Class Struggle, 116, Autumn, 2016

Contents
From Guernica to Aleppo
For a Socialist Aotearoa
Marx and the Media
The Truth about Libya
China's Socialist Future
Class Struggles in India

https://www.scribd.com/doc/305445969/Class-Struggle-116-Autumn-2016

The Truth about Libya

Revolutionary youth celebrate capture of one of Gaddafi's tanks

Martyn Bradbury editor of The Daily Blog finds that Hilary Clinton’s emails reveal the ‘truth’ about Libya. It was always a US/NATO ‘regime change’ mission to get rid of Gaddafi and grab Libya’s oil. That means there never was a revolution, the rebels were no more than paid stooges of the US and the result is a failed state, worse than when Gaddafi was in charge.

Was Libya just another ‘proxy war’?

 First, these so-called revelations are hardly new. It was obvious at the time that the US and EU powers coveted the oil that Gaddafi was promising to China. That is what you expect from imperialist powers when they are competing for a vital resource such as oil.

Does that mean that imperialism determined the fate of the Libyan revolution? No! The Libyan revolution won despite imperialist intervention. It got rid of Gaddafi's pro-imperialist dictatorial regime. There were excesses including the summary execution of black mercenaries by the rebels, and the summary execution of Gaddafi himself. These were known at the time and opposed by those supporting the revolution who called for such acts to be subject to a revolutionary court.

Semi-colonial revolutions don’t follow the blueprints of Western revolutionaries. Democratic revolutions against military dictatorships are not ‘pure’. Such revolutions in the West were bloody and were fought over decades. Revolutions are messy and do not mean that suddenly the future is rosy. So talk of chaos and anarchy is stupid when killings are a fraction of downtown Chicago.

Revolutions are always bloody because they are confronted by bloody counter-revolutions. Ruling classes rule by force unleashing anarchy and chaos to destroy revolutions. Revolution can only prevail by destroying the military dictatorship of the counter-revolution.

In Libya today it is clear is that the popular masses are still in control. The militias will not agree to disarm until a national army exists that represents all their interests. They control the oil production and negotiate shares. The US/NATO bloc and Russia/China bloc have failed to create a new client regime to pump the oil for them.

The machinations of Clinton and her US power brokers are largely irrelevant to this situation because they failed in Libya and they will ultimately fail in Syria.

The imperialist ‘left’ conspiracy

The so called Clinton ‘revelations’ are merely fuel for the social imperialist left that is desperate to find 'facts' to prove that Arab and other MENA people are incapable of determining their own future because they are dupes of the CIA or Muslim 'extremists'. This is the left that has benefited from generations of 'democracy' paid for by the blood of colonial peoples and suppressed by dictators like Gaddafi, Assad and Sisi. These people would not recognise a democratic revolution if they ran into it in a pub.

The imperial ‘left’ are liberals bought off by colonial super-profits decades ago to support to ‘progressive’ leaders (Gaddafi and Assad!) or big powers (Russia!) to create a better world without having to get off their backsides. When ‘reality’ social media shows up their conspiracies they have to look for new conspiracies to plug the gaps. Clinton's emails don't tell us anything we don't already know and nothing about real revolutions. Let’s look at how these ‘imperialist conspiracies’ to make revolutions have worked out in practice.

Western ‘Leftists’ who write off the Arab masses as no more than the pawns of Big Power spies or proxy fighters, claim that revolutions are the result of imperialist conspiracies. Classic anti-communist conspiracy theory holds that workers cannot make revolutions unless organised to do so by their imperialist masters. So those revolutions then must serve the interests of the imperialists.

Favourite conspiracies include that the Bolshevik revolution where the Kaiser supposedly allowed Lenin to travel in a sealed train back to Russia and contributed gold to back the Bolsheviks in return for a ceasefire. On the contrary, proving they were not puppets of the Kaiser, the Bolsheviks delayed signing a peace treaty to foment revolution in Germany. French and British spies also tried to influence the Bolsheviks into continuing the war against Germany. But the Bolsheviks served the interests of none of the big powers.

Bolsheviks were no imperialist puppets

 The Bolsheviks delayed signing a peace treaty with Germany in support of the German masses fed up with the war and primed for mutiny. This forced Germany to invade the Ukraine and destroy Russia’s agricultural and industrial heartland to force the Bolsheviks to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Within months the German soldiers had mutinied and the Bolsheviks had expropriated the assets of all the imperialist powers. The real conspiracy then became obvious. The warring powers hastened to sign the Armistice so they could unleash an invasion of 7 armies against the ultimate enemy, Bolshevism, only to be defeated in the Civil War by the Red Army, establishing the Soviet Union as a thorn in the side of imperialism for 70 years!

