Khiyana Daesh, the Left and the Unmaking of the Syrian Revolution Jules Alford and Andy Wilson (eds) Essays by Muhhamad Idrees Ahmad, Javaad Alipoor, Leila Al- Shami, Mark Boothroyd, Joseph Daher and Shiar Neyo, Sam Charles Hamad, Bodour Hassan, Michael Karadjis, Louis Proyect, Eyal Zisser Unkant Publishers London 2016 Published in Great Britain in 2016 by Unkant Publishers, London The articles herein are copyright © the authors 2016 The rights of the authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998. Designed by Keith Fisher and Andy Wilson Cover illustration by Andy Wilson British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-9926509-6-4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 (previously ISBN 0 86104 352 9) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in a binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Set in Unkant Jensen www.unkant.com Contents Assad an-Nar: Socialism and the Democratic Wager 1 Mark Boothroyd: Who are the Syrian Rebels? The Genesis of the Armed Struggle in Syria 41 Sam Charles Hamad: Anti-anti-Imperialism–The Syrian Revolutionary War and the anti-Imperialist Left 67 Mark Boothroyd: The Syrian Revolution and the Crisis of the Anti- War Movement 91 Louis Proyect: The Betrayal of the Intellectuals on Syria 111 Muhammad Idrees Ahmad: The anti-Imperialist’s Guide to Inaction in Syria 131 Sam Charles Hamad: The Rise of Daesh in Syria–Some Inconvenient Truths 145 Leila Al-Shami: The Struggle for Kobane–An Example of Selective Solidarity 197 Javaad Alipoor: Quwwah al Ghadhabiyya–Iran, Syria and the Limits of Khomeinism 205 Joseph Daher: Interview With Shiar Neyo 235 Budour Hassan: Nasrallah’s Blood Soaked Road to Jerusalem 245 Mark Boothroyd: Can the Revolution in Syria Survive an Imperial Carve Up? 251 Michael Karadjis: The Class Against Class Basis of the Syrian Uprising 265 Eyal Zisser: Can Assad’s Syria Survive Revolution? 269 Contributors Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is Lecturer in Digital Journal- ism at the University of Stirling and the author of The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War (Edin- burgh University Press 2014). He co-edits pulsemedia.org. Javaad Alipoor is a mixed race artist, writer and social- ist based in northern England. He blogs at attheinlandsea. wordpress.com. Mark Boothroyd is an NHS staff nurse, a socialist activist, and a founder of Syria Solidarity UK. Jospeh Daher is a Doctor in Development at SOAS (Lon- don), assistant teacher at the University of Lausanne (Swit- zerland), founder of the Syria Freedom Forever blog and a member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (Syria) and Solidarities (Switzerland). Sam Charles Hamad is a Scot- tish Egyptian writer and commentator on the Arab Spring and the Syrian Revolution. Shiar Neyo is a Syrian journal- ist and activist of Kurdish descent who has lived in exile for around a decade. Louis Proyect is a life-long social- ist activist, writer and commentator. He is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list and a member of New York Film Critics Online. Eyal Zisser is dean of the faculty of humanities and the Yona and Dina Ettinger Chair of Con- temporary Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University. Assad an-Nar: Socialism and the Democratic Wager he narcissism of the left is so thoroughgoing that it now conceives revolution and counterrevolution in terms of its Town worn obsessions rather than proceeding from events. Thus the left has become largely irrelevant to the calculations of those actually engaged in revolution. But we proceed differently. Contemporary revolution calls for a reassessment of everything the left has come to believe because the raison d’etre of the left is to serve the social revolution, and this now positively demands such a rethink. Therefore this essay is unashamedly about the contemporary left and its impasse. Left wing anti-imperialism today exists as an immense ac- cumulation of platitudes and stupidities—in terms of the bare facts, in terms of social reality, and in terms of the objectives lying beyond the theory. The problem goes all the way down, so that older travesties of the left’s platforms are happily being travestied all over again. Consider the emergence of ‘Stalinism without Stalinism’. None of its positions are associated with genuine beliefs. Then there is the corresponding danger that the critique of ‘Stalinism without Stalinism’ overshoots and becomes itself a travesty of earlier an- archist, Trotskyist or liberal critiques by failing to register the changes that have allowed the old language, the old certainties, to float free. We need to be clear when considering the Stalinist, totalitarian legacy and ideology. More often than not, these adaptable ideas sprang from a species of reformism. What could be more natural 2 Syria in a world dominated by a competing hierarchy of nation-states than to reframe politics as being essentially concerned with such competition. Stalinism can be considered as an historic adjustment to the ‘Game of States.’ It is not by coincidence that Stalinism has emerged as the dominant form of reformist leftism in both the global North and the global South of late capitalism. The puzzle is how this tradition—a disaster in the historical calculus—has emerged dominant, given the many challenges it has faced. Two historical moments are pivotal today. First there is the crisis of the post-68 left. Second there is the crisis of anti-im- perialism in an age of revolution. These are tied together by the changing nature of revolution and anti-imperialism in an age of neoliberalism and the difficulties of the post-colonial moment. The main problem is in relating the large scale changes to the details of the situation: the crisis of Social Democratic moder- nity in the global North and the post-colonial states in the global South and the radical movements which have fought against these tendencies. In this context the anti-war movement that sprang up in the North in the early part of the twenty first century must be understood, at least in part, as a false dawn marked by a deter- mined clinging to illusions. That section of the left that fought against this historical riptide has itself in turn descended into the worst of these trav- esties; either sectarian denial of the new revolutions or active counterrevolutionary propaganda on behalf of those who pay the wages of yesterday’s full time activists with no other career pros- pects in view. The idea of history as scientifically underwritten, the idea that the working class was swimming with the current, must be given up. The principles of self-emancipation, of collective and democratic struggle are now ideas in search of a subject. The identity of theory and practice was loudly proclaimed just as the unity of theory and practice was evaporating into myth. The coming unity of theory and practice can only be achieved through the struggles now taking place. The contradiction that democratic revolutions can have undemocratic consequences in the age of neoliberalism and globalisation is a post-colonial challenge that older, authoritarian versions of leftism cannot address. Parochially these large issues raise the question of how The Democratic Wager 3 to be a minority for revolutionaries committed to ‘socialism from below’, and what the latter means today. The Era of Arab Revolution The era of Arab revolution was foreshadowed by the Green revo- lution in Iran and culminated in the overthrow of dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Theocracy was rocked in Bahrain but the rebellion was then crushed by theocratic intervention. The revolution swept through Syria in March 2011 and hatched into a brutal war whose course has disorientated a left that previ- ously had confronted imperialism. In the C20th, ideas about de- mocracy, socialism and the struggle against imperialism were at least conceived as running in the same direction; today they are frequently counterposed to each other. This is true not just of the slogans but of actual movements that may each be taken as a moment of freedom but negate that moment when they engage in military clashes with each other; for example, between those fighting for Kurdish self-determination in Turkey and revolu- tionary forces in Syria; or the deep divisions within the Palestin- ian movement and its supporters internationally; or, finally, the bitter divide on the global left between those seen as supporting counterrevolution and those seen as being in league with imperi- alism. The picture is one of profound disorientation and a grow- ing incoherence of the most basic concepts of socialism—revolu- tion, democracy and imperialism—as they apply today. It all seemed so different in the period after 2001, when the left cohered around opposition to Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and a generation was radicalised around the issues of war and impe- rialism in the Middle East. The Bush administration’s martial, neo-conservative rhetoric appeared out of kilter with the post-co- lonial world, and the response was the convergence of older and newer radicalisms. Following considerable debate and argument large sections of the global justice movement adopted slogans de- nouncing imperialism, and what had begun as a movement unit- ing radical and moderate NGOs focussing mainly on economic issues appeared to undergo a further political radicalisation. The cycle of huge anti-war demonstrations which followed appeared to take all this in a yet more radical direction, while bridges were built connecting previously divided sections of the global left.