Sri Lanka Crackdown

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Dictatorship is once again the solution of the bourgeoisie to the crisis it faces in south Asia.

Junous Jayewardene has now established himself as both head of state and head of government in Sri Lanka.

Jayewardene came to parliamentary power last year as leader of the United National Party.

Not acceptable His amendments to the constitution now give him at least six years in office as President, and his government will no longer be accountable to the Assembly which he can dissolve at will.

The UNP won a landslide victory in July 1977 on the basis of its lavish promises to Apartheid state spies on Namibian village resolve the island's massive social and economic problems.

Murdered

The election was followed by protests from the Tamils (an ethnic minority in both Sri Lanka and southern India) against racial discrimination.

Their demands provoked a vicious reply: hundreds of Tamils were murdered in government-sponsored massacres.

But while he resists the Tamil movement for self-determination, Jayewardene himself is now proposing to create an independent statelet on the island-what he calls 'a capitalists' paradise' modelled on Hong Kong, that would be a magnet for the Soweto rebellion to the point where the workers face a new sharper level of state reaction without the only weapon which can defend them-independent organisation and programme.

Standing at that political crossroads the working class, in the struggle to preserve its independent interests, is increasingly vulnerable to state repression and the schemes of the reformists.

No shortage There is no shortage of opportunists standing in the way of the working class.

One of the most important is Chief Buthelezi, leader of the legal Imkatha movement who swings between left and right in his cynical attempt to ride to power on the backs of South African workers.

His recently announced alliance with fellow collaborators in the Coloured Labour Party and the Indian Reform Party, brought into life with a wave of radical rhetoric, is not an attempt to forge genuine working class unity but a further attempt to shackle the workers firmly to a petty-bourgeois leadership.

The Soweto movement saw broad sections of the working class breaking from the sectarianism of the traditional nationalist movements and forging a fighting unity.

Substitute But this was achieved without the political leadership ner essary to defend and develop the struggle through building on that unity.

In true opportunist fashion Buthelezi now emerges from the gutter of his capit ulation and betryaals during t le Soweto events and foreign investment.

This scheme goes alongside a wide-ranging attack on the Sri Lankan workers and peasants.

An 85% currency devaluation has resulted in a huge rise in prices, and welfare subsidies are being withdrawn.

Already about half the population has been denied the free rice ration in a period where unemployment means near starvation, and the rate of unemployment has reached 20%.

Not satisfied But these measures have not nearly satisfied the IMF, which requires an end to subsidies on wheat and transport before it will grant a loan for seeks to present his alliance of petty-bourgeois collaborators as a substitute for the consolidation of the unity of the working class as an independent force.

Capital's agent

By substituting his new alliance of collaboration for the independence of the class Buthelezi once again exposes his real role as capital's agent in the attempt to demobilise and fragment the working class as an independent force.

Opportunist collaborators will continue to owe their political life to their usefulness to capital on the one hand and the failure of the traditional nationalist movement to develop a revolutionary alternative on the other.

The political facing the working class in Africa now demands the government's new employment' Jayewardene claims that this strategy will create new employment. But its populist propaganda barely conceals the truth that the UNP, like the Indian Congress Party, is the agent of the landowning and industrial capitalists.

Jayewardene has already moved to suppress opposition to his dictatorship and its policies. Trade union leaders have been removed from office, all demonstrations banned and political strikes threatened with severe recrimination.

the constructic alternative.

It demands that working class militants inside all the organisations whose bankruptcy has led to the current vulnerability of the working class, break decisively with the political line of collaboration, compromise and popular frontism and regroup around an alternative revolutionary programme of transitional demands based on the independence of the working class.

Such a regrouping is an essential aspect of the building of the genuinely revolutionary organisation which alone can defend the working class against the state offensive through the consolidation of the gains of Soweto and the development of the struggle to the only resolution in the interests of the working class-the establishment of socialism.

Native reserve in Namibia