Class Warrior #10

Full PDF document & articles available here for download:  Class Warrior #10

A Response to Those who Abandon the Barricades

See No Revolution, Hear No Revolution,
Make No Revolution:

In Defense of Permanent Revolution in Syria

Regular readers of the press of the Liaison Committee of Communists (LCC) could well wonder what two of our members were up to attending the recent Permanent Revolution Collective (CoReP) conference in Paris in March. This would be the correct question if we had known that CoReP considers the Syrian Revolution to be over, crushed and defeated by Assad and Islamists in 2012.  We of the LCC did not know this definitively until the actual conference and we saw our duty then to defend the Syrian Revolution, which we did.

The working class demands that those who make claims to leadership try to develop its historic program and theory and make sincere efforts to pursue a principled unity of revolutionists.  A number of militants internationally pointed out the appearance of a methodological identity between ourselves (the LCC) and CoReP, another current identified with Trotskyism with organizations in Peru, Austria and France and with members in other countries. Leading LCC members began exploring this question which principally concerns the agreement that China and Russia have become new imperialist powers following the exceptional circumstances of the triumph of capitalist restoration in each case.  Both groups recognize the exceptional character of the transformation was based on the foundation of networks and efficiencies bequeathed to Russian and Chinese capitalists by the workers states. We did not anticipate finding the CoReP method was empiricist, and because of other points of agreement and a general agreement with their Draft Program, we would not have guessed how empiricist their method would turn out to be.  In fact, it is an empiricism driven by the influence of national chauvinism, which results in their own model of social imperialism.  Discovering this was a great disappointment for us.

In the Fall of 2015 we received their Draft Program for a new international with great interest.  We did not expect completely concentric takes on every historical question or political tactic with a grouping that had an altogether different organizational genealogy.  We took exception to their employment of the term Islamo-fascism and suspected that their response to the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine was reflective of an excessive “Laicite,” an overboard secularism which is a cover in liberal circles for hysteria about an Islamization of France and Europe.  We direct our readers to “Our Objection, Our Worries and Hesitation Explained.”  Little did we know that behind the objectionable terminology we would find a serious gulf existing between our understandings of what constitutes a revolution. A revolution is not a checklist to be completed with only an approved cast of historical actors.  The real masses participate in a revolution, on one side of the barricades or the other, without exceptions (even refugees actively flee it.)  As we say below, revolutionary organizations that do not recognize a revolution are out of business, and in this case, due to a national chauvinism hiding in their revulsion at a perceived Islamo-fascism.

The empiricist method turns social revolution into a schema. For the empiricist if the working class does not take the proper action according to their plan the masses are not involved in social revolution. However social revolution does not unfold according to a plan. Any well-trained academic can lay out a stepwise plan for social change. Unfortunately for the schematicists social reality unfolds according to its own dialectic.  When conditions no longer allow the masses to remain passive the learning process begins to unfold with each step the masses take towards achieving their understanding of both the change necessary and how to accomplish it. The masses will always look for a reform road, a pacifist road, a legislative road, before coming to the conclusion that the armed revolution is the only solution.  Indeed they may even embark on the path of armed revolt without all of the tools in place and they may have to retreat in the face of superior armed force but as we see today in Syria after a few years of retreat during the respite that the ceasefire provided the masses quickly stepped forward to make their intention clear. As observers from afar and participants in defense of social revolution we do not turn our back on the masses while they are in retreat. Where the empiricist declare the revolution dead or stillborn the dialectic declares the masses are in their learning curve.

Two Liaison Committee of Communists (LCC) representatives attended the 3rd Permanent Revolution Collective (CoReP) conference in Paris from March 25th-27th, 2016.  The LCC found much common formal political agreement between our organizations, particularly over the rise of Russian and Chinese imperialism.  In the run-up to the conference, the LCC submitted a document, “Our Objection, Our Worries and Hesitation Explained”1 detailing two major political differences.  The first difference was over the characterization of reactionary clerical Islamism as Islamo-fascism.  The other was the Syrian Revolution, which the LCC considers to still be alive, while CoReP considers it crushed, except in “the north that the Assad government has conceded to Kurdish nationalism.”2  It is the Syrian question that is the more serious of the two.  The conference also revealed a third difference which we hope does not signify a methodological problem.  Except in certain countries (for instance, Greece and Brazil,) as they say, CoReP claims that world capitalism has stabilized since the 2008 crisis.

