The fall of the Assad regime last December, after fifty-five years of hereditary dictatorial rule, was as momentous and unexpected as its beginning and endurance since the 1970s. Amid the unprecedented and uncertain transformations that Syria is undergoing today, what significance do left-wing ideas still have for postcolonial Syria?
Rosa Luxemburg recognized in her 1913 work The Accumulation of Capital the constitutive influence of colonialism on the destructive formation of ninetenth-century capitalism. The Italian Marxist historian Domenico Losurdo has criticized Western Marxism for its blindness to the colonial question and its theoretical Eurocentrism (as well as its dismissal of Joseph Stalin’s legacy). Yet his books are limited to a critique of the Western canon itself.
In the period between Luxemburg and Losurdo, African and Asian communists have been largely absent from the theoretical narratives of international communism, and even more so from analyses of the specific conditions against which they struggled. Focusing on the checkered legacy of Syria’s Khalid Bakdash (1912–95) in all its global, regional, and local dimensions is a way of revisiting the wider history of the Arab communist movement.
Bakdash was the towering figure of Soviet-aligned communism in a region struggling with colonialism and its legacies, including low levels of industrialization, sectarianism, patriarchy, and neo-feudalism. Bakdash’s political life encapsulates the constraints and contradictions of communism during the Arab Cold War, the transition from Stalinism to independent Marxism-Leninism at the regional level, and the communist splits and persecutions at the national level during the period of Assadist rule over Syria.
Bakdash became the most significant communist leader not merely in Syria but throughout the Arab world, creating a Stalinist personality cult around himself. In the words of the late historian Tareq Ismael, “He ruled the party in the name of…
Auteur: Jens Hanssen
