A large and angry demonstration was held outside the Australian embassy in Dili on 23 February, against the Australian government’s refusal to negotiate a permanent international border with East Timor.
The protest – organised by the coalition Movement Against the Occupation of the Timor Sea (MKOTT) – included dozens of organised contingents of students, young people, civil society groups and veterans of the national liberation struggle. “Timor Leste, viva! Australia, abaixo!” (“Long Live East Timor! Down with Australia!”) – was one popular chant.
The embassy had been subject to a smaller protest in 2013 and a graffiti protest in 2014 after it was revealed that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) spied on the Timorese government during negotiations over a temporary resource sharing arrangement. This latest protest indicates a dramatic escalation.
Tama Laka Aquita, vice president of the Socialist Party of Timor (PST), told Red Flag that another protest will take place on 22-23 March. This will coincide with protests in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and New York in the same week. PST president Avelino Coelho has already been on television talking up the issue.
All Timorese political parties agree that resolving the border dispute is a national priority. That has been reflected in a string of recent media statements by senior politicians calling Australian spying “a criminal act”, to quote Xanana Gusmao the historic leader of the Timorese resistance, and calling for an immediate re-start to negotiations to finalise the border.
The Timorese parliament has appointed a Council for Final Delimitation of Maritime Boundaries, which includes all former presidents, prime ministers and speakers of the parliament. Gusmao has been elected chief negotiator.
Australia’s present violation of Timorese sovereignty denies Timor the resources it badly needs for even basic national development. Many Timorese still lack access to electricity or safe water. Young people with university education are often lured to foreign NGOs or AID organisations that can pay higher wages than teachers receive at the National University of Timor Leste.
There are large gas reserves beneath the Timor Sea – particularly the enormous, undeveloped Greater Sunrise gas field, which is almost entirely on the Timorese side of the halfway line. In net terms, East Timor is actually the largest foreign aid contributor to Australia – if we count revenues taken by the Australian Treasury from gas already extracted from smaller, already developed fields on Timor’s side of the halfway line.
Australia’s aggression, for a time, seemed to be successful. Just prior to Timor gaining independence in 2002, foreign minister Alexander Downer reportedly told the UN transitional administrator of East Timor, Sergio Vieira de Mello, “Australia could bring meltdown to East Timor if it so chose” – i.e. by withdrawing foreign aid while the country was still waiting for gas revenues to come on line. In March 2002, Downer announced Australia’s withdrawal from the maritime boundary jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice.
The following month, Canberra was able to obtain a signature from then Timorese prime minister Mari Alkatiri, for the highly unfair, temporary, Timor Sea Treaty. The TST encountered immediate opposition and was never ratified by the Timorese parliament.
However, in 2006 then foreign minister Ramos Horta signed another highly unfair agreement with Australia. The new agreement – CMATS (Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea) – gave a partial concession to Timor by allowing it 50 percent, up from 18 percent, of the revenues from Greater Sunrise. However, it completely excluded Timor’s government and oil company from participation in the development and required Timor to postpone all negotiations for a permanent settlement of the boundary for 50 years.
Now even Horta is on record calling for Australia to re-start negotiations for a permanent settlement, as is Alkatiri. The new atmosphere of protest – which extends from the streets to the parliament – if it can be sustained and supported by a lively campaign in Australia, might prove correct what former Australian ambassador to Indonesia Richard Woolcott cabled to Canberra in 1975.
Woolcott argued for Australia to support the Indonesian invasion of the country in 1975 – which led to a quarter-century occupation and the death of 200,000 people. He thought that “closing the present gap in the agreed sea border” (i.e. finalising a border closer to Timor than Australia) “could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia … than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor”.
Indeed, the original Timor Gap Treaty that the Australian Labor government famously signed with the Indonesian military dictatorship in 1989 was far worse than the present CMATS. But even CMATS is no longer accepted by independent East Timor. Unfortunately for Malcolm Turnbull and his ilk, there is no longer a military dictatorship in Timor than can put down protests against the Australian embassy.
It seems safe to assume that embassy staff, DFAT and the Turnbull government must be monitoring the growing movement with increasing alarm. Working people in Australia should greet it not only with joy but with active support. The most meaningful solidarity we can give is by building our own movement to support East Timor’s democratic and sovereign right to complete its national self-determination. Viva Timor Leste!

