The following paper was delivered to a meeting organised by the Alba Granada North Africa organisation in Tunis. The meeting was held to mark the 79th anniversary of the founding of the Syrian Arab Republic in April 1946.
Very few workers in the west are aware of the fact that Syria had maintained a sovereign and anti-imperialist government for nearly eight decades in the teeth of imperialist opposition and constant attempts to bring it down. Despite having to contend with zionist armies on its doorstep, a zionist occupation on its territory, and zionist spies and saboteurs infiltrating its society, the Syrian Arab Republic refused to normalise with zionist Israel and remained a steadfast friend to the cause of Palestine liberation and a reliable base for Palestinian resistance movements.
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The fall of the Syrian Arab Republic in December 2024 came as a huge and very unwelcome shock to progressive people all over the world.
For workers in the imperialist countries, there are some very important lessons that must be learned from this event. The hard truth is that the people of Syria – and elsewhere – could have been spared what they are now enduring if our working-class movements had been doing their job for the last 20 years.
We allowed ourselves to be sidelined and disempowered. We allowed a leadership tied hand and foot to the interests of the imperialist ruling class to prevent us from organising ourselves to carry out genuine, rather than tokenistic, antiwar work.
Treachery of the antiwar leadership
In Britain, the self-appointed leadership of the trade union and antiwar movement knows this full well. Back in 2009, my party took a motion to Stop the War’s national conference. In those days, the antiwar movement was still large and vibrant, with many active local branches. The assembled delegates overwhelmingly endorsed the motion that we presented, which called for the instigation of a campaign of mass non-cooperation with the British war machine – which at that time was focusing its efforts on Iraq and Afghanistan.
That resolution required Stop the War to “do all in its power to promote a movement of industrial, political and military non-cooperation with all of imperialism’s aggressive war preparations and activities among British working people”. The steering committee was instructed “to campaign vigorously among trade unions to encourage them to adopt a practical policy … [of refusing] to support illegal wars or occupations directly or indirectly”.
On the day that their members voted that motion through, Stop the War’s leaders raised no objections. They did not dare to openly express their hostility to such a line at a time when antiwar sentiment was running so high. This was, after all, a time when many workers were realising just how badly they had been lied to when the war in Iraq was being launched. They wanted to do something to end the bloodshed, and they approved the proposals our party put forward.
So in classic bureaucratic, social-democratic fashion, the leadership allowed the resolution to be passed and then quietly shelved it. Its contents were never mentioned again in public, and the policy that had been agreed upon was never implemented.
This took place in April 2009. In 2010, our party reminded the organisation that it had taken this position, and that it must be implemented. Again, the conference overwhelmingly endorsed a motion that instructed Stop the War’s leaders to launch “a full campaign inside the unions to draw attention to British, US and Israeli war crimes, with the aim of passing in each of them, and then at the TUC, motions condemning those crimes and calling on workers to refuse to cooperate in their commission, whether it be by making or moving munitions or other equipment, writing or broadcasting propaganda, or helping in any other way to smooth the path of the war machine”.
This second resolution was also shelved and ignored. When we consider that the original position had been taken two years before the launch of the dirty war on Syria and the criminal destruction and invasion of Libya, we can appreciate fully the treachery of the antiwar movement’s leadership and the role they played in facilitating these terrible crimes.
During that period, far from implementing non-cooperation as a policy, which would have included refusing to cooperate in the spreading of war propaganda, the Trotskyites, Labourites and revisionists who dominate our movement continued to help the imperialists in preparing their next round of illegal aggressions.
Reinforcing imperialist narratives
As the ruling class was preparing for its wars against Libya and Syria, Stop the War meetings were dominated by Trotskyists who repeatedly proclaimed the advent of a ‘people’s revolution’ in both countries. They told British antiwar activists that ‘people’s councils’ were being formed, giving the totally false impression that a mass movement to topple unpopular ‘dictatorships’ was in motion.
