In the North, on the first front, the Kurdish region, the PYD/YPG forces have seized the historic opportunity to gain an independent region. A second front is the vast area stretching from Syria to Iraq, held by the Islamic State (EI), which today appears to be clearly running out of steam under the blows of the international coalition. From these two fronts, the Syrian regime rapidly withdrew, concentrating on “useful” Syria, that of the major cities and ports, where most of the country’s economic activity is located. If we look at the whole picture, we are faced with what appears empirically to be a generalized breakdown, a purely anomic situation. As a result, the bombardment of Aleppo and the firing of rockets by rebels on regime-held areas take on the same “barbaric” nature as the exactions of the EI, with the idea that this is what always happens in these countries.
It’s not enough to analyze events in the Middle East in macro-economic and geopolitical terms: the “Shiite crescent” issue, hydrocarbons transiting through Syria, Russian military bases and various international rivalries play the role of deus ex machina in this drama. The fact that in 2011, thousands of people took to the streets every Friday to demonstrate under the bullets of the regime, and that in Palestine people are fighting with stones, can only be explained by the fanaticism of the demonstrators, guided by the actions of secret organizations: everything else is economics, diplomacy and trade relations between states. When we’re not dealing with outright conspiracy rhetoric, we’re often dealing with a vulgar Marxist-style analysis, which amounts to revealing a series of determinations that have their source in the so-called “economy”. It’s no coincidence that all such analyses generally support the el-Assad regime, i.e. the status quo: “economy” is a way of thinking about order.
What we must try to grasp is how the conflicts in the Middle East are part of the present moment of the global crisis of capital, understood not only as an economic crisis, but also as a social crisis, in the particular conditions of these societies. We need to grasp the determinants of this crisis, without reducing to a single factor – be it religion or oil – the generalized social explosion that is every civil war. Let’s try to grasp how this moment is also ours.
ISRAEL AND PALESTINE – CAPITAL, SETTLEMENTS AND THE STATE
Conflict as history
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, parts of the Middle East were invaded by the new capitalist mode of production. In this region, the indigenous textile industry, especially in Egypt, was destroyed by cheap English textiles in the 1830s. By the 1860s, British manufacturers had begun growing cotton along the Nile. In 1869, the Suez Canal was opened to facilitate British and French trade. In line with this modernization, the origins of primitive accumulation in Palestine can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire’s 1858 land ownership law, which replaced collective ownership with individual ownership of land. Tribal village chiefs were transformed into a class of landowners who sold their titles to Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian and Iranian merchants. Throughout this period, the pattern of development was one of uneven growth, with the foreign bourgeoisie taking the initiative and the indigenous bourgeoisie, so to speak, remaining weak and politically ineffectual.
Under the British Mandate, many absentee landlords were bought out by the Jewish Colonization Association, leading to the expulsion of Palestinian sharecroppers and farmers. As the dispossessed had to become agricultural workers on their own land, a decisive transformation of production relations began, leading to the first appearance of a Palestinian proletariat. This process took place despite violent opposition from the Palestinians. The great turning point in a succession of revolts was the uprising of 1936-1939. Its importance lies in the fact that “the driving force of this uprising was no longer the peasantry or the bourgeoisie, but, for the first time, an agricultural proletariat deprived of the means of work and subsistence, associated with an embryonic working class concentrated mainly in the ports and the Haifa oil refinery”. The uprising led to attacks on Palestinian landowners as well as English and Zionist settlers. It was at this time that the kibbutz movement developed, as an experiment in communal living inspired by anarchists such as Kropotkin, within the framework of Zionism but opposed to the project of a state.
The legacy of the Second World War is hard to imagine. Jewish settlement in Palestine, already underway but of little importance between 1880 and 1929, increased in the 1930s and then gained tremendous momentum in the post-war period, giving birth to Israel. The new state used the legal apparatus of the British Mandate to pursue the expropriation of the Palestinians. The proletarianization of the Palestinian peasantry was further extended by the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. This new wave of primitive accumulation was not confined to land grabbing. It also involved the authoritarian control of the West Bank’s water reserves by Israeli capital, for example.
After the 1967 war, the Israeli state found itself not only still surrounded by hostile Arab states, but also obliged to control the Palestinian population of the occupied territories. A third of the population controlled by the Israeli state was Palestinian. In the face of these internal and external threats, the permanent survival of the Zionist state required the unity of all Israeli Jews, Western and Eastern. But uniting all Jews behind the Israeli state meant integrating previously excluded Eastern Jews into a vast Zionist labor colony. The policy of establishing Jewish settlements in the occupied territories was an important element in the extension of Zionist labor settlement to include previously excluded Eastern Jews. Of course, the immediate aim of the settlements was to consolidate Israel’s control over the occupied territories. However, settlement policy also offered the poorer bangs of the Jewish working class housing and jobs that enabled them to escape their subordinate position in Israel proper. This was not without resistance from the Israeli working class, some of whom opposed it, such as the Israeli Black Panther, but the Histadrut, a state “union” and major employer, strove to stifle Israeli working-class struggles, such as the violent picketing of road workers.
In 1987, it was the inhabitants of the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza who instigated the Intifada, not the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) composed by the Palestinian bourgeoisie, based in Tunisia and completely taken by surprise. As with the second intifada in 2000, it was a spontaneous mass reaction to the murder of Palestinian workers. In the long term, the Intifada helped bring about the PLO’s diplomatic rehabilitation. After all, the PLO might well be a lesser evil compared to the autonomous activity of the proletariat. However, the PLO’s negotiating strength depended on its ability, as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”, to control its constituency, which could never be guaranteed, especially when its strategy of armed struggle had proved unsuccessful. It was therefore difficult for the PLO to recover an uprising initiated by proletarians, who had little interest in nationalism, and who hated the Palestinian bourgeoisie almost as much as they hated the Israeli state.