Sam King

Big Protest confronts Australian Embassy in Dili

Mike Gonzalez (Red Flag March 3) tells us, “What can save the Bolivarian project ... is for the speculators and bureaucrats to be removed, and for popular power to be built, from the ground up, on the basis of a genuine socialism”.
However, the Venezuelan revolution is isolated. The only friendly socialist state is the small, poor island of Cuba (itself suffering US economic blockade for 50 years). Venezuela inherited an undeveloped capitalist economy. What could possibly be the meaning of Gonzalez’s “genuine socialism”?
It is, in essence, yet another call by foreign leftist for Venezuela to ‘go forward and create socialism now’, ‘hurry and expropriate all capitalists...’ etc. This has been stock-in-trade for small Trotskyist groups since the Venezuelan revolution began with the defeat of the counter-revolutionary coup (2002) and bosses lockout of the oil industry (2002-2003).
However, Gonzalez’s call is for “socialism” in one country, or more accurately, in two backward countries. While Stalin advanced the policy of “Socialism in One Country” to force-march Soviet development from the late 1920s he was only able to “achieve” it at terrible cost to workers and peasants who were forced to compensate for Russia’s backwardness.
Notably, the Cuban Communist Party does not agree with Gonzalez’s view either. Witness Cuba’s forced retreat from a fully socialised economy since 1991 when the island lost 80 percent of all foreign trade owing to the Soviet collapse that year. So, for what Gonzalez’s Venezuela might look like we would have to cast our eyes to North Korea!
Gonzalez’s starting point is in principal opposition to any collaboration with capital – an ultra-left position, rather like a unionist advocating in principle opposition to signing any contract with the bosses. Back in 2007 Gonzalez criticised Chávez for pursuing a “policy of mixed enterprises in the development of the oil industry”. But Gonzalez’s criticism assumes there is another option. While Venezuelan oil has been fully nationalised, it exists in the form of a thick tar that is buried deep underneath Lake Maracaibo. How does Gonzalez propose this be extracted at competitive cost without contracting the advanced technology which is monopolised by the principal multinational oil corporations?
Gonzalez believes his “genuine socialism” would be possible if “speculators and bureaucrats [were] removed” and “popular power ... built, from the ground up”. The speculators are the capitalist class, so that is just another call for “forward march!” Then we are told the “bureaucrats” (an extremely imprecise term in the circumstances) should be removed. But Venezuela has an undeveloped economy, I.e. one where material shortage is not resolvable given the existing level of development of productive capacity; were the cultural level of the population is also undeveloped, even compared with that of working people in “advanced” capitalist societies, like that which Gonzalez is from, the UK.
It is possible to remove individual bureaucrats who are found to be corrupt, inept, politically counter-revolutionary etc. But Gonzalez believes through this process it would be possible, in an isolated backward country to resolve problems of bureaucratism, corruption etc. This is despite the fact that in Gonzalez’s own (unsubstantiated) view “the institutions of popular power have largely withered on the vine”. The short answer to this perspective is not “North Korea” but “Stalin”. Or perhaps Gonzalez thinks Stalinism in the USSR was not a function of under-development isolation, but just the Bolshevik leadership’s inability to adopt “genuine socialism”.
The contradictions arising from Gonzalez’s refusal to make a concrete assessment can be seen from his awkward understanding of popular power. For Gonzalez, “The promises of community control, of control from below... have proved to be hollow.” So “control from below” is determined by “promises” from the government i.e. from above. This formulation wasn’t a one off; it proceeds from Gonzalez’s outlook. He repeats the same view at London Marxism 2013, concluding his speech calling for “conscious reorganisation of those elements of popular power that were promised and really never delivered”. “Popular power” can be “promised” but can never be “delivered”. It must be organised popularly.