Over recent decades, workers in the west have heard such lies repeated about many different countries, all of whom just happened to be targets of imperialism (Yugoslavia and Iran, for example). Every time, this assertion turned out to be a lie – but how many of those who heard the lie ever found out the truth? Certainly, no Trotskyite organisation has corrected itself or apologised for misleading the people. They assume our memories are short and simply transfer their big lie to a new theatre of operations.
Each time, they act in consort with a western media demonisation campaign that aims to galvanise support for a new war and to demobilise working-class antiwar sentiment. The imperialists know that aggressive war is not supported by the masses, so they aim to present their aggression as being somehow in support of the local people. This is why we are subjected to such hysterical campaigns to demonise the leadership of every country that imperialism wants to bring down.
In the west, the Trotskyites and ‘official’ working-class and antiwar leaders play their part in reinforcing this hysteria by claiming to have knowledge of an allegedly ‘mass’, ‘working-class’ opposition to the targeted government. Very often, they are more hysterical even than the rabid warmongers in denouncing the supposed ‘crimes’ of the governments (always referred to as ‘dictatorships’) being targeted (as, for example, in the cases of Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe, Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi or Russia’s President Putin). The result is that whatever ‘antiwar’ slogans they later produce are purely tokenistic: a bit of pacifist handwringing about the ‘nasty violence’ that is being used to achieve an aim that they have fundamentally endorsed.
In the case of Syria, Stop the War’s leaders left it to their allied Trotskyites to dominate the floor of meetings and tell lies about what was happening in the country. In the case of Libya, they were much more blatant. Just when the British people were being inundated with lies about Libya and Colonel Gaddafi by politicians and media, the StW leadership responded not by exposing these lies but by organising a picket outside the Libyan embassy to protest Gaddafi’s supposed “crimes against his people”!
And when my party criticised and exposed this war-enabling activity by our supposedly antiwar leaders, which was carried out just as Nato’s blitzkrieg was being prepared and the imperialist propaganda campaign was reaching fever pitch, we were promptly expelled from the organisation (by a leadership that had never been elected and according to no official rulebook).
Excluding anti-imperialists from the controlled ‘antiwar’ movement
So the only organisation that had proposed a genuine antiwar policy, which the membership would have been happy to carry out if given decent leadership, was expelled from the official antiwar movement – just as imperialism was launching two more illegal, aggressive wars. Wars that the antiwar movement did absolutely nothing to prevent or oppose.
It is worth noting that the chair of the Stop the War coalition at that time was Jeremy Corbyn, who would later be held up to British working people as the great hope for their salvation from austerity and war. Corbyn personally presided over the next annual conference of Stop the War, at which he refused to allow our party members even one minute to speak against their expulsion from the floor.
The protest against Gaddafi’s government was the sum total of national activity by Britain’s ‘antiwar’ movement in relation to the criminal war on Libya. Likewise on Syria, for the first two years that the war raged, Stop the War acted as if nothing was happening at all, and studiously avoided mentioning the conflict. It was not until a parliamentary vote was held in 2013 to decide on launching a direct (as opposed to proxy) intervention that they took part in some lobbying of MPs. No mass movement was mobilised at any point to use British working-class power to prevent or stop the war.
And no effort was made to expose the lies being told about Bashar al-Assad’s government or to explain the role of British and US imperialism in creating and directing the various proxy forces that were working together to carve up and destroy Syria – from the army of mercenary jihadi invaders to the Kurdish separatists and the zionist bombers. Quite the reverse, many of those involved in Stop the War described the invading jihadists and terrorist gangs as the cutting edge of a “working-class, progressive revolution against a dictatorship”.
These details are not recounted for sectarian point-scoring purposes, but to illustrate a vital point: the working class in an imperialist country has very real power to prevent its ruling class from engaging in aggressive war abroad. But this power remains untapped if we are not conscious of it, and if we do not explicitly organise ourselves to harness it.
Learning from our history
To our great shame, the last time the working class successfully organised against a British war intervention was over a century ago. On 10 May 1920, inspired by communist leader Harry Pollitt and the communist-led ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign, the dockers and stevedores of London refused to load arms and ammunition onto a ship called the Jolly George, giving such a lead to the whole working class that it went on to defeat the British bourgeoisie’s planned invasion of revolutionary Russia.
