Islamists Are Not Revolutionaries

In the media coverage of events in Syria, over the last week, the Islamists and jihadi terrorists have often been referred to as revolutionaries. Paul Mason, in his usual, sloppy superficial analysis, also, talks about the “Syrian Revolution”. But, Islamists are not revolutionaries, and what is happening in Syria is not a revolution.

A revolution is what happens when a society undergoes a revolutionary shift from one level of social development to a higher level of social development. As Marx and Engels describe, this “social revolution”, goes on behind Men's backs, driven by material conditions and social laws, just as the process of biological evolution occurs. The Law of Natural Selection drives biological evolution, and The Law of Value, drives social evolution. The Law of Value drives society to raise productivity, which drives technological development, which revolutionises the method and relations of production, which revolutionises the social relations that rest upon them.

These new social relations, drive a change in the political and juridical superstructure that rests upon them, as the state becomes the state of the new ruling class, and a new political regime arises, through which this new ruling class, acts to control that state. The establishment of this new political regime takes the form of a “political revolution”.

But, what is happening in Syria, much as happened previously in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, as well as previously in Iran, is not a revolutionary transformation, either socially or politically, but the opposite. It is a counter-revolution! Describing it as such, does not imply or require Marxists to, then, defend the Assad regime. We do not proceed on the ridiculous basis that our enemy's enemy is our friend. Nevertheless, we can also, on the basis of understanding the nature of Islamism, and looking at even recent history, also, conclude that, bad as Assad's regime was for workers, what replaces it is going to be much, much worse.

When the Shah of Iran's regime fell in 1979, Marxists could shed no tears over the removal of a brutal dictator, who had been put in place, and for a long time, kept in place, by US imperialism. On the contrary, many Marxists saw the popular revolt against the Shah, also, in revolutionary terms, and, to begin with, it had some potential to become such, though the relatively low level of capitalist development of Iran, made that problematic, without it being part of a much wider revolution in the region, including in what was, then, the USSR. And, this problem, did indeed, play into the reality that what transpired in Iran, was not a revolution, but, ultimately, a counter-revolution, as the Islamists under the leadership of Khomeini, seized control.

A social revolution requires that the social relations of production are revolutionised, and raised to a higher level. That did not happen in Iran, just as it has not happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya, and now in Syria. On the contrary, if anything, the established state-capitalist relations of production, have been set back, not only to the level of private capitalist relations, but to the conditions prior to that, those of petty-bourgeois commodity production and exchange, and the old Asiatic clerical despotism. As happened in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, even the bourgeois development that leads, via the bourgeois national revolution, to the creation of the bourgeois nation state, is reversed, as these competing petty-bourgeois, clericalist, semi-feudal forces cause the society to degenerate into fiefdoms, and warlordism.

A political revolution, requires, similarly, that the political and juridical superstructure, the political regime, be brought into line with the new social relations created by the social revolution. The British state became a capitalist state, around 1689, reflecting the fact that capitalist social relations had become dominant, but the political regime, did not become revolutionised until 1832, when the effects of the Industrial Revolution, had made that dominance overwhelming, and the bourgeoisie, backed by the industrial proletariat, imposed itself on the old landed aristocracy. Along the way, not only such political revolutions, but also political counter-revolutions, can occur, as with Thermidor in France, and in Russia.

However brutal the regime of the Shah, the reality was that it objectively developed the productive forces in Iran, as part of its role as an agent of US imperialism, and as imperialism invested industrial capital in that development. Primary concern with the political regime, and its brutality, rather than these objective material conditions, and social relations, is the method of moralists and liberals, not Marxists. The reality of Iran, since the Shah, is that it not only has replaced one brutal regime for another, but has also, via that regime, undermined the development of the productive forces, and social relations that had already arisen. It is not such a stark contrast as that which occurred with Pol Pot, in Cambodia, where an attempt was made to reverse capitalist development in favour of petty-bourgeois, peasant production, but, the principle is the same.

The reality of the Shah' s regime, as with that of the Baathists in Iraq and Syria, as well as that of Nasser in Egypt, and Gaddafi in Libya, is that these were “modernising” regimes, usually state-capitalist in nature – the regime in Afghanistan, prior to the Taliban was similar, as with that in Ethiopia - which, inevitably, given the conditions in which they existed, took the form of Bonapartism, just as, indeed, did the modernising regimes of Bismark in Germany, and Louis Bonaparte in France.

Indeed, given the material conditions in the Middle-East and North Africa, the lower level of development, and history of colonialism, the numerous cross-cutting cleavages of ethnicity, and religion, it was even more inevitable that modernising regimes would take this Bonapartist form. None of that has changed, and rather it has become even more intensified, as the descent into chaos in Libya, since 2011, has shown, and as the continued fragmentation in Iraq, despite the external unifying force of Iran, via the majority Shia population, demonstrates.

