The Slaughter in Sri Lanka

Once more, socialists have witnessed the meaningless slaughter of our fellow-workers, this time in Sri Lanka. The Socialist Party is saddened and outraged by the terror attacks and have no sympathy for those who carried out those atrocities. Make no mistake about it, as members of the working class we are repelled by the slaughter. Those lying dead beneath the rubble are our fellow-workers. Socialists will empathise with the feeling of popular revulsion that follows such barbaric acts of mass murder. For someone not totally doped up on the belief of the inseparability of god and cause, the idea of taking the lives of other people is too utterly sick for contemplation. But as socialists we need to take a more considered measured view of the phenomena of terrorism.

Rarely has a day gone by where there are no terror related stories in the news. And it is a little bit sickening to see political leaders stand up after every terrorist act to announce that they stand together to protect democracy, or freedom, or human values and anything else that they can co-opt and misappropriate in order to serve the purposes of capitalism and the capitalist class. 

Indiscriminate murder, political assassinations, kidnapping, are not just the preserve of the terrorist organisations but the instruments of policy of many nations. Capitalist ‘compassion’ is a highly selective kind of compassion.

It is not your neighbour but the capitalist system which is the enemy. It is only by establishing a class-free, state-free, propertyless global society that real freedom will be won. Let the supporters of capitalism reflect on the tragedy in Sri Lanka: their system caused it. As long as we have capitalism we will never be free of violence and terrorism. The solution remains the same. There is one world and we exist as one people in need of each other and with the same basic needs. There is far more that unites us than can ever divide us along cultural, nationalistic or religious lines. Together we can create a civilisation worth living in, but before that happens we need the conscious cooperation of ordinary people across the world, united in one common cause—to create a world in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation, a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders and a world in which production is at last freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used for the good of humanity—socialism.