CoReP responded to the LCC document “Our Objection, Our Worries and Hesitation Explained”3 on March 18th.  Fundamentally, CoReP’s position is as quoted below from their reply of March 18th that the Syrian Revolution ended in 2012:

“A democratic revolution started in 2011 but was crushed by 2012. As in other countries in North Africa and West Asia, youth and workers have rebelled against a torture and police state. As there was no revolutionary workers’ party and the working class could not take the lead, the revolution was defeated under the pressure of two counter-revolutionaries forces: the bourgeois state supported by the Iran and Russia; Islamofascism of ISIS and al-Nosra (al-Qaeda) supported by Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey. The theory of permanent revolution was confirmed, but negatively.

The Baath regime has not fallen yet, not only because the Russian state, Hezbollah from Lebanon, the “Revolutionary Guards” from Iran (this designation shows that we should not word for everyone speak of “revolution”) have strengthened militarily, but also for political reasons. A part of the population, not just the great bourgeoisie, preferred the Baath regime to that of ISIS or al-Qaida.

The regime and the imperialist powers (USA, Russia, France, Great Britain …) bombed and devastated much of Syria. According to the United Nations for Refugees (UNCHR), about 23 million Syrians, four fled to neighboring countries and Europe, 6.5 million have fled within the country. How to believe that in such a situation, a revolution can grow?

The only significant area of the country that escapes the tyranny of the Baath, al-Nosra (al-Qaeda) or ISIS is the north that the Assad government has conceded to Kurdish nationalism. The PYD-YPG could maintain and extend its position with the help of the US military.

The Free Syrian Army has been marginalized since 2011 and it controls in March 2016 only a small fraction of the territory. On the ground, the difference between the jihadists and FSA has never been clear. It is doubtful that the foreign states which supported it finance and arm a social revolution. Since its birth, the FSA recognized the authority of bourgeois SNC. The SNC is notoriously dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that led the against-revolution in Tunisia and Egypt, which is close to the AKP / Turkey enclosing journalists and murders the Kurds.” – CoReP reply to the LCC, March 18th

The LCC did not submit a formal written response since there simply wasn’t time before the conference.  There was an informal three hour International meeting with the CoReP International Bureau members on Friday, March 26th.  The LCC responded to CoReP’s position on Syria in a statement during the International discussion at the conference on Saturday, March 27th. The unedited written speech is reproduced at the end of this document.4

The LCC wanted to shake CoReP up.  We didn’t come thousands of miles to call people names; our presentation at the conference was based upon our own internal discussions.  We went to the CoReP conference because we agree on Russian/Chinese imperialism and because CoReP doesn’t subscribe to the universal Russophile or Robertsonian view that China is still today a deformed workers state.  This is a fundamental dividing line.  CoReP’s analysis of Libya and their polemic with Gerry Downing gave us hope of methodological agreement.  So it was a tremendous shock to us that they don’t recognize the Syrian Revolution.  The LCC has no inclination to forming an international on a dishonest basis where the official line would deny existence of the Syrian Revolution and we would be required to abide by discipline that would muzzle us.

A revolutionary tendency that does not recognize a living revolution is out of business.  Many organizations exist solely on their independent organizational dynamic and when revolution comes calling in their own countries they get swept into the dustbin of history.  Furthermore, we believe no good can come of trying to build an international on two divergent political lines.  This is not the method of Bolshevism, it is the method of Mensheviks and Manicheans.  The LCC still has hope that CoReP will snap out of this funk.

