforementioned publications and train other women contributors from among women laborers and women Party activists.

The Commissions must see to the publication of popular agitational literature, and along with it, educational literature in the form of leaflets and pamphlets, and provide for distribution.

The Commissions must promote the optimal use of all political educational facilities of the Party by women Communists.

The Commissions must concern themselves with deepening the class consciousness and strengthening the will of the young Communist women by drawing them into Party-wide education courses and discussion evenings and, only where it proves necessary and appropriate, organizing special evenings for reading or discussion or a series of lectures especially for women workers.

For the purpose of strengthening the spirit of camaraderie between women and men workers, it is not desirable to establish separate courses and schools for women Communists. However, all Party-wide schools must conduct a course on methods of work among women. The Departments must have the right to delegate a given number of their women representatives to Party-wide courses.

The Structure of the Departments

Departments and Commissions for work among women are established under every local Party Committee, under Region [Okrug] or Province [Oblast] Party Committees and under the Party CC.[9] The number of members chosen for these Commissions is set in accordance with the needs of each country. Likewise, the number of paid members of these Commissions is determined by the Party in keeping with its means.

The head of a Women’s Agitational Department or the Chairman of a Commission must at the same time also be a member of the local Party Committee. Where this is not the case, the head of the Department attends all sessions of the Committee with the right to a decisive vote on all questions of the Zhenotdel and a consultative vote on all other questions.

Along with the above-enumerated general tasks, the following additional functions are included in the duties of the Regional and Provincial [Gubernia] Departments or Commissions:

• supporting communications between the Departments of the given area and with the Party Organization;

• compiling data on the activity of the Departments or Commissions of their given Region or Province;

• enabling the exchange of materials between local Departments;

• providing their Region or Province with literature;

• allocating agitational forces throughout their Regions or Provinces;

• mobilizing Party forces for work among women;

• convening Regional or Provincial conferences of women Communist representatives of the Departments at least twice a year, with a delegation of one or two from each Department; and

• conducting non-Party conferences of women workers, peasants and housewives of the given Region or Province.

Members of the Department or Commission collectives are confirmed by the County or Province [Party] Committees upon the recommendation of the head of the Department. This head is elected, just as are other members of the County and Provincial Party Committees, at County or Provincial Party Conferences.

Members of the Local, Regional and Provincial Departments or Commissions are elected at a City, County, Regional or Provincial Conference, or are appointed by their corresponding Departments, in connection with the Party Committees.

If the head of the Zhenotdel is not a member of the Regional or Provincial Party Committee, then the Zhenotdel head has the right to attend all sessions of the Party Committee with a decisive vote on questions of the Department and a consultative vote on all other questions.

Apart from all the functions listed above for the Regional and Provincial Departments, the P.O. [Party Organization] fulfills the following functions as well:

• instructing the Women’s Agitational Department in questions of Party work;

• supervising the work of the Departments;

• in conjunction with respective Party bodies, allocating forces for carrying out work among women;

• monitoring the conditions and development of women’s labor, keeping in mind changes in the legal and economic position of women;

• participating, via representatives or mandated deputies, in special Commissions that deal with questions of betterment or change in the everyday life of the working class, the protection of labor, providing for the needs of childhood and so forth;

• publishing “Central Women’s Pages”;

• editing a periodical journal for women workers;

• convening an assembly of women representatives from all Regional or Provincial Departments not less than once per year;

• organizing countrywide agitational tours by instructors of work among women;

• supervising the enlistment of women workers and the involvement of all Departments, in all manner of Party political and economic campaigns and mobilizations;

• delegating a representative to the International Women’s Secretariat; and

• organizing annual International Women Workers Days.

If the head of the Zhenotdel of the CC is not a member of the CC, the head has the right to attend all sessions of the CC with a decisive vote on all questions concerning the Departments, and a consultative vote on all other questions. The head of the Zhenotdel, or the chairman of the Commission is appointed by the CC of the Party or is elected at a general Party Congress. The decisions and decrees of all Departments or Commissions are subject to final approval by their respective Party Committees. The number of members in the Central Department and the number of these who have a decisive vote is established by the Party CC.

On Work on the International Level

The leadership of the work of the Communist Parties of all countries, uniting the forces of women workers around tasks advanced by the Communist International and recruiting women of all countries and peoples to the revolutionary struggle for Soviet power and the dictatorship of the working class on a world scale, is the responsibility of the International Women’s Secretariat of the Communist International. 


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Notes

1. This and the following four paragraphs were submitted as amendments to the Preliminary Theses. Back

2. This paragraph was the second amendment to the Preliminary Theses. Back

3. This is one of three paragraphs not in the Preliminary or Press Bureau versions. We were unable to determine when this amendment was added. Back

4. This and the following eight paragraphs, i.e., to the end of the section “The Work of the Party Among Women in Soviet Countries,” were omitted from the official CI text in German published in 1921 by Carl Hoym. In the Preliminary Theses these paragraphs appear in the section “Methods of Agitation and Propaganda”; they were moved here in the final version. Back

5. This refers to the Decree of the Soviet of People’s Commissars “On the Recruitment of Women Workers and Peasants to Serve in Soviet Institutions,” 11 April 1921, that established the legal framework for the delegate system. Back

6. This paragraph was the final amendment to the Preliminary Theses. Back

7. This and the next paragraph are the other two paragraphs not in the Preliminary or Press Bureau versions. We were unable to determine when this amendment was added. Back

8. In the 1921 English version published by the Comintern, this paragraph appears at the beginning of this section. Back

9. The administrative areas of the Soviet Republics and the terminology used for these were changing in this period. The term Okrug here refers to a Region, an area smaller than a Province (in this document referred to as both Oblast and Gubernia) and larger than a County (Uyezd) or City. Back