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The smell of blood

Philip Proudfoot

To cite this article: Philip Proudfoot (2017): The smell of blood, City, DOI:
10.1080/13604813.2017.1331568

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CITY, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1331568

The smell of blood

Accumulation by dispossession, resistance
and the language of populist uprising in
Syria

Philip Proudfoot

This paper is about how the Syrian government lost control over its rural and rural-to-urban
constituents. From the twin perspective of ethnography and political economy, I show how
the same pressures that structured mens decisions to migrate from the countryside to sell
labour power in the city resemble the material foundations for the uprising itself. The domi-
nant narrative of the Syrian uprising is that protests calling for democracy were suppressed
with violence, and with that the movement degraded into a sectarian civil and proxy war.
Contra this narrative, I describe from a moment of cynicism expressed toward the Ba,th
partys official slogan how the government once relied not only on the repressive apparatus
of the state, but also a politico-economic system that guarded against total impoverishment.
Following liberalising reforms in the 1990sdeepened in the 2000sthis arrangement
crumbled; agricultural input subsidies were stripped; food price capping was removed; guar-
anteed pricing on crops was cancelled; and import barriers fell. In attempting to answer
challenges thrown up by Syrias position within global capitalism, the government aban-
doned its welfare pact. In a context rapidly determined by accumulation by dispossession
and mass impoverishment, Syrias marginalised population vocalised chains of what
Ernesto Laclau (2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso) would recognise as populist
demands. These demands were refused or responded to via transparent propaganda.
Against a backdrop of uprisings across the Arab world, the Ba,th partys remaining
thread of a social contract snapped.

Key words: Syria, Lebanon, Beirut, revolution, life history, uprising, Arab Spring, ethnogra-
phy, agriculture, labour, populism

Introduction Abdullah and Haythamwho at that time

Bta,rif rihat al-dam? [Do you know the
_
smell of blood?], said Jamal.
What do you mean?, I replied.
I know the smell, Jamal continued, I
cant forget itthe regime taught me the
scent.1
were distracted, giggling to each other over a
WhatsApp exchange with a Lebanese girl
quickly hushed up.2
Jamal is 26, the youngest of four sons, hes
portly, short and wears his thinning hair
brushed neatly to one side. Jamal spent
most of his childhood in a small village

# 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2 CITY
toward the edge of the central Syrian city of
Hama. His family are former fallahn [land
workers].3 Not long after his birth,_ Jamals
father sold their modest parcel of land and
moved the family to their nearest urban
centre. From the mid-1990s onwards his
father was absent after having moved to
Lebanon to secure work driving taxis.
During this time, remittances flowed reliably
across the border. In the midst of his teenage
years, Jamal began developing an
obsession with all things automotive. By 16,
he had started working odd jobs at a local
garage and at 18, he was fully employed
fixing windshields at a neighbourhood
repair shop.
When Jamal talked about the uprising, he
made sharp observations and conjured
moods that switched from joviality to a
fiery-eyed seriousness. Everyone listened
when Jamal spoke. That summer day we
were sitting at one of our favourite cheap
cafes on Beiruts seafront, sharing an argileh
and watching the Mediterranean crash up
against Raouchea hollow rocky outcrop
and the citys principal geographic feature.
It was almost a year since the siege of
Hama, a year since Jamal saw his friend fall
to the floor after being hit by a snipers
bullet, his head nearly separated cleanly
from his body. Jamal tells us how blood
spat out from the wound, hitting his face
and sticking to the insides of his nostrils.
But even in describing the point at which
live ammunition was turned on the crowds,
he remained adamant that he was aware of
the risks and that his friends knew them
too. They all had heard about events in the
southern town of Daraa, in Syrias rural
Houran province. Images had rapidly circu-
lated across Internet and television networks
documenting the brutal violence. In Jamals
village, a number of the shops had been
locked up for several days in an expression
of solidarity. So, the night before the
protest, he and his friends made the decision,
they would join the demonstrators occupying
central Hama and would do so for freedom,
dignity, Syria and for the people.
The event Jamal described has become
known as the Siege of Hama (3 July 4
August 2011). It was one of the first in a
chain of crackdowns carried out by Syrian
government forces during the initial stages
of anti-government protests. At least 216
individuals were killed (Al-Jazeera 2011;
Bakri 2011). But this wasnt the first time
Hama had witnessed such violence
(Dumper and Stanley 2007). In recent
memory remains the 1982 military onslaught
ordered by Hafiz al-Assad against a Muslim
Brotherhood uprising. It is estimated that
10,000 40,000 were left dead (Fisk 2010).
Once again, in 2011, it looked like the city
was set to become a centre of opposition,
with protests flaring across Hamas country-
side villages, culminating eventually in the
occupation of the central Al-Asi square.
So, did you just join the protests mostly
because of what happened in Daraa?, I asked.
Yes, but naturally there were lots of
reasons I went, Jamal answered, I wanted
the regime to fall, to give the people democ-
racy, freedom and justice.
What exactly is democracy, freedom and
justice?, I replied.
Jamal said first that these were human
rights, and to elaborate on this, he described
his life circumstances. In his description, he
attempted to contextualise what it was he
saw himself up against, how it was that
he woke up and realised that the regime
was blocking his capacity to become free.
He emphasised that, from 2007 onwards, he
faced a series of declining economic con-
ditions and stressed that this decline was in
his mind when he decided to attend the pro-
tests in Hama. This was sharpened by the fact
that a few months prior to the uprising Jamal
had lost his job; his boss informed him the
repair company was not turning enough of
a profit to justify keeping him on. Unem-
ployed and miserable he took to the streets,
envisioning that the protests might lead even-
tually to a better future in Syria. But when the
street failed to provide answers, Jamal saw
little option left other than trying his luck
in Lebanon where he hoped he would