The LCC polemic against CoReP’s Syria position was blunt, honest and to the point:

“We think the path CoReP is on away from the Syrian revolution is non-internationalism; in the real circumstance it is as bad practically as the absurd “revolutionaries” and “Trotskyists” who support Assad. This is a surprise given the analysis CoReP made of events in Libya when you polemicized with and cleaned the clock of Gerry Downing’s pro-Ghaddafi neo-Healyism. The majority of the comrades in the CWG were in the nowadays defunct Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism (HWRS) at the time and supported comrade Couthon’s analysis (and still do), which we intended to publish before Dave Winter’s radical position reversal.5

But that is a formal position only because CoReP does not concretely defend the Syrian Revolution which is fighting IS etc., and explains why we can’t actually defend it [IS, ed.] from imperialism any more than we can defend Assad.  Moreover while the Syrian revolution is fighting on three fronts (imperialism, Assad, and the various hostile militias) it also has to combat the fourth front which is the ‘imperialist left’.  CoReP’s position on Syria puts it in the category of the ‘imperialist left’.  Why? Because it adopts phony arguments to pronounce permanent revolution dead.

Was it dead by 2012? How to explain the survival of a revolution (effectively denied heavy weapons by imperialism and its proxies) until today requiring the intervention of the Russian bloc to stop it overthrowing Assad?  In Aleppo there is an armed resistance coexisting with popular (workers, professionals, traders, etc.) self-administration. How is this Aleppo Commune still alive and kicking?”

It was the statement “CoReP’s position on Syria puts it in the category of the ‘imperialist left’” that forced the issue, with CoReP asking the LCC representatives to renounce this statement, which they termed an accusation of “social imperialism”, in order to carry on further discussion.  The political discussion degenerated into “we think, whereas you think…show us proof…” that the Syrian Revolution lives. The LCC finds it pretty difficult to argue with an organization that touts bourgeois media sources, and at the same time states that recent Syrian demonstrations were staged by CNN, all the while denigrating legitimate independent sources, both independent and partisan, on the Syrian Revolution.

It is clear that differences exist in CoReP as one comrade had a closer position to ours, who, completely independent of the LCC, arrived at his position. The lawfulness of the appearance of this position within their ranks ought to give the CoReP leadership pause. CoReP may not realize that denying the Syrian Revolution is a concrete expression of social imperialism, not least of all because the Syria on the map was a French invention. Having a wrong position on Syria is not conjunctural or tactical, but is methodologically empiricist.  For CoReP the revolution in Syria is dead and to say that the Permanent Revolution is “confirmed in the negative” means the Permanent Revolution has been negated.  Presumably, this is what the evidence they employ means to them — evidence we do not dispute — where they cite the many millions of dislocated Syrians and ask, “How to believe that in such a situation, a revolution can grow?”

For the LCC the Syrian Revolution is palpable and gives us evidence daily that it is the leading edge of the Permanent Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as a popular armed uprising. Now sustained for five years, it has had the Assad regime in retreat during much of that time, preparing conditions for and opening the road to revolutions in the rest of MENA.  If CoReP looks at the same evidence and maintains that the Permanent Revolution in Syria is dead, then it is also dead in MENA.  And if it is dead in MENA then we can draw the conclusion that CoReP is an ultra-left social imperialist cover for imperialism because they require a revolution to pass a checklist test of accomplishments, i.e., if a revolution within one country is not immediately a socialist revolution, it is no revolution at all.  This is not a new historical deviation.  And if true, it is only the ultra-left flip side of the Stalinist right-centrist position that a revolution must begin as a bourgeois democratic revolution in a confined and historically separated stage.  When CoReP says that the capitalist system has established stability again in all but a few countries, we have to ask if they mean a political stabilization.  And further, we wonder what tea leaves they are reading because even most bourgeois economists are wringing their hands and warning of an impending stock market crash with much more dire consequences for the capitalist world market than the 2008 world crisis.

Was it too far of a stretch to equate abstention with support in practice for Assad and imperialism? Historically it has been shown that organizations that do not recognize and defend workers’ gains will end up capitulating to “their” ruling class.  Schachtman’s Third Camp renunciation of defense of the Soviet workers state led inexorably to State Department socialism.

If continuing discussions lead us closer, then we will have them.  The LCC certainly agrees with much of CoReP’s draft program.