The Russian revolution was handicapped by its isolation as a result of the failure of the German revolution. That had nothing to do with the Entente whose greed impoverished German workers and helped drive them to insurrection, but rather to German social democracy which was bought off by the German ruling class to form a bourgeois “Socialist Republic” and to kill Luxemburg and Liebknecht the leaders of the Spartacists who demanded a socialist insurrection. This momentous episode in history proves that it was not imperialist spies manipulating revolutions, but rather organising counter-revolutions to divide-and-rule the proletariat and defeat revolutionary insurrections.

A second example is the Chinese revolution of 1949. No imperialist power, especially the US and Japan, expected the Chinese revolution to kick them and the national bourgeoisie out of China. The CCP influenced by Stalin formed an alliance with the ‘progressive’ national bourgeoisie, but it fled the country making it necessary for the party to go further than it intended and nationalise imperialist and capitalist property. Far from being the dupes of imperialism the Chinese bureaucracy was forced to expel it and to base itself on the ‘state property’ of poor peasants and workers. However, the bureaucracy feared the power of workers and poor peasants to rise, overthrow it and take state power into their own hands. So they plotted a return to the “capitalist road”. However, even then they were no dupes of imperialism.

While the Chinese bureaucracy painted themselves as “communists” they were actually moving to build state capitalism in China strong enough to resist any return to Western colonial domination. Thus in 1989-92 the US imperialist bloc celebrated the restoration of capitalism in Russia and China only to face the shock of these two countries emerging from ignominious defeat in the Cold War as born again rivals to US hegemony. Now both Russia and China led a block of “emerging nations” that threatened to rival the declining US imperialist bloc.

Revolution vs Counter-Revolution

 The class war is a constant battle between labour and capital. Revolutionary forces are constantly confronted and attacked by counter-revolutionary forces. As war and repression expose the attempts to use democratic forms to contain the revolution, the imperialist ruling classes are forced to resort to naked state power. They can only hold onto their power by hiring spies, mercenaries and agents to divide and conquer the working masses. But these measures too are insufficient. That is what Libya and Syria show us.

Attempts to intervene and manipulate popular resistance have come to nothing. There is only so much that the imperialist spies and mercenaries can do before they are powerless in the face of the armed masses. For all its “interventions” the US bloc has lost every war it fought since Vietnam because it could not destroy revolutionary workers and poor peasants who defended democracy against imperialism and its lackey client regimes.

That is why the weapon of last resort that the imperialists have is the imperialist ‘left’ that cynically bemoans the manipulation of the masses by the US imperialist bloc. For them the popular revolution is actually an imperialist counter-revolution. That is why they side with reactionary, genocidal regimes as “progressive” allies in the ‘war on terror’. 

The revolutionary masses in Libya and Syria refuse to bought off or subordinated to imperialism and its servants and will always overshoot the plans of their ‘masters’ when they have nothing to lose but their chains. One of those chains is the imperialist ‘left’ bought off by the comforts of civilisation to write off the masses as history’s losers. That is why the Libyan and Syrian revolutions will win only if based upon armed militias that are independent of imperialism and its lackey national regimes, and materially backed up by the world's working class.

MENA: Yemen, Iran and the Arab Revolution

Yarmouk Camp, near Damascus, symbol of the Arab Revolution

Battle lines in the Middle East continue to be drawn between the US bloc and the rising China/Russia bloc over control of the hydrocarbon resources of the region. This has not become an open proxy war since the China, Russia bloc do not want to be drawn into a fight over oil in MENA (Middle East, North Africa) where the stakes are so high. At stake is the fate of Iran. Iran is in the camp of Russia and China. It has the 4th largest reserves of oil and 2nd largest reserves of gas in the world. Its immediate interests are to get the sanctions lifted and its own oil flowing. It has a stake in Iraq where the Shiite led regime and militias are driving back the IS forces in the north. It is the main force that is keeping al Assad in power in Syria.

In Yemen the latest front in a series of connected fronts has opened as the US bloc led on the ground by Saudi Arabia and a coalition of the US lackey states, lines up against the popular Houthi rebellion that has overthrown the US sponsored dictator who has flown the country. While the US bloc claims that the Houthi are armed by Iran, Iran denies this though the Houthi have links to Hezbollah another Iran proxy. Iran as part of the China/Russia bloc is clearly engaged in a struggle with the US bloc for control of MENA.

We advocate independent working class action in defence of the Houthi uprising without any political support to the bourgeois leadership or its proxy role aligned to the Russia/China imperialist bloc.

The Arab Revolution threatens both blocs

While the inter-imperialist rivalry underlies these wars in MENA, the real threat to both blocs is the unfinished Arab Revolution. In 2012 a year into the Arab Revolution re-opened in MENA we wrote a balance sheet in which the success of the revolution was clearly in the armed masses fighting against dictatorships. To the extent that uprisings were steered into parliamentary ‘solutions’ as in Tunisia and Egypt the revolutions were halted. Where these rebellions met overwhelming armed repression as in Bahrain they were aborted. Where they met armed repression but survived to arm a popular resistance movement as in Libya and Syria, the revolutions are still alive.