secure a steady income. But it was a different
time now, different to when his father had
migrated and succeeded in obtaining extra
cash that was later channelled productively
into household improvements. Even before
the uprising these possibilities appeared to
be closing down for men like Jamal. It
looked as though migration was becoming a
safety valve, remittance flows were now an
essential means to fill the accelerating gap
between wages and prices. Migration was
changing from something that once was con-
sidered supplementary into something
essential, or in rebel-worker reckonings, it
moved from a fursa [an opportunity] to
necessary].
shi darur [something
The professor of Modern Arab Politics at
Columbia University, Joseph Massad
(2011), has argued that the mainstream
medias tendency to portray the Arab upris-
ings as awakening is both ignorant of the
Middle Easts long history of rebellions
and an orientalist trope in that it depicts
Arabs as quiescent people who put up
with dictatorships for decades. He has
further suggested that the vocabulary of
freedom, democracy and human rights recall to me their deep anger when peaceful
as well as the term spring itselfas in,
Arab Springhave a distinct ideological
trajectory (Massad 2012). During the recent
round of Arab uprisings, he maintains that
the media focus on circulating demands for
formal or civil rights, like, the right to immediacy of this repressionas brutal as it
free association, freedom of movement,
free expression, etc., deliberately neglected
many of the material demands that were
emanating from the Middle Easts impover-
ished masses. The masses were far more
likely to demand social and economic
rights such as more equitable wealth distri-
bution, free education, universal healthcare,
a minimum wage and quality housing
(Massad 2012).
Jamal occupies the lower rungs of Syrias
socio-economic ladder, yet he too portrayed
the emergence of his revolutionary
PROUDFOOT: THE SMELL OF BLOOD 3
subjectivity as something of an awakening.4
He was also at other times resolute in dis-
avowing what he saw as the peoples prior
ignorance and quiescence. Moreover, what
he claimed to desire was often freedom,
democracy, human rights and justice
was echoed in conversations I had with
Syrian rebel-workers over a 24-month
period in Beirut (2012 14) where I found
both awakening narratives and human
rights talk to be repetitive linguistic tropes.5
Does this mean, then, that the discourse
Massad had convincingly identified as promi-
nent amongst mainstream Euro-American
and Arab media has ultimately also succeeded
in setting the terms of the debate writ large?
Does it mean that Syrias marginalised rural
and rural urban populations now also see
the solution to their declining circumstances
in a bourgeois capitalist democracy? Was
this really what pushed Jamal to risk his life
on the streets of Hama?
Without a doubt, Jamals story contained
strong sentiments of solidarity.6 Indeed, in
trying to locate what motivated individuals
to protest in Syria, these basic emotional
and affective dimensions should not be too
hastily swept aside by structural analysis. In
oral histories of the uprising, men would
protests, that called only for reforms to the
system, were responded to with violent
crackdowns. But the protest repression
cycle failed, popular resentment was not
quelled and resentment increased. But the
evidently wasis not, in and of itself, expla-
natory as to what caused the Syrian upris-
ing, and ultimately led these men into the
streets. The following argues that behind the
immediacy of repressive violence are sets of
foundational socio-economic grievances that
were generated through economic violence
committed against social reproduction.
These mounting grievances were not just
unaddressed by the regime but were actively
made worse through its pursuit of neo-liberal
economic policies that constituted nothing
short of accumulation by dispossession.
4 CITY
In the renewed attention that Marxs work
on primitive accumulation has garnered by
the likes of Harvey (2003) and Perelman
(2000), much light has been cast now on
how the accumulation of assets through
non-market meansthat is, via appropria-
tion, networks of power, violence and
lawis not only critical for the early
history of capitalism, but that these pro-
cesses continue into the present. Syria is a
case in point. Here, a more or less state
socialist system has crumbled over the past
20 years; assets have been siphoned off by a
narrowing state elite. But in Bathist Syria,
the language of class, socialism and struggle,
has been monopolised by the state itself and
increasingly delegitimised through its
actions. Leftist parties and trade unions
have faced control and suppression. It is
expressly in scenarios like this that a broad
appeal can be lodged around the language
of democracy, freedom, justice and cism directed toward the ideological pillars of
reform (see also Kalb 2005; Ost 2005).
But in situations that are nonetheless still
determined by accumulation by disposses-
sion it would be brash to presume that
even these bourgeois and liberal concepts
reflected directly the alternative future
society impoverished Syrian citizens like
Jamal were envisioning. Thanks to a neo-
liberal policy direction, mounting webs of
structural violence threatened to entrap
large swathes of Syrias population into a
future defined only by expanding impover-
ishment and pauperisation.
My immediate focus here is on the
earlier phases of the uprising (2011 12)
and I therefore refrain from commenting
fully on the immense catastrophe currently
engulfing Syria. With the limitations of
space, I cannot describe in any great
detail how the uprising came to be so
rapidly distorted through imperialist
assault, and thus how base socio-economic
grievances were, in many quarters, replaced
by conspiratorial phantasmagoria and
dreams of sectarian purification (see
instead Kadri 2016; Proudfoot 2016). By
taking a step back from the current crisis,
this paper will instead lay the empirical
and theoretical foundations needed to
grasp fully how, in the absence of any
organisational form capable of representing
labour, other than the internationally
backed Islamist factions, raw class antagon-
isms were always already ripe for counter-
revolutionary redirection.
The analysis below commences with an
ethnographic vignette from the summer of
2012 describing the circumstances of two
Syrian labourers in Beirut. For these men,
the pressure unleashed by processes of
accumulation in Syria informed their
decisions to migrate from the countryside to
sell labour power. These pressures, in turn,
resemble what many have identified as the
economic foundation for the uprising itself
(e.g. Azmeh 2014; Hinnebusch 2012; Kila
2013; Matar 2012a, 2012b, 2016). To this
end the vignette culminates in a note of cyni-
the Ba,th partyunity, liberty and social-
ismand then asks: would this cynicism
have always been possible?
I think not, and to argue why not I
move from ethnography to outline the
evolution of a politico-economic system
that facilitated 40 years of relative stability
before describing how this system
degraded. In line with this degradation,
the final section builds on the political
theory and revolutionary demands of
Syrian rebel-workers themselves. In doing
so, I draw on Laclaus (2005) theory of
populism and suggest that calls to end
military service, stop corruption and
bring freedom, democracy and the fall of
the regime represented context-specific
chains of empty signifiers capable of
tying together these emergent socio-econ-
omic antagonisms that sprouted through
the welfare gaps generated by dispossession
and elite-driven wealth-snatching from the
poor. Initial opposition sprung, in the first
instance, from the anti-poor outcomes gen-
erated through processes of accumulation
that held sway over Syria for the past
20 years.7