We all hope the Venezuelan working class are ready and organised to expropriate the remainder of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie (principally the food and beverages company Polar, who employs 90,000 people). But Gonzalez has not attempt to show this is the case through any concrete assessment of the real situation. He ignores the frequent a repeated attempts to stimulate the development of popular power made by the Chavez leadership for more than a decade. The Bolivarian Circles, myriad social missions, housing committees, communal councils, workers councils, United Socialist Party of Venezuela, worker control of basic industry and many other initiatives were all more-or-less successful, more-or-less wise attempts to not to “deliver” workers power but to stimulate its organisation in a semi-proletarian country.
It is only through a serious and concrete analysis of these and initiatives – i.e. by assessing the interaction between the leadership and the mass – that it’s possible to draw political conclusions about the character of the Bolivarian leadership or of the political situation in Venezuela in general. By ignoring all the concrete forms of the development of the revolutionary process in order to paint the leadership as fakers and sell-outs, Gonzalez reduces the Venezuelan class struggle to government policy in the abstract.
Against Gonzalez we can glimpse another method. In “The Revolution Will Not Be Decreed: An interview with Gonzalo Gómez” (<a href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/">venezuelanalysis.com</a>) we find that Gonzalo Gomez, a revolutionary leader inside Venezuela would, similar to the international left critics, like to see “an acceleration, a democratic radicalisation, of the revolutionary process, with more audacious and radical measures that rupture with the existing capitalist system.” However, unlike Gonzalez, he sees that “these measures will have to recognise the reigning balance of forces, obviously.”
Thus for Gomez, “workers’ control will never come from the government merely giving a directive for workers’ to assume that role. The working-class needs to achieve a certain level of organisation and consciousness, it has to have its own leaders, and it has to be carried out in a dynamic of struggle. If there is no dynamic of struggle, the attitude of the people is to wait for the government.
“If there is no dynamic of struggle and mobilisation within the workers themselves that make this a possibility in reality you are not going to see actual workers’ control installed. The enterprises will instead be managed by the government. And with the structure of the state that currently exists, given the fact that we have not superseded capitalism, with all of these processes of bureaucratisation inside of the state ... the slogan of workers’ control will be distorted.
“The government is a close interlocutor of ours, sensitive to our demands, and it pushes various actions forwards and provides an orientation; but at the same time, the bureaucratic apparatus of the state often acts as a break on all advances. The bureaucracy appropriates the discourse of the revolution, but in reality rather than living for the revolution, they live from the revolution. They accumulate capital, negotiate with the bourgeoisie, and reject real changes.”
Gonzalez’s view that it might be possible to defeat this bureaucracy through simple purge and government directed organisation of workers is not just in opposition to Gomez it is contradiction to Gonzalez’s own tradition, the International Socialist Tendency’s support for “revolution from below”. It is also against Lenin’s general orientation, who in April 1918 wrote, “Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The difference between socialisation and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by “determination” alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialisation cannot be brought about without this ability.
To ignore Lenin’s distinction, and march headlong into more expropriations (and there have been over 1000 nationalisations already) may mean simply handing more property to “the bureaucratic apparatus of the state” which appropriates the discourse of the revolution, but in reality rather than living for the revolution, they live from the revolution. Short of a consolidated workers power to replace this apparatus, it cannot, in the real world, be swept away by government decree – that is the lesson of the whole terrible history of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Concrete analysis needed on Venezuela

