Versión en castellano

1. The fall of the Assad regime and the control of Syria by HTS and other allied opposition forces backed by NATO powers, is taking the trend towards a new global imperialist war a step further. 

We are not facing a popular or democratic victory, but a new division of Syria, placing it on the side of regional powers such as Turkey or Israel, and in the international arena of NATO. It was seen that the defense capacity of the bourgeois Assad regime, whose economy was destroyed, whose supporters such as Hezbollah and Iran were extremely weakened and which was rotting from within, was finished.

The current situation in Syria is historically rooted in the defeat of the great Syrian popular uprising of 2011-2012 – a defeat due as much to the ruthless repression of the Baathist regime and by the reactionary involvement of the United States, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, as to the fragmentation and deviation -on confessional, ethnic and local bases- of the initially unitary popular movement, to which all the regional and global powers have made a decisive contribution, now disputing, weapons in hand, the strategic Syrian territory. 

The Assad family regime ransacked the country for decades, turning the socialist promises of the Baath Party into an authoritarian and police state, implementing neoliberal policies of impoverishment. The Assad regime’s “anti-imperialism” has always been a bargaining chip, such as when it supported the US intervention in Iraq. The bloody civil war that sought to crush the popular uprising left half a million dead and millions displaced. No popular sector has risen up in its defense, and its own allies-protectors have deemed it too costly and risky to engage in trying to save it.

This new situation is certainly unfavorable to Russia and Iran, as Syria was historically on the Russia block and more recently under the Iranian influence. Immediately the Zionist state, Turkey, the United States and NATO have intensified their war operations in Syria and in the Middle East, taking the trend towards a new global imperialist war a step further. In fact Israel and the Western imperialist powers feel encouraged to carry out their offensive in Yemen too, as they are already doing, and to intensify their threats and maneuvers in the direction of Iran, by trying to foster also a regime change

The group that led the military offensive against the Assad regime, the HTS, is not a revolutionary force but one of the strands of Islamic fundamentalism, supported by Turkey and other reactionary regimes of the Middle East, as well as the USA and Israel, which are actively intervening in order to control the process that is developing in that country. The other opposition formations are also characterized by their links with regional and international powers, starting with the Syrian National Army, a mercenary force armed by Erdogan’s Turkish government. The communiqué after taking power announces a call for ‘national unity’ and their willingness to move closer to Israel and the West, while targeting Iran, meaning they are preparing to act as pawns in the imperialist regional dispute. The new provisional government, in which a trusted confidant of the HTS leader was appointed, emerged from an agreement with al-Assad’s prime minister. They are working towards putting together an ‘orderly transition’ in which efforts will be made to leave vital aspects of the deposed regime in place. Nothing good for the peoples of the world can be expected from this new regime, which embodies the most reactionary obscurantism and attacks on the independent organization of the people.

We are on the side of the Syrian’s workers and peasants who struggle for their democratic and economic rights, and on the side of women and minorities fighting for their demands, against the danger of a theocratic oppressive regime emerging in Syria, against the old and new bourgeois leaders, and against the threat of a fragmentation of the country. 

A special problem is posed with the national demands of the Kurdish people, regarding which we stand for their right to self-determination. But it should be noted that the strategy of acting as auxiliaries to an imperialist camp constitutes a terrible blow to the cause of liberation of the Kurdish people. People of Kurdish origin are being used as bargaining chips in regional negotiations and there is a real danger of the United State’s impending betrayal to Kurdish people, while systematic attacks are carried out by Turkish government proxy forces.

Taken as a whole, the situation in Syria represents an episode of the imperialist war. We are faced with an attempt to set up a pro-imperialist regime – even if it is wrapped up in ‘democratic’ rhetoric – that is part of an international political reconfiguration tailored to the liking of the western powers. 

We denounce that in the framework of this confrontation of forces both the HTS group and the jihadist and mercenary formations as well as the forces of Al Assad, Iran and Russia constitute reactionary camps that are refractory to the interests of the workers. This carnage must be overcome. Only the entry on the scene of an alternative of unity of the exploited and for the expulsion of imperialism, Zionism and the local regimes of oppression can change this picture. We claim the popular uprisings in the region, such as those in Iran or Lebanon, or before that, the Arab Spring, as well as the heroic Palestinian resistance and the international support for their cause.

2. The escalation of the imperialist war continues to become more severe on the Ukrainian front. The US, UK and French governments authorized the use of long-range missiles that have already hit Russian soil. It should be made clear that these are weapons that can only be fired by satellites calibrated by NATO members and must be operated from launch to detonation by US military officers. They thus constitute an even more direct and undisguised involvement of NATO in the war.

