Exploding the myth of Syria
being ‘anti-imperialist’ – the working class needs to mobilise independently to
seize power
Syria has a population of 21 million, of which about 54%
are urbanised. This means that the working class has a much greater weight in the
Syrian revolution today than 50 years ago. From the 15th March 2011
up to the current date, much of the urban working class have not participated
in the uprising against the Assad Baathist regime. The main reason for this is
that the regime has managed to posture as ‘anti-imperialist’. Further, in March
the regime gave a 20-30% wage increase to public sector staff and workers to
attempt to curb the current revolt. But the central reason why the Assad
military dictatorship has managed to sustain itself is that within the Syrian
and the world working class movement the leadership directly and indirectly
paint the regime as ‘anti-imperialist’. [A party or regime can be said to be
anti-imperialist if they oppose the
great imperialist regimes of the United States, France, Germany, Britain and
Japan and their violent, brutal subjugation and domination of the masses of the
world; as Israel is artificially sustained by world imperialism as its major
policeman of the masses in the Middle East, being anti-Israel is also being
anti-imperialist; The regimes of Spain, Portugal, Greece, Holland, Belgium, are
minor imperialists].
The role of Stalinism
Before 1989 the Stalinist ‘left’
(of the ‘Communist’ parties and some groups who pose as Trotskyist but who
adapt to Stalinist policies) and imperialism consciously built the myth that
there was a ‘cold war’ between the Communist and capitalist forces. The reality
was that the Stalinist (communist) parties were acting as an agency to behead
the workers revolutions from within so that world imperialism could continue
its domination of the world. The case of Syria illustrates this very well.
In Africa the stalinists
promoted ‘African socialism’, which was nothing else but promoting the African
middle class to become the local rulers on behalf of imperialism- in other
words a new form of control by imperialism through co-option of the local
middle class, in the place of workers organizing independently and seizing
power through revolutionary means. In Africa
the Stalinists either directly supported the African nationalist movements or
where workers were already organising independently, they formed communist
parties that tied the working class to support the national ‘socialist’
movements.
In the Middle
East the Stalinists supported the Arab nationalist movements and
the Arab national ‘socialist’ parties. In 1924 the Communist Party of Syria and
Lebanon
was formed. [in centuries gone by, predating the existence of Palestine
and even Judea, several of the countries such as historic Palestine
(including the entire ‘Israel’),
Jordan, and Lebanon were part of Syria]. When imperialism carved up the
region, dividing up Syria
and Lebanon, the Stalinists
obeyed their imperialist masters and dutifully split the Communist party
between Lebanon and Syria.
From 1941, when Syria
supposedly declared its independence from imperialist France, there were a series of
military coups aimed at pre-empting the masses overthrowing the regime. In 1958
Egypt and Syria unified into the United
Arab Republic, UAR. The Syrian Communist Party opposed this
unification. The UAR split again in 1961. A pro-unification coup took place in
1963, followed by a coup in 1966 led by a group of army officers and then
Minister of Defence, Hafez Assad. By 1970 Hafez Assad became President, having
consolidated the coup. Soon afterwards the Baathist socialist party of Hafez
Assad formed a front, the National Progressive Front, which co-opted the middle
class leaders of the popular committees. Both Communist Parties of Syria formed
part of this front which accepts that the Baathist rule and are the only ones
who can operate among students and in the army.
Both Communist parties (in
reality fractions that had split from the same Stalinist Syrian Communist
party) supported the bloody Baathist regime from 1970 up until the current
period when the regime is violently suppressing the uprising by the masses.
This what the Syrian
Communist Party wrote to all the world’s Communist and Workers parties as recently as 17th September 2011.
