The current events in Syria are the prologue of the third world war.

The third world war and the tasks of revolutionary workers.

Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI) and Turkish Dordunku Blok statement

1. The current events in Syria are the prologue of the third world war. Imperialism created the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) and their barbarism, to carry out a coup d’état in Syria and to justify the re-colonisation of the Middle East. Most of their endeavours backfired. Imperialism created IS to justify their intervention, but the existence of IS also justifies Russian intervention. That’s why, at this early stage, imperialism is confused.
2. all the prologue of the current conflict (Afghanistan, Iraq, the economic crisis of 2008, the Arab spring, adventure military expansionists in Libya and Syria, disputes in the South China Sea, coups in Latin America, Ukraine, Iran, Kurdistan, Yemen, Guatemala, Burkina Faso, the drama of the refugees) accumulate to make a leap in quality in a great anti-imperialist front in gestation. As the conflagration spreads it is leading to a conflict that spans much more than those who border Syria, bringing in China, Iraq, Israel and Turkey. After the first moment of confusion, imperialism will give respond against the Eurasian bloc in the Middle East itself in any region of the planet, which will surely worsening the tragedy of refugees around the world.
3. in its response to the Eurasian block, it is possible that imperialism tries to deepen the conflict more in the East. In that context it is of vital importance that we defend the bureaucratised workers’ state in North Korea. Imperialism will also seek more control in its direct area of influence, which leads to it to menace Cuba and therefore we must also redouble our defence of the Cuban Workers’ State. Immediately, in the countries where the threat of coup d’état was already large, as Nicaragua (to prevent the construction of the Panama Canal), or in Brazil, our policy must be to combat the rightist elements that seek to make coups.
4. on one side of this conflict imperialism is headed by the United States and NATO and their terrorist agents such as Israel, the “Islamic State”, etc. On the other hand, are oppressed peoples, countries facing sanctions of imperialism, countries in which their peoples has an economy parasitized and sabotaged by imperialism, such as Brazil, peoples and countries that are invaded and occupied militarily by imperialism. There is a third field in this war and we are not pacifists: we are the opposite of imperialism. We are with the devil and his grandmother against imperialism!
5. Although a temporary ceasefire may be established, current events are preparing a new war as the ongoing cold war overheats, about which we have been alerting from 2011
6. in the anti-imperialist front, the revolutionaries do not enter as mere critical supporters of the bourgeois directions which are now faced with imperialism. The victory of in this war would represent a defeat for workers around the world. The victory of the bloc led by Russia and China, represent a defeat of the great enemy of all peoples, but not yet the release of workers from capitalist exploitation. Although the imperialist bourgeoisies and the bourgeoisies of Russia and China, etc., may be in conflict now, what they all fear is the proletarian revolution, which will lead to the final victory of the workers in a class war
7. at this time between capitalist economic crisis, defeats and being on the defensive for our class, as we prepare the most appropriate tactics to prepare conditions more favourable to the fight of our class, so the balance of power begins to shift in favour of workers in the use of the contradictions within the capitalist world to that is, this into the tactics of the front of masses with specific partners who run the mass movement, unless it means to establish a common agenda with the same and without any political support to the bourgeois and petty this front addresses.
8. this anti-imperialist front is a tactical Alliance, that not for one second can be confused with a stageist orientation or populist struggle front of classes, and that it needs to be subordinate wing defence of the interests of workers against employers in all and each of the nations and wing strategy of the fight by the World Party of the revolution, the Fourth International, and by the Permanent Revolution to planetary scale.

Karl Radek, Fourth Congress of the Comintern, 1922: “Comrades, you must understand that in China neither the victory of socialism nor the establishment of a soviet republic is on the agenda. Unfortunately, the question of national unity has not been historically placed on the agenda in China”. The task of Communists consisted of “unifying the real forces taking shape in the working class with two goals: first, organising the young working class, and second, establishing a proper relationship between them and the objectively revolutionary bourgeois forces”. He urged Chinese members to “Get out of the Confucian scholars’ reading rooms and go to the masses!” Paul Hampton http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2013/05/01/anti-imperialist-united-front

This article argues for the abandonment of the Anti-Imperialist United Front in favour of the theory of Permanent Revolution. The ICFI argues they are complementary theories united by the Transitional Programme and method. We would cite Trotsky, On the Sino-Japanese War, (September 1937), https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/10/sino.htm as proof of that thesis

Socialist Fight Additional Statement:

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism like the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS is fundamentally caused by the reactionary nature of imperialism itself and its methods of defending and expanding its influences. However the rise of Islamic fundamentalist reaction in Afghanistan in the 1980s and in the Middle East and North Africa since is partly a consequence of the bureaucratic and reactionary methods of struggle of Stalinism against reaction historically in the degenerate and deformed workers’ states and the bourgeois nationalists in semi-colonial countries. There is no political attempts to liberate the oppressed peasants and women from the domination of the landlords and misogynist Mullahs. Mass indiscriminate bombings causes big civilian casualties and consolidates their hold over them.

Both Stalinism historically and bourgeois nationalists are ‘anti-imperialist’ through necessity only when they are under economic or military attack either directly by imperialism itself or by its proxy forces. Joseph Stalin pioneered this ‘anti-imperialist’ ideology whose apogee was the wartime ‘anti-fascist’ bloc with Roosevelt and Churchill. The essence of this popular front alliance was to prevent the victory of revolutions after WWII as we had seen in the Russian Revolution after WWI. The aim of the struggles by these forces are always to avoid an existential political struggle with imperialism itself and to seek a better settlement with it. They seek to persuade imperialism that they will be its best regional representatives if only they are allowed:

1. The latitude to enjoy their own corrupt privileges in the case of the remaining Stalinist regimes in Cuba and North Korea. The Castro brothers in Cuba and Kim Jong-un in North Korea continue to seek settlements with imperialism that maintain their own privileges whilst conducting no global struggle against it. Nevertheless we defend the gains of the workers and oppressed in these deformed workers’ states and fight for political and not social revolutions there.
2. The semi-colonial bourgeoisie also seek a settlement with imperialism to allow them to exploit their own working class and oppressed people on their own terms in closer alliance with global imperialism. Assad, Putin and the Donbass leaders are seeking a deal with imperialism to sell out the struggles that is now forced upon them.

Only revolutionary Trotskyism has a coherent programme of struggle and an integrated worldwide ideology to defeat imperialism on a global scale; that programme is Permanent Revolution allied with the Anti-Imperialist United Front as one coherent strategy. Our anti-imperialism has nothing in common with Stalinist, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois third world anti-imperialism which seeks only its own national and regional privileges. This is fundamentally opposed to mobilising the working class as a global force to overthrow capitalism in world revolution, the only ultimate solution to all national problems. Permanent Revolution as theorised by Trotsky after 1927 and the Anti-Imperialist United Front as elaborated by the revolutionary Comintern up to 1922 are united in the Transitional Programme and the method that flows from that as outlined by Trotsky in 1938.Front as elaborated by the revolutionary Comintern up to 1922 and its development, the Transitional Programme and the method that flows from that as outlined by Trotsky in 1938.