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| Sunday, 16 October 2005 |
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Concluding the Young Philip : The high priest of Trotskyism Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake
As we noted last week Philip Gunawardena was acknowledged by his comrades as the undisputed leader and theoretician of the LSSP and as such played the pivotal role in taking the party in the direction of Trotskyism which made the LSSP in the words of Isac Deutscher, Trotsky's brilliant biographer, a 'curiosity' among left parties. How then did Philip who was a member of the British Communist Party, turn Trotskyist? Ervin says that the seeds of Philip's later rebellion against Moscow lay in his realisation of the falsity of the Comintern line of 1929-32. This was Stalin's argument that capitalism was in its death throes and only Communists could oppose it effectively which made socialists, reformists and patriots guilty of a treachery even worse than fascism. But frequent visits to Berlin convinced Philip that this was no deterrent to fascism which was steadily gaining ground even in the face of which the German CP maintained its disastrous Stalinist line. However Philip remained in the British CP till 1932 although he had established contacts with Trotskyists in Britain as early as 1930. International events too offered proof of the wrong nature of Stalinism. In China for example the CP was instructed to support Chiang Kai-shek who was described as an anti-imperalist. However, in 1927 when the Communists in Shanghai established Soviets Chiang Kai-shek did not hesitate to ruthlessly crack down and decimate them. Ervin traces Philip's anti-Stalinism to his association with Frank Ridley, an ex-seminarian and Marxist intellectual active in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and Agrawala, a Punjabi from Amritsar in India. Under their influence Philip formed what was called the 'T' group (T for Trotsky) and intelligence reports in Britain's India Office confirm that Philip was indeed the group's leader. One of their meeting places was the British Museum library where Marx wrote his magnum opus, the Das Kapital, the fount of all left-wing wisdom. So fervent was Philip's Trotskyism at this time that he even attempted to meet Trotsky then in exile in Prinkipo, Turkey. He boarded the famed Orient Express but was apprehended by a Scotland Yard officer (who had followed him) on the railway platform at Sofia in Belgium when he got down to stretch his legs. Things came to a head at the May 1932 annual conference of the British Section of the Anti-imperialist League. Philip clashed openly with Harry Polit, the undisputed leader of the British CP and was expelled. The close Trotskyist had now come into the open. Following his expulsion from the CP and the refusal by the British Raj to grant him permission to travel to India Philip returned to Ceylon. He joined the Colombo South Youth League, a radical youth organisation of the time of which his brother Robert was already a member. In the words of the late Senator Reggie Perera he was already a hero in the eyes of the young when he returned from his overseas sojourn. The rest is history. What the foregoing evidence adduced by Ervin makes clear is that the LSSP from its inception was a Trotskyist party although the split came only later over the Soviet Union's attitude to the Second World War. All the leading office-bearers (President: Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, Secretary: Vernon Gunasekera) were members of the London 'T' group. Philip was also helped in building up a powerful Trotskyist party paradoxically enough by Soviet policy itself. The advent of the Soviet Union into the Second World War on the side of the Allies saw the Ceylon CP (formed by the Communists expelled from the LSSP) supporting the war effort. They took this to ludicrous lengths by joining the Ceylon National Congress going on Stalin's Maxim of aligning themselves with the national bourgeoisie whereupon the patriarch D. S. Senanayake bromptly left the Congress so obsessed was he with his anti-Communism. (The historical error of course, was that the national bourgeoisie was to come about only with the advent of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike). Charles Wesley Ervin's book on Philip (translated by W. T. A. Leslie Fernando) is therefore valuable for the evidence it offers about the roots of Philip's Trotskyism. It is quite clear that he imbibe his Trotskyism during his days in London which paved the way for the establishment of Deutscher's 'curiosity'. Just as Marx had propounded his shattering philosophy in London Philip too conceived of Sri Lanka's first political party in the imperial capital of our former overlords. |
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