The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Sri Lanka is holding an online public meeting, entitled “The COVID-19 pandemic and capitalist barbarism”, on Sunday, April 5, at 3 p.m. local time. The event will be live-streamed through the party’s official Facebook page.

The SEP meeting is being held as billions of people around the world attempt to deal with the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic and as the ruling classes demonstrate their callous indifference to human life and their inability to combat the highly contagious virus. Like their global counterparts, the Sri Lankan government has endangered the country’s population by failing to ensure adequate healthcare or introduce mass testing. Its response is mainly limited to an indefinite lockdown.

President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s government is exploiting the pandemic to push ahead with plans for dictatorial forms of rule to be used against the working class. Rajapakse has placed the military in the control of all anti-coronavirus operations and appointed his brother Basil Rajapakse—an unelected individual—to head the COVID-19 Presidential Task Force.

The inability of the ruling classes to control the pandemic exposes the failure of capitalism to meet the basic social needs of all working people and the oppressed masses.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a product of the capitalist profit system, which must be overthrown and replaced through a unified movement of the working class fighting for an international socialist program. This is the perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International and its national sections, the Socialist Equality Parties, and the World Socialist Web Site.

We invite workers, youths, intellectuals and WSWS readers everywhere to participate in this vital event and discuss our internationalist program.