The Syrian Revolution

The Revolution in Syria is an advanced revolutionary process where the fight against a dictator who bombards tortures and kills millions of people today has the largest imperialist powers intervening to defend their own specific interests.  The Syrian Revolution is indissolubly linked by thousands of connections to the broader unfinished Arab national revolution and its latest conjunctural rise in the Arab Spring. The revolutionary Syrians, their advocates, activists and militants who five years ago started the fight against the tyranny of Assad, and then the imperialist blocs of the U.S. and China and against ISIS in turn, have had to defend the revolution also against the “imperialist left” as well, or the western “left” that was either positioned directly with the counterrevolution or who simply do not recognize the revolution, which amounts to the same thing.

The Syrian people being massacred have shown that they have not to lost hope in the victory of their revolution and that they will not cease to fight. As Trotskyists, we do not lose faith in mobilizing the support of the working class around the world (and their organizations) and we do not cease to fight for it.  Class struggle militants must defend the Syrian Revolution. Victory of revolution in Syria and/or the world requires the revolutionary party, but it is not going to be built by abandoning the masses through abstention.

Street by street and town by town, the masses have tough decisions to make and abstention is not an option.  Or is only an option for the refugees.  To stay is to fight, and to fight alongside whatever grouping your neighbors have joined in the fight against Assad.  This doesn’t decide the political question for an epoch or even a year, but only for now, for the moment.  Revolutionary processes have trajectories, as do the tendencies who play their parts.  It is only from our own vantage of Marxist training that we can immediately recognize the reactionary characteristic of this or that Islamist group. When it is time to fight, Sunnis may believe that ISIS is the coming of Joan of Arc when they arrive and have to be disabused of this impression by their own experience

Consider the following from an article “How the Syrian Revolt Became Armed”:

“Still, abstract criticisms of the revolution’s militarization miss the point. Syria’s revolutionaries didn’t make a formal collective decision to pick up arms—quite the opposite; rather, a million individual decisions were made under fire. Yassin Swehat puts it like this: “It wasn’t a choice. Look at Homs. When thousands are praying in a square, peaceful, unarmed, and they are shot at, murdered—What do you expect to happen next?”

CoReP in their response to the LCC derided those who defend the Syrian Revolution as opportunist and engaging in class collaboration. For our own part, we insufficiently appreciated CoReP’s charge of “class collaboration” clearly aimed at us, made in the last days before the conference. But we are some tough monkeys brought up in the Cannon school so the rough and tumble of factional struggle does not throw us. CoReP argued that:

“Opportunism talk of a metaphysics “revolution” in Syria to cover class collaboration. It divides only on how to surrender to the bourgeoisie.

Opportunism differs according to the strata of the bourgeoisie with which it tries to unite and in whose support it attempts to enlist the proletariat. (Lukacs, Lenin, 1924, ch. 4)

Most of them support the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats who apparently oppose the regime and Jihadism;
Some support the official Syrian regime arguing this one is “anti-imperialist”;
Others support jihadists in Syria and Iraq under the same pretext.”
– (emphasis added, CoReP 03/18/2016 Reply to LCC)

So CoReP does not advance military support to neighborhood militias, local fighters or democratic elements in Syria who oppose the regime, while at the same time opposing the Jihadists and imperialism?  In countering the CoReP position our representatives told the conference:

“The 400-700 LCCs [Local Coordinating Committees, ed.] identified by some as petty bourgeois intellectuals and pacifists are more than that.  Is there revolutionary workers party? No.  Are they workers councils? No! Do they unite across class lines as did the soviets? Yes!  Despite a leadership that for a time made close alliance with the FSA, despite some leadership elements that make claim to pacifism, the LCC’s [Local Coordinating Committees, ed.] are more than their leaders.  And as Marxists know, class consciousness can change very rapidly.

The Bolsheviks had to combat both obsequious compradors, pacifists and anarchists in the soviets.  The comrades abandon that fight inside the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC) and among the secular and multi-ethnic and multi religious brigades that are the youth of Syria in rebellion against Assad and the two imperialist blocs.   In the soviets the Bolsheviks had to win the workers to class independent action to expose the sellout leaderships and alien class forces, this is the fight in the LCCs [Local Coordinating Committees, ed.].”

