Reformist socialists welcome the new jihadist regime in Syria
What is a revolutionary and socialist approach?
5 January 2025
Islamist militants in Damascus.
We have reported earlier on the new threats facing the people of Syria following the fall of Assad and on the geopolitical shift towards Israel and the imperialist powers.
How do we explain this? Traditionally socialist groups have been to the fore, using tools of class analysis to remove the superficial elements of situations and the fog of war and expose the elemental struggles beneath.
This is not the case today. Many on the Western left, considered as the pro-NATO left by their opponents, produce explanations that obfuscate rather than clarify the situation in Syria.
A noted example is a recent interview with Joseph Daher in the leftist magazine Tempest. The interview so impressed European sympathisers that a whiteboard summary was carried on the Internet.
Daher is a Swiss-Syrian academic, author of Syria After the Uprising: The Political Economy of State Resilience (Pluto, 2019) and Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God (Pluto, 2016).
What is his analysis? He is knowledgeable about Syria, so much of the interview is about the various groups and factions involved in the situation. The issue then becomes how he explains the picture to bring clarity. We don’t get this, instead much is left out. We select Daher for analysis because he is representative of a broad swathe of the European left.
In his analysis “authoritarian actors” are the main problem. It is formally stated that the US is the main enemy but their role, and the role of Israel, in the fall of Syria is not explained nor are there any proposals to counter these forces.
A chief pearl of wisdom is if the new jihadist leadership will keep promises to respect diversity. This is still to be determined. Apparently, they are not to be trusted!
Normally imperialism would be seen as the major issue, but Daher refers mainly to Russia as the imperialist power, demoting US and Israel to “regional and imperial powers”
Response must be to build popular movements for democracy, equality and women’s rights. The major problem was the “glaring absence of an independent, democratic and progressive force”.
This is strange, because for much of the Syrian civil war Daher was amongst those claiming that such a force was the main opposition to Assad and those claiming a jihadist danger were defending Assad. Now the jihadists have swept into Damascus and the progressive force is nowhere to be found. The new line is to hope that the jihadists will find their inner democratic sentiments!
The truth is that in the nations of the Arab Spring there were middle class movements with genuine grievances. However, they saw the resolution of their problems in terms of an appeal to imperialism. That appeal is never answered. The current US sponsorship of HTS as the government of Syria is an extension of widespread use by the US, Israel and other powers of jihadist forces to weaken their enemies. The middle classes are used to feed a narrative that imperialism is interested in democratic change.
The other main account of the significance of the Syrian collapse is a broad movement for Multipolarity. It argues that the nations of the global south are breaking loose from US dominance and, through mutual defence treaties and the economic protection provided by the BRICS system, will be able to establish a new world order of equality and cooperation.
East Asia is seen as a special case, where US and Israeli aggression and genocide produced an axis of resistance compromising Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, with Russia and China providing background support in terms of technical and economic resources.
The collapse of the Assad regime has led to various explanations. Syria will become a quagmire that bogs down the imperialist powers. Because Russia stepped back, it was little damaged. The main elements of the Axis of Resistance have been preserved and the battle goes on.
The problem is that, although the multipolarity movement has the very real strength of unremitting opposition to US and Western imperialist hegemony, the very foundations of its analysis are based on nations and not on class.
Yet in Arab spring it was the Arab working class rather than the capitalists or middle classes who posed the greatest threat. The US helped to suppress those movements and the entire Arab leaderships are dependent on them, silently collaborating throughout the Gaza genocide.
From the multipolarity perspective the axis of resistance still stands, but the problem is that the foundations of this system seem shaky. What common strategy is operated by the various groups? The central element is Iran, but their cautious responses indicate that they still hope to do a deal with the US.
The major problems immediately are those of inter-imperialist rivalry. In Syria there are conflicts between the US Türkiye and Israel over the future development of the area. The US and Israel are contesting over a truce in Gaza that would limit, for the time being, the completion of the genocide.
Above all the elements of the US ruling class and Israel are discussing the potential for an attack on Iran in the expectation that they can declare supremacy over West Asia – and the road to a new war focused on China and extending for decades.
In the background is the class struggle. All reports indicate boiling rage, especially with the populations of Egypt and Jordan, at the open collaboration with the genocide. Only savage repression holds them at bay.
Socialists have a role to play is this ongoing struggle, but only if they recognise the aggression of the West in both West Asia and Ukraine and if they see the mobilisation of the working class as the essential response.
We are already inside the drive to global war. It seems highly unlikely that the internal and external contradictions attending the decay of the US hegemon can be resolved short of war, with the danger of nuclear conflict on the horizon. If socialists are to play a role in the defence of the working class, they must sweep away liberal play actors and unite around a common, international, revolutionary response.