About SLLA

The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left-Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka, is a Trotskyist political movement fighting for socialist internationalism.

It was formed by a few comrades who were distilled, by revolutionary perspective, from a group of comrades who fought together inside the SEP-SL against its bureaucratic leadership, and who were later, from late 2022 to early 2023, arbitrarily expelled by the SEP leadership for fighting for the international socialist perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) during the historic mass struggles in Sri Lanka from April-August 2022. Expelled from the party, this group, identified themselves as the Left Faction of the SEP, commenced fighting against the political degeneration of the party in relation to the class struggle and against identified reactionary political tendencies of the party leadership. In the course of events and succeeding months, an utterly reactionary nationalist clique formation within this faction rejected factional struggle, against which tendency a few comrades fought for Bolshevik method of factional struggle and for socialist internationalism of the ICFI. After a principled political fight with this reactionary clique for over half an year, those few comrades parted with the latter, in order to continue to wage factional struggle within SEP, aiming to build the SEP and resolve the historical crisis of the leadership of the working class of Sri Lanka and South Asia, and identified themselves as SLLA, as a faction of the SEP-SL.

SLLA seeks not to reform capitalism, but to create a socialist, democratic and egalitarian society through the establishment of a workers’ federation of socialist republics of Asia and the world and the revolutionary transformation of the world economy. As part of the ICFI, we seek to unify workers in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally in the common struggle for socialism—that is, for equality and the rational and democratic utilization of the wealth of the planet.

We accept political authority and are guided by the perspectives and programme of the ICFI, which is the world party of the world socialist revolution. We defend the historical continuity of the heritage of the ICFI against the reactionary tendencies of sectarianism, pragmatism, conservatism, bureaucratism and toxic subjectivism of the current opportunist leadership of the SEP-SL, and all forms of nationalist tendencies within the movement, and fight to lead united struggles ahead of the working class of Sri Lanka and South Asia. 60 years after the Great Betrayal of Lanka Sama Samaja Party in 1964, against which ICFI fought, the working class of this region has yet been unable to solve the crisis of its own leadership, which SEP-SL failed to build during more than half a century since then.

As explained by the ICFI and its world publication, the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org), the world has entered into an epoch of world war and socialist revolution, which coincides with the Fifth stage of the Fourth International, necessitating the building of the ICFI as the conscious political leadership, that will counterpose to the capitalist politics of imperialist war the class-based strategy of world socialist revolution.

We invite workers, youth, students, intellectuals, and all those who wish to uproot the global capitalist-imperialist system of war, fascism, social inequality and oppression to join SLLA today, and take the struggle forward in building the necessary revolutionary leadership of the working class within SEP-SL, which only can lead mass struggles toward revolutionary gains.

The reorganization of the society on socialist lines requires a cultural awakening among a significant section of the working class, as such an awakening is essential to the development of a conscious, revolutionary critical attitude toward capitalist society. This awakening, however, does not occur independently of the efforts of the world revolutionary party, the ICFI. Rather, it is the revolutionary party – the most conscious section of the working class – that leads the fight for this development. The intellectual essence of socialist consciousness is a critical revolutionary attitude to the existing social relations and everyday political assumptions and concepts as they emerge and find “spontaneous” expression in capitalist society.

Thus, a socialist reorganization of the society, a true system-change, is not attained overnight, by masses gathering in thousands in streets, unless such consciousness is engineered systematically, preparing the working class and the oppressed masses for such a new world order and society.

SLLA publishes theSocialist.LK to boost such an awakening of socialist consciousness and to build the necessary revolutionary leadership within the working class of this region.

SLLA
14 July 2024