Red Flag has been a strong supporter of the uprising in Syria, a stance that is controversial. Sam King and Corey Oakley debate some of the issues.
Is there a revolution in Syria? 
Sam King
In Red Flag issue 9, Omar Hassan writes, “There is a widespread belief that the US is desperate to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s brutal dictator. Some go as far as to deny the existence of the revolution taking place in that country, instead seeing the popular struggle there as a CIA plot.”
For Hassan, the popular struggle in Syria is either a revolution or a CIA plot. But what if we agree that the US is not desperate to overthrow Syria’s brutal dictatorship, and that there is a popular struggle that is not a CIA plot? Does that mean we must agree with Hassan that there is a revolution occurring? Like most writers who believe this, Hassan does not define “revolution”.
Traditionally Marxists have seen “social revolution” as the change of state power from one social class to another. In Russia in October 1917 power was transferred from the capitalists and landlords to the working class, while in the Chinese Revolution of 1949 from the capitalists to a peasant army. The term “political revolution” refers to transfer of power from one to another section of the same class by revolutionary means, for example the US civil war.
For Tariq Ali, the size of a popular struggle does not determine whether it is a revolution. “A crowd becomes a revolution”, he writes, “only when they have, in their majority, a clear set of social and political aims. If they do not, they will always be outflanked by those who do, or by the state that will recapture lost ground very rapidly.”
Gilbert Achcar, who, like Hassan, argues there is a revolution in Syria, believes “there is an ongoing process throughout the [Arab] region, which, like any revolutionary process in history, has ups and downs, periods of advances and periods of setbacks”. He claims the Arab uprising of 2011 represents a long term revolutionary process, “which would develop over many, many years if not decades”.
But this doesn’t help us to understand Syria today. In Achcar’s view, Russia would be in “revolution” just as much in 1907 as 1917 – yet one was a period of violent reaction following the failed 1905 revolution, the other a period of earth-shaking working class advance. So why classify them as the same thing?
Switzerland-based spokesperson for the Syrian Revolutionary Left Current, Joseph Daher, sheds the most light on this understanding of revolution.
Daher’s article “Self-organization of the popular struggles in Syria against the regime and Islamist groups? Yes, it exists!” explains the situation in the opposition controlled town of Raqqa. There, “the popular organizations are most often led by the youth. They have multiplied, to the extent that more than 42 social movements were officially registered at the end of May.”
These campaign by “painting the revolutionary flag in the neighbourhoods and the streets of the city, to oppose the islamists’ campaign to impose the black islamist flag”. In June, “a mass protest led by women was held in front of the islamist group Jabhat al-Nusra’s headquarters, where the protesters called for the liberation of the incarcerated prisoners”.
“In the city of Deir Ezzor in June, a campaign was launched by local activists that sought to encourage citizens to take part to the process of surveillance and the documentation of the practices of the popular local councils.”
More generally, Daher highlights “the emergence of newspapers produced by popular organizations … In the neighbourhood of Bustan Qasr, in Aleppo, the local population has protested numerous times to denounce the actions of the Sharia Council of Aleppo … in the same neighbourhood, the activists hailed ‘go f*c* yourself Islamic council’, protesting the repressive and authoritarian politics of the latter.”
Daher here highlights very important popular struggles. More precisely, these struggles are protest movements against the imposition of reactionary local state power by al-Qaeda affiliated militias. That al-Qaeda is able to kidnap is opponents and the popular movements can only demand their release presupposes that al-Qaeda has power.
The youth must restrict themselves to painting their flag on walls because they don’t have the power to raise it hegemonically. That Daher’s polemic is aimed at proving that a popular struggle even exists in the rebel zones of Syria concedes by omission that this struggle has not taken power.
Daher concludes: “[T]he Syrian revolution is still there, continues, and will not stop.” After Daher’s article was written Raqqa fell to al-Qaeda, whose black flag now flies over Aleppo, Idlib, Raqqa and much of Syria’s rebel-held north.
So for Hassan-Achcar-Daher, “revolution” does not mean taking power, it is all about the struggle. But what is the social character of that struggle? No English language Marxist analysis I have seen gives a class analysis of the Syrian opposition.
Socialists like Jonathan Maunder assess the character of the Assad regime as well as “the social and economic roots” of the 2011 uprising, which he argues is based in the failed neoliberal capitalist model of the Assad regime. However, analysis of the class or political character of the organisations of the “revolution” is difficult to find. Supporters of the “revolution in Syria” thesis often avoid talking about Syria much at all.
Israeli academic Eyal Zisser claims the “revolution in Syria … was at its base a peasants’ revolt, a protest by the Sunni periphery against what was perceived as the Baath regime’s turning its back on the country’s rural population”. But he makes no attempt to prove the rural and regional revolt is based in the peasant classes. Nor does he say if he is talking about rich or poor peasants.
The same article details how the non-peasant ruling class Tlas family of Rastan is split between supporting Assad and the opposition, thus tending to contradict Zisser’s own claim of a peasant revolt.
In the most well known case, the town of Azaz was controlled by the Northern Storm militia established by local capitalist Ammar al-Dadikhi before it was driven out by al-Qaeda. Where the poor have taken power is unclear.
Those arguing there is a revolution in Syria maintain it is kept from power only by the Assad regime’s superior weaponry. But if that were the case, what explains the continuous rise of al-Qaeda, which does not have an overwhelming monopoly in firepower?
Surely the case is closer to how Tariq Ali explains it, “a crowd becomes a revolution only when they have, in their majority, a clear set of social and political aims. If they do not, they will always be outflanked by those who do” – even if that force is utterly reactionary.
There is a revolution, and the left must support it