When some people tried to assert their authority by claiming to be leaders of the Intifada, the story goes that a fourteen-year-old boy pointed to the stone he was holding and said, “That’s right, the leader of the Intifada.” The Palestinian Authority’s current attempts to militarize today’s Intifada are a tactic to prevent this “anarchy” from happening again. The widespread use of stones as weapons against the Israeli army meant that it was understood that the Arab states were incapable of defeating Israel by means of conventional warfare, let alone the PLO’s “armed struggle”. Disarmed” civil disorder necessarily rejected “the logic of state war” (although it could also be seen as a reaction to a desperate situation, in which dying as a “martyr” might seem preferable to living in the hell of the present situation). To a certain extent, stone-throwing thwarted the armed might of the State of Israel.
Other participants belonged to relatively new groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In an attempt to create a counterweight to the PLO, Israel had encouraged the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s. The Brotherhood had demonstrated its anti-working-class sentiments by burning down a library it deemed to be a “communist hotbed”, and Israel began supplying them with arms.
First known as the “Gaza-Jericho Accords”, the Oslo Accords established the PLO as the Palestinian Authority. Hamas was able to exploit this discontent while adapting and compromising. Having rejected the Oslo accords, it boycotted the first Palestinian elections to be held under the accords in 1996. This is no longer the case. Like all nationalist parties, Hamas, with its religious rhetoric, has no intention of giving power to the people, with or without the trappings of bourgeois democracy. In fact, this is what the movement has in common with the PLO in all its components: the establishment of a political-military apparatus that is built up in the course of the struggle, in the name of the people but clearly above them as soon as it comes to taking and then exercising power. After several years in government, Hamas’s credibility is probably, and to all appearances, well and truly damaged, and no one is keen to return to the arms of Fatah (the PLO’s military wing). It seems that skepticism, or even despair and withdrawal, are winning over the population more and more each day.
Is Zionism just another form of colonialism?
In this situation, the question of determining the boundaries of what would delimit a “legitimate” Israeli state is pointless, as it is simply impossible: the logic of land grabbing seems inseparable from its existence as a nation-state. To question the extent to which the Israeli state is more or less “legitimate” in relation to some other state, is simply to ignore how nation-states are always constituted as homogeneous spaces.
To understand the current situation, we need to understand the general restructuring of class relations that began in the 1970s. Parallel to the two “oil crises” of 1973-74 and 1978-80, the end of Arab nationalism and the rise of Islamism, the economic and social structure of the State of Israel changed radically. Zionism, in its strictest sense, was the protection and safeguarding of “Jewish labor”, either for Israeli capital against international competition, or for the working class against Palestinian proletarians: in short, it was a post-1945 “Fordist compromise”, rooting a fraction of capital in a nation-state. Zionism meant giving the state and civil society a “leftist” stamp within this interclassist, nationalist compromise. It was this compromise that Likud progressively liquidated, no longer able to guarantee the same standard of living to the poorest. Yet the definition of Israel as a “Zionist state” remains. Waving around words like “Zionist”, “lobby”, etc. – consciously or unconsciously – serves to undermine the notion of Israel as a “Zionist state”. – consciously or unconsciously – serves to charge Israel’s existence with an area of intrigue, mystery, conspiracy, exceptionalism, whose subliminal message is not difficult to grasp: Israelis, i.e. Jews, are not like other people. Whereas the only secret in this whole story is the movement of capital, which few look in the face. The generalized competition between “those at the top” and “those at the bottom”. The worsening situation of the Israeli proletariat and the quarter-globalization of the Palestinian proletariat are part and parcel of the same mutations in Israeli capitalism, but this does not give us the conditions for the slightest “solidarity” between the two – quite the contrary. For the Israeli proletarian, the low-wage Palestinian is a social and increasingly physical danger; for the Palestinian proletarian, the advantages that the Israeli can keep are based on his exploitation, his further relegation and the monopolization of the territories”.
Solidarity has become a liberal act of conscience, taking place entirely within the individual. At most, we’ll have a few slogans, a demonstration, maybe a leaflet, a couple of insults to a cop… and then everyone goes home. The splendor and misery of militancy. Meanwhile, war – traditional or asymmetrical – is waged with weapons, and the right question to ask is: where do they come from? Who pays for them? There was a time when Katyusha rocket launchers arrived with the “East Wind”. Today, when it comes to Qassams, we have Syria and Iran to thank. There was a time when we could believe that the Palestinian Revolution would ignite the Third World and, from there, the whole world. In reality, the fate of the Palestinians was decided elsewhere, and they served as cannon fodder within the balance of the Cold War. The myth and reality of “international solidarity”.
We know all too well how religion can be “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world” (Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right). But this generality applies to Palestine, Italy and everywhere else. In the Near and Middle East, as in most of the Arab countries of the Mediterranean basin, Islamism is not an ideology that has fallen from the sky; it corresponds to the evolution of class struggles in this area, to the end of Arab nationalism and the need for the state apparatus to ensure capitalist accumulation. The minimum – I dare not even say solidarity, but respect for Palestinian and Israeli proletarians – requires us first of all to be lucid and without illusions about the current situation; not to consider the Palestinian proletariat as morons who would be bamboozled by Hamas, nor as saints invested by the Proletarian Mandate of Heaven; not to consider the Israeli proletariat as morons who would simply be filled with hatred towards Palestinians, nor as saints whose situation is not based on the exploitation of others. Anti-Zionism is a dead end, just like antiglobalism (defense of national capital against globalized capital), or all the proposals for alternative capital management, which are part of the ordinary course of class struggle without ever abolishing classes. Without falling into the trap of calling for immediate global revolution as the only solution, we need to start from concrete reality and the existing divisions in the mode of production, in order to tackle them. Communism is not the fruit of a choice, it’s a historical movement. It is with this approach that we seek to confront this question. The fact remains, however, that by now – by dint of thinking in bourgeois categories such as “law”, “justice” and “the people” – it is not only difficult to imagine any solution, it has become almost impossible to say anything sensible about it.
KURDISTAN, BETWEEN HOPE AND ILLUSION
A little history
The emergence of a specific “Kurdish question” at the end of the First World War is part of the chaotic process of nation-state formation in the Near and Middle East. Whereas in Europe, the formation of nation-states was driven by the development of domestic capitalism, made possible by the well-defined succession of previous modes of production, in the Balkans and the Middle East, this formation was driven by capitalist development from elsewhere, with the intercapitalist rivalries that ensued. Following the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, whose spoils were shared between the victorious powers (Great Britain and France), came the creation of Iraq and Syria, which the British and French placed under mandate, and Turkey, with the rise of Mustapha Kemal’s (Atatürk) nationalist movement.
The first period of the Kurdish movement – under the domination of the landed bourgeoisie – was characterized by a series of violent upheavals: from 1919 to 1930, uprisings multiplied. The Shikak tribal confederation, Sheikh Mahmoud Barznadji, self-proclaimed King of Kurdistan, and then the Barzani family took the lead; in Turkey, 18 uprisings were recorded in less than 15 years; Syrian Kurds took part in most of these movements. The most important event of this period was the proclamation of an independent republic in Iran on July 22, 1946, in the wake of the USSR’s occupation of part of the country. These uprisings were ferociously crushed by the new national bourgeoisies of Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.
After the “era of silence” of 1948-1958, a new nationalism emerged: It was this educated petty-bourgeoisie – educated in western Turkey, Istanbul and Ankara – who reactivated Kurdish nationalism after the first coup d’état in Turkey (1960), giving the movement a more distinctly national-popular character. These were the “years of ungovernability”, with a succession of governments unable to regain control of the situation until the new military coup of 1980. During this period, illegal Kurdish organizations proliferated. Their social composition was almost the same as in the previous period: students and professionals, the average age was lower, and political allegiance shifted to Marxism-Leninism, which was very much in vogue among European intellectuals at the time. This gave rise to groups such as the PSTK (Socialist Party of Turkish Kurdistan, whose project was an autonomous Kurdistan within the framework of Turkish socialism) and the separatist PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party).
Initially, the PKK was made up of a handful of young students imbued with a vague Marxism and united around the personality of Abdullah Oçalan (from the 1949 generation). The class character claimed in the organization’s name exists only in verbal terms, and is little more than wishful thinking. The party, which officially came into existence in 1978, claims to aim for the liberation of Kurdistan from imperialism and the Kurdish feudal landed bourgeoisie, who are described as “the main social cause preventing Kurdish national development”. The PKK thus took up the themes of Marxist-Leninist, Guevarist, Third Worldist and other organizations, even though they were already on the downward curve. From 1978 onwards, the organization was strong enough to launch a “revolutionary war” against the “feudalists”; in this phase, its actions consisted mainly of homicides (attempted or successful) of tribal chiefs, while not excluding participation in municipal elections.
On August 15, 1984, following its reorganization, the PKK relaunched its armed struggle by attacking two Turkish military posts. This changed the organization’s social base: “The PKK’s guerrilla warfare quickly attracted the attention of young Kurds, who soon swelled its ranks. It recruited massively in the countryside, but also in Kurdish cities, among young people and workers in large Turkish cities and in certain European countries, in Syria and Libya. The PKK acquired a predominantly rural character”. By 1991, the movement had established itself in almost all Kurdish towns and in many Turkish cities (Ankara, Istanbul, Adana, Izmir, Denizli). During this period, in parallel with the street demonstrations, a genuine Kurdish diaspora developed throughout Europe, with France, Germany and Sweden being the main host countries.
In the 1990s – despite repression in Turkey and the exacerbation of the sub-national conflict between the PKK and the Iraqi Kurds of the PDK – guerrilla warfare developed beyond the most reasonable expectations, based on the demand for an independent Kurdish state. In 1995, a Kurdish parliament-in-exile was set up, with its headquarters in Europe, and although the goal of establishing a local government was not achieved, the PKK did manage to carry out a series of state functions involving taxation and the administration of justice. But at the end of the 90s, the PKK suffered the cold shower of the capture of Oçalan. From then on, the period between 1999 and 2005 was relatively calm, until the resumption of clashes between the Turkish army and the PKK, which have since been interrupted.
