Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist
4th May 2013, 00:45
Link: http://aroundthepear.blogspot.com/2013/05/in-response-to-pham-binh.html
In Response to Pham Binh On the Syrian Question
Preliminary Remarks
This article is not a response to everything that Pham Binh has written, nor is it a comprehensive response to every point he has made on the Syrian Question, it is merely a response to a few remarks that he has made. However before we go into the meet of the matter there is a need to engage with the elephant in the room that is of human rights. On both sides of the debate one faction has supported one member of the conflict on the basis of which one is more brutal. Normally these debates become obtuse in their obscurity and merely end in one side psychoanalyzing the motivations of the other and questioning sources to the point that facts no longer contain an objective existence and merely assume the form that is most convent for political argument. I have no intention of providing a correct list of the human rights abuses of the two sides because at this point facts do not exist outside of ideology and hence to render them "objectively true" removes their meaning. For our purpose I will only assume two things; that the Syrian government has committed more abuses than the Free Syrian Army and that the Free Syrian Army is slowly degenerating due to the influx of foreign mudjeen, while at the same time the Islamists are still a minority that is not the dominate strain. These two facts are to a large extent truisms and I don't think anyone will take issue with me mentioning them.
However, the very fact that we can no longer cite factual evidence indepedant of perspective does prove something. After all, the very act of debating is an act of class struggle and what regimes we declare to be "good" or "evil" all depends on your definition of these words and more importantly, your ideological perspective. In the post-cold war world so much history has been outright fabricated that there really is no way to look at the past without hearing not only an ideological perspective but a completely different version of what happened. Not only did the belligerents of the cold war wage a political war but they also waged a propaganda war that rendered all sources faulty. One only has to look at Halway and Chang's book on China to read how the interests that are invested in falsifying the history of Mao's China will do so without any regard for factual information, context, or even the slightest attempt at objectivity. The Leading Light Communist Organization has published a through critique of this account (Not that I in anyway endorse their political line) however if you notice this critique focuses more on systematically disproving every claim made by Chang and Halway and not on providing an alternative account of what actually happened in Mao's China. Of course, these accounts exist however I am sure that if Chang and Halway really wanted to they could also reply with an article questioning all of the sources cited in that article and we end up at square one again. This is not to say that there isn't an objective truth to be found somewhere, or that we shouldn't spend time debunking these coldwar myths, but that we need to be aware that it isn't about history as much as it is about ideology. Because even if we proved that no one ever died in the various so-called socialist states and that it was a worker's paradise, then they can simply reply that they don't like communism and that therefore they don't see the content of these regimes as relevant.
Likewise, recently it has been revealed that the Free Syrian Army has been using child soldiers Now, if I were a vulgar person I could simply cite this as a reason why we shouldn't support the FSA. But of course, since I support groups such as FARC and other armed communist rebels, you could simply reply that these groups also use child soligers and dismiss my support of those groups on the ground of hypocrisy Now, I could reply that the use of child solidgers in these groups takes place in a different context where in many cases the use of child soildgers provides these children with a far more stable, safer and beneficial form of employment but then I'd be missing the point. Because even if I could prove that FARC has never committed any error on any account then the question simply becomes one of what they intend to achieve. If you oppose socialism then ultimately you would oppose FARC regardless of what means they use to achieve this end. So at this point we can realize that there are always multiple accounts of historical details that in essence boil down to what perspective you take and how this perspective is advanced in practice. Because if you are a capitalist you might say that western imperialism was a necessary evil but if let's say a Communist commits a moral grievance they will simply denounce said grievance as a proof of "evil" of course it's important to engage these sort of historical comparison, but as I've already said; the nessecity of the evil is not based on the relative amount of evil, but rather the ends which the evil attempts to achieve.
Which brings me to my point. At the end of the day, the Free Syrian Army is a Capitalist army fighting against a Capitalist state to establish.... a Capitalist state. So as socialists why are we defending tooth and nail either sides in an inter-capitalist war. This doesn't apply to just the FSA apologists, but also to Assad apologists. Why should we defend capitalists? How will this in anyway advance the cause of socialism?