Mohammed and Bilal
In the corner of Mohammed and Bilals bree-
zeblock shack, a salvaged television splut-
tered, indal,at ishtibakat f rfi dimashq al-
yawm [clashes broke out today in the
Damascus countryside].
The guysboth 20 years oldare cousins
and school friends from the countryside
near a small town, just outside of Idlib in
North Eastern Syria. Mohammed is the
tallest of the two, painfully skinny with a
big nose and dark eyes; his hair is short
with small black curls. Bilal is short but hand-
some; his features are balanced and his hair
always styled neatly. Bilals demeanour is
that of a troublemaker, whereas Mohammed
has a more scholarly disposition.
The news broadcast continued, announ-
cing the latest round of skirmishes breaking
out in the summer of 2012; images of
clashes beamed in and detailed information
followed concerning the various militia
organisations involved. Momentarily the
boys both glanced over at the screen, but
then their eyes fell back down to our game
of poker. Bilal, seemingly more engrossed in
his hand, began musing aloud on the role
Jabhat al-Nusra were playing during this
early stage of the Syrian uprising.
I met Mohammed and Bilal a few months
earlier. In my first months of fieldwork I
wandered around Beirut, familiarising
myself with the citys streets, trying my best
to locate an adequate site around which I
would be able to embed myself into a
network of opposition-aligned Syrian
workers and rebels. It was edging toward
6 pm as I made my way home. I took a
slightly different route and noticed two
young men lounging on a worn leather
couch placed at the entrance of an early
stage construction site. Their seat looked
out across one of Beiruts few public
gardens. Mohammed had his legs propped
up, resting on a broken swivel chair, and
Bilal was sitting upright, smoking and drink-
ing black tea. Sensing an opportunity to carry
out another of my basic population surveys,
PROUDFOOT: THE SMELL OF BLOOD 5
I walked over and introduced myself. I asked
permission to subject them to a few questions
about Syrian migrant workers in West Beirut.
Both said yes, and we began a rather stunted
back-and-forth: whats your income?, how
much do you send back?, are your siblings
here too? and the like.
So . . . what?, interrupted a bored looking
Mohammed, arent you going to ask for my
opinion on the revolution?
I laughed and explained my concerns over
raising suspicion.
Ok, fine, but these questions are dull!, he
replied.
I tried to insist they were rather important,
but by this time Bilal had already jumped up
and was gesturing for us all to go inside while
he refilled the teapot.
From the roadside entrance, Mohammed
and Bilals home is obscured from view: its
hidden behind large construction machinery,
mounds of scaffolding, rusting iron rods and
heaps of excavated earth. To reach their
building, the boys first cross a wooden
beam bridging a deep foundation trench. It
wobbles with each step. Bilal enjoyed
teasing me and, because of this, hed
occasionally sprint across at full pelt, throw-
ing in jumps just to turn my stomach. Once
at the other side, the shack moves into view.
For the boys, avoiding private accommo-
dation meant their wages stretched further
and that remittances and savings could
increase. Bilal made around $400 per month
as a labourer on site. This was an improve-
ment on his previous job, selling bananas at
the roadside near Sabra, the Palestinian
camp in Southern Beirut.
Mohammed, a student at Damascus Uni-
versitys journalism department, brought in
around the same wages as his cousin;
however, Mohammed worked behind the
counter at a local pastry shop. As a non-
labourer, he had established an arrangement
with the sites foreman, via his cousin, and
each month handed him $50 from his pay in
exchange for an extra bed and turning a
blind eye. This represented a substantial
saving on rent costs, especially with such a
6 CITY