Military vs. Political Support

As we wrote three years ago:

“Here it is important to clarify and emphasize the difference between political support for and military support for the rebels fighting against the Assad regime: Political support means taking the position that the establishment of a pro-imperialist or Islamic government would be a progressive, advantageous first step in the revolutionary struggle. By contrast, military support means attempting to achieve only military coordination between all forces fighting against the Syrian army, without ceasing a political struggle against the various rebel leaderships, the goal being the taking of power by the working class, and not the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie.

We want to bring down Assad, but do not want a pro-imperialist or Islamist regime in his place. Anyone who knows history knows that this was the line taken by the Bolsheviks in 1917, when they formed a joint military front with the Kerensky government against the revolt led by Kornilov, without giving any political support to the Kerensky government. Immediately after revolutionary forces defeated Kornilov, the Bolsheviks toppled the regime of Kerensky and his pro-imperialist partners in the October Revolution.” – Class Warrior, Volume 1 Number 2, Summer 2013

Various Class Forces in the National Revolution, or, How Do Real Revolutions Take Shape?

When Lenin wrote about the Irish Easter uprising of 1916, he challenged those who schematically imposed a mechanical, preconceived conception of the revolutionary process on history:

“…Whoever calls such a rebellion a “putsch” is either a hardened reactionary, or a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon.

To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.-to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, “We are   for socialism”, and another, somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a “putsch.”…,

…Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is…,

…The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a bourgeois-democratic revolution. It consisted of a series of battles in which all the discontented classes, groups and elements of the population participated. Among these there were masses imbued with the crudest prejudices, with the vaguest slid most fantastic aims of struggle; there were small groups which accepted Japanese money, there were speculators and adventurers, etc. But objectively, the mass movement was breaking the hack of tsarism and paving the way for democracy; for this reason the class-conscious workers led it.

The socialist revolution in Europe cannot be anything other than an outburst of mass struggle on the part of all and sundry oppressed and discontented elements. Inevitably, sections of tile petty bourgeoisie and of the backward workers will participate in It—without such participation, mass struggle is impossible, without it no revolution is possible—and just as inevitably will they bring into the movement their prejudices, their reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses slid errors. But objectively they will attack capital, and the class-conscious vanguard of the revolution, the advanced proletariat, expressing this objective truth of a variegated and discordant, motley and outwardly fragmented, mass struggle, will be able to unite and direct it, capture power, seize the banks, expropriate the trusts which all hate (though for difficult reasons!), and introduce other dictatorial measures which in their totality will amount to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the victory of socialism, which, however, will by no means immediately “purge” itself of petty-bourgeois slag.”
(emphasis added, “The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up”, Lenin, 1916)

The Irish revolution (and others of course) show that the revolution is not linear and it draws to it all the sectors of the mass with a gripe against the oppressive conditions and exploitation of capitalism and of imperialism (in the semi-colonies). Trotsky also wrote:

“The alternative, socialism or fascism, merely signifies, and that is enough, that the Spanish revolution can be victorious only through the dictatorship of the proletariat. But that does not at all mean that its victory is assured in advance. The problem still remains, and therein lies the whole political task, to transform this hybrid, confused, half-blind and half-dead revolution into a socialist revolution.” – (emphasis added, “Ultralefts in General and Incurable Ultralefts in Particular”, Trotsky)

In Class Struggle 116, our New Zealand comrades wrote:

“Today, in Syria most of the Western left deny that a civil war exists. They are by default on the side of the fascist regime. Trotsky said that Stalinism without workers property would be a kind of fascism. With the end of workers property Putin inherited Stalin’s mantle. So the crypto-Stalinists today claim there is no popular insurrection in Syria.

They buy Assad’s lies that the US created militias to bring about ‘regime change’ and that most of those militias have been overrun by the IS itself a US proxy. There is no revolution and no side to support in Syria for these crypto-Stalinists except Russia as the only force capable of wiping out IS.

Others prefer to back peace talks in the hope that the war can be stopped. Neither will talk to the Syrian people about their struggle for survival. The Syrian people may as well not exist.

There is a third alternative that has been deliberately suppressed by the Western ‘Russia Today’ (RT) left and that is the reality of the popular uprising against Assad. Aleppo shows it is a lie to reduce this to a CIA project or to Saudi arms when both (and Turkey) have conspired to stop the arming of the opposition.

