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Back in 2012, Anand Gopal had an article in Harper's describing the revolutionary class politics visible in some towns in Syria, still the best I've seen on that front: http://harpers.org/archive/2012/08/welcome-to-free-syria/ Now we have an interview with Anand which picks up this theme again, contrasting the need and opportunity for working-class based politics to the practice of the mainstream bourgeois opposition. Some key quotes: "There are also internal reasons for the weakness of the FSA and the mainstream democratic opposition. "The revolutionary councils that popped up around the country in 2012-13 sought to include all segments of Syrian society. While this may have seemed laudable at the outset, it was, in fact, effectively a popular front strategy--the councils often included, or were dominated by, the big landowning families and the prominent traders of the community. "But if the councils were to be the seed of a new alternative state, they should have taken the question of revenue seriously. This would have meant directly confronting the class divisions in Syria, which in many ways were at the root of the uprising to begin with. This might have included confiscating the property of the wealthy and redistributing it to meet the revenue needs of the councils. "Instead, the councils and their armed protection--the FSA--sought outside funding from NGOs and foreign intelligence agencies, which inevitably introduced corruption and fragmentation, creating the space for Islamic fundamentalists to challenge their authority. "It's no coincidence that the three strongest state-building movements in Syria--ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and the left wing YPG--relied very little on foreign funding. ISIS's main source of revenue, for example, was confiscation, followed by taxation and oil. "Of course, it's easy to make this critique in the abstract, but we should also recognize the extremely difficult conditions that the rebel movement was operating under. "To begin with, the sort of organized left that might have made class demands was very weak in Syria, in large part because of the legacy of Baathist rule, which co-opted or crushed any type of progressive alternative..." Full article at link below. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: 'Ashley Smith' via Critical Syria <critical-sy...@googlegroups.com> Date: Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 9:41 AM Subject: [Critical-Syria] Does the U.S. want regime change in Syria? | https://socialistworker.org/2017/04/26/does-the-us-want- regime-change-in-syria _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