At the same time, the debate over troop deployment, whether by the regular army or private companies, has flared up in Europe, especially in France and the UK. The rest of the continent’s countries are also preparing for a new phase of mass or compulsory conscription. They have had signals in favor of sending troops to Ukraine from Lithuania (supported by Germany) and Poland.

The prospect of an autonomous European military force, which EU heads of state are discussing, puts into perspective the possibility of major tensions within NATO. Donald Trump’s diatribes about who bears the greatest financial cost of operations in Ukraine have the context of the clashes between the United States and European countries over how to divide spheres of influence and economic agreements. The Nord Stream pipeline explosion, an act of war against their European allies under the Biden administration, is one of the antecedents in this growing inter-imperialist hostility in the NATO bloc.

The division of tasks between NATO partners also includes projections about the ‘reconstruction’ of Ukraine and a ‘peace’ which, if it succeeds, will be an imperialist peace, i.e. the dismemberment of Ukraine into territories or zones of influence, the plundering of natural resources and the unloading on Ukrainian and European workers of the real economic and social costs of the war. But even a settlement in Ukraine does not ensure a lasting peace as was the case with previous agreements. The Western imperialist powers want to defeat Russia at all costs, including disputes over its sphere of influence and the possibility of a regime change.

Russia does not represent an anti-imperialist barrier or a beacon of combat for the peoples. Putin’s regime is advancing on Ukraine to preserve the big Russian oligarchs’ slice of the regional divide. Its military forces operate as invaders seeking to subjugate neighboring peoples, a far cry from the glorious proletarian Red Army. Putin relentlessly pursues the left and workers’ opposition, preventing the last vestiges of independent organization, and applies a general crackdown on democratic freedoms.

We reaffirm, echoing the tradition of the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences, that the main enemy is at home. Down with war and hunger governments, down with war funding and military budgets. We call for fraternization between the workers and soldiers of Ukraine and Russia, and for the imposition of proletarian power.

3. Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections has been accompanied by an aggravation of all existing tensions. Trump has signalled his willingness to cut off support for the war in Ukraine, trying to force a peace agreement that could include territorial concessions favorable to Putin. His aim is to point all guns towards a more direct confrontation with China. At the same time, he has announced a tariff policy against China, the European Union and even free trade partners Mexico and Canada. The crisis in the US is brutal, and it is not clear that the measures he proposes would solve the problem, they might rather aggravate the recession.

At home in the US, he intends to institute a regime of offensives against the workers, announcing mass deportations, state layoffs to fill the state with far-right officials and a reinforcement of repressive forces. 

In the face of Trump, Meloni and Milei, it is necessary to organize the fight against the ultra-right and the fascistic forces. This fight is defined on the streets and in the direct action of the united front of the forces of the working class. We reject the policy of raising expectations in bourgeois democracy as a way of combating the far right. The fronts with the ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie bind the workers hand and foot and lead to the worst betrayals and defeats. The other bourgeois resource that emerges in parallel to the new ultra-right groups is the class-collaborationist popular front and the integration of working-class forces into bourgeois governments or cabinets. It should be noted that it has been the governments of so-called ‘democratic’ imperialism that have undertaken the biggest massacres of this last period, as well as unheard of austerity measures on the peoples.

Reformist parties and reformist leaders do not really fight the ultra-right, but they cheat and betray the workers who trust them. An example of this is the total dissolution of the Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez behind the genocidal government of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, or the agreement towards a Republican Front in France, which only helped Macron to stay in the saddle and seek new center-right, totally anti-proletarian, solutions to the deep French political crisis. It has been the reliance on traditional bourgeois forces and the subordination of the so-called institutional left to them that has paved the way for the ultra-right and the fascists.

4. China is neither a banner of peoples’ liberation nor a fulcrum for anti-imperialist initiatives. Neither is Xi Jinping or the CCP bureaucracy. Its action towards the peoples of the world with the so-called ‘New Silk Road’ has not been that of a fair exchange aimed at mutual complementation and planning, but has had the same basis and premises as that of any capitalist or imperialist enterprise, i.e. the primacy of a predatory and confiscatory interest, which in this case is embodied by the Beijing bureaucracy and its native bourgeoisie. Within its own territory, the Chinese working class is exploited and oppressed, and is deprived of any possibility of independent intervention. It has been stripped of all control over its organizations and workers’ dissent has been banned at the dictates of the party. China is a central piece and part in the imperialist war.

