Bashar al-Assad and The Anti-Imperialism Debate
One thing I’ve noticed among left-wing circles online is that there is a schism between people in the far-left regarding the question of Bashar al-Assad in relation to the recent military intervention in Syria.
To be clear: everyone on the left agrees that the intervention itself was wrong. We all agree that it was an unjust intervention based on scant evidence and without an investigation into the truth behind the chemical attack. However, where we seem to be divided is the issue of whether that means we support Bashar al-Assad, the leader of the Syrian nation. This debate also touches on questions not uncommon in leftist discourse, such as the question of national liberation within the broader context of anti-imperialism.
To summarize the whole debate: there is one side of the debate that believes it is justified to support Bashar al-Assad because his government, although bourgeois, represents a national bourgeoisie attempting to resist the imperial bourgeoisie and thus the struggle for national liberation and determination becomes a part of the struggle for socialism and against capitalism, and another side which opposes support for Assad on the basis of his character and policies and/or because the national liberation question is less important than the broader class struggle central to socialist and communist discourse. The former side is occupied by people like Jason Unruhe and my senpai Pierre Tru-Dank, and the latter side is supported by Muke (aka Xexizy).
This is summed up by an exchange between Pierre and Muke over Twitter on the very subject three days ago. Muke thinks that Assad’s opposition to US imperialism is meaningless, presumably because he dislikes Assad as a leader. Pierre countered this by pointing out that Karl Marx supported US President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War, despite him suspending Habeas Corpus, his forces burning Atlanta and him apparently viewing black people as racial inferiors. The reason Marx supported Lincoln and congratulated his re-election in 1864 was because he saw his side of the war as being an ultimately emancipatory force because it would lead to the abolition of slavery in the United States of America.
The next day, Muke tried to assert that Marx’s reasoning for supporting Lincoln was totally different in context from the way Pierre had argued, but then stated that he didn’t care. Pierre responded to this by pointing out that Marx supported Lincoln because he thought it would empower an industrial bourgeoisie over a slave-owning aristocracy, and from there that the Assad government wants to empower a national bourgeoisie (the indigenuous entrepreneurial class) over what he calls a reactionary comprador bourgeoisie (referring to those who were allied with foreign organizations interested in economic investment, trade and exploitation).
When responding to the accusation that his side was secretly pro-war, Muke responded that, according to him, there was no need to leap to Assad’s defence on the basis that the strikes against Syria were self-evidently wrong and that only idiots defend them, to which Pierre responded by questioning the consistency of his anti-imperialist position given he spends more time shilling against Assad, to which Muke replied that there is no need to argue against war because it should be self-evident why war is bad. Oh Muke, shouldn’t you know by now that the free market of ideas doesn’t actually work? Even Rocking MrE can tell you that, in politics and philosophy, it is inevitable that you will face having to repeat yourself.
Muke then went on to say that he dislikes the pro-Assad side more than the pro-war side because he views them as just supporters of quasi-fascist dictatorships who promote their views under the banner of leftism, adding that he views national liberation as just bullshit that appeals to naive people who are new to socialism, thus he considers refuting the national liberation ideas more important than making anti-war or anti-imperialist arguments. Pierre, in response, sent Muke a letter Marx wrote to Sigfrid Meyer in which he outlines the importance of the Irish struggle for national liberation to the liberation of the working class.
I hope I’ve given a good window into the debate within the far-left over the question of Assad and national liberation, and with that I think it is time to present my view.
I am of the opinion that we should, as a tactical measure, support Assad. The key word here is tactical, not moral. It’s not simply because of some of the wrongdoing attributed to Assad (not including the fictitious chemical attacks attributed to him), but also because, while Assad seemingly represents the national bourgeoisie in Syria, he is also a client of Russia one way or another. See, Syria is also a client state of another arguably imperial faction of bourgeoisie: Russia. Russia wants to keep one of its military bases in Syria and maintain access to the oil that Syria has, and because of that Russia would not like Syria to fall into Western hands. Thus the economic interests of Syria are invariably tied to that of a larger faction of the bourgeoisie, and it from there it would be a bit misguided to extrapolate that Syria represents an independent national bourgeoisie.
Yet, we mustn’t forget that it is the Western bourgeoisie who we are concerned with right now, for they hold hegemony over the world and thus present the greatest danger. We must remember that, although Russia is considered a formidable power in its own right, the United States and NATO surround it, with several military bases dotted across the world. Indeed, Russia are really the underdog in this geopolitical situation.
Solidarity with Bashar al-Assad, then, represents the desire of the socialist to see the international bourgeoisie fracture and weaken through its division of power, and in particular to see the growth of Syria’s national bourgeoisie make way for the rise of a Syrian proletariat, in a similar vein to how Marx saw the Irish national struggle as paving the way for the growth of both the Irish and British proletariat. Thus, we want to see the dominion of the Western comprador over the Middle East bourgeoisie broken, and Assad’s government in this sense represents resistance to said bourgeoisie, whether material or symbolic. This is what I mean when I speak of tactical support for Assad.
In addition to this, we have a clear memory of what happens when we allow the Western bourgeoisie to exert themselves in the Middle East. When any Middle Eastern leader that exerts its own national economic interests against those of the West, the end result is a military intervention supported by a propaganda campaign in order to train us into morally justifying what is essentially pure robbery and conquest in the name of capital and the petrodollar. And after that leader is deposed, the Islamists who have been waiting in the wings, kept at bay by the former national bourgeois presence, will enter the power vacuum that has been created and turn what was a stable country practicing economic nationalism, secularism or even a kind of socialism into a barbarous, relatively poor, theocratic Islamist hellhole. It happened in Iraq when the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, it happened in Libya when the Western-backed Libyan revolution overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, and thus we have every reason to assume that it will happen again in Syria when Bashar al-Assad is deposed. Not to mention, we have reason to believe that the Islamists have always been supported by the US bourgeoisie that they might fulfil their economic and political interests, as the Saudi businessman Osama bin Laden, before he became public enemy #1 for the United States following the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, recruited muhajideen with the support of the United States in order to undermine the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
As a final note, I may be a socialist, but I am far from anti-nationalist like so many leftoids seem to be. I support the right of nations to determine their own destiny and uphold their own sovereignty, and thus as a socialist national liberation is one of the pillars of my socialism. If you think about it, this makes sense. So long as the world remains dominated by global capitalism and its interests, the nation state will always be subservient to capital and thus it will always be looking for new masters. We see this in the way Britain, even after leaving the European Union, could find itself subservient to either the USA or China under the guise of becoming a more “global” Britain, and in the way that America, even under Donald Trump, reminds subservient to Saudi interests. Therefore it becomes pertinent to unburden the nation state and the world from capitalism so that its people are no longer slaves to capital.
So there you have my stance on the Assad debate within the online left. While acknowledging that Assad’s interests are not pure, I ultimately align with Pierre Tru-Dank’s side of the argument on the grounds of national liberation and undermining the cause of the Western bourgeoisie in their quest to carve up the Middle East.
If you want to follow the conversation I talked about earlier on Twitter, look for Pierre Tru-Dank at @HauntedPierre and Xexizy at @muke010.
Marx’s letter to Abraham Lincoln: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm
Marx’s letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm