Syria Fact Sheet: Victory to the Revolution!

Rebel fighters hold their weapons as they take their positions near the town of Kafr Nabuda in Hama province, Syria, Oct. 11, 2015. The Syrian army, backed by allied militias, has made advances in western Syria after heavy Russian airstrikes. (photo by REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah)

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/11/syria-opposition-advance-hama-countryside.html#ixzz4MjO8HyuT

 

Syrian Fact Sheet

1)       U.S. sheds crocodile tears over Aleppo while their own coalition is waging attacks on people across the region; the tears are for the deal they had with Russia. The U.S. never had a problem with Assad while they were employing his torture chambers against captured Afghanis and Iraqis during the Iraq war or while he kept Palestine in check.   Indeed the U.S. refusal to arm the opposition with heavy artillery, anti-tank, anti-aircraft MANPADS and SAMS has long indicated the two-faced non-commitment to any revolutionary upsurge of the masses for democracy.  The U.S. has always been hedging its bets in search of the new pawn or in deference to Assad. The Obama “red line” declaration after Assad’s Sarin gas attack on Ghouta proved this. That pro-Assad figures in the west have had so much fun disputing the truth of the attack is due to the Obama administration’s refusal to energize their press control, exactly for doublethink reasons when they found no support in Congress for enforcing any red line.

2)       The Arab national revolution emerged again in 2011 with the democratic and economic demands of the masses across the Middle East and North Africa.  The people's demands could not be met under regimes that sustained imperialist control and perpetual semi-colonial subjugation.  Thus the masses came in collision with imperialism.  Both the dominant western imperialism and the emergent Russia/China bloc contesting for geopolitical advantage and control of semi-colonial resources and markets.

3)       The counterrevolution emerged from multiple quarters against the masses in the region from Egypt to Libya to Syria. The majority of local counterrevolutionary forces are proxies for imperialists, East or West. Thus we see Hezbollah backing Assad, while additional counterrevolutionaries are the proxies for regional players and are external expressions of intra-royalty factions in Saudi-Arabia and/or counters to Iranian intervention, and a virtual invasion by Iran with Russian technical and logistical support. To survive the masses have had to find arms where they can. This disturbs sectarians who equate the stencils on the arms crates with imperialist control over the end users. Some of these sectarians say there is no Syrian working class.

4)       The bourgeois army officers and Syrian capitalist renegades around the FSA/SNC who abandoned Assad and ran off to Geneva to make alliance with imperialism claim leadership of the opposition and make alliance with western imperialism in the hope of gaining control in a post Assad regime subordinate to the U.S./EU and free from the Russian bloc. They do not speak for the revolution, nor for the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC).

5)       Russia is not anti-imperialist; Russia is looking at Syria as a fertile territory for investment of its surplus capital.

6)       The bombing of civilian populations by Assad and Russia with no real opposition from the west is aimed not at ISIS or Al Qaeda but at the civilians who are organizing their own self-defense, including their own self administration.

7)       The Local Coordinating Committees (LCC) established across Syria are the form that self-organization takes, they are the natural organs of self-defense and survival created by a civilian population under siege.  Inside the LCC’s both the democratic aspirations of the masses and the need for civil administration and defense from the neo-liberal barrel bombs of Assad unite a civilian opposition against all anti-democratic forces. Thus they are an embryo of workers councils for self-administration of the society by the working population and the lower middle class and dispossessed farmers driven to the cities by climate change.

8)       U.S., Russia and China suffer overproduction of Capital and are desperate to find places to put it to use where they can assume profit in actual investment and not speculation. Syria has the misfortune of geographic location to be right where profitable pipelines can be built.  For Russia, Syria is a host that offers naval and airbases on the Mediterranean, a geopolitical objective of the first order as a counter to the U.S. bases that ring this body from Morocco to Turkey. This is also a proxy war over the allegiance of important business partners for both imperialist blocs, namely the business of Turkey and Iran.  For Turkish and Iranian business, the Russian bloc, just like the U.S. bloc would sacrifice the national liberation of the Kurdish people just as readily as sending their bombers or facilitating invasions of Syria.

9)       But make no mistake, none of these profit-making objectives can be achieved by either bloc so long as the revolution is contesting political power with the regime; both Russia and the U.S. endeavor to crush the Revolution; Russia seeks to obliterate it and fortify the personal regime of Bashar Assad; the U.S. seeks to combine elimination of the revolutionaries with co-optation of forces it can make amenable to the survival of an Assad regime minus Assad.

