Like many schools of political thought, Marxism seems unable to provide a meaningful or accurate explanation of what is happening in Syria today. Yet it is perhaps the most incapable of all; ironically, because Syria should, in theory, fit well within its model. Marxism has traditionally excelled at analysing “primitive” societies, politically and economically underdeveloped communities unable to build stable political or economic systems. It has done so by employing a vast theoretical toolkit of class dynamics, political forces, and economic determinants, expecting that historical inevitabilities would unfold when the right conditions were absent.
None of this applies to contemporary Syria. The country’s internal landscape is home to millions of people living amid a chaotic populism, yet they are unable to produce any serious political, social, or civic movement with weight, purpose, or vision. Worse still, they fail to form class, professional, economic, or intellectual connections among themselves. Syrian society today suffers from a complete political primitiveness that accompanies its economic underdevelopment. It exists under a political regime devoid of effective institutions or instruments of governance. If Marxist explanations were accurate, Syria might have been an example of the “primitive communism” that Marx once imagined in such societies.
There is no real “class struggle” in Syria today. One cannot claim that the owning classes are preventing the oppressed from developing consciousness or organising themselves. On the contrary, what could be called the wealthy classes – those with modest levels of capital – are often the most fearful in public life, concerned only with achieving some minimal level of safety for themselves and their businesses, and avoiding the rising tide of populist anger that engulfs the country.
Syria is also far removed from what Marxists once called “imperialist action.” No major power sees Syria as a territory worth dominating, exploiting, or investing in, politically, economically, or militarily. There is no foreign power blocking Syria’s “internal development.” Instead, the country has become a burden on the world: a state that exports its own crises – waves of refugees, extremist movements, and regional conflicts. International powers today are more focused on helping Syrians contain their own wounds than on deepening them.
Similarly, Syrian society does not suffer from capitalist or class crises in the traditional Marxist sense. Factors such as overproduction or commodity accumulation – the drivers of instability in Marxist theory – simply do not exist. Instead, Syria suffers from the opposite: a deepening crisis of production that generates chronic shortages of economic, social, and cultural value.
Every condition that Marxist theory identifies as preventing societies from realising their collective potential – the lack of class solidarity, the dominance of ruling elites, the barriers to organisation – can be listed. Yet none of them adequately describe Syria’s experience. Still, the country fails to reach the “historical inevitability” that Marxism once promised.
There is virtually no “infrastructure” left in Syria – no real economy, no production, not even clear ownership relations. Nor is there a “superstructure”: no functioning state, no meaningful politics, no coherent public discourse. Concepts like class struggle, systems of control, or mechanisms of domination are almost entirely absent.
The point here is not to denounce Marxist analysis or to criticise its intellectual value. It is to stress, once again, the impossibility of using any external theoretical or political framework to interpret our specific reality in full.
We are, in the end, populations marked by deep primitivism in every sense. We have experienced no substantial human development – not economic, intellectual, educational, or political. We have not reached even the basic foundations of social or political awareness, organisation, and class consciousness upon which future development could be built.
The misery of our societies – their lack of social classes, their isolation from the wider world, the collapse of systems of power and hierarchy – is not enough to generate meaningful political or human growth. These conditions may produce forms of freedom, but such freedom is often chaotic and destructive. It leads to civil wars and conflicts based on the most primitive forms of human identity – sectarianism and tribal loyalties.
The creation of genuine political realities requires far more than raw freedom. It demands accumulated experiences and long-term growth – in education, social reform, economic and intellectual production, and, above all, in political maturity. Only through such gradual progress can societies move from chaos and survival towards genuine transformation.
