13) DEMYSTIFYING SYRIA: BACKGROUND TO THE CRISIS

By Salim Kassem

     Two relationships have long been at play behind the stability of the Syrian regime. The first is an economic relationship, in which the regime would put back into national production just enough to create jobs and produce cheap national goods to keep the working population in steady or, better yet, improving living conditions.

     The second is a political relationship, in which the regime must raise its repression and pan‑Arab rhetoric, as more power, control and wealth become concentrated in the hands of the ruling military elite and its adjunct bourgeois class. As the recent popular uprising has come to show, serious distortions have been incurred in both relationships, which are also, under more realistic conditions, inseparable.

     The distortion to the economic process began with Syria's adoption of neoliberal reforms. The Syrian ruling elite siphoned resources that were needed to reproduce the working population under stable or enhanced living conditions. As early as 1987, the Syrian regime, expressing the interests of a small military elite, which had clasped the state apparatus, began to dissociate itself from a relatively planned and heavily state interventionist past.

     Up until 2002, the reforms were circumscribed to promote private investment with some, albeit very little, erosion to the subsidies and the basic consumption bundle delivered to the working population.

     The initial reforms did not pay off, and the investment rate as a whole declined. In the uncertainty and geopolitical risk engulfing Syria, private investors steer away from projects with high initial costs and long gestation periods and engage in speculative ephemeral endeavours. Until 2002, and just prior to the second oil boom, real per capita growth rates were on average zero or negative, and unemployment figures reached the two digit level.

     In 2006, the second‑generation of intensive neoliberal reforms were born. There was a lifting of price controls on basic commodities, a lifting of tariff barriers, a relative freeing of capital accounts, and soon, lifting of subsidies on certain essential commodities. The price of staples rose, and initially, the inflation rate jumped to more than 10 percent a year. When inflation tapered down, it did so at still higher costs to employment.

     In the absence of autonomous trade unionism, the corresponding rise in wages was torpid. It was a prolonged and calculated shock therapy, which formalised the hold of the state bourgeoisie on the economy, desocialised land tenure, widened the income gap, dealt a blow to national industry, and promoted import-led growth.

     But this was no ordinary liberalisation. It was meant for a class that deployed absolute political authority to extract wealth at every juncture of the circuit of capital.

     Less and less was paid into health, education, or wages. A state sponsored merchant was free to mark up prices. The Central Bank would stabilise the local currency with nationally owned reserves so that locally accrued rents could be converted into dollars and sent abroad. The dollar peg unequivocally eroded the efficacy of monetary policy and, subsequently, the economy was dollarized.

     In the uncertain environment of Syria where complete collapse a la Iraq is a possibility, the rich either save abroad or turn to affluent consumption, emulating the rich classes of Western countries. In this second phase of reform, the real growth rate was on average six percent for the past nine years, while income inequality rose at a higher rate.

     The growth in income was driven by higher oil prices and by "geopolitical rents", which bring us to the distortion incurred to the political relationship.

Syria is a key player on the Middle Eastern stage, and there is a price tag associated with the various positions it adopts. For instance, its billions in debts to Iran disappeared at one point. The Hariri Tribunal, which had pointed the finger at the Syrian regime, suddenly swerved to Hezbollah after the borders with Iraq were closed off to the Iraqi resistance, and so on.

     But for the Syrian working people, the anecdote was that ours is a regime that signals to the left but turns to the right. There was a certain predictability when dealing with the regime, based on the premise that the interests of a small ruling clique forms the context for decision making. But the ruling clique itself did not predict the wave of Arab revolts shattering the fear barrier, the frustration of a dispossessed working population subjected daily to the ostentatious display of nouveau riche wealth, or that the distance it kept from Iran was no longer tolerable by the US.

     The regime had survived because it knew what distance to keep from war and peace, which made a best friend out of an enemy. The left ignored its transgressions on human rights because Syria did not go the unilateral peace way of Egypt and Jordan. The US and Israel acquiesced because repression hollowed development, the radical splinter groups were effectively contained, and not a bullet was fired over the Golan for nearly forty years.

     But Syria also lies in a region that falls squarely under the diktat of accumulation by encroachment and dispossession, where war and dissolution represent inherent relationships, which compose a steadying force for global capital accumulation. The pertinent questions then become: does the US drive for hegemony over the Iranian side of the Persian Gulf necessitate a US/Israeli instigated "sectarian strife" in Syria? Will the West overlook the ongoing events in exchange for delivering Hezbollah, or will the regime reform and resist with Iran coming to the rescue?

     The regime is faced with a choice between resistance - aligning a broad spectrum of social classes integrated and empowered in a reformed political process - or dissolution. Capitulation is not an option. Discrete sectarian lines and forty years of authoritarian rule have dimmed the possibility of sacrificing a president to save a social class.

     The regime's reaction has not been to embark on serious reforms, although the most recent developments may signify a shift towards real political reforms. Earlier, it raised salaries as if it these were handouts to subjects under an absolute monarch, and lifted the ban on niqab‑wearing teachers to appease a minority of ultra fundamentalists, measures that do not amount to reform.

     Appointing Islamic bankers in the government will not redress inequities. The Arab protests are about the right to political participation and decent living conditions. In 2008, a basket of eggs, a principal protein provider for children, costing three to four times the price of two years earlier.

     There was an active and purposeful act of pauperisation of the Syrian working population, which also compromised national security. The fate of Syria as a state always hinged upon upholding Arab historical rights and on maintaining a national front based on a relatively equitable distribution of resources. For a social class in power to relinquish any of these tenets is to relinquish the state as form of social organisation that mediates class differences; hence the danger to Syria represented by the usurping of the popular revolt by imperialist‑backed forces masquerading as revolutionaries. Has the momentum for resource extraction from Syria been exhausted? Is it now time for capital to reorganise with broader geopolitical concerns in mind?

     The answer to this remains to be seen in the concessions that are going to be made to the Syrian working class, as opposed to the US and "moderate" Arab regimes and in the political position vis‑a‑vis the Arab-Israeli conflict.

     On the economic side, a re‑socialisation of the economy has to be undertaken. Reinstituting land reforms, which had made Syria a net producer of food, can be a start. Revitalising industrial and agricultural state-sponsored banks that lent to national projects at concessional long term rates can be another. Putting the protection of the national industry back in place is also vital. Strict monitoring of the capital account, and the reinstitution of multiple exchange and interest rates aimed at galvanising national resources, provide exchange rate stability and induce investment. Heavy subsidies and price controls elevating the standard of living for the working population are a must.

     On the political side, the matter can be easily settled with the smallest glitch over the border in South Lebanon, which would realign all national forces behind the regime and possibly quiet all protests. Only serious concessions to the working class, including an empowerment of working people in a strong national front, could redress the course of events. Or else, whither Syria?

INTERNAL STRUGGLE, IMPERIALIST AGGRESSION

Despite its relatively small size, Syria plays a significant role in the struggle against US imperialism's drive for unrivalled hegemony in the region. Like Libya before the installation of a client regime by NATO, and unlike most Arab countries, Syria's neoliberal reforms had not yet dismantled the public sector or completely eradicated the earlier social gains of the working people.

     Nor have they had the chance to produce a shift in political power to dislodge Syria from its nationalist, objectively anti-imperialist positions. Syria's resistance to US diktat put her squarely in the crosshairs of imperialist aggression. For almost a decade before the wave of popular protests began, the US has been actively pressuring Syria to kowtow to its policies, financing reactionary groups and satellite TV stations which promote American "democratic values", enacting legislation and enforcing sanctions, and threatening to use the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister as a pretext for further aggression.

     The external dimension of the political crisis in Syria involves not only U.S. and European imperialists, but also U.S. client regimes in various Arab countries, most notably the Gulf emirates; so much so that Syria can be characterized today as an arena of an Arab Civil War. Some of these Arab countries played an active role in the occupation of Iraq, publicly supported Israeli aggression against Lebanon and Palestine (Gaza 2008‑09), actively schemed against the Egyptian uprising, supported the crushing of the Bahrain uprising, and most recently supplied weapons and mercenaries to topple the Libyan regime.

     After a number of false starts, US‑backed Syrian opposition groups managed to ride a wave of popular protests and immediately started a campaign of destabilization using assassinations, killings of security personnel and, as government claims go, even protestors. The drive to "militarize the uprising" has greatly weakened its popular base, and ensured that Aleppo and Damascus, the two largest population, economic and political centers of the country, would not join the uprising, leaving it confined to a few small cities and rural areas.

     This has further enabled the extreme right‑wing to take charge of the uprising and sideline leftist and nationalist groups, and set the stage for calls for foreign intervention a la Libya. Combined with psychological warfare and a massive media disinformation campaign laden with lies and fabrications (Al Jazeera, AlArabia, Fox, France24, CNN, BBC, CBC...), the US‑backed opposition has managed to become a spokesperson for the uprising, at least internationally. United in the Syrian National Council (modeled after the Libyan one), this opposition actively seeks foreign military intervention, lately couched in their calls for such an intervention by Arab states, and supports the paramilitary gangs operating under the moniker of the "Free Syrian Army". These conditions amount to a complete gutting of the initially progressive character of the Syrian uprising.

(The above article is from the February 1-14, 2012, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)