Update on the Syrian Revolution after the fall of Assad

 

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The fall of Assad on December 8 was a victory for the Syrian Revolution and shows the limits of the bourgeois democratic revolution and the need to overcome the crisis of workers' leadership. Syria shows that these limits will only be tested and overcome by workers' and peasants' revolutions that take the leadership of the resistance from national revolution to permanent revolution. Thus, the reopening of the Arab Spring in Syria pushes the balance of forces in this direction.

The Syrian Revolution has collapsed the structures of the bourgeois state with 13 years of civil war. The leader of HTS, Ahmed Al Shara (Al Jolani) has stated and demonstrated that his main concern is to keep the state institutions functioning, to this end the priority is the reconstruction of institutions and even the maintenance of remaining Assadist structures. HTS seeks viability and stability to govern. To this end, Ahmed Al Shara knows that he needs to rebuild the country and provide conditions for the return of refugees. The Syrian people want to return to their homes and find only rubble and destruction, and they cannot return.

HTS is a bourgeois leadership and Al Shara is trying to contain the Permanent Revolution by making it look like democracy. It needs to rebuild the bourgeois state, its regime, whether dictatorship or democracy, makes no difference. In the imperialist era, democratic tasks can only be achieved with a workers’ state and the petty bourgeois imperialist social left fails to see that the collapse of the state was caused by a revolution and that it is the absence of revolutionary leadership that prevents the advancement of the bourgeois democratic revolution into a permanent revolution. A leadership that does not rebuild the bourgeois state, but destroys it completely and builds the workers’ state.

Assad’s fall was not a blow to Russia or Iran, nor to the axis of resistance as a whole, but it does highlight the limits that exist under both Islamist and secular dictatorships. The Houthis, for all their effectiveness, represent those limits. This is the same old “weak Russia” line from the neocons to cover up another US defeat. Russia and Iran have lined up behind Turkey to resolve the main barrier to its BRICS membership by removing US/Israeli support for the Kurds to permanently destabilize, divide, and rule Syria. Turkey will now join the BRICS as the mentor of a sovereign Syria, whatever the color of its regime, and the further isolation of US/Israeli power in West Asia will continue until its demise.

Israel wanted a weak Assad so that it could divide Syria and expand in the long term into Hama, which it sees as part of Greater Israel. October 7 changed that and reopened the Syrian Revolution. A weak Assad allowed the US to control the northwest, supporting the Kurds, and the south, supporting Druze separatist groups.

The alliance between HTS and Turkey, with Russia and Iran, puts Turkey on a definitive path towards the BRICS. The truce between HTS and Hezbollah agreed between Erdogan and Putin is an operation by the BRICS members to arrange Syria to triangulate with Turkey and Iran and facilitate the exit of the US from the north and expel Israel from the south by realigning Syria with the axis of resistance.

HTS is trying to bring all bourgeois sectors into the government, including the old regime, which has sparked a lot of criticism from the population. The workers and the Syrian people should not stop their struggle with the promise of democracy because they cannot deliver it. People want to go home and only find destruction and the government is trying to disarm the militias. Reconstruction needs meetings of provisional committees to organize, the committees must be armed. The movement to collect the weapons of the militias is an agreement with imperialism and the Arab national bourgeoisies. They are trying to avoid any resistance that is out of step with the bourgeois leaders of the resistance axis.

 The military drive of the HTS ranks is still there, we have to defend the people's militia. The fall of Assad has shown what the internal limits to development set by these bourgeois regimes and sometimes imperialist interests to block the revolution mean, which can now create a more explosive situation than under Assad.

The fundamental shift of the masses in the global South against the normalization of genocide, with the masses in West Asia drawn to the fighters on the ground such as HTS, Hezbollah and Iraqi militias as a bloc fighting against genocide. How will the contradiction in HTS develop? Will it become bogged down in the imperialist character of BRICS, or will the axis of resistance shift to resistance from below?

The only force that can resolve this contradiction in the interests of permanent revolution is the armed intervention of the masses. We must immediately give military support to the unity of Palestinian and Syrian fighters to form a front against the Zionists’ plan to expand into the West Bank and southern Syria as part of a Greater Israel. We must also give military support to Hezbollah to defeat the Zionist invasion of Lebanon.

The world left needs a United Front for the struggle in defense of the workers and the masses in struggle, against the war and genocide in Gaza, which tests the program of the organizations in the struggle and builds an International Workers' Leadership for the Victory of the Permanent Revolution against the Permanent Counterrevolution that leads us to World War II and the destruction of the planet.

International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency