The socioeconomic ideology of Sri Lanka’s President, Anura Kumar Dissanayake, and his political party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), has always been rooted in Marxism. Founded in 1965, the JVP has been led by Dissanayake since 2014. In 2019, the JVP, together with 27 other organisations, rebranded itself as the National People’s Power (NPP) — a change that took place just six months before this year’s presidential election. At the same time, however, the JVP quietly removed its official website’s access to its longstanding 60-point Marxist-Leninist Party Programme.
Before this removal, many in the media and general public had already downloaded the full document, which included the following declaration in Point 58:
“A political revolution will be necessary for the transformation of the capitalist property system into a socialist common property system. The precondition for building socialism is the elimination of bourgeois class rule and the establishment of proletarian class rule. Socialist revolutionary tasks cannot be achieved without taking, building, and establishing State power in the hands of the proletariat. Therefore, the prime objective of socialism is to capture State power. Although the proletariat may prefer a peaceful transition, the final decision rests with the capitalists who hold power.”
Despite concealing their true political programme after 49 years, the JVP has claimed in both political platforms and parliament that the party has “changed.” While they publicly praise the successes of countries that have achieved significant poverty reduction and economic growth through privatisation and market-based economic principles inspired by Adam Smith, they also reveal an inner contradiction: their unwillingness to abandon Marxism, a doctrine that has proven economically ruinous and led to the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1991 when the USSR disbanded.
Yet the JVP’s Marxist commitments persist. The party’s headquarters continues to display its 60-year-old flag bearing the communist symbol of the sickle and hammer, symbolising loyalty to an economically self-destructive myth. Additionally, large portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin—the architects of these economically ruinous ideologies—are prominently displayed.
On their YouTube channel Leftline, the JVP still promotes Marxist ideology, with Politburo member Bimal Ratnayaka delivering lectures on the Communist Manifesto in Sinhala. (Leftline channel video)
Are the JVP’s Marxists now attempting to implement socialism in Sri Lanka via parliamentary democratic ballots, having failed twice to achieve their goals through violence in their 60-year history?
Historically, communism has inflicted widespread poverty, starvation, and famine upon socialist countries, and it has been implicated in the deaths of approximately 100 million people worldwide. The Black Book of Communism, a 912-page work authored by Stéphane Courtois, Andrzej Paczkowski, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Margolin, and other European scholars, meticulously documents the political repression associated with communist regimes, including genocide, extrajudicial executions, deportations, forced labour camps, and engineered famines. Originally published in France under the title Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression by Éditions Robert Laffont, the book was later published in the United States by Harvard University Press (Wikipedia reference).
In a historical perspective, it took humanity approximately 99.4% of its 2.5-million-year history to reach a per capita GDP of 90 international dollars around 15,000 years ago. The international dollar, based on 1990 purchasing power, is a standard measure for comparison. Astonishingly, humanity then required only another 0.59% of its history to double this per capita GDP to 180 international dollars by 1750. From 1750 to 2000—a period representing less than 0.01% of human history—the global per capita GDP grew thirty-sevenfold to 6,600 international dollars.
In this brief period, 97% of all wealth created in human history was generated, with global life expectancy tripling (from only 26 years in 1820). This unprecedented economic growth was not due to a sudden surge in human intelligence or industriousness; it stemmed from the rise of capitalism in Western nations roughly 200 years ago—a system that has proven itself vastly superior to any that preceded or followed it.
Abandoning the successful socio-economic principles of capitalism, which rest on supply, demand, and a market-driven economy, in favour of Marxism—a model tried and proven disastrous—constitutes a betrayal of humanity. If the President and the JVP/NPP truly seek rapid national development and prosperity, they owe it to the public to openly renounce Marxism along with its symbols, and to dismantle the remnants of a devastating economic ideology.
