Neoliberalism in Syria: or the cynical abandonment of the working man

Syria’s neoliberal trajectory asserted itself (and consequently, its exclusion and alienation) not only as an economic model for concentrating wealth, and its generation, but also through the active social and political promotion of that exclusion. In the years preceding the eruption in Syria, international and local commentators heaped praise on Syria’s neoliberal reforms, and its newly established elite. At that very same time, the country suffered one of the worst droughts in millennia, pushing many millions into starvation and starting an unprecedented wave of internal migration that saw 1.5 million people leave their barren lands to look for jobs elsewhere. Ironically, the areas worst hit were the fertile lands of the Euphrates in the northeast of Syria and provide the country with its most important strategic resources, namely wheat, cotton and oil. The state’s policy of social exclusion manifested itself by its complete blackout of any mention of this tragedy in local media, while international organizations, like the FAO, were warning of an impending famine.

It was no surprise then that when the wave of revolts reached Syria these most disenfranchised groups were its first flag-bearers. And it was no surprise either that the state’s neoliberal policy was to culminate in the total dehumanization of these groups and the emergence of a vocal near-fascist discourse that is not oblivious to that suffering but actively promoting it as a necessary evil to do away with the backward, uneducated class that was holding back Syria’s progression into the “modern age”.

Even within the revolution, these classes have suffered abandon on two fronts. One, which was to be expected, from the international officialdom and its chosen political representation of the revolution. That is, a coalition dominated by conservative groups that offer no alternative economic or social platform for the country to that of the extant regime (namely the Syrian National Council and the Syrian National Coalition). Its second abandon, and the most tangible to its cause, was from international leftist circles that raced to line up behind the regime in its “battle against international imperialism” and its apparent agents from the peasants and workers of Daraa and other provincial towns.

Thus, the debate over neoliberalism’s role in promulgating the Syrian tragedy is at one and the same time a debate over the coercive nature of such discourse that eliminates the very concept of self-determination, and a debate about the failure and unwillingness of the international progressive movements to empower that very same “oppressed creature” searching for an alternative to his “heartless world” and “soulless conditions”.