That is why for all the talk of the US and its proxies, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, arming the rebels, none have provided the only weapons capable of decisively defeating Assad’s planes, Surface to Air Missiles (SAMS).

Aleppo (the largest commercial city) shows it is a lie to claim that Assad is the legitimate ruler with majority support. Until Russia began its bombing of the opposition militias 4 months ago, Assad was losing. Not to the IS but to the many local popular militias such as that which held Aleppo for years.

How can anyone claim Assad has legitimacy after his gas attacks and barrel bombing of civilians? After half a million deaths and 4 million in exile? Why if Assad has legitimacy does he now need Russia to blast Aleppo into the European dark ages?” – Class Struggle 116, pg. 3

Our Opponents: Non-Internationalism Rejecting Dialectics

For the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) and Norden’s Internationalist Group, there is no process, never mind revolution in Syria. What they have, as always, is a “camp” theory and no dialectics at all. This is the “method” Robertson learned at Schachtman’s knee. When Murray Weiss recruited Robertson away from Schachtman in 1957, this shortcoming was either overlooked or thought to be unimportant. This is a conclusion derived from reading the historical materials.  As is the understanding that Cannon seldom worried himself about dialectics after 1940. Why do we bring this up?

Because process matters to us. For Trotsky, and for us, the Spanish revolution began in 19316 when the masses caused Alfonso XIII to abdicate. Spain had workers’ parties, and Socialist Party (UGT) and Anarchist (CNT) labor federations, and yet at the outset the masses “…most of them support(ed) the bourgeois and petty bourgeois democrats….”7 Now in Syria under conditions of the inconsistent cease fire, the masses have again hit the streets with their own demands after cutting the SNC loose and rejecting Al Nusra (Al Qaeda in Syria.)8 Without a revolutionary party functioning as popularizer of the revolutionary program and perspective, without the class memory of the party, the masses have to learn all their lessons from their own painful experiences. And this under fire.

If all the regime has been fighting are forces subordinated to the various bourgeois democrat strata and their political projects, why has it turned out to be so impossible for Assad to win? Why has he needed the Russian air force?  And the United Nation’s affirmation of his ‘legitimacy’?  Is CoReP saying there is a wing of the bourgeoisie that has the material strength and class fortitude to fight the Assad army to a standstill for five years without the street level muscle of the working class and oppressed masses?  This conclusion challenges the entire foundation of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution.

In Defense of the Syrian Revolution

The revolution is objectively necessary to end the reign of capital imposed by imperialism, imposed via a sliding scale of tyranny.  As in MENA generally and Syria in 2011, the revolution emerges on the broadest demands that unite the masses.  The masses face the fact of the unfinished democratic revolution and raise minimal and democratic demands with expectations their experience has not prepared them to fulfill.  This is the crisis of leadership.  The revolution emerges at its own time, but the working class is not prepared for its tasks. The class lacks both the knowledge and the tools to overcome the resistance of the array of capitalist forces. To become a class for itself intent upon the conquest of all power at the head of all the oppressed social strata, the working class must grasp its historic program and build its revolutionary party and its revolutionary international party. This is how the crisis of revolutionary leadership has been solved historically and this crisis of leadership faces the Syrian workers today.

In the semi-colonies, the comprador bourgeoisie has claimed a nationalist mantle of anti-imperialism, denying agency for the democratic revolution to the masses.  The ideology of the comprador bourgeoisie is taught in school, through the media, and in cultural institutions. Joining the chorus are the Stalinists, Maoists and Healyites who love echoing the truth that imperialism is the enemy and then poisoning that truth by lying to the masses, injecting the Menshevik two stage theory, saying that the tyrants in power, the thugs of the comprador bourgeoisie (Gaddafi, Assad, Zuma, Mugabe, Raul Castro, Rousseff) are busy confronting imperialism on the masses behalf.  The World Social Forum (WSF) lines up to sing the praises of these worthies, rejecting Permanent Revolution and the Democratic Centralism of the revolutionary party, which it also rejects as of another era.

