I · SectionIntroduction

The key to understanding the present is understanding the past, just as the key to looking toward the future is understanding the present: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1975).

The Syrian political conflict is a conflict among the interests of nation-states and, consequently, it cannot be understood without first understanding what a State is, because otherwise it will also be impossible to understand which sectors of society carry their interests from the national sphere into the international sphere through the State itself.

In general terms, this concept appears implicitly as far back as the philosophers of ancient Greece, although it is in Machiavelli’s work that the word “State” appears for the first time, where he says: “All states, all dominions that have held and hold power over men have been and are either republics or principalities.” (Machiavelli, 2006, p. 13). Subsequently, throughout history, different political theorists would define it in different ways. Here, two orthodox definitions will be introduced and then contrasted with a heterodox definition. The two orthodox definitions belong to the last classical treatise writer (Hegel) and the last modern treatise writer (Weber).

Hegel writes on the matter: “The State, precisely, as universal and objective freedom, in the free autonomy of the individual will; the State, which as a real and organic spirit, a) of a people, b) through the relations of the specific national spirits, c) realizes and manifests itself in Universal History as the universal spirit of the world. The Law of the State is supreme.” (Hegel, 1968, p. 33).

Weber, for his part, writes: “For sociology the reality ‘state’ is not necessarily composed of its juridical elements; or, more precisely, it does not derive from them. In any case there is no collective personality in action. When one speaks of the ‘state,’ the ‘nation’ (…) one refers only to the development, in a certain form, of the social action of a number of individuals, whether real or constructed as possible (…)” (Weber, 2002, p. 12). Having clarified this, he states: “The State, like the political associations that preceded it, is a relation of domination of men over men based on the means of legitimate coercion (that is, regarded as legitimate). Thus, for it to subsist it is necessary that the dominated submit to the authority of those who dominate in each case. When and why they do so can be understood only when the internal motives of justification and the external means on which domination rests are known.” (Weber, 2002, p. 1057).

Machiavelli’s definition explicitly says little or nothing about the political motives underlying the formation of the State; implicitly, however, it suggests the State’s repressive role or, in his words, “the dominions that have held and hold power over men.” In Hegel’s case, a romantic vision of the State is presented, which is hardly surprising, since for this author the State was the will of God. Historical evidence, of course, shows that the State has little or nothing to do with the free autonomy of individual freedom and therefore cannot be universal and objective freedom either, since individual freedom is the sine qua non condition of universal or general freedom. It is precisely from this definition that the naïve view arises that the State is all of us. If this were so, there would be no way in which the State could be the organic spirit of a people, although it does possess a real existence as a social fact[1] through the relations among specific national spirits. Ultimately, if the State were all of us, there would be no need to create institutions that protect the rights of individuals against the State itself.

Weber’s definition sheds light on the necessary condition for the State to subsist (the submission of the dominated to the dominant) and the sufficient condition (possessing means of coercion regarded as legitimate). The necessary condition of subsistence is, in turn, the circumstance that makes its existence possible, while the sufficient condition is the most important circumstance guaranteeing its perpetuation. Yet the most important question in terms of political philosophy is precisely the one Weber refuses to answer: why does one sector of society accept submission to another sector? How does a State concentrate the monopoly of physical violence?

The preceding questions could be answered from Rousseau’s point of view. He wrote: “I suppose men to have reached the point at which the obstacles to their preservation in the state of nature exceed the forces that each individual can employ to maintain himself in that state. Then this primitive condition can no longer subsist, and the human race would perish unless it changed its manner of being. Now, since men cannot generate new forces, but only unite and direct those that already exist, they have no other means of preserving themselves than to form by aggregation a sum of forces capable of overcoming resistance, to bring them into play toward a single end, and to make them act together and in conformity. This sum of forces can arise only from the cooperation of many; but since the strength and freedom of each man are the principal instruments of his preservation, how can he commit them without harming himself and neglecting the obligations he owes to himself? This difficulty, reduced to my subject, may be stated in the following terms: ‘To find a form of association which will defend and protect with the common force the person and goods of each associate, and by which each, uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.’ Such is the fundamental problem to which the Social Contract provides the solution. The clauses of this contract are so determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would render them useless and without effect; so that, although they may never have been formally stated, they are everywhere the same and have everywhere been tacitly recognized and admitted, until, when the social pact is violated, each person recovers his original rights and regains his natural freedom, losing the conventional freedom for which he had renounced the former.” (Rousseau, 2007, pp. 45–46).

Rousseau’s view, although broadly correct, contains a certain romanticism and leaves questions unanswered. It is romantic to think that a social institution as complex and historically rooted as the State would disappear at the slightest violation of the contract established among the sectors of society involved in that contract. Nor does Rousseau explain the historical pattern that determines how the clauses of such a contract are formulated at each historical moment in the transition from one form of State to another. All sciences seek, in their object of study (for the social sciences, that object is society), to establish general patterns of behavior that allow them to predict future changes in that object, because the ultimate purpose of the social sciences is not merely to explain a social fact, but to predict the behavior of the fact analyzed over time[2]; in that sense, explaining it is only an inevitably necessary step toward achieving that end.

Once the above is established, the following question arises inexorably: is there a general pattern across the different societies that have existed in human history which explains why the clauses of the different social contracts that emerged in the transition from one social formation to another were established in a particular way? The answer is yes. Rousseau already leaves implicit a fundamental point: necessity as the foundation of the birth of the social contract or, what amounts to the same thing, a clear position on the fundamental problem of philosophy—that material causes determine and subordinate the realm of ideas.