In Syria, Hafez el-Assad’s expulsion of Oçalan marked the end of the Kurdish-Syrian idyll. From then on, the discontent and desire for “democratization” (but also the pro-American sympathies) of the Syrian Kurds manifested themselves repeatedly until the demonstrations of 2011 and the outbreak of civil war. In Iraq, the glorious days of Mustafa Barzani’s PDK guerrilla autonomy are more distant than ever: “[…] the Gulf War radically changed the configuration of the Kurdish question. It led to the creation of a zone of protection in which the Iraqi Kurds were able to build institutions that they manage themselves. Finally, the 2003 Iraq war, which toppled Saddam Hussein and reshaped Iraq and the region, confirmed the Iraqi Kurds in their role as strategic allies of the United States.
Crisis or revolution?
The evolution of the Kurdish question cannot be understood without considering the structure of the “world economy” and its global dynamic of capitalist accumulation. Divided between a global “center” and a global “periphery”, and with rigid, nationally-invested relationships between the two. This structure assigned to the center the task of driving accumulation through intensive industrial development, and to the periphery the subordinate role of supplying low-cost raw materials. The “socialist bloc” with all its internal conflicts (USSR vs. China, etc.) was a closed zone of accumulation, excluded from the world market, and served as a pole of attraction for all attempts at “disconnection” on the part of the peripheries trying to escape the role assigned to them by the center. These diversifications at the level of social formations only made sense – as happens in every era of the capitalist mode of production – in the reciprocal relations within the international division of labor (“world economy”), whose complex coherence in no way avoids the possibility of internal conflicts.
The regime in place in Rojava proclaims a “will to defend a form of organization of society that respects equality between men and women and linguistic diversity” and “a fraternal, democratic, ecological and emancipating society for all, regardless of gender, ethnicity or religion”. Oçalan was inspired by the social ecology of libertarian thinker Murray Bookchin, and developed what he called a democratic confederalism.
The libertarian turn taken within the PKK, i.e. the abandonment of the perspective of an independent Kurdish state, responds to three orders of requirements: 1) the recognition of a state of affairs: the obsolescence of “nationalisms from below”; 2) the negative outcome of the guerrilla strategy, symbolized by Oçalan’s arrest in Nairobi in 1999; 3) the social transformations that have taken place in historic Kurdistan over the past 25 years.
With regard to the obsolescence of “nationalism from below”: the crisis of the 1970s, beginning with the oil crisis, the end of the “socialist bloc” and the decomposition of the Third World into “castaways” (Fourth and Fifth Worlds) and “survivors” (emerging countries: Brazil, China, India, Turkey, etc.) appears as a new configuration which – far from preventing or attenuating the center/periphery polarization – nevertheless makes it more complex, by de-nationalizing it. A diversified structure, hierarchized by zone, is emerging: at the top, the capitalist hypercenters linked to finance and high-tech; in the middle, an intermediate zone divided between logistics and commercial distribution on the one hand, assembly activities and outsourcing on the other; at the bottom, the crisis zone and the “social garbage dumps” animated by an entire informal economy. This tripartition is reproduced in a fractal manner at every level of the world, right down to city districts. “Today, big business has established itself above the national state, with regard to which it tends to maintain a relationship that is both instrumental and conflictual. It is instrumental when it seeks to bend the state to its own interests, either through the direct action of lobbies or the discipline of markets. It is conflictual when the dislocation of its interests on a global scale provokes economic difficulties in the economies of nations, especially those with advanced capitalism, putting in crisis the function of “national collective capitalist” assumed in the past by states.
The decline of traditional Marxist-Leninist or Third Worldist guerrilla models partly explains why the PKK sought to link up with the anti-globalization movement. The “movement of movements”, the “people of Seattle”, provided Oçalan and his comrades with all the material they needed to carry out the theoretical and organizational renewal imposed by the situation, mainly in terms of articulating a perspective that was and remains national liberation, with the renunciation of obtaining an independent Kurdish state. In its new source of theoretical inspiration, the PKK deploys a rhetorical effectiveness that places the emphasis on change in the here and now, the demand for ethics, the critique of hierarchies, the praise of horizontality, a theoretical eclecticism (ecology, feminism, etc.) that eschews unitary syntheses smacking too much of “Marxism”, and an insistence on self-government and autonomy.
Over the past 25 years, Kurdish protests have been taking place in a largely urbanized area. The rural landscape with which the Kurds were closely associated, both in their daily reality and in the imagination of orientalists, has all but disappeared […]. In Iraqi Kurdistan, where Kurdish villages were destroyed in the 1980s by Saddam Hussein’s regime, three-quarters of the population live in the three major cities, the capital Erbil, Dihok and Souleimaniye. […] In Syria, the core of Kurdish politicians has always fought in the cities, and today more than ever, it is the intelligentsia and youth who occupy the stage.
War economy and utopia
The Rojava “revolutionary experiment” is often presented as facing general hostility and threats from the imperialist and “fascist” armies of the region, if not the world. But even the last admirers of Rojava’s “libertarian utopia” have to acknowledge the “state aspect” of this “experiment”, its “proto-state institutions”, the weight of the PYD, compulsory military service, the cult of the leader, respect for private property, the imposition of a currency and so on. In spite of everything, they remain hopeful that, with time, the situation will evolve positively. In the meantime, there is much talk of the communes that the PYD is setting up in villages and neighborhoods. However, far from being workers’ councils, they are above all neighbourhood councils with limited powers, advisory in nature and acting as first-instance judicial mediators. The rest of the political and administrative functioning, which appears to be highly bureaucratic, is modelled on Western democratic institutions – which, it’s true, is a novelty in Syria.
