Syrian Crisis: Expanding World War, Potential for Communist Revolution

Imperialists and Capitalists fight over Syria here ♦ Nationalism and Imperialism in Northern Syria here ♦ Communists Must Prepare Workers for War and Revolution here ♦

Imperialists and National Capitalists Fight Over Syria– We Need to Overthrow All Warmaking Exploiters with Communist Revolution

December 16— In Syria, a coalition of military units led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) just toppled the Assad government. This makes an already unstable war-torn world even more dangerous.

There are increasing chances for direct confrontations between major regional capitalists and among the major imperialist powers. There is greater opportunity and need for workers’ communist revolution. That begins with building collectives of the International Communist Workers’ Party.

Masses in Syria are celebrating  the downfall of the brutal, hated Assad regime while anxiously searching for survivors of its hellish prisons. The regime’s own soldiers massively deserted in the face of the rebel offensive.

However, under the new HTS rulers, the Syrian masses will remain exploited and repressed. HTS will continue to count on sectarian and ethnic divisions among the masses. But if workers and soldiers fight instead for communist internationalism, they will lead the way for many more in the region and worldwide.

Assad’s main support had come from Iran and Russia. Israel had weakened Iran and Hezbollah. Russia remains mired in Ukraine. The HTS victory is another blow to Iran’s “axis of resistance.”

Iranian workers say that the US-led sanctions and consequent inflation are literally killing the masses there. There are many strikes, usually unreported. Masses blame the Iranian rulers’ huge military spending. Even some Iranian soldiers are growing resentful of years of war.

This is an opportunity for us to convince masses in Iran, Syria, and beyond to fight to end imperialist wars with communist revolution. And to build a communist society that meets the masses’ needs. We must reach out to everyone we know with ties in the area and ask them to help our party grow.

Capitalist and Imperialist Powers Seek to Profit from Syria Crisis

The US-backed Zionist military is grabbing more land for Israel in southern Syria. It massively destroyed Syrian military stockpiles and its navy (but didn’t touch the Russian navy).

The US has moved more troops into oil-rich, Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria.  It has launched air strikes there. An entire US naval Carrier Strike Group is offshore.  All these strains relations with European allies who are eager to do business with Syria’s new rulers.

Even the US rulers are in direct contact with HTS. In short, they can’t get out of the Middle East even if they want to.

Türkiye’s rulers are, so far, the big winners. They openly back the Syrian National Army (mainly against Kurdish forces) and covertly backed HTS. Türkiye is a US ally in NATO, but also a member of the China-led BRICS trade group. How long can it play on both sides?

Russian imperialism is strategizing to cut its losses in the region and regroup while prioritizing Ukraine. China’s imperialist rulers are poised to profit. Perhaps they hope to sit out most of the war and win the peace, as US imperialism did in World War I.

None of those murderers is any worker’s friend!

There will be war and more war. No worker or soldier should fight for any of these profit-hungry vultures. We must turn their imperialist wars into communist revolution as the Bolsheviks did in Russia in 1917.

Lessons of the Arab Spring:  Fight for Power, Build Communist Society

A series of anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions rocked the Arab world in 2011-2012. This “Arab Spring” responded massively to poverty and corruption. It toppled the governments of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen. US imperialism backed this movement.

The Arab Spring sparked the ongoing civil war in Syria. Türkiye, the Gulf states, the US, Israel, Russia, and Iran all jumped in.

The newly formed International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) said then:

The audacity, courage, and innovation of the Arab Spring inspired masses around the world. It demonstrated once again that history is made by the masses in motion. Nevertheless, it also demonstrated that without taking power, everything is illusion.

The masses need the leadership of the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) to destroy the old state machinery. Only this can create conditions that allow new social relations between human beings to flourish. Otherwise, any movement, however massive and effective, will find itself confronted with the evils that it fought against—only more sophisticated and better prepared to defend themselves from the masses….

We must learn from the lessons of the past, how to take power and build the communist society that workers in the region and around the world need.

All still true! And now there are ICWP Red Flag collectives in Tel Aviv and Gaza, South Africa, India, El Salvador, the USA, and elsewhere.

We ask every Party collective, every Red Flag reader, to help take advantage of this critical moment. What can you do now to step up the fight for communism?

Nationalism and Inter-Imperialist Rivalry in Northeast Syria

December 15— What is the Syrian Democratic Force, the Kurdish forces allied with the US in Syria?

It is the army of Rojava, the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria.

In 2011, the YPG (People’s Protective Unit), a militia led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) took advantage of the civil war to seize control of most of northeast Syria.

