With al-Assad, Putin and Erdogan, under US imperialist command, the only reality is further looting, currency devaluation, shortages and an unsustainable cost of living
Powered by hunger,
The Syrian masses once again take to the streets to the cry of
“The People want the fall of the Regime”
“Anti-regime hunger-driven revolution continues”
Huge marches are shaking Syria again. As in 2011, now the masses take to the streets not only in Idlib, but, and mainly, in the areas occupied under the fascist boot of al-Assad, such as Aleppo, Hama, Swayda, Daraa and the same Damascus outskirts. They are again driven by hunger. The Syrian lira has plummeted, reaching a 100% devaluation in less than a week, which has made the already inaccessible prices of bread, tea, vegetables and staple foods even more expensive. That is why the exploited are rising again, even after 9 years of suffering genocide and living under fascism that shoots to kill anyone who participates in a mobilization.
On June 8, on the first anniversary of the death of the hero of the revolution, Abd el Basset Sarout, (who was a goalkeeper for the national team), thousands of exploited took to the streets taking up placards with his face and chanting “the people want the fall of the regime!” Thus a succession of mobilizations has begun that take place almost daily in the mentioned cities.
The Middle East masses are rising up against imperialist looting and widespread famine
The global economic crisis has been plaguing workers around the world. It has hit the countries of the Middle East hard with the fall in the price of oil, and this crisis is unloaded on the masses, who are left in the worst of miseries, while what little is still there, is looted by imperialism. Imperialism has left only super-indebted states like Lebanon and Tunisia or Sudan, economies broken by oil looting like Libya, Syria, Iraq, without leaving a single dollar even for infrastructure.
Thus, corruption, imperialist looting compounded by local governments that are imperialism’s subordinates, and the constant and accelerated devaluation of the currency are common factors in the region.
For example, in Lebanon, the currency is continuously plummeting, prices soar and infrastructure collapses. For this reason the Lebanese masses are repeatedly taking to the streets and clashing directly with Hezbollah’s anti-worker troops and the Lebanese army. They block the roads to every city and surround the house of Prime Minister Hassan Diab, burning banks on their way, since they identify the enemy clearly. Those banks have stolen their savings, their wage, their means of subsistence.
But for the exploited in Syria, the situation is even worse after 9 years of massacre and genocide at the hands of Bashar and Putin, on behalf of US imperialism, leaving hundreds of thousands of dead, millions of displaced people and devastated cities.
The response of the working class and the exploited in the Middle East to such a catastrophe already erupted last year, reviving the revolutions of 2011. In Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, the working classes, driven by hunger, clashed again and again with the forces of repression of the imperialism-servant states. Hunger could not be solved by making up the regimes by means of democratic reforms, which on the other hand were but a detour to return to fascism and authoritarian, dictatorial regimes, as we can see in Egypt.
After a short interruption as quarantines were decreed for the rapid expansion of COVID-19, today we see Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine exploding again …
The natural allies of the Middle East exploited, the working class of the central countries have taken to the streets
The uprisings in the heart of the imperialist states are a gulp of fresh air. They are the allies that we so longed for and hoped would go out to fight. With them we directly hit those who command the genocidal offensive in Syria and plunder the entire Middle East.
The Black Vests in France, which are the slaves from the Maghreb all of Africa, have entered combat. The black and Latin working class in the heart of the US imperialist beast surround the citadel of power in combat against the bosses who far from caring about the health of their workers have forced them to work even under the threat of the Coronavirus, leaving them fully exposed without EPP and sent to clean all the residues and infected material. Their dead are found by the thousands in mass graves. Black workers fall like flies along with immigrants and Chicanos while the bourgeois flee to their mansions. And this happens in the richest country in the world.
Police mistreatment was the trigger for the current wave of fighting that began in Minneapolis after the police murdered African-American George Floyd. Shock waves have hit Spain, England, Germany, Greece, Mexico, Brazil, to name a few.
These revolutionary days have put the US imperialists’ central command in crisis and this has a direct impact on the nations that the United States oppresses and loots, such as Syria and Iraq, where it has military bases and troops on the ground.
Thus, this fight in the US and the crisis of imperialism, added to the hunger suffered in Syria, compounded with the crisis that has opened among the clans that make up the Alawite bourgeoisie who govern the country by opening divisions between them, have been the trigger for the uprisings in the area occupied by al-Assad, both in the heart of Damascus and in Swayda, whose population belongs to the Druze ethnic group, which have maintained a non-aggression pact with Bashar since 2011.
The expectations of those who fight in liberated territories against misery and confront the governments of the local bourgeoisie as well as against the Turkish-Russian occupation troops have grown exponentially as they see their best allies, the American working class, rise up and confront those looting the Middle East and the world in their own home. Whoever has known how to resist and stay on their feet in the last trenches of the revolution, like the rebel masses of Idlib, the partisans of a revolution that has not stopped for even an instant, say that the victory of the revolution can come if these uprisings driven by hunger throughout Syria, twinned with the masses of Lebanon and Iraq that confront their regimes and the imperialist transnationals looting the region, coordinate with the uprisings in the United States and Europe.