As I wrote some time ago, having flattened Gaza, and rolling over the rest of Palestine, and, now, having, also, flattened Lebanon, destroying Hezbollah, the Zionist state inevitably, turns its attention to Syria, which it already occupies in the Golan Heights, and which it has been intensifying its attacks upon, as with its bombing of Damascus, of its airports and airbases etc.

The fact of the attacks by the Islamists in Syria, at this time, was no coincidence immediately after the collapse of Lebanon, and destruction of Hezbollah. The Islamist forces are connected to Türkiye, but are descendants of Al Qaeda, and, in Gaza, Israel has also been giving such forces control, in relation to the distribution of what little aid gets in, as well as acting as general enforcers. Of course, Israel did the same thing, originally with Hamas, which it encouraged, as an opponent of Fatah, in Gaza.  As with Libya, HTS represents very few social forces, having around the same level of 17,000 fighters as that of the jihadists in Libya, in 2011.

Syria is now doomed to go through a similar period of chaos, disintegration and warlordism as that which has been inflicted on Libya, and Afghanistan. No doubt, many of those celebrating in the streets are themselves associated with those Islamist forces of reaction, as in Libya, many will also be people who are blindly welcoming the fall of one dictator, but without thinking about the day after, when what they face will be even worse. Others probably understand that it will be much worse, but are too fearful not to demonstrate their enthusiasm for fear of losing their heads, as many already have done in areas where the jihadists have taken over.

The situation in Syria is even worse than in Libya or Afghanistan. In Libya, US/NATO imperialism was able to carpet bomb the regime to destroy it, leaving the jihadis of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group – who themselves had previously been fighting the US in Iraq – backed by the Gulf Monarchies, and their Special Forces, to sweep its remains from the ground. It didn't take long for that to descend into chaos and warlordism, but their were no other, external parties on the ground, and Libya, unlike Syria, was not occupied by, or on the border of Israel.

In Syria, Russia has a military base on the Mediterranean, which it will be keen to maintain, though, having established its old warm water naval base in Crimea, that is less imperative, now. That base is in an Alawite region, and the Alawites are likely to come under sectarian attack and face pogroms from the now dominant Islamist forces. The US, still has troops in Syria, and uses the Syrian Kurds as a proxy for its interests. But, those Kurdish forces are also opposed by Türkiye, which sees them as a threat in relation to its own Kurdish region, and their demands for a Kurdish state. The Kurds in Syria, as in Iraq, will be thrown under the bus by US imperialism, just as they strung the Palestinians along with talk about a Two State Solution.

Iran also has interests in Syria, although, with the destruction of Hezbollah, and collapse of Lebanon, those interests have mostly disappeared, along with it. Its main concern was to be able to ferry arms to Hezbollah. Now, that will become concentrated on Iraq, and so expect US imperialism to refocus its attention, there, in the near future too. Russia and China, will inevitably see their client in Iran, as weakened by these developments, and so expect them to shore up their support for Iran, with greater trade and investment, as well, as, of course, a much greater level of military support in air and naval defence systems, as the period of phoney war between US/NATO imperialism and Chinese~Russian imperialism continues and intensifies.

As Syria descends into a failed state, chaos and warlordism, the Zionist state will use the opportunity to invade and annex it further, using its standing line of a “right to self-defence”. But Syria is too big a bite for the Zionist state to swallow whole, and nor does it need to. The Zionist state only needs to clear sufficient territory to occupy, so as to create a large enough state to operate in, as it then, establishes normal relations with the surrounding Arab states in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf, which are already US client states.

The Islamists are not revolutionaries for another reason.  When the bourgeoisie undertook its revolution, it was, as set out above, based upon its capitalistic transformation of the relations of production.  When the proletariat undertakes its revolution, it is similarly on the basis of its transformation of the forces of production.  The Islamists, at best, are forced by reality to conserve the existing productive relations, whilst seeking to impose earlier social relations upon them, or else, at worst, seek to revert to those earlier productive relations themselves.

The bourgeoisie, whose social power resided, with their economic power, in the urban areas, mobilised the social forces brought into existence by the new productive relations, in the urban areas, to carry through their political revolution.  The industrial proletariat does the same thing, in relation to the socialist revolution.  But, what characterises the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, is that they lack any such centralised economic and social power, and as with the various peasant revolts, or the Peasant War, as undertaken by Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, or Castro, what they carry through is not a mass popular revolution, and certainly not a proletarian revolution, but simply a rural guerrilla war.  Such is the nature of the terrorism, and rebellion of the Islamists in Syria, as in Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere.