The Brooklyn Rail

Some Context

In 2009, I lived for three months in the Tadamon neighborhood, in the suburbs of Damascus. I was staying with a young Kurd who hated both the Syrian regime and the PKK because of their ties. With a worthless degree in his pocket, he dreamed of leaving for Europe. I spent my days in the Yarmouk neighborhood/camp, adjacent to Tadamon, where I hung out with a small, ever-changing circle of young Palestinians from the camp: raised in working-class families with little religious background, politicized, outward-looking, hash smokers, flirting with foreign girls (often English-speaking), broke, aspiring artists, all trying to avoid military service.

Tadamon was an “informal” neighborhood: while some buildings had property titles, 90 percent were built without permits. Its population was made up of workers who had come from the agricultural region of Ghouta around Damascus, former peasants who had joined the industrial reserve army of the broader metropolis one or two generations earlier. Official statistics put Tadamon’s population at 80,000, but less official sources spoke of 200,000 souls.

In this suburb, regime control was less visible—a “periphery,” as sociologists call it, always careful to stay on the right side of the line. In 2011, gatherings began to form. They gradually armed themselves, and the neighborhood completely slipped out of the security forces’ control. By 2012, half of Tadamon was in the hands of the insurgency. In 2013, a horrific massacre took place: 280 civilians were kidnapped and executed by military intelligence, and their bodies burned in mass graves. This was just the tip of the iceberg of kidnappings, killings, extortion, shelling, and forced evictions that ravaged the neighborhood for six years.

In 2018, the regime regained control of Tadamon, now almost entirely emptied of its inhabitants and reduced to ruins. That same year, as most armed groups around Damascus and Daraa surrendered their weapons, Decree No. 10 of 2018 forced refugees who had fled their homes to present property titles in order to return. In these self-built neighborhoods, property titles simply did not exist, and the land was seized and auctioned off to businesses close to the regime. In the absence of capital people were willing to invest, the promised reconstruction never materialized, and the ruins were left to be traded for speculation.

My Kurdish roommate left Syria in the spring of 2011, unrelated to the events. He found work as a hotel receptionist in Mecca. Eight years later, he managed to reach Germany legally. Among my friends from Yarmouk, some were murdered after being tortured; most fled the country as Tadamon was reduced to rubble by the regime.

Some managed to build new lives, selling their labor power for wages not so far from those of the intellectual middle classes in the countries where they ended up. Yet they often found themselves caught up in the Western proletarian experience, with all the hardships that come with it. In solidarity with my friends, and with the comrades and masses who faced the regime’s tanks and thugs in 2011, I have, from afar, never ceased to ardently wish for the fall of the Assad regime.

Fourteen years later, long after the initial insurrectionary fervor faded and the looming civil war shattered the small far-left circles, the time has come to look back and attempt an analysis of this sequence in class terms. Stepping back from political “camps,” democratic projections, and orientalist interpretations (the so-called “communities”), but also from the revolutionary hopes that may have emerged as the battles raged, what do the Syrian revolution, the trajectory of the civil war, and the “new regime” reveal about social classes, ground rent, and the State?

The “Middle-Class Moment” in the Face of Massacre

During the spring of 2011, neither labor nor the circulation of commodities was directly targeted. The revolution was the demonstration itself. Retrospective testimonies converge on this point: the demonstration was a bubble uniting individuals beyond their social affiliations, their relationship to money, and their position within exploitation. It was utopia in process, generating new forms of solidarity in the face of repression. It was a temporary suspension of the social world, and it was claimed as such: demonstrators were united beyond what otherwise divided them. Thus, not only did the subjectivity of the movement reject any class-based interpretation,¹ but its social composition could not, at first glance, be reduced to final proclamations traceable to specific interests.

We can, however, note that this protest had a geography. The first calls to take to the streets in Damascus and Aleppo, initiated by young urban graduates, drew an activist milieu but failed to attract large crowds. The spark came from Daraa, a provincial town despised by the intelligentsia, where protests broke out spontaneously after yet another humiliation by the security services. After Daraa (March–April 2011) came the massive demonstrations in Homs (April–May 2011) and Hama (July 2011). This was the movement of the “city centers,” uniting activists and proletarians, confronted immediately with the practice of massacre. Repression was savage, carried out by both the security forces and their thugs—the shabbiha, the regime’s reserve army, the ugliest of ghosts among ghosts—accompanied by an unprecedented wave of incarceration. The cross-class tendency of 2011 was less the convergence of two distinct movements than a shared experience in the face of repression.

