Jordan - June 11th, 2018

Brutal attack of the IMF, the bosses and the despotic regime of the monarchy on the workers and the poor

Enough with fees and tax hikes! No more attacks on wages or increase in the cost of living!
The Jordanian masses take to the streets!

Long live the workers struggle! Long live the general strike!

The Prime Minister fell,
Now, let the one that organizes and commands the attack on the masses fall:
Down with the monarchy!
Out with IMF!

The Jordan people do not kneel down!
Let the crisis be paid by those who caused it: the bosses, the monarchy, the bankers and the IMF!
Expropriate the expropriators of the people!

As yesterday in Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Morocco and today in Iran and Jordan
The Workers of Maghreb and Middle East are the advanced of the struggle of the world working class against the IMF and its lackey governments

The masses in Jordan have risen confronting the enormous anti-worker attack that the IMF agreed with the Jordanian government, which includes hikes in the wage taxes and in the electricity and fuel prices, which would increase the cost of living of the Jordanian people even more.
Since Wednesday May 30th, when the unions and professionals associations called for a general strike, the masses took to the streets every day, clashing with the police and staging the most massive demonstrations that Jordan has seen in years. They have imposed the general strike with fighting in the streets of all sectors of the workers of Jordan, even the ones that are not unionized, like the refugees, without papers or the public employees.

 

The Jordanian masses re-take the steps of their huge struggles of 2011

These actions are even bigger in numbers and they reached further than those of 2011, when the workers and exploited of Jordan took to the streets as part of the chain of revolutions headed by the working class and the subjugated masses that broke out back then in the entire region, from Tunisia to Egypt, from Libya to Bahrain, from Yemen to Morocco. These revolutionary demonstrations also cornered Al Assad’s regime in Syria. The struggles in Jordan, together with the revolutionary offensive of the Syrian masses, threatened with knocking on the doors of Jerusalem, occupied by Zionism.

In Jordan in 2011, King Abdallah II suppressed harshly the mass demonstrations, but he was forced to retreat from his measure of withdrawing the food subsidies in order to prevent the revolution from starting. The bourgeoisie was anticipating, because it couldn’t let the monarchic Jordanian regime to fall, as it is a key stronghold for supporting the Zionist-fascist state of Israel and if it had fallen it would’ve meant that the Palestinian masses entering into the revolutionary stream, not only in Jordan but mainly in Gaza, the West Bank and the entire diaspora, would’ve been at the order of the day.

 

The fights in Jordan in 2011 and those of today, a link of a chain of revolutions in the entire Maghreb and Middle East

The region was crossed by great revolutions. The social-imperialist parties and the currents of the reformist left branded these processes as “springtime of the peoples” and “democratic revolutions”. They asserted that the revolutions only attempted to put an end to the old despotic regimes of the region. They denied that they were, together with the Zionists, nothing more and nothing less than the gendarmes of the oil plundered by imperialism. This oil production is made by a slave labour force, the working class of the Arab people and the Muslim nation.
Other currents in 2011-2012, like world Stalinism, openly supported the anti-worker reactionary regimes, like that of the Iranian theocracy that crushed the masses in 2009 before they besiege Tehran with their struggles. They supported Qadafy, a multimillionaire lackey partner of Italian company ENI and Fiat, and the biggest slave seller from Africa to Europe. This counterrevolutionary policy was concreted cynically in Syria, where they support Al Assad’s genocide, supported by Putin, Erdogan and the US even today.

With the excuse of the "springtime of the peoples" fraudulent electoral traps and illegitimate constituent assemblies were imposed. With them, imperialism and the native bourgeoisies contained and diverted the revolutionary processes so that they don’t advance to directly attack the property of the capitalists and the imperialism that plunders the entire region.
In Jordan, as we have seen, before losing his head – as it happened to Ben Ali, Mubarak and Qadafy - and before the revolution overthrows all the institutions of the regime, King Abdullah II yielded and temporarily stopped the most brutal attacks against the masses.

But after the electoral traps and frauds, the sabers of the generals came. Imperialism concentrated its forces and all its agents in Syria to cut this chain of revolutions and prevent the fall of Al Assad. This opened a phase of imperialist counterrevolution that ended with tough defeats of the exploited as in Egypt and with massacres as in Yemen and Syria.

The state of Israel today raises its head and attacks the Palestinian masses openly again. Not only that. US imperialism needs its Zionist agent to become the central counterrevolutionary device in the region.
Thus, once the Iranian counterrevolutionary theocracy has been used to massacre the Syrian masses, rewarding it by lifting the embargo on that nation, now again, once it has carried out its "dirty work", it must return home... This is how imperialism pays to its servants and lackeys for their services. Now Zionism is preparing itself to openly attack the Iranian nation, just as Saudi Arabia does today against the martyred Yemen.