This isn't to say that we should only support things that advance the cause of socialism. On the contrary, we ought to support any movement that has a historically progressive task. This is why Marx supported the bourgeois revolution in France and the Americans in their civil war (Though there ought to be debate over whether this was the correct policy, but that isn't an issue that needs to be brought up here). As the Northern Star has noted before, Lenin made the distinction between bourgeois democratic revolutions and proletarian revolutions while arguing that bourgeois democratic revolutions are progressive within their context. But of course, Leninism is the Marxism of the imperialist era. The progressive nature of these revolutions comes from the fact that when a bourgeois democratic revolution happens in the third world, such as the state of affairs in Venezuela or Zimbabwe, these revolutions are progressive because they break allow a country to develop it's own bourgeois instead of being dominated by foreign bourgeois. However we ought to note that bourgeois democratic revolutions can never break with imperialism. Either the country in which they take place will be too weak to defend it's self from imperialism and it will endure a state of siege (as in the case of Zimbabwe) or these countries are able to achieve levels of economic growth by breaking with foreign imperialism that allow them to become imperialist powers themselves (as in the case of India). Yet with the opposition cololition being organized by Americans, the Syrian revolt isn't an issue of anti-imperialist revolution as much as it is shifting camps from Russian Imperialism to American Imperialism.
And lastly, there is the argument that this rebellion is progressive because it wishes to install a democratic republic. While Lenin supported the democratic revolution in his country it was because that during this era the Russian state was largely feudal and the bourgeois revolution represented a fundamental change in the class composition of the ruling class in a progressive (bourgeois) direction, while the Syrian revolution would not. However what needs to be re-iterated is Lenin's most important contribution to revolutionary theory, that is the idea that we live in an era of monopoly capitalism and imperialism where the state no longer functions as a distinct body from the bourgeois (Marx entertained revising his theory of the state slightly when the second Bonapartisan regime appeared to be able to function seperatly from the interests of the bourgeois, ). In this era of imperialism, the state is no more than the executive committee of the ruling class while in Marx's era and partially Lenin's era the state was capable of a certain degree of Independence from class mediator that only had a tendency to side with the bourgeois because the bourgeois were the upholders of the status quo and the state naturally has a vested interest in upholding the Status quo. So naturally if the state is capable of a certain degree of Independence from class society then the democratic republic is the best form of state because it is imbued with liberal democratic ideology that theoretically would allow us to transform the state "from the inside out" because since this state is capable of a degree of class independence then if it is imbued with this liberal democratic ideology then it should logically abide by the results of an election, and if an election results in the victory of a socialist party then theoretically speaking it should be possible to transform the state into a socialist state from there. But of course, the era of Marx and Lenin is gone and now we live in an era where the state and the capitalist class are largely indistinguishable. This is the era where the FBI takes orders from banks and aims it's sniper rifles at non-violent demonstrators. An era where our police departments are requesting drones. Or in short, an era where our government treats the word "Democracy" like the Chinese government treats the word "Socialism". So in this era, we have to ask ourselves to what extent is this demand still progressive when in practice liberal democracy is just a phrase in the constitution that is used as a pretext for mass repression.
Likewise, to return to the argument of human rights, we have to ask ourselves whether Assad's violence is proof of the supposed fascist nature of his state or merely the natural reaction of a state organism to a threat; or to be more specific, we need to ask ourselves whether his violence is unique to him and therefore exceptional, or whether the liberal democracy that the Free Syrian Army is fighting for would react any differently to such a threat. Now Pham Binh is obviously correct in noting that Syria is a far less repressive state then Britain. Yet, at the same time Britain is not under going a civil war, and unlike Syria, Britain is surrounded by allies and guaranteed safety by her empire. Still, even when faced with an insignificant threat such as the Irish Civil Rights movement, they responded with brute force by massacring non-violent demonstrators in the streets of Derry in 1972. When the Irish responded by waging guerrilla warfare under the leadership of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the British government responded with a brutal occupation and extreme levels of force, imprisoning hundreds of innocent Irishmen in concentration camps and sponsoring protestant fundamentalist groups whose sole goal was the extermination of the catholic population of North Ireland The list of casualties and the responsibility for them goes something like this:
Of those killed by British security forces:
187 (~51.5%) were civilians
145 (~39.9%) were members of republican paramilitaries
18 (~4.9%) were members of loyalist paramilitaries
13 (~3.5%) were fellow members of the British security forces
Of those killed by republican paramilitaries:
1080 (~52%) were members of the British security forces
728 (~35%) were civilians
187 (~9%) were members of republican paramilitaries
56 (~2.7%) were members of loyalist paramilitaries
10 (~0.4%) were members of the Irish security forces
Of those killed by loyalist paramilitaries:
868 (~85.4%) were civilians
93 (~9%) were members of loyalist paramilitaries
41 (~4%) were members of republican paramilitaries
14 (~1.3%) were members of the British security forces
From this list we can glean a few things from the conflict. Despite the fact that the IRA was a guerrilla outfit, despite the fact that the British had a modern army sponsored by one of the most wealthiest states possible, they still managed to slaughter a larger percent of civilians than the IRA. Additionally, we can also see that while the IRA targeted mostly military targets, the state sponsored death squads of Britain had no such intention and killed more Catholics then legitimate targets. We can clearly see that Britain was not waging a war of defense they were waging a war of aggression against the Irish people where innocent civilians were butchered for sport for doing nothing more then demanding the right to survival. Considering the documents leaked from the Ulster Defense Force in 1994 that loyalist militias intended to ethnically cleanse Northern Ireland of Irish Catholics I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that the war against the Irish people was genocidal in charcther.