Rousseau is not alone in taking this position. As can be seen, Weber also attributes the subsistence of the State (what has here been called the “sufficient condition”) to possession of the means of legitimate coercion, that is, the monopoly of physical violence. Weber’s first cause or necessary condition is the submission of the dominated to the dominant, which is itself explained by internal motives of justification (which will evidently have an explanation rooted in the historical conditions of the moment) and the external means (which are objective) on which domination rests.

Durkheim also proceeds along these lines when he states: “Thus, we must consider social phenomena in themselves, independently of the subjects who form a representation of them; they must be studied from the outside, as external things, for it is as such that they present themselves to us (…) A thing is recognized principally by the fact that it cannot be modified by a simple decree of the will. This does not mean that it resists every modification, but rather that to produce a change it is not enough merely to desire it; an effort, more or less arduous, is also required because of the resistance it opposes to our action and which, moreover, cannot always be overcome. We have already seen that social facts possess this property. Far from being a product of our will, they determine it from outside; they are like molds into which we are compelled to cast our actions.” (Durkheim, 2009, pp. 83–84). Machiavelli states that “Principalities are either hereditary (…) or new.” (Machiavelli, 2006, p. 13), and throughout his work he explains that new principalities are generally acquired by arms and virtue or by the arms and fortune of others. Comte, for his part, writes: “But this provisional instinct, without which science would then have lacked suitable nourishment, must ultimately become habitually subordinated to a just systematic appreciation, as soon as the full maturity of the positive state has made it possible always to apprehend sufficiently the true essential relations of each part with the whole, so as constantly to offer a broad horizon to the most eminent investigations while nevertheless avoiding all puerile speculation.” (Comte, 2017, p. 23). Finally, Marx, an author who will be examined in greater depth below, likewise takes a position along the same lines.

As can be seen, one of the two great theorists of Political Law[3], one of the greatest political theorists in human history, and the four founding fathers of Sociology are clear, despite their theoretical differences, on the point under discussion[4].

Having established the above, we can proceed to the next stage of the analysis. Humanity has witnessed four different social formations: a) primitive community, b) slavery, c) feudalism, and d) capitalism.

If the Social Sciences are indeed sciences and, moreover, the emergence of the different social contracts corresponding to each of the social formations set out above obeys objective factors, the first task is to determine which objective factor is the most important of all. This poses no great intellectual challenge, because before anything else the human species seeks, and has always sought, to obtain the means of subsistence necessary for survival. In this sense, the production of those means of subsistence stands as humanity’s most important material or objective factor, although, contrary to what economicism assumes, it is not the only one.

“In the production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are necessary and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of the material productive forces. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which a legal and political superstructure rises and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond.” (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1989, pp. 7–8).

It is therefore the relations of production—those relations which members of a society establish in response to necessity at a particular historical level of technological development—that condition social life and around which a particular culture arises, reinforcing them and allowing them to remain stable over time. This in turn means that a particular social contract is constructed around the relations that members of society establish in order to secure the production of their means of subsistence. These social relations of production will also express the degree of development of the productive forces of the period, which in turn will shape the way in which the clauses of the social contract are designed. Now, do members of society establish these relations on equal terms? The answer is emphatically no. Once human beings became sedentary, the enslavement of members of one gens by another and the emergence of the social division of labor gave rise to the slave mode of production. Equality was thereafter erased from the fate of human society, and the social relations of production established in every historical-social formation became a clear expression of the relation between dominant and dominated: slaveholders and slaves, feudal lords and serfs, capitalists and proletarians. The common denominator of these power relations among social classes, expressed in the legal relations of each period (which are no more than the expression of relations of production on the juridical plane), is that one social class possesses the material means for producing wealth—the means of production—while another social class possesses only its labor power with which to secure its subsistence.

This distribution of the means of production does not, of course, obey the whims of history or random events whose explanations are isolated in character. Rather, in general terms[5], it results from one sector of society finding itself, through historical evolution, in a privileged position that it uses to accentuate its differences from the rest of society, accumulating wealth from that position and achieving a monopoly over the means of exercising physical violence. In Europe, for example, the capitalist class has its origins in the Middle Ages among small merchants, a status accessible only to free men rather than serfs. By buying in the countryside at a lower price than they sold in the city, they began the accumulation of wealth that in its contemporary form we know as capital. Yet the primitive accumulation of capital was not limited to this: independent producers were also expropriated from their lands by force of gunpowder and blood, and decrees were even issued by different kings permitting the opening of the tombs of saints and other religious figures of Catholicism in order to extract any piece of gold—including dental prostheses—which could then be minted into coin.

Once the foregoing has been established, the State can therefore be defined as the political organization of the economically dominant class whose ultimate purpose is to maintain the existing order and crush the resistance of the other classes through possession of the monopoly of physical violence. It is therefore unsurprising that the process of State formation consisted in setting apart a special public power with its army, police, prisons, and coercive institutions of various kinds.

In this sense, speaking of democracy, defined as a “Form of political regime based on the proclamation of the principles of the power of the people, the freedom and equality of citizens. Democracy presupposes recognition of the principle of the subordination of the minority to the majority, the electability of the principal organs of State power, and the existence of political rights and freedoms.” (Oníkov & Shishlin, 1980, p. 140), lacks real meaning.

Contemporary evidence of the foregoing is provided by the 2001 Nobel laureate in Economics, Joseph Stiglitz, who writes: “Finance is not the only area in which foreign investment has been an ambiguous blessing. In some cases, new investors persuaded governments (often with bribes) to grant them special privileges, such as tariff protection. In many cases the U.S., French, or other advanced industrial-country governments exerted pressure, reinforcing the notion in developing countries that it was perfectly appropriate for authorities to intervene in the private sector and presumably collect from it. In some cases, the role of the State seemed relatively innocuous (although not necessarily incorruptible). When U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown traveled abroad, he was accompanied by American businessmen seeking contacts with those emerging markets and entry into them. Presumably, the chances of obtaining a seat on the plane increased if one made significant campaign contributions.” (Stiglitz, 2003, p. 100).