The national and  comprador bourgeoisie strike the pose that they are naturally the best equipped social group in the country to confront the imperialists; that they are best educated and the natural leaders of the ‘bloc of four classes’ to express the anti-imperialist aspirations of the masses and the nation.   And any revolutionary upsurge against oppression and tyranny is proof that those involved are no longer part of the anti-imperialist national mass. The democratic insurgents have sided with imperialism, so the theory goes, and are thus objectively, counter-revolutionary running dogs of imperialism. These “counterrevolutionary running dogs” then become the justification for the state of siege, and in turn calls forth repression of the opposition. This script has been staged across MENA, with variations in Libya and Syria.

The Stalinist theory of Socialism in One Country tied historically to the Menshevik two stage theory of revolution, found its material basis in the self-interest of the bureaucracies of the Deformed and Degenerated Workers’ States (DWS). Stalinism surrendered the revolutionary workers party’s historical role in favor of the ‘anti-imperialist bloc of four classes’. Its influence in world affairs has sustained tin-pot-dictatorships around the globe against the aspirations of the people.  The latter-day emergence of China and Russia as imperialisms, is masked by the lies of the Stalinists, Stalinophiles and others who put Russia and China in the camp of the semi-colonies and peg them as leaders of a progressive anti-imperialist bloc.  This trick transforms the old Cold War bloc around the DWS’s (which, tied to social property, maintained an objectively progressive and defensible character,) into the new Russia/China bloc, embracing the BRICS and SCO, which are based on capitalist property relations. This bloc is fully integrated into imperialist global structures and is objectively counterrevolutionary and in no wise defensible. This alignment of forces kept Assad in the Russia bloc and with that support he could sustain his power.

With Assad chiefly depending on one imperialist bloc to sustain his power, the masses’ anti-imperialist revolution expresses itself in the ongoing uprisings against Assad, while the masses are trapped between the two imperialist blocs as the proxy war unfolds with imperialist bombs from both blocs raining down upon them. Their revolutionary aspirations and actions of 2011 were objectively anti-imperialist uprisings against the bogus roadblock to the anti-imperialist democratic revolution, the Assad-led popular front. Assad’s popular front incorporates the Syrian Communist Party (SCP), with what they style their ‘anti-imperialist united front’ bloc with Russia/China.  Taking Assad’s side as he wages war on the Syrian masses, the SCP inadvertently exposes the regime’s fake anti-imperialism and its own Stalinist lies to the masses.

Into the vacuum of leadership steps every form of reactionary Islamists with a ready supply of anti-imperialist propaganda readied on the one side and coddling sectors of the “democratic” comprador bourgeoisie on the other. Together, via the Free Syrian Army/Syrian National Council (FSA/SNC), some have tied themselves to the U.S./western imperialist bloc. Wary of the intent of the masses, the U.S./NATO coalition deny them advanced weaponry and anti-aircraft missiles, thus they condemned the masses to the “anti-imperialism” and treacherous shelter of al Qaeda, al Nusra, and IS. Today the U.S. celebrates the victory of Assad over IS in Palmyra as the greater good, further exposing its long-term ambivalence toward the butcher Assad. Ultimately U.S. imperialism’s goal is to lure Iran out of the orbit of the SCO and the fate of Assad is a secondary question. In the estimation of U.S. interests, therefore, the U.S. confines its military struggle, if we are to believe them, to its battle against IS.  It justifies this with the barbaric behavior of IS even while the identical behavior of its Saudi allies draws no objection from “Foggy Bottom” (the U.S. State Department.)

That the masses took arms where they could get them, FSA, al Nusra, IS, Assad’s forces,  (see Trotsky, “Learn to Think”)9 the argument that their revolution was defeated in 2012 ignores both the international dynamic of Syria and the fluidity of the historic fabrication of states and borders by imperialism in 1919.  The Sunni masses in Iraq, super-oppressed by the Shiite leadership in Baghdad, rose up against their oppression.  In the absence of revolutionary leadership, the armed struggle against the Baghdad regime was assumed by a constellation of ex-Hussein military figures and Islamists of the al Qaeda in Iraq formation. The latter were driven from Iraq and into Syria. The al Qaeda international leadership under al Zawahiri told them that they had no business operating in Syria where the al Nusra front was the recognized al Qaeda organization. Thus the split of IS from al Qaeda and the promulgation of the “New Caliphate,” encompassing Iraq, Syria and in its plans, a good deal of Eurasia besides.  IS sees itself as the liberator of the Sunni faithful and the conqueror of every sort of infidel, be they democratic, Zionists or imperialists of whichever bloc. They project this image and attract recruits both alienated westerners and diaspora youth to arms under this false pretext.  This is fantastic religious lunacy but it has great cultural appeal that the masses have to overcome and so far without the tutelage of a revolutionary workers international. This Sunni uprising is the democratic national anti-imperialist revolution captured by the counter-revolution, which in the guise of IS is itself incapable of meeting the democratic, anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist aspirations of the masses.

