In previous issues of International Socialism, we have covered in some detail events in Syria—the initial uprising in 2011, the interventions of rival imperialisms and regional sub-imperialisms, the fracturing of Syrian politics, the ultimate overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime in late 2024, and the emergence of the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (Levant Liberation Committee, HTS) government. In July, an important analysis, “The Syrian Thermidor”, by the socialist Ghayath Naisse, appeared, and it is now available from the website of the Revolutionary Left movement in Syria: https://revoleftsyria.org/32633/the-syrian-thermidor.
Thermidor was the name of a month in the new calendar introduced by the French Revolution that erupted in 1789—and it was in Thermidor 1794 (July) that a coup toppled Maximilien Robespierre and his supporters, putting in place a more conservative regime. The term is apt. While Naisse celebrates the revolutionary impulses from 2011, and certainly has no nostalgia for Assad, he points out that the “brief joy and the reclaimed freedoms were quickly eroded” as HTS secured its grip on power. He calls for resistance against the new regime’s reactionary economic and social policies and their use of violence and sectarianism to divide and crush dissent.
Naisse ends his pamphlet with an appeal for the struggle of the toiling masses with “the working classes” at its centre. On this topic, and for those with access to academic journals, there is a fascinating piece in Economic and Industrial Democracy entitled “Can strike action revitalize labour unions? An empirical analysis of the Chilean case” (https://doi.org/10.1177/0143831X25134238). The authors, Pablo Pérez-Ahumada and Nicolás Godoy-Márquez, ask how it is that union density in Chile, which declined in the 1980s and 1990s, as it did in many countries, has since risen again, and is now higher than at any point since the 1980s. They put this down to an uptick in strike activity, carefully examining the quantitative data to show the linkages.
They suggest: “To use the Marxist terminology, strikes remain of vital importance not only as an expression of workers’ collective resistance to capitalists’ power, but also as a strategy to build collective power.” They also point to further questions that need to be explored to develop their findings, regarding the impact of strike duration and size, and the relation between politicisation and support for unionisation.
The May-June issue of the New Left Review (which arrived in July) marked the tragic death of the radical sociologist Michael Burawoy earlier this year, by publishing, among other pieces, an unfinished draft contrasting South African and Israeli settler-colonialism. As authors in this journal have done, it contrasts the different varieties not just according to their differing demographics but the social relations underpinning them. In South Africa, the exploited majority, black workers, were an essential source of surplus-value powering the economy; in Israel, as Burawoy argues, there was an attempt to expropriate the land and create an economy powered exclusively by Jewish labour.
The resulting class power of black workers was, he argues, part of the reason why a negotiated transition away from apartheid was possible in South Africa, whereas in Palestine we see the “relentless expansionism” of Israel. Quite apart from the merits of the discussion itself, the piece shows how this highly political engaged scholar was, to the very end, grappling with burning questions, in this case thrown up by the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
The mass protests that have erupted in Nepal have slipped under the radar of many socialists in Britain. Kunal Chattopadhyay published his assessment on the Historical Materialism blog (www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/nepal-the-failure-of-refurbished-stalinism-and-maoism-the-attempts-by-hindutva-and-imperialism). What matters is not only the protests themselves, which now join the chain of uprisings across Asia beginning in 2021, but also the fact that the Nepali Communists were prominently involved in the last governments. Hence, sections of the left see a conspiracy of imperialist powers behind these protests. Readers of this journal will not agree with everything Chattopadhyay argues (for instance, he characterises the former Soviet Union and, up until a certain point, China as bureaucratised workers’ states). However, he shows that the protests are clearly a consequence of the failure of the Stalinist-influenced Nepali left and its faulty theoretical assumptions.
JC & SR