Revolutionary Workers Party (Sri Lanka)

Revolutionary Workers Party
Revolutionary Workers Party
Founder	Edmund Samarakkoddy
Founded	1968
Split from	Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary)
Preceded by	Revolutionary Samasamaja Party
Ideology	Communism ; Trotskyism
	Politics of Sri Lanka ; Political parties ; Elections ;

Last updated May 05, 2019

Revolutionary Workers Party−RWP, initially known as Revolutionary Samasamaja Party is a Trotskyist political party in Sri Lanka.

A political party is an organized group of people, often with common views, who come together to contest elections and hold power in the government. The party agrees on some proposed policies and programmes, with a view to promoting the collective good or furthering their supporters' interests.

Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is the island country in South Asia, located in the Indian Ocean to the southwest of the Bay of Bengal and to the southeast of the Arabian Sea. The island is geographically separated from the Indian subcontinent by the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait. The legislative capital, Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, is a suburb of the commercial capital and largest city, Colombo.

History

The party was formed in 1968, as a split from the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary). The founding secretary of the party was Edmund Samarakkoddy.

Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary) was a Trotskyist political party in Sri Lanka. LSSP(R) was formed in 1964 when the Lanka Sama Samaja Party was expelled from the Fourth International. LSSP(R) was constituted by the ideological hardliners who opposed LSSP joining the national government and wanted to preserve the bonds to the Fourth International. The United Secretariat recognised it as the Sri Lanka section of the Fourth International.

The party adopted its current name in 1973.

RSP had denounced the 1971 uprising of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna as adventuristic.

Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna Peoples Liberation Front, a Sri Lankan Socialist Party

The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, often abbreviated as JVP is a communist and Marxist–Leninist party and political movement in Sri Lanka. The movement was involved in two armed uprisings against the ruling governments in 1971 (SLFP) and 1987–89 (UNP). The movement entered democratic politics by participating in the 1994 parliamentary election as a political party, and has been a third party in Sinhalese Sri Lankan politics since then.

In the latter half of the 1970s, RWP developed contacts with the international Spartacist tendency. The relationship with the Spartacists was broken in 1979, and in 1981 RWP suffered a split when a minority formed the Spartacist Group India/Lanka.

After the break with the Spartacists, RWP developed close contacts to an Italian split-off from iSt, the Revolutionary Workers Group (GOR). In 1991 RWP was one of the founder of the International Liaison Committee of Communists, an international Trotskyist tendency that is now defunct.

Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a European country consisting of a peninsula delimited by the Italian Alps and surrounded by several islands. Located in the middle of the Mediterranean sea and traversed along its length by the Apennines, Italy has a largely temperate seasonal climate. The country covers an area of 301,340 km² (116,350 sq mi) and shares open land borders with France, Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland and the enclaved microstates of Vatican City and San Marino. Italy has a territorial exclave in Switzerland (Campione) and a maritime exclave in the Tunisian sea (Lampedusa). With around 60 million inhabitants, Italy is the fourth-most populous member state of the European Union.

Samarakkoddy died in 1992. Little remains of the RWP today.

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