Fascism shall not pass!

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4 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 2013 This statement by OKDE-Spartakos, Greek section of the Fourth International, was issued on Sept. 18.

Last night in Keratsini, the 34-year-old antifascist Pavlos Fyssas was murdered by members of the Golden Dawn. The murderers ambushed Pavlos on his way from a cafe back home. It was a political murder. Pavlos, also known as Killah P, a well-known militant of the antifascist movement and a hip-hop singer, did not suffer the attack randomly. According to the testimonies, only a few meters away from the murder scene there was a mo­ torcycle police squad, who did nothing to prevent the attack.

This murder is not an isolated inci­ dent. We should put it in the framework of the ever-increasing aggression of the Golden Dawn against not only immigrants any more, but also systematically against militants and organizations of the mass movement. It is the continuation of the aggressive action of the Golden Dawn, that started with the vio­ lent attack against the antifascist concert in Kallithea and went on with the murderous assault against Communist Party mem­ bers in Perama a few day ago.

These attacks show which are the real targets of fascism. Aim­ ing to prove their loyalty to every kind of boss, the GD neo-nazis hit workers’ unions, militants of the workers’ movement, immi­ grants, and antifascists.

The murderous action of the GD is an escalation of the attack unleashed for a long time by the government itself against all workers’ rights and all workers’ struggles, against youth movements and squats, against immigrants. Taking advantage of the anti-communist climate nourished by the government and the cover offered by the police, the GD present themselves as a force willing to do whatever necessary in order to meet the needs of the bosses, even cold-blooded murders.

Therefore, we don’t have any trust in the hypocritical democratic sensitivity of the government, nor in any kind of “con­ stitutional arch.” We are well aware of the fact that the government will combine

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... U.S. threats against Syria In view of this fact, the world’s tiny ruling strata prefer to lars intervening on currency and credit markets and in ev­ invest at profit rates that are virtually guaranteed by official ery other crevice of a world system that today can only government policy. Technically, or for public consumption, this is expressed in the corporate-controlled media terms For the ruling rich there is no other way out other than at today include the poorest and most oppressed sectors of of debates over government “stimulus” programs. In truth, workers’ expense. For working people, there is no way out the population as well as immigrants and now prison labor. what is under debate is how best to cut all social programs, other than the revolutionary transformation of the preda­ Neither Bernanke and his bosses, nor indeed any self- lower wages, and destroy pensions and all other hard won tory capitalist system itself. While this is the music of the respecting capitalist profiteer or bankster, ever intended social gains to keep a degenerating social system afloat. future, it is sounding louder and understood by greater to stimulate the economy by investing in jobs at a living The war against working people at home and the wars for wage. Whatever jobs might return to the U.S. are based on resources and cheap labor abroad are inseparable elements Today, approval of socialism, as opposed to capitalist the assumption that workers must pay dearly to keep the of the system’s inherent functioning, as is the associated plunder and ruin, registers higher than ever before. The gap between the thought and the struggle to bring it into being Today, overall profit rates in the super-heated competitive Bernanke’s concern about the government’s seemingly still remains large, but it is far from insurmountable. Marx capitalist world are eroding to the point that it’s simply not endless subsidies to speculative endeavors stems from a was on the mark when he noted that “capitalism creates its profitable—or better, it’s financially impossible—to effec­ deeper understanding that the resulting speculative U.S. own gravediggers,” that is, a working class that can rapidly tively compete on world markets, except by the extreme bubble must inevitably burst, and along with it the world become conscious of its power and capacity to end a social economy that is heavily dependent on valueless U.S. dol­ system that has become intolerable. n SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 2013 5 (continued from page 1: “U.S. threatens bombing of Syria despite diplomacy”)

In the last year, most U.S. military aid has been delivered covertly, in collabo­ ration, variously, with Saudi Arabia, Qa­ tar, Turkey, and Libya.

Heavy arms, and well-armed Islamist forces backed by these countries, have been flowing into the country for some time. The New York Times estimates that around 6000 foreign fighters, from countries as far afield as Chechnya, are part of the coalition in northern Syria that has just declared its independence from the exile opposition Syrian Na­ tional Council. A conservative estimate of the total number of foreign fight­ ers currently in Syria is 10,000. These forces, along with Syrian sectarian al­ lies, have been fighting not only with the Syrian government forces, but also against the militias of local grassroots activists who fear Islamic rule and op­ pose an Islamic state.

While reactionary Islamist forces re­ main only a portion of the opposition forces under arms, they control large swaths of northern Syria. Their touted fighting skills have undoubtedly con­ tributed to the fact that, according the Syrian Observatory on Human Rights, over 40% of the 120,000 deaths caused by the fighting so far have been wellequipped Syrian soldiers.

While many grassroots community groups have protested Islamic rule, many of the secular bourgeois leaders of the Free Syrian Army have, instead, collaborated with the foreign and Is­ lamist troops. On Sept. 7, on the occa­ sion of the seizure of the al-Menagh airbase by a multinational group of for­ eign fighters, the British Telegraph re­ ported that the Free Syrian Army chief in Aleppo, Abdul-Jabbar al-Aqidi, had confirmed that the FSA was providing weapons to these foreign fighters.

The Syrian youths and working peo­ ple who justifiably rose up in March and April of 2011 to protest the corrup­ tion, economic policies, and authori­ tarianism of the Assad regime thus find themselves in an increasingly difficult position. According to Dr. Vijay Pra­ shad from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., many towns in northern Syria are now under the control of reaction­ ary Islamist forces that have imposed harsh and unpopular social restric­ tions on the population. In the south of the country, despite several well-pub­ licized attempts by democratic-mind­ ed local leaders to bring the military struggle under the political control of local town councils that have remained loyal to the goals of original struggle, the secular armed forces seem to have been increasingly consolidated in the hands of Syrian elites who have mar­ ginalized the town committees, wel­ comed foreign fighters, and demanded direct U.S. military intervention.