Corey Oakley
It is extremely fortunate that the millions of Syrians who have risen up against the Assad regime, engaging at enormous cost in one of the great popular revolts of modern history, did not first consult the Western left about the proper manner in which to make a revolution.
If they had, the Assad regime would still be firmly in place. Its monstrous security apparatus would still terrorise anyone who dared to raise the faintest voice of dissent. The private capitalists and regime insiders who grew obscenely rich over the last decade as a result of neo-liberal economic “reforms” would still be swanning around the capital in their expensive European cars, dining at fancy restaurants, gloriously unconcerned about the growing social crisis around them. Bashar al-Assad and his wife would still be travelling around the world like Saudi royalty, feted by th­­­­e Queen in Buckingham Palace, and John Kerry in Washington.
Why? Because for some on the Western left, any revolt against a dictator who is not wholly in the pocket of US imperialism is by definition suspicious. At one extreme are those like Sydney University lecturer Tim Anderson, an open apologist for the regime. He is of the type who, every time the regime carries out a massacre, immediately announces it to be a “false flag” operation: at best fabricated, at worst carried out by the opposition itself. Anderson and others like him also dutifully repeat every lie of the Assad regime denouncing the opposition as all Islamic terrorists and pawns of US imperialism.
Sam King does not adopt this approach in his article. But in raising the question of whether there is a genuine revolution taking place in Syria, he follows a pattern of leftist suspicion about the Syrian uprising, and demands a standard of proof for the credentials of the revolutionary forces far beyond that demanded of those who have risen up in revolt in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere.
There is a simple reason for the inconsistency. Whereas in Egypt the revolution was directed at overthrowing the pro-US regime of Hosni Mubarak, in Syria the revolt is directed at the supposedly anti-imperialist Bashar al-Assad. Even among those on the left who have little sympathy for Assad, the rhetorical hostility of the US to the Syrian regime, and the fact that Assad has from day one characterised the opposition as pro-imperialist, has had a profoundly disorienting impact.
In this context, it is necessary to establish some basic facts about the situation in Syria. The first is that the Syrian revolution is a genuine part of the broader Arab revolt – a movement for democracy and political freedom, for the redistribution of wealth, and an end to the economic and social policies that have had such a devastating impact on the lives of people across the Arab world.
In Syria, the period since Bashar al-Assad’s ascent to power was marked by a neoliberalism that dramatically restructured the previously statised economy. Austerity decimated spending in health, education, and social security. The regime encouraged the establishment of private schools, universities and hospitals for the rich, while running down public services. Real estate speculation and an end to rent controls drove reasonably well off workers into the impoverished suburbs of the cities. At the same time these suburbs were swelling with an influx of poor people from rural areas hit by drought and neoliberal policies that combined to cause a deep crisis in the countryside.
These factors explain why the Syrian revolution was driven from the beginning not by the educated middle classes, but by the rural and semi-urban poor.
In the initial phase of the revolution, before the regime forced it to become militarised, enormous steps were made to develop networks of popular control. Local co-ordinating committees, district revolutionary councils, and an array of other grassroots organisations sprung up – as did countless radio stations, revolutionary newspapers, and social media networks. The level of organising outstripped that of the revolutionary movements in other Arab countries.
While there were significant strikes, one of the weaknesses of the Syrian revolt from early on was the lack of independent working class organisation. And, as King suggests, the rural based revolt was far from some simon-pure class movement.
The revolution is undeniably messy, contradictory, ideologically and socially variegated. Given the history of Syria and the region, it is utopian to think it could be anything but. Nonetheless, for all its weaknesses, the Syrian opposition has fractured the regime to an extent that virtually no one believed possible. The regime has lost territorial control of large swathes of the country, and faces both armed and civil opposition in almost all the areas it still controls. If this is simply a “popular struggle” and not a revolution, it is a non-revolution of a quite unique kind.
This is not to say the Syrian revolution does not face immense difficulties. While the institutions of civil revolt still fight to exist, and particularly in the south have been extraordinarily resilient, the logic of armed conflict has taken a heavy toll. The role of al-Qaeda linked Islamists has been much exaggerated, but they are playing an increasing role in the north and west of the country, which has recently led to sharp struggles with the revolutionaries.
Numerous outside powers are intervening to try and shape the conflict in their interests: Russia, Iran and Hezbollah on the side of the regime; Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and to a lesser extent the US on the side of elements of the rebellion.
All of this means that there is no guarantee the revolution will succeed. If your definition of revolution is so narrow that it only includes revolutions that have already succeeded then, yes, I would concede that there is not a revolution in Syria. Just don’t tell the Russians who thought they had a revolution in 1905.
King quotes Tariq Ali’s definition of revolution. Without knowing the context of the quote, I have to say it strikes me as schematic and lifeless. I prefer Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin said that revolutions happen “when the ‘lower classes’ do not want to live in the old way and the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way”. Two undeniable features of Syrian life today.
Trotsky said, in characteristically more poetic terms, that “revolution is above all the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny”. For nearly three years now, millions of Syrians have been fighting to rule their own destiny. They have given their blood, their lives, their loved ones and their comrades in terrible number. The least the Western left can do is give them our solidarity.

