Argentina - March 25th, 2017

Intervention of Carlos Munzer in the event in honor to the Syrian revolution and its martyrs held in Buenos Aires on March 25th, 2017

On the sixth anniversary of the Syrian revolution, today more than ever
Let us unify the struggles and the workers of the world to break the siege on the revolution!

Today, after 6 years, we have to affirm that the Syrian revolution suffered a huge isolation before the workers and the peoples of the world. The leaders of the world workers organizations, who live as trade union bureaucrats or as "socialists" in the seats in the parliaments of the imperialist powers, made the workers of the world believe that those who rose for bread and against the dictator Assad were not workers, but were "nomads backward", "clans"; that there was a fight between Sunnites and Shiites, Sunnites against Alawites, that they were all "backward Muslim masses", "jihadists" and all kinds of lies.
The truth is that there were very few times in history when a working class has been so denigrated as the one of the Maghreb and Middle East. In Syria, a country of 27 million people, 9 million of them are workers. The Syrian working class is part of the working class of the whole region, which produces 80% of the world's oil, which is under its feet and it is stolen by the imperialist gangs, when that oil feeds the trade and energy of the planet.
That is to say, the treacherous leaders of the working class treated the greatest gangs of thieves and criminals as "civilization".  Wall Street bankers and the imperialist powers, who went to rob the workers and the people of the Middle East the greatest wealth, which makes the whole economy of the world work. And at the same time, they treated the workers that rose up because they could not bear to have black gold under their feet without being able to buy even a crust of bread, as "barbarian", "dishonest", "jihadist" and "backward" people.
The Yemeni revolution, where the masses took to the streets with a piece of hard bread in their hands, because it is the daily food of the exploited, was an example of this struggle.
The Yemeni masses are a real industrial army of reserve of hundreds of thousands of construction workers, building the luxurious buildings of the bourgeoisie in Dubai and Qatar. It is part of the working class of the region that make the constructions in the oil wells. It is a nomad reserve industrial army, which runs through the Maghreb and Middle East.
This is the character of the working class in the region, and that is why all the workers know each other. They are from different countries and work together in the same oil wells, the same oil companies, the oil wells in the middle of the desert. Libyan, Egyptian, Palestinian, Syrian, Saudi Arabian, and Arabian workers live there. They do not recognize the national borders that imperialism has established after the Second World War when it drew the countries of the Maghreb and the Middle East.
For the Arabian and Muslim masses there is only one nation, the Arabian Nation. That is why each one saw the revolution of his class brothers and sisters in Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Palestine, as his own revolution, that is, the revolution of the Arab Nation, the struggle for bread and freedom of the Middle East people when imperialism was eaten away by a deep crisis and crack.
The Syrian revolution was dishonored and stained by the entire reformist left, when it had everything to win. Six years after the revolution, we have to draw lessons on how imperialism and counterrevolutionary forces acted to defeat it. Because tomorrow, in any country in the world where the working class go out to fight for bread and the bourgeoisies of the countries get cornered by the mobilization of the masses and decide to defend their interests, they will treat the masses just as Al Assad did to his own people, or even worse.
In Syria, Tunisia and Egypt today, there are bosses who, in the middle of a brutal counterrevolution, defend their businesses and murder the masses who have risen up. The reformist left, preventing the workers of the world from identifying the working class and the Syrian masses as such, permitting the Syrian working class was isolated in its revolution. 
How can this revolution last for six years? How can anyone endure six years of such massacre, the lack of definition of the class struggle, ten or twelve million refugees?
We have to say that the revolutions that began for bread and freedom throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East had a great ally, which was the American working class.
In 2008 a huge imperialist crack broke out, that revealed that the imperialist bankers had falsified all the accounts of their banks. They were mounted on a mountain of falsified securities on their balance sheets. It came to light before the masses of the world that 1% of the population appropriates 50% of the wealth. Oil is one of them, with the super-profits obtained from the barrel at a price of 140 dollars. The American masses, in the middle of the crisis and the crack, attacked by their own imperialism, did not want to go to fight to Iraq anymore and forced imperialism to withdraw from there. There is where the Syrian revolution began.