Most important, the Arab Revolution had to be joined up at Palestine from East, West, North and South. If the Syrian revolution did not join up militarily with the Palestinian struggle it would be doomed. If the Libyan and Egyptian Revolutions remained separated they would not succeed. Thus it was necessary for the revolution to remove the imperialist borders imposed by Sykes Picot in 1919 and turn the Palestinian struggle into a Pan Arab Permanent Revolution.

In those countries where the revolution succumbed to the siren songs of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, they failed to arm themselves and win over the ranks of the army. In Egypt the SCAF (Supreme Command of the Armed Forces) sacked the Muslim Brotherhood regime of Morsi and continued its historic role since Nasser as the military Bonapartist institution that is the backbone of the authoritarian state defending capitalist rule in Egypt, not only from the external enemy, but from the internal enemy, the populist Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian masses.

The most important task of this military regime is to isolate the Egyptian masses from the rest of the Arab states. One of the first acts of Al Sisi was to close the border to Gaza and to the uniting of Egyptian and Palestine revolutions. Today Al Sisi joins the Yankee coalition bombing IS in Libya and invading Yemen with Saudi planes and tanks to smash the rebellion as they did in Bahrain.

In those countries where the resistance armed itself, civil wars opened up against dictatorships like al Assad in Syria, al Maliki in Iraq, and the NTC in Libya. Yet in none of these countries has the armed resistance united across borders to join the Palestinian struggle. But neither have they been disarmed and destroyed. Every attempt has been made by both US and Russia/China blocs to isolate and destroy the popular resistance creating power vacuums in which other forces especially Islamic jihadist were able to fill the gap. In Iraq this has meant that the non-sectarian resistance to al Maliki has been overrun by the Sunni IS in the North while the Shiite militia from the South have become the dominant force in pushing the IS back. Similarly, in Syria the non-sectarian militias have become the target of not only al Assad but of the IS and its jihadist allies such as al Nusra. The IS has now moved against the Palestinian revolution attempting to take over the refugee camp at Yarmouk on the outskirts of Damascus.

Sectarian or imperialist wars?

So while the armed revolution advanced from 2011 to 2013, it has been overtaken by counter-revolutionary forces who may want to carve out Islamic states in much the same way that Israel carved out its Zionist state. These are the open enemies of the Arab Revolution. The result is that in both Syria and Iraq the dictatorships have aligned themselves with the counter-revolutionary Shiite forces against the Sunni masses in an attempt to turn what are potentially anti-imperialist and revolutionary wars into reactionary sectarian wars. It is the stalemate between these dictatorships and their Sunni opposition that has created the vacuum that the Islamic State has moved to fill. Yet the fundamental fault lines of the wars in MENA are not sectarian but imperialist.

Yemen demonstrates this exactly. Look who is driving the ideology of the anti-Shia, anti-Iran realpolitik; Israel and Saudia Arabia with the US providing the intelligence and supplying the weapons. Israel, the Zionist reactionary state has fought wars against Hamas and Hezbollah. Along with Saudi Arabia the home of the Wahabi Sunni sect and al Qaeda, both are client states of the US bloc armed by the US to the teeth, and backed up by not-so-secret Israeli nuclear weapons! But who joins in this god squad of mercenary states after a bloody purge of the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Sisi and his secular Egyptian army that isolates Gaza on behalf of Israel. Turkey even chimes in from the sidelines fearful of a vacuum being filled on its borders by a Kurd nation that threatens its own territory.

Look to see who is backing the opposition. The Iraqi regime forces trained by the US are incapable of stopping the Islamic State. In Iraq, as in Syria, it is the Shia militia led by Iranian generals and backed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that are putting up the only opposition to the revolutionary democratic militias and the Islamic State. Iran is part of a military bloc with Russia and China. Russia has recently committed to supply S-300 missiles which are a defence against aircraft if not an Israel nuclear missile attack. Of course, both blocs are in the final analysis attempting to maintain stability of the whole of MENA against the revival of revolutionary uprisings that become linked into one united struggle.

For a United Front with Palestine!

There is only one force that can solve the crisis of war ridden MENA in the interests of the popular masses, those masses themselves. Revolutionaries recognise that the Arab masses are fighting a revolution against both imperialism and its national dictators, bought and paid for by imperialism. We give no support to fake anti-imperialist bourgeois war lords and jihadist mullahs who claim religious rights to steal the land that has been liberated by the masses’ struggles. If not the creations of one or other imperialist bloc, they are competing to create new bourgeois mini-states that do deals with one or both blocs for the franchise to pump oil or gas.