Now what if this wasn't another rebellion in an occupied province that doesn't threaten the standing of the British ruling class, what if this was a popular revolution against capitalism right in the streets of London? Do you really think that the liberal democracy that was willing to sponsor death squads to kill civil rights protesters would be kinder? Likewise, do you really think that the state form that would result from a Free Syrian Army victory would be any less brutal? The answer of course, is not at all. A state is a state, it's actions are representative of the ruling class it defends. So while this conflict might change Syria's form, it will not change her content.
Content: Does It Matter?
Pham Binh on multiple occasions has identified various forms of revolution, bourgeois-democratic revolutions, wars of national liberation, and socialist revolutions. He has classified the Syrian revolt as a bourgeois democratic revolution. When asked if the presence or dominance of Islamists would change the charcther of this war, he has answered no:
Even if the elements that we Marxists find abhorrent were the dominant strand in the Syrian uprising, it would still be a bourgeois-democratic revolution, an armed struggle against tyranny and political oppression. A struggle’s class and political content is not reducible to the character or program of the political forces leading it, dominating it, or that end up in power as a result of it. Bourgeois-democratic revolutions have almost always been led by undemocratic forces and led to less-than-fully-democratic outcomes. The American revolution was led by white male property-holding slaveowners bent on ending British rule so they could finish exterminating the indigenous peoples and colonizing their land. The Iranian revolution toppled the U.S.-backed Shah and led to the creation of a police state with some democratic trappings after Islamist forces gained enough popular support to crush the left.
Does Pham Binh recall the last time islamists took hold of a bourgeois democratic revolution? Has he ever done a cursory reading of Afghanistan's history? If so, then I must ask Pham Binh if it resulted in more rights for organize labor, more protection for woman, and more freedom for the queer community? It didn't? What, you say that it led to the very opposite of those things? It led to one of the most tyrannical regimes to spring forth from the the post cold-war era? Then I must ask Pham Binh, if this whole struggle is about democratic freedom, then why would support a faction that would destroy it if they took power?
Because it is a bourgeois revolution of course! Why, Lenin supported his bourgeois revolution didn't he? Of course he did, and yet that was a different context. Imperial Russia at that time was an absolute monarchy with semi-feudal elements and an aristocratic ruling class. At this time the stagist theory that was dominate on the Marxist left stated that as a pre-capitalist formation, the bourgeois had a historical task to abolish feudalism once and for all to establish a democratic republic. But of course, we all know what happened after the revolution of 1905: Russia continued to be a backward, tyrannical, despotism. What happened? What went wrong? The simple fact was that the bourgeois were unable to complete their historical task. Russia went on very much the same as it was before.
Now we find ourselves in Syria, but things are different now. We are no longer dealing with a pre-capitalist social formation. We are dealing with a fully bourgeois state facing a bourgeois army. Does the stagist theory that said that the bourgeois were a progressive faction in feudal formations still apply? Not in the slightest. This isn't a class war, it's a war between competing interests in the ruling class.
To return to another point, a fundamental question needs to be reiterated Does the content of either sides matter? In a polemic against the Party of Socialism and Liberation, Pham Binh responds with a no:
"The next step in Majidi’s counter-argument is to ask, “What is the political character of the Syrian and Libyan rebels?” Earlier in the article, he poses questions of fundamental importance for approaching this issue:
“In his entire article, Binh conveniently assumes the very thing that needs to be proven—that the Libyan rebels and the Syrian opposition are revolutionary. This false premise, once accepted, leads to all sorts of false conclusions. What is the political character of the NTC-led rebels in Libya? What qualified them as revolutionaries? How does Binh determine that the Syrian opposition is revolutionary and the government counter-revolutionary? When analyzing an opposition movement anywhere in the world, this is the first question that needs to be asked.”
Wrong.
The first question that needs to be asked in assessing an opposition movement is: what is it a movement in opposition to? What is the class character of the regime it is coming into conflict with and why?"
Is this the Marxist approach? Are either methods proposed here the Marxist approach, my answer is similar to Pham Binh in this regard.
Not in the slightest.
The question should be, what is the character of both forces in this conflict, what is the contradiction and how does it express it's self?