central Beirut location, his shop being less
than a minutes walk from the site.
Mohammed had initially planned only to
be in Beirut for the summer, but his plans
began to fall apart because, and as the televi-
sion report made clear, intensifying clashes
were breaking out, and skirmishes were
edging toward the capital.
By contrast, Bilal had imagined his
migration was for the long haul. Revenue
from his familys olive grove had, for
several years, failed to provide an adequate
standard of living: It just wasnt sufficient,
he said. His brother, Khalil, was also now
looking to join the fight in Syria. There was
no other solution, he told me, I had to
leave and work here. I want to fight, but my
brother is more experienced . . . he did mili-
tary service . . . hes more knowledgeable in
these things.
For both, wages regularly arrived with
complications, gaps widened between pay-
ments and miscalculations occurred regard-
ing labour hours. In the evening Mohammed
often stormed back to the site and announced
that was it, he was done. His boss regularly
talked down to him: there is no respect, he
said. He occasionally even gloated to him
about regime victories in the suppression of
the uprising. Mohammed associated this
with the fact that his boss is Shia, and there-
fore it is something tabi [natural] that he occasionally summon the energy to shoot
would support the regime, all Shia in
Lebanon like the regime . . . they are the
same, both killing us in Syria.
Mohammed endlessly would fight with
this ahbal [moron] over his wages and the
exact amount of hours he had worked
versus what was recorded. Without any
form of collective representation, and cer-
tainly with no union or embassy willing to
take action, Syrian migrant workers have
zero collective bargaining power deployable
in any fight against exploitation, the better-
ment of their condition or just to receive a
decent wage. As more refugees moved
across the border into Lebanon, with many
searching for work, individual protestations
would meet with responses like, Go then!
There are a hundred like you, Youre not
special and I can easily put someone in
your place.
Throughout our nights together Bilal
habitually provided Mohammed and me
with intermittent analysis around the scenes
appearing on al-Arabiyas television reports.
These opinions were formed along well-
worn lines that had crystallised over the pre-
ceding months. I had noticed that Bilal was
becoming a supporter of the Al-Qaeda-
aligned Jabhat al-Nusra and his view was
that their role in the revolution ought to be
enlarged. Nusra, he stressed to us, are evi-
dently the only group powerful enough to
realise victory for the Syrian people. His
line of reasoning rarely deviated into any
serious discussion of Jabhat al-Nusras par-
ticular relationship with Salafist Islam, a
relationship that has been given attention
elsewhere (e.g. Comerford 2015; Sherlock
2012). The only mention of this factor
would come with the occasional assertion
that, theyre good Muslims or religion
gives strength.
Though, for his part, Mohammed dis-
agrees. Instead, he limits his support to
smaller organisations, specifically his
towns LCC [Local Coordination Commit-
tee]. He had heard Bilals opinions many
times before, yet still, somehow he would
back an incredulous look. One evening, as
I watched a grin grow over Bilals face,
having apparently achieved the rise he so
desired, he said, But look man, Ive told
you before, Jabhat al-Nusra are just the
best fighters, when they cry allahu akbar
[God is great] they strike fear into regime
dogs.
Dude! [Ya zalami!], interjected
Mohammed, I dont care if theyre good
fighters . . . theyre breaking the unity of
the people [wahda a-ashb].
_
Unity? [Wahda?], replied an increasingly
_
irritated Bilal, who then gestured to our sur-
roundings and said, My darling: Unity,
Liberty, Socialism! [Ya habibi, wahda,
_ _
huriya, ishtirakya!].
_