That is to say that the revolution began to take shape already since 2008. We have not only 6, but a few years more of Syrian revolution. Because it is a revolution of the whole Maghreb and Middle East, which had a starting point in 2008 on the streets of the United States, when American workers revolted and did not accept to go to die in Iraq and refused to accept that their imperialist bourgeoisie kill the people in the Middle East. The US had withdrawn from Iraq, after having invaded it with the most powerful army. There, the Sunni masses that had revolted in the north awakened. In the south, the Shia masses of Basra threw out English imperialism. It was a real revolutionary and anti-imperialist uprising of an occupied nation by US imperialism, which had its base of operations in the American working class.
The masses of Middle East were so brave, because they saw that Yankee imperialism fled the region. The American people began to fight. At the beginning of the revolution in Egypt, in Wisconsin they raised the slogan of "fighting as in Egypt". The Tunisian revolution and the chain of revolutions that opened up impacted the entire European, US and world working class.
It was then when the reformist left came to speak of the famous "Arabian Springs". They told the masses that dictatorships were falling and the struggle was for democracy, that elections and constituent assemblies had to be won. That was the way out.
The whole world Left supported this. When Mubarak was toppled in Egypt, all of them went to the Tahrir Square in Cairo to take pictures. When there were hundreds of thousands of workers in the streets, they all went to tell them that with democracy the problem was solved.
This was a huge and tenacious trap imposed by imperialism. Yankee imperialism could no longer intervene directly, but it could use its agents and the world reformist left to deceive the masses. And they made them believe that with democracy the bread would be obtained.
There were elections and even a constituent assembly in Egypt. The generals acted as if they were democratic and did not attack the masses who, by millions, took to the streets. In Tunisia, it happen the same thing. They made the masses believe that a long period of democracy in the Middle East was opening and thus they contained the revolutionary process of the masses.
But the result was that this "democracy," that is to say, the elections in Egypt, the constituent assembly in Tunisia, the one they promised in Libya, were no more than a detour for the fascism arrival.  The governments and states of the bourgeoisie in the region were demolished by the great masses insurrections. With US imperialism without intervention capacity, the trap with "democracy" as a deception that bread would be conquer with "democracy", brought the sabers of the generals and the black night of the whole revolutionary process that we live today.
Yesterday they liberated Mubarak the murderer in Egypt. He was vice president when the Camp David pact of recognition of the fascist Zionist state of Israel was signed in the name of the Arab nation in 1978 and he so well supported it for 30 years as President of Egypt. That murderer of the workers and peoples of the Middle East has just been released, while in the same country there are 40,000 workers who are on the death row and gallows poles for having revolted against the dictatorship of Al Sisi.
The counterrevolution is not only in Syria. Prisons and repression are to all the peoples of the Middle East, including the Palestinian masses martyred by the state of Israel. It is the response that imperialism gave to this revolutionary process.
The reformist left made the workers believe that they could not take power, that oil had to remain in the hands of the imperialist powers and that they had to settle for "democracy", while imperialism took the dollars. When the workers did not accept it, genocide came.
Six years have already passed, and if the Syrian revolution could not be defeated and imperialism could not stabilize the situation in its favor is because it could not intervene directly and had to do it through its agents. He used them all. First, he used Putin the assassin.
Putin intervened there with fury, hatred, relentlessly. In the first place, he did so because it is a gendarme of all the Muslim peoples, which are not only the republics of the Maghreb and the Middle East, but all the Eurasian republics of southern Russia. Putin is a hit man on the side of imperialism to keep the Muslim masses under control in Eurasia.
But overall, Putin intervened with such fury because he wants killing. This Russian bourgeoisie is taking revenge on the workers who expropriated them and who made the heroic October revolution and demonstrated that the working class could take power and build with the socialist revolution, the greatest of its conquests in history.
