The mirage of the revolution in Syria

PUBLISHED December 29, 2024

KARACHI:

Antonio Gramsci’s adage that “the old dies, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a wide variety of morbid symptoms appear’ is painfully appropriate for the Arab world.

Caught in cycles of upheaval, the region replaces one tyranny with another, endlessly recycling power under the guise of change while grappling with the relentless pressures of global rivalries.

If the region was once under the iron grip of statist authoritarianism, now perpetual “revolution” itself seems to be its bane: a morbid trivialization of revolutionary change itself.

If the Western powers once supported autocracies in defiance of the will of the people, they now seem to support the disaffected masses – a grotesque contradiction, symptomatic of a disintegrating empire.

Recently, as December crept into the war-torn Middle East, the world was greeted with a familiar spectacle, this time in Syria: jubilant crowds filling the streets, storming palaces and firing guns to mark the fall of yet another autocrat. It was a manual scene of chaos, emblematic of the politics of late modernity, played out under the shadow of neoliberalism.

Yet another Arab nation seemed poised for a changing of the guard and a new flag, only for the dust to settle on a return to “business as usual” – the eventual “return to normal”.

Amid the celebrations and cautious hopes, Syrian rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, appeared in unexpected form, wearing a suit and white shirt. In his dapper attire, he called for the lifting of international sanctions – a golden ticket back into the global tide – and proclaimed that the new Syria was not looking for quarrels.

Here was another ex-jihadist, newly baptized in Imperial waters, harmless and tame.

The transformation was unmistakable: carefully chosen words, a rebranded image and muted rhetoric. He, as it were, served up a “decaffeinated revolution,” a movement watered down to suit the taste of the Western palate.

Once again, the waves of turmoil gave way to a simple adjustment, ensuring that the Western agenda remained intact and that the proverbial boat was not rocked too much.

However, the Western media and certain left-wing circles, who are quick to celebrate the “birth of a new Syria”, have once again overlooked how radical revolutionary movements have absorbed in the past into the machinery of the neoliberal status quo with the blessings of the Empire’s security apparatus. and how all outbreaks of rebellion were successfully neutralized.

But at the root of the tragicomedy is the neoliberal order’s obsession with newness and constant change itself—rather than actual “eventual” transformation—which has been repeatedly exposed every time warlords become revolutionaries in the Middle East. Isn’t it change itself that fuels the status quo?

As some cautious optimists noted after the fall of Damascus, the real test was “the morning after”—when the rush of unity faded, leaving behind the serious weight of reality. Then the fervor for solidarity had to be harnessed into concrete political action or, at least, into a coherent administrative plan.

However, the pressing question “what now?” it wasn’t just asked locally; more often than not, his answers came from voices far removed from the region itself.

Meanwhile, caught between the false dichotomy of “national sovereignty”—often a guise of tyranny—and the foreign-backed push for “democracy,” exemplified by interventions such as the invasion of Iraq, lies the breeding ground for “morbid symptoms.”

For progressive politics, the pattern reflects a deeper malaise: political language itself has become a prison, displacing authentic progressive voices and confining discourse within dominant narratives.

The collapse of the secular left in the region remains the region’s greatest tragedy, leaving a void filled by Islamic fundamentalism. While the latter mimics the left’s call for social justice, it lacks emancipatory ideals. The Syrian war has devolved into ethnic and religious strife, further revealing the criminal absence of a unifying secular vision.

Amid this lack of authentic, indigenous narratives, the challenge seems to be breaking free from the cycle of pro-Western liberalism and Islamic fundamentalism, which have perpetuated each other.

Civil society movements in Egypt – through trade unions, women’s groups and intellectuals – have offered glimmers of hope, but the region still struggles with the West’s contradictory stance.

Despite the lofty rhetoric, the West has repeatedly sabotaged progressive openings by claiming to support them. In 2011, when Arabs broke free from the binary for the first time, occupying public spaces not in the name of fundamentalism but for progressive demands, the West managed to operate its “ideological bomb disposal” – not by crushing heresy, but paradoxically. integrating the emergence of crisis and ultimately mitigating “dysfunctions” and disturbances.

This has left a landscape dominated by false radicalism, dictated choices and illusory gradualism. As a result, the only other visible alternative in the troubled waters of the region is either a capitalist-parliamentary framework, parochial identity freedoms at the cost of long-simmering economic precarity (the cause of the unrest in the first place), or tamed autocracy. regimes to safeguard US-Zionist interests in the region.

The United States, in particular, has a history of channeling popular uprisings into parliamentary-capitalist frameworks and gatekeeping revolts, as seen in post-apartheid South Africa, the post-Marcos Philippines, and post-Suharto Indonesia.