II · SectionHistorical Background of Syria

Syria is a country whose population is concentrated in the northwest of its territory, which is due to the fact that only 0.06% of its surface area has water. According to (Datosmacro, 2017), Syria has a population of 18,502,413 inhabitants and a total area of 185,180 km.², which is equivalent to a population density of approximately 100 inhabitants per square kilometer.

According to (OPEC, 2017), Syria has 2.5 billion barrels of oil in reserve, ranking 31st in the world; however, these are only proven oil reserves[6]. According to (CIA, 2017), Syria also ranks 43rd worldwide in terms of proven natural-gas reserves, with 240,700,000,000 m.³

This significant quantity of natural resources, while not representing proportions of global reserves as important as those of other countries—for example Iran (the country with the 5th-largest proven oil reserves and the 2nd-largest proven natural-gas reserves) or Iraq (the country with the 4th-largest proven oil reserves and the 11th-largest proven natural-gas reserves)—is sufficient reason for different nations to have a geopolitical interest in Syria. There is, however, an even more important reason: Syria borders Iraq, and Iraq in turn borders Iran, as can be seen below:

Figure 1

As can be seen, the gas pipeline runs from the Iranian coast across the Iran–Iraq and Iraq–Syria borders until it reaches the Syrian coast. Its final purpose is to supply European consumers, as well as consumers in the countries through which the pipeline passes. Syria is therefore geopolitically fundamental: whoever controls that country controls the pipeline’s final outlet and, with it, the supply of natural gas to Europeans; if, in addition, Iraq and Iran are controlled, one has in hand one of the most profitable businesses a company could imagine.

The matter does not end there. To move the oil extracted from any of these countries, one must also go around the entire Arabian Peninsula or around the entire African continent.

Figure 2

Since Euclid, it has been known that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Construction of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline began in 1947 and was administered primarily by the U.S. company Bechtel[7]. The pipeline was originally intended to terminate in Haifa, which at the time lay within the British Mandate for Palestine; because of the establishment of the State of Israel, however, an alternative route through Syria was established, and Lebanon was selected for one of the export terminals at Sidon. As (Little, 2003, pp. 12–13) notes, the Syrian government initially opposed the plan but ratified construction of the pipeline in 1949 after a military coup overthrew the democratic government there, and oil transport through the pipeline finally began in 1950. This coup against the government of the day—which had been chosen through free elections—was promoted by the CIA, and authoritative voices such as (Massad, 2017)[8], (Little, 2003)[9], and even declassified CIA records confirm it. Although that pipeline is no longer strategically important today, it serves as a historical reference point for understanding who has continued to destabilize Syria and why, a matter that will be examined in greater depth below.

Although the Trans-Arabian Pipeline is no longer strategically important in geopolitical terms, Syria certainly remains so, because going around the Arabian Peninsula and crossing the Suez Canal significantly increases transport costs and also the time required to realize oil as a commodity.

Figure 3

As can be seen, going around the Arabian Peninsula in order to reach the Suez Canal (where fees are paid) involves traveling 11,600 kilometers, while avoiding the Suez Canal requires going around Africa, a distance of 19,800 kilometers. To give the reader a sense of scale, traveling through the Suez Canal would amount to 22.3 times the distance between Paso Canoas and Peñas Blancas, while avoiding it would mean traveling 38.05 times that same distance[10].

Would it not be simpler to trade the oil if it could be taken out in a straight line through Syria? The answer is yes. Doing so, however, would require political control of Syria. This makes the country a fundamental geopolitical point, because whoever controls Syria will control not only those reserves of natural resources—oil and natural gas—but also the most efficient commercial route for placing them in Western markets.

This highly strategic commercial position—in terms of any commodity, not only oil and natural gas—has made Syria desirable to various empires throughout world history, from the Persians and Greeks, through the Romans, and ultimately the Turks.

Let us reconstruct some of that history in order to see the political evolution of the territory now known as Syria and thereby understand both the reasons for its relatively recent emergence as a nation-state and the climate of instability that has arisen within it and in its surroundings.

The Roman Empire underwent an administrative division initiated with the tetrarchy[11] of Emperor Diocletian (284–305) and consolidated by Emperor Theodosius I (379–395), who divided it between his two sons: Arcadius became emperor of the East and Honorius emperor of the West. What remained of the Roman Empire after Odoacer (King of the Heruli) deposed the last Western Roman emperor (Romulus Augustulus) in 476 was conquered by Islam, becoming the Ottoman Empire[12] on May 29, 1453. The Ottoman Empire would then endure until the First World War (WWI).

After WWI, small countries appeared on the map for the first time, among them Syria on September 1, 1918. Like every historical event, this occurrence was not arbitrary. As with the emergence of Iraq, Jordan, and others, it resulted from the fact that the French and British could not defeat the Ottoman Empire alone, making it necessary not only to ally with one another but also to secure the support of civilians residing within the empire. To win their favor, they promised them “Greater Palestine,” that is, a single nation for all Arabs.

In secret, however, France and the United Kingdom concluded the Sykes–Picot Agreement[13], which consisted of distributing the geopolitical control they would exercise over the territory occupied by the Ottoman Empire in the event that they won the war. Napoleon is said somewhere to have remarked that, if one wished to succeed in politics, the key was to promise everything and fulfill nothing; that is precisely what the Europeans did, and the promise of a single nation for all Arabs was never fulfilled. Instead, as part of a distribution of Ottoman territory among the European powers of the time, they created many relatively small nation-states.

