When Sri Lanka Operated Workers’ Councils
Inspired by Yugoslavia’s market socialism, Trotskyists in the Sri Lankan government instituted workers’ councils during the 1970s. A decade later, the experiment collapsed. What explains its rise and fall?
1942: The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) protest against Ceylon's support for the Allied forces
On June 28, 1948, the Cominform, the Stalinist alliance of European Marxist-Leninist parties, expelled Yugoslavia from its ranks. Having deviated from the Stalinist line, Yugoslavia’s leader, Josip Broz Tito, could have expected little else. Facing a blockade from his former allies, he hence had to rechart his country’s course.
Tito did this by institutionalizing what would later be called “market socialism.” Initially criticized as a deviation from communism, it was later embraced by not just anti-Stalinist reformists, but also advocates of a third way between capitalism and communism, particularly in the Third World. Tito’s involvement in the Non-Aligned Movement in later years helped bolster his credentials as a proponent of this line.
One significant innovation in Yugoslavia’s market socialism was the formation of workers’ councils. The logic behind these councils was not immediately clear and it was, for obvious reasons, viewed as an aberration by Stalinists. Nevertheless, it was based on an unmistakable Marxist body of theory, dating back to Engels’ Anti-Dühring:
State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase “a free people's state”, both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the state out of hand.
(Anti-Dühring, Part III, Chapter II)
Engels contended that the post-revolutionary state would cease mediating social relations between people. With the “dying out” or “withering away” of the state, the means of production would be managed and controlled by the proletariat itself, leading to a true “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Such views were, to a certain extent and within certain limits, articulated by the Bolsheviks as well. “The implementation of all these measures,” Lenin contended, “is possible only if all the power in the state passes to the proletarians and semi-proletarians.” Upon coming to power, Stalin abandoned that line: instead of giving greater power to workers, he resorted to bureaucratic repression and administrative commands, dissolving such projects as the Kuzbass Autonomous Industrial Colony.
1944: Stalin and Tito. Image: MacLean, 1980
Tito institutionalized workers’ councils as a counter to Stalin’s policies. To do so, he also had to implement additional political reforms. Against Stalinist forms of centralized bureaucracy, for instance, Tito embraced devolution. In May 1949, his government granted autonomy to local governments. Political decentralization led to increased worker participation: in 1950, the Yugoslav National Assembly legalized worker self-management schemes. The state soon began to move away from direct management of productive enterprises.
This was bound to have an impact on left movements elsewhere, especially in the Third World. Arguably the most striking use of workers’ councils was to be found in Sri Lanka, where the left used them as part of a wider strategy of fomenting revolution through working-class mobilization.
A Brief History of the Sri Lankan Left
Sri Lanka, Ceylon under British rule (1796-1948), had been a plantation colony for over 150 years. The imperialist experiment of breeding “a class of men Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” had succeeded in the tiny island colony more than it had in India. After British forces annexed the Kandyan kingdom in 1815, they faced, and brutally crushed, a series of peasant uprisings, the most serious of which took place in 1848 – a time of revolution in continental Europe. In the aftermath of the uprising in Ceylon, the colonial government shifted its strategy from bureaucratic rule to co-opting the country’s elites, especially the newly emerging middle-classes.
The result was the formation of a bourgeoisie that, in effect, identified their interests with the interests of the colonial state, and worked on behalf of the latter. The nature of this colonial bourgeoisie not surprisingly determined the course of anti-colonial agitation in the island in the years to come.
“Trotsky could even have taken the Ceylon bourgeoisie and its political leadership as a demonstration piece of the incapacity of that class to play a militantly anti-imperialist role.”
The conventional Stalinist line held that, in colonial and semi-colonial countries, the national bourgeoisie would lead a democratic revolution, and then overthrow imperialism. In contrast to this view, Leon Trotsky contended that the “national bourgeoisie” was too weak to combat imperialism. It was the working class and not the bourgeoisie, he argued, that had to lead the confrontation against imperialism.
The Trotskyite line fit the situation of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie aptly. As a former Sri Lankan Marxist writer and commentator, Regi Siriwardena, once noted, “Trotsky could even have taken the Ceylon bourgeoisie and its political leadership as a demonstration piece of the incapacity of that class to play a militantly anti-imperialist role.”
In the early years of the 20th century, workers in Ceylon led a series of struggles, strikes, and movements. But devoid of leadership, these had petered out. While the creation of a Labour Party in 1928 gave a fillip to these struggles, the depression of the 1930s led to their rupture.
A new generation of radicals began to question the leadership of the Labour Party. In 1935, these young radicals formed the Lanka Sama Samaja (“Equal Society”) Party (LSSP). They declared as their aims the achievement of complete independence (as opposed to the bourgeoisie’s call for constitutional reform), the socialization of the means of production, and the abolition of all forms of inequality “arising from differences of race, caste, creed, or sex.” Other demands included the enactment of the eight-hour day, the passing of a minimum wage, and the abolition of child labor.
From its beginning, the LSSP identified the weak and embryonic nature of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie. Concentrated within the Ceylon National Congress, the bourgeoisie found itself incapable of playing the militantly anti-imperialist role that its Indian counterparts were playing through the Indian National Congress. While the LSSP did not initially articulate these views along Trotskyite lines, especially since a section aligned with Stalin, by 1940, the party had split, with the majority faction siding with Trotsky’s Fourth International and firmly rejecting any alliance with the bourgeoisie.
The LSSP, considered the world’s oldest Trotskyist party, now pinned its hopes for a revolution on workers rather than the Ceylon National Congress. It was against this backdrop that, in the post-war period, the party began looking at countries charting alternative paths to Stalinism. This included Yugoslavia’s market socialism, especially Tito’s labour reforms.
The Establishment of Workers’ Control
In its manifesto for the general elections in 1952, the LSSP called for “the establishment of workers’ control in all industrial establishments and workplaces.” One of the most fervent advocates of this line was the LSSP’s General Secretary, Leslie Goonewardena. Goonewardena contended that Tito’s reforms constituted “an original contribution to socialist thought and practice.” Regardless of differences between the two societies, he found the reforms suitable for “an underdeveloped country embarking on socialist construction.” This was no doubt informed by the party’s attitude to the Soviet Union, which it saw, and denounced, as a “degenerated workers’ state.”
Having failed to make headway among the rural masses in the 1950s, the LSSP decided in 1964 to sign an electoral agreement with the Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP). While the LSSP adopted a program for workers’ councils as part of this agreement, the party’s decision to align with the SLFP proved to be controversial in the long term.
Founded in 1951 by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, who had broken away from the leading Sri Lankan bourgeois capitalist party, the United National Party (UNP), the SLFP brought together a powerful section of the Sinhala Buddhist middle-class. It provided a platform for anti-imperialist politics, but also empowered anti-minority sentiment, transforming radical-progressive proposals, like the replacement of English by Sinhala and Tamil, into majoritarian legislation, like the Sinhala Only Act. These marked the beginning of Sri Lanka’s long, protracted descent into ethnic fratricide.
Not surprisingly, the LSSP’s decision to partner with the SLFP in 1964 led to its expulsion from the Fourth International. At the same time, this alliance enabled the LSSP to come to power and implement some of its radical labour reforms.
In 1968, the LSSP and the SLFP, together with the Communist Party, formed the largest electoral coalition in Sri Lanka’s post-independence history, the United Front, which, in 1970, won the general elections. Leftists were put in charge of several ministries, which enabled them to pursue policies they had been advocating since the 1950s, including those influenced by Tito’s reforms. The United Front government thus soon adopted a series of reforms that paved the way for workers’ councils and advisory bodies at state enterprises.
Weaknesses and Strengths
The councils and advisory bodies had very clear aims. Both were entrusted with powers to “check waste, indifference, and sabotage.” The leftist academic Wiswa Warnapala has noted that they were also “expected to bring down the cost of living and narrow the gap between the upper and lower rungs of the administration.” To this end, they were empowered to submit proposals “for increased efficiency” and play a wide role in the management. In the longer term, these councils were also perceived as a viable means of improving “national economic profitability.”
In instituting workers’ councils, the government sought to combat, if not reform, the colonial bureaucratic structures that had ailed the country’s public enterprises. As Warnapala has noted, these enterprises suffered from a range of problems, including inadequate training, poor organization of work, and lack of proper supervision and delegation. Moreover, they recorded a “high rate of absenteeism”, an issue attributed to the absence of worker participation in their management. In that sense, these councils tried to rationalize Ceylon’s then still prevalent “colonial-oriented administrative structure.”
The working class responded positively to these developments. Following the United Front’s victory in 1970, several councils and committees were formed, many of them on the spur of the moment. The Minister of Finance, N. M. Perera, contended that they would help workers identify better with the administration, thereby facilitating what he saw as a socialist transformation in the island. However, while forming these bodies, the government soon made them subject to ministerial directives, empowering ministers to modify them in line with the requirements of individual public corporations. Democratization, in other words, would be carried out within certain administrative limits.
Among the institutions that took the lead in forming these bodies was the Ceylon Transport Board, or the CTB. Under its Chairman, Anil Moonesinghe, who had served as Transport Minister in 1965, issues like the utilization of capital equipment and reduction of overtime came within the purview of the councils. Moonesinghe mobilized the latter at not only the head office, but also the workshops, the regional offices, and the depots.
N. M. Perera addressing a meeting of the LSSP. Perera served as the Minister of Finance in the coalition government of 1970. Image: Daily Mirror
The membership of these councils, which generally cut across ethnic lines, depended on the number of employees in a particular work unit. In the Transport Board, for instance, where a unit employed fewer than 250 workers, the councils included 10 members. The Board also allocated seats to representatives of drivers and conductors, widening the composition of the councils. Moreover, under special circumstances, council secretaries could be released from their normal duties for full-time work in these bodies. This was in addition to other facilities, such as extended financial assistance, which, in theory, would empower them even more.