War is a catastrophe, first and foremost for the proletarians who suffer and wage it, with civil war adding its own atrocities. Is it really necessary to point out that the handling of arms, as a separate activity, stifles any expression of class struggle? But that this does not prevent proletarians from being particularly active? These situations are always more comfortable to criticize from the comfort of one’s armchair. In this chaos, and in the Syrian civil war in particular, there’s one thing to be seen, and it’s so obvious that it’s everywhere: it’s precisely everything that revolution isn’t, whether in terms of self-organization, survival, military activity, alternatives, proto-state utopias and so on. There is no model to be found there, nor, for that matter, any counter-model. The revolution will certainly not be a gala dinner, far from it, but it won’t resemble those despicable civil wars of which contemporary capitalism has the secret.
SYRIA, THE LIMITS OF A REVOLT
“The Party leads society and the State” (Article 8 of the Constitution)
Since the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon, all successive leaders of the Syrian state have drawn on existing confessional and communal divisions to consolidate their political and economic power. Under the French mandate, army and administration cadres were recruited from minorities – including the Alawite minority, made up mainly of poor peasants and virtually considered heretical from an Islamic point of view – according to a classic colonial method, in order to keep a Sunni majority committed to Arab nationalist ideas out of power, and to secure the unwavering support of a social group organically linked to the state. The problem of Syria’s “confessional division” was rather that of the French Mandate wishing to exercise its power over the 80% Sunni Arabs present in Syria, without putting the tools of power into the hands of this majority. This policy led to the creation of a bureaucratic and military elite, recruited and co-opted according to family and clan networks, and provided the basis for what was to become the el-Assad system from the 1970s onwards.
Thus, from the outset, the Syrian state was constructed not as a nation-state in the strict sense of the term, but as the tool of a ruling minority that had to resist a population that was always potentially hostile. This colonial pattern is reinforced by the rentier structure of the region in which the Syrian state is embedded, which makes the state a tool for capturing rents, to the benefit of this minority. Arab nationalism has long been the ideological cement of the Syrian state, serving both to capture indirect rents from Arab monarchies in support of the struggle against Israel, and to provide an “Arab” alibi for the minority in power.
This nationalist period, under the domination of the Baath Party, was an economic and political struggle against the bourgeoisie of merchants and large landowners in order to consolidate the power of the bureaucratic and military elite, which led to the strengthening of state power and the Party’s domination of all social activities. In concrete terms, this led to the de facto domination of a minority of Alawites recruited on a clan and clientelist basis over all levels of the army and – above all – the secret services. Article 8 of the Syrian Constitution (before its “democratic” revision in 2012) states: “The Party leads society and the State.” The resulting social network is a blend of Stasi-inspired methods and community recruitment, whose relational density increases the closer you get to power. At the top, the el-Assad family, brothers, brothers-in-law, etc., and at the bottom, an entire clientelist network based on relationships of trust and subjection.
The early insurgency: between democratic demands and repression
Since the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the integration of capital into the world economy on the basis of underdevelopment, the end of Arab nationalism and of rent-redistributing socialism, the ruling classes born of decolonization have appeared increasingly parasitic. States such as Egypt and Syria, whose authoritarian character may have been justified to the poorest by the need, for example, to carry out agrarian reforms against the old bourgeoisie that could be seen as revolutionary, now exist only as the new owners of countries they exploit more than they govern. The 2008 crisis precipitated matters, and in 2011 the sharp rise in the cost of raw materials, particularly wheat, shed a cruel light on the dependence of these economies on the world market, despite all the talk of national independence, and the inability of states (with the notable exception of Algeria) to redistribute the money from rents, which has become their minimal justification.
The alternative posed by the el-Assad clan from the very first demonstrations, and summed up in the formula “us or chaos”, is not only a prediction but a threat. Repression immediately took an ultra-violent, military form. Clearly, the repression of the peaceful demonstrations of 2011 was the first trigger for the militarization of the insurgency proper, in 2012-2013, and the start of the civil war, from 2013 onwards.
Unlike the brutally crushed 1980s insurrection by the Muslim Brotherhood and its military wing, which drew on the Alawite/Sunni antagonism, this insurrection was spontaneous. It was an unorganized and explicitly peaceful population that took to the streets, with no precise objective, no agenda and no military capability. What’s more, at the start of the insurrection, the religious referent was not only absent, but explicitly dismissed. Alawites, Kurds, Druze and Christians mingled with Sunnis. During demonstrations, slogans referred to Syrian national unity, and called for the fall of the regime.
The aim was to present the insurrection as democratic and peaceful. If the demonstrations took place after Friday preaching, it’s because Syria is a Muslim country, and demonstrations, however spontaneous they may be, need a time and place to exist. To declare that the uprising in Syria in 2011 was initiated by clerics, “Salafists”, or even jihadists, is to understand nothing of the course of events, and in particular of the confessional turn the insurrection subsequently took.
The story of the sectarianization, militarization and civil-war lock-in of the uprising is also the story of the gradual departure of all those who could still leave, leaving only the poorest or most politicized behind, forced to continue the struggle to avoid being disarmed by the regime’s reprisals against them or their families. Deserter soldiers join their families in their villages, even if it means joining jihadist factions in order to have access to weapons to defend their own. This is the story of the transition from revolutionary struggle to the struggle for survival, which ends in survival in the struggle, with no discernible end.
Syria’s fearsome repressive apparatus has only been able to keep the regime in power, not to give it victory. At the same time, the insurgency, which had become a civil war, proved incapable of using its advantage, and its de facto control of large swathes of territory, to lead the insurgency to victory, i.e. the fall of the regime.
From insurrection to civil war: society without the state?