The working-class campaign against the invasion included mass protests in Trafalgar Square, but it achieved victory because workers collectively refused to participate in the invasion – not just as soldiers but also as facilitators, as aiders and abettors. Not only did a very shaken British government back down, but it was quick to also grant some pension and unemployment concessions to a working class whose militance was posing a direct threat to the stability of British capitalist rule.
This history is unknown to the vast majority of British people. It is deliberately buried not only by the ruling class but also by the social-democratic leadership of the organised working class. These misleaders have blood on their hands from every war waged by British imperialism without meaningful British working-class opposition. In the case of Syria, they are palpably guilty, having enthusiastically endorsed lies about the Assad government and failed to mobilise meaningfully against the war.
From the beginning of the war my own party put forward two slogans: “Victory to Syria” and “No cooperation with the war effort”. One of many leaflets we distributed in 2012 outlined the real reasons for the war as follows: “Syria’s government … is ‘guilty’ of the high crime of following anti-imperialist policies that seek to deliver economic and democratic gains to the Syrian, Arab and middle-eastern peoples.
“The imperialists, faced with the deepest ever economic and social crisis of capitalism, and with the prospect of losing some of their all-important footholds in the middle east, want to grab [Syrian and Iranian] resources. They also want to destroy the dangerous examples of independence that those countries set – and to try to establish new territorial bases from which to carry on controlling the region.
“Nato’s dictators want to install governments that will reverse progressive gains in Syria and Iran, such as free education and healthcare, nationalised oil and mineral wealth, and food and housing subsidies. Most importantly, they want to put an end to their independent and anti-imperialist foreign policies, particularly their principled refusal to compromise with Israeli zionism.
“In Syria, they want to overturn a secular and inclusive state and replace the present national-unity government with a politics rooted in confessional divisions. In this way, they hope to break the unity of the Syrian workers and divert their energies into religious and ethnic conflicts.”
What might have happened if this understanding had been spread by the whole of the trade union and antiwar movement to the British working class 15 years ago? How much suffering could have been spared not only in the middle east but also at home if the workers had been organised to resist the endless onslaughts of crisis-ridden imperialism?
The treachery of the antiwar movement’s official leadership allowed the British ruling class to play its vital role in directing a proxy jihadi army against Syria with impunity. It left the British working class ignorant of the ways in which the imperialists were destroying that country’s economy and steadily undermining its social fabric through a combination of vicious sanctions, endless bombing campaigns, territorial occupation and the seizure of some of its most important oilfields and wheat-growing areas.
Today, the working class of Britain is more demoralised and less organised than ever before. And at the same time as ever-larger numbers are being plunged into abject poverty with no meaningful resistance, we see the longstanding plans of the imperialists to balkanise Syria also coming to fruition.
Workers should take careful note of who joined the imperialist cheering over the fall of President Assad and the destruction of the secular, sovereign, anti-imperialist and anti-zionist Syrian Arab Republic. They have shown their true colours, and their allegiance to imperialism has been clearly revealed. The antiwar, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements will get nowhere until we learn to recognise such enemies within our ranks and eject them.
Linking our struggles
We owe this to our brothers and sisters in Syria and all the other countries ravaged by imperialist war, and we owe it to ourselves. For as VI Lenin pointed out (also in 1920): “The revolutionary movement in the advanced countries would in fact be nothing but a sheer fraud if, in their struggle against capital, the workers of Europe and America were not closely and completely united with the hundreds upon hundreds of millions of ‘colonial’ slaves, who are oppressed by that capital.”
We need a programme and a strategy against war that recognises the intimate connection between the struggle of the workers in the imperialist countries and the struggle of the masses in the oppressed countries. We need to understand that imperialism’s strength comes from its ability to draw superprofits from colonial and neocolonial territories, and to use a portion of those profits to buy social peace at home. We need to recognise that the struggle to rid humanity of this parasitic and bloodthirsty system must be fought on both fronts, and that neither can be fully victorious without concerted action by the other.