Figure 4

It was in this context, after the victory of the European nations, that Syria appeared and came under French control, a state of affairs that lasted until the end of the Second World War (WWII).

As reported in (U.S. Department of the Army, 2017), shortly after the end of WWII, during 1944 the Syrian government assumed the functions of fourteen administrative departments that had been under direct French control since 1920. These included departments responsible for matters such as customs, social affairs, excise taxes, supervision of concessionary companies, and oversight of tribes. France retained control of social, cultural, and educational services, as well as the Levant Special Forces[14], which were used for security purposes. Despite French opposition, the Soviet Union in July and the United States in September 1944 granted Syria and Lebanon unconditional recognition as sovereign states; British recognition followed a year later. These Allied nations pressured France to evacuate Syria.

The new Syrian government demanded the immediate and unconditional transfer of the Levant special troops to Syrian control or their dissolution, and threatened to form a national army unless that step was taken. France, however, made the withdrawal of the troops conditional on Syria signing a treaty that would assign France a privileged position in the country.

In January 1945, the Syrian government announced the formation of a national army, and in February it declared war on the Axis powers (principally Germany, Italy, and Japan). In March, the country became a founding member of the United Nations (UN), an indication of its sovereign status, and in April it affirmed its commitment to the idea of Arab unity by signing the Arab League pact.

Before introducing Israel’s role in Syria’s historical and current situation, it is necessary to discuss the ideological-religious conflicts in the region.

Shortly after the end of WWII, the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party was founded, hereafter referred to as BA’ATH in reference to the ideology of this pan-Arab party, which combined the old aspirations for a single Palestinian nation with a secular ideology and socialist foundations. It came to power in 1963 in Syria and Iraq; the Syrian and Iraqi factions of the BA’ATH clashed in 1966 and thereafter acted independently. This produced an ideological fragmentation in the region, dividing it essentially into two blocs: Syria’s allies and Iraq’s allies.

Shortly before the BA’ATH came to power, Syria united with Egypt (with which it did not even share a border) to form the United Arab Republic between 1958 and 1961. The alliance did not last long, but it endured long enough for Egypt to persuade Syria to nationalize its natural resources. The failure of this union was not due to random or arbitrary factors either. In 1961 there was a coup d’état in Syria sponsored by the radical Syrian army, after which the country and its population endured a tyrannical government for two years; another coup followed in 1963, the one in which the BA’ATH took power in both Syria and Iraq in that same year.

In this 1963 coup, Háfez al-Assad appeared for the first time as a political figure and became head of the BA’ATH State; the same occurred in Iraq with Saddam Hussein, also a member of the BA’ATH Party. With the Cold War, which began in 1947, Syria aligned itself with the Soviet Union, while a recently created nation-state aligned itself with NATO. Israel must now be introduced into the international setting.

Between 1936 and 1939, a revolt took place in the Palestinian territories controlled by the United Kingdom—those formed after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire—whose cause was protest against Jewish immigration, since Arabs and Jews possessed ideological-religious differences that were irreconcilable within the framework of Middle Eastern culture. The revolt arose because of the United Kingdom’s consent to Jewish immigration into Palestinian territories[15] and its refusal to hold democratic elections to decide the future of the Jews. Since Palestinians had historically occupied those territories for centuries, they possessed an overwhelming demographic majority that would have resolved the elections in their favor.

Thus, after the French and British withdrew from what had formerly been Ottoman territory, and amid the ideological-religious conflicts between Palestinians and Jews in the area, the United Nations General Assembly met on November 29, 1947, following the report of the Peel Commission (which evaluated the causes of the conflict), and approved a plan dividing Palestine into two States. Curiously, the plan awarded 53.6% of the territory to the Jews and 48.7% to the Arabs, while determining that Jerusalem—which represented an area equivalent to 2.7%—would be a corpus separatum administered by the United Nations. The fact that, for political reasons (Israel would be a Western ally in the Middle East), the Jews were given lands that had been occupied by Palestinians for centuries, and that despite Palestinians making up 67% of the population compared with 33% represented by Jews, the latter were awarded a larger share of the territory, led the countries representing Palestine to intervene militarily in the territory assigned to the Jews two weeks after the UN resolution was adopted. Jerusalem subsequently ceased to be a corpus separatum and became the capital of the State of Israel, with the complicity and silence of its Western allies. According to Israeli professor David Grossman, this would later mean that “since 1967, those who set the agenda and benefit from the budgets (in Israel) are the right and the settlers, a small devout group that has kidnapped an entire nation and confiscated our future.” (Grossman, 2010).

The foregoing caused Israel’s neighbors not to recognize it as a legitimate nation-state and, once the Europeans had departed, to attack Israel instead.

Since then, through force and the complicity of the West, and since the artificial creation of the State of Israel, geographic changes have taken place in the proportion of territory occupied by Palestinians, as shown below.

Figure 5

This problem extends beyond geography; it concerns the distribution of resources per capita and, with it, quality of life. We will now briefly examine the variation in population density from before 1948 to 2014.

