Blood-Baath in Syria… and proletarian direct action
It was thirty years ago, in the city of Hama in Syria… On February 2nd, 1982, the population responded to calls for insurrection against the government, against misery and repression. The insurgents were joined by 150 officers of the army and seized control of the city; they destroyed centres of repression, they executed more than 300 mercenaries of the regime, as well as a first unit of paratroops sent to subdue the revolt. The state retaliated while besieging the city and bombing it with heavy artillery during 27 days; even cyanide gas was used. The final assault reminds us of the “bloody week” during the Commune of Paris when the last bursts of proletarian resistance were equal to the state terror: young “kamikaze” women exploded their bombs amidst tanks and soldiers sweeping district, house by house. The repression was terrible, a sheer bloodbath: between 25,000 and 50,000 are estimated to have died. Media didn’t relay the information about these events, or not much, no indignation rose abroad, especially as the thesis of Islamite plot was put forward everywhere to better hide the social nature of these struggles, like any struggle of our class.
This uprising was not a bolt from the blue: strikes, demonstrations, sabotages, riots, bomb attacks, executions of army officers and VIPs of the Baath regime, mutinies in jails, various massacres, it was since months and years that important clashes had been setting Syria ablaze. Moreover the country was situated in a region that was laid waste by many problems–the struggles of our class were mixed with conflicts between various bourgeois factions: let’s remind the Lebanon war in 1982, as well as the bloody repression in “Palestinian” refugees camps where proletarians were slaughtered once by the Israeli army, once by various militias, if not directly by the PLO cops and their “national liberation” let’s remind the “Iranian revolution” from 1977 to 1979 and its transformation into an inter-bourgeois war between Iran and Iraq that will make about a million of dead in eight years; let’s also remind the struggles against this war, sabotages, revolutionary defeatism, army regiments of both belligerent countries that deserted their respective camps and got united to take actions against their own bourgeoisie, against both states; let’s remind the wave of proletarian struggle that swept through Egypt in 1977; let’s remind…
Nothing has changed, but everything begins…
It is more than one year now, an important wave of struggles has been flowing across Maghreb and Mashrek, a region that stretches away from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Dictators fell, others hang on to the remnants of their power, the repression is fierce everywhere, because the proletarians are determined not to croak on the altar of value without at least selling their life dearly. Struggles against hunger, against misery, against the increase of prices of “basic” foodstuffs, against unemployment, against the impunity of torturers, against the arrogance of masters entrenched in their less and less inaccessible fortresses… Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Kuwait…
And when dictators are ousted under the pressure of “the street” (soft journalistic euphemism for not saying the truth bluntly: i.e. the proletariat in struggle!), or better said, when the world bourgeoisie and its central apparatuses remove such or such administrator who is not able to control the situation anymore, then “new” faces appear, more credible political “alternatives” appear in order to restore social peace and business law and order. But very quickly, the struggle recovers its dynamics as we can see since some weeks, some months: in Tunisia where the “new” leaders (a mixture of “progressive” and Islamite factions) have been booed off on “the revolution’s” first anniversary, but also in Egypt where important sectors of the proletariat rejected each turn of the electoral circus by a real active boycott and clashed with always the same old torturers in the streets, and up to Libya where TNC “liberators” got a trashing from the proletariat occupying the streets, re-appropriating squares and afterwards completely ransacking TNC’s headquarters in Benghazi, which represent a simple and efficient activity of our class…
Despite some symbolic wage rises, despite a raising of subsidies for “basic” foodstuffs, despite promises to remove the state of siege that has been in force since 1963, despite the proposition to organize “free elections”, despite repression and slaughters (and the last one happened this February 4th 2012 when the army bombed the city of Homs and killed more than 200 people in one shot), despite arrests and tortures, despite the surrounding of cities by tanks, despite the bombing, despite all that and even much more, the revolt has been spreading in Syria since March 15th, 2011 and it continues to develop. Starting from the border city of Daraa, it inflames proletarians all over the country: Homs, Hama, Damascus, Aleppo, Baniyas, Lattaquia, etc.
Very quickly, various structuring of struggle set up, among others hundreds of coordinating committees (“tansiqyat”) that respond in the practice to the needs of the struggle, its organization on the ground, its coordination, its centralization and its self-defence, although they develop some very contradictory levels of radicalism as for the perspectives of the struggle. Very quickly the movement of our class counters also the state terror with class violence and direct action, it encourages defeatism in the central apparatuses of repression: more and more soldiers desert the ranks of bourgeois army, they fraternise with their class brothers and sisters and protect demonstrations against thugs of the regime. There are various networks of deserting soldiers, among which the most mediatised is without any doubt the FSA (“Free Syrian Army”) that, despite its alliances with groups of opponents of the current regime (bourgeois factions that are candidates for the political alternation and the management of our misery), is nevertheless developing on the ground a very contradictory militant practice of defeatism…
Proletarian comrades in struggle in Syria, Egypt, Tunisia… in Kazakhstan, Nigeria… in Romania, China, Bolivia… in the United States and everywhere else in the world… capitalism doesn’t have anything else to offer us than always more austerity, misery, exploitation, repression, war, death…
The struggle for living goes through the elimination of all the bourgeois factions that manage our everyday life and keep us in misery: “dictators” and “democrats”, the right and the left, militaries and civilians, ultraliberals and Social Democrats as well…
The capitalistic economy is in crisis, may it die!
The enemy is capitalism and the dictatorship of world market!
The objective is everywhere the same: social revolution!
Destruction of capitalism and the state!
Class War, February 2012
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