In 2014, the US started backing the Kurdish forces in the fight against the Islamic State. Part of the deal was that the Kurds would set up a coalition army which included Arab, Assyrian and other forces along with the YPG, forming the Syrian Democratic Force (SDF). They played a decisive role in defeating the Islamic State. The US continues to arm the SDF and has around 900 US troops embedded in it.

On December 12, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken went to Ankara, Türkiye. He was talking with the US’ NATO ally President Erdoğan about their competing interests in oil-rich northeast Syria.

Large parts of Eastern Türkiye (and Iran and Iraq) are predominately Kurdish. Thus, Türkiye’s rulers see Rojava as an existential threat. Turkey has long backed an Islamist militia, the Syrian Nationalist Army (SNA) to attack Rojava.

The fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad created a power vacuum. This heightened hostilities between the SNA and the SDF.

Türkiye is in a much stronger position than the US in the region. Blinken hopes to persuade Erdoğan to allow the US presence to continue and to allow their ally to have a role in the new Syrian government. US imperialists are happy to allow the SDF to do their fighting for them to maintain a US footprint in the new Syria.

Why do Anarchists and Western Leftists Support Rojava?

On December 11, anarchists in Tel Aviv blocked the road leading to the HaKirya military base. They demanded an end to the genocide in Palestine.  One of their signs stated: “From Rojava to Palestine, End State Violence.”

When the PKK-led forces took power in Rojava they set up an interesting form of anarcho-feminist secular “democratic” capitalism.

Many western leftists saw this as “the future of the left.”  Part of Rojava’s attraction for them is its feminism. Its rules require equal participation of women in governing bodies. Its all-woman militia, the YPJ, is separate from the YPG.

But women as well as men can fight for capitalism. Think of US Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Germany’s Angela Merkel, and the Zionist leader Golda Meir. Women soldiers serve in the Israeli “Defensive” Forces and the imperialist US military.

Anarchists and feminists who saw Rojava as the future must now see the bankruptcy of its dependency on US imperialism. That is the inevitable result of nationalism. The SDF was never a military force based on communist internationalism. It was and is a temporary coalition of capitalist military units, fighting a proxy war for the US.

As the Assad regime collapsed, many Arab units of the SDF deserted on the battlefield. They joined the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham on its road to victory and abandoned strategic areas, such as Manbij on the Euphrates. They were always openly nationalist and fascist.

It’s time to shed any illusions that the pro-US Kurdish militias in Rojava are any different. But we hope that disillusioned YPG and YPJ units (and those in the IDF and US military) will choose to fight instead for true communist internationalism.

Communists Must Prepare Workers for War and Revolution

The comrade in Canada raises an important question in a letter (previous issue of Red Flag) that says we should stop saying that World War III is imminent. The comrade points out that communists have been making that declaration for decades and yet the whole world is not yet again inflamed in a singular conflict as it was from 1914-1918 and again from 1941-1945.

Well, comrade, I beg to differ. The very definition of imperialism has war as an essential component. What did Belgium do to workers in the Congo? Mass murder. Britain in India? Murder of millions. France in Africa from Algeria to Morocco. Spain throughout Latin America, Portugal in Brazil, Russia in Poland, Japan in Korea, the US throughout its “own” territory and Central and South America, the Philippines, Hawaii. The list goes on— centuries of imperialist war and plunder taking and destroying the lives of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions. The competition that is the lifeblood of imperialism is the destruction of the world’s working class.

We are communists. We seek to lead the workers of the world. Our responsibility is to be out front, even at times possibly premature, in our call to organize the masses. It is our charge to warn, organize, educate, and struggle. If not us, then who? We would be useless to workers if we twiddle our thumbs and debate just how bad things are.

The fact is that there are wars on virtually every continent. These are not minor skirmishes but all-out battles reflecting major existential struggles between major imperialist camps. The world is awash with huge, never before existing, weapons of “mass destruction” already doing phenomenal murder and misery. Not to the imperialist masters but to the very workers we seek to mobilize to overthrow the source of their exploitation, wage slavery.

The current events in Syria, Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine have put the world closer to World War III than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The imperialists have avoided an all-out conflagration – so far – but it could start almost anywhere, anytime. The history of imperialism is war, war, and more war.

Marx wrote in 1850: “Whereas we tell the workers: You have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and national struggles, not only in order to change conditions but also to change yourselves and make yourself capable of political rule.”

We are not “the boy who cried wolf” when we warn of the imminence of world war. We are doing our communist duty. We are not trying to make workers feel guilty, we are leading them to feel and act emboldened. There is nothing the ruling classes can do to stop the ultimate advance of the world’s working class. Let them fight their wars. The workers will bury them with worldwide communist revolution.

—A Comrade

Read our Pamphlet:

Soldiers, Sailors and Marines: Crucial for Communist Workers’ Revolution here

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