The Stalinist scourge, that bureaucracy that later became bourgeoisie, inherited the thirst for revenge of the old Russian bourgeoisie. This is what it concentrates today as a gendarme. This is Putin, who was the one that saved Al Assad and together its partners of Iran and Hezbollah were Bashar's Praetorian Guard so that he did not fall.
There were more than enough conditions to succeed in Syria. The masses fought near the Government House in Damascus. In Libya Gadhafi had been executed. There, the state was destroyed, but the working class did not seize power.
The world left wants to make the workers of the world believe that everything that happened was because they had made so many revolutions, for having mobilized so much, for having dared to defend themselves when the armies were killing them. The left wants us to believe that the working class was wrong because it fought hard and tried to make revolutions.
The revolutionaries, after six years of the revolutionary waves of the Maghreb and Middle East, of the heroic struggle of the masses, we say that it is the other way around. We were not able to develop all the combat that we had to give; The reformist leaders tied our hands and did not let us fight; They separated the working class from the Maghreb and Middle East from the Palestinian masses who were facing Zionism; They separated the workers from Iraq who expelled imperialism and NATO out of Iraq and Afghanistan from the workers of Europe and the United States; When the Spanish workers said that they put the dead in the war in Iraq and the Spanish bosses and the Monarchy took over the business. When the American working class revolted and said "we do not want to fight more in the war, they closed the road to the European working class and the working class of the Maghreb and Middle East to join their fight against the same enemy in a single revolution.
They separated and torn up our struggle, our revolution. Paris was not Baghdad as the youth of the French cites shouted. Washington could not be Benghazi. Athens was not Cairo, at a time when European imperialism was united and the working class entered into general strike maneuvers. Forty-two general strikes took place in Greece. They separated the struggles from the world working class. They close the road to the general strikes in Europe and shown the workers of the Middle East as "backward and nomadic" peoples. This allowed imperialism to concentrate all its forces on Syria, to massacre and punished the masses severely.
In those years, the World Social Forum, with the support of the whole Left, did a great favor to Al Assad and all the forces of imperialism. Fidel Castro, Chavez, Cristina Kirchner, the entire Latin American bourgeoisie who dress up as anti-imperialist and revolutionary, went to support Al Assad, giving him an anti-imperialist varnish to the greatest lackey of imperialism.
The World Social Forum met in 2013 and said "the enemy is ISIS," which was no more than a fraction of the Sunni bourgeoisie commanded by the Yankees to strangle the revolution because they could not do it directly. They assert the resistance was terrorists and the ISIS forces, allowing to keep them isolated so Al Assad massacred them.
Those who promised yesterday that the way out was democracy (when fascism came), then created "the perfect enemy" to justify the strengthening of imperialist governments to achieve social base and cover the greatest genocides on the planet. 
On March 24 in Buenos Aires there was a great mobilization on the anniversary of the genocidal coup d’état of 1976. We know what genocide is. We lived it too. They are regimes of terror of the capitalists.
The genocide in Argentina, as in Syria today, was a brutal attack of counterrevolutionary terror against the best of the working class and youth, to crush a revolution that had begun in Argentina in the Cordobazo in 1969. That was Videla, supported by the UCR and the PJ, the "democratic" parties that yesterday marched through the streets of Buenos Aires. Videla was the Commander-in-Chief to massacre the workers of the Factory Coordinators of Gran Buenos Aires, so that not to leave a milestone of classism forged in the heroic Cordobazo in Argentina and to attack even the last rebel young guy of the country. The same was Pinochet in Chile, who gave the coup to crush the revolution of the Industrial Cordons.

The imperialist bourgeoisie and the world reformist left want to make the world masses believe that in Syria and throughout the Middle East there are dictators who attack "backward Islamists" and "terrorists." They have developed a brutal Islamophobia, which is the excuse of imperialism today to support fascist and counterrevolutionary governments that massacre the masses, and with which they support the brutal exploitation of the European working class, since a large part of it is workers Immigrants from the Middle East.