“ …Armed gangs were formed, attacking public and private properties,
and setting up barriers inside some cities in which they had had the upper
hand.”…
“Further, we
would like to add that the party has asserted, in all the documents adopted
during the last period that it supported the national stance of Syria.”…
“Political solution and the continuity of a real and radical
reform constitute the only way out of the crisis”…
“we call upon
these parties to solidify with Syria because it is the most important Arab
country resisting the imperialist plans to dominate the Middle East, and firmly
opposing the American-Israeli plan to fragment the area in several sectarian
entities whose control would be easy. Syria
also supports the national resistance in Palestine,
Lebanon and Iraq.
Besides it supports the right of the Palestinian people to liberate its
territories and establish a national state with Jerusalem as its capital.”
In summary then, the Syrian
Communist Party supports the Assad regime, also labelling the resistance
against the regime as ‘armed gangs’ and thus they also support the massacres by
the regime over the past period. They oppose a workers revolution in Syria,
claiming that a negotiated settlement with this bloody dictatorship is the way
forward. Their justification is that the regime is ‘anti-imperialist’ and supports the masses in Palestine,
Lebanon and Iraq. The
opposite is true as we show below. The Syrian Communist party help to contain
the industrial proletariat in Syria
also through their support of the Baathist regime in the trade unions- the
trade unions are also affiliated to the Stalinist WFTU (World Federation of
Trade Unions). [There is only one union federation allowed in Syria, which allows only the
Baathist party to lead it]. The Syrian CP supports the division of historic Palestine, accept the existence of Israel and thus has the same line as the CP of
the Soviet Union under Stalin, which was the first state to recognize Israel,
showing its role as a lackey of world imperialism.
We explode the myth that the Assad Baathist regime is
‘anti-imperialist’
While the Assad regime may
have ‘nationalised’ the oil and gas sectors of the economy, these are partnerships with imperialist companies and
not under workers control. For example the Loon Lattakia oil company is a partnership with Mena which is a Canadian oil company; Gulfsands Petroleum operates
extensively in Syria-
Gulfsands is in part controlled by the infamous Blackrock Investments, Schroder Investments, Goldman Sachs and Cheriot Norges bank. The bank of America,
Barclays, AIG and Merrill Lynch, as shareholders in Blackrock are thus also
participants in the imperialist operations in Syria. Earlier this year,
imperialist magazine, World Finance,
awarded Rami Makhlouf an award as visionary business leader.
Makhlouf is part of the Assad family that through Cham Investment Group, Mada
Transport (a motor assembly operation) and Real Estate Bank, control over 60% of the Syrian economy on behalf of
imperialism. Makhlouf and other Syrian capitalists have opened their warehouses as prisons as the official
prisons are overflowing with the regime’s captives. Yet the Syrian CP insists
that the regime is ‘anti-imperialist’!
The Communist Action Party in Syria
confirms that when the Assad coup took place the local capitalist class was not expropriated and continued to
operate. Thus when the oil and gas sector were nationalised, it was a state
capitalist regime that made this raw material available for imperialist
exploitation- the state using part of the revenue to create perks such as free
education and health care to create capitalist stability. [Free education and
free health care are not in themselves indicators of a ‘socialist’ regime. Saudi Arabia
and some other capitalist countries also have free education and health care
but are brutal anti-worker regimes. Even if education may be offered free,
under capitalism it is still a tool to brainwash the working class and produce
tame and obedient wage slaves for capitalist needs.]
In 2002 Canadian Syrian, Mahel
Aher, was kidnapped by the CIA in New York,
while in transit to Canada.
He was sent by the CIA to Syria
to be tortured for months as a ‘terror’ suspect. He was kept in the ground in a
coffin-like narrow hole, 2 metres deep. After he was released because his name
was cleared, the Canadian government tried to buy his silence through a payment
of $10 million. Aher and others have confirmed that Syria
is one of the places where the CIA has
rendition prisons. It is reported that Syrian-born Pakistanis are sent to Syria
by the CIA to be tortured. Other regimes which also have rendition prisons of
the CIA are Egypt, Jordan, Libya. Rendition prisons are outsourced torture centres of imperialism where their captives are
kept under harsh conditions which would not be allowed in the imperialist
countries because they would expose the true, violent anti-worker nature of the
regime. How can Syria be
regarded as ‘anti-imperialist’ when they are one of the main subcontracted agencies
of torture for US
imperialism? Yet the Syrian CP and
some of the world’s left that pose as Trotskyist like the Qina Msebenzi group, insist that Syria is ‘anti-imperialist’.