Against the counter-revolution in Syria, Iraq and Libya, the popular armed militias have to fight the dictators and their imperialist backers, and the jihadists who hijack the revolutions to create caliphates. This can only succeed as a common front with the Palestinians who have carried the burden of the Arab Revolution for generations. The key is Egypt the most powerful state in MENA that is the pivot between the Middle East and North Africa.

As we argued from the start of the ‘Arab Spring’ in Egypt the workers program against a military Bonapartism of Mubarak (and now Al Sisi) is clear. Re-activate the unfinished ‘democratic revolution’ as the Permanent Revolution. This means building a Marxist party that can raise a transitional program to mobilise the working class to build workers councils and militias to fight for the immediate demands of workers and poor peasants through strike action and a political general strike.

Such a program will challenge the Islamic fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood youth who have come to the fore with the arrest of the old Morsi generation and who are no longer following the road of parliamentary reform. Drawing the masses behind such a program will force the hand of the SCAF to resort to an Al Assad type civil war. This will split the ranks from the SCAF officer corps and create the conditions for an armed insurrection.

The revival of the revolution in Egypt will draw the US and Israel in to defend the Al Sisi dictatorship at all costs. The loss of Egypt would allow the revolution in North Africa to link up to the Palestinian and Syrian revolutions. It would signal that the non-sectarian Arab forces can form a bloc from Libya to Iraq and a potential alliance with the Kurds.

The only solution is the Permanent Revolution where the proletariat, small traders and poor peasants led by a mass proletarian party overthrow the bourgeois state and build a workers’ state. The legacy of the reactionary Stalinist parties that entered popular fronts with the secular Baathists and Nasserites has to be replaced by the program of Permanent Revolution of a new Leninist Trotskyist International.

The Permanent Revolution in MENA requires a transitional program that begins with the struggle for basic democratic rights of assembly and speech. But nowhere in MENA are such rights possible without workers taking power. The semi-colonial state is the agent of imperialism in extreme crisis. Imperialism can only survive by using these client regimes to super-exploit and oppress the masses. There can be no reform of the existing state and society. A revolutionary insurrection is necessary based on workers, farmers, and soldiers councils defended by popular militias from Tunisia to Yemen.

For a Revolutionary Marxist party!

For the Permanent Revolution!

For a Union of Socialist Republics of MENA!

The Arab Revolution meets NATO-Zionism

Syrian militia with outdated anti-aircraft gun Aleppo August 4th (AFP via Getty)

The current situation in the Middle East is one of a growing confrontation between the resurgent Arab democratic revolution – popularly called the ‘Arab Spring’ now two years old – and US imperialism represented by its military ‘gendarme’, Zionist Israel. The US and EU imperialist powers are attempting to impose a ‘democratic’ counter-revolution, to prevent the working masses from overthrowing their national bourgeoisies and breaking with imperialism. The global crisis means that revolution and counter-revolution are on collision course. Gaza is the first point of impact of the collision. The recent Israeli attack on Gaza was the imperialist gendarme testing the reliability of the Arab bourgeois factions to impose the imperialist ‘democratic’ counter-revolution. The outcome proves that the Zionist and Arab ruling classes are united against the mass base of the Arab Revolution. 


Driving this confrontation is the worsening global crisis of capitalism. The imperialist powers are undergoing a severe recession brought about by falling profits and overproduction of capital. This is not a ‘financial’ crisis but a deep structural crisis of capitalism. To restore profits the imperialist economies have to destroy $trillions of capital value which is why the world economy is still in a long depression. Made to pay for the crisis are the weaker capitalist powers and the world’s workers and peasants and that means further austerity. Between 2008 and 2010 massive attacks on workers and peasants living standards were launched. By 2010 resistance to these attacks were reaching explosive potential. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in Tunisia the masses of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) were ready to rise up. The Arab Revolution that had been frozen and driven back by dictatorships since the 1950s rose up and brought down one regime after another in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, while in Syria the regime is approaching its downfall.

The awakening Arab Revolution destabilised the rule of terror of the Zionist regime. Israel had reached a stalemate with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Then came the wave of uprisings from Tunisia to Syria which strengthened the mass support for the isolated Palestinian Revolution. The Egyptian Revolution put the freedom of Palestine at the top of its program, thereby declaring its anti-imperialism and internationalism. The army deposed Mubarak and conceded the election victory of his successor Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) to put the lid on the revolution calling for an end to Mubarak’s treaty with Israel. The Libyan armed revolt exploded and threatened to spread across the whole Arab Revolution. It was contained by NATO intervention and bourgeois parliamentary elections.