This sequence was nonetheless a “middle-class moment” of the revolution, discernible less in its social composition than in its political perspective: a civil society asserting itself against the state but simultaneously reflecting itself within it—the idea of a state of justice, guarantor of the fulfillment of separate individuals. This moment sought the unity of the country’s social, political, and communal components, and a new pact between society and the state grounded in the recognition of citizenship and its “dignity.” It was not the preserve of any particular social category. As one comrade-theorist wrote: “it makes no sense to try to describe the middle classes otherwise than as a moment of the struggle.”² We could even say that, in 2011, it was proletarian struggle that gave the Syrian “middle-class moment” its insurrectionary form. The proletariat is a specter haunting capitalist social relation, the negative moment of the struggle, opposed to the political pole—which does not mean that the proletariat played no role in it.

Repression gradually pushed the movement outward into the suburbs. Peripheral neighborhoods, under-administered by the state, became the heart of the revolution. Pre-urban relationships specific to a recently proletarianized peasantry provided in these areas a stronger capacity for self-defense than in the city centers, and the weaker presence of the state made them safe havens for the new activists who emerged in the first weeks of the uprising. A proletarian turn (in terms of social composition) also unfolded spatially, changing the nature of the protest. The utopia of a unified society demanding political revolution now faced the concrete question of self-administration in territories freed from the regime.

The “middle-class” coloration of the revolution was dealt a blow, but the cross-class nature of the movement endured. This was the beginning of a second cross-class moment, revolving around the issue of the self-administration of society—that is, above all, the management of class relations.

The State-Haul

Let us first examine how the Syrian regime responded to the movement it faced in 2011: on one side, with massacres and the large-scale destruction of the urban fabric at breakneck speed; on the other, with the use of political rents at its disposal to reinforce its position among sections of the proletariat.

In Marxist literature, we find a definition of the modern state as a “gang of armed men,” coexisting with the reflections of the young Marx on the state as a social form “separate from civil society” and as a “committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.” The stakes of the Syrian revolution, in its “middle-class” moment, were essentially an attempt to move from the former to the latter: from the appropriation of the state by a capitalist clan as an apparatus of capture, to its separation from particular interests and its transformation into an apparatus of regulation. This attempt failed: in Syria, the “armed gang” state-form is deeply embedded in basic social relations. It is therefore necessary to look again at social history.

In the 1980s, Michel Seurat subordinated the class analysis of the Syrian State under the Assad family to that of social formation and power, using concepts from Ibn Khaldun’s medieval sociology: a military force external to the dominant urban society, emerging from socio-demographic margins and bound by “primary ties” (Asabiyya), takes hold of the state, turning it into its haul. In Khaldun’s schema, this Asabiyya is supposed to dissolve into the social formation it has conquered (urban civilization, with its division of labor and delegation of public affairs to a separate body). But as Seurat observed, in Assad’s Syria this relationship to the state-haul persisted, producing a situation in which the very existence of the state in its “modern” form (as a body separate from society) was put into question.³ Explanations rooted in barbarism or medieval social forms having their limits, Seurat then smuggled in historicity: he pointed out that the functioning of the state-haul was integrated into a socio-economic structure far removed from Khaldun’s schema, namely the circulation of rent capital.

This rent originated in the retrocession of oil revenues by Gulf countries in the name of supporting the Palestinian cause, but once appropriated by the Syrian state, it became autonomous. It never ceased to be unstable and, in a context of geopolitical polarization where states do not coalesce into social blocs, it materialized at the level of villages, neighborhoods, and circulation circuits. It carried constant political violence within it: in order to guarantee access to politico-security rents, those who benefited had every interest in playing different geopolitical channels against one another, fueling micro-logics of regional destabilization so as to become indispensable to… maintaining a kind of order. The Syrian regime never ceased, in this way, to display its capacity for nuisance in order to secure continuous funding, while the security rent trickled down through a world of subcontractors of both disorder and order, simultaneously investing in trafficking—drugs and weapons—whose business was necessarily tied to the security apparatus and its clienteles.

These clienteles, fragmented into clans and religious groups, gradually replaced the “masses” as the social base of the party-state. For two decades (the 1960s and 1970s), rent provided a form of proletarian reproduction guaranteed by the state: an era of mass public employment in the administration and nationalized industries, alongside Syrian “nationalism.” But from the 1980s onward, the reproduction of the proletariat as a waged class entered into crisis, and the regime maintained its grip through massacres. In their wake, gangs of armed men of Alawite origin, organized into competing security services, took over entire sectors of the economy abandoned by the state. Privatizations and the implosion of the party-state into mafia-run enterprises led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of proletarians into the informal sector; the end of state support for agriculture triggered the proletarianization of the peasantry. The recurring droughts of the second half of the 2000s exacerbated this phenomenon, and self-built suburbs expanded around the urban centers.