Given the geographic change undergone by Palestinian territory, and using the total-population figures from (Datosmacro, 2017) beginning in 1970, we can calculate changes in Palestine’s population density. According to (Simpson, 2017), before 1948 Palestinian territory covered 26,626 km.² and had an estimated population of 1,061,270 inhabitants, equivalent to 39.86 inhabitants per square kilometer. If Palestinian territory became 48% of the original in 1947 with the UN resolution, then the territory would have amounted to 12,780.48 km.²; assuming that the population did not vary significantly during that period (and even if it did, there are insufficient data to perform the calculation), the resulting population density would have been 83.03. In 1967 Palestinian territory was only 22% of the original, equivalent to 5,857.72 km.²; given that by 1970 the Palestinian population had risen to 1,124,293, this would imply a population density of 191.93 inhabitants per square kilometer. Finally, in 2014 Palestinian territory was only 12% of the original, equivalent to 3,195.12 km.², and with a population of 4,422,143 reported by the source cited above, the resulting density would be 1,384.03 inhabitants per square kilometer. This would imply an approximate increase in population density of 3,372.23%. It is not difficult to imagine the economic difficulties that this increase in demographic pressure has implied for the Palestinian people in terms of implementing social policies, income-distribution policies, and other related government actions, even without counting the destruction of wealth caused by the wars with Israel. Conversely, it is also not difficult to imagine the economic advantages this has afforded Israel, whose population, as seen above, was the minority occupying those territories, without yet considering the substantial financing provided by the United States to Israel in various political and social areas, including the war against the Palestinian people and against countries that do not align themselves with its interests, as detailed by (Sparrow, 2017). The United States also used economic leverage in the international arena: it was the country that contributed the most to UNESCO (22%) and withdrew that support from the institution after Palestine was admitted, as reported by (El Mundo, 2017).

What have the industrialized powers done in the face of such a violation of the civil rights of the Palestinian population? Absolutely nothing. They have simply made requests that have no coercive force, leaving Israel free to comply with them or not; naturally, those requests have not been obeyed, while the blood of hundreds of victims has been shed. According to (TeleSUR, 2017), between April and May 1948—the first year of the State of Israel—the Israelis took several Arab cities under the UN partition plan, but on April 10 the first massacre by Jewish militiamen against 100 Palestinian peasants in the village of Deir Yassin was recorded, forcing thousands of Arab civilians to flee the region. In 1967, during the Six-Day War, which began on June 5, Israel militarily occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Syria’s Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. During the military offensive, Mirage 3 aircraft of the Israeli army destroyed more than 400 Arab aircraft. Those battles reportedly left 776 Israelis dead, 2,563 wounded, and 15 prisoners. On the Arab side, there were at least 24,000 dead, 45,000 wounded, and 6,000 prisoners. Between 1975 and 1981, the number of deaths officially recorded by Palestinian and UN organizations was 170, although reports from human-rights organizations speak of more than 3,000 additional deaths not officially recorded.

In 1982, the death toll rose sharply, with 11,275 deaths recorded in the Lebanon War, where the Zionist army under then Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon launched “Operation Peace for Galilee” on June 6, with the objective of destroying the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was concentrated in Beirut after being expelled from Jordan in 1970. In the Sabra and Shatila massacre, 675 Israeli soldiers, around 9,800 Syrian soldiers, and Palestinian militiamen died. Between 2000 and 2010, an estimated 7,342 Palestinians, mostly civilians, died as a result of bombings and land and sea attacks by the Israeli army. Finally, during Israel’s prolonged occupation of Palestine, more than 1,500 civilians died and 1,215 Palestinians were displaced because of the demolition of homes by Israeli authorities. In the Gaza Strip conflict, 86% of the dead were Palestinians.

Ultimately, “Does the so-called international community exist? Is it anything more than a club of merchants, bankers, and warriors? Is it anything more than the stage name the United States adopts when it puts on theater?” (Galeano, 2017).

Háfez al-Assad’s arrival in power did not alter the conflicts already present in the region, specifically between Syria and Israel. Later, with the Cold War placing the two countries in different ideological blocs, tensions intensified and Syria entered into an open war against Lebanon.

Syria’s complications were not yet over, and the ideological frictions within the region were exploited by its allies. Before proceeding to describe that social fact, however, the genesis of the political-ideological factions among the Palestinian people will be introduced.

Contrary to what is commonly assumed, Arabs are not necessarily Muslims, although most of them are. The following table presents this segmentation.

Table 1

The proportion between Sunnis and Shiites is shown below.

Figure 6

It is estimated that Sunnis account for roughly 80–90% and Shiites for 10–20%. In Syria, because Háfez al-Assad’s government belonged to the Shiite minority while governing a Sunni majority, strong opposition movements began to emerge and were suppressed by gunpowder and blood. This internal conflict in Syria was exploited by Sunni Islamists, who took up arms against Háfez al-Assad; once again, the revolt was put down at the cost of many lives. Háfez al-Assad died in 2000 and was succeeded by Bashar al-Assad.

As (Rafizadeh, 2017) notes, once Bashar al-Assad came to power he proposed neoliberal-style economic openings with the goal of joining the World Trade Organization (WTO). These policies even led the United States to lift its opposition to Syria entering the organization, and with 153 members in favor, the WTO granted Syria observer status[16]. However, as the cited author observes, this economic reformism was not accompanied by income-redistribution policies (as is characteristic of the neoliberal model) and generated social unrest in the country. This forced the Syrian president to return to his father’s economic policies.

Several years later, the “Arab Spring”[17] reached Syria. There, “dozens of people demonstrated in Dar’a in the south of the country demanding freedom, political reforms and action against corruption, peaceful acts controlled by the Syrian police without violent incidents. The march against the government was launched on Internet social networks and supported by thousands of people who backed a Syrian revolution against President Bashar al-Assad until freedom and justice were achieved, but mobilization in the streets was limited. In response, Al-Assad announced economic reforms, amnesty for prisoners, and greater Internet access. The situation of instability continued throughout 2011, attracting international attention and raising the possibility that the UN Security Council might impose sanctions similar to those applied to Libya.” (EcuRed, 2017).