How did this situation come about? According to the Syrian human rights leader, Haytham Manna, the original demands of the first demonstration of the uprising in Dar’a in March of 2011 were “Death rather than Oppression” and “Rami the Thief.” Rami Makhlouf, ... Fed bails out the rich (continued from page 3: “ObamaCare: Not in business for our health”) failing system alive.

super-exploitation of workers everywhere. the subject of the second slogan, is a cousin to Assad, and the wealthiest man in Syria. Makhlouf, considered a reliable political ally to the Assads, was granted extraordinary opportunities to amass wealth during the privatizations of Syria’s national patrimony that came with the Assad family’s introduction of neoliberal economic “reform.” His ob­ scene wealth and power were a symbol of the corruption that ordinary people deem responsible for the downward spiral of the standard of living in Syria.

For the ordinary Syrian, opposition to joblessness, corruption, and au­ thoritarianism were inextricably inter­ twined with their fight to enter fully into the real political life of Syria. For a great number of Syrians of the upper middle classes, however, opposition to Maklouf’s plundering was not based on egalitarian concerns, but on getting their fair share of the loot.

According to Manna, who sat on the exile Syrian National Council represent­ ing a coalition of 13 political parties associated with the old Stalinist and Nasserist movements of Syria, many of the businessmen who funded the SNC conferences were former partners of Makhlouf who had fallen out with him over business deals. Relationships be­ tween these businessmen and the main U.S. ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, had been built over time through commer­ cial and financial negotiations. It is no surprise that the elite forces that domi­ nated first the Syrian National Council, and now dominate the Syrian National Coalition, are focused on salvation via imperialist intervention.

Thus, from the very beginning of the armed struggle, there has been a bi­ furcation of interests among the dif­ ferent classes set into motion by the neoliberal economic reforms carried out by the Assad regime. The journalist Anand Gopal, speaking on a Syria panel at the 2013 Left Forum in New York, ex­ plained that the loss of control of local committees over the armed struggle was apparent at the very onset of the militarization of the upsurge. To fund a military brigade, you need money, and businessmen asserted their political primacy in the old fashioned way—by setting up their own militias.

If one’s goal is a more self-serving di­ vision of the spoils among elites, prag­ matic alliances with foreign fighters sent by your economic allies in the Gulf States, those who are in turn allied with the imperialist U.S., is just business as usual. In addition, nothing creates the opportunity for material aggrandize­ ment quite like the conquest of terri­ tory in the midst of war.

Those intrepid local activists strug­ gling on the ground for justice for the tens of thousands killed by Assad, scraping to survive war-induced depri­ vation, working to develop democratic functioning, defending women’s rights, creating solidarity economies, and dreaming of a society informed by hu­ manitarian values, are thus faced with tremendous obstacles.

Today, some Syrian towns are con­ destruction of the environment. trolled militarily and politically by re­ actionary Islamist forces. Others are controlled by those whose aim is booty or the theft of more seriously substan­ tial economic resources. Without real influence over the conduct of the war that will determine who politically rules Syria, the possibilities open to the egali­ tarians will likely be very limited.

Those forces also seem to lack the kind of political instrument that will allow them to hold their own and then defeat the pro-imperialist bourgeois leadership of the Syrian opposition. Historically, that kind of contest has required a revolutionary working-class party. Only that kind of formation can defend the interests of those who be­ gan the rebellion in Syria against the intervention of local and regional elites, and U.S. imperialism.

Many radicalizing youth in the U.S. and Europe, shaken by the shift of the relationship of forces in the opposition from those who struggle for economic justice and democracy to those prag­ matically allied with imperialism, the Gulf States, and foreign fighters associ­ ated with reactionary Islamist politics, wonder if they can escape the unsavory logic of the war and give their political support directly to the town councils organizing independently of the Syrian National Coalition and the leadership of the Free Syrian Army.

At a recent panel on Syria held at Yale University, featuring Vijay Prashad and Syrian-American intellectual Bas­ sam Haddad, a student asked, “What if we want to escape the binary of the proxy war between the U.S. and Iran, or the U.S. and Russia, and just do direct Tony Savino / Socialist Action solidarity with those trying to create collective structures on the ground?” Prashad answered, firmly, that while “solidarity is the most noble sentiment on earth,” those experiments in social justice on the village level in Syria can only survive, ultimately, if “we take the imperialist boot off the neck of the na­ tions of the Middle East.”

The United National Antiwar Coali­ tion has been attempting to build the kind of movement with the power to do just that. During the first two weeks of September, UNAC helped to call and co­ ordinate over 100 protests to demand: No More War! End the U.S. War on Syr­ ia! These actions, while not large, were, in general, successful efforts to unify all the forces that were ready to march to oppose the U.S. missile strike on Syria. In most cases, speakers with many dif­ ferent points of view on the origin of the civil war in Syria came together respectfully to create events that could attract media attention and inspire those new to the movement to venture into the streets. This strategy—one of unity in action around the principled demand of U.S. Out Now!—is as critical to movement success as ever.

Recent polls show that an over­ whelming majority in the United States is opposed to U.S. military intervention in Syria under any circumstances. War weariness and deep skepticism regard­ ing U.S. war aims have been fueled in part by the extraordinary revelations of Edward Snowden. This presents a chal­ lenge to antiwar activists to find a way to close the gap between mass antiwar sentiment and the numbers ready to mobilize in protests. n exist by inflicting misery on the world’s people.

numbers than in modern memory.