Bilals tone was deeply sarcastic; his recita-
tion of the Ba,th partys ideological pillars
sound almost camp, but his utterance
defused the mounting tension. We all
giggled. And yet, when the laughter faded, I
was left wondering, why exactly was this
funny? Was it just his out-of-character
camp tone? Was it the context? A construc-
tion site shack and dismal poverty wages
seem indeed far removed from a socialist
utopia. But does this mean the very idea of
those pillars were cynically dismissed? Or
was it just the capacity for the Ba,th state to
accomplish them?
Cynicism and the political economy of
Syria
Bilals interjection made apparent the contra-
diction between their contemporary circum-
stances and the language of Ba,th party
ideology. Yet, neither Bilal nor Mohammed
ever went so far as to convey an all-encom-
passing cynicism toward political projects of
socio-economic transformation writ large.
True, they diverge in which outfit they
invested their faithbe that, Nusra, the
LCCs or the Free Syrian Armybut theirs
was not a stance of postmodern incredulity
toward meta-narratives. It never appeared
that the idea of unity of the Syrian people
was being laughed at, nor the ideals socialism,
liberation, least of all a society organised
along more equitable lines. Instead, what
appeared to be the actual target of their cyni-
cism was specifically Bashar al-Assads gov-
ernment and the very idea that his
government had any real intention of materi-
ally realising the partys supposed founda-
tional pillars.
Our laughter and Bilals cynicism might
not have surprised Lisa Wedeen, a political
scientist and specialist on Syria. Wedeen
(1999) described a phenomenon ostensibly
similar in her book Ambiguities of Domina-
tion. She documents the private jokes and
public parodies that targeted the personality
cult that came to envelop the late president,
PROUDFOOT: THE SMELL OF BLOOD 7
Hafiz al-Assad. What Wedeen argues is that
this mockery evidences a prevalent public
cynicism. Syrians, she suggests, never took
the exaggerated claims of the Assad cult
seriously. Rather, the cult acted more like a
disciplinary mechanism for enforcing the
correct guidelines to behaviour and speech
across a host of scenarios and spaces. The
result was citizens only behaved as if they
revered the leader.
Crucially, this does not mean the cult
lacked power, for even if we do not take
things seriously, even if we keep an ironical
distance, we are still doing them (Zizek
1992, 155 cited in Wedeen 1999, 155). This
reasoning is doubtless sound in relation to
some of the regimes most obviously absurd
claims like: Hafiz al-Assad is the countrys
premier pharmacist who knows all things
about all issues (Wedeen 1999, 1). But
without factoring in political economy or a
wider articulation of Syrian voices outside
of the bourgeois intelligentsia, her argument
for public compliance and mass cynicism
should not be quickly generalised to the
regime and its ideology in totality. Wedeen,
in fact, seems to make some slippages
between specific critiques of the Assad per-
sonality cult to a more general analysis of
the state. For instance, she presents the
reader with a comedy script ostensibly
attacking the states policy and assumed
failure to subsidise sugar and fuel (Wedeen
1999, 106). For Wedeen, this appears
designed to draw attention to the fact that
the state, cannot celebrate its economic
policy, and this is presumably because her
research participants think it is bad economic
policy to subsidise basic commodities. And
certainly, it is bad policy if you are, perhaps,
a sugar merchant. But one of the first things
Mohammed ever told me about his familys
economic circumstances was that we can
barely afford a sack of sugar these days.
The accelerating price of sugar was, in fact,
the most common complaint I heard when I
asked rebel-workers about economic con-
ditions prior to the uprising. Perhaps the
reason why sugarout of all other possible
8 CITY
commoditiesgarnered the most attention is
thanks to the role it plays in the drinking of
tea. And as anyone who has visited Syria
can attest, sharing sweetened black tea is an
essential component of sociality. To make
sugar unaffordable is to make unaffordable
a small but quite fundamental gesture of hos-
pitality, and a gesture central to social iden-
tity. For Syrias rural poor, the subsidisation
of sugar was, then, no laughing matter. In
sum, economic policies are in the last instance
about determining the distribution of capital,
the manner in which this distribution is con-
ceptualised may well be imagined as related
back to some aspect of a phantasmagorical
personality cult, the kindness of the leader
and so onbut distribution is, itself, none-
theless real. That is to say, Mohammeds
family presumably could once afford sugar
and now they cannot.
In other words, previous re-distributive
policies in Syria had led to material trans-
formations, and indeed there was a general
reduction of inequality between Syrias
rural and urban populations. The contrast
between the rural and the urban was noted
best by the historian Hanna Batatu, who
argued that for Syrias countryside, the
citiesespecially Aleppo and Damascus
have been the seats of distant imperialist
rulers, tax collectors, the gendarmes and
foreign occupations (Batatu 1981, 336). The
countryside came to understand the urban
as being full of the inhospitable, the
haughty and the imperious. The Damascene
merchant, as a common rural knowledge
would have it, [. . .] will extract profit even
from his father (ibid.). The conflict that
came to define post-independence pre-
Bathist Syria was, for the most part, gener-
ated through in-fighting between landed
elites to the neglect of the countryside. The
rural poor garnered little attention through-
out the mid-20th century where, in Syria, a
series of coups, countercoups, rapidly chan-
ging cabinets and swift re-writings of the
constitutions instead held centre stage (Hin-
nebusch 2004; Perthes 1997; Seale and
McConville 1990; Van Dam 2011).
Against this history, one of the central
explanatory factors as to why the Ba,th
party succeeded in ending state-level instabil-
ity where others failed lies in the partys
capacity and ideological willingness to fold
into its project those otherwise neglected
rural and impoverished Syrians. Through
this process, popular legitimacy was afforded
to the Ba,th state which rested not solely on
external political factors, or the barrier of
fear evoked by the states repressive appar-
atus, but also built a politico-economic
system that limited total impoverishment
and brought down the most rampant
degrees of inequality. Or, as Jamal put it
once:
People say the Syrian regime created security
. . . I mean, before the uprising . . . but you
know the truth? They never created the
security; the Syrian people created it. Just
look now, when we all decided wed had
enough, that security went away so easily . . .
didnt it?
To achieve a compromise between these
competing social formations, the economic
policies adopted in the Baathist state that
emerged in the 1970s after Hafiz al-Assads
corrective revolution allowed for some
limited space in which the private sector
could expand. This selective opening
awarded the traditional elites with an
avenue to advance economic interests
(Azmeh 2014, 8; Hinnebusch 2004, 89 93).
Such selective liberalisation was nonetheless
far removed from a Sadat-like renunciation
of socialism (Hinnebusch 2004, 91). In
1970s Syria, the bourgeois were never
awarded privileged access to policymaking
and any desire they had for extended
accumulation opportunities was balanced by
the power of corporative popular organis-
ations (ibid.). In short, the bourgeois did
not fully recapture the state and the space
they were awarded was tactical in so far as
power-grabs and squabbles between the
high bourgeoisie and urban notables had
hitherto resulted in continuous political
tension and instability. If these elites were