The Beards of Cross-Class Alliance

Rent, and its realization in the form of the state-haul, would become the red thread of the social dynamics of revolution and civil war, giving rise to the various forms of cross-class politics after 2011.

First of all, it was less the revolution than the regime itself that took care to crush in the bud any attempt by the bourgeoisie to constitute itself as a unifying pole. These attempts were as weak as the class itself: the commercial bourgeoisie, largely Sunni—and therefore marginal to the circuits of the security gangs recruited from the Alawite pool—remained loyal to the regime for a long time, lacking the strength to stand against it. According to several sources, the bourgeoisie tried a U-turn in the summer of 2012, when rebel groups seemed on the verge of seizing Damascus and Aleppo, but in the absence of regime collapse—and faced with threats to “crush the Hamidiyah souk”—this bourgeoisie quickly fell back in line.

Above all, it was the logic of rent-seeking that shaped spatial division and pushed the revolution out to the suburbs. The split between a “useful” zone and a secondary one, handed over to massacre and destruction, reflected the structure of capitalist profits: sites of production (factories, concentrated in peripheral zones) were sacrificed in favor of circulation circuits, through which regional and domestic capitalists could realize their incomes. At the same time, this territorial segmentation accelerated the transformation of the Syrian proletariat into surplus populations, ejected from wage labor and from the economy itself.

In the areas “relinquished” by the regime, the state no longer existed: only thugs armed with machetes, carrying out raids, slashing and shouting that Bashar was their God— institutions were behind this barbarism, following in its wake. The state, in these places, had to be created from within society, out of the tightening of everyday social relations in neighborhoods under constant threat of repression.

Authorities emerged in the “liberated” zones, attempting to embody a form of regulation rooted in “society.” These civilian authorities, promoted by the neo-activists of the first wave of mobilizations, actually gathered together an entire social sector that “joined” the revolution because of this spatial segmentation, and which soon constituted its de facto leadership: mid-level civil servants, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and an armada of “sheikhs,” embodying a relation to justice arising from society, by virtue of its “Islamic” character.

Islam became the space left open to society by the state-gang, a space for projecting itself into a bond of justice to organize relations between social classes. It was instrumentalized in different ways by social groups seeking to substitute themselves for the state in the name of “society.” The civilian authorities, in their quest for “just” regulation, respectful of existing social segmentations, embodied the first of these “beards.” But they would soon coexist with another type, one thrown into a life-or-death struggle with the state-gang: the armed groups.

The militarization of the uprising began with the massive wave of desertions in the summer of 2011, which introduced not only weapons but also large numbers of proletarians with no resources (deserters could not return home) into insurgent areas. At first, these militiamen were proletarians without fixed structures: unpaid, they moved from group to group, creating their own military leadership in defiance of attempts to subordinate them to the pseudo-command of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), established in Turkey as an intermediary of foreign powers and financial sponsors. These armed proletarians remained tied to their local communities (neighborhoods and towns) and continued to be inspired by the imaginary of the “state of justice.” In this way, for two years, across all insurgent zones, under regime siege and bombardment, the civilian dynamic (urban and petit-bourgeois) and the militia dynamic (peasant and proletarian) coexisted as best they could.

But the emergence of the “armed group” form in the class dynamics of the Syrian revolution produced a double movement. On the one hand, it represented an autonomization of the surplus proletariat and its logic of action; on the other hand, it looped back into the social relations of rent, contradicting the cross-class imaginary of the “state of justice.”

Proletarian Massacres vs. Progressive Leadership: The Social Contradiction and Its Holding Pattern

In the absence of a decisive victory against the regime, the proletarian war of liberation increasingly took on an eschatological and vengeful character. Daesh thus emerged as the paroxysmal expression of the proletarian exodus from revolutionary cross-class politics (citizenist in 2011, Islamic in 2012–2013):

Daesh’s idea was … to infiltrate poor neighborhoods and identify groups or individuals who might feel humiliated or frustrated. … There was clearly an element of class revenge that Daesh exploited very effectively, and that the rest of the opposition completely ignored. The Islamic State fed off those left behind by the revolution. The FSA was caught off guard.⁴

The “barbarism” of Daesh, and its ability to impose itself through armed force against established social hierarchies, stands in stark opposition to the attempts of leaderships claiming to represent “civil society” to capture the proletariat.

The Islamic beard has long functioned as a symbolic means for aspiring state-builders to appropriate the activity of the male proletariat at low cost. Yet this operation reaches a breaking point when the latter turns not against its own reproduction as a class within this society, but against “society” itself—understood as the pacified formalization of social relations. Daesh offers a fraction of the male proletariat, transformed into a clientele of henchmen, a power of social coercion that compensates for domination rooted in access to rent: the power of the phallus, the freedom of the gun, and looting, all framed within a grandiose eschatological narrative that replaces the ideals of social reproduction regulated by “representative” institutions.

Nonetheless, Daesh remains a recomposition of the cross-class alliance. The movement neither escapes the economy of rent nor the gravitational pull of the state. The proletarian “barbarism” on which Daesh rests is subordinated not to the “revolutionary” middle classes, but to the specter of the middle classes of the past: those who took control of the rentier state in the 1970s. This new state of barbarism perfectly embodies the Khaldunian eternal return in a Baathist mode: a rentier gang refounded as a state. Daesh represents a social formation in which the Iraqi mukhabarat, “out of the desert,” spread their practices of predation and massacre under the black banner of jihadism, aligning themselves with a new proletarian clientele—only to perish alongside it.

Faced with the monster engendered by the defeat of the cross-class revolutionary process, the imaginary of an armed democracy was recuperated—but for export—by a political force constituted outside the revolutionary movement, yet endowed with real capacities to manage the proletariat: the PKK. Since 2012, it has seized control of Kurdish enclaves in northern Syria with the regime’s blessing, and, in the context of the struggle against Daesh, it expanded its territorial holdings under US protection. The “democratic” structures erected in these areas are in no sense the product of proletarian dynamics. They function as mediations between “communities” that the PKK itself largely reconfigured, seeking to neutralize proletarian contradictions by managing them through a system of governance directly descended from colonial logics—relying on ethnic and tribal structures and chains of loyalty.

Northern Syria thus appears, once freed from the “barbarian” forms of rent, as a transitory social formation in the hands of the PKK’s politico-military cadres. Its survival depends on unending negotiations with the “communities” under its authority, and above all with external military actors who guarantee its protection in exchange for territorial presence. It remains, ultimately, another form of rent, benefiting the leadership alone. The proletariat in the northeast “communalist” is compensated by the protection granted by a state apparatus that does not massacre, hardly expropriates, and is itself externally controlled by other cadres.

This is the inverse of the proletarian utopia of revenge: a “revolution” produced outside the social relations of class.

HTS: The Quest for a “Separate State”

From 2016 onward, the military dynamic clearly tilted in favor of the regime, backed by Russia and Iran. Yet the regime had less capacity than ever to reproduce the proletariat by any means other than integrating it into its own militias. Proletarians in reconquered areas found themselves excluded from the economy, more impoverished than ever: deprived of access to education and healthcare, unable even to use the national currency to buy means of subsistence. Repression itself turned into a racket, as competing security apparatuses financed themselves through extortion.

The “Idlib pocket” thus became the last refuge of the “rebels.” Whenever the regime regained territory, it organized the mass deportation of populations to Idlib—thereby fulfilling its project of expelling a surplus proletariat that constituted both a burden and a threat. Yet this enclave, sheltering three million refugees, also began to take shape as the first sketch of a state emerging from the revolution. Paradoxically, the hegemonic military force in Idlib—Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which eliminated its rivals between 2017 and 2019—emerged from the Al-Nusra Front, a group that had originally derived its social power from rejecting any accommodation with the civilian institutions of “revolutionary society.” Whereas Al-Nusra had stood as an armed group external to the revolutionary project and its contradictions, HTS gradually imposed itself, albeit not without frictions, as a social formation “separated from civil society” in Idlib.

The institutions in Idlib incorporated the ruling classes while belonging to none of their specific factions. They suspended the territorial ambitions of warlords while simultaneously curbing the predatory activity of proletarians absorbed into armed groups. This formation was neither a mere instrument of looting nor a utopian attempt to represent society democratically. Even as demonstrations persisted—against both the regime and HTS⁵—the embryonic state in Idlib repressed and co-opted at once. It imprisoned threats, negotiated with protestors, allocated positions among elite factions, managed capital flows, and built alliances without subordinating itself to a foreign power.

More than an armed group, this social formation in Idlib demonstrated, in November–December 2024, its internal cohesion by seizing control of the country in a matter of days—outperforming the regime itself in terms of internal cohesion. To defeat the cliques dividing markets and sharing the burden of reproducing the proletariat’s different fractions, it was essential to possess a ready-made state apparatus: self-constituted, distanced from the revolutionary upheaval and its contradictions. Just when it seemed that the very idea of a Syrian state—as a national framework for the reproduction of social relations—had collapsed once and for all, it suddenly reemerged from the regime’s downfall as a possible horizon.

Capital Fix & Capital Shoot

In December 2024, the revolutionary moment staged a strange return. The regime’s collapse seemed to realize the end of the revolution—namely, the pacification of civil society. Once no longer persecuted, society could refrain from interfering in the business of the state. As the self-regulated activity of “the people,” the revolution saw its last convulsions in the hours immediately following the regime’s fall: a peculiar mixture of looting and the peaceful “irruption” of the proletariat into the seats of power, while (class) “society” remained untouched. Very quickly, HTS absorbed the “promise of statehood” into its politico-military apparatus.

This promise of statehood—whose “democratic” character matters little—was not about proletarian revenge or a civic utopia. Rather, it was about separation from the particular interests of mafia cliques. For the bourgeoisie, the promise lay in a form of renewed and “guaranteed” autonomy; for the proletariat, it lay in a return to normal exploitation, without the threat of abduction by a mafia state or expulsion from the economy altogether.

Yet this promise is illusory, as recent events have confirmed. If the Assad regime’s management of rent was shaped by a local context, the appropriation of the state by armed gangs is no cultural anomaly. It has emerged both as a condition and a limit of bourgeois revolution in the region. Today it is inscribed in the very restructuring of capitalist relations under the pressure of the global crisis of valorization and the shortage of surplus value.

In Syria, the profitable sectors from the point of view of capitalist investments can be counted on one hand: construction, extraction, transportation of commodities (and protection), drug trafficking, and the trade of militia loyalties to foreign powers.⁶ None belong to the “productive” sphere; all have a rentier dimension. These markets are dependent on state-linked positions—not as an instance of regulation, but as a distributor of monopolies. Competition between capitalists in such a configuration is decided by brute force and alliances with other brute forces. Within this structure, the line between proletarian and henchman grows increasingly blurred.

The fall of the Syrian regime coincided with a global crisis in which the scramble for rent markets has gone hand in hand with the spectacular erosion of the state-form oriented toward regulating inter-capitalist competition. The state “distinct from particular capitalists” (a never achieved ideal) has given way to a state increasingly captured by particular capitalist groups, competing for extractivist, land-based, and speculative markets under the constant threat of armed violence. This “state of barbarism” tends to prevail at the global level—not as an archaic form, but as the paradigm of a crisis of surplus-value seeking salvation in profits structured around rent positions.

While the reproduction of the proletariat remains a central concern of the state in the core zones of accumulation, the situation differs radically in the peripheries, where the question of surplus proletarians and their reproduction is ever more openly resolved through massacre—the latter becoming itself a moment of profit. The destruction of Gaza can thus be read as a globalized counterpart of the destruction of Syrian suburbs.

In the Middle East, the proletarian irruption of 2010—weak in its offensive capacity yet persistent in its manifestations—appears to be settling into an endless military restructuring, with Israel once again at the forefront. The necessary subordination of national states to this restructuring renders obsolete the “promise of statehood.” This subordination, combined with the military control of peripheral populations, entails a “communitarian management” of the proletariat along classical colonial lines (Israel as “protector of the Druze,” and perhaps soon of the Kurds). At the same time, it opens new markets for investment on the backs of the “formally” waged proletariat, through promises of a “competitive market economy” secured by the privatization of industrial firms still under state control.⁷

On the Other Side of the Ring Road

“It’s strange to say this, but everything was simpler during the war. We cared more about each other. Now it’s every man for himself.”⁸

Although the fall of the regime briefly revived the “middle-class” struggle of 2011, the middle classes have little to expect from the new order. They can finally intervene in the public sphere without risking death, once again carrying the banner of democracy and civil society in the face of the bearded militiamen occupying the presidential palace. Yet, as they gradually realize that their intervention has no effect on the form of the state, their defeat is dull and without shine—like a lost battle adorned with the fineries of victory, stripped even of the bittersweet consolations of collective nostalgia.

The surplus proletariat from the peripheric neighborhoods and medium towns on the outskirts of the “useful Syria” has nothing more to expect in the form of a “state of justice.” With Assad gone, it remains pushed out of the economy, confined to exile or refugee camps, reduced to subsisting on humanitarian aid and family support. It is increasingly dependent on new cycles of violence, finding work as henchmen for armed capitalists competing over access to rentier markets.