THE world capitalist crisis is driving forward the working class and poor of the world to carry through the world socialist revolution, and replace the bankrupt and completely outmoded world capitalist system with a world socialist republic.
The huge increases that have taken place in the cost of living, and the massive unemployment caused by the crisis, is driving forward this revolution with great power throughout North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf.
This revolution has shown its permanent nature by the refusal of the Tunisian and Egyptian workers to accept military-appointed ‘transitional regimes’, and their determination to continue to march forward.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has declared that the revolution is over and that it is working excellently with the army, while the working class is continuing the revolution and is demanding its rights, jobs, homes and living wages, and continually clashing with the army’s counter-revolutionary role.
The counter-revolutionary response to the North African revolution has seen UK, French and US imperialism attack Libya, to grab its oil and garrison it to police North Africa.
However, the Libyan masses have refused to submit, and the ever more desperate attempts to assassinate Gadaffi have failed, leaving the imperialists to contemplate a ground war at the same time as they are making war on their own workers.
Meanwhile, in Bahrain and the Yemen the masses have risen up against feudalism and military dictatorship.
Imperialist-supported massacres and abductions in the two states have failed to drive the masses back.
When the British monarch invited the King of Bahrain to join her at the forthcoming royal marriage comedy, he had to sorrowfully refuse, saying that he dare not leave his kingdom for fear that he would not get back.
The counter-revolution is indeed struggling to drive back the massive revolutionary wave, not least in Palestine, Iraq and Syria!
Tens of thousands of Palestinian youth are mobilising independently of the PLO and Hamas to demand Palestinian unity and revolution to establish their state.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi youth are rallying from north to south and from east to west demanding the end of the Maliki regime, and that every US soldier must quit Iraq.
In Syria the masses have taken to the streets and are determined to no longer put up with the prison-type rule established by the Syrian bourgeoisie.
These masses are not pro-US or pro-Zionist.
If the US or the Zionists attempt to interfere in Syria, the masses will fight alongside the Syrian army to defeat them, since such intervention will be to disintegrate Syria, prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state, strengthen Israel and add more occupied Syrian territory to the occupied Golan Heights.
The Syrian bourgeoisie is long established, and has played a perfidious role in the past, when it supported the Falangists against the Palestinians in Lebanon in the mid-1970s, and supported the US in the 1990 Gulf War, while in 2003 it stood aside. It would make a deal with the US if it could, but it cannot.
There is no room for both Israel and Syria in the Middle East as far as the US imperialists are concerned.
The Syrian workers are taking the lead in the struggle for democratic rights and for the rights of the working class and socialism.
The class struggle in North Africa, the Gulf and the Middle East has now entered a decisive phase.
It is vital that sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International are built throughout the area to lead this still developing revolutionary struggle to victory over the imperialists and their feudal and bourgeois local agencies, to establish a socialist North Africa and a socialist Middle East.
Above all, the workers of the UK must declare that their enemy is at home and that the victory of the Arab workers and poor will be their own victory, and then bring down the coalition government to prove it.