Both forces are bourgeois armies, one army is supported by Russian Imperialism and the other is supported by American and Saudi Imperialism, this doesn't mean that a victory for the Free Syrian Army would make Syria more imperialized than it is now; it would simply change the side that Syria now stands, it would most likely not increase the degree to which the Syrian people are oppressed by imperialism. Both sides have engaged in the oppression of the Kurdish people.
The political programme of the Free Syrian Army is bourgeois dictatorship under the facade of democracy, the political programme of Assad's forces is bourgeois dictatorship under the facade of nationalism. Of course the Free Syrian Army can promise liberal democratic freedoms, but likewise Assad can boost of the social democracy that his regime has put in place.
This is not a bourgeois revolution in the progressive sense, it will not deliver the Syrian people from feudalism and imperialism. It is a conflict between two sets of the bourgeois with conflicting interests, it is solely an intra-capital conflict. So what side do we take? Neither.
There are those who say that socialist revolution can not occur without a bourgeois revolution, but has this ever been true? Did either the Russian, Chinese, Cuban, or Albanian Revolutions occur under the facade of liberal democracy? No. So let's throw this claim where it belongs, in the dust bin of history.
Are they exactly equal? Probably not. But this isn't the point; the point isn't to support the most progressive faction, it's to support the progressive faction.
There's one faction out there, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party. The Kurdish have been a historically oppressed group whose language was forbidden and whose customs have been repressed. This group has clashed against the FSA and the forces of Assad as both forces represent the privileged Arab section of the Syrian people. They are decendent from the Kurdish Worker's Party and claim a socialist ideology. For the sake of earnestness, we know that their socialism is not our socialism. However every national liberation movement has taken up socialist rhetoric because this rhetoric is in opposition to that which creates the imperialism that oppresses them, capitalism. So it is fair to say the Kurdish Democratic Union Party has the characteristic that describe the classic model of a national liberation movement. As this movement would liberate the Kurdish people from imperialism, it would indeed be progressive as opposed to the mission of Assad's forces or the forces of the Free Syrian Army.
Still, this isn't an exhaustive answer to the question who should we support; but that isn't the point. The point is that even if we should deny our support to the Kurdish faction, that we would do so out of it's content and it's class nature. And that when we apply similar criteria to Assad's forces and the forces of the Free Syrian Army, they would fall short.
But of course, what is the point of this exersize? After all merely wishing one faction to win won't change anything and the left can not meaningfully aid either group in conflict. So in a certain sense we are limited in what we can meaningfully accomplish from this debate. We can't steer the Syrian revolt into another direction, we can only root for one side, but why do we engage in these debates? Because they shape future debates and praxis. So let's stop talking about Syria and propose a similar scenario where the American Left could intervene.
Let's say that the progressive wing of the democratic party has finally had it and rose up in armed revolt after an act of brutality of the Obama regime, this would most likely drive the most reactionary aspects of the right to Obama's side and there is no doubt that in such a conflict the racist tendencies of the American right would be expressed through violence. Such a scenario would be somewhat similar to the Syrian revolt, with the brunt force of the military being set against the population and with a group of freedom fighters fighting for a future of legal equality and civil rights, while the other faction would most likely fight to create a military dictatorship. Of course there are differences as I'm sure that Pham Binh would probably point out in reply; but the simple truth is that these differences between this scenario and the Syrian situation are irrelevant because Syria it's self is irrelevant. What is relevant is the lessons we can learn from this event so we can apply them where the left can intervene.
So which side do we support? Of course there would be complications, of course we'd probably have some right-wing milita groups taking advantage of the situation to attack the government, of course different powers would sponsor their own interests, and yet in a certain sense it is all quite simple because neither sides represent anything that is truly progressive in a quantitative fashion, they are simply two sides to the coin of capital. So what would we do in such an unlikely situation that would most likely never occur?
First of all, assuming that the left is at least a physical presence in America that is capable of organizing at a greater level then we can now, we'd need to distinguish ourselves from the mode of operation of the other factions. Yes we ought to take up arms but not to overthrow the government. Instead our first task would be to defend our neighborhoods and cities from both factions and expel them. Our primary task would be to reject an inter-capital war by forcing peace within the base areas which we opperate
Obviously this is speculation, and therefore I can not say what the tasks of the left would be after that has been achieved . Would it be power? Ideally but we don't live in that context so we can't say if that is an attainable goal. Of course Pham Binh could reply that this mental exersize is absurd because it hasn't happened, but absurd in comparison to what? The left can do nothing for Syria, nothing about this debate will matter to the people of Syria. So if proposing a course of action where the left could actually act is absurd, then the entire debate is clinically insane. But to reiterate what has already been said, neither of these situations are about what the left should do but rather about the direction the left should take in the future; and in the future that direction should definitely not be towards taking sides in an inter-capital conflict.
