September 8th
International day of struggle for the freedom of the Syrian revolution prisoners
Rally-tribute in Buenos Aires
Idlib: The masses take to the streets. The revolution doesn’t give up
In Astana meeting, Erdogan, Putin and Al Assad prepared a plan to deepen the massacre, besiege and impose the rendition of Idlib and other last trenches of the revolution
√ Don’t give up the weapons!
√ This is a people’s revolution!
√ Out with Putin, Erdogan, Trump and Al Assad!
√ Out with all the invader troops of Syria!
By Carlos Munzer, director of the paper The International Workers Organizer
We are supporting and standing in solidarity with the workers and the poor in Syria, who in Idlib have taken to the streets massively to confront the aggression of Al Assad and Putin and the siege imposed by Turkey, shutting down the borders and encircling that province with outposts. The masses once again march to the war cry “The people want the downfall of the regime!”
Meanwhile, we are in a common struggle with 23 cities demanding the freedom of the political prisoners and condemning the mass genocide of the militants of the Syrian revolution in the jails of the fascist Al Assad.
The demonstrations that took place yesterday in Idlib, as they were massive, remind us the 2011-2012 demonstrations that foiled the hatred regime of Al Assad and all the institutions of the Syrian bourgeois state.
In 2011-2012 there were mass demonstrations demanding democratic rights, bread, against a 400% increase of the food prices. Thus Syria was a link of the chain of revolutions that started in Tunisia and set on fire the entire Maghreb and Middle East.
In those years, in six months, the masses dissolved the repressive forces of Al Assad, as he sent the soldiers to attack… but the people couldn’t kill the people. The rank and file soldiers of Al Assad were the children of the people and they turned around with their guns.
Seven years after, we see the Syrian people resisting and presenting battle to the fascist Al Assad, Putin and the counterrevolutionary troops of the Iranian theocracy, also with mass actions. Idlib is besieged not only by the bombs of the murderers of the revolution, but also by Turkey, who closed the borders and shoots massively any Syrian that wants to cross over to Turkey and seek shelter there, while it has encircled the borders of Idlib province neighbouring with Al Assad controlled areas with its outposts. The facts also show that Turkey has besieged and step on Idlib. The Turkish regime and its loyal bourgeois forces of the FSA generals are preparing to be those who disorganize the resistance and to impose the rendition to the masses with the gun to the head of the fascist Putin and Bashar.
This is the perfidious counterrevolutionary plan resolved in Astana Conference. This is the plan of partition of Syria and the sellout of the last stronghold of the revolution.
USA took the oil wells in northern Syria. Turkey has the control of the route of the oil pipes of Euphrates river and now, besieging Idlib province, is preparing itself to disarm the resistance from inside.
Under the pretext of “peace”, to “stop the massacre” and to “prevent a humanitarian catastrophe”, Turkey is preparing to become the one disarming the masses, occupying an area of Idlib province. With its outposts, it will try to appear as an “interposition force” but will do so by disarming the resistance. That’s why it is there. That’s Astana’s plan.
The job that these counterrevolutionary forces, which have filled the Syrian nation with blood and partitioned it, won’t be easy for them. The masses are once again on the streets.
The revolution broke out first in Iraq in 2008 with the expulsion of the US army, with the first uprisings in Iran in 2009 against the Iranian theocracy and in 2011-2012 going through Tunisia to Damascus as gunpowder and it still lives. There’s resistance in Idlib, but also in Basra, southern Iraq. The Yemeni masses don’t surrender. Gaza confronts Zionism. And the workers of Jordan have shown they won’t accept the plundering or IMF starvation plans. The Iranian people have identified its enemies: the fascists of the Iranian theocracy, which “live as kings while the exploited live as beggars”, as they masses say.
The revolutions in Maghreb and Middle East were one of the great battles that the world working class waged against imperialism which in those years was trying to burden the crisis on the world masses.
In 2010 huge battalions of the European proletariat have also entered the fight, such as the workers of the Spanish State, France, England. The Greek working class shook Maastricht Europe with huge general strikes. The masses from Georgia, Romania, Hungary, entered to the fight against the IMF plans. The anti-imperialist fight of the Latin American workers didn’t cease. In Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria there were also struggle. The mass upsurge threatened to a new generalized mass uprising in the whole world.
As we have been denouncing, the treacherous leaderships of the world workers movement, the World Social Forum (WSF), Stalinism and its servants, the renegades of Trotskyism, disorganized and de-synched these mass revolutionary processes.
In Europe they set up the “anti-terrorist front” and invented a so-called “war against ISIS”. They separated the European working class from the revolutions in Maghreb and Middle East. Thus they left the counterrevolution’s hands free for it to take Egypt by storm, attack in Yemen and start a fascist offensive in Syria.
Syria was a key point for imperialism, and so it was the miners and working class uprising in Ukraine, which threatened to unite the fights of the working class in Eastern Europe with the west.
In Syria, imperialism had to stop the chains of revolutions of Maghreb and Middle East that had started in Tunisia. If it didn’t, these struggles would’ve joined the struggle of the workers in the central countries that kept on fighting. The “Indignados” (outraged) of Madrid had already taken Puerta del Sol and shouted “long live the republic”. They threatened the Borbon monarchy with hard struggles. Meanwhile, the masses in USA besieged Wall Street to the war cry “death to the 1% of parasites” with Occupy Wall Street movement. They surrounded the 8 blocks of the largest banks of the world. This is how the masses clashed against the bankruptcy of the world capitalist system.
The revolutions in Maghreb and Middle East were a detachment of this world mass offensive. They threatened to open a 68-74 type process, i.e., of generalized mass uprising, as we saw.
The workers in India started to fight too. The Chinese workers rolled the heads of the bosses that wanted to shut down factories as in Tonghua and Lingzou, when they announced massive retrenchments.
Imperialism in its economic marasmus saw the floor move under its feet. He called the WSF and the union bureaucracies around the world to put a wall of contention against the masses' offensive. In Latin America he breathed life to that scam of the "Bolivarian Revolution" that today is saying goodbye shooting the workers in Nicaragua and Venezuela. In Bolivia, Morales even murders his own peasant ranks, as he did days ago with the coca growers of the yungas, the same area where Evo Morales comes from. Not to mention Lula and Cristin Kirchner who kneeled down before the IMF in the Latin American Southern Cone. And also, as we saw, imperialism created a true "anti-terrorist front", not only from Europe supported by the bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy, but also from Latin America, where the "Bolivarian Revolution" scam supported the biggest agents and assassins like the Iranian theocracy, the army of the Yankee protectorate in Iraq, Saudi Arabia or even Al Assad that crushed the masses.
The symbol of this process was the Obama-Castro pact, which subordinated the American working class to one of the greatest "white collar" killers of the peoples of the world. Obama was the one who sent Al Assad to do his "dirty work" since the Yankees could not intervene directly after his defeat in Iraq.
The world reformist left, the lackeys of Wall Street, are the ones that really "turned off the light", left the world in darkness, so that the murderer Al Assad can guarantee his fascist “serial killer” plan
In 2013-14 two meetings of the WSF were held in Tunisia where more than 2,500 organizations, the Chavists, the entire left, the European Stalinist trade union bureaucracy, etc. They said "the enemy is ISIS". They left and did not appear anymore in the Middle East. Al Assad remained, this time with Putin's aviation, destroying all the Syrian cities.
This policy could not work nor be credible without the imperialism and Al Assad himself opening the doors of the jails of Damascus and Baghdad so that the mercenary forces of the saddamhusseinist old bourgeoisie - now turned into ISIS - would organize counterrevolutionary bands, transvestited into "Ultra-Islamic", to create the caliphate of "The Levant". Its only objective was to control the oil wells of northern Syria and the Sunni triangle of Iraq in Mosul, Fallujah, etc., when all this region was being burned by the fire of the revolution.
This way they contained that great Syrian revolution. Their cities were devastated, with millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of martyrs. In the prisons and dungeons of the regime the best and most self-sacrificing fighters of the Syrian revolution were imprisoned, tortured, martyred and killed by tens and tens of thousands.
But none of this could happen without the Sunni generals, comming up from the bowels of the al-Assad officer caste, disorganizing the masses, disarming them and with their army-parties handing over every rebellious city from inside. This was and still is the nefarious counterrevolutionary plan to defeat the Syrian revolution organized from Geneva and the UN, under the command of the United States.
The offensive against the Syrian revolution was also imposed against the Ukrainian revolution. With the Minsk pacts, they strangled the struggle of the working class, split it and divided it between the fascist Kiev and the subjection of the revolutionary mining movement to the Bonapartist oligarchy of Donbass and Moscow.
Today this imperialist counter-offensive that is unleashed against Ukraine and Syria, already runs around the world. The brutal labor flexibilization by decree in India, France, Brazil, South Africa and the one that is being imposed in fact in Argentina, is nothing more than the continuity of this imperialist offensive that devastated and crushed the most advanced focus of the revolution, while the treacherous leaderships were very well in charge of disorganizing the hard offensive of the masses that shook the planet during the capitalist crash in 2008; crack and swamp from which imperialism still cannot leave without throwing all its crisis to the world and to the exploited.
As we said, the treacherous leaderships have given a huge handicap to imperialism. The Cuban revolution was sold out to imperialism and, as we saw, Castro's agreement with Obama, was a new blow in the back to the processes of struggle of the masses worldwide. Stalinism, when capitalism is sinking, has launched a war cry from Havana saying "socialism is over". Right at this moment in which the masses present hard battles against true famines and generalized miseries, as it is the one that shakes the planet. In these moments the traitors to socialism leave to say that "socialism does not go any more". And they just voted for a constitution that legalizes private property in Cuba.
The renegades of Trotskyism, hastily, as Left servants of the Stalinism, have already come out to proclaim the four winds, to recite the same chant that "socialism is no more" and that it is only possible to fight to "expand democracy". This policy was already applied in the Middle East, with its calls to Constituent Assemblies that ended first with great frauds that disorganized the mass offensive and prepared the conditions for counter-revolutionary and Bonapartist blows.
With the masses in the streets of rebel Idlib, it will be Turkey now, with the bombs of Putin and Al Assad in the head of the exploited, the one in charge of strangulating from within and disarming that last trench of the revolution
If you see from these enormous convulsive processes opened by the crash of 2008, and from this counterrevolutionary offensive of imperialism that does not stop, yesterday there was a new fact in Idlib, an enormous event, because the masses appeared in the streets. Imperialism had everything under control and was already preparing its final offensive with Russia and Al Assad, and with Turkey closing its border.
But the masses are winning the streets. A land offensive by Al Assad to occupy this enormous bastion of the revolution, such as Idlib, can be very difficult for Bashar and Putin. Even it can put at risk what has been achieved so far with the counterrevolution.
The time when Turkey with its checkpoints, encircling the province of Idlib, is the one in charge of demobilizing the masses, disarming them and control them with their counterrevolutionary generals, consummating the partition and defeat of the Syrian revolution, is getting closer. For that they prepare themselves, closing their borders first and arming to the teeth their checkpoints that surround Idlib and border the provinces under the control of Al Assad.
The US has already affirmed that every plan on Idlib starts by annihilating the "terrorists", that is, the revolutionary vanguard of all Syria that has taken refuge there. No doubt, that the counterrevolutionary forces of Erdogan already have armed a bourgeois officer caste of the FSA, the same that yesterday sold out Douma, Ghouta, Homs, Aleppo and that accompanied Erdogan in his offensive in the Euphrates. This officers caste will be the one who will really play a fifth-column role within Idlib to divide the masses and even fill it with blood from inside. That is the plan of Erdogan and Putin, which includes to transform the lackey brigades of Erdogan into an internal police of Bashar, as they have done in every rebel city sold out from inside by the FSA generals in the cruelest way. Also, they want to turn the leaders of those brigades into generals of a common army and government with the fascist Al Assad. That’s the plan. Will they achieve it?