Some argue that the “Arab Spring” was a social movement sponsored by the United States to destabilize governments in the region that were not aligned with its interests, as investigative journalist Lee Stranahan put it: “When Barack Obama took office as president in 2008 with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, one of his first foreign-policy steps was his speech in Cairo, Egypt, where he stated, in the presence of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, that ‘a new era had begun in the U.S. attitude toward Islam’ (…) What followed was the wave of Arab Spring uprisings throughout the region, which, despite initially being regarded as ‘bold movements of people desperate for freedom,’ were in fact ‘a way for Islamists to dethrone the more secular military dictators of the region (…) The U.S. openly called for the overthrow of Al Assad despite the fact that it was clear that the outcome of this overthrow would be the seizure of control by Islamist groups (…) Syria proved resistant’ to Obama and Clinton’s regime-change efforts, even though the U.S. supplied weapons to the so-called ‘rebels’ that ultimately ended up in the hands of Islamist groups.” (Stranahan, 2017).

Likewise, according to U.S. attorney John F. Kennedy Jr.: “Our war against Bashar al Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011, but in 2000, when Qatar offered to build a $10 billion gas pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey.” (Kennedy, 2017).

Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, takes a similar line, stating: “The Syrian chapter goes back to 2006, when in a very important cable Ambassador Roebuck, based in Damascus, responds to a discussion about a plan to overthrow the Assad Government in Syria (…) When the United States needs to do something, it brings together the different arms of U.S. power, which include the military, Intelligence, finance, commerce, and its information power.” (Assange, 2015). Assange also states that “Within those military strategies, the journalist highlights the role of apparently civilian institutions, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (…) Assange also mentions the alignment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) with Washington’s foreign policy when it comes to weakening or destabilizing countries through their finances.” (HISPANTV, 2017).

One fact does not, of course, exclude the other. From the standpoint of Western conceptions of political philosophy, many countries in the region have unfinished business regarding the political freedoms they grant their citizens. After the democratic opening, however, Bashar revived his neoliberal policies by promoting privatizations in order to smooth relations with the United States and its allies, while making no concession to the opposition movement in Syria. Thus, despite his economic-liberalization policies, as (RPP Noticias, 2017) reports, the United States and the other aligned countries called for the Syrian president’s resignation, and Obama announced economic sanctions against Syria, including a prohibition on trade with the Arab country. In the words of the U.S. Department of State: “The United States government has repeatedly called on President Bashar al-Assad to step down and has led the efforts of the international community to work toward a negotiated political solution to the conflict.” (U.S. Department of State, 2017).

In its attempts to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, the United States financed the creation of the Islamic State, according to Julian Assange: “Thus, for example, the disastrous intervention—absolutely disastrous—in Libya, the destruction of Gaddafi’s Government, which led to the occupation by Islamic State of large segments of that country, the flows of weapons going to Syria, guided by Hillary Clinton toward jihadists inside Syria, including Islamic State, are there in those emails. There are more than 1,700 emails from the Hillary Clinton collection that we have released on Libya alone.” (RT, 2017).

In addition, the Obama administration allowed Islamic State to grow in the expectation that this would help force the overthrow of the Syrian president, as John Kerry stated at the time: “We knew that it (Daesh) was growing, we were watching, we saw Daesh strengthening and we thought that threatened Al-Assad (…) We thought that we could probably get Al-Assad to come and negotiate, but instead of negotiations we found that Al-Assad got Putin to support him (…) The Russians have intervened because they do not want to see a Daesh government […] Unfortunately, the Russians have changed the situation. They have changed the equation.” (RT, 2017).

Figure 7

Ultimately, the reader should remember that 241 years ago the United States, France, and England were the United States, France, and England and governed themselves; 100 years ago, by contrast, Syria did not exist on the map, and 72 years ago it did not govern itself. Moreover, unlike the Western countries just mentioned, Syria never decided its own borders: they were decided for it on the basis of geopolitical convenience rather than criteria grounded in its economic, demographic, cultural, and social needs. The country therefore contains profound design errors—errors in its geographical architecture. It is difficult to imagine implementing social projects in a country such as Syria, where water exists only in a small part of the territory and where a desert of 200,000 square miles lies between the population and its sources of natural resources (as can be seen in Figure 7), according to (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2017). It is also a country that has continually been destabilized and even controlled by the principal powers of the West, and where a profound ideological-religious contradiction, combined with foreign interventionism, makes it extraordinarily difficult to achieve the minimum social and political cohesion required to move forward as a nation-state. It is therefore not surprising that the BA’ATH repeatedly uses repression to remain in power, or that this produces social eruptions that reach the level of civil war, as has occurred in various Western countries during the past century when they faced socioeconomic problems of far smaller magnitude than Syria’s.

III · SectionWars as a Mechanism for Offsetting the Fall in the Average Rate of Profit

“War, then, is not a relation of man to man, but of State to State, in which individuals are enemies only accidentally, not as men nor even as citizens, but as soldiers: not as members of their country, but as its defenders. Finally, a State can have as its enemy only another State, and not men, since between things of different natures no true relation can be established.” (Rousseau, 2007, p. 42).

As Rousseau argues, wars set States against one another. In the first section of this research, however, it was shown that States respond to the interests of the dominant class at each specific stage of historical-social development. When two nation-states confront one another, what lies behind the conflict is a confrontation between the interests of the dominant classes within each of them. The constant interventionism of the United States in Syria is not the product of chance or coincidence; rather, it obeys inexorable economic laws belonging to the capitalist mode of production, specifically the law of the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall.

“(…) as the historical-natural process we call human society unfolds, Capitalism develops the productive forces to an unprecedented level and thereby generates an increase in the proportion of accumulated surplus value allocated to the acquisition of constant capital at the expense of the proportion allocated to variable capital (because technological innovation reduces necessary labor time and increases surplus labor time). Proportionally, however, the reduction in necessary labor time will be smaller than the increase in total capital or, what amounts to the same thing, increases in the rate of surplus value will be smaller than increases in total capital, and thus a downward tendency in the average rate of profit will emerge, which Marx called the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” (Gómez, 2017, pp. 51–52)

In weighted-average terms, the foregoing means simply that the technological innovations undertaken by capitalist firms will not proportionally offset the increase in total investment and, consequently, the average rate of profit will tend downward. There are, however, counteracting causes that turn the law into a law of tendency. In Marx’s words: “(…) we see that instead of the difficulty with which economists have hitherto struggled, namely explaining the fall in the rate of profit, the inverse difficulty arises: explaining why this fall is not greater or more rapid. This is undoubtedly due to the play of influences that counteract and neutralize the effects of this general law, giving it merely the character of a tendency, which is why we present the fall in the general rate of profit here simply as a tendency to fall.” (Marx, Capital, Volume III, 2010, p. 232).

Marx enumerated the most general causes that make the fall in profit a tendential law: an increase in the degree of exploitation of labor (the intensity and/or duration of the working day), a reduction of wages below their value (below the value of labor power), the cheapening of the elements that make up constant capital (fixed capital and intermediate consumption), relative overpopulation (the role played by the mass of unemployed workers in wage determination), foreign trade, and the increase in share capital (which generates dividends).

Despite these counteracting causes, however, the fall in the rate of profit asserts itself tendentially, as shown below.

Figure 8

Although capitalism has been the first socioeconomic formation (SEF) to exhibit cyclical crises and to make use of elements foreign to the essence of its economic philosophy, it has also shown an enormous capacity to reinvent itself and recover. In this sense, it has increasingly and more clearly employed mechanisms that were previously less prominent—for example, wars.

Figure 9

Figure 9 shows a Kondratiev long wave, named after the economist Nikolai Kondratiev, who argued that the capitalist economic cycle as a whole follows periodic fluctuations in economic activity that can be represented as waves. Each wave has different stages. The starting point represents the beginning of economic activity, which expands until it reaches a peak; after that, markets become saturated as a result of overproduction (production greater than what the market, given a particular level of purchasing power, can absorb), causing capitalist economies to slow until they reach what we now know as financial crises.

In Kondratiev’s words: “It is generally recognized today that the dynamics of economic life under the capitalist social order are not simple and linear in character, but rather complex and cyclical. Nevertheless, science has clarified very little about the nature and types of cyclical movements, which resemble oscillations. When we speak of cycles in economics, we generally refer to cycles of activity lasting seven to eleven years. But it is evident that these movements are not the final type of economic cycle. In reality, the dynamics of economic life are more complicated. In addition to the cycles already mentioned, which we shall agree to call ‘intermediate,’ it has recently been shown that the existence of still shorter oscillations, lasting approximately three and a half years, is probable. But this is not all. There are real grounds for supposing the existence of large oscillations of approximately fifty years in the capitalist economy, a fact that makes the problem of economic dynamics even more complex.” (Kondrátiev, 2017)

Kondratiev is referring here to the three principal cycles of economic activity: Kitchin cycles (short duration), Juglar cycles (intermediate duration), and Kondratiev cycles (long duration). This section will focus on the latter, the long cycles.

It is true that Kondratiev’s analysis is rough and relatively mechanical because it lacks a prior theoretical formulation. This leaves him unable to establish precise duration intervals for the long waves or explain the causes of those intervals; nor does it allow him to examine deeply either the reasons that give rise to crises or those that permit capitalist economies to recover, much less the causes of the point-to-point transition within the wave. Nevertheless, it does provide a general idea of the behavior of economic activity and makes it possible to identify certain patterns of behavior that can be connected with what has been developed throughout this research.

As can be seen in Figure 9, each Kondratiev cycle has corresponded to some technological revolution. The expansionary phase begins once the innovation is introduced and, as a snowball effect develops—that is, as the innovation spreads beyond the innovating firm to imitating firms—economic activity flourishes. Once all sectors of the economy, or at least the most important ones, have adopted the innovation and produced what their production-possibility frontier permits, the economy stagnates. After some time, stagnation gives way to slowdown and finally to economic recession. It can also be seen how a new technological revolution begins the recovery and opens the curtain on a new phase, or wave, of the economic cycle. Statistically speaking, these long waves have been found to last between forty and sixty years, tending more toward the upper than the lower limit.

What Kondratiev proves unable to explain, however, is why economic crises become deeper as the economic cycle advances. Nor does he explain why it becomes more difficult to emerge from them, or the consequences this has for the average rate of profit, capital accumulation, and competition. In general terms, this can be explained by the fact that as capitalist economies develop—and with them technological development—it becomes increasingly difficult to carry out revolutions in production techniques. Among other factors, competition forces firms constantly to introduce small innovations; as society reaches a given degree of development of its productive forces, these become increasingly costly (as explained above) and their impact on the average rate of profit becomes progressively smaller. At the same time, every SEF has shown insurmountable limits to its capacity for technological innovation. For primitive communities, for example, it would have been impossible to construct the carriages and armor produced by the Roman Empire under the slave mode of production, just as it would have been impossible for the Romans to conceive the construction of mills powered by water or wind, and for those societies in turn to discover nuclear energy. What does this mean? Simply that as historical-social development advances, each mode of production gradually exhausts its capacity for technological innovation, which also means that technological revolutions become increasingly less close at hand.

The foregoing has two fundamental consequences. The first is an intensification of the downward tendency of the average rate of profit; the second is the centralization of capital, that is, the deepening of inefficient and weakly competitive market structures such as monopolies, monopsonies, oligopolies, oligopsonies, and others. This in turn has important effects on capital accumulation. The most important is that market structures lacking efficiency and competitiveness move away from the average rate of profit because their profit margins rise as a result of their market power[18], while firms with an average level of technology simultaneously see their rate of profit fall and firms with below-average technology are penalized by competition through bankruptcy and are absorbed by other firms, generally those with greater market power. This economic phenomenon occurs because technological innovations, for the reasons already discussed, become increasingly costly.

The matter does not end there, because market structures to which the average rate of profit does not apply and which possess significant market power—for example, monopolies—are free to slow technological innovation because they do not face competition[19]. In this way they move still farther from the downward tendency of the average rate of profit, since their profit margins are above the average. It is not uncommon to observe, for example, that monopoly profit rates tend to rise during financial crises while the average rate of profit plummets.

It might seem that these kinds of market structures, which promote inefficiency and lack of competitiveness, are an economic alchemy for capitalist firms. Since Adam Smith, however, economic science has understood the inverse relationship between wages and profits. Consequently, the measures by which firms distance themselves from the fall in the average rate of profit can only be possible at the cost of implementing the factors mentioned earlier by Marx. There is various evidence of this. One recent example occurred in France, an industrialized economy whose large companies were nevertheless forced to introduce greater flexibility into the labor market. Actions of this type by those operating within such market structures generate social discontent and, on many occasions, large generalized protests, as reported by (Yárnoz, 2017), one of which ended with 60 French people detained and 40 injured in a single day.

There is, of course, a palliative measure for this problem which, while not representing a definitive solution, contributes to slowing the natural course of economic laws: wars.

Figure 10

As can be seen, wars have played a major role in the recovery of capitalist economies when they have gone through crises of overproduction. This is clearly not a new phenomenon: it can be observed at least as far back as 1812, when capitalism had existed for only 23 years if its political establishment in France is dated to the storming of the Bastille in 1789. What explains this? The answer is quite simple. Part of the unemployed labor force leaves the economy, which raises wages (given the resulting shifts in the labor-supply curve, holding labor demand constant); purchasing power therefore rises and production is stimulated again. In addition, many unemployed workers die in war (so firms do not have to pay severance compensation, for example), while the Government assumes responsibility for subsidizing their families (with taxes paid by those same families). The “benefits” of war for the economy do not end there. In many countries war destroys land and industry, reducing the stock of available fixed capital. Holding other factors constant, if demand for fixed capital remains unchanged while its supply declines, its market price rises. Machinery that had been undergoing depreciation as a result of use and new technologies therefore experiences a slowing of that process, which in turn slows the need for innovation. Finally, war itself promotes economic activity by activating industries closely linked to weapons manufacturing and even industries that benefit significantly from arms production. These factors lead to higher stock-market valuations for companies wholly or partly connected to this industry, because greater economic activity increases their profitability.

Industries most closely linked to arms production are those that belong directly to the weapons industry. “These are the first 10 companies on the 2011 ranking (figures in parentheses correspond to the 2010 ranking):

1 (1). Lockheed Martin (United States). Missile systems, electronics, and aerospace. Sales of $36.270 billion in 2011. Net profits: $2.655 billion. 123,000 employees (132,000).

2 (3). Boeing (United States). Aircraft, electronics, missiles, aerospace. Sales of $31.830 billion. Net profits of $4.018 billion. 171,700 employees (160,500).

3 (2). BAE Systems (United Kingdom). Aircraft, artillery, missiles, military vehicles, ships. Sales of $29.150 billion. Net profits of $2.349 billion. 93,500 employees (98,200).

4 (5). General Dynamics (United States). Artillery, electronics. Sales of $23.760 billion. Net profits of $2.526 billion; 95,100 employees (90,000).

5 (6). Raytheon (United States). Missiles, electronics. Sales of $22.470 billion. Net profits of $1.896 billion. 71,000 employees (72,400).

6 (4). Northrop Grumman (United States). Aircraft, electronics, missiles, warships. Sales of $21.390 billion. Net profits of $2.118 billion. 72,500 employees (117,100).

7 (7). EADS (EU). Aircraft, electronics, missiles. Sales of $16.390 billion. Net profits of $1.442 billion. 133,120 employees (121,690).

8 (8). Finmeccanica (Italy). Aircraft, artillery vehicles, missiles. Sales of $14.560 billion. Net profits of $902 million. 70,470 employees (75,200).

9 (9). L-3 Communications (United States). Electronics. Sales of $12.520 billion. Net profits of $956 million. 61,000 employees (63,000). 10 (10). United Technologies (United States). Aircraft, electronics, engines. Sales of $11.640 billion. Net profits of $5.347 billion. 199,900 employees (208,220).”

Source: (Moreno, 2017)

As can be seen, of the nine companies mentioned, six are American and the other three belong to countries allied with the United States. Even public officials can benefit from war, as has been the case with Donald Trump. According to (Boggioni, 2017), Trump owns shares in Raytheon, the company that manufactures Tomahawk missiles, and therefore benefited from having initiated the attack on Syria, because Raytheon’s shares appreciated, as can be seen below.

Figure 11

Nor is the impact of wars on industries only partially connected with warfare negligible, such as steel producers, pharmaceutical companies, oil producers, among others.

In modern times, oil is fundamental to all productive processes, while natural gas also plays an important role in combustion, to the point that many regard it as the fuel of the future. If to the foregoing we add the savings in transport and commercialization costs represented by the possibility of moving these resources out in a straight line (through Syria), the significant quantity of resources the country possesses, its geopolitically strategic position on the map, and the law of the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall, it becomes entirely natural to understand the reasons why the United States conducts its current foreign policies toward Syria.

Critical apparatusReferences