The “Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019” (the Caesar Act), the tool for a transition to get the Syrian masses off the streets and strengthen the control of imperialism in Syria
US imperialism has just announced that it will initiate the application of the so-called “Caesar Act”, which is, a law voted in the US Congress that dictates a series of sanctions against the al-Assad regime. It is definitely a mandate that “would put in place” the agents who have been massacring in Syria, since it allows for “trying” them for war crimes (with a parody of a trial where all genocidal generals and officers would be saved) to remove them from Damascus. It would also nullify millionaire arms contracts with the Russian government, letting Putin know that his role if merely one is a hit man, that is, that he is there to massacre the masses and cannot keep any business.
The “Caesar Act”, is applied after 9 and a half years of letting Bashar massacre the Syrian revolution, making it clear that it was the United States that coordinated the counter-revolution through the Geneva, Sochi and Astana pacts.
Since December last year, the Trump government has been threatening to apply the Caesar Act, seeking the opportune moment to begin the orderly transition to a government that in Syria guarantees colossal post-war businesses that imperialism has in mind. However, that moment never came because the exploited in Syria have not stopped mobilizing for a second, despite and against HTS, the bombings of Bahsar and Russia, or the brutal repression by the Turkish occupation army. Time and again they cut the M4 route, preventing the Sochi pact of Syria partitioning from being applied, and demonstrating that in Idlib the revolution continues to resist on its last line.
Now, hunger has struck and the masses returned to the streets, at a time when Lebanon and Iraq are in revolt. It is imperative for US imperialism to control the situation. That is why they now announce the application of the Caesar Act, which is celebrated by the entire Sunni democratic bourgeoisie, to mount a democratic deceptive mechanism to take the masses out from the fight against Bashar, to contain the situation until the US high command believes that it is ready to be able to replace al-Assad.
In the midst of this most dangerous deception, a current of the reformist left in Argentina has vindicated imperialism and assigned it a liberating role. This current has come out to announce that Kurdistan has been liberated thanks to the intervention of imperialism. Thus, any Syrian would conclude that the Caesar Act would now have to be supported because the US imperialists would be able to liberate Syrian people from al-Assad.
Once again, the PTS is the spokesperson for what the entire world left affirms when they vindicate “Rojava”, silencing the role of US imperialism there. This small Argentine national sect has the “merit” of openly saying what everyone understated but none dared to speak out.
We are facing a plan to establish the cemetery of the Syrian revolution, a protectorate in which imperialism loots with impunity and a point of support of the counter-revolution to appease the masses of the Middle East. The reformist left is, once again, upholding the counterrevolutionary action of imperialism and its agents.
Though, nowhere it is written that this has to be so. Hunger is an urgent necessity and that will not be solved by the Caesar Act, since imperialism and its looting is the main responsible of hunger.
Idlib’s resistance appeal to resume the path of the 2011 revolution
That is why today, when the revolution is revived again, we must urgently call a large NATIONAL CONGRESS of delegates to unify the revolutionaries, the workers who rise up in the al-Assad areas, the refugees who have been resisting the worst hardships, abandoned by the world left in front of the cannons of imperialism and its lackeys. Let a great Shora or Majlis of workers and peasants stand up to coordinate the mobilizations against Bashar, both in liberated and in occupied territories to conquer bread, land and freedom!
Let’s throw al-Assad down! Out with all the invading troops!
We must open the arsenals and make available every bullet, every rifle, in order to succeed in our fight against the regime and its mercenary troops. We must re-establish the coordination committees of the revolution with direct democracy and recovering arms for the people!
Those who do business and enrich themselves with the sweat and suffering of the masses must be expropriated with utmost urgency! In moments when the workers cannot afford to buy anything, it is time for everything to be expropriated.
It is essential to establish a government of combatants and workers because once the territories have been recovered, millions of exploited people must return to their lands and rebuild their homes.
We must cut off the head of the Assadian snake that is in Damascus, expropriate the banks, land and wealth that were stolen from us, starting with the oil companies that are looting us. There is the money to rebuild the houses and have bread and a decent life, as was claimed in 2011 and is still claimed now.
We must conquer this way a workers’ plan to escape from the crisis they have left us, in order to have bread, land for the peasants and all the demands of the exploited.
Down with the Geneva-Sochi pact! Away the invaders from our land!
We call on the Turkish working class and its organizations to rise to the situation and confront Erdogan, who is the guarantor of the Syrian looting and who watches over the war borders on Bashar so that the masses do not advance.
We call on the working class in Lebanon confronting the regime and Hezbollah to unify our fighting. As well as the exploited in their marches say, in the banks, in the tax havens, there is the money that has been robbed from the people. We must expropriate the banks to resolve our demands!
The Kurdish working class, which has been subjected to the pact between PKK and al-Assad and US imperialism, must break their submission to their executioners and return to the front of the revolution, to succeed in their fight for self-determination, breaking with the Kurdish bourgeoisie.
As our siblings the Black Vests in France say, “Fear has changed sides!” As our oppressed siblings shout in the US “No justice, no peace” ... in Syria, without justice for our martyrs, without al-Assad getting out, without releasing prisoners, without a dignified life, there will be no peace, of course neither will it be in Lebanon as long as the banks continue to steal the money and as long as the IMF and imperialism continue looting our nation, or of course there will be no one in Iran, where the ayatollahs live like kings while the people live like beggars. There can be no peace if we do not defeat the Zionist occupiers and conquer a free, secular, democratic and non-racist Palestine.
There can be no peace if we do not expel imperialism and all its agents from the Middle East, liberate all prisoners, and recover the wealth for the exploited. Only then we will have a decent life.
Abu Muad and Abu Muhajer
