Sri Lanka: Pseudo-left NSSP celebrates alliances with capitalist parties
By
Pani Wijesiriwardane
1 February 2017
The Sri Lankan pseudo-left Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP) used a meeting to mark 39 years since its founding to celebrate its opportunist history. Its leader Wickremabahu Karunaratne declared that his party would continue to back the present pro-US government so as to “defend democracy” and hailed the NSSP’s long record of similar alliances with bourgeois parties.
The NSSP was formed in 1978 by Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) leaders who had stayed in the party after it entered a coalition government with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in 1964 and again in 1970, with disastrous consequences for the working class. Karatunaratne split from the LSSP after its sweeping electoral defeat in 1977 but never broke with its treacherous program of class collaboration—that is, the subordination of workers and youth to one or other faction of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie.
Karunaratne declared at the anniversary meeting: “We are going forward after a democratic revolution,” adding that the NSSP wanted to “isolate reactionary forces and gain victories for progressive forces” through its “united front with the democratic movement.”
The NSSP leader’s “democratic revolution” is the ousting of former President Mahinda Rajapakse and his replacement by Maithripala Sirisena in the January 2015 election. Far from being “democratic” or “a revolution,” Rajapakse’s ouster was a regime-change operation orchestrated behind the scenes by Washington with the assistance of former President Chandrika Kumaratunga and United National Party (UNP) leader Ranil Wickremesinghe.
The NSSP, along with other pseudo-left groups, trade unions, non-government…