In the imperialist countries, this means refusing any longer to be sidelined; refusing to accept the false idea that we are mere bystanders to world events. It means organising to deliver meaningful solidarity to those who are targeted by our common exploiters overseas. By effecting such organisation, we will also begin to create the forces necessary for taking charge of our own society and finally overthrowing the senile rule of British finance capital at home.
In considering all this, it is worth noting that the overall trajectory for imperialism is the same as it was before it achieved what I have no doubt will turn out to be a temporary victory. It is true that this has been achieved through the most dirty and brutal means and is having horrific consequences for the Syrian people. But this does not by any means signify the end of the struggle, either for Syria or for us. Our shared struggle continues.
We expect, and are already seeing, that the struggle of the people of the middle east will be redoubled in the face of this reverse, and we in the imperialist heartlands must likewise learn to organise ourselves so that we can play our essential part in bringing about the final victory of the struggle against imperialist domination of the globe.
Reverses are bound to happen in the course of a long struggle such as ours, but no such reverse can alter the fact that imperialism is weak and rotten at its core. The system has become so utterly parasitic that it can no longer even organise itself efficiently to fight its own wars. It remains incapable of escaping the contradictions of capitalist economics and the deep global capitalist crisis of overproduction – a crisis that is impelling the imperialist bloc’s reckless drive towards all-out global war against Russia and China.
The launch of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation by a resistance movement that the zionists thought they had successfully neutralised, and the course of the genocidal war against Gaza over the last year and a half, have shown clearly that while the imperialist camp can do tremendous damage to people and places, the real balance of forces in the region has shifted substantially in favour of the Axis of Resistance. The imperialists and all their proxies combined have been unable to defeat even one of the Palestinian, Lebanese or Yemeni resistance movements.
Quite the reverse. Without the full support of the entire Nato bloc, Israel would have been destroyed by the combined actions of these forces. The imperialists have likewise been unable to wage an open war against Iran. Despite the defeat suffered in Syria, this steady shift in favour of the resistance remains fundamentally unaltered.
Meanwhile in the imperialist countries, the outrage of large numbers of workers at the genocidal war being waged on Gaza, and their disgust at their own governments’ complicity, has led to an outpouring of rage on the streets that the imperialists have been unable to contain via the usual ‘antiwar’ control mechanisms. The official ‘Palestine solidarity leadership’ did not mobilise those people onto the streets, and it is not able to demobilise them either, despite its best efforts.
While relatively few workers in Britain yet understand the role that was formerly played by Syria in the Axis of Resistance, the growing anti-zionist consciousness that is developing in Britain is creating a genuinely anti-imperialist core at the heart of the Palestine solidarity movement. Since this is not under the direction of the social-democratic controlled ‘opposition’, the state is having to become increasingly repressive in response – further undermining its claims to be either ‘democratic’ or ‘representative’.
Our own party members are among the many who have been targeted under public order laws (for supposed “antisemitism”) and anti-terror laws (for “support for a proscribed organisation – Hamas”). This began under the Rishi Sunak’s Tory government and has continued under Keir Starmer’s Labour one. Labour’s role as unconditional supporter of zionism and the Gaza genocide has exposed not only the party’s leadership but all the ‘left’ Labourites, Trotskyites and revisionist ‘communists’ who endlessly repeat the mantra that Labour is the party of the working class and that voting Labour is the only route to meaningful change for working-class people in Britain.
We have no doubt that the forces of resistance in Syria and across the region are going to continue their century-long struggle for liberation and sovereignty. And we are determined to do our part in educating as many workers as possible with a genuinely anti-imperialist understanding, re-establishing a Marxist-Leninist leadership that is able to give clear guidance in the rebuilding of a revolutionary movement in Britain.
Given the blood price that is demanded of humanity for every year that this decaying, parasitic system remains in place, it is simply not acceptable to wait passively for better times. It is our bounden duty to work now, and work together, so that the defeat of Anglo-American imperialism is brought about sooner rather than later.
Death to imperialism! Death to zionism!
Victory to the Axis of Resistance!
No cooperation with imperialist war!
