PARTISAN!

The Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation outlines its perspective on the recent capture of the Syrian state by the Opposition led by Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The CC states that neither Assad nor the Islamist rebels are factions that should be championed by the Left, and that the recent change of power is simply the inauguration of a new phase of the Syrian Civil War. To ensure its end, the empowerment and seizure of state power by the working class, peasantry, and women is needed.

Dear comrades,

Assad has fallen, as has the ruling Ba’ath party. We welcome the fall of the ruthless dictator.

The Ba’ath party sold itself as a socialist party pursuing national development. In reality, it was a party of oligarchical capitalists that aimed to rise higher in the global hierarchy. Their class-collaborationist state was rooted in the military apparatus, the secret police, and the dependent trade unions and youth organisations. Their strategy was built on establishing a racial hierarchy on the one hand, between Arab farmers and tribesmen at the top and various racial minorities at the bottom, and a religious hierarchy on the other, with preferential treatment for Alawites and suppression of various other religious sects. Their popular front government, which included communists and fascists, violently suppressed independent working-class action. Hundreds of working-class militants faced torture in Assad prisons.

This strategy has failed. Unwilling and incapable of serious reform, the successive governments of the Assad family stumbled down a road of neoliberal “structural adjustment” and conciliation with imperialist powers. Only a revolution of Syrian workers, peasants, and women, against the capitalist world order, together with their comrades in neighbouring Middle Eastern states, could liberate Syria from imperialism. Instead, violence was turned on the people by the state. When the “Arab Spring” opened the possibility for independent working-class politics, Assad violently cracked down. In doing so, he created a simmering cauldron of sectarian hatred and reactionary violence that ignited into a civil war against him in 2012 that has lasted more than a decade.  

Who Are The Victors?

The Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is the party chiefly responsible for Assad’s fall. There are many misconceptions about this militia, who represent a powerful Sunni religious bloc. They represent the interests of Arab tribal patriarchs, clerics, and small capitalists and landlords.  Importantly, they receive significant economic and military support from NATO, and Turkey especially. Business leaders associated with the HTS have already pledged to implement neoliberal free market reforms and open up to foreign competition.

Many praise HTS for their supposed good treatment of minorities within occupied cities, yet they have conscientiously allowed morality police and sharia law to continue unabated under their noses. HTS only appears moderate compared to Islamic State, but they are still a religious militia seeking a religious state. Already, Alawite Syrians have begun to flee the country, frightened of a possible genocide.

Under their rule, we are unlikely to see meaningful liberalisation or secularisation. Rather, sectional conflicts between various tribes, ethnicities, and religious sects and their regional backers (the USA, Russia, Iran, Israel, Saudia Arabia, etc.) will intensify and a continuation of the war, in one form or another, is likely.

The Civil War Shall Continue

The war itself has taken on a reactionary character. The Syrian economy is in tatters, with millions displaced. Assad and his backers are responsible for 80% of civilian deaths. By instigating the conflict, by suppressing communists, and continuing the war so ruthlessly, Syria, Iran, and Russia have all played a reactionary role. Meanwhile, Israel has begun its invasion of Southwest Syria in earnest, including the shelling of Damascus. The expansion of settler-colonial settlements will be an inevitable consequence of this.

Similarly, Turkey has used the opportunity of Assad’s fall to intensify its own invasion of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). AANES is the result of the peasant nationalist Democratic Union Party (PYD)’s struggle for autonomy against anti-Kurdish racial policies. It is also a reflection of the broader regional struggle of the Kurdish people (led by the once-Marxist Kurdistan Workers Party), who have suffered decades of racial exploitation in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Under the leadership of the PYD, the Syrian Kurds have found themselves in an uneasy alliance with the United States – an alliance that will leave them abandoned by their imperialist benefactors and encircled by hostile imperialist agents. In turn, they have abandoned a policy of revolution across the region, which has left them politically isolated from the Syrian, Iraqi, Turkish, and Iranian working class. Despite these limitations, the fall of the AANES would unleash pogromist violence and patriarchal reaction upon the masses and consolidate the position of Turkish imperialism.

Where to From Here?

To advance the liberation of Syria, the Revolutionary Communist Organisation calls:

• For independent organisations of the workers, peasants, and women. Syrians must organise themselves on their own terms, separate from Islamist sectarianism, bourgeois nationalism, and state-loyalism. This includes industrial unions, peasant associations, cooperatives, and a revolutionary, democratic, socialist workers party in Syria.

• For international unity against imperialism! For a single secular, anti-imperialist, and democratic mass-movement that unites the struggles in the Levant, Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey. While the various movements for women’s liberation, peasant autonomy, and workers power remain isolated in national divisions, there will be no freedom for anyone in the region.

• For a secular, democratic, and multi-ethnic state made up of men and women workers and peasants. There must be no accommodation with HTS and its imperialist backers. As long as Syria is dominated by religious and ethnic sects, there can be no peace. Workers, peasants, and women must unite in the struggle for universal liberation and overcome these divisions. They must take power for themselves, through their own political organisations, rather than fighting for the victory of this or that exploiter.

• To smash the invaders! Arm the workers, peasants, and women. Israeli and Turkish expansion risks further subjugating Syrians to the whims of US imperialism, they must be stopped.