Anton Holberg
On June 1st, Labournetaustria has published a leaflet from the RCIT titled „Victory to the Revolution in Syria!“
(http://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/victory-to-revolution-in-syria/)
In it this organization writes:
„The Islamophobia of the left
Various left groups refuse to defend the revolution because many of the fighters against Assad are Islamists that are getting weapons from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan and claim either that the revolution is an imperialist plot (The Communist Party), or that the revolutionary struggle is over and it is now only a military conflict between equally two reactionary sides (CWI). We reject these claims. In 1936-39 the Palestinian revolutionary struggle against the British and the Zionists took place. At the head of the revolutionary workers and peasants stood an upper class reactionary leadership led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. Only pro British imperialists and pro Zionists could claim that because of the reactionary nature of the leadership, the masses did not fight a revolutionary struggle. What was necessary was to be with the masses to form a military united front with the leadership of the struggle without giving the upper class reactionary leadership any political support and warn against their inevitable betrayal of the struggle. The same applies today in Syria.“
This reasoning is fundamentally mistaken. The Palestinian struggle of the time was a struggle of national liberation against foreign colonial domination of which the Zionist schemes were but one aspect, albeit a crucial one. The struggle in Syria today is not aimed at national liberation against colonialists and is not even an antiimperialist struggle. It is a struggle against a bourgeois dictatorship. For communists therefore the question of the socioeonomic and goals of those fighting this dictatorship ought be primordial. The fact that large stretches of the toiling masses do in fact have good reasons for oppositing the rule of the regime is not sufficient reason to support their concrete struggle if it can be shown that the leading forces (and in a situation of civil war these are bound to be armed forces) fight for a program diametrically opposed to the objective interests of those oppositional masses as are freedom from social and political oppression and a socio-economic order which would enable them to have a better material life than under the present regime. Nothing like that is to be expected from the leading forces within the socalled Syrian „revolution“, forces made up to a very high degree of various strands of islamists from the conservative Muslim Brotherhood to the arch-reactionary salafi-jihadi forces of whom the well known ‘Jabhat an-Nusra‘ is but one. It is an absolute necessity to fight these terrorist forces who in the past have shown in many countries that their first victims are not some imperialist forces or some citizens in imperialist countries which happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time but other muslims in the countries of the islamic world. Communists or just all sorts of ‚unbelievers‘ and atheists should be aware that they – at least if they have to live in Syria – would be exterminated by those forces together with the supporters of the current baathi Regime.
Of course, imperialism is the main enemy of humanity as a whole. But at present there are no forces to be detected in Syria which in any serious way could be understood as being antiimperialist, at least not in the way Marxists understand this notion as beeing directed against capitalism in its monoplist era. This goes for both sides of the present conflict.
To say this has noting to do with „islamophobia“ since it is not directed against Islam as such, a religion not fundamentally different from any other, but against a sort of black reaction which is an absolute minority of muslims but which instrumentalizes this creed for politically and socially reactionary goals.
While it is of course wrong to to put European fascism as a form of rule of parts of an imperialist bourgeoisie on equal footing with modern islamism, there are aspects common to boths – such as the necessarily bourgeois character of the socio-economic order, absence of democracy, terrorist means of rule etc. Historical fascism organized large parts of the petit bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat in order to smash the rule of more liberal parts of the bourgeoisie and the working class movement. The rule of non-fascist sections of the bourgeoisie was fought at the same time – and with good reasons – by the communist movement.
Would any marxist/communist have argued that the fascists „revolution“
ought to be supported because the fascists fought against the treachorous social democrates or even other bourgeois forces? Syria is of course different in so far as the regime itself is a dictatorship, but that does not make the islamists any better.
Those who call for support for the Syrian „revolution“ must prove that there are outside of the reactionary islamist forces if not proletarian-socialist forces at least democratic ones willing and able to hold the black reaction at bay as soon as the Assad regime will be toppled. As far as one can see at present nothing is more unlikely. On this basis the call for support for the Syrian „revolution“ accompanied even if by a critique of its bourgeois leadership is a very abstract one if we do not have means to strengthen forces within Syria who stand for a fight against both the regime and the majority of the opposition on the basis of trur antiimperialism and progressive solutions for the plight of the toiling masses and the Syrian working class in particular.
Some groups of 10-20 unarmed revolutionary minded people, which might be detected somewhere in Syria (not in exile!) is definitely not enogh in a situation of civil war. The situation in Syria however does not allow for such an abstact and thus pathetic position as is the RCIT’s.