Voices from the Middle East

Against hunger and plundering,
mass decisive clashes have started…

HUGE MASS REVOLTS AND OUTBURSTS
ATTACK THE CITADEL OF POWER

Lebanese workers and poor are rising and confronting the government and the regime on the streets. Under the command of imperialism, its transnational companies and banks, the native powers have imposed misery, hunger, unemployment and a redoubled oppression. Sparking from Tripoli in the north, a huge spontaneous action of the working class and the exploited of the entire country has extended as a wildfire to the capital city Beirut and throughout the country.
Demonstrations and highway blockades haven't stopped for a week. The Lebanese pound got devaluated even more and dollar reached 9,000 pounds, when only a year ago it was only 1,500. Flour price has sky-rocketed, so buying bread is impossible. During the last days, COVID-19 cases have risen and the government decreed a total lockdown, without paying wages and giving no chance of getting incomes for the workers and the poor, in an attempt of downloading  the brutal economic crisis on them. Thus, revolts returned on January 25th in Nour square in Tripoli, where confrontations took place, with the masses and the army led by Hezbollah clashing in the streets, as it was called to evict them by means of tanks. After hours of confrontation, the army finally emptied the streets, but rage returned the next day and new demonstrations and road blocks took place in Tripoli and in Beirut. So far, there was one dead, several wounded, and protests continue.

Nothing seems to stop the unrest that started in 2019. Under the reckless attack of both native capitalists and imperialism, decisive onslaughts of the masses have started. From Tripoli to Beirut, insurrectional actions are rising.

This revolutionary onslaught of the exploited opens a true revolutionary crisis, sharpens the crisis and division among those from the top about how to crush the masses that do not leave the streets, as they are confronting repression and not abiding by the state of emergency decreed by Hariri government. The state has put its entire repression apparatus in action in order to crush the uprising. It had used intelligence service moles to attack the masses from within the demonstrations, with plainclothes agents attacking, marking and persecuting the best activists.
They decreed martial law to crush the protests with the army. The armed forces, under Hezbollah's command, shoot their own people. After doing the dirty job of massacring the Syrian revolution as Gurkhish troops, on behalf of imperialism, now they play a fundamental role by shooting the exploited in Lebanon. Their businessmen have been totally discredited. They are hated by the masses. The militant youth and the people mourn their martyrs of these revolutionary days and the hundreds of wounded by the bullets of the murderous army led by Hezbollah.

The streets of Lebanon are living proof of the sinister role Hezbollah plays. Macron and the imperialist transnationals consider these businessmen, whose hands are stained with blood from massacring in Syria, essential to implement their plan of recolonization and domination of Lebanon. Hezbollah, as the executioner of its own people, has exposed both its supposed "anti-imperialism" and its fake "anti-Zionism", which have been functioning through deception and backstabings against the exploited from all over the Middle East, supported by the Stalinist parties and the social-imperialist currents.

Their rifles guard the borders of Zionism, their police and vigilante gangs attack and terrorize Syrian and Palestinian refugees, their officers do not point their rifles against imperialism or against Zionism: they are there to massacre and crush the starving people. Hezbollah has remained as a true multimillionaire gang that is imposing the worst hardships on its own people. It is clear now that they not only acted as “Gurkhas” in Syria, but they were the ones who guaranteed the smuggling of oil  they took out, in agreement with Assad, from Syria to export it by sea to Israel.

Las masas explotadas, que están en pie de lucha desde el 2019, con la chispa de Trípoli que incendió al país, han dado un salto en su embestida contra los capitalistas. La revolución libanesa comienza a dar sus primeros pasos en una verdadera acción insurreccional de las masas en todo el país, con piquetes en las zonas industriales, barricadas y bloqueos en las principales carreteras, chocando abiertamente contra las fuerzas represivas del estado y desarrollando a cada paso organismos de lucha independiente de las masas desde donde se organizan y se agrupan los obreros, los jóvenes desocupados, las clases medias arruinadas.
Lebanese exploited masses, on war footing since 2019, have taken, with the spark of Tripoli that set the country on fire, a leap in their onslaught against the capitalists. The Lebanese revolution is starting to take its first steps in a true insurrectionary action of the masses throughout the country, with pickets in industrial zones, barricades and blockades on the main roads, openly clashing with the repressive forces of the state and developing independent organisms of struggle of the masses  at every step, from which the workers, the unemployed youth and the ruined middle classes are organized and grouped.

The uprising of those below has begun. The poorest neighborhoods in Lebanon have risen up, such as Bab Tabeneh, one of the largest in Tripoli, where an 80% of it is unemployed and condemned to hunger; they led the fighting in the streets facing the police. Municipalities, ministries and other government buildings, along with banks, were set on fire by the masses as we saw in 2019. In their onslaught they also have begun to set fire to police stations and openly clash with the repressive forces that have been provided of tanks and frigates by French imperialism. The Army forces under the Hezbollah officers have asked for total control of the situation, putting into qiestion whether they will be able to protect imperialist interests as, being delegitimized, they cannot mobilize counterrevolutionary forces, since they have also lost control of their own base that is revolted.

It is us or them! Only the working class and the insurgent masses expropriating the expropriators can liberate the nation and conquer bread; they have to take the resolution of the crisis in their hands.
THE LEBANESE REVOLUTION HAS STARTED! The task of the moment is to conquer the generalized armament of the masses in struggle and the organization of workers, peasants and rank-and-file soldiers militias.
The way to conquer bread is the expropriation of the banks, the transnationals and all the capitalists without compensation and under workers and the poor people's control. The nationalization of the banking system and the monopoly of foreign trade must be conquered, thus breaking all the subjugation and looting agreements that were signed with imperialism.
The Lebanese revolution is a link in a single revolutionary chain that streeches to Sudan, Iraq, Tunisia, etc., with the Syrian resistance and above all with the struggle together with the Palestinian people to expel the Zionist occupier… For the destruction of the Zionist-fascist State of Israel! Out with al-Assad! A single revolutionary chain throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East!

The masses need a revolutionary leadership that defeats the social-imperialist parties, ripping the clean banners of the socialist revolution off their dirty hands.
This revolutionary leadership will only be conquered on the condition that it is at the forefront of the fighting, in war against reformism and tirelessly fighting against the influence of the bourgeoisie; also fighting from the organizations of the working class around the world to break the isolation of the revolution, and resolutely calling on the workers of France and the United States to stop the war machine of Macron and Biden, which provides Lebanon and Tunisia with military supplies to crush the insurrections of the masses.

These are decisive moments; we must conquer the conditions of victory and the leadership that the masses deserve to succeed.
The reformism that yesterday supported the governments and regimes of the Maghreb and the Middle East, looks the other way, while supporting the executioners of the workers. The revolution bursts in their noses while the forces that will settle accounts with their sellouts stand up in their battles. The forces to refound the Fourth International are in the streets of Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, the martyred Syria, their victory is in the streets of Paris, New York and the imperialist metropolises.