The SEP and the International Students for Social Equality (ISSE) will hold a public lecture in Colombo on Thursday to launch a new publication—The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party-Sri Lanka. The book contains the main perspectives resolution unanimously adopted at the founding congress of the SEP held in May last year.

The SEP was established in 1996 to take the initiative in providing the necessary revolutionary leadership for the working class in Sri Lanka and South Asia following the renunciation of any, even limited, struggle for the class interests of workers by the Stalinist, reformist and petty-bourgeois pseudo-left parties. The document establishes the political basis for the transformation of the SEP into a mass working class party.

The SEP’s forerunner, the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), was founded in 1968 to overcome the crisis of working class leadership following the betrayal of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party that had devastating consequences for workers throughout South Asia. The LSSP, which claimed to be Trotskyist, entered the bourgeois government of Sirima Bandaranaike in 1964.

The SEP’s perspectives resolution draws the necessary political lessons from the rich history of the struggle for Trotskyism in Sri Lanka and South Asia, beginning with the founding of the LSSP and its transformation into the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India. The resolution reviews the principled and courageous struggle waged by the RCL and SEP over the past 44 years for socialist internationalism in the difficult conditions of civil war. The document establishes that Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution is the only basis for the building of revolutionary parties of the working class in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

We call on workers, housewives, students and intellectuals to attend the lecture.

Venue: Public Library Hall, Colombo.

Date and time: Thursday November 8, 4 p.m.

Speaker: Wije Dias, SEP General Secretary