Why Certain Leftists Embrace Putin and Assad
The Blind Spots of the Left: Geopolitical Simplifications and the Cost of Misplaced Alliances
The al-Assad dynasty in Syria has been overthrown in a swift and unexpected offensive by a coalition of forces led by a fundamentalist organisation that is a successor of Al Qaeda – and which is also classified as a terrorist group by both the United States and the European Union. The al-Assad dynasty had been in power since 1970, during which time it functioned as a single-party dictatorship that persecuted and tortured dissidents. Among these dissidents were prominent Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, but also communist and Kurdish factions.
As journalist Olga Rodriguez recalled in her remarkable book El hombre mojado no teme la lluvia (2009), "in Syria, people are afraid to speak out loud about certain issues," and "around four thousand human rights defenders and political prisoners are held in its prisons." It was a political regime which, if located in Europe, would undoubtedly be condemned by every leftist organisation in Spain. But it is not in Europe.
On the international stage, the al-Assad dynasty has been an ally of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and therefore an enemy of Israel – which illegally seized the Golan Heights in 1967 – and its Western allies. Undoubtedly, the recent military weaknesses of al-Assad’s key allies, Iran and Russia, are behind the rapid military developments of recent weeks. But this international alignment by Syria is also the main factor explaining the fascination that the Syrian dynasty has exerted on certain segments of the European left.
We might agree that the left has traditionally been anti-imperialist, although we must note that during the 19th and 20th centuries, the European left’s relationship with colonialism was, to put it kindly, fraught. In any case, the anti-imperialist narrative was fundamentally correct on two central points. First, the economic development of rich countries has been based on the exploitation and appropriation of labour – whether enslaved, waged, or unwaged – and natural resources from poorer countries. Second, these classical forms of imperialism have persisted today through more sophisticated mechanisms, most notably the “unequal exchange” highlighted by dependency theorists. As German sociologist Gunder Frank insisted, the development of the rich necessitates the underdevelopment of the poor.
On these pillars, more compelling narratives could be built about what imperialism means in the 21st century. For instance, we could follow Jason Hickel’s recent quantification that the economies of the Global North have appropriated, through trade and its unjust rules, 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the Global South. Alternatively, we could revive and adapt Lenin’s notion of the “labour aristocracy” to remind ourselves that the living standards of developed countries still depend on the continuous and cheap supply of natural resources and labour from the South. In other words, the mass consumption characteristic of the West would not be viable if labour, human, and environmental rights were extended equally across all nations. We could go further and point out, as John Smith does in Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, that Northern states and their public services are also financed by taxes derived from these value transfers from the South – each garment produced by a subcontracted multinational in a low-wage country also generates tax revenues in the country where it is consumed.
These avenues are profoundly fruitful for understanding our world and its asymmetrical relationships of domination and exploitation. They would make an excellent starting point for a left concerned about the state of the international working class and the planet’s changing biophysical conditions. However, this is not the norm. I say this with deep knowledge – and great sadness: the notion of imperialism used by leftist parties refers primarily to geopolitics and the competition between state power blocs. It resembles Risk – the board game – more than Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism.
It will surprise no one if I assert that this is, almost certainly, a poisoned legacy of the Cold War. The European left’s worldview was shaped in the context of ideological, military, and power disputes between the Soviet Union and the United States, and this mental configuration did not disappear with the fall of the Soviet Union. At most, it underwent slight adjustments. Two points are worth noting here.
Firstly, in July 1920, amid civil war, the Bolshevik leadership, headed by Lenin and Trotsky, feared that the socialist revolution might not succeed due to its complete isolation. As Antoni Domenech described in The Eclipse of Fraternity, this led them to impose very strict conditions on European social-democratic parties – which were Marxist at the time – if they wanted to join the Third International. One of the harshest conditions concerned party organisation, requiring the democratic self-organisation methods of European parties to be replaced by hierarchical forms typical of the clandestine Bolshevik party. The socialist movement experienced its greatest fracture after the First World War, and the new communist parties were born with deeply vertical organisational structures directed from Moscow. This left a profound mark on the European socialist and communist tradition, unresolved even by the democratising waves promoted by certain currents in the 1970s (Eurocommunists, ecologists, feminists, radicals, etc.).
Secondly, despite the Soviet Union’s indispensable contribution to the victory over Nazism and international fascism, the Cold War created an imaginary of deeply antagonistic blocs. This imaginary continues to influence not only the far right, which labels anyone who dissents as communist, but also certain leftists who remain stuck, in some way, in that context. Here, in terms of my argument, it is important to note how the notion of imperialism inadvertently transformed during this time into a caricature of what it had been before the Second World War.
Anti-imperialism was reduced, almost overnight, to simple anti-Americanism, or more specifically, to opposing whatever the United States did. And, of course, there was no shortage of evidence in the actions of the United States throughout the 20th century to make this discourse not only palatable but particularly effective. This was a country that dominated the capitalist global economy and used its immense power to sponsor coups and civil wars, eradicating the emancipatory potential of the Global South’s peoples. Far less attention was paid to the USSR’s invasions and interventions in other territories, although each occurrence tended to fracture parts of the European left – as happened most notably with the invasion of Czechoslovakia. For the average activist – those fighting in their workplaces and neighbourhoods but informed by the party – the international outlook was shaped by this binary simplification. Economic class dynamics at the international level were no longer analysed; instead, discourse revolved around justifying the USSR’s position and opposing the US’s. It was an easy formula for quick and convenient positioning.
As I have noted, despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, the tools for positioning remain the same for many in the European left. There are moments when the diagnosis can be insightful and even correct, since, as I mentioned earlier, imperialism has taken more sophisticated forms that still often require military support. The supply and provision of rich economies depend not only on abstract international trade but also on well-lubricated and protected global value chains at critical points, particularly those involving natural resource supplies. Wars in Iraq, for example, and many interventions in the Middle East have numerous economic motivations – water, oil, etc. – and highlight the ideological hypocrisy of the United States and its allies concerning their “democratising” rhetoric – since what applies to Syria does not apply to Saudi Arabia.
The problem is that the Cold War has left part of the left blind to other forms of imperialist behaviour in the world. Even when such behaviour is placed directly in front of them, they fail to see it. This left lacks the tools to analyse, for example, China’s commercial expansion in Africa – and to understand Biden’s recent visit to Angola as a slow and clumsy response after decades of Chinese intelligence – or Russia’s old-fashioned military invasion of Ukraine. None of these processes are theorised using the notion of imperialism and, in the worst cases, are even justified for their overtly “anti-American” stance. This is something that would probably have scandalised the original theorists of imperialism, who focused far more on the economic relationships and dynamics underpinning capitalism than on mere military competition between states or empires.
In short, the result of all this is that there exists a European left incapable of analysing global political and economic relations simply because it is trapped in outdated parameters that, in any case, were inadequate even during the Cold War. Instead of capitalising on the fertile ground laid by current imperialism theorists, they resort to fossilised bloc-based tools. This inevitably leads to oversimplification of the geopolitical map, idealisation of dictators, underestimation of human and environmental costs, marginalisation and exclusion of emancipatory forces and movements, and ultimately, justification of crimes and atrocities that, if they occurred in their own country, would be denounced. And that is perhaps the most absurd and painful aspect: to see people who defend the most profound and beautiful ideals, even in their neighbourhood assemblies, suddenly wrapped up in the justification of torture and imprisonment of their peers thousands of kilometres away.