Abstract
In these so-called revolutionary times, could it be that actually revolution is increasingly impossible? If so, Syria provides the symptomatic case, and Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s book, The Impossible Revolution, the most penetrating analysis. Unlike many other writers on Syria, Saleh is an organic intellectual. The essays in this book are written from inside Syria, with an ambition to ‘think with the revolution’ as opposed to merely thinking about the revolution.
Thinking with the revolution involves an attempt to give voice to the desires and hopes of revolutionaries, and to relay the contradictions and challenges that developed in the clash with the Syrian regime, the militarisation of the revolution, the growing Islamist dominance, and the imperialist interventions in the conflict by regional and global powers. It is both an intellectual and personal journey through its frenzy and ultimate tragedy, as it developed from a broad popular ‘revolution of the common people’, as Saleh describes it in the opening essay of June 2011, to become an orgy of ‘militant nihilism’, the title of an essay written just one year later.
Despite his lack of academic training, Saleh is a towering figure among contemporary Arab thinkers. His thought is shaped by his experience as a communist political activist in his youth, who was imprisoned for sixteen years. Upon his release in 1996, he joined the democratic opposition. Like many of his peers, he wholeheartedly supported the popular uprising in 2011, and went on to become one of its strongest voices. His weekly columns in the London-based newspaper al-Hayat, are widely read by Arabs across the world. This book is a selection from hundreds of articles, and only gives a small idea of the breadth of his work, which also includes six books in Arabic.
In prison, Saleh had ample time to read Hegel, and throughout these essays, both Hegel and Marx are strong influences. In his 2012 book With Salvation O’Youth, Saleh described how prison allowed him to read classic social theory carefully, but also cured him of a Hegelian understanding of history. Rather than basing his critique on historical dialectics, he began to think with the present and the real, as he put it. This approach shaped his work before 2011, where he reflected on the social structure of the Syrian regime and society. Still, reading The Impossible Revolution, Saleh’s philosophical method remains influenced by dialectical materialism. He analyses the political economy that underpins the regime, and the relation between class struggle, violence and sectarian identity. He looks for the social structures and psychological effects that explain the violent manifestation of politics in Syria by grounding his arguments in a concise historical analysis.
His voice is analytical, sociological and political. In several of the essays he adopts the ‘we’ of the revolution. This is no detached, outside account of the uprising, but nor is it a mere testimony. Thinking with the revolution is a radical method that requires one to walk the tightrope between sound analysis and political jingoism. At the same time, it is not a method that anyone consciously chooses, but rather arises from a situation he and many other Syrian intellectuals have been thrust into. Here, Saleh succeeds in using the revolutionary experience to paint a picture of the complex nature of the events that have, since 2011, tragically torn the country apart and changed the world. His book resonates with the work of Frantz Fanon and C. Wright Mills, who also wrote piercingly about the revolutions they were part of.
How did Syria’s revolution and the war turn out so badly? First of all because of the regime’s violent response to what was initially a peaceful call for reforms. Violence against opponents of the Assad regime, as Saleh knows from his time in Hafez al-Assad’s penitentiary system, has undergirded the Syrian state since 1970. It was often invisible, carried out in detention centres far from the public eye. Nevertheless, this threat of violence structured what political scientist Lisa Wedeen calls the politics of dissimulation, whereby Syrians pretended to support the often spurious claims of the ruler, and in this way became complicit in an untruthful social construct.
When ordinary people broke this wall of fear, it became a popular revolution that surprisingly quickly drew in people from all areas, sects and classes, threatening the legitimacy of the regime. The act of speaking truth – of breaking the complicity in violence and distorted reality – was liberating and propelled people to participate despite the obvious danger. The violent response that followed went beyond clashes between revolutionaries and the Syrian army. Regime thugs, the dreaded shabiha, acted on their own, sadistically and efficiently targeting supporters of the revolution. Whereas most people see the shabiha as an instrument of the regime, Saleh analyses them as symptomatic of Assad’s state, the ‘shabiha state’ that appropriates rather than produces wealth; that practises repression rather than politics; and that lies endlessly. The aim of the revolution, Saleh wrote hopefully in 2011, must be to facilitate a politics based on a truthful rendition of social facts. By doing so, it would restore the value of material, moral and political production: ‘a grand re-establishment project’.
Saleh’s critique of the regime also takes aim at its particular version of Arabism, going back to Hafez al-Assad and his appropriation of Arab nationalist thought. In its idealised form, the Syrian Baathist brand of Arab nationalism retains the original impulse of the 1950s and 1960s to unite Arabs against imperialist aggression. In the real world, the regime that prides itself on being ‘the beating heart of Arab nationalism’ criminalises dissent and manipulates sectarianism, fracturing rather than uniting the body politic.
Bashar al-Assad in the 2000s appeared to be changing the absolutism of his father to a lighter authoritarian neoliberal form of government that allowed certain freedoms of association and speech. However, from his catastrophic speech on 30 March 2011 onwards, in which he branded all dissenters terrorists and Islamists and blamed the popular protests on a foreign conspiracy, he has increasingly reverted to the same ideological core as his father, stressing local homogeneity, external conspiracies, accusations against traitors, and – together with President Sisi of Egypt – a muscular authoritarian secularism that appeals both to the nationalist Right and the anti-imperialist Left in the West.
Indeed, one could argue that Assad’s crony capitalism has been a good match with a rebooted militant Baathism. In times of extreme uncertainty, national unity, militarised leadership and protection of minorities (including Christians and Druze) appeals. At the same time, the protection of crony interests in the war economy ensures the loyalty of broad sectors of the politically relevant elites.
Saleh does not shy away from blaming Islamists themselves and their supporters in the region for having contributed to the catch-22 in which the revolution has found itself since 2015. Nor does he have much complimentary to say about the deeply divided and inefficient opposition outside Syria. This opposition failed to gain legitimacy and representation from the local co-ordination committees that organised local governance and protests in the liberated areas.
But rather than just pointing the finger, Saleh analyses the conditions that shaped this tragic train of events. First and foremost, extreme violence such as torture, random shelling, barrel bombs, and pure urbicide in large cities like Hama and Aleppo created intense shock and anger, particularly among Sunni Muslims. Various militias, some of them funded by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, gave an outlet for this brutalised society and its dreams of vengeance. This has led to a situation where the primary armed forces facing Assad have an Islamist agenda that is impossible for the West to support.
Secondly, the world failed to act. When faced with the most extreme violations of the Geneva Convention, the UN and the global powers produced a weak response that resulted in a drawn-out mediation with no end result. Officially, western donors supported ‘non-lethal’ aid for local governance; meanwhile, the US played a role in facilitating military aid though two large Joint Operations centres in Turkey and Jordan. Even if it did not provide the weapons, the CIA sat at the table where decisions were made to provide arms. In this way, the US may have played more than a small role in creating the hyper-militarisation of the conflict. Much more needs to be said about this, in a way that maintains Saleh’s analysis of Assadist violence and does not reduce it to an afterthought to facile anti-imperialist rhetoric.
Either way, the fact is that Syria became a theatre of narrow national interest and imperial ambitions, and that it remains, at the time of writing in spring 2018, stuck in this deadly pattern. Violence, social disruption, retrenched authoritarianism and a misguided, unco-ordinated and largely cynical response from the outside world torpedoed the revolution. As a conflict that now involves the world, we need to find a truthful way to think about it and talk about it. La révolution dévore ses enfants. Luckily, it spat out the bits that were left and gave us Saleh’s indispensable work.