In Response to Pham Binh On the Syrian Question
Preliminary Remarks
This article is not a response to everything that Pham Binh has written, nor is it a comprehensive response to every point he has made on the Syrian Question, it is merely a response to a few remarks that he has made. However before we go into the meet of the matter there is a need to engage with the elephant in the room that is of human rights. On both sides of the debate one faction has supported one member of the conflict on the basis of which one is more brutal. Normally these debates become obtuse in their obscurity and merely end in one side psychoanalyzing the motivations of the other and questioning sources to the point that facts no longer contain an objective existence and merely assume the form that is most convent for political argument. I have no intention of providing a correct list of the human rights abuses of the two sides because at this point facts do not exist outside of ideology and hence to render them "objectively true" removes their meaning. For our purpose I will only assume two things; that the Syrian government has committed more abuses than the Free Syrian Army and that the Free Syrian Army is slowly degenerating due to the influx of foreign mudjeen, while at the same time the Islamists are still a minority that is not the dominate strain. These two facts are to a large extent truisms and I don't think anyone will take issue with me mentioning them.
However, the very fact that we can no longer cite factual evidence indepedant of perspective does prove something. After all, the very act of debating is an act of class struggle and what regimes we declare to be "good" or "evil" all depends on your definition of these words and more importantly, your ideological perspective. In the post-cold war world so much history has been outright fabricated that there really is no way to look at the past without hearing not only an ideological perspective but a completely different version of what happened. Not only did the belligerents of the cold war wage a political war but they also waged a propaganda war that rendered all sources faulty. One only has to look at Halway and Chang's book on China to read how the interests that are invested in falsifying the history of Mao's China will do so without any regard for factual information, context, or even the slightest attempt at objectivity. The Leading Light Communist Organization has published a through critique of this account (Not that I in anyway endorse their political line) however if you notice this critique focuses more on systematically disproving every claim made by Chang and Halway and not on providing an alternative account of what actually happened in Mao's China. Of course, these accounts exist however I am sure that if Chang and Halway really wanted to they could also reply with an article questioning all of the sources cited in that article and we end up at square one again. This is not to say that there isn't an objective truth to be found somewhere, or that we shouldn't spend time debunking these coldwar myths, but that we need to be aware that it isn't about history as much as it is about ideology. Because even if we proved that no one ever died in the various so-called socialist states and that it was a worker's paradise, then they can simply reply that they don't like communism and that therefore they don't see the content of these regimes as relevant.
Likewise, recently it has been revealed that the Free Syrian Army has been using child soldiers Now, if I were a vulgar person I could simply cite this as a reason why we shouldn't support the FSA. But of course, since I support groups such as FARC and other armed communist rebels, you could simply reply that these groups also use child soligers and dismiss my support of those groups on the ground of hypocrisy Now, I could reply that the use of child solidgers in these groups takes place in a different context where in many cases the use of child soildgers provides these children with a far more stable, safer and beneficial form of employment but then I'd be missing the point. Because even if I could prove that FARC has never committed any error on any account then the question simply becomes one of what they intend to achieve. If you oppose socialism then ultimately you would oppose FARC regardless of what means they use to achieve this end. So at this point we can realize that there are always multiple accounts of historical details that in essence boil down to what perspective you take and how this perspective is advanced in practice. Because if you are a capitalist you might say that western imperialism was a necessary evil but if let's say a Communist commits a moral grievance they will simply denounce said grievance as a proof of "evil" of course it's important to engage these sort of historical comparison, but as I've already said; the nessecity of the evil is not based on the relative amount of evil, but rather the ends which the evil attempts to achieve.
Which brings me to my point. At the end of the day, the Free Syrian Army is a Capitalist army fighting against a Capitalist state to establish.... a Capitalist state. So as socialists why are we defending tooth and nail either sides in an inter-capitalist war. This doesn't apply to just the FSA apologists, but also to Assad apologists. Why should we defend capitalists? How will this in anyway advance the cause of socialism?