Under these conditions, the Jordanian bourgeoisie saw itself with its hands free to impose the IMF's plan by attacking the masses to the point of taking away any chance of subsistence. With the Syrian revolution massacred and resisting in its last trenches, with a Yemen devastated by the Saudi invasion, with a counterrevolutionary dictatorship settled in Egypt and upholding Camp David agreement, with Tunisia under Ben Ali's party government, with the Zionists massacring the Palestinian masses of Gaza, now imperialism with King Abdullah II of Jordan have gone on the attack, seeking to impose the plan that they had failed to pass previously because the battles of the exploited.
In these last years, as the counterrevolution advanced throughout the region, in Jordan they started to remove the subsidies of food, electricity and fuel, causing a huge increase in all prices.
But now the cost of living has skyrocketed. Only in 2018 the fuel price increased 5 times, the electricity fee hiked 55% and the bread costs the double of it cost at the beginning of year.
The Jordanian masses could not stand it nor allow it. The situation for the working class and the exploited is unbearable. According to official data, more than 20% of the population is below the poverty line and official unemployment is above 18%, although unofficially it is much more. Not only this. Jordan is a country of a bit less than 10 million people, of which two million are Palestinian refugees, without documents or rights, who work as slave labour. There are about 700,000 Syrian refugees in the Jordanian desert, as in Zaatari, the second largest refugee camp in the world. There are more than a million Iraqi workers and also workers from Egypt, Yemen and other countries doing the worst jobs, with miserable wages. Under these conditions, the Jordanian volcano boiled and burst out.

 

The Jordanian working class and masses fight with the political General Strike on the streets

In this country where practically half of the population lives without rights because they are refugees and immigrants; where the vast majority has a wage that cannot afford the typical basket, as we said, the IMF and its lackey government have launched a new round of the attack they are already carrying out with hikes in fees and taxes. It is impossible for the working class and the exploited masses to eat and they have come out to face this brutal attack. Again, as in 2011, the engine is the struggle for bread, against the IMF and the counterrevolutionary governments and regimes, which are agents of imperialism that brutally plunders those nations.

With a general strike with actions in the streets and clashes against repression, the workers and the poor of Jordan have forced to take back the latest hikes in fuel and electricity fees; they have stopped the hikes in taxes and have forced the resignation of the Prime Minister! Thus a huge political crisis in the heights was opened, threatening with making the head of the king roll.
That is why the bourgeoisie threw the head of the prime minister to the masses. But King Abdallah II appointed a new prime minister. This is how the Jordanian regime works: the king has full faculties to place and remove governments and even to decree laws and veto them, but he hides behind a fake stage of ministers and parliaments so they are the ones to be exposed themselves before the masses. So, at the same time the king asked the new prime minister to withdraw the law, he entrusted him and his new cabinet to study how to implement a new one.
The fact is that the IMF, Trump and imperialism demand that a fraudulent and usurious debt must be paid. That is why, with their lackeys of the Jordanian bourgeoisie, they launched an attack on the workers and the people that allows them to pay it with the hunger of the people and thus reduce their indebtedness from 94% of the GDP to 77% in five years. For imperialism and the Jordanian bourgeoisie, it is key that the king's head does not roll and that his state and regime are not dismantled. The revolutionary struggle of the workers and the oppressed masses has forced them to retreat from their attack, but in the backstage all the exploiters continue to conspire to see how they can implement the plan.

The working class and the masses have not demobilized. On Wednesday 6/6 a general strike and demonstrations were held again. Although they have withdrawn the last hikes and attack to the wages, the high cost of living and the unbearable situation for the exploited ones is still there.
A huge political crisis is opened. The masses do not leave the streets and must not leave them until they defeat the IMF attack as a whole, ending with the bloody Jordanian monarchy.

The war cry in the streets is clear:
No more high cost of living! Decent wages for all!

The way out is to attack the property and the superprofits of the capitalists:
Share the working hours and one extra shift in each factory and workplace for the unemployed to enter to work!

In the entire Maghreb and Middle East, one single working class!
Documents, houses, decent work and full rights for all the Palestinian and Syrian refugees!

Let the crisis be paid by those who caused it: the bosses, the king, the bankers and the IMF! Expropriate the expropriators of the people!

For that reason, we need to complete the revolutionary actions that have started. Guillotine to the king! Let his whole regime, servant of the IMF that only apply plans against the workers with hikes in fees, taxes and cost of living! No payment of the foreign debt! Out with the IMF!

The need is to set up the power of the ones form below, the working class and the exploited! They know each other. They are the ones who have imposed the general strike in every workplace. They are the ones that are part of the 33 unions that called it. They are the ones who have been taking to the streets to defeat the attack of the IMF.
For factory committees and committees in workplaces; for committees of unemployed, of immigrants, of Palestinian and Syrian refugees who, together with the unions and overcoming the union bureaucracy that has already manifested its willingness to negotiate the tax hikes, get coordinated by city, town, region and nationally!

