The class against class basis of the Syrian uprising Published in Alford, J & Wilson, A (2016) Khiyana: Daesh, The Left and the Unmaking of the Syrian Revolution, Unkant Publishers, London. Countless articles have described the social background to the Syrian revolution, and a good bibliography would be a useful tool to be put together at some stage. Below this brief introduction is a fairly straightforward one, but the fundamental facts are well- known. The early Baath Party governments of the 1960s built a base among the peasantry via land reforms and rural subsidy programs, and many Baath political and military leaders had their origins in rural areas, eclipsing the traditional urban-based bourgeoisie. At that stage the main Muslim Brotherhood opposition tended to represent the opposition of the Sunni urban bourgeoisie. However, as a new more powerful capitalist class consolidated itself through the state apparatus – the typical process of Nasserite/Baathist/Kemalist development – the rural dwellers again got left behind. But it was not until this new elite, under Bashar Assad after 2000, launched neo-liberal “reforms” that the new divide widened into an abyss. These reforms transformed the countryside, leaving it prey to a new class of big capitalist landowners, connected to the regime, driving large numbers of peasants into landlessness, while the abolition of subsidies and freeing of prices and similar measures further hammered the peasantry and also the growing urban poor – themselves first and second generations from the impoverished countryside, with family and other links to rural Syria – who formed great new shanty-suburban rings around Damascus and Aleppo. While, as elsewhere in the Arab Spring, the first sparks of revolt in early 2011 occurred in urban areas, in Syria these tended to be the smaller towns and cities located in impoverished regional areas, large rural towns essentially, from Daraa in the south to Idlib in the north; the movement in Damascus and Aleppo at this early stage did not look as magnificent as in Cairo and Tunis. From these rural towns the revolt spread like wildfire to the now vigorously anti-Baath countryside. Eventually, the revolution did come to the two big cities, by mid-2012, and the divide between regime-control and opposition-control in both cities is virtually a lesson in sociology: the suburbs dominated by the urban poor are controlled by the revolution, the more established middle and upper class suburbs are under the regime. Indeed, as virtually all analyses tell you, innocently enough, one of the sections of the population that has remained tied to the regime, apart from much of the Alawite and Christian minority population, is the Sunni “business classes” in Damascus and Aleppo. Unlike in Egypt, Tunisia, and in its different way, Libya, the Syrian capitalist class, a creature of the Baath, has remained tied solidly to the regime (indeed, this has to be understood as part of imperialism’s problem all along – where is the section of the ruling class to replace a discredited Assad with?). Of course it is not only the capitalist class – much of the secular, comfortable, established Sunni and Christian middle classes in these two cities remain tied to regime, if often grudgingly, or at least neutral, due to the clear political limitations of much of the opposition leadership: a movement based among the overwhelmingly Sunni peasantry and urban poor, which has taken up arms, and which is overall more traditional and religious in outlook than the older established elites, may indeed look frightening to many. Of course, this “religiosity” is also what many in the western left are obsessed with, often in a way indistinguishable from the Islamophobic right; yet while there clearly are seriously reactionary jihadist formations in Syria, overall, the moderate Islamist rebel groups (or indeed even the adoption of religious names by some politically-secular FSA brigades), simply reflect the greater religiosity of the urban and rural poor, ie, those sectors left out of the bourgeois “secular” Baath project, especially after 2000. Thus, a revolution that for many is nothing but a “sectarian” clash is in reality the sharpest class against class clash in the Arab Spring, thus its extraordinary tenacity and ferocity; its sectarian element is, at base, an overlay of this. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t gone further than this, and cannot go even further and become purely and simply a sectarian war (which is manifestly not the case yet); but even if that did eventuate, it wouldn’t cancel out the social origins of this phenomenon. Interestingly, the Syrian revolution can be seen as the mirror image, in class/sectarian terms, of the Bahrain uprising, while understanding obviously how different the two societies are: there the state is controlled by a royal elite from the Sunni minority, which rules over an impoverished Shiite majority, the urban and rural poor, whose uprising was partially led by Shia clerics and was overwhelmingly more religious in outlook than the regime and the established classes which stood behind it; the regime and its Saudi and Gulf backers were able to slander the uprising as an Iranian 5th column. Whereas in Syria, the state in dominated by a political and military elite from the Alawite minority (even if it rules for a mixed Alawite-Sunni capitalist class), which rules over a vast Sunni majority of the rural and urban poor, whose revolt is slandered by the regime as a Saudi/Gulf 5th column. But enough from me. Here first is a brief clip from the article that underlines the point I am making here, and below it the article itself: (clip) The revolution in Syria, in contrast to the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, was at its base a peasants' revolt, a protest by the Sunni periphery against what was perceived as the Baath regime's turning its back on the country's rural population ... ... And so, from the time the revolution broke out in March 2011 in the city of Dar'a, the rebellion spread like wildfire to all the rural areas and the periphery, including the northern part of the state, the Jazira region, and later, the agricultural towns of Homs and Hama ... ... Another source of regime strength lies in the fact that while turmoil has come to the suburbs and the slums of Aleppo and Damascus, the revolution has not ignited among urban Syrians, including the Sunni bourgeoisie of the big cities ... ... Part of the reluctance stems from the economic benefits the urban bourgeoisie enjoy, especially during recent years thanks to the regime's economic policies. Some have to do with the bourgeoisie's age-old resentments, reservations, and aversion toward the periphery and the rural regions and their inhabitants ... ... Since most opposition activists come from rural areas, most incursions into the big cities, including Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs, have been carried out by insurgents from nearby rural regions. They penetrate the big cities mostly through the slum neighborhoods and suburbs, which are often inhabited by recent migrants from the periphery and rural areas. These migrants generally maintain connections with relatives back home, and it is from there that the armed bands come. But because the bourgeoisie of Damascus and Aleppo have refrained from joining the insurgents,[14] the Syrian opposition has been denied victory photos such as those from Cairo's Tahrir Square ... Clip from: Can Assads Syria Survive Revolution? by Eyal Zisser Middle East Quarterly Spring 2013, pp. 65-71 (view PDF) http://www.meforum.org/3529/assad-syria-revolution