This isn't to say that we should only support things that advance the cause of socialism. On the contrary, we ought to support any movement that has a historically progressive task. This is why Marx supported the bourgeois revolution in France and the Americans in their civil war (Though there ought to be debate over whether this was the correct policy, but that isn't an issue that needs to be brought up here). As the Northern Star has noted before, Lenin made the distinction between bourgeois democratic revolutions and proletarian revolutions while arguing that bourgeois democratic revolutions are progressive within their context. But of course, Leninism is the Marxism of the imperialist era. The progressive nature of these revolutions comes from the fact that when a bourgeois democratic revolution happens in the third world, such as the state of affairs in Venezuela or Zimbabwe, these revolutions are progressive because they break allow a country to develop it's own bourgeois instead of being dominated by foreign bourgeois. However we ought to note that bourgeois democratic revolutions can never break with imperialism. Either the country in which they take place will be too weak to defend it's self from imperialism and it will endure a state of siege (as in the case of Zimbabwe) or these countries are able to achieve levels of economic growth by breaking with foreign imperialism that allow them to become imperialist powers themselves (as in the case of India). Yet with the opposition cololition being organized by Americans, the Syrian revolt isn't an issue of anti-imperialist revolution as much as it is shifting camps from Russian Imperialism to American Imperialism.
And lastly, there is the argument that this rebellion is progressive because it wishes to install a democratic republic. While Lenin supported the democratic revolution in his country it was because that during this era the Russian state was largely feudal and the bourgeois revolution represented a fundamental change in the class composition of the ruling class in a progressive (bourgeois) direction, while the Syrian revolution would not. However what needs to be re-iterated is Lenin's most important contribution to revolutionary theory, that is the idea that we live in an era of monopoly capitalism and imperialism where the state no longer functions as a distinct body from the bourgeois (Marx entertained revising his theory of the state slightly when the second Bonapartisan regime appeared to be able to function seperatly from the interests of the bourgeois, ). In this era of imperialism, the state is no more than the executive committee of the ruling class while in Marx's era and partially Lenin's era the state was capable of a certain degree of Independence from class mediator that only had a tendency to side with the bourgeois because the bourgeois were the upholders of the status quo and the state naturally has a vested interest in upholding the Status quo. So naturally if the state is capable of a certain degree of Independence from class society then the democratic republic is the best form of state because it is imbued with liberal democratic ideology that theoretically would allow us to transform the state "from the inside out" because since this state is capable of a degree of class independence then if it is imbued with this liberal democratic ideology then it should logically abide by the results of an election, and if an election results in the victory of a socialist party then theoretically speaking it should be possible to transform the state into a socialist state from there. But of course, the era of Marx and Lenin is gone and now we live in an era where the state and the capitalist class are largely indistinguishable. This is the era where the FBI takes orders from banks and aims it's sniper rifles at non-violent demonstrators. An era where our police departments are requesting drones. Or in short, an era where our government treats the word "Democracy" like the Chinese government treats the word "Socialism". So in this era, we have to ask ourselves to what extent is this demand still progressive when in practice liberal democracy is just a phrase in the constitution that is used as a pretext for mass repression.
Likewise, to return to the argument of human rights, we have to ask ourselves whether Assad's violence is proof of the supposed fascist nature of his state or merely the natural reaction of a state organism to a threat; or to be more specific, we need to ask ourselves whether his violence is unique to him and therefore exceptional, or whether the liberal democracy that the Free Syrian Army is fighting for would react any differently to such a threat. Now Pham Binh is obviously correct in noting that Syria is a far less repressive state then Britain. Yet, at the same time Britain is not under going a civil war, and unlike Syria, Britain is surrounded by allies and guaranteed safety by her empire. Still, even when faced with an insignificant threat such as the Irish Civil Rights movement, they responded with brute force by massacring non-violent demonstrators in the streets of Derry in 1972. When the Irish responded by waging guerrilla warfare under the leadership of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the British government responded with a brutal occupation and extreme levels of force, imprisoning hundreds of innocent Irishmen in concentration camps and sponsoring protestant fundamentalist groups whose sole goal was the extermination of the catholic population of North Ireland The list of casualties and the responsibility for them goes something like this:
Of those killed by British security forces:
187 (~51.5%) were civilians
145 (~39.9%) were members of republican paramilitaries
18 (~4.9%) were members of loyalist paramilitaries
13 (~3.5%) were fellow members of the British security forces
Of those killed by republican paramilitaries:
1080 (~52%) were members of the British security forces
728 (~35%) were civilians
187 (~9%) were members of republican paramilitaries
56 (~2.7%) were members of loyalist paramilitaries
10 (~0.4%) were members of the Irish security forces
Of those killed by loyalist paramilitaries:
868 (~85.4%) were civilians
93 (~9%) were members of loyalist paramilitaries
41 (~4%) were members of republican paramilitaries
14 (~1.3%) were members of the British security forces
From this list we can glean a few things from the conflict. Despite the fact that the IRA was a guerrilla outfit, despite the fact that the British had a modern army sponsored by one of the most wealthiest states possible, they still managed to slaughter a larger percent of civilians than the IRA. Additionally, we can also see that while the IRA targeted mostly military targets, the state sponsored death squads of Britain had no such intention and killed more Catholics then legitimate targets. We can clearly see that Britain was not waging a war of defense they were waging a war of aggression against the Irish people where innocent civilians were butchered for sport for doing nothing more then demanding the right to survival. Considering the documents leaked from the Ulster Defense Force in 1994 that loyalist militias intended to ethnically cleanse Northern Ireland of Irish Catholics I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that the war against the Irish people was genocidal in charcther.