In 1975-6 the Syrian army
invaded Lebanon
to support the Maronite-Falangists against the Palestinian resistance. It was
the Syrian military support of the Israeli-backed Falangists that allowed the Sabra and Shatilla massacres to take
place. [The UN oversaw the disarming of the Palestinian masses, promising them
safe passes out of Lebanon.
When the Palestinians disarmed, the Falangist forces massacred them in the
Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps]. The Syrian army stayed in Lebanon from 1976 until 2005,
assisting imperialism to suppress the Lebanese masses.
In 1990 the Syrian regime
sent troops as part of the US-led
coalition against Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait. US imperialism was so impressed
with Assad that they gave them military
funding and equipment. Such military funding and equipment is now being
used to slaughter the Syrian masses.
In 1983 Israel annexed the Golan
Heights. Such is the cosy relations of the Assad regime with the
fascist Israeli regime that the remaining masses in the Golan Heights have Israeli citizenship but trade with Syria,
having access the Syrian free schooling
and free health care. There are 300 000 refugees from the Golan
Heights internally displaced within Syria.
The role of imperialism
Having shown that the Syrian
regime is a lackey of imperialism, the actions of the regime can now be seen
for what it is. The Egyptian regime shooting down protestors, the use of live
ammunition to shoot down anti-regime protestors in Yemen, in Libya (under
Gaddafi) and Bahrain, the use of tanks, the killing of soldiers who break with
the regime in Syria are all part of the same strategy of imperialism to drown
the attempted revolutions in blood. Where the masses have gone over to armed
uprising, as happened in Libya, as is now starting to happen in Syria,
imperialism deliberately caused a section of the political ruling elite to
break with the local regime, to join up with the masses in revolt, in order to
betray it from within. In Libya, imperialism deliberately set up the
Transitional National Council as a counter-revolutionary entity to gain control
over the insurgent masses in order to ensure that, in the event that the regime
was overthrown, it could be reconstituted, on a capitalist basis, that is, as
the same regime but with some new faces. Imperialism depended and still depends
on the middle class leaders of the Libyan resistance who were part of the
leadership of the popular committees that had been the base of the Gaddafi
regime, to be the base of their TNC. The base of the TNC is the Libyan middle
class.
In Syria, as soon as imperialism
realized that the masses proved far more resilient than they thought they would
be, they started setting up a Syrian Transitional Council, STC, made up of some
defectors from the Assad regime and from deliberately placed
counter-revolutionaries. The Syrian Transitional Council, STC, was formed in Turkey
as a reserve puppet agency of imperialism to sidetrack the Syrian revolution. From
the Libyan experience, the Syrian masses are correctly suspicious of this
Syrian Transitional Council. Through repeated attempts for its
counter-revolutionary agency to gain legitimacy, imperialism has used the
Syrian Transitional Council set up a broader Syrian National Council which is
trying to co-opt the leadership of the uprising, especially the leaders of the
local co-ordinating councils. Imperialism is trying to set up the Syrian
National Council made up of 60% internal and 40% external representatives.
[Thus the ‘new’ Syrian National Council would include the Syrian Transitional
Council- really just an expanded version of it where imperialism still has
absolute control]. In other words,
imperialism is trying to set up a counter-revolutionary council to strangle the
Syrian revolution from within, attempting to generalise their use of the TNC in
Libya
to contain and ultimately destroy the wave of revolutionary uprisings.
Meanwhile imperialism still supports the Assad regime to kill off as many of
the leadership of the resistance as possible.
