From Belgrade to Ceylon : When Sri Lanka had Worker”s Councils

By Uditha Devapriya

In a penetrating analysis in Jacobin Magazine, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California Irvine, James Robertson, diagnoses the problems of Yugoslav socialism. For Robertson, Yugoslavia during the Cold War, “represented to many a viable alternative to the Soviet model.” On June 28, 1948, the Cominform, the Stalinist alliance of European Marxist-Leninist parties, approved the expulsion of Yugoslavia. Having deviated from the Stalinist line, it could have expected little else. Facing a blockade from his former allies, its leader, Josep Broz Tito, hence had to rechart Yugoslavia’s course.One of the reforms Tito pioneered in his country, as a response to these external pressures, was the institutionalisation of what would later be called “market socialism.” This came to be embraced by not just anti-Stalinist reformists, but also advocates of a Third Way between capitalism and Communism in the Third World. One important innovation of Tito’s market socialist reforms was his network of Workers’ Councils. The logic behind these Councils was not immediately clear, and it was viewed as an aberration by Stalinists. Nevertheless, it was based on an unmistakable Marxist body of theory. In Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels had laid down the future of the State under Communist rule.

“State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished’. It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase ‘a free people’s state’, both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the state out of hand.”

(Anti-Dühring, Part III, Chapter II, 1877)

In other words, unlike the anarchists who called for its wholesale destruction, Engels contended that the State would eventually cease intervening in the social relations between people. Since Engels’s argument undermined the use of coercion as an instrument of State power, this meant that the means of production would be owned, managed, and controlled by the proletariat itself: a true “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The Bolsheviks had, for a brief period after the October Revolution, embraced this line of thought. Lenin saw factory workers’ demands for greater control over factories as aligned with the imperative of “the fight for workers’ power.” “The implementation of all these measures,” he contended, referring to the Bolshevik programme, “is possible only if all the power in the State passes to the proletarians and semi-proletarians.” Under Stalin this line was abandoned: in place of greater power to the workers, Stalin resorted to “administrative commands and mass mobilizations to reach economic goals.”

Tito institutionalised Workers’ Councils as a counter to these tendencies. For that, certain reforms had to be in place. In response to Stalinist advocacy of a centralised bureaucracy, for instance, Tito embraced devolution. In May 1949 his government granted autonomy to local governments. Political decentralisation led to increased worker participation: in 1950, a year after devolution had been implemented, the Yugoslav National Assembly legalised worker self-management schemes. The State, as at least one scholar has noted, in effect moved away from direct management of productive enterprises. This was bound to have an impact on Left movements elsewhere, especially in the Third World.

In 1951 the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, through its election manifesto, called for “the establishment of workers’ control in all industrial establishments and workplaces.” One of the prime movers of this suggestion was Leslie Goonewardena. Goonewardena noted that the Yugoslav reforms, which influenced the LSSP’s moves towards establishing similar organs and bodies in Sri Lanka, constituted “an original contribution to socialist thought and practice.” Regardless of certain obvious economic and political differences between the two countries, he considered it suitable for “an underdeveloped country embarking on socialist construction.” This was no doubt informed by the LSSP’s attitude to the Soviet Union, which it saw, in line with the Fourth International, as a degenerated workers’ state.

Goonewardena continued to emphasise the need for Workers’ Councils, partly as a measure to radically alter the colonial administrative bureaucracy. In 1964 the LSSP adopted it as part of its coalition agreement with the SLFP, in a bid to radicalise the latter and bring people into “participation in the process of government.” Against the backdrop of a parliamentary democracy, which Sri Lanka had been since 1931, it was felt necessary to join forces with a petty bourgeois party to foment revolution in the country. This led to certain defections, but it also led to discussions about those reforms, so much so that five years later, even the UNP could float the idea of “worker participation in managerial functions.”