Now what if this wasn't another rebellion in an occupied province that doesn't threaten the standing of the British ruling class, what if this was a popular revolution against capitalism right in the streets of London? Do you really think that the liberal democracy that was willing to sponsor death squads to kill civil rights protesters would be kinder? Likewise, do you really think that the state form that would result from a Free Syrian Army victory would be any less brutal? The answer of course, is not at all. A state is a state, it's actions are representative of the ruling class it defends. So while this conflict might change Syria's form, it will not change her content.
Content: Does It Matter?
Pham Binh on multiple occasions has identified various forms of revolution, bourgeois-democratic revolutions, wars of national liberation, and socialist revolutions. He has classified the Syrian revolt as a bourgeois democratic revolution. When asked if the presence or dominance of Islamists would change the charcther of this war, he has answered no:
Even if the elements that we Marxists find abhorrent were the dominant strand in the Syrian uprising, it would still be a bourgeois-democratic revolution, an armed struggle against tyranny and political oppression. A struggle’s class and political content is not reducible to the character or program of the political forces leading it, dominating it, or that end up in power as a result of it. Bourgeois-democratic revolutions have almost always been led by undemocratic forces and led to less-than-fully-democratic outcomes. The American revolution was led by white male property-holding slaveowners bent on ending British rule so they could finish exterminating the indigenous peoples and colonizing their land. The Iranian revolution toppled the U.S.-backed Shah and led to the creation of a police state with some democratic trappings after Islamist forces gained enough popular support to crush the left.
Does Pham Binh recall the last time islamists took hold of a bourgeois democratic revolution? Has he ever done a cursory reading of Afghanistan's history? If so, then I must ask Pham Binh if it resulted in more rights for organize labor, more protection for woman, and more freedom for the queer community? It didn't? What, you say that it led to the very opposite of those things? It led to one of the most tyrannical regimes to spring forth from the the post cold-war era? Then I must ask Pham Binh, if this whole struggle is about democratic freedom, then why would support a faction that would destroy it if they took power?
Because it is a bourgeois revolution of course! Why, Lenin supported his bourgeois revolution didn't he? Of course he did, and yet that was a different context. Imperial Russia at that time was an absolute monarchy with semi-feudal elements and an aristocratic ruling class. At this time the stagist theory that was dominate on the Marxist left stated that as a pre-capitalist formation, the bourgeois had a historical task to abolish feudalism once and for all to establish a democratic republic. But of course, we all know what happened after the revolution of 1905: Russia continued to be a backward, tyrannical, despotism. What happened? What went wrong? The simple fact was that the bourgeois were unable to complete their historical task. Russia went on very much the same as it was before.
Now we find ourselves in Syria, but things are different now. We are no longer dealing with a pre-capitalist social formation. We are dealing with a fully bourgeois state facing a bourgeois army. Does the stagist theory that said that the bourgeois were a progressive faction in feudal formations still apply? Not in the slightest. This isn't a class war, it's a war between competing interests in the ruling class.
To return to another point, a fundamental question needs to be reiterated Does the content of either sides matter? In a polemic against the Party of Socialism and Liberation, Pham Binh responds with a no:
"The next step in Majidi’s counter-argument is to ask, “What is the political character of the Syrian and Libyan rebels?” Earlier in the article, he poses questions of fundamental importance for approaching this issue:
“In his entire article, Binh conveniently assumes the very thing that needs to be proven—that the Libyan rebels and the Syrian opposition are revolutionary. This false premise, once accepted, leads to all sorts of false conclusions. What is the political character of the NTC-led rebels in Libya? What qualified them as revolutionaries? How does Binh determine that the Syrian opposition is revolutionary and the government counter-revolutionary? When analyzing an opposition movement anywhere in the world, this is the first question that needs to be asked.”
Wrong.
The first question that needs to be asked in assessing an opposition movement is: what is it a movement in opposition to? What is the class character of the regime it is coming into conflict with and why?"
Is this the Marxist approach? Are either methods proposed here the Marxist approach, my answer is similar to Pham Binh in this regard.
Not in the slightest.
The question should be, what is the character of both forces in this conflict, what is the contradiction and how does it express it's self?