In 1970, two French Marxists, L. Schmidt and D. Maurin, spent several months in Ceylon examining these councils. Observing their formation and mobilization in the Transport Board, they commented that under Moonesinghe’s leadership, the councils had helped in “cutting down costs, improving services and timetables and better upkeep of the buses, cutting out corruption, and better use of new buses,” leading to a jump in revenue “from 600,000 rupees a day in April to 800,000 a day in August.” On a more sober note, they also wrote that the SLFP’s right-wing “proposed a White paper that the presidents of the workers’ councils and people’s committees be appointed by the Minister concerned” – a move antithetical to the spirit of such reforms.
To be sure, these organs suffered from a number of weaknesses. Apart from being subject to ministerial oversight, they also led to tensions between councils and trade unions, as the latter felt that their powers were being usurped through the granting of autonomy to employees. The government did not ignore their concerns: consultations were frequently held to prevent tensions from flaring up and defeating the aims for which these organs had been set up. Such tensions, however, did not disappear, in part because trade unions were led by political parties which prioritized their own interests.
An Ultimatum
Owing to a loss in popularity due to food shortages and scarcities, the SLFP was defeated by the rightwing United National Party in 1977. Led by J. R. Jayewardene, the new government enacted neoliberal reforms that had their antecedents in Chile under Augusto Pinochet. Needless to say, the workers’ councils were abandoned. The passing of an Employees’ Councils Act No. 32, in 1979 may have bolstered hopes about their continuation, but this did not happen. The new government was, in any case, not pro-worker: in 1980, it broke up a general strike in Colombo by firing more than 40,000 workers, two years before Ronald Reagan dismissed more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers and four years before Margaret Thatcher crushed a coal miners’ strike.
In 1997, a newly returned SLFP alliance, albeit one that modeled itself along Third Way centrist rather than socialist lines, issued a circular to re-establish workers’ councils. This, too, fell into neglect later. They have not been revived since then.
Workers who were laid off demonstrating during the July 1980 general strike. Image: Lanka Web
“they [workers’ coucils] became a prototype for worker empowerment, making them suitable for any country lacking a bourgeoisie to foment a democratic revolution.”
What these reforms in their original form would have led to, we may never know. But their achievements were considerable. By 1974, 212 councils had been formed. These covered a workforce of 135,000 in the public sector. The labor studies scholar Gerard Kester called them “an important innovation in social political development.” They were also praised by the International Labor Organization. Whether or not these pointed to an alternative road to socialism, they became a prototype for worker empowerment, making them suitable for any country lacking a bourgeoisie to foment a democratic revolution.
To say this is not to ignore the failures of the left’s alliance with the SLFP. Typical of most Third World parties that posed as alternatives to communism and capitalism, the SLFP harbored both radical and reactionary tendencies. In 1975, the latter gained an upper hand, leading to the expulsion of left parties from the United Front. Under the new Minister of Finance, Felix Dias Bandaranaike, the United Front veered to the right, providing an opening for the UNP and proposing such schemes as Free Trade Zones. Not surprisingly, the left lost heavily in the 1977 election, a fallout from which it never recovered.
Meanwhile, in the country of their birth, Yugoslavia, workers’ councils had a mixed record: as James Robertson of the University of California Irvine puts it in an essay in Jacobin, these organs went on to accentuate the country’s economic fault-lines and contradictions. These contradictions included uneven rates of growth between regions. As Robertson observes, self-management, and other market socialist reforms, propelled the northwestern parts, including Slovenia, to push for greater economic liberalization, paving the way for integration with Western markets. By contrast, the southern republics, including Serbia and Montenegro, opposed such moves, calling for greater protectionism for industries, as well as redistribution of profits from wealthier regions – which the latter obviously opposed.
Yugoslavia’s shift to market socialism, even under the guise of self-management for workers, hence could not stop the country’s free-fall after 1989. By then, Robertson notes, “[c]rippling foreign debt, structural adjustment measures enforced by the International Monetary Fund, and economic collapse amplified the centrifugal pulls of foreign markets.” The result, which came to fruition in the new millennium, was the disintegration of an entire country, and with it the reforms it had once implemented
If, in Yugoslavia, workers’ councils could not sustain the contradictions of Tito’s alternative to Stalinism, in Sri Lanka, they were hemmed in by the contradictions of a left-petty bourgeois alliance. As in Chile under Allende, and Egypt under Nasser, the bourgeois state in Sri Lanka could not withstand petty bourgeois elements coexisting with a radical left. The result could only be a turn to the right, which came about in 1977.
Whatever criticism one can make of the LSSP and the Communist Party for their decision to ally with the SLFP, it was through that alliance that several important reforms happened. The workers’ councils held the promise of such a reform, as did the advisory bodies. Yet as with every radical piece of legislation after 1970, including land reforms, these would eventually, and tragically, be stillborn.
Uditha Devapriya is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist based in Sri Lanka, whose writings have appeared in various local and international magazines, journals, and newspapers. He is interested in the history of left politics in Sri Lanka and South Asia. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.