The masses of the Middle East, after the heroic Iranian revolution that overthrew the Sha Rezha Palevi and after the mass uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria in 2011, know very well that they must set up their own structures of struggle and of power: the shora, the councils of workers and soldiers that organize all the masses in struggle. It is time for the heroic Jordanian revolution not to stop, as the future of revolutionary processes throughout the region also depends on it in a large extent.

For a provisional revolutionary workers and peasants government, based in the struggle structures of the self-organized and armed masses!

A new link in the chain of imperialist domination in the Middle East has been broken. The masses in Jordan occupy the center of the scene. The Iranian masses began their uprising at the beginning of the year with an accurate demand against hunger and extreme misery. In the streets of Tehran and in the entire Iran the cry was: "the clerics live as kings and the people as beggars", with the demand of the Iranian mercenary forces to be withdrawn from Syria since "in Iran there is hunger and here we cannot take it anymore".
In these combats of Tehran, of Jordan, of the martyred people of Gaza clashing with the Zionist forces, that heroic chain of revolutions that broke out in Maghreb and Middle East in 2011-2012 still lives. It is the same fire from the same dry wood that burned the whole region and shook the whole world.
In these combats the heroic Syrian and Yemeni revolution, which are already fighting in the last trenches, live... But the last acts of the revolution and counterrevolution have not finished to be written neither in Maghreb and Middle East nor at international level.
The offensive of imperialism in crisis and bankruptcy does not give a rest. The IMF's brutal attack to impose its plans and plunder the oppressed peoples has only been doubled in the recent years. With labour flexibilization, the transnationals seek to impose on the workers of the world in the 21st century the slave conditions of the 19th century.
The imperialist offensive does not stop but the masses wage huge battles and class battles. The struggles against labor flexibilization in Brazil, India or France, the fight against the hikes in fees and the high cost of living as in Argentina, Bolivia or South Africa, are a faithful proof that the masses are far from withdrawing from the battlefield.
The imperialist powers announce that they have declared a trade war for the control of the trade, finance and businesses of the transnational companies and monopolies. But the disputes of those of the above are disputes of parasites and vultures for the loot, for a world market that does nothing but to shrink and to leave entire imperialist gangs out. The vultures have begun to peck on each other. However the real war of the ones on the top is against the working class and the oppressed peoples of the world. This is the class war and the Jordanian masses have entered into it, standing up with the revolutionary general strike that threatens with shaking the Syrian and Palestinian outcasts and broadening the borders of the fighting in Gaza and the West Bank.

 

In the entire Maghreb and Middle East, one single intifada!
In the entire world, one single working class confronting one same enemy, imperialism and its lackey governments!

The Jordanian masses have risen. The allies of the Palestinian masses that are being slaughtered in Gaza by Zionism have entered into the struggle. The State of Israel is supported by the Jordanian monarchy that has an agreement that recognizes Israel since 1994. Palestine and Jordan, one single struggle! For the destruction of the Zionist-fascist state of Israel!
The allies of the Syrian masses who resist in the last trenches of the revolution have stood up. They are the allies of the Iranian masses who have revolted against the Ayatollahs with the war cry "the clerics live as kings while the people live as beggars!"
Out with the Iranian theocracy! Out with Al Assad and all the invading troops of Syria! For the defeat of the Saudi troops that invade Yemen! Out with the counterrevolutionary dictatorship of Al Sisi! In the whole Maghreb and Middle East, one single intifada!

The Jordanian masses today show the way on how to confront the plans of the IMF, with a general strike, struggle in the streets, mass uprising facing the governments and regimes lackeys of imperialism! This is how the masses from all over Maghreb and Middle East did it in 2011, or in recent years in Morocco and now in Jordan.
The reformist left hides this enormous struggle. They have insulted the masses of Maghreb and Middle East by calling them "terrorists", "backward people", "barbarians"... when they have shown how to confront the attacks of the IMF: with a general strike, fighting on the streets, insurrections, overthrowing governments and regimes ... This is not a coincidence: the social-imperialist currents are spokespersons and they look after the businesses of their own imperialist bourgeoisies that plunder the oil of the nations of Maghreb and Middle East, because these leaderships live out of the crumbs that fall from the super-profits that their imperialisms get from the looting and over-exploitation of the working class of the colonies and semi-colonies that they oppress. For that reason, so much viciousness, slander and betrayal by these currents against the working class and the Arab masses. It is that they are the vanguard of the world working class in its fight against imperialism and its lackey regimes in the region; one of the battalions of the proletariat that fought the most in this 21st century.
The exploited of Maghreb and Middle East show the way for the world working class on how to fight, against the claims of the reformist left that always want to take the workers to the feet of the parliaments, laws, judges, labour ministries, that is to say, to the feet of the capitalist regimes.

Long live the struggle of the Jordanian masses and those of the entire Maghreb and Middle East!

 

Carlos Munzer
For the paper The Truth of the Oppressed,
Spokesperson of the socialists of Syria and Middle East