Anand Gopal
We should look first at the context in Syria before the revolution. The Assad regime had co-opted and eradicated the Left over fifty years, so what remained of the Syrian left was not rooted in working-class communities, and left-wing language was alien to these communities. Of course, Syria is hardly unique here — this is the story the world over.
Beginning in the 1990s, the regime allowed Islamic discourse to pervade society as part of its neoliberal turn. It encouraged the proliferation of Islamic charities to carry out the duties once performed by the state. Around the same time, millions of Syrians went as migrants to work in the Gulf and returned with a more Islamic outlook.
So by 2011, political Islam had become an authentic mode of expression among the Syrian working class. Still, at the outset of the revolution, the protesters were demanding a secular, democratic state. However, from the very beginning, there were two currents within the uprising. The majority were working-class people, often living in shanty towns ringing major cities or in small provincial towns. Their demands were for political freedom and a better livelihood. And a minority were middle- and upper-middle-class activists, often with university degrees, who focused primarily on demands for political freedom and saw class-based demands as secondary or irrelevant. This latter group was tapped into international NGO networks and adopted the Western neoliberal language of human rights and individual rights.
As the revolution wore on, and as towns and cities became liberated from the Assad regime, these two currents moved in different directions. The secular FSA rebels were corrupt and ineffective, and they did not offer an ideology that could paint for the poor and working class a positive vision of a different kind of society, where people’s needs would be…
Auteur: Anand Gopal