10)    The revolution increasingly comes to understand that national liberation from the combination of the Assad dictatorship and the invaders allied to Assad requires breaking with imperialism completely. This places socialism on the order of the day as the only way out and that the national democratic revolution has no hope of realization in a bourgeois parliament but must be carried through to victory by the armed masses and their own workers-democratic organizations. Stalinophiles count as nothing the proliferation of hundreds of Local Coordinating Committees or their five years of experience administering and exercising growing powers in areas liberated from Assad.  

11)    Defense of Rojava against ISIS was at first heroic and led by the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) with armed women’s detachments taking the fight against brutal counterrevolutionary theocracy. But as has happened numerous times in the post-WWII era, Kurdish national liberation has collapsed into an unholy alliance with U.S. imperialism. That this time, the betrayal was managed by the Maoist PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), the same group that lately abandoned the armed struggle within Turkey, shows how the stagist theory of Stalinism, in practice, abandons the masses when a revolutionary victory is within their reach. The U.S. forced the YPG to abandon the fight against Assad, just as it co-opted FSA forces on the southern front

12)    Co-opted forces allied to one or the other bloc can only deliver a carved up Syria corresponding to contemporary spheres of economic interests. Assad howls that this is what Washington wants, but has nothing to say about the forced redistribution of populations-- actual ethnic cleansing -- that is the object of the Russian air campaign against Aleppo and the invasion by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

13)    Since the end of WWII the semi-colonial states have been driven by the need of their peoples to liberate their economies from the parasitism of imperialism.  The Russia/China bloc is not leading an anti-imperialist bloc that can win national independence for semi colonies from imperialism.    Russia and China are not leading an anti-imperialist united front a la the World Social Forum’s dream of a “21st century Socialism,” rather they are trying to wrest countries from U.S./EU imperialist control across the global south and claim the semi-colonial prizes for their own profit.  Did their BRICS bank bail out their preferred popular front in Brazil and head off the U.S.-inspired impeachment? No!

14)    Today internationalist workers must defend the Syrian Revolution as it is the front line in the struggle of the international proletariat and oppressed masses against the designs of imperialism, the system that each of the two blocs employs in a quest for control of all the world’s trade and labor. This is what is at stake in besieged Aleppo. Take the side of the masses against every one of their would-be masters! Victory to the Syrian Revolution!

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Survival Socialism

The terminal economic crisis of capitalism is evident in the growing level of destruction of wealth; of the many wars and the massive human destruction caused; and the inevitable onset of climate catastrophe. These are all the terrible consequences of the capitalist class that cannot help but destroy nature on which it is parasitic. The capitalist class cannot survive without destroying the popular opposition to its rule and with it nature; the working class cannot survive without overthrowing the ruling class and imposing its own solution: survival socialism.

Society vs Nature?

Most analyses of this mortal predicament cast ‘evil’ capitalism against ‘good’ nature. This idea is now highlighted in the term Anthropogenic that refers to the changes brought about in climate (nature) as a result of industrial society. For climate warriors society has to ‘return to nature’ to survive or otherwise suffer the pain of extinction. Marx did not agree. For him, society and nature were one. The contradiction between society and nature was not that of capitalism versus nature, but one that runs through the heart of capitalism.

It is the contradiction between the class that uses its natural labour power to meet its social needs and reproduce itself as part of nature - the working class in the widest sense, and the capitalist ruling class that expropriates workers’ productive value as its private property, destroying all that is natural in society to increase its wealth. This is not about the neo-liberal 'financialisation' of healthy capitalism. The whole capitalist class is parasitic on the natural labour power it exploits. Therefore the concepts of class struggle, of class war, refer to the fundamental contradiction between nature as use-value and capital as exchange-value that permeates the whole of capitalism as the motive force of the historic rise and fall of capitalist society.

The Dialectics of Nature

We can call this the dialectics of nature, which recognises that the Marxist concept of dialectics is not confined to ‘society’ as separate from ‘nature’. For Marx, dialectics was a method of analysis which took as its starting point the reality of social change as a material process driven by humans producing to meet their basic needs. Before the birth of capitalism in Europe in the 16th century human society was seen as dominated by nature because its ability to ‘control’ nature was limited. Change occurred when new technologies allowed greater control of nature, that is growth in the forces of production and the growth of a social surplus.