But the masses are in the streets. They demand the unity of the brigades to resist and fight. Since the Astana meeting, the "bad policeman" and the "good policeman" between Putin and Erdogan, with Yankee supervision, have been conspiring to impose the surrender of Idlib. Turkey will close its siege. Al Assad, just like a gun in his head, will deepen his bombings. Turkey enters Idlib to try to surrender it and not to defend that great Syrian revolution.
The last word has not been said. The crisis of the Syrian revolution is not the intelligence or capacity of its assassins or executioners. The enormous betrayal of Stalinism and all the social-imperialist parties that support Al Assad internationally allows them to impose their plans, divide the masses and even give the masses false illusions.
The crisis of the Syrian revolution is, in the final analysis, the crisis of the revolutionary leadership of the working class, an accumulation of treacherous leaderships that disorganize what the masses build in their struggle.
In Syria the renegades of Trotskyism have brought to the mud of ignominy and betrayal the clean banner of the Fourth International
The crisis that the masses have to fight and overcome is their leadership. They are all in the trenches of Al Assad or Trump and Erdogan, kneeling before the executioners of the revolutionary masses.
The crisis of our world party, the Fourth International, is added to the brutal crisis of the leadership of the masses. Pabloism and its traitors today carried their banner openly to the mud of betrayal, as we saw it with openly see in the events of Syria, Middle East and Ukraine.
They have dissolved the Fourth International in fronts or common parties with Stalinism and all its spoils that continued it like Podemos, Syriza and the European Left Party. They are the “socialists of the queen” of the British SWP that entered to the Labour Party of London City, or those who have done the same with the imperialist Democratic Party of Obama and the Clintons. The former-Trotskyists are already openly within all those organizations together with the Stalinists in true single parties and class collaboration fronts.
While the "anticapitalists" became appendixes all the Stalinist fronts in Europe, Partido Obrero (PO) of Argentina and its partners have reconstructed a parody of "Revolutionary International." They have just done it with the Unified Communist Party (OKP, for its acronym in Russian) of Russia, which is a party of the former Stalinist bureaucracy that handed over the workers state and restored capitalism in the USSR in '89.
PO’s partner, the Socialist Workers Party (EEK) of Greece of Savas Matzas, has made a bridge with Stalinism, as they did for decades supporting even Gorbachev himself. Their Stalinist policy of "anti-fascist front" with the "progressive" and "democratic" bourgeoisies led Matzas to establish closer ties with several Stalinist parties in Eastern Europe, as those which went to defeat the miners movement in Donbass from within, together with the pro-Putin oligarchs of that region. Jorge Altamira of PO, ridding the coat-tails of EEK, has just founded a new international, affirming he is proud of setting it up together with the Stalinists.
Darya Mitina of OKP, after taking flowers to Stalin’s grave, was in Buenos Aires in the international meeting of PO. Mitina was not just a guest to that meeting. This is proved because a few months later PO and EEK founded with her and her OKP an international party in Greece. Altamira had already announced that they would set up a new international with Stalinist currents. So the “confluence” between the renegades of Trotskyism and Putin appendix parties ended up in a common party. The former Trotskyists kneel before the Stalinists.
Mitina is a founding member of the Stalinist Youth in the bourgeois and oligarchic Ukraine in 1993. Mitina with the OKP went to Damascus to pay tribute and to support Al Assad and with the fascists of Belgium created a committee to support butcher Putin and his bombing in Syria, while maintaining, as it continues to do, the Minsk pacts with which Putin’s Russian oligarchy has drowned the revolutionary uprisings of the masses of the Donbass, dividing them from the workers of Kiev.