threatened with more radical redistributive
measures, then further incapacitating hostili-
ties could have followed given their access
to Muslim Brotherhood sympathisers.
However, throughout the 1970s the regime
also maintained an ability to threaten
business elites with populist anti-corruption
campaigns which could crack down on osten-
tatious elite accumulation; this fact was
further combined with the states relative
autonomy bought through oil rent. The mer-
chant bourgeois were, then, subservient to
the party.
A set of protectionist trade policies also
prevented local markets from being flooded
with cheap imports. This policy assisted
bourgeois Syrians who had become engaged
in various manufacturing industries (Azmeh
2014, 8). Indeed, as we saw in Jamals life
history, these small-scale manufactories,
repair shops and the like were somewhat
capable of absorbing reserve flows of labour
power as it emerged intermittently through-
out the Syrian countryside. The state also
built an employment-generating public
sector that placed significant investments on
infrastructure and other large-scale industrial
projects (Rabo 1986).
Generations of rural Syrians born under
the early Baathist state benefited greatly
from subsidised food, electricity and trans-
port, as well as price controls on agricultural
inputs like fuel and fertiliser. Sugar, transport
and fuel had received, since 1963 to the mid-
2000s, up to 40% reductions in costs thanks
to state subsidies. While these processes and
their attendant webs of bureaucracy were
not without slippages and contradictions,
under early Bathist Syria poverty diminished
and human development indicators rose, even
in Syrias poorest regions (Azmeh 2014;
Batatu 1999; Hinnebusch 2012; Khatib 2011;
Rabo 1986). On top of pricing subsidies
came universal healthcare and state edu-
cation, as well as guaranteed pricing on
agro-outputs and the possibility for gainful
employment in the state sector, further
decreasing unemployment and limiting
inequality.
PROUDFOOT: THE SMELL OF BLOOD 9
Moving into the 1980s, Syria maintained
one of the most redistributive taxation
systems in the region, with a high rate of
income tax on top-earning groups. In
reality, the enforcement of this system was
lax, leading to minimal private sector contri-
bution to the state coffers (Azmeh 2014).
However, laxness itself had political efficacy:
it kept at bay the reactionary elite who might
have otherwise sought more links to inter-
national actors in an attempt to sow
discord. Political stability was maintained,
while gaps in the state budget were accounted
for through resource-based extractive
activity, that is, oil and minerals, as well aid
flows from other Arab nations and the
Soviet Union (Hinnebusch 2012).
By the 1990s it had become clear that this
arrangement was no longer sustainable. At
that time, the implemented system of targeted
privatisation did not generate enough capital
flow into the state budget that would have
been capable of reversing a decline in oil
rent following a decrease in supply, this
then coupled with the weakening of geopoli-
tical rent flows after the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the worldwide retreat of social-
ism. These facts linked with a significant
demographic boom and a low rate of overall
economic expansion. By the turn of the
century, there were now serious limitations
appearing in the Baths states politico-econ-
omic strategy. Thusand in the face of
worldwide US capital led pressure pushing
states toward market opennessBashar al-
Assad deepened liberalisation adjustments
that had already commenced during later
periods of his fathers rule.
Crucially, the impact of these reforms was
not equitably distributed across Syrias socio-
economic groups. The business and regime
elite acted in a way that strengthened their
stranglehold over the economy and the alli-
ance between the military regime and the
business elite intensified, morphing rapidly
into a single ruling class presiding over what
was fast becoming a distinctly crony capital-
ist economy (Azmeh 2014; Haddad 2012;
Hinnebusch 2012).
10 CITY
Syrias increased pace of neo-liberal
reforms did not occur in a geopolitical
vacuum. The collusion between the mer-
chant military Assad-led class and US-led
capital meant that the state bourgeois actively
facilitated the subordination of the Syrian
economy to US imperialism (Kadri 2012).
With that, the bourgeois transformed into a
full comprador class, eroding the security of
working people by promoting import-led
growth (Kadri 2012). So, rather than, for
instance, implementing a taxation system
that might have maintained the all-important
redistributive pact between the city and the
countryside, the cost of economic restructur-
ing was, to be borne completely by poorer
sections in society through ending the
earlier social compromise (Azmeh 2014, 20).
From the mid-2000s onwards, nearly all
subsidies were cancelledexcept for bread
(Khatib 2011, 135). Even on the basis of offi-
cial figures, the Gini index between 1997 and
2004 rose from 0.33 to 0.37, with a 11%
increase in inequality. In all likelihood, this
was significantly higher on the eve of the
uprising in 2011 (Khatib 2011, 206; Al-
Laithy and Abu-Ismail 2005). This accelera-
tion in poverty must also be read with an
eye to the fact that many of these policies
were implemented in a top-down hurried
manner with seemingly zero research about
the ground conditions.
In the early 2000s, geopolitical rent, tourist
revenues and remittances from migrant
workers were all now essential to maintain a
semblance of Syrias prior macroeconomic
position and to prevent absolute poverty.
Things worsened again by the mid-2000s
and by 2007 Syria went ahead with signing
a free trade agreement with Turkey, flooding
Syria with cheap goods. This agreement,
combined with the impact of Chinese
imports, meant that by 2010, small-scale pro-
ducers, and textile and furniture makers were
increasingly unable to compete with their
international counterparts (Azmeh 2014,
15). On top of this, subsidies over energy,
agro-inputs and state purchase guarantees
were cancelled. The impact of these
cancellations compounded with other pro-
blems regarding poor water management,
and they hit their hardest during a period in
which Syria faced its most severe drought in
modern history (Azmeh 2014, 20; De
Chatel 2014; Gleick 2014; Mohtadi 2012).
Economic life in Syrias rural communities
was eviscerated.
Shadi
So tell mewhy do you think the uprising
started?, I said to Shadi, one summer
evening in 2013. Shadi is originally from a
rural village on the banks of the Euphrates,
close to the Syrian Iraqi border town of
Abu Kamal. Hes 24, about 5 ft 9 in., he
wears tight jeans with pointed shoes, and
his dark hair is combed neatly and waxed
down. Shadi replied:
Look the beginning of the revolution remains
a subject of mystery; its causes are not really
understood, [But] we knew the regime, we
knew the secret police, and we knew their
power. You wouldnt simply gamble with
your life or the lives of the people. We have
been very patient, for four decades we were
willing to get lower and lower, and then
suddenly we woke up from sleep [w,na min
al-nawm] and decided to fly [. . .] we rose into
freedom.
Shadis story is a familiar one, like many
others he had planned only for a temporary
migration to Lebanon. Yet, as the uprising
transformed into civil war, Shadi found that
with each passing month his remittances
grew more vital. What strength the rural
economy once exhibited faded into
memory. Al-ziraa kanit btkaf [Agriculture
was sufficient], he told me, we once could
live on it if we had to.
For Shadias with Jamal, Mohammed and
Bilalmigration once was supplementary.
On occasion, his family had deployed accu-
mulated remittances to hire local farmers to
work their agricultural holdings, thereby
freeing his father to generate additional