The United States is seeking a way out of its own crisis of capitalist hegemony by using its military might to advance and attempt to impose itself. This is the function of the US military encirclement of the Chinese Sea, the rearmament of South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, and the formation of a kind of NATO of the Pacific Ocean, the AUKUS of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Added to this is India’s involvement in military preparations against China, which shows that the BRICS are neither a politically homogenous bloc nor an alternative emancipatory or anti-imperialist project for the working class.

5. In Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, the state of Israel continues to commit genocide against the Palestinian people, the biggest massacre in recent times. The signing of the ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah has not been honored by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In reaction, Israel has repudiated the 1974 treaties and has proceeded to reinforce its presence with bombings and incursions, penetrating even beyond the Golan Heights into the former ‘buffer zone’. With NATO’s support, their intention is to consolidate the annexations of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria that the ultra-Zionists project as ‘Greater Israel’.

The massacre of the Palestinian people, with the annihilation of countless human lives, the death marches, the wiping out of all civilian and humanitarian infrastructure, has not, however, been a total triumph for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his masters in the United States. The Israeli government continues to grapple with the continuing fierce resistance of the Palestinian people to Zionist and imperialist domination, which must be supported unconditionally, without this meaning to agree with the orientation of its leadership. As revolutionary internationalists we actively defend their fair resistance and call for an end to the genocide and for a single Palestine, including the right of return, which is for us a secular and socialist Palestine. An action that must be understood on the road to power for workers and peasants throughout the Middle East.

6. The left, generally speaking, has stood in the face of imperialist war by repeating the betrayal of the old social democracy which voted the so-called ‘war credits’ in 1914, i.e. by supporting their respective bourgeoisies against the rival states. With honorable exceptions, the forces of the institutional left, communist and socialist parties, and nationalist groups in the West voted in favor of budgets and funding for the war in Ukraine, whether in national or European parliaments, as did DSA in the United States. The same attitude was adopted by the so-called Russian Communist Party and other left-wing forces, in this case in favor of Putin’s approach. A fierce denunciation and demarcation with these groups is necessary. The massacres of capital are financed by the hunger of the people, on whom the burden of increasing military budgets falls, while social spending on work, housing, health, education, pensions and infrastructure collapses under ‘austerity measures. The satisfaction of popular demands is incompatible with the continuity of war governments.

There is also the case of the left which, claiming to be revolutionary, has adapted to imperialist pressure, demanding money and arms for Ukraine, while others have wanted to see in the Russian army a revolutionary counterweight to the West. Others have developed the curious thesis of a ‘dual’ war and justify, with the right to Ukrainian national self-determination, support for the imperialist NATO side. With the same logic, they hail the advance of the jihadists in Syria, promoted by Israel and Turkey, as a ‘revolution’ or call for the handover of the government in Venezuela to the US-linked opposition.

We reaffirm that this is a single imperialist war, of camps alien to the workers, that Ukraine and Volodymir Zelensky act as pawns on behalf of NATO, and that the attitude to the imperialist war, whether of adaptation to the bourgeoisies or of internationalism and workers’ independence, separates camps in the revolutionary left.

7. An unavoidable point in this picture is the internationalist solidarity against the repression exercised, with increasing emphasis, by the governments of War and Hunger. We point out that the repressive blow is being unloaded first of all on the left and the militant sectors of the workers‘ and students’ movement, i.e. sectors that are confronting, with their public and militant actions, the social consequences of the war effort and the austerity measures dictated by imperialist capital. This is the situation of the “piquetero” movement in Argentina, of grassroots trade unionism in Italy, of students in Greece, of labor activism in Turkey, of the persecution of the movement for the Palestinian cause, of the trade union movement in Great Britain facing austerity and so many others.

8. Based on this common understanding and reading, on the great mass struggles that are beginning to take shape with the strikes in Italy, France or Germany, on the clamor of the peoples in support of Palestine, on the effort to recompose the workers’ and exploited movements in all countries, we call to organize actions against the imperialist war, including an internationalist conference against the war in 2025.

We oppose the governments of hunger and war to the struggle for workers’ governments all over the world and the internationalist brotherhood of the working class and the exploited. Once again, we say: ‘proletarians and oppressed of the world, unite’.

Agreed on 1/4/2024

First signatures:

NAR New Left Current for Communist Liberation (Greece) 

PO Workers’ Party (Argentina)

SEP Socialist Workers Partty (Turkey)

TIR Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency (Italy)

Avanza la campaña internacional contra la persecución al Polo Obrero

Contra la persecución a los luchadores honestos y los atropellos a las garantías procesales, llevarán el caso al Alto Comisionado por los Derechos Humanos y a las embajadas de numerosos países. –

prensaobrera.com