While believing that the voluntary amalgamation of all oppressed nations offers the best opportunity for economic and cultural progress, the proletarian dictatorship pledges that those nations which wish to secede shall have the right to do so. As the framework for the genuine equality of nations, it proposes the creation of a voluntarily united socialist federation. Self-determination is achieved as a by-product of the socialist revolution led by the proletariat which, having established its dictatorship, guarantees to all oppressed people their legitimate democratic rights. It fights for self-determination with its own weapons and on the basis of its own program, rallying behind it all the oppressed masses of the villages and countryside. However, it does this not as an appendage to the national bourgeoisie, but rather as its implacable enemy. “It is the only social force that can realise the right of nations to self-determination. While upholding the right to self-determination, the ICFI statement insisted that national self-determination could only be achieved through the strategy of socialist revolution and was therefore subordinate to it. Consequently, these bourgeois democratic tasks fall to the proletariat. The post-independence history of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma-in fact, of every former colonial country in the world-decisively proves that the bourgeoisie cannot establish genuine national unification and political independence.” Ģ5-3. This state of affairs cannot be altered as long as bourgeois rule prevails. Arising out of such conditions, with the joyous approval of the bourgeoisie, are the horrors of intercommunal warfare. The type of state created in this process has been nothing more than a prison ground for putrefying capitalism, upon which the progressive development of the productive forces has been impossible. In this process, the national bourgeoisie has functioned not as the liberator of the oppressed masses, but as a junior partner in imperialist plunder.
“Invariably, imperialist-sanctioned ‘independence’ has meant the setting up of bastard states whose very foundations have been built upon a fatal compromise of democratic principles. As the ICFI statement explained, none of the so-called independent states established after World War II had met the democratic aspirations or basic material needs of the masses. The slogan clearly demarcated the RCL’s orientation in fighting to mobilise the working class-Sinhala and Tamil-to defend basic democratic rights through the struggle for socialism from any tendency to reduce the party to the role of cheerleader and political adviser to the Tamil national movement-as the WRP had done.Ģ5-2. In other words, national self-determination, like other democratic tasks, could not be resolved by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois movements no matter how courageous or militant.
The statement, based on the Theory of Permanent Revolution, unambiguously insisted that the democratic rights of Tamils would only be realised through the struggle of the working class for socialism. In November 1987, the ICFI published a comprehensive statement entitled “The Situation in Sri Lanka and the Political Tasks of the Revolutionary Communist League” that for the first time raised the slogan of a United Socialist States of Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam.
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