Communist Party of Sri Lanka

Template:Politics of Sri Lanka The Communist Party of Sri Lanka is a communist political party in Sri Lanka. At the last legislative elections, 2 april 2004, the party was part of the United People's Freedom Alliance that won 45.6 % of the popular vote and 105 out of 225 seats. The CPSL was founded as the Communist Party of Ceylon in 1943, and was a continuation of the United Socialist Party. The USP had been formed out of the pro-USSR-wing of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. USP was proscribed by the colonial authorities.

USP and CPC were led by Dr. S.A. Wickremesinghe.

In 1952 Wickremesinghe's wife, the English-born Doreen Wickremesinghe, was elected to the Sri Lankan parliament.

In 1960 the Communist Party, Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna formed the United Left Front. The ULF broke down in 1964 when the then Prime Minister Bandaranaike offer ministerial posts to LSSP and the CP.

Later CPSL joined the People's Alliance, the front led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. When SLFP shelved the PA and formed the United Peoples Freedom Alliance together with Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna ahead of the 2004 elections, CPSL and LSSP initially stayed out. They did however, sign a memorandum with the UPFA at a later stage and contested the elections on the UPFA platform. CPSL does not, however, consider itself a member of UPFA.

The CPSL has one member of parliament (2004), party general secretary D.E.W. Gunasekara. Gunasekara was supposed to have become the speaker of the Sri Lankan parliament, but lost by a handful of votes. Gunasekara was then sworn-in as the Minister for Constitutional Affairs.

The youth wing of CPSL is the Communist Youth Federation. CYF is a member organization of the World Federation of Democratic Youth.

In Tamil, the party is called இலங்கை கம்யூனிஸ்ட் கட்சி.

Growth of Leftist Parties

Sri Lanka Table of Contents

During the Donoughmore period of political experimentation, several leftist parties were formed. Unlike most other Sri Lankan parties, these leftist parties were non-communal in membership. Working-class activism, especially trade unionism, became an important political factor during the sustained economic slump between the world wars. The first important leftist party was the Labour Party, founded in 1931 by A.E. Goonesimha. Three Marxist-oriented parties--the Ceylon Equal Society Party (Lanka Sama Samaja Party--LSSP), the Bolshevik-Leninist Party, and the Communist Party of Sri Lanka (CPSL)--represented the far left. All three were divided on both ideological and personal grounds. The Soviet Union's expulsion of Leon Trotsky from the Communist Party after Lenin's death in 1924 and Stalin's subsequent decision to enter World War II on the Allied side exacerbated these differences, dividing the Communists into Trotskyists and Stalinists. The LSSP, formed in 1935 and the oldest of the Sri Lankan Marxist parties, took a stance independent of the Soviet Union, becoming affiliated with the Trotskyite Fourth International, which was a rival of the Comintern. Most LSSP leaders were arrested during World War II for their opposition to what they considered to be an "imperial war." Although in more recent years, the LSSP has been considered a politically spent force, gaining, for example less than 1 percent of the vote in the 1982 presidential elections, it has nevertheless been touted as the world's only successful Trotskyist party.

The CPSL, which began as a Stalinist faction of the LSSP that was later expelled, formed its own party in 1943, remaining faithful to the line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik-Leninist Party was formed in 1945 as another breakaway group of the LSSP. The leftist parties represented the numerically small urban working class. Partly because these parties operated through the medium of trade unionism, they lacked the wider mass appeal needed at the national level to provide an effective extraparliamentary challenge to the central government. Nonetheless, because the leftists occasionally formed temporary political coalitions before national elections, they posed more than just a mere "parliamentary nuisance factor."

Official Address

Communist Party of Sri-Lanka

91, Dr. N.M. Perera Mawatha, Colombo 08.

Code:(+941)Tel : 2688942 Fax : 2691610

External link

• Gift from CPSL to the SED in 1976 (http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/souvenirs/so000322.htm)ta:இலங்கை கம்யூனிஸ்ட் கட்சி