Blood-baath in Syria and proletarian direct action

Greetings to proletarians in struggle in Syria, Egypt, Tunisia... and all over the world!

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Blood-Baath in Syria and proletarian direct action

Greetings to proletarians in struggle in Syria, Egypt, Tunisia... and all over the world!


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 army officers 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 paratroopers sent to subdue the revolt. The State retaliated while besieging the city and bombing it with heavy artillery over 27 days; even cyanide gas was used. The final assault reminds us of the “bloody week” during the Paris Commune 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. The media didn’t relay information about these events, or not much, no indignation arose abroad, especially as the thesis of an 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 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 remember 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 PLO cops and their “national liberation”; let’s remember the “Iranian revolution” from 1977 to 1979 and its transformation into an inter-bourgeois war between Iran and Iraq that would make about a million dead in eight years; let’s also remember the struggles against this war, the sabotages, revolutionary defeatism, army regiments of both belligerent countries that deserted their respective camps and united to take action against their own bourgeoisie, against both States; let’s remember the wave of proletarian struggle that swept through Egypt in 1977; let’s remember…

Nothing has changed, but everything begins…

It is more than one year now that an important wave of struggles has been flowing across the Maghreb and Mashrek, a region that stretches away from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Dictators have fallen, 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 from “the street” (a soft journalistic euphemism for not saying the truth bluntly: i.e. the proletariat in struggle!), or rather, when the world bourgeoisie and its central apparatuses remove such and such an administrator who is unable to control the situation any more, 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 have been able to see for 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 have 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 the TNC “liberators” got a thrashing from the proletariat occupying the streets, re-appropriating squares and afterwards completely ransacking the 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 proposal to organize “free elections”, despite the repression and slaughter (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 throughout in Syria since March 15th, 2011 and it continues to develop. Starting from the border city of Daraa, it has inflamed proletarians all over the country: Homs, Hama, Damascus, Aleppo, Baniyas, Lattaquia, etc.

Very quickly, various means of structuring the struggle were set up, among others hundreds of coordinating committees (“tansiqyat”) that respond in 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 also countered State terror with class violence and direct action, it has encouraged defeatism in the central apparatuses of repression: more and more soldiers are deserting the ranks of the bourgeois army, they fraternise with their class brothers and sisters and protect demonstrations against regime thugs. 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 but 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, the military and civilians, ultra-liberals and Social Democrats as well…

The capitalistic economy is in crisis, may it die!
The enemy is capitalism and the dictatorship of the world market!
The objective everywhere is the same: social revolution!
Destruction of capitalism and the State!

TŘÍDNÍ VÁLKA
(Class War)

February 2012