Corey Oakley

Debating Syria

In his article “No US Attack on Syria” (Red Flag, September 1) US socialist Lee Sustar claimed, “Evidence of a horrific chemical weapons attack by the Syrian regime against civilians has revived liberal calls for “humanitarian” intervention by the U.S. Military.”
Sustar provides no evidence the 21 August attack in Damascus was carried out by the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and not its opponents. Despite the article’s ostensive anti-war stance, it repeats, without question, the key propaganda used by the US government to prepare public opinion for it to attack Syria.
US secretary of State, John Kerry claims that (classified) evidence constitutes a “clear and compelling” case against the Syrian regime. While Obama told PBS Newshour on 29 August, “We have concluded that the Syrian government in fact carried these out.” Neither statement is proven; both have been repeated uncritically by the overwhelming majority of the mainstream media.
Significant questions remain about the origins of the 21 August Chemical attack, and the previous ones. The Associated Press (AP) reported on 29 August that “multiple US officials used the phrase ‘not a slam dunk’ to describe the intelligence picture”.
The AP article cites a report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence “acknowledging that the US intelligence community no longer has the certainty it did six months ago of where the regime’s chemical weapons are stored, nor does it have proof Assad ordered chemical weapons use, according to two intelligence officials and two more US officials.”
Given that Obama had publically stated the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” triggering a US reaction, it is easy to see why sections of the opposition in armed conflict with Assad could have used a chemical attack to attempt to bring the US into the war. Military motive can equally be attributed to Assad. We are left with no conclusive evidence. It is unclear who is responsible.
When the US government, with the support of Australia and other allied imperialist regimes, is preparing a military assault, it is important not to believe anything printed in newspapers in support of their war drive.
When our own imperialist governments make specific claims to justify their aggression it is irresponsible for socialists, or any opponents of war, to repeat those claims without evidence.
Eds: We stand by our decision to publish Lee Sustar’s article, including the claims about chemical weapons.

Big Protest confronts Australian Embassy in Dili

Concrete analysis needed on Venezuela

Debating Syria

COUNTERVIEW: Red Flag should not have printed chemical weapons claim

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