In such a scenario, progressive truths uttered in a language sanctioned by the international status quo hide more regressive and destructive meanings.

“Half a Revolution, No Revolution”

In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse introduced the idea of ​​”repressive desublimation” to describe the so-called sexual revolution: human impulses might be unleashed but remain tightly bound to capitalist control.

This lens helps reveal the deeper meaning behind protests and riots without a clear agenda. Their very lack of purpose says a lot about the ideological and political situation.

Today’s protester is a disgruntled consumer living in a society that loudly advocates choice but offers a harsh reality: the only alternatives to forced democratic conformity are either blind rebellion or destructive violence.

Opposition to the system can no longer present itself as a viable alternative or even a utopian dream—it instead erupts as a futile, chaotic outburst.

In a society driven by consumerism that thrives not on complete unity but on dissonance, there is little difference between a new pair of sneakers at a high-end store and a political identity that ironically heals the wounds of consumerism itself . Both calm the tension of the nerves.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou, a Maoist and soixante-huitard, argued that we exist in an increasingly “worldless” social space—one in which protest, lacking purpose or vision, manifests itself only as violence without sense.

Or, as the philosopher succinctly puts it in his book “Ethics”, “not every ‘newness’ is an event”. Mere false negativity and the wild, mad dance of rebellion only ends up creating new, fiercer idols out of the dust of the old.

Destruction, though cathartic, cannot replace the effort required to save and protect what is good. The guiding principle is fiat iustitia, pereat mundus — justice, where the line between justice and vengeance blurs.

Blake rightly wrote:

“The hand of vengeance has found the bed,

To which the violet ran;

The iron hand crushed the head,

And he became a tyrant in his place.”

For example, when the pandemic hit the world, a major pause was anticipated that would eventually force a pause for reflection, an opportunity to think beyond the realm of competence and devise a transformative “outside” to save humanity .

However, as anticipated, the force of history prevailed and the crisis was responded to by a “new normal” perfectly consistent with the contradictory nature of late capitalism.

“Revolutions”

Most accounts of the Syrian conflict focus on its internal dynamics, highlighting the iron fist of the Assad regime and the failure of the opposition to get its act together, while relegating international involvement as an afterthought. However, external forces were the real movers and shakers from the beginning, shaping the course of events on both sides.

While neither Assad nor the opposition were puppets on a string, foreign involvement added fuel to the fire, amplifying the scale and trajectory of the war.

Discontent across the region exposes the cracks in the neoliberal order. However, the answers rarely go beyond its framework. The result is a cycle of futility, where resistance becomes show rather than substance.

Leftist politics oscillates between extremes. On the one hand, unyielding radicalism refuses to compromise, as does the Maoist determination to concede nothing. On the other hand, the fatalistic acceptance of superficial reforms only goes through the crises without addressing their root causes. As the saying goes, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

This deadly oscillation often benefits regimes that deftly defuse revolutionary momentum with cosmetic reforms. The result is a trompe-l’oeil of transformation—the illusion of progress masking unchanged oppressive systems.

The pressing question remains: can a truly transformative vision emerge, or will the Arab revolutions remain confined within the contradictions of late capitalism?

Iranian scholar Asef Bayat describes the Arab uprisings of 2011-2012 as “revolutions without revolutionaries,” a term he unpacks in his book of the same name.

Drawing a sharp contrast with Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979—a classic example of a revolution with organized revolutionaries—Bayat, who himself observed the Iranian revolution closely, systematically compares these movements.

According to Bayat, the Arab uprisings were distinctive in their lack of radicalism, characterized by what he calls “dissent and de-radicalisation”.

Unlike the Iranian revolution, these revolts had no intellectual basis in ideologies such as nationalism, socialism, or Islamism, resulting in no decisive break with the old order. Instead, they represented “revolution as a movement” through mass mobilization, but not “revolution as an outcome” that drives systemic change.

This liminality—existing in a state of transition without progressing toward full transformation—was their defining feature. It was not a stepping stone to revolutionary reconstruction, but rather a half-blocked point, encapsulated in a protester’s placard: “Half-revolution, no revolution!”

Bayat coined the term “revolution” to describe these semi-revolutions, borrowing from Timothy Garton Ash’s use of the term to describe the mixture of reform and revolution seen during the collapse of communism in 1989.

He argues that the structural adjustments imposed by the IMF and the World Bank were the straw that broke the glass, steering the revolts away from radical change and into the grip of neoliberalism.

As for the Syrian revolution, a cautious hope, despite the cynical times we live in, remains, albeit stained by fourteen years of blood and betrayal. Or, as the poet Robert Lowell described such situations: “The light at the end of the tunnel is only the light of an approaching train.”