The Syrian people began to resist al Assad’s dictatorship and without imperialist support are today pushing to overthrow the regime. Under pressure from the Palestinian masses, Hamas broke with Iran to back the Syrian revolution against al Assad. This leaves Hezbollah as a proxy for Iran on the side of al Assad, weakened and isolated from the rest of the ‘Arab Spring’. The weakening of Iran’s influence in MENA reduces the pressure for direct US intervention beyond a CIA watching brief on 'Jihadists' in the Syrian opposition. The US is confident that it can find a pro-imperialist coalition government to impose a ‘democratic counter-revolution’. Israel is not so confident. A revolution without imperialist strings attached could develop into a mortal threat to the Zionist state and to the Arab bourgeois factions who rule over the Arab masses. Israel has lost the support of al Assad as a counterweight to the Palestinian revolution. The Palestinian Diaspora in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan became embroiled in the Syrian war as under pressure from the masses in the camps the PLO and Hamas came out in support of the revolution against the Stalinist PFLF-GC who supported al Assad. Thus it is no surprise that the Arab Revolution threatened to break out of the ‘democratic’ counter-revolution at the major fault line, Gaza, where the Israeli and the Palestinian bourgeois factions staged another missile war to test the new balance of forces in MENA.

The Gaza attack has allowed the Arab and Israeli ruling classes to test their relative power and re-affirm their class alliance against the Arab masses. The result is that Israel re-affirms its military gendarme role against the armed Arab revolution, by doing a deal with the Palestine bourgeois factions, Fatah and Hamas, taking the pressure off al Assad, and reinforcing the MB rule in Egypt. The ceasefire signals that Israel has tested its defences and reached agreements with the ‘moderate’ Islamic regional powers Turkey and Egypt. Israel has fine-tuned its gendarme role to play tough cop to the soft cop of US/NATO ‘democratic’ counter revolution. Imperialism has incorporated Israel into its ‘solution’ to the Arab Spring, the flowering of moderate Islamic regimes in a bloc with Israel against radical Islamic nationalism and against popular mass revolutions that are capable of breaking with imperialism.

Obama’s foreign policy setting is to stabilise MENA as a secure base to pursue its vital hegemonic interests in the ‘pivot’ towards the Asia-Pacific. This requires a firm alliance between the Zionist and moderate Islamic nationalist regimes against the masses. The US will enlist the ‘global community’ to pressure Israel to re-open negotiations with Palestine for a ‘two state’ solution. Recognising Palestine as an UN ‘observer’ state is a move in that direction despite US official opposition. To the extent that Iran’s allies on its borders weaken, Israel has less reason to threaten war with Iran. Thus Iran’s significance will be less as a destabilising factor in MENA and more a focal point in the inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and China for control over the Asia-Pacific.

Permanent Revolution

This imperialist policy setting for MENA - that of ‘democratic counter-revolution’ - is inherently unstable not only because behind the fig leaf of parliamentary elections there are the naked austerity attacks on the working masses. Fundamentally ‘democracy’ in MENA is incompatible with the existence of Zionist Israel. The borders imposed by imperialism after WW1 created artificial states, dividing and trapping nations such as the Kurds and other minorities. In the case of Israel however, imperialism allowed a new settler colony to drive the Palestinians off their land creating the Zionist ‘nation’ at the expense of the Palestine nation. Any claims by the Zionist state to ‘democracy’ are a lie since its very existence is at the expense of Palestinian national rights. Therefore, imperialism cannot impose stability on MENA by pretending to resolve the Palestine question, i.e. recognising Palestine and imposing a ‘two state solution’, as long as Israel continues to exist. Just as Palestine can only be freed by the destruction of the colonial settler state of Israel, the Arab masses cannot be freed without overthrowing the rule of imperialism and the national bourgeoisies that serve imperialism in the MENA. This means the Arab revolution must fight to complete the national bourgeois revolution by means of socialist revolution in the whole MENA region.

We can see what progress is being made in transforming the national into the socialist revolution. The most advanced front is in Syria where a popular ‘peaceful’ resistance movement was transformed by defections from the military into an armed insurrection. Here imperialism has not intervened directly to subordinate the popular rebellion to a ‘government in waiting’. The militias are not controlled by the SNC or by any attempt by the US to set up a ‘reliable’ alternative to al Assad. Despite the imperialist legacy of splitting up nationalities and the deliberate sectarian incitement by the regime to weaken the opposition, the militias are broadly committed to an inclusive, tolerant bourgeois democracy. Any attempt by imperialism to prevent or hijack the victory will turn the insurrection against imperialism. The Syrian revolution has already reactivated the Palestinian revolution so the two cannot be isolated. The question of whether a victorious Syrian revolution and the Palestinian revolution can be contained by a ‘democratic’ counter-revolution will depend on wider developments in the Arab Revolution.