In Libya, the imperialists used
funding and all manner of political instruments to prop up its TNC to gain control
so that it can now begin to disarm the masses and re-establish a capitalist
regime. A few arms were given to the masses, and only to the extent to boost
the TNC’s profile as combating the Gaddafi regime. The TNC called for a bombing campaign by the
imperialist Nato. The TNC hosted imperialist military ‘advisors’ on the ground.
Imperialism bombed the anti-Gaddafi militias from time to time and prevented
the really weaponry from getting into the hands of the masses; imperialism also
prevented the masses from flying the planes they had against the Gaddafi army.
Thus the fighting was deliberately dragged out so that the masses would be
tired out and weakened. The TNC sent the militia lightly armed and in some
cases unarmed to face the heavy weaponry of Gaddafi’s army. Hundreds, if not
thousands of the militia members were killed off by the Gaddafi armed forces
and mercenaries during this period of deliberate delay. Despite this, a section
of the petti bourgeois ‘left’, still called for a united front with the TNC
under the guise of a ‘defence of democracy’, while refusing to call for a
single cell to be set up of revolutionary socialists within the militia, nor
did they even call to organise a council of delegates of the workers and
militias to co-ordinate the fight against the Gaddafi regime. This council
could have spearheaded the fight against the TNC as well. As it is, the only
structure that was ‘co-ordinating’ the fight against the Gaddafi regime, was
the TNC! This petti bourgeois ‘left’ broke from the fundamentals of the
Transitional Programme of the Fourth International, which under the section on
the fight against fascism state the following: ‘…A merciless exposure of the theory and practice of the People’s Front
is therefore the first condition for a revolutionary struggle against fascism’.
In other words a consistent, merciless campaign to expose the TNC, its
capitalist- anti-worker- anti-immigrant nature, from the time it was created
and had little base among the masses, up to the current period, had to be
conducted. Lean on the ‘democratic’ TNC and ‘democratic’ imperialist Nato
forces against the fascist Gaddafi, the workers and militia were advised by the
petti bourgeois ‘left’- we will deal with them later, they said. The Libyan
masses captured and killed Gaddafi despite Nato and its TNC. Nato and its TNC
are now trying to disarm the militia and the masses to re-establish the Gaddafi
regime without Gaddafi. The masses are currently resisting.
The existence of Rendition
prisons of the CIA in Libya
showed that the Gaddafi regime was an agency for imperialism. Thus imperialism
had 2 agencies to crush the masses- the Gaddafi army on the one hand and the
TNC and the Nato forces, on the other. Socialist Fight and the Qina Msebenzi
group called for a military bloc with the imperialist agent Gaddafi against the
masses, the identical position of world Stalinist ‘communist’ parties.
A correct position on the TNC
is crucial for the Syrian masses and the world proletariat, as imperialism is
trying to generalize the use of a transitional council in areas where they need
to betray an uprising from within. In Syria, the Syrian National Council
is already distancing itself from armed revolt and is also calling for Nato
‘intervention’. What is needed is a merciless all-sided exposure and combat
against any Popular Front/ Transitional Council that imperialism wants to plant
from within the insurgent masses.
There is also a trend across
North Africa and the Middle East that imperialism relies in part on the Muslim
Brotherhood, in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Libya, in Syria, in Lebanon (with
Hezbollah), in Gaza (Hamas) and the West Bank, to act within the mass uprisings
as a force to maintain and sustain a capitalist regime. This means that the
Muslim Brotherhood acts to ensure that a regime emerges from the uprisings,
that is still tied hand and foot to imperialism. The trade off for this is a
stake within the political ruling elite of the respective countries and areas.
Towards a programme for the Syrian revolution
We also have to demonstrate
our programmatic differences with the 2 main branches of those groups who each
claim to be the Fourth International: We deal first with the International
Committee of the Fourth International, ICFI (who produce the World Socialist
WebSite wsws). The ICFI is largely silent on Syria and the massacres that happen
almost daily- this is no accident as the ICFI produces a daily international
bulletin. On Libya
they oppose the Nato invasion and the NTC but offer no programme for the masses
in their fight against the Gaddafi regime. Similarly while they criticize the
military preparation that imperialism is apparently making against the Syrian
regime, they offer no programme and do not even call for the Syrian masses to
set up a section of the ICFI there. They do hint that the Syrian regime is
under indirect control of imperialism as they expose that Total and other
French companies have partnerships with the Assad regime for years now. The
ICFI thus capitulates to the Stalinist notion that the Assad regime is progressive
and somehow ‘anti-imperialist’.
