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Source: https://againstwagelabor.com/2024/12/16/syria-war-partition-and-the-fate-of-the-working-masses/

Original in Persian: https://alayhesarmaye.com/2024/12/09/_/5212/

/ CLASS WAR / We present here a short contribution from a group of comrades in Iran about the recent events in Syria. These comrades, who call themselves “Anti-Capitalist Workers”, publish the blog “Against Capital” [علیه سرمایه], and we recently opened our columns to them when we published our bulletin on the important class struggles in Iran in 2022 (see our bulletin n°15).

One of the points made in the text that we particularly appreciated (in addition to the reminders to the primacy of class struggle, and to the abolition of wage slavery, capital and the State, the rejection of the electoral circus, the criticism of political parties and trade unions…) was the denial of the particularisms that segment and divide the proletarian population – our class! – into various communities and identities, and thus the reaffirmation of internationalism:

“A major axis of deception, brainwashing, and misguidance practiced by both right-wing and left-wing bourgeois media globally is the narrative that Syria is a country made up of Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Turkmen, Yazidis, Muslims, Christians, Alawites, Jews, and Sunnis!! This is the deadliest drug or poison historically injected into human consciousness by dominant classes, their governments, and—countless times over—by the capitalist system with its massive forces of coercion. It aims to destroy the unified social existence of workers and the foundation of their united struggle for liberation, turning them against one another and preventing their radical and united fight against the real roots of exploitation, oppression, and misery.”

This criticism of the comrades from Iran is fully in line with what we said a few years ago when we reviewed the myths and impostures developed by the worshippers of the so-called “Rojava Revolution” (see our bulletin n°13):

“What matters to us, we as revolutionary proletarians, communist militants, or anarchist ones (beyond labels), it’s not what “differentiates” us, it’s not our “singularity”, the fact that we are “Czech” or “French” or “British” or “American” while others are “Kurdish” or “Assyrian” or “Chaldean” or “Sunni” or “Shia”, etc. What is important on the contrary is what unifies us as a human and militant community against the global and universal dictatorship of Capital which materializes for all of us through exploitation, alienation, commoditization of our bodies and our lives, misery, war, death… What matters for us is to display very clearly our contempt for all national community, community of citizens, people’s community, for all democratic community in the deep sense of what democracy is, i.e. not a simple form (parliamentary democracy, “workers’” democracy or direct democracy, cantonal or municipal democracy, etc.) but rather the essence of capitalism and therefore the negation of class antagonism and the dilution of the proletariat (revolutionary class) into this bourgeois entity that is the People, the Nation and ultimately the State. What matters above all is the fact that we are, or become, brothers and sisters of misery and exploitation, brothers and sisters of revolution; and that we recognize it consciously.

Humanity has been separated from itself, from the nature, from its activity and its production, to be turned into slaves, serfs and modern proletarians. Mankind is separated from their genuine human community and they are linked as a multi-“something” false community: multiethnic, multicultural, multinational… Internationalism is not the addition of various or even different nationalisms or all nationalisms, but on the contrary its complete and accomplished negation…”

So what, “order reigns in Damascus”!? to paraphrase Rosa Luxembourg… In a way, we’d tend to say “yes”! The fall of Bashar and his Baathist regime, which had reigned for six decades with mass murder, torture, rape, arrests and centuries of imprisonment imposed on all those who dared to raise their heads a little… the disappearance of this much-hated clique of capitalist managers in favor of another, “cleaner” (sic), less discredited (sic) faction, pushed forward or at least tolerated by a large panel of the party of the world capitalist order (USA, EU, Turkey, Israel, petro-monarchies…), it all looks very much like, if not a gendarmerie operation to suppress the direct action of our class, at least an operation to maintain order or to restore order in the “Syrian chaos”… even if capitalist order fits also very well with a certain amount of disorder and destabilization…

But we would also tend to answer “no”, in the sense that, at the highest level of abstraction, revolution feeds on the rottenness of counter-revolution, and is thus enriched by the confrontation between two classes, two projects, two worlds… These last events could have a tendency to reactivate the social dynamics that have been slumbering for some years now. The embers of the 2011 revolt are still hot and are just waiting to reignite a material that is as flammable as ever: the social contradictions that counterpose classes with antagonistic interests… Just watch the videos from Syria, all these shining faces of human beings, proletarians, who sing, who dance, who are partying, on the public squares of the towns, districts and villages liberated from the yoke of the Baathist torturers, while the new police force (that of HTS) has not yet really imposed itself, or at least has not yet stifled these cries of joy and shouts of struggle…

We would also like to point out here that the struggles of our class are certainly not absent from these events (even if very little, too little information reaches us in this regard): some have spoken of “solidarity demonstrations” in southern Syria at the time of the fall of the city of Aleppo, of “popular uprisings” which would have taken place in parallel to the advance of HTS on Damascus, mainly around the rebel town of Suwayda…

And finally, let’s remember that after years of silence our class raised its head on various occasions in 2019, 2022 and 2024 in the governorate of Idlib, which was ruled and managed with an iron fist precisely by the HTS clique now in power in Damascus, that our class organized demonstrations there against the high cost of living, against shortages, against repression… confronting the henchmen of the Islamist militias.

Let’s also remember that since 2023, numerous and sometimes violent demonstrations have broken out in Suwayda – the said “uprising of Dignity” –, here against Bashar’s regime, accompanied with strikes, occupation of public buildings, road blockades, etc., and that none of this can be attributed to any particular local specificity: here belonging to the “Druze community”, there to the “Sunni community”, etc. ad nauseam!

And now it’s time for our “Anti-Capitalist Workers” comrades…

CW.