While the revolution has been driven back by force in Kuwait, and so far contained by an Islamic regime in Tunisia, the resistance in Jordan where the majority are Palestinians has taken to the streets protesting against fuel price rises and calling for the downfall of the regime. This shows that while the revolution may be stalled or pushed back in some countries, in others is it moving ahead. Those who are being driven back or are just beginning their struggle need to look to the most advanced struggles to learn the lessons of how to fight for permanent revolution. If we look at Syria, Libya and Egypt we can see that some of the conditions for permanent revolution exist, while others have yet to be created.

Libya is the only other front of the Arab Revolution where the armed struggle succeeded in overthrowing a national dictatorship. It must be remembered that strength of the rebel army resulted from defections from Gaddafi’s armed forces. This is a key development that allowed the rebel army to win without becoming subordinated to NATO. NATO intervened to prevent the war of liberation from dragging on like in Syria and sparking a wider Arab war. It succeeded in installing a parliamentary regime but has not been able to disarm the militias or form a stable government. The recent attack on the Benghazi US Consulate shows that the US has some way to go to create a ‘reliable’ client state in Libya. While the elections have been widely supported the masses have yet to see any relief from the austerity of the Gaddafi dictatorship. The militias remain armed and the potential to overturn any austerity regime exists. This fact shows that it is vital for the Syrian revolution to build and maintain a popular militia independent of imperialism and of any pro-imperialist national regime.

In Egypt the popular revolution did not arm itself or take power. The military regime replaced Mubarak with Morsi of the MB as a ‘democratic’ facade, but this has already proven unstable. Morsi has assumed total power to rush a new constitution through that will guarantee a MB majority in a new parliament. The MB knows that its middle class support base will not survive mass resistance to the austerity measures that the IMF demands. It wants to create a constitutional front that allows an Islamic bloc backed by the military to restore a dictatorship. This has revived the revolution on the streets but the masses do not have the power to bring down the Government. Demands that Morsi retracts his assumption of total power or resign cannot be enforced as it could be in Libya by the armed militias. What is lacking in Egypt is any popular power based on industrial action or more importantly winning over the base of the army. Both of these essential conditions were never seriously fought for by the revolution of the streets. To realise them now requires a fight for a revolutionary constituent assembly to unite the masses and the base of the army to bring down Morsi and his middle class MB dictatorship.

Permanent revolution means that to win the most basic democratic rights, such as Palestine liberation, such as a constitution that reflects the popular working masses and not just the middle class in Egypt, such as a popular victory over the al Assad regime in Syria, it is necessary to arm the popular struggle. In Palestine the resistance to Israeli occupation has always come from the masses not the Fatah or Hamas bourgeois leaderships. In Libya and Syria, the masses were armed when militants and defectors from the army joined forces. In Egypt, the fight to bring down Morsi will mean winning over the base of the military and uniting it with armed militias based on the organised workers. This will open the road to popular democracy and to bourgeois democratic republics. Yet, in semi-colonies dominated and super-exploited by imperialism, the national bourgeoisies serve as agents of imperialism to rule over the super-exploited masses. The bourgeois democratic republic must always revert to an open bourgeois dictatorship unless it is overthrown and turned into a proletarian dictatorship. For the working masses to survive they must insist on retaining their armed independence from the bourgeois regimes and take the fight to imperialism. We can see that this is necessary in the whole of MENA just as the liberation of Palestine necessitates the destruction of the Zionist imperialist enclave.

A new revolutionary international

The Arab masses are fighting to complete their national revolution against imperialism in crisis and the national bourgeoisies that act as its agents. Their spontaneous demands are to reform the state so that they are not victims of exploitation and oppression. The default ideology of capitalism is that individual citizens are equal and that once a majority mobilise for equal rights this can be won. In Libya, Gaddafi was seen as the problem. In Egypt, Mubarak was seen as the problem. In Syria al Assad was seen as the problem. The revolutions against these dictatorships aim to create egalitarian bourgeois democracies. The problem is that in the epoch of imperialism bourgeois democracy is incompatible with the survival of global capitalism. Once dictatorships are overthrown, new dictatorships must arise in their place. This is particularly true of semi-colonies where imperialism must use the national regimes to repress mass resistance to super-exploitation.

This means that to win the most fundamental bourgeois democratic rights the bourgeois ruling class must be overthrown and replaced with a socialist republic – the dictatorship of the working majority over the exploiting minority. But for this to happen, the most advanced workers must have a program to lead all working and oppressed people to socialist revolution. But in the Arab states socialism has been repeatedly betrayed. First, by the Western social imperialists of the rotten Second International who turned their backs on national struggles; second by the Stalinists of the rotten Third International who aligned themselves with the national bourgeoisies during the national struggles; and third the fake ‘Trotskyists’ who made friends with Gaddafi and al Assad and co, and today give critical support to the national bourgeoisies. Those who pass themselves off as revolutionaries like the Revolutionary Socialists of Egypt vote for bourgeois governments. There is no revolutionary party embedded in the working class in any of these countries that fights for a clear transitional program that lays out the road forward from the struggle for immediate and democratic demands and shows how these can only be won by an armed insurrection – the Permanent Revolution. Building such a party as part of a new socialist international party is the most important and urgent task facing revolutionaries.