The definitive surrender of the Fourth International banners to Stalinism by the renegades of Trotskyism has deepened the crisis of leadership of the proletariat. This is the most backward factor of the revolutionary processes and of the heroic battles waged by the masses: their leadership that in the name of socialism only betrays it every day.
Also, PTS and MAS of Argentina, along other neo-Trotskyist and anarchist-Stalinist currents, stated that the best thing that could happen in Syria was for the YPG and the PKK to win. Here it is clear which were the "convergences between Trotsky and Gramsci in the '30s", falsely posed by PTS. They have subjected the world working class, and particularly the Kurdish people, to the Stalinist traitors of the PKK. That is, they submitted the struggle for the national liberation of the Kurdish people to Al Assad. And the last and Putin to a pact with Erdogan; it is an infamy that not only surrendered the Kurdish people in Syria, but throughout the region. Everything was a vile counterrevolutionary hoax. Today these leftists are under the command of Kurdish Stalinism and the 10 US military bases installed in northern Syria. That is what they did: they united their banners to Stalinism to support imperialism.
It is now clear: The former Trotskyists are in single parties with Stalinism and with social-imperialist currents in the entire world. The crisis of leadership of the proletariat is thus about the perfidious role of the treacherous leaderships of containing and diverting the revolutionary processes, and if not, to attack them openly, as it happens with the Syrian revolution.
Today also the curtain rises so that another sector of the world socialist-imperialist left that was crying out for the US, Turkey or Qatar to arm the Syrian resistance be exposed. This was done by LIT, Izquierda Socialista of Argentina and UIT-CI, British SWP... The US had already sent ISIS, the ayatollahs and Putin. And now Turkey is not going arm the resistance, but to disarm it and deliver its last stronghold.
The Syrian masses paid a high Price for the false illusions imposed by the FSA generals and these currents of the left of trying to make them believe that the “democratic” imperialism was going to support and defend the revolution “against the fascists”. A brutal deception, because democracy and fascism come out of the same sewer, that is, this capitalist system; while the Syrian revolution fighting for bread confronted it openly.
Comrades, today a decisive battle is being held in Middle East and, the outcome of that battle will depend largely on what happens with the battles in every continent. A battle is being prepared to recolonize Russia and China in the trade war between the US and Germany. The attack on the working class of China and Russia has already begun and continues with a policy of looting, famine and attack on the conquests of the entire labour movement, including the rest of the so-called BRICS such as South Africa and Brazil. Argentina is in crisis and doubly looted by the IMF.
In Russia they have liquidated pensions. Putin’s victory in Syria means that workers in Russia are deprived of their pensions and they will retire when they are 70. Millions of workers do not collect their salaries. But there is enough money to arm fascist troops to massacre in Syria. This is the role of the hit man Putin and his servants.
The battle in Idlib today has huge enemies that are not only Al Assad’s barrels or Putin’s bombing. We have already seen how the invasion of Turkey is and will be the great counter-revolutionary factor acting to disorganize from within the enormous struggle of the Idlib masses that have won the streets, so that the resistance there will not regroup its forces and reopen the fronts towards Damascus, Daraa, Aleppo...
But masses do not leave the streets. The outcome is not clear. The crisis of leadership deepens. If the revolution is submitted to the bourgeoisie and its various gangs, surely it will be defeated... But, we insist, the masses are on the streets. The cry of “They shall not pass” is heard throughout the world. In Idlib there are the militiamen who have already heard the "siren songs" of those who said that they had to disarm and make a pact with Al Assad. They already saw FSA generals put on the uniforms of Bashar's army or become their police. It will not be easy for Turkey to impose its plan of surrender from within and to disarm the masses.
The last chapter of the Syrian revolution has not been written yet. But the more and more workers of Syria and world manage to recognize who their enemies are and who their allies will be, the closer we will be to defend the Syrian revolution, to its last trench and to prepare a mass counteroffensive in Syria and all the region.
We must conquer a program of social reforms for the exploited to dispute the leadership of the military war against Al Assad to the cowardly Sunni bourgeoisie and clear out all the false illusions that Erdogan and his Bonapartist troops are coming to save the oppressed of Syria.