On the street level, block by block, in areas contested and occupied by the competing forces, the masses have very basic needs including food, shelter, water, and self-defense.  Until areas are completely bombed out and made uninhabitable and until the millions are forced to flee, the logic and necessity of the Local Coordinating Committees gave birth to between 400-700 of them nation-wide. As the society is massive and heterogeneous it is to be expected that these LCCs are both fluid and heterogeneous as their makeup is an expression of the various neighborhoods, cities and towns and factions therein.  They may be recruiting grounds for the Islamists and the FSA but they are not subordinated to or particularly led by them.  The LCCs and the multitude of small armed detachments and networks of local people are the living expression of the democratic revolution.  We asked in our address to the conference, “Are they workers soviets? No.” But they represent the democratic expression of the masses in their attempt to meet basic needs and oppose the dictatorship.

On the Marxist Method

Academics love to make abstractions out of Marxist method and then speculate on what various quotations mean. We are workers and for us the Marxist method is always concrete and is as concrete as the content and the subject, which is the class for itself.  So when the CoReP leadership dismisses the Syrian Revolution, employing a comparison with the revolutionary events of 1936-37 in Spain, we say that revolutions take their own time to develop and that the 1936-37 developments followed five years of mass struggle that held Trotsky’s attention at every moment.   No empiricism for Trotsky; not comparative dismissal but a microscope examination of the masses’ activities.  Trotsky examined every ebb and flood tide of the masses’ struggle while tracing the arc of the entire revolution.  We reference the very sharp comment of 1932 as evidence.

“We recalled at that time that the orbit of the revolution admit of ups and downs. The art of leadership consists among other things in not ordering the offensive at the moment of ebb-tide and not retreating at the flood. For this it is necessary above all not to identify the fluctuations of the particular “conjuncture” of the revolution with its fundamental orbit.

With the defeat of the general strike of January, it was evident that we had to deal with a partial retreat of the revolution in Spain. Only chatterboxes and adventurers can fail to take account of the ebb. But to speak of the liquidation of the revolution in relation to a partial abatement, can be done only by cowards and deserters. Revolutionists are the last to leave the field of battle. Anyone who wants to bury the revolution alive deserves to get the firing squad himself.” – “The Spanish ‘Kornilovs’ and ‘Stalinists’”, Leon Trotsky, (September 1932)

Trotsky, in the moment, has no patience left for those who cannot acknowledge the revolution and give it unreserved support.  In conditions obtaining now in 2016, with the international vanguard atomized and in disarray, we have to have more patience than Trotsky had in 1932, but to be true to the Marxist method, our patience can’t be inexhaustible.

Proof the Revolution Lives

http://www.syriauk.org/2016/03/on-february-27th-syria-solidarity-uk.html

https://syriafreedomforever.wordpress.com

http://www.syriadeeply.org/op-eds/2016/03/9868/syrian-revolution-lives/?lang

http://www.wnyc.org/story/former-isis-hostage-we-need-new-narrative/

http://www.syriadeeply.org/articles/2014/07/5861/syrian-civil-society-strives-rebuild-communities/

http://www.juancole.com/2016/03/how-not-to-talk-about-muslims-after-a-fringe-terrorist-group-attacks.html

https://www.facebook.com/solidaysyria/

http://www.syriadeeply.org/op-eds/2016/03/9868/syrian-revolution-lives/?lang

http://www.wnyc.org/story/former-isis-hostage-we-need-new-narrative/

http://www.syriadeeply.org/articles/2014/07/5861/syrian-civil-society-strives-rebuild-communities/

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