The legacy of the Arab Spring"The Syrian revolution is resumable today and tomorrow"
How has the passing of time changed our understanding of the revolutionary event? What does this event – and what came after – reveal about the Arab revolutionary tradition? And what sites of micro-politics have emerged in the last 10 years, informing our understanding of the broader polity of the region?
A tradition is unchanging rules that govern human action, while a revolution is a transformative event that follows no predetermined path. As far as a "revolutionary tradition" is a contradictory term, it also tends to obliterate the revolutionary event and impose its rules upon it. This is remarkably evinced in the communist "hard tradition", a reflection upon which may shed light on today’s revolutions.
The communist tradition assumes three revolutionary preconditions: theoretical (Marxism), practical (class struggle) and organisational (the working-class party). It thus strips the revolution of its subjectivity and treats it as a "science" or ready-made scheme, rather than a dynamic relationship between certain actors and situations. Eradicating the Soviets, who demonstrated the subjectivity and creativity of the Russian revolution, was justified by the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the science of revolution continued to cast doubts on revolutions that did not resemble its own, considering communist rule to be "the end of history".
This translated into using tanks to crush any revolutions that took place in Communist-ruled, USSR-allied countries, as happened in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), giving birth to the word "tankies" or militant anti-revolutionists.
The communist tradition turned into an anti-revolutionary tradition when revolution mutated into a hard tradition: unchanging doctrine and rules of action, dispensing with the need to know anything relevant about the countries concerned.
Post-communist in name only
The Arab revolutions are post-communist in that they came after the discrediting of the communist tradition, though they fall within no other particular tradition. Truth be told, we hardly have any revolutionary accumulation, and our modern memory of rebellions revolves mainly around decolonisation, with a brief history of anti-authoritarian struggle that did not achieve a breakthrough to form a tradition. This helps explain why our revolutions have stumbled, at the same time imbuing them with a quality of newness and experimentation.
But does that mean that we entered into an explosive and utterly chaotic event without any organisation or preliminary ideas? Not exactly, unless what is meant by "organisation" is a party of the Leninist type, and by "ideas" a doctrine such as Marxism-Leninism.
There had always been protest movements, even in a country like Syria, and democratic change was the guiding idea of an active segment of the early revolutionaries, all of whom were crushed by death, disappearance or exile.
Photo gallery: The suffering of the Syrian people
For months now, Syria's largest city, Aleppo, has been a battleground. These pictures, taken in Aleppo by the photojournalist Daniel Etter in July and August this year, tell a tale of violence and suffering - and also hope.
Fighting for every street
Grieving parents
Temporary victory
Overwhelmed
Living in a classroom
Written in blood
Outsiders
On the front line
In rebel hands
Uneven fight
Watching the skies
Hospitals under fire
Surveying the damage
Away from the fighting
War games
In its beginnings, the Syrian revolution appeared as a cross-fertilisation of the protest experiences that followed the Damascus Spring, which had taken place in self-censoring, private spaces, and the protest method innovated by the Arab Spring, manifested in peaceful assembly in openly rebellious public spaces. However, both the pre-revolutionary and the borrowed protest method evaporated in the heat of an imposed war. It later felt as if everything had begun at the revolution, which increasingly seemed like an absolute beginning, without a before.