Both forces are bourgeois armies, one army is supported by Russian Imperialism and the other is supported by American and Saudi Imperialism, this doesn't mean that a victory for the Free Syrian Army would make Syria more imperialized than it is now; it would simply change the side that Syria now stands, it would most likely not increase the degree to which the Syrian people are oppressed by imperialism. Both sides have engaged in the oppression of the Kurdish people.
The political programme of the Free Syrian Army is bourgeois dictatorship under the facade of democracy, the political programme of Assad's forces is bourgeois dictatorship under the facade of nationalism. Of course the Free Syrian Army can promise liberal democratic freedoms, but likewise Assad can boost of the social democracy that his regime has put in place.
This is not a bourgeois revolution in the progressive sense, it will not deliver the Syrian people from feudalism and imperialism. It is a conflict between two sets of the bourgeois with conflicting interests, it is solely an intra-capital conflict. So what side do we take? Neither.
There are those who say that socialist revolution can not occur without a bourgeois revolution, but has this ever been true? Did either the Russian, Chinese, Cuban, or Albanian Revolutions occur under the facade of liberal democracy? No. So let's throw this claim where it belongs, in the dust bin of history.
Are they exactly equal? Probably not. But this isn't the point; the point isn't to support the most progressive faction, it's to support the progressive faction.
There's one faction out there, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party. The Kurdish have been a historically oppressed group whose language was forbidden and whose customs have been repressed. This group has clashed against the FSA and the forces of Assad as both forces represent the privileged Arab section of the Syrian people. They are decendent from the Kurdish Worker's Party and claim a socialist ideology. For the sake of earnestness, we know that their socialism is not our socialism. However every national liberation movement has taken up socialist rhetoric because this rhetoric is in opposition to that which creates the imperialism that oppresses them, capitalism. So it is fair to say the Kurdish Democratic Union Party has the characteristic that describe the classic model of a national liberation movement. As this movement would liberate the Kurdish people from imperialism, it would indeed be progressive as opposed to the mission of Assad's forces or the forces of the Free Syrian Army.
Still, this isn't an exhaustive answer to the question who should we support; but that isn't the point. The point is that even if we should deny our support to the Kurdish faction, that we would do so out of it's content and it's class nature. And that when we apply similar criteria to Assad's forces and the forces of the Free Syrian Army, they would fall short.
But of course, what is the point of this exersize? After all merely wishing one faction to win won't change anything and the left can not meaningfully aid either group in conflict. So in a certain sense we are limited in what we can meaningfully accomplish from this debate. We can't steer the Syrian revolt into another direction, we can only root for one side, but why do we engage in these debates? Because they shape future debates and praxis. So let's stop talking about Syria and propose a similar scenario where the American Left could intervene.
Let's say that the progressive wing of the democratic party has finally had it and rose up in armed revolt after an act of brutality of the Obama regime, this would most likely drive the most reactionary aspects of the right to Obama's side and there is no doubt that in such a conflict the racist tendencies of the American right would be expressed through violence. Such a scenario would be somewhat similar to the Syrian revolt, with the brunt force of the military being set against the population and with a group of freedom fighters fighting for a future of legal equality and civil rights, while the other faction would most likely fight to create a military dictatorship. Of course there are differences as I'm sure that Pham Binh would probably point out in reply; but the simple truth is that these differences between this scenario and the Syrian situation are irrelevant because Syria it's self is irrelevant. What is relevant is the lessons we can learn from this event so we can apply them where the left can intervene.
So which side do we support? Of course there would be complications, of course we'd probably have some right-wing milita groups taking advantage of the situation to attack the government, of course different powers would sponsor their own interests, and yet in a certain sense it is all quite simple because neither sides represent anything that is truly progressive in a quantitative fashion, they are simply two sides to the coin of capital. So what would we do in such an unlikely situation that would most likely never occur?
First of all, assuming that the left is at least a physical presence in America that is capable of organizing at a greater level then we can now, we'd need to distinguish ourselves from the mode of operation of the other factions. Yes we ought to take up arms but not to overthrow the government. Instead our first task would be to defend our neighborhoods and cities from both factions and expel them. Our primary task would be to reject an inter-capital war by forcing peace within the base areas which we opperate
Obviously this is speculation, and therefore I can not say what the tasks of the left would be after that has been achieved . Would it be power? Ideally but we don't live in that context so we can't say if that is an attainable goal. Of course Pham Binh could reply that this mental exersize is absurd because it hasn't happened, but absurd in comparison to what? The left can do nothing for Syria, nothing about this debate will matter to the people of Syria. So if proposing a course of action where the left could actually act is absurd, then the entire debate is clinically insane. But to reiterate what has already been said, neither of these situations are about what the left should do but rather about the direction the left should take in the future; and in the future that direction should definitely not be towards taking sides in an inter-capital conflict.