At the time of 2011, it was an ideal Syrian being who was constructed as a collective subject by the demonstrators, and this Syrian being was democratic and civic. The demonstrations were the expression of a society claiming its right to exist. At the time, the demonstrators seemed to be united by the simple and effective idea of doing what the Tunisians and Egyptians had done before them: putting an end to the regime. This objective appears to transcend existing social divisions, which are set aside, in order to obtain, for the duration of a demonstration at least, even as a collective democratic project. For the demonstrators, it was above all a question of being a people.
The insurgency found itself obliged to carry out the functions usually assigned to the state, modelled on existing social divisions: military function, care function, supply, roads, civil defense, judicial function, etc. From this point of view, the insurgency’s continuity was a key factor. From this point of view, continuity outweighs rupture. The example of judicial practice is particularly interesting in this respect. The role of judge was quickly assigned to local imams, who were often poorly qualified as the religious authorities had left the country, but who were considered to be the most capable of giving legal form to these conflicts. This is by no means a strict application of Sharia law or Daesh-style Islamic courts, but a civil institution in which clerics are recognized as the most competent, while civil judges are virtually absent. If civil law has managed to impose itself here and there, where judges had joined the insurrection, in the face of a lack of personnel capable of applying it, it is Sharia law, which is in any case the basis of a large part of the Syrian civil code, that has imposed itself. This desire for institutional standardization of the judicial sector led to the almost wholesale adoption by the insurgency of the Sharia-based Arab Union Code, produced in 1996 by experts from the Arab League with funding from the Gulf States.
The division of labor between civilians and the military, and the specialization of activities, produced their own mediations. New institutions are created, modelled on the old and generally considered legitimate. The institutions on which every state is founded – the army, the police, the judiciary, etc. – are not contested for their own sake, but rather for the undemocratic character they had under the old regime. Finally, it should be noted that the democratic form that follows from this critique is not direct democracy, but representative democracy, at least when this is possible given the explosive situation.
The people without the state at the start of the insurrection thus rapidly moves from a unanimist fiction to a movement that attempts to reconstitute a state from the people, i.e. from existing class divisions. But even this, in the case of Syria, is problematic, and the opposition is unable to achieve within itself a class structuring likely to lead to the formation of a state. The Syrian state has lost all legitimacy and presents itself as a foreign body to its own society, while Syrian society in a state of insurrection is unable to constitute itself as a state. Let’s hope that behind this impasse, other post-capitalist horizons are opening up.
DAESH – THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION OF THE STATE
The Islamic State, or DAESH, attracts all eyes, but its image is blurred. The reflection that reaches us via the media is that of a carefully staged atrocity fair, or of warlike episodes chosen according to obscure politico-military interests. But among the “rebel” groups that emerged during the Iraqi-Syrian conflict, the EI is attempting to set up a state-like structure based on a structured and ambitious political project: the re-establishment of the Caliphate that disappeared in 1258, which implies a critique of the world, its course, the West, democracy, nationalism and so on. Does this mean a critique of capitalism? Certainly not, but rather that of some of its evils and excesses, those which would impede the free and harmonious functioning of a dreamed-of Caliphate society… and above all its economy.
Birth of DAESH: a state like any other?
DAESH or the Islamic State was originally just one of the armed resistance groups against the American occupation of Iraq (i.e., a terrorist group); but, from 2009 onwards, it benefited from the rallying of thousands of Sunni militiamen and hundreds of former Iraqi army officers. Militarily very effective, the EI was considered by a large part of the Sunni Iraqi population as a “liberation army” and therefore celebrated as such, and many tribal chiefs chose to pledge allegiance to it. In this way, the EI acquired a large arsenal which it used to advance in Syria from 2013 onwards; in this country, localities were taken following violent battles against other Islamist groups or thanks to the rallying of these. In the midst of the chaos, its logistical and regal capabilities have earned it a certain popularity among the population. Many of the Syrian rebels of the Arab Spring pledged their allegiance to the EI when it entered Syria in 2013. They are therefore the physical link between the revolts of 2011 and the Caliphate, which claims to be “the only true heir” of the Arab Spring. In any case, it is the consequence, if not the response, to their failure.
In Iraq, it drove out the Shiite troops considered by the population to be an abominable army of occupation, a “checkpoint army” whose presence only brought exactions, violence, rape, racketeering, widespread corruption and insecurity. In a city like Mosul, where clientelism reigned and massive misery adjoined inexplicable pockets of prosperity, the new regime’s first measures – highly symbolic, inexpensive and highly publicized – were the eviction and public execution of the corrupt. If order reigned in Mosul, it was also because repression was ruthless. But far from being dictated by an uncontrolled mortifying madness, it responds to cold state and administrative logic and finds legitimacy in a literal interpretation of the Koran and a very rigorous interpretation of the Hadith (deeds and words of the Prophet).
When a city is conquered, like any significant army of occupation, one of EI’s priorities is to re-establish the functioning of public services. The Islamic State strives to rebuild war-damaged infrastructure, but also launches new projects highlighted in its press: repairing bridges and electrical circuits, creating low-cost public transport lines, restoring a postal service, etc. – a kind of “Keynesian” stimulus financed by the EI’s war chest.
The EI is re-establishing a form of rule of law, thus “responding to the aspirations of local actors” and offering a way out to the poorest, because in addition to its charitable aspect, it is a potential employer for the supernumerary proletariat who have not emigrated. In the areas of Iraq and Syria under its control, the EI seems to bring together the interests of part of the capitalist class with those of part of the proletariat, thus forcing the creation of a single community that brings social peace, or rather order.
