The 90th Anniversary of Sri Lanka’s Socialist Movement

Leslie Goonewardene as General Secretary of the LSSP in the early days of the party -- image via A S Goonewardene - Fair use, via Wikimedia Commons

By Shiran Illanperuma

Ninety years ago, on 18 December 1935, a handful of young people came together to establish the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). Leslie Goonewardena, General Secretary of the LSSP from 1935 to 1977, later wrote that the party was founded because “there was a void to be filled”.

On the one hand, the conservative Ceylon National Congress (founded in 1919), composed of local elites with economic interests that overlapped with the colonial administration, was failing to push forward the agenda of national liberation—they preferred to settle for piecemeal reforms and dominion status over complete independence. On the other hand, the social democratic Ceylon Labour Party (founded in 1922), led by trade unionist A. E. Gunasinghe, was playing an increasingly collaborationist and communal role in the working-class movement, having come under the pacifying influence of the British Labour Party.

The young founders of the LSSP stepped into this political void during the height of the 1930s depression, which had caused great immiseration due to the reduction in prices of Ceylon’s export crops. The party’s first manifesto identified a series of goals that are as straightforward as they are ambitious:

First, achieve complete national independence. Second, nationalise the means of production, distribution and exchange; and third, abolish inequality arising from differences of race, caste, creed or sex. The LSSP’s founding aspirations were essentially for national sovereignty and the dignity of the working people of Sri Lanka.

Pre-history of the LSSP

Writing in 1945, LSSP co-founder S. A. Wickramasinghe recalled that “it all began on a misty cold day at the Indian Student Hostel in Bloomsbury, London”, where he met with fellow Ceylonese students Colvin R. De Silva, Philip Gunawardena, N. M. Perera, and Leslie Goonewardena. This group, which went on to form the core leadership of the LSSP, “were all appalled by the backwardness of Ceylon’s leaders, and at their smug complacency and self-satisfaction.” Their discussions were helped along by Shapurji Dorabji Saklatvala—an Indian Parsi who was Britain’s first communist member of Parliament. Wickramasinghe recalled that they were “tremendously impressed and inspired by the example of the Soviet Union” and “resolved that we must return to Ceylon to work for independence and socialism.”

At the time of the LSSP’s founding, the core membership was under 40 years old. Wickramasinghe was 35, then there was Philip Gunawardena (34), Colvin R. De Silva (32), N. M. Perea (30), and Goonewardene (26). But it would be a mistake to think that the LSSP was merely the product of a handful of young, idealistic, Western-educated radicals. These individuals were themselves shaped by the class struggles of the time.

In the late 19th century, the first manifestations of modern anti-colonialism took the form of the Buddhist revival movement. The activities of Buddhist monks like Migettuwatte Gunananda Thera and Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala Thera attracted Western theosophists like Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. The Buddhist revivalist movement led to the foundation of Buddhist-oriented “Olcott schools” which challenged the monopoly of Christianised education—Wickramasinghe, De Silva, Gunawardena, and Perera were products of these schools.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Youth Leagues inspired by the Indian freedom movement’s call for Purna Swaraj (complete independence) sprang up in Ceylon, first in the northern city of Jaffna and then across the entire country. These organisations drew in young patriots and socialists dissatisfied with the conservatism of the Ceylonese elites who were deeply integrated into the colonial Planter Raj (a term used to describe the total political and economic domination of the plantation owners). During the 1930s, these youth leagues participated in a range of political activities that gradually took on a mass character.

In 1933, the members of the youth leagues stepped in to support striking workers at the Wellawatte Spinning and Weaving Mills when the existing union leadership sought to demobilise the workers. Youth league activists organised meetings and raised funds for the strikers, eventually creating a new union under their more radical leadership. These strikes were among the young socialists’ first experiences in organising the working class. In the process, they also had their first confrontations against communalism, as the conservative union leaders attempted to disrupt the strikes by introducing backlegs along ethnic lines.

Also in 1933, youth league activists began to point out the hypocrisy of the colonial government using Ceylonese school children to sell poppy flowers to raise funds for British ex-servicemen. This led to the Suriya-Mal Movement, where activists sold local portia flowers (suriya-mal in Sinhala) to raise funds for Ceylonese ex-servicemen. These funds were also used to finance the education of children of oppressed castes, thereby combining the anti-imperialist struggle with the fight for democratising society. The Suriya-Mal Movement spilled over into the malaria epidemic which ravaged the Ceylonese countryside in 1934-1935, revealing the colonial administration’s neglect of the rural masses. Many youth league members led relief works, using their own personal wealth and skills to set up rural dispensaries and making connections with the peasantry in this process.

The Buddhist revival, the Youth Leagues, the Wellawatte Spinning and Weaving Mills strikes, the Suriya-Mal Movement, and the malaria relief campaigns were part of the conjuncture that produced the LSSP. The experiences gained in these movements, and the connections made across the country’s geography and social classes, led to the necessity of a unifying political party to take the struggles for sovereignty and dignity forward.

Socialism and Sri Lankan Society

Despite numerous splits, the socialist movement embedded itself in Sri Lankan society and made a lasting impact on the polity. Had they been united, the socialists would have comprised the single largest bloc in Sri Lanka’s first post-independence parliament. The movement would go on to influence a range of progressive reforms, including the expulsion of British military bases, the nationalisation of the plantations, and the formulation of the country’s first republican constitution in 1972.

Sri Lanka today is one of two countries to contain the word “socialist” in its full name—the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka (the other country is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam). Ironically, the word “socialist” was entered into the constitution formulated under the right-wing President J. R. Jayawardena, who, while bringing in neoliberal reforms, still understood the broad appeal of socialist ideals.

According to a survey conducted between 2022 and 2023 (when Sri Lanka was in the throes of an economic crisis), 49 percent of Sri Lankans viewed socialism favourably, while only 22 percent felt the same about capitalism. Another survey, conducted in 2022, found that privatisation of healthcare and education was opposed by 52 percent and 54 percent of people, respectively. In fact, Sri Lanka is one of the few countries in Asia which provides free education and healthcare and is known to have social indicators above what is expected for its per capita GDP. Socialist ideals remain hardcoded in Sri Lanka’s social contract, even as the socialist movement itself is at an ebb tide.

The past decades of neoliberalism and austerity have made the original aspirations of Sri Lanka’s socialist movement more relevant and urgent than ever before. In the last decade, Sri Lanka’s people have been put through the grinder: the 2019 Easter bombings, the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 balance of payments crisis and sovereign default, and Cyclone Ditwah have peeled away layer after layer of Sri Lanka’s social fabric. Since 2019, the number of people in extreme poverty has doubled. Debt devours the national budget and the IMF circumscribes the possibilities of economic policy. Meanwhile, the country’s industrialisation has stalled, pushing millions to migrate in search of employment.

The dilution of partisanship between the two mainstream political poles (the centre-left UNP and its spinoff, the SJB, and the centre-left SLFP and its spinoff, the SLPP) has once again created a political vacuum akin to the 1930s—a vacuum which the ruling NPP was able to exploit in 2019. Years of political horse-trading and opportunistic alliances have eroded confidence in the political establishment. But for the left, the challenge is not only to turn social discontent into political power but also to advance an actionable programme towards economic development. Standing up to the creditors and the IMF, rebuilding state capacity and social protection, and repressing domestic merchant and financial capital in order to industrialise – these are some of the immediate tasks that the Sri Lankan socialist movement must provide a programme for today.

Shiran Illanperuma is a Sri Lankan journalist and political economist. He is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and a co-editor of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought.

This article was produced by Globetrotter