SYRIA: May Day … the revolution of the workers and the toiling masses

Aware of the revolutionary left in Syria

Declaration

In this third year of the Syrian popular revolution which has made enormous sacrifices, it is clear that it reflects a fierce struggle and acute class. A struggle that involves the popular classes, led by the workers, the working masses and the poor in urban and rural areas, to face a tyrannical power bourgeois coalition around a corrupt junta that serves the interests of a middle class whose power and greed have achieved in the last decade of staggering proportions. This along with the implementation of anti-social liberal policies that led to the loss of more than a third of the country’s population accompanied by an absolute denial of civil liberties, including freedom of opinion, expression, party and trade union, the right to demonstrate …

Syrian working class, estimated at six million workers / Artists, suffered all forms of repression and domestication over the last four decades. She was stripped of his right to form independent trade unions and to express its demands and rights, and that, by making the General Union of Workers in the circles of power and supervising union year under the slogan of “unionism policy “through a network of devices monitoring and enforcement including various law enforcement agencies and the union bureaucracy which most members are subservient to power and organizations of the Baath party security services, but also to the directions of opportunistic communist parties that owe allegiance the dictatorial regime and bourgeois whose role boils down to stifle any movement of the working class struggle.

However, the Syrian working class has not abdicated repression and attempts to domestication. It was recorded, especially during the five years preceding the outbreak of the popular revolution, a remarkable recovery of the struggle of workers in all sectors in protest against the neoliberal policies of power, where discontent and protest reached up ‘the middle and lower rows of the union bureaucracy.

Despite the repression and the brutal violence of the regime against the masses in revolt, the expulsion of tens of thousands of workers and the destruction or closure of more than a thousand plants and facilities and renunciation the construction of more than three thousand industrial facilities, the working class has initiated many events over the past two years. These protests include both strikes in the port of Tartus in early 2011, the workers’ demonstration company molasses spinning and weaving at the beginning of February of the same year and the sit-in workers technical services in Aleppo at the headquarters of the Prime Minister on 29 June 2011, the protest of temporary workers in the departments and directorates of the province of Damascus in the same period, the workers strike at the National Hospital and al-Malikiyya Workers protest wire tagging Aleppo or those of the cement Adra. In the year 2012, another series of demonstrations by workers were organized, including the transport strike truckers gas in the oil and gas site al-Ramilan in the city of Al-Hasakah in early January 2012 Workers protest cotton gins in Idlib, the minibus drivers’ strike in Damascus and society, workers protest company spinning Jableh, the workers cleaning Kameshli, strike Crescent staff PRCS which began in early pril 2012 and lasted a month, the sit-in printing workers in Dar Al-Baath, July 27, 2012, to protest against workers Plast Ryan in the endosperm July 2012, the protest by workers of Al-Rayyan Plast in al-Suwayda city, the workers of the company Rima, the sit-in in the building of the Union of Workers in the province of Damascus and workers protest Ebla Hotel.

Since the workers are the class that energizes the revolution, places of residence and their lives have become bastions of the revolution and protests, but also the first victim of the regime’s brutality. No wonder that the vast majority of the thousands of martyrs come from these disadvantaged and regions and suburbs were destroyed and crushed are mainly working class areas and strongholds of the poor and the working masses. In addition, a significant portion of workers were left without work after the shutdown of hundreds of factories or dismissed. While another part is the main striking force in the revolutionary process and the armed popular resistance, particularly in the industrial and working class areas such as Damascus, Aleppo and Homs.

The power of the ruling clique tried by all means to prevent the working class to challenge by using quality and social in nature. By the destruction of industrial areas, the closure of many factories and the dismissal of tens of thousands of workers, the regime tended to dismantle the capacity of the working class to take revolutionary action as a class and also dismantle its actual capacity paralyze and overthrow the bourgeois regime on the basis of which is diametrically opposite social alternative.

We call on the workers to get their hands on factories and industrial and agricultural facilities that were closed by the government or the capitalists, and manage themselves through autonomous workers’ councils. This initiative will be a qualitative leap in the context of radicalization of social revolution in which the constitution of these boards will be accompanied by self-defense mechanisms, which allow the revolution to an essential step on the way to his social outlook.

There are no radical democratic revolution, or rather no social revolution without a major and independent role of workers and the toiling masses. Working to form workers’ councils and workers in each factory and each facility with fractions of workers armed resistance everywhere.

For a power of workers and the toiling masses …. All the power and all the wealth to the people!
Aware of the revolutionary left in Syria

Damascus, 1 May 2013

Source: Syria Freedom Forever