Daesh represents the interests of a well-defined class, the ousted fraction of two states, Iraq and Syria, where the bureaucracy and the army played an essential role. Its insistence on presenting itself as a genuine state, like the Islamic State, and surrounding itself with all the attributes of sovereignty, is not anecdotal, but expresses its true class nature. This does not prevent it from entering into relations with the international market, whether to sell oil, buy weapons or carry out financial operations, like other bureaucracies before it. It’s not business that EI wants to turn upside down, but rather appearance and surface, to bring it back into line with divine will.
Monster of capital: the reactionary state
Western states are loath to officially regard the Islamic State as a state, preferring to think of it as a terrorist group. But the two cannot be strictly opposed. It has a territory, an army, an administration, a tax system, a currency, and so on. It was not born as a terrorist group, but as the emanation of fractions ousted from the Iraqi and Syrian state apparatuses with a view to regaining their place.
Its form may seem surprising, but the EI plays its role as a state by preserving the interests of the local capitalist class and having a vision for the future. From an economic point of view, the EI’s desire to unify (beyond artificial, national or ethnic divisions) and pacify a territory, and to relaunch, rationalize and modernize the economy, particularly oil extraction. And if it calls for Hijra, inviting not only Muslims with military experience, but also teachers, lawyers, doctors and engineers to emigrate to its territories, it is to compensate for the emigration of many members of the middle/upper classes and prepare for the future.
The EI, which denounces nationalism as “Western garbage” and has abolished the border between Syria and Iraq, is based on a religious version of Baathist nationalism. Islamism is rooted in all classes, and it can also take up elements of the Syrian national ideology that cuts across all these classes. It is capable of seizing on Arab nationalism, both in its role of identity and as a prospect for regional economic integration, substituting it with the Ummah, the community of believers, or even the Caliphate. The same applies to “socialist” distribution, whose function – essential in a rentier context – is ensured by charity, seen as a religious duty for the State as well as for individuals, and so on. As for the “medieval” character, this is misleading: while in France it is unfairly considered archaic, crude or primitive, in the Arab-Muslim world it evokes a golden age, a period of reference. To take up this theme is to revive “an Arab dream”. Certainly a “waking dream that sows death”, but “the last credible totalitarian ideology, both idealistic and realistic” and capable of mobilizing crowds.
EI also relies on an entirely misogynistic practice, designed to fully restore male dominance. The patriarchal brutality of the Islamic State, of which the sexual slavery of women from non-Muslim minorities is the extreme form, is part of this context of patriarchal counter-revolution. the situation of women has progressively deteriorated in Iraq since the first embargo in 1990 and especially after 2003. The place of women in the armed struggle in Kurdistan, in the victory of Kobanê against the Islamic State, is significant because one of the central issues of this war is the place of women in society. The Islamic State promises men to restore their dominant place in the family, and is multiplying the most outrageous and degrading acts against women to show it.
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External attacks, which constitute a veritable strategy on which the EI relies, are an instrument in an asymmetrical war, which draws its methods from a genealogy of terrorism in the Near and Middle East. DAESH’s attacks are not irrational; they express its political need to survive as a state in its weakened conditions.
Global crisis, local reaction
However, taken out of context, some of the Caliphate’s projects and practices have an unexpected echo. Its program includes the fight against corruption and financial speculation (prohibition of usury), the creation of an alternative currency (gold, silver and copper coins in reference to the Abbasid dinars and dirhams, i.e. a “real” currency to escape the dominant monetary system), the upgrading of public services, the decentralization of power through regional autonomy, the rejection of parliamentary democracy (and of democracy “tout court”, as EI advocates a kind of “organic centralism” under divine domination), the abolition of borders, the fight against racism, not forgetting the rejection of unbridled consumerism and submission to brands.
A discourse that would seem alter-globalist if it referred to Le Monde Diplomatique and Subcomandante Marcos, rather than the Koran and Caliph Ibrahim. Yes, the EI claims to be medieval but modern, “egalitarian, universal and multiracial”.
Do words still have meaning here? No more and no less than elsewhere. Whether in practice or in theory, EI is obviously not engaged in a critique of capitalism, but seeks to modify certain aspects that seem the least licit or the most troublesome, and to adapt others. If certain practices are extreme, the discourse often rings hollow. The extreme right has also long denounced the excesses of capitalism. Financial capitalism, that is. The source of all evil, especially since it’s easy to add doses of conspiracy and anti-Semitism. Class relations, exploitation, surplus-value and other old terms are swept aside, the vocabulary is simplified and everyone agrees.
With promises of a brighter tomorrow no longer in demand, the Caliphate’s motto is “Full speed astern! At the crossroads of the Islamic State and France, we find: born again Salafists, Manif pour Tous, defense of the family, of traditions, of soil, etc. If the irruption of capitalism is the cause of all ills, but it has become unsurpassable, what can we do but go back to “before”, and if so, why not to the Middle Ages? A Golden Age while we’re at it.