Erdogan brandishes the whip of repression and slavery against the Turkish workers, the Kurdish people and the millions of Syrian refugees that are in his borders. The road to victory cannot be other than: the weapons taken during the civil war must be controlled by the people who are already in the streets. In Idlib, nobody disarms, nor any foreign force nor the counterrevolutionaries of Al Assad occupy a millimeter of territory.
One person, one rifle! Heavy weaponry is not to be surrendered! For committees of workers and soldiers! Let the shora and the coordination committees come back!
For the people, "let the regime fall!" means to conquer bread and crush the fascist forces of Al Assad. In the liberated zones, the cost of living is worse than in the areas controlled by dog Bashar. The demand that the entire economy of liberated Idlib, of Daraa or Aleppo, their commerce, industries and banks move to the hands of the people so they can eat is a very powerful missile for the masses to revolt in Al Assad’s rearguard and to increase by a thousand the fighting mood and spirit of the rebel masses. This is also a demand felt by millions of refugees, so that they can return to Syria and resume the fight and so that the counterrevolutionary forces of Erdogan, murderers of their own people and who are ready to also act as gendarme of all imperialism in the region.
No civil war is won without a program of social reforms. The expropriation of capitalists is the way to separate the bourgeoisie from the weapons and to return them to the people.
The fight to nationalize without compensation the banks and the oil wells all over Syria, as compensation also for the destruction and looting of the nation, is the minimum program for the exploited to give their lives to the end in this civil war, where going back means death. This is the only way forward to recover and rebuild the houses and the entire Syria, which was devastated by the occupation troops.
A revolutionary program like this would awaken the sympathy of the masses of the entire Middle East, who have under their feet 80% of the oil and gas of the world, while they die out of hunger and suffer the worst. And the workers of Europe and of the entire world will see that in Syria there’s an ongoing battle in defense of the interests of the working class and the oppressed of the planet. They would see that the victory of the Syrian resistance is a central question to stop the attack of the capitalists in a worldwide level.
The program of the socialist revolution is the program of the victory for the civil war. The call is to raise it as a demand of the exploited throughout Maghreb and Middle East for the entire region to return to war cry of " the regime must fall," the one of Al Assad, Putin... and Erdogan. But not only there, but also the infamous regimes of Wall Street, the Bourbons in the Spanish State, the French V Republic, etc.
Decisive battles are coming. Today, more than ever, the struggle to set up a revolutionary leadership of the masses of Syria and Middle East has become fundamental. We have dedicated all our forces in this task.
We from the FLTI, we want to greet all the comrades who marched around the world and particularly in Idlib. And we state that the action of the masses in the streets poses new obligations to us and in this case we have to assume them in the American continent.
In Argentina, the G20 meeting will be held in November. We must respond to imperialism for all these counterrevolutionary battles that it organizes in Middle East and in the world. The next G20, like yesterday in Hamburg, deserves hell. The same hell that the imperialist pirates imposed to the masses from Syria, Middle East and the whole world, they deserve in Argentina; and that is a task for all the workers of the world and Latin America in particular.
In those battles there will be the banner of the Syrian revolution. And there will also be against the Russian embassy, against the assassin Putin, presented as an ally of the people by all the treacherous leaderships of the masses, who must also get what they deserve. This has already been voted by assemblies of students in struggle in Buenos Aires. Enforcing that resolution is our obligation. While that of undermining the citadel of the power of Jackal Putin are being ordered by the Russian masses who win the streets in defence of their salaries and their pensions and who are clashing with their soldiers. The Russian working class stands up and will return to combat again as it did in the 20th century. They will punish harshly, as she did with the Tsars, the outrages and genocidal massacres of Putin and his Moscow gang against the peoples of Eurasia.
Neither the Syrian prisoners nor the hundreds of thousands of massacred will be forgotten. There will be no forgetting, no forgiveness! Justice will be conquered with the victory of the revolution in Syria and internationally.
