Solidarity with working people of Syria

The following statement was released March 9 by Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, and Osborne Hart, SWP candidate for vice president.

The Socialist Workers Party calls on working people to stand with our fellow workers in Syria — in solidarity with their struggle to throw off the hated dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, to liberate sections of the country where the toilers have fallen under the tyranny of the reactionary Islamic State, and to aid the Kurdish people in their struggle to win independence and control over the regions where they live. All Syrian working people — Sunni, Shia, Christian, Alawite, Turkmen, Kurdish and others — have a common interest in fighting for these demands.

These struggles require international working-class solidarity. Syrian toilers need the space to mobilize in political action, to learn in struggle, to be transformed from victims into conscious actors in history. All of the imperialist and capitalist forces intervening in Syria today are obstacles to this course. We oppose the U.S. rulers’ involvement in the war in Syria and Iraq and call for Washington, its allies and others — from London and Paris to Moscow, Ankara and Tehran — to withdraw their warplanes, ships and troops now.

The relative weakness of U.S. imperialism in the Mideast today is a confirmation that Washington lost the Cold War. The U.S. ruling class lost the political assistance it got from Stalinist regimes and parties, which had used the prestige of their long-broken connection to the mighty Russian Revolution to disorient and destroy workers’ struggles worldwide. The vacuum of working-class leadership left by decades of class-collaboration by Stalinist parties in the region and the exhaustion of bourgeois nationalist forces there will take time and political space to fill.

Fearing the consequences of using their raw military might in the Middle East, the U.S. propertied rulers sought a bloc with Moscow and Tehran to replace the deepening disintegration of the old world order, in the futile hope of achieving stability for U.S. imperialism in the region. The truce Washington and Moscow have driven through strengthens the murderous Assad dictatorship, guaranteeing many more working people will be killed or driven from their homes.

“The drawing together of struggles by working people the world over opens the way toward winning more and more revolutionists to become communists, toward rebuilding proletarian leadership and an international communist movement,” the Socialist Workers Party’s 1990 resolution “U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War” explains. “The world in the making will see more Malcolm Xs, more Maurice Bishops, more Thomas Sankaras, more Nelson Mandelas, more Che Guevaras, more Fidel Castros. They will continue to be thrust forward through struggle toward the renewal of communist leadership. They will more and more recognize communism as the opposite of Stalinism and social democracy, as a road toward overthrowing world capitalism, not accommodation with it.” This perspective remains the way forward out of the devastation in Syria today.

The Cuban Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista is an excellent example of how ordinary working people can come together, become stronger and more conscious and build a new society based on human solidarity. The 1954-65 Algerian Revolution led by Ahmed Ben Bella that overthrew French colonialism and established a workers and farmers government in a country where the majority is Muslim and Arab shows what is possible.

Help spread the truth about battles and the class realities unfolding in Syria, help get the Militant around! Solidarity with the working people of Syria!

Related articles:
Socialist Workers Party: ‘Back workers struggles!’
Washington’s Syria deal with Moscow aims at securing interests of US rulers
Iran vote shows support for nuke deal, political openings

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