Yet for all its separatism and excess, the Caliphate discourse, like the more reasonable alternativism to which we are accustomed, is a discourse produced by the dominant system, and its project is an alternative within what exists. The Caliphate can only survive if it is economically linked to the rest of a capitalist world. The jihadists’ taste for slaves does not, however, lead them to establish or restore a “slave mode of production”, and wage labor reigns in Mosul as much as in Milan. A waking dream and a new phase of the nightmare, DAESH can only be understood and fought as a monstrous variant of the global capitalist order it claims to be the enemy of. The Islamic State is not an archaic throwback, the fruit of decaying social relations, but a political entity in tune with the era and milieu that produced it: it is the denationalized state in person. From an ideological point of view, the reconstitution of the Caliphate and the reconquest of Jerusalem present themselves as a credible response, in every respect worthy of succeeding the “Arab nation” as a social and geopolitical actor; The unfolding of the daily class struggle, insofar as (and as long as) it remains caught up within the relations of distribution, and not of production, finds its natural political extension in the demand for a redistribution of income which, in the southern area, can only mean the reappropriation and redistribution of rent.
The EI has drawn its power, prestige and finances from its warlike conquests. Stagnation on its fronts, tactical retreats and incessant bombardments will be its undoing. The process of normalization and nationalization is undermined. The Caliphate’s strength lies in its “social” capacities, which it will only be able to compensate for by raising taxes and increasing repression, which will inevitably turn some of the population and some tribal chiefs against it. Differences of interest are likely to resurface. As a state-building project on a completely new basis, the religious aspects of the EI are not due to extremism specific to Islam, but to the fact that religious fanaticism is unleashed in a context of global crisis, civil war and foreign intervention.
If the keys to understanding the Syrian civil war, DAESH or Kurdistan are not to be found in Syria or Iraq alone, it’s not because of some plot by international powers, but because of the global evolution of capitalism, and the region’s specific place within it. An unenviable place, in which capitalist development itself accommodates and feeds on forms of exploitation and reproduction of labor power, where the predation of capitalist enterprises can be unleashed without the restraints imposed on them in the most developed areas. Locally, these are poles of intense wealth, to be found not only in Israel and the Gulf States, but also in the poorest countries of the zone, poles that feed off an ocean of poverty.
Far from promising the realization of anarchist utopias, the fact that masses of poor people are increasingly living in stateless zones opens up the prospect of a collapse of the capitalist world in its very preservation, the possibility of a retraction of capitalism advanced by the extension of the most savage relation of exploitation, until the abandonment of any social form adequate to the reproduction of this relation of exploitation, until the abandonment of the state.
The way for capitalism to free itself from the contradiction of having to reproduce labor power within itself, while at the same time constantly expelling it from the process of valorization, could in future consist in the effective expulsion of masses of supernumerary proletarians into “gray zones”, where they would be solely responsible for their own reproduction and free to self-manage their own misery. Deproletarization” within the world of capital would then take the form of the extension of shantytowns and territories in a state of permanent civil war. This should be seen as a long-term hypothesis for capital’s way out of the crisis. We are entering a period of hopeless conflict, the beginnings of which are already apparent, not only in Syria, but also in Libya, Mali and parts of Afghanistan, as well as in the Ukraine on the edge of Europe. But a general social crisis is not the sum of local crises evolving in parallel, without touching. In insurrectional or pre-insurrectional crises that have reached a certain level of extension, the insurgents of a given country will be forced – by the very necessity of continuing the conflict – to seek support beyond its national borders, or to cross these borders en masse (or dispersed…) to support the insurrection elsewhere. It is in this way – materially, and not on the basis of abstract appeals to internationalism – that revolution destroys separation and unifies humanity. The prospect of communization, as an activity of pooling in the crisis and as a way out of this capitalist world, seems in these conditions to be a most necessary horizon.
Synthesis by Guillaume Deloison
Source:
Neither Allah nor oil: for an open approach to the Syrian question:
https://carbureblog.com/2017/02/04/ni-dieu-ni-petrole-pour-une-approche-ouverte-de-la-question-syrienne/
State, society and civil war in Syria
https://carbureblog.com/2017/05/11/etat-societe-et-guerre-civile-en-syrie/
Caliphate and barbarism (part one):
https://ddt21.noblogs.org/?page_id=667
Caliphate and barbarism (part two)
https://ddt21.noblogs.org/?page_id=728
What is the Islamic State? Elements of Marxist analysis
https://mars-infos.org/qu-est-ce-que-l-etat-islamique-546
Grasping the question of communism:
https://dndf.org/?p=13854
Caliphate and barbarism: the final struggle?
https://ddt21.noblogs.org/?page_id=1906
Letter to “Rojavist” friends
https://ddt21.noblogs.org/?page_id=914
Counter-history of Islamism as a capitalist phenomenon – with Clément (Sortir de l’économie)
http://www.sortirducapitalisme.fr/143-contre-histoire-de-l-islamisme-comme-phenomene-capitaliste-avec-clement-sortir-de-l-economie-23-02-2016
Il Lato Cattivo: “Letter on anti-Zionism
https://dndf.org/?p=13757
Introduction: nationalism and the emergence of an oil proletariat
http://www.mondialisme.org/spip.php?article191
Gaza: controversy surrounding a damning Amnesty report
https://dndf.org/?p=4634
Israel-Palestine: is an internationalist working-class policy still possible?
http://mondialisme.org/spip.php?article1303
The hope of the Kibbutz
https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/talmudiques/talmudiques-du-dimanche-08-avril-2018
Behind the 21st century intifada
http://libcom.org/library/21st-century-intifada-israel-palestine-aufheben
Beyond Zionism and anti-Zionism. For a global critique of modern national-state ideology.
http://benoitbohybunel.over-blog.com/2016/12/israel-palestine-penser-une-critique-globale-de-l-ideologie-nationale-etatique-moderne-contre-un-antisionisme-spectaculaire-et-fetic
french oirginal here