The United Secretariat of the
Fourth International (who produce International Viewpoint and who are the main
party in the French NPA) is more bold in their position: in their 21st
August 2011 statement, after Tripoli had fallen, claimed that now a period of
Freedom, democracy and the use of the wealth of Libya for the fundamental needs
of the masses, is now on the agenda. They claim to oppose Nato but say nothing
against the imperialist organ, the NTC, which is now taking every step to
ensure that there will be no freedom for the masses and that the wealth of Libya
is mainly for exploitation by imperialism. They claim that the next dictator to
go should be Assad. Thus, while claiming to support the revolutionary ‘processes’
on the ground and to oppose imperialism, they actually land up supporting the
agencies of imperialism such as the TNC in Libya and the Syrian National
Council.
The USFI and ICFI do not link
the fights of the masses in Syria,
in Libya,
with the necessary fight to overthrow the regimes in the imperialist centres;
they have nothing in common with the programme of the Fourth International.
The Communist Action Party,
although to the left of the Communist parties of Syria, has not completely
broken with Stalinism as they call for a democratic front to defeat the regime-
in other words, replacing the Assad regime with a regime dominated by the
middle class, raising yet again the prospect of a new regime that is capitalist
and a new agency for imperialism.
A draft programme for the Syrian revolution
1. for workers delegates,
whether local or immigrant, local or refugee, from every workplace to join the
local co-ordinating councils and to set up co-ordinating councils where none
exist based on a programme to expropriate all imperialist asset and the local
bourgeoisie (including Assad and Mahlouf the thief), without compensation, and
under workers control; that rank and file soldiers and the rural workers ,
rural poor peasant and unemployed youth be invited to send delegates to the
local co-ordinating councils;
2. for the nationalization of
all the land, expropriating all capitalists and all large commercial farms
without compensation, placing these under workers control; for model collective
farms to be set up and the poor peasants invited to be part of them; for allocation
of land for use by any peasant farmer with full support such as cheap credit
and assistance with implements;
3. Free all political
prisoners; close all the rendition prisons; expel all the imperialist troops
from Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the entire region;
4. disbanding the army, police
and the bureaucracy and for the general arming of the masses;
5.Down with the Assad regime,
all power to these co-ordinating councils, no to a parliamentary republic but a
workers government based on delegates from these co-ordination councils; break
with the capitalist Syrian Transitional Council and the Syrian National Council,
break with the Stalinist communist parties. For the formation of Bolshevik
Leninist parties in Syria and every country in the region as sections of a new
International- which can only be the refounded Fourth International
6. No to any Nato or
capitalist intervention in Syria
7. for the clarion call:
expropriate the 1% in Syria and every country without compensation, under
workers control, to be taken across North Africa , the Middle East, into
‘Israel’, into Greece, into the entire Europe and North America, and indeed the
entire world. In the semi-colonies we are enslaved by the agents of the 1%; in
the imperialist centres the 1% enslave the working class and lower middle
class;
8. For the Palestinian, Syrian
and Jewish masses to unite to expel the Israeli army from the Golan
Heights;
9. for the Palestinian and
Jewish masses to unite against the Israeli bourgeoisie and Arab bourgeoisie,
agents of the 1%; Free all Palestinian prisoners from the Zionist jails and
that of Hamas and the PA. For a workers’ and poor peasants’ government in
historic Palestine
10. For the refounding of
the Fourth International, with sections in each country; for a federation of
Socialist workers states of North Africa and the Middle east; for groundwork
preparations toward the working class to take power in the imperialist centres.