SMASH THE ZIONIST STATE OF ISRAEL! FOR A SECULAR, SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF PALESTINE!

DOWN WITH BOURGEOIS REGIMES—THEY SERVE THE IMPERIALIST MASTER!

US/NATO/CHINA HANDS OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA!

DOWN WITH THE REACTIONARY BOURGEOIS CONSTITUTIONS OF TUNISIA, LIBYA AND EGYPT!

FOR REVOLUTIONARY CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLIES FOR ALL FROM 16YRS OF AGE!

FOR WORKERS COUNCILS, WORKERS MILITIAS, POOR FARMERS COUNCILS, COUNCILS OF THE MILITARY RANKS! FOR GOVERNMENTS OF WORKERS COUNCILS!

FOR A FEDERATION OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICS OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA!

Statement of Liaison Committee of Communists 

Communist Workers' Group (USA) 

Revolutionary Workers' Group (Zimbabwe)

Communist Workers' Group (Aotearoa/NZ)

 Co-signed by Workers Socialist Party (India)

30 November 2012

DEFEAT STATE PERSECUTION OF ARGENTINE SOCIALIST MILITANTS OF THE LOI-CI

Some of the leading members of the Trotskyist LOI-DO of Argentina have been subjected to house searches and confiscation of documents and cell phones by legal authorities on false charges of fraud. This is a capitalist state persecution of the "Movement for Workers' Democracy" and an attack on the workers' movement internationally.

The Liaison Committee of Communists strongly supports the call for a campaign to fight the persecution of the socialist fighters of LOI-DO, to drop all charges and end the persecution of militants by the state.

We reproduce part of the Press Release of the Movement for Workers Democracy  below (any translation errors are ours). 

Communist Workers Group (USA)
Communist Workers Group (A/NZ)
Revolutionary Workers Group (Zimbabwe)

-----------------------------------------

Press Release of the Movement for Workers Democracy

STOP THE ATTACKS AND PERSECUTION OF THE SOCIALIST FIGHTERS!

Against the Trotskyists, no. Against us, no. We are with Aleppo and the workers and exploited who in Syria fight against the genocide to Al Assad on behalf of imperialism!

Out with the judges of Mossad like the fascist Melazo and the bosses justice that attack the Socialist workers and fighters!


October 1st, 2012

[...]On Wednesday, in simultaneous raids, in several houses of Argentinian socialist revolutionary leaders some with more than 40 years in the national political arena, were raided. The office of the labor lawyer Viviana Noguerol was raided also. She is member of the Promotion Board of “Movimiento por la Democracia Obrera” (Movement for Workers Democracy) in Argentina.

Days before, Paula Medrano was phoned by the UFI 8 of the city La Plata in charge of María Victoria Huergo, prosecuting attorney of complex crimes in the [...] public prosecutor office where César Melazo, the Magistrate of “guarantees” works. 

Paula Medrano is a "daughter of the disappeared" of La Plata city. She had called the tribunal and public prosecutor’s office asking if the corpse of her mother had appeared in the year and a half since the corpse of her father “appeared”. The phone call in reply was to inform her that the prosecutor's office had found cause to charge her with "fraud". 

[...] As already happened with leaders of Quebracho 5-6 years ago, this fascist judge Melazo now accuses worker and popular fighters of “fraud” and “theft” as a means of political persecution. We face a repetition of this proceedure, this time against socialist leaders, labour lawyers, intellectuals, and sons and daughters of disappeared. They have been targeted  by the Bonaerense Police (from Buenos Aires Province) [...]. 

The judge Melazo, last April 2, said in the press that “here is a punch of the Quebrachitos - that hid their faces - till we  break their faces”. Thus, this magistrate called for an attack like the murderous Bonaerense Police made when they “went to punch the picketers in Puente Pueyrredon” that killed Kostequi and Santillán in 2002. Some of the killers were caught not because a judge was investigating the Bonaerense police but because they were filmed by journalists at the moment when they killed the comrades in Avellaneda Station.

We are facing a provocation. The raids against socialists including detention of people at their home address. People that have nothing to do with the search warrant and were detained in public, in the street like ordinary thieves. Dozens of policemen and prosecuting attorneys trashed the houses and lawyer’s offices seizing papers, mobile phones and computers. They sought telephone numbers, personal notebooks, names, ransacked wardrobes, turned mattresses over. They carefully checked the books on Marxism and socialism found in the houses one by one. 