The dictatorship of Videla, the Peronist party and the UCR claimed that they were attacking "terrorism" and "guerrilla" in Argentina and only attacked the best of the working class and youth. In Syria they are attacking the best of the Middle East working class and youth to teach the world working class, as they did with the genocides of Pinochet and Videla in Latin America.
And when that happens, the world Left, led by Stalinism and the World Social Forum, support the Pinochet and the Videla of the Maghreb and Middle East as Al Assad is. And that is the tragedy that suffers the labor movement.

This "new left" with old recipes says that the struggle for socialism is no longer raised, and that "democracy must be broadened to conquer bread." And there you are the "democracy" they preached in the Maghreb and Middle East, full of dictatorship, prisoners and massacres. There you are too, are Putin's fierce dictatorships in Russia and the counterrevolutionary Chinese Mandarins Party crushing their working classes, teaching "democracy" to these scoundrels who live off the parliamentary seats and alongside the labor bureaucracies in the trade unions.
They are not strong because of their ability or intelligence; they rely on the bourgeois states that support them and huge defeats of the international socialist movement, as the defeat of the USSR and China where the Stalinist bureaucracy that turned into a new bourgeoisie sold out the Workers States.
Fidel Castro did a great favor to Obama and imperialism by telling them that "socialism did no longer work in Cuba," He sold out Cuba to imperialism, planted the American flag there and supported Al Assad. If socialism does no longer work in Cuba, why should it work in Libya or in Syria? Why should we expropriate the oil companies? Why do we have to make the revolution? Why should workers 'councils and a self-organized workers' government be set up? "Socialism does no longer work in Cuba," said Fidel Castro, and the whole world Left came up to argue that Syria was a fratricidal war, where the exploited are fighting to each other and they are all "barbarians".
It is not true what Altamira of the Workers' Party (PO) says, that "the Third World War was beginning in Syria," that is, the United States was with the rebels. For Altamira, "The United States is making a war against Al Assad and against Russia." Strange war in which the United States gives all the air space to its two supposed rivals ... The United States has the largest aviation in the world and is more advanced in relation to Russia. It has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, atomic shields. Why is he going to give Syria's airspace to Russia?
How can there be a war between the United States and Russia, if the United States gave no weapon to the resistance? In any case, they were delivered to them to Turkey, not for the rebels, but for the FSA generals, to control and remove the masses from the battlefield, far away from Aleppo, Turkey and the FSA with their bourgeois generals sold out the revolution from inside. Precisely the leaders of the FSA linked to Turkey and Qatar, partners of the United States, are those who sold out Aleppo.
The PTS of Argentina went so far as saying that Russian helicopters did not bomb but carried humanitarian aid. Meanwhile, his friends of the MAS claimed that the only healthy thing in Syria was the Rojava movement, oppressed by Al Assad and Turkey over years. It is an excuse to put themselves under the feet of the Kurdish Communist Party which subordinated the Kurdish masses to a pact with Al Assad. There, the Kurdish masses are locked in the cities controlled by the air routes and the barracks of Al Assad and Putin. 
In Syria there is a workers and peasants revolution, sister of the whole struggle of the working class of the world and it is sieged
Six years after the Syrian revolution and the great punishment the masses are suffering, a vampire appears from the bowels of Wall Street. He is not very different from Obama, the latter shows his teeth. Obama killed from behind, used assassins ... he was a cynic. He had the good face and behind commanded the whole theater of operations of the Syrian counterrevolution.
Trump, the sharp-teeth vampire, is seeking to gain back social power into the US to regain the power of fire and the power in the superior military actions in the world.
Anyone who believes that Syria is an exception is going to be wrong and it will be late; because Syria is what is coming. Imperialism is in a huge crisis. Again the balance sheets of their banks are falsified. An uncontrolled gang of parasites in the global economy, on Wall Street, have counterfeit banks with non-existent securities, future mortgage bonds, with insurance bonds, buying bonds and soybean oil ten to twenty years  ... goods that do not exist. The balance sheets are falsified and all these parasites of the world are spending the wealth that has not yet been produced.
