Presentation at Round Table on Ukraine

From the previous presentations, it should be obvious that the USSR was not a union of equal republics. It was an empire in which Russia dominated the former Tsarist colonies, sometimes in extremely cruel ways.

Lenin envisaged a different set-up from the centralised and Russified Tsarist empire, and he did try to bring about equality as the civil war was winding down. A series of treaties in 1920–1921 recognised Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland and Poland as independent states. Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent Soviet Socialist Republics. In smaller minority ethnic enclaves, local and regional self-government and linguistic and cultural development were encouraged. On December 30, 1922, the First Congress of Soviets of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics approved the Treaty on the formation of the USSR. Lenin insisted on a clause proclaiming the right to self-determination, including secession from the USSR. Lenin made some serious mistakes; for example, he prevented the Constituent Assembly from taking place and stifled opposition, laying the basis for Stalin to come to power. But his insistence on the right to secede was absolutely correct. If the USSR was to be a voluntary union of equal republics, every republic had to be free to secede from it.

The Current Economic Crisis and the People's Movement in Sri Lanka: Prospects and Challenges

On July 14, 2022, Sri Lanka’s parliamentary speaker announced that he had accepted the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, sent by email from Singapore where he had fled via The Maldives.[1] That this former military commander – known as ‘the terminator’ due to his propensity to get critics assassinated[2] – was forced to resign by an overwhelmingly non-violent mass movement marks this as a major episode in Sri Lanka’s protracted democratic revolution.[3]

Sri Lanka's Democratic Revolution: The Latest Episode in a Decades-Long Drama

On July 14, 2022, Sri Lanka’s parliamentary speaker announced that he had accepted the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, sent by email from Singapore where he had fled via The Maldives.[1] That this former military commander – known as ‘the terminator’ due to his propensity to get critics assassinated[2] – was forced to resign by an overwhelmingly non-violent mass movement marks this as a major episode in Sri Lanka’s protracted democratic revolution.[3]

Christianity and Capitalism in India and Sri Lanka

Introduction

Christianity came to India and Sri Lanka from other countries at various periods ranging from ancient times to the present. Therefore a general view of the link between Christianity and capitalism (or anti-capitalism) is necessary in order to understand how the specific relationship between Christianity and capitalism (or anti-capitalism) developed in these two countries. The first section of this paper will present a general view of Christian attitudes to poverty, wealth and capitalism in early Christianity, during the Reformation, and in the modern period; the second and third sections will look at the shapes and forms these attitudes took in India and Sri Lanka respectively; and the conclusion will sum up the findings of the paper.  

'The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary' Intertwines the Personal with the Political

Review of Land Guns Caste Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary by Gita Ramaswamy, New Delhi: Navayana, 2022, pp. 431.

The personal and the political are intertwined so tightly in Gita Ramaswamy’s Land Guns Caste Woman: Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary that it would be impossible to separate them. Another running thread is intersectionality: the way in which different axes of privilege and oppression interact, sometimes reinforcing each other but also sometimes working in opposite ways.

Nightmare's End?

I am not in Sri Lanka, and I feel torn about what is happening there. Acute anxiety about how millions of people will survive the dearth of food, fuel and medicines nestles alongside a glimmer of hope that this crisis could be the beginning of the end of a decades-long nightmare. Since the country gained its Independence in 1948, various sections of the population have been targeted by its ruling bloc: threatened with losing their homes, livelihoods and often their lives. They have fought back, but each section has been isolated and crushed by an increasingly centralized and ruthless state. Now, for the first time, the vast majority of the population has risen in revolt. Criticism of the dictatorship is widespread, and divisions between working people may finally be healed.

Socialist Internationalism and the Ukraine War

How do the working people of the world transform themselves from a plethora of groups waging a multitude of scattered struggles for survival and dignity to a revolutionary force capable of ending capitalism, governing the earth, and taking over production? They have innumerable tasks before them, but one of the most important is to overcome divisions among themselves resulting from ethnic supremacism and nationalism. Marxists have been debating this issue from the beginning, but it still plagues us today. The war in Ukraine offers a good opportunity to examine it more closely.