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Saturday 25 January / 2:00-5:30pm
Southall seminar: How the left failed Syria

Speakers: Joti Brar and others tbc When trying to make sense of the tragic collapse of the government led by President Bashar al-Assad and of the entire Syrian Arab Republic in December last year, western analysts have been quick to point the finger of blame at this or that faction of the worldwide anti-imperialist resistance axis. Some immediately jumped to blame Russia or Iran, others complained about President Assad himself. What almost none of these commentators thought to do was examine their own role and that of the workers in the countries in which they sit, discussing world politics as if it were a baseball game and they merely passive observers. But the truth is that any victory over imperialism can only be assured by action on both fronts of the enemy. The workers in the imperialist countries have a crucial role to play in disrupting the war machine on the home front; in refusing to allow their ruling classes to enjoy social peace and in refusing to cooperate with the waging of these genocidal wars abroad. This is why Lenin long ago pointed out that the struggle for socialism in the imperialist countries is intimately bound up with the struggle for national liberation in the oppressed world, and that it was doomed to fail if these two parts of the anti-imperialist world were not connected and working together. That therefore any leaders claiming to be ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ who do not actively work to create this unity of action between themselves and all those fighting the same imperialist power abroad are charlatans and traitors. And this is why our party has always insisted on bringing two slogans to the antiwar movement: Victory to the resistance, and No cooperation with the imperialist machine. It is precisely because we consistently promoted this genuinely antiwar stance that the self-appointed leadership of the Stop the War Coalition expelled our party in 2011 – just as the wars against Libya and Syria were being launched. These leaders have not acted in ignorance but in full knowledge of what a real antiwar movement should be doing. For 25 years, they have consistently chosen to use their control over the opposition to divert the attention and defuse the power of workers’ antiwar energies. They have effectively demobilised all those who really wanted to stop imperialism’s vicious wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Palestine. While they routinely repeat imperiallist lies against its main war targets Russia and China, they do not even deign to mention the wars raging across Africa, such as in Congo, Sudan and Somalia, despite the fact that these wars, too, are waged for imperialist plunder and have led to the death and displacement of many millions of Africans. To understand the , and to prevent more such terrible reverses befalling the hard-pressed peoples who face the full economic and military onslaught of western imperialism, the treachery of the antiwar leadership must be exposed and its influence rooted out. Instead of empty slogans and aimless pseudo-activities, we need to demand a return to the practical programme of action that in forcing the British government to withdraw from the war of intervention against Soviet Russia (waged with the intention of “strangling the Bolshevik baby in its crib”, in the words of that vicious anticommunist Winson Churchill).