South Asia Citizens Web

Some visuals, URLS to key reference materials for data and select commentary

People’s Union for Democratic Rights has long been drawing attention to egregious violation of rights of workers governed under various labour laws. Most important of these rights is the fundamental right to form trade union, so as to engage in collective wage negotiations and to ensure that conditions on shop floor do not become tyrannical.

The second decade of Soviet history, the 1930s, was volatile and consequential in ways that none of the other six were. The revolution that occurred then, explicitly designated as a revolution, and the third since February 1917, recast economy and society in ways that justify the use of adjectives like tectonic and paradigmatic. Unlike the first two revolutions, the apical character of agricultural, industrial and social change – directed by the Politburo ‘from above’ – rendered this revolution a semantic mystery: where was popular participation in support of the regime, as against its strength in opposition?

It was not until eighteen years after the October Revolution of 1917 that the first Marxist- led political party appeared on the Ceylon scene. This was in striking contrast to other Asian countries, where soon after the revolution small groups of Marxists began to organize.

For seventeen years from 1905, the Russian polity was soaked in blood and cruelty. The revolution was born and bred in the crucible of warfare. It is one of the most tragic ironies of modern history that a movement driven by massive disgust with war and militarism was overtaken by a series of events culminating in a violent ideological dictatorship directed - for the most part - at the Russian people. The aspirations of that time can neither be forgotten nor dismissed. But the only way the socialist vision may be revived is by speaking across state borders; and speaking truthfully about the Russian Revolution.