The witnesses that supposedly “were passing by on the street” were arrested without the knowledge of anybody. [...] the police and experts opened their computers and mobile phones without the physical presence of the proprietors of the housing and without their permission [...]
[...] Nobody should be surprised by this attack, when the Macri, Chief of Government of the Ciudad de Buenos Aires is accused of listening telephone conversations of citizens demanding their rights. Nothing can be odd when all the political originators of the assassinations on December 20, 2001 are free, as well as of the assassination of Kostequi and Santillán and the thousands cases of “easy trigger” against the Argentinean youth, among others. 

[...] Of course, we will show, neither before judges of the dictatorship nor their prosecuting attorneys living in La Recoleta, but before the eyes of the working class and workers of Argentina and the world that the true criminal gangs are those who steal the rivers, minerals, water, oil, the Central Bank, 50.000 millions of dollars of the savers while  all the bankers remain free.

[...] we will denounce not before judges who belonged to the CNU, the fascists of the Triple A who killed students in Mar del Plata, who in partnership with Mossad persecute the fighters for the Palestinian cause. While the Triple A has kidnapped some of us it has not intimidated us.  Neither did the military dictatorship intimidate us, let alone, the CIA, Mossad and CNU’s judges against which we fight.
 
[...] Facing the provocation, against the courts of the oligarchy, we call for a public tribunal of the workers organizations and those who stand for true democracy to bring to trial the judges of the dictatorship, their collaborators, the prosecuting attorneys and the oligarchy and expropriators of the people. We will investigate them. We will judge them. And before the eyes of the people we will show they are impostors.

[..]The internationalist socialists of world working class organizations will denounce the persecution of our comrades of Argentina because they dared to lead the Campaign of international solidarity with the workers and people massacred by genocides in Libya, Syria and Palestine. We accuse the political chiefs of these judges and the State as responsible. They are the agents of the oligarchy and imperialism that pillages the nation.
 
We know that these threatens and arrogance and this attack against the democratic freedoms are a respond to a relentlessly fight in defense of the interests of the workers all around the world and in particular of the Argentinian workers.

[...] The UFI 8 says it has an expert team with the best technology to solve “complex crimes”. They say to have the “best men” and the “best technology”…so, why don’t they find the kidnappers of Julio López if they are able to solve so many “complex crimes”? If they are of such "high quality” and “efficiency” where is Julio López?  [...] where is the young Luciano Arruga and Daniel Solano-delegate of the agriculture workers? Until they fi find them this is living proof that they only catch “chicken thieves” and allow the kidnappers, the murderous military-men, the corrupted politicians, and the transnational companies, plunderers of the nation, to go free.

We know that we will get the support of the organizations that fight for democratic freedoms; the socialist and worker organizations of the world that support the fighters in Syria and Libya; those that in Wall Street and in Europe fight against the capitalists´ attacks. Those who fight for the freedom of the prisoners of Guantanamo, Chile, Colombia, Palestine will be side by side with us.

[..] Thousands of worker fighters have been under prosecution for “the crime” of asking for what belongs to them with justice. The capitalists’ state needs hostages and worker organizations with their leaders having “the Damocles sword” over their head so they will surrender rather than openly fight against this rotten society. And they speak about “democracy” when there are thousands of worker fighters under charges and hundreds of youth killed by the police. Even they speak about “democracy” when there are peasant peoples massacred to take away their lands like Qom in Formosa, and there are policemen sent by judges of the same quality of Melazo and other repressors that in order to defend the exploiters’ lands don’t need signed search warrants, or orders for assassinations and humiliations of all kind.

[...] This is one more of so many political fights that our socialist movement has made in the Argentinean, Latin American, and world working class. In the particular case of the “Movimiento por la Democracia Obrera” of Argentina which has begun its campaign to stand in the next electoral campaign to present, this time with electoral legal status, its positions in public. This provocation is aimed at preventing  a socialist, independent, and intransigent voice being heard denouncing the interests of the exploiters and their political representatives in Argentina. They will not achieve it. We know of the great national and international solidarity that we will get through this appeal.

[...] The “Movimiento por la Democracia Obrera” is member of an international movement in support of the Syrian masses to stop the genocide of Al Assad on behalf of all the imperialist powers of the world. We take up again the socialist tradition of the Argentinian workers that in the ´30s sent volunteers, money and medicine to the battlefield in Spain against Francoism. We know that the “franquist” Argentineans of today are the ones attacking us and they want to stop us. They will not achieve it.

Paula Medrano
Viviana Noguerol
Juan Pico
W.M.


Clarification:

[...] Melazo ordered no less than 25 raids. What he found in these raids is secret.
What supposedly he found in the houses of the fighters members of the “Movimiento por la Democracia Obrera” that they had during a week confiscated by the SIDE, Mossad and Bonaerense will be exposed in a “public expert´s report”…since this note was already in the street and they knew about its existence.