income working a range of jobs in Kuwait.
Beginning in 2006, Shadi, though still
young, can recall the tightening of belts. He
remembers that his familys cotton crops
were generating less revenue and then, to
top it off, his father developed a back injury
which further inhibited his capacity for work.
Shadis decision to migrate can be read
against these broader stories of declining
welfare and unemployment, and like Jamal,
he too understood these socio-economic con-
ditions as having informed a desire for
freedom, and leading to his sense of identifi-
cation with emerging opposition protests that
were rolling out across Syria. Roughly one
year later, Shadi found himself in Beirut stand-
ing with me as we watched a Syrian worker
football league. Growing tired of seeing my
friends lose at football, I slipped off to buy
an espresso and packet of cigarettes. The
vendor, a local Lebanese man, regularly sub-
jected me to suspicious looks. But this time,
he proceeded with direct questioning: Who
do you know here?, he said as I approached.
Shadi, who had been standing close by cut
in and said, Hes our friend, its not a
problem. He swiftly ushered me away.
Now at a distance, he continued, That guy
is with harakeh, and Dont talk to him too
_
much, he might report you, he probably
just thinks youre a spy.8
Still a little nervous despite Shadis under-
statement, I thanked him.
Dont worry, he said. We know how to
stop trouble with these guys.
In wide-reaching political debates, Shadi
would make frequent references to concepts
like democracy, dignity and freedom.
Like many, he suggested the regime denied
people freedom of expression and was fun-
damentally corrupt. He made comparisons
between the suspicion my presence was
invoking in Sabra with the secret police and
security apparatus in Syria. I learned too
that Shadi classifies himself as a supporter of
the Free Syrian Army, but that he had
only participated peacefully, in one or two
demonstrations, as well as via the media
[al-i,lam] by which he meant Facebook and
PROUDFOOT: THE SMELL OF BLOOD 11
WhatsApp groups. Shadis central argument
was that freedom is impossible when one
has a government denying citizens karama
[dignity].
So what do you mean by dignity?, I
retorted. How does the government take it
from you?
Dignity is close to freedom, he assured
me. Dignity means the government assists
its people so that they can do what they
want with their lives, and they should
not let people go hungry; [they should]
provide jobs . . . all these young men I know,
back home, have nothing. No opportunities
. . . or if they do work, its usually in low paid
jobs. We should also not be punished for
having an opinion on this.
Shadi insisted that freedom of conscience and
expression are central to making a better
future in Syria. He then gestured at the
ragged football pitch where we stood, and
pointed to the pristine and evidently more
expensive one next door: This is the discrimi-
nation government should preventwe have
no dignity here; we play next to the Lebanese
on their expensive pitch. We play in trash.
Continuing with this theme, Shadi said,
Have you seen the mountain of trash near
Sayda?
Yes, I replied.
And whats your opinion?, Shadi asked.
Dont you laugh? The Lebanese are arrogant
[shafn halun], they say this is an advanced
_
country, and then you go south, and theres a
mountain of trash next to the seait is a
symbol of all the corruption and all thats
wrong with this government: how can they
call this freedom if there is no dignity.
Well, ok, I get your point, I said, but what
about Syria?
Oh, its just as bad, maybe worse: not only
does the government not care about its citi-
zens dignity, but it tries always to take it
from us.
Shadi went on to expound how insti-
tutions, like military service, strip the
12 CITY
peoples dignity forcing them to act as what
he thinks of as slaves for corrupt officers
and that this is against human rights.
This is not democracy. We cant say no;
we cant protest conditions, he said.
Democracy in this instance signified
something directnot just exercising a
vote in a parliamentary electionbut the
ability to influence decisions; to control
ones destiny and indeed not be subjected
to arbitrary exercises of power. Democ-
racy, freedom and dignity all appear inter-
connected. The North American critical
theorist, Susan Buck-Morss (2003), has
stressed something similar to this, writing
that:
[. . .] in a post-colonial context, dignity
matters. Better put, dignity is freedom in a
different sense, as liberation from Western
hegemony [. . .] if the adoption of Western-
defined freedom brings with it submission to
Western power, the purported goal is
undermined by the self-alienating means.
(46)
So, perhaps Shadis political imagination is
achieving a similar sense of resistance
through his tight but at the same time vague
connections between democracy, freedom instinct toward concentrations of wealth
and dignity.
In our broader discussions, the cancellation
or radical reform of military service rep-
resented a central and, on the face of it, a dis-
tinct contention. Shadi doubted whether a
genuine change was possible, but was not
entirely against the idea of a future service
that actually works for the people. But as
it stands, it works only for the regime and
its corrupt practices. For many of these
men, military service is also a personal
matter. Shadi had not served in the military,
nor does he want to. In fact, part of his motiv-
ation for leaving the protests and travelling to
Lebanon was to avoid service. This unrealised
demand for reforming service was an as yet
unmentioned factor which also structured his
decision to migrate to Lebanon. Here, in one
of our interviews, he was very clear he has no
intention of signing up:
They enlist us on the basis of a lie: liberating
the Golan Heights and Palestine. Let us say
we are emotional people, we dont like
anyone to laugh at us, but unfortunately the
regime is laughing at us. They are exploiting
the peoples kindness. But now we are awake,
we see the oppression, they have taken
[stripped] our dignity. They are cheap, they
exploit the idea of liberating Palestine, but we
dont liberate anything. We are not even
liberated; we are not free.
If an analysis of sentiments like those
expressed above by Shadi, and earlier by
Jamal, was to begin by setting down, as nar-
rowly as possible, how these men seemed to
be defining and precisely comprehending
some of the most debated concepts in politi-
cal philosophy we soon would run into diffi-
culty. Understandings are often vague, and
typically multifaceted. Shadi revealed his
freedom to be swamped with meanings.
One might argue hes variously implying
both positive and negative liberty (i.e.
Berlin 1969). He is seemingly arguing for
both economic and civil rights. An Aristote-
lian notion of self-worth and human
flourishing through active participation in
the polis is intermingling with a levelling
and power; in other words, we could say
his freedom is not too distant from equal-
ity (see also Laclau 2005, 76; Rude 1964,
224 225).
Populist reason
I think that the polysemy in Jamal and Shadis
political vocabulary can be best clarified if the
Syrian uprising is understood primarily as a
populist struggle seeking to overturn the
pauperisation that has resulted from Syrias
neo-liberal policy direction transforming the
state bourgeois into a fully fledged compra-
dor class willingly subservient to US-led
capital. The on-the-ground, anti-poor
impacts of these policies are the structure
from which decisions to migrate to urban
slums or even attend protests first emerge.
Dispossession and wealth-snatching from