Now they have to recognize they have worthless papers in their banks... truth is that they are all broken.
Tump arrives to the White House to put order; He speaks the language of war that the capitalists speak in this rotten system. Announced, "We will double the US Air Force, we will build more than fifty aircraft carriers and ships, we will give 241 billion dollars to war companies in the US for high-tech research, We will build a missile system of all satellites in the stratosphere where nothing is breathed so that they can kill at any time, we will remodel the entire atomic park of the United States, we will double military bases around the world, We will double the US army. That is the domestic market that Trump comes to develop to put the world down on its knees, even their competitors the other imperialist powers!
The most important economic factor of this rotten imperialist capitalist system is war, the manufacture of weapons; because it produces weapons, bullets and the entire war industry is an inexhaustible business. In the war, the bullets are fired, the airplanes are destroyed, that is to say, capitalism returns to produce more bullets, more airplanes. Capitalism produces no more bread, produces no more wealth for the exploited, but produces profits for the capitalists on the basis of the development of destructive forces. That is why it is also the war of Syria, because it is the great business of the imperialist companies of the world. This is what you need to develop all over the planet. They will create and recreate hundreds of wars.
American imperialism believed that it could dominate the world alone. The problem is the crack of the economy shrank the world market. Imperialist Europe is disputing the markets to US imperialism; it wants the loot of Russia and China. The war is not between the US and Russia. The United States, the Franco-German axis and England going alone to the world are fighting to see who is left with the business of the Armed Forces and Russian military and who keeps the huge Chinese market. They are rabidly fighting over the world market.
If the revolution does not come in time, if the masses of the imperialist countries do not revolt, if there are many defeats as in Syria and the world working class is out of the scene, open disputes of the imperialist gangs will begin like The First And World War II, to see who gets the loot that has shrunk because the existence of the global crisis.
The Syrian question, it is not "Syria", is the question of the whole planet working class. That is why, for the world working class, the Syrian working class, the vanguard of the world working class, today massacred as yesterday under the claws of Pinochet or like fascism in Germany or Franco in Spain, by the rotten capitalist system which survives killing the only producing class that produces the wealth of civilization ... On the sixth anniversary, more than ever we shout:
Long live the Syrian working class! Let us unite the fighting and the workers of the world to break the siege they have on Syria!
Comrades, all we did was to fulfill our obligations: to fight and to die for the Syrian working class and for the world-wide working class.
Socialism or war is the alternative that human civilization has ahead.
On this sixth anniversary of the Syrian revolution, it must be said clearly that if the revolutions of the Maghreb and the Middle East have went backwards, it was not for lack of courage and combat of the masses, but for the betrayal of their leaderships. These are the ones that have saved and continue saving the world capitalist system.
The World Social Forum farewells from history by selling out the Latin American revolution and Cuba to the Yankees, after supporting Obama, who took away the greatest achievements of the American working class, such as housing, collective bargaining agreements, health insurance and his retirement.
Stalinism today, recycled as union bureaucracies, retains its whole old role, especially that of shooting in the back. Because under their control, the European unions stood at the feet of Al Assad, while they supported the greatest enemy of the socialist revolution in Eastern Europe, butcher Putin, representative of the Russian oligarchy and heir to the Stalinists of the Kremlin.
The conditions of the times of crisis, wars and revolutions are sharpened. Reformism enters an era "without reforms", that is, where there are no more alms that can show as achievements.
History needs Trotskyism. The program and theory of the Fourth International have again passed the test of the revolutions of the Maghreb and the Middle East. With the lessons of the Syrian revolution and the betrayal of the leadership of the world proletariat, a new generation of revolutionaries will be formed. In their hands will be carried to victory the revolutions that today cannot be conquered, a thousand times betrayed.
Open the road to the IV International of 1938 Re founded!

Carlos Munzer