Thus society evolved by a series of ‘revolutions’ in social relations to create new classes of owners and producers. Men overthrew women in lineage societies to privatise the surplus and create patriarchal class society; then some men became slave owners to privatise the labour of other men and all women; then some men became landowners in tributary or feudal society, privatising the labour other men and all women as rent; finally, some men who started as merchants became capitalists by creating the factory system to privatise the labour of landless labourers. Each revolution enabled the new class to proclaim its historic superiority in developing the forces of production to new heights only to be replaced by a new revolutionary class capable of even greater feats until they too become defeats.

End of Class Society

Each historic class society harnessed nature for private wealth. The socialised forces of production clashed with the privatised relations of production that formed a barrier to their further development.  So too capitalism, which long ago ceased to develop the forces of production without first destroying them. The contradiction between social labour and privatised property that runs through capitalism has reached bursting point. Thus capitalism is overdue to be replaced by a new revolutionary class, this time one that is genuinely superior because it is represents universal humanity.

A socialist revolution is necessary to restore those forces of production to nature by removing the parasitic capitalist ruling class. Capitalism has terminated the pre-history of class society and created the pre-conditions for real human history where the privatised surplus is is expropriated by social labour, not under a condition of scarcity, rather of plenty. The contradiction between potential humanity/nature to reproduce itself and the ruling classes that expropriated the social surplus, can now be resolved (the negation of the negation) by the working class, no longer an oppressed class, but as universal humanity, ending the privatisation of social relations and socialising production as part of nature. The Age of Plenty replaces the Age of Scarcity.

Social revolution for humanity/nature

Quoting from the article ‘Why is Russia in Syria’: “How do we want to die? Ground down by a terminal crisis of global capitalism? In one or other of the proxy wars that fosters national, religious or tribal divisions, slaughtering 100,000s of workers to smash their democratic or socialist revolutions? Surveilled and executed in our streets in the mayhem of global terror? Or will those who survive these, then face death by climate or nuclear meltdown? Of course these are all in the last analysis manifestations of the decline and collapse of global capitalism. Economic crisis makes wars necessary and the massive waste and destruction of war-torn capitalism makes climate collapse more certain. It should by now be obvious that capitalism has to die for the working masses of the world to survive!”

The question then is “how”? As in all historic crises of modes of production that stagnate, they fall when a new class overthrows an exhausted and defunct ruling class. Today we face a terminal crisis. If the working class does not rise up in time to replace capitalism with survival socialism, humanity and many more species will become extinct. This time the stakes are higher than ever before. It is not just about breaking barriers to the further development of the productive forces, but overcoming the barriers to our survival as humans. The ruling class must be overthrown, not simply because it destroys the potential for future development, but because it is capable of destroying humanity/nature embodied in all past and future social development.

Can we do it?

Can we do it? Yes, capitalism has created its own gravediggers. Everywhere, it has abandoned bourgeois democracy and the rule of law and now rules by naked force, militarising society to destroy all political opposition. Its weakest point is US imperialism whose productive capacity is now devoted to the military destruction of humanity. The US is forced to confront its rivals directly through invasions, occupations and ongoing wars. In its desperation to contain its old rivals Russia and China, whose demise as ‘communist’ states allowed them to emerge as new imperialist rivals, the US turned the triumph of global capitalism into its own nemesis.

This explains why the US and its EU and Japanese allies must act to contain their rivals by expanding NATO and building economic trade blocs like the TPP and the TTIP? It also shows why growing popular opposition to war forces the US to use proxies like al Qaeda and IS to create an ‘Islamic’ mortal enemy in the ‘clash of civilisations’ to divide and rule the global working class and shift the blame from capitalist terrorism to Islamic terrorism.

The proletariat stands for humanity

Capitalism has outlived its use-by date. It openly destroys humanity/nature by dividing and repressing the working class globally. It has to be overthrown by actively resisting its destruction at every point. The class war is being fought everywhere by Arab and Kurd warriors resisting military dictatorship and imperialist bombs, by anti-austerity and anticapitalist youth, by unions defending casualised workers, by hackers and whistleblowers, by social mediaphiles using the internet as a weapon, and by climate warriors opposing fracking and deep sea drilling. This is an international class war where the arsenal combines ideas, high tech, civil disobedience and military resistance.

However, the class war will be disorganised and fragmented by imperialist memes of nation, Islam, terror, violence, etc until the working class becomes conscious of itself as the class that represents humanity and fights for itself as humanity. Essential to this task is the international organisation of the working class as a united anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist force with a program for socialist revolution that can counter and defeat the organisation of the imperialist ruling classes. That program must empower the working class in its historic mission of restoring humanity/nature. Its victory in the class war will open the way to a future communist society. The victory will be sweetest for women workers who were the first representatives of humanity to be socially oppressed.