the poor meant that the redistributive mech-
anism that once kept inequality between the
city and the countryside in check fell away
and, in the gaps, this created a series of popu-
list demands drawn from pressing socio-
economic grievances. This collapse and the
antagonisms it produced likely informed
Bilals cynical disavowal of the Ba,th partys
ideological pillars: unity, liberty and
socialism.
This points to a central feature of the
Syrian uprisings populist language: founda-
tional antagonisms could not have been
smoothly articulated through the rhetoric of
class struggle, socialism and anti-imperialism,
given that this language was already monopo-
lised and discredited by the regime and its
facilitation of elite accumulation. Therefore,
the demanding of freedom, human rights,
democracy and the end of military service different individuals is achieved through
need not necessarily represent an investment
in bourgeois political or civil rights but a
populist rhetorical gesture that announces
opposition to regime hypocrisy. But what
makes the uprising a populist struggle in the
first place?
Populism has been analysedand politi-
cally denigratedfor its imprecision and its
use of rhetorically moving empty words
intended to sway the masses (Canovan 1981;
MacRae 1969). Populist politics, in this
frame, is contrasted with developed politics
due to its ideological emptiness, anti-intel-
lectualism and use of fleeting surges in
narrow self-interested struggle. These per-
spectives have been systematically dismissed
by the political philosopher, Ernesto Laclau
(2005) in his book: On Populist Reason. He
argued that the relative ideological simplicity
and emptiness [of populism] is seen in most
cases as the prelude to an elitist dismissal,
but instead populism [. . .] should be
approached in terms of what those processes
of simplification and emptying are attempt-
ing to performthat is to say, the social
rationality they express (73). He asks, is
not the vagueness of populist discourse
the consequence of social reality itself being,
in some situations, vague and undetermined?
PROUDFOOT: THE SMELL OF BLOOD 13
And if so, populism might be best seen as a
performative act endowed with rationality
of its ownthat is to say, in some situations,
vagueness is a precondition to a constructing
of relevant political meanings (17 18). What
this emphasis on performance implies is that
populism can be considered as a political
style and not a distinct ideology. The politi-
cal formations that resulted from the Syrian
uprising can be framed as populist but not
defined as such. Political practices do not
express the nature of social agents but,
instead constitute the latter (33; my empha-
sis). Thus, populisms distinctiveness lies in
its capacity to gather together common grie-
vances towards political power or authority,
here meaning, the people and the regime
[al-sha,b wa al-nizam].9
Laclau maintains that the consolidation of
their unification in relation to a particular
series of demandscommon grievances
which themselves become unified through
the arrival of empty signifiers. Empty signif-
iers are conceptual nouns, such as freedom,
which lack direct specificity, or even
context-specific antagonisms that can, none-
theless, be drained of their particularity.
Vagueness in such an understanding of
populist language is now essential if particu-
lar demands are going to stand for the
diverse range of socio-economic antagon-
isms. So, in the formation of populist move-
ments, the empty signifiers that emerge
typically come first from particular
demands that have an enduring resonance.
This resonance means in the circulation of
discourse that these demands appear drained
of their direct particularisms. Ending mili-
tary service, stopping corruption or
freedom of expression stand out as key
examples in Syria.
For example, when rebel-workers
expressed their opposition to corruption I
never felt they were advocating some alterna-
tive system of monopoly laws, financial
ombudsmen, trade