On the basis of a common programme adopted in 1968, the United Front government that came to power in 1970 adopted a series of reforms which paved the way for Workers’ Councils and Advisory Bodies at State enterprises. This was necessitated, in part, by two factors: the growth of Public Corporations and a rise in the number of employees at these Corporations. Whereas in Yugoslavia the need to chart an alternative course to the Soviet line had determined the formation of Workers’ Councils, in Sri Lanka the imperatives of a parliamentary democracy would compel the Left to enforce these measures to radicalise a still largely colonialist bureaucracy. As Vinod Moonesinghe has observed:

The LSSP’s strategy was to use the electoral process to further the cause of the revolution. In introducing employees’ councils to state corporations, the LSSP’s aim was to create organs of dual power… The fact that the LSSP refused to convert itself to an electoral-based party from a cadre party shows that it had not “embraced” a solely electoral policy. (“The Decline of the LSSP in 20th Century Sri Lanka: Sivasambu’s Question”, Thuppahis.com)

The Councils and Advisory Bodies had very clear aims. Both organs were empowered and entrusted with powers to “check waste, indifference, and sabotage.” Wiswa Warnapala has noted that they were also “expected to bring down the cost of living and narrow the gap between the upper and lower rungs of the administration.” In Yugoslavia, at the same time, the Councils gave a direct voice to workers in key management decisions. The effect it had on the League of Communists in that country was, to say the least, significant: in 1952, the League effectively broke away from and operated apart from the State, hence “opening up the government” to competition between different ideological formations.

Sri Lanka already being a parliamentary democracy, such radical ruptures were not really required. As a result, the Councils remained subject to Ministerial directives. That did not, however, hinder further democratisation of these organs. Among the bodies that took the lead in forming them was the Ceylon Transport Board. Under Leslie Goonewardena and Anil Moonesinghe, issues like the utilisation of capital equipment and the reduction of overtime came within the purview of these organs. Moonesinghe adopted these at not only the Head Office, but also the Workshops, the Regional Offices, and the Depots.

To be sure, these Councils did suffer from several weaknesses. Apart from being subject to Ministerial oversight and discretion, they also led to tensions between the Councils and trade unions, the latter of which may have felt their powers usurped through the granting of autonomy to employees. The government did not ignore these issues: consultations were soon organised to prevent tensions from flaring up and defeating the aims for which these organs had been set up. Such tensions, however, did not totally disappear, in part because many trade unions were led by political parties, which had their own interests.

In theory, these reforms continued after 1977. In practice, they were abandoned. The passing of the Employees’ Councils Act No. 32 in 1979 did not lead to any progress on that front. In 1997, the UPFA government issued a Presidential Circular to re-establish Workers’ Councils. This, too, fell into neglect. The reasons are not hard to find: since 1977, working class mobilisation had been clipped by the then UNP administration, an administration that clearly favoured economic liberalisation over employee autonomy.

What these reforms would have led to, of course, we may never know. Nevertheless, their achievements were considerable. By 1974 212 Workers’ Councils had been formed. These covered a workforce of 135,000 in the public sector. The labour studies scholar Gerard Kester called them “an important innovation in social political development.” They were also highlighted by the ILO. Whether or not these signalled an alternative road to socialism, they became a prototype for the democratisation of the workplace, making them, as Leslie Goonewardena had put it, eminently suitable for an underdeveloped country.

In the country of their birth, Yugoslavia, on the other hand, Workers’ Councils obtained a mixed record: as James Robertson puts it, the contradictions which the Yugoslav model of socialism generated, including uneven rates of growth across regions, eventually led to their collapse. The country’s shift to market socialism, even under the guise of self-management for employees, could not stop its freefall after 1989. By then, Robertson notes, “[c]rippling foreign debt, structural adjustment measures enforced by the International Monetary Fund, and economic collapse amplified the centrifugal pulls of foreign markets.” The result, which came to fruition by 1999, was the disintegration of an entire country.

If in Yugoslavia Workers’ Councils could not sustain the contradictions of Tito’s alternative to Stalinism, in Sri Lanka they were hemmed in by the contradictions of a Left-petty bourgeois alliance. As in Chile, the bourgeois State in Sri Lanka could not withstand petty bourgeois elements cohabiting with a radical progressive Left. The result could only be a turn to the Right, which would come about in 1977. Whatever criticism one can make of the LSSP, and the Communist Party, for their decision to form an alliance with the SLFP, however, it was through such an alliance that certain important reforms would come to pass. The Workers’ Councils held the promise of such a reform. Yet as with every other progressive-radical piece of legislation after 1977, it would eventually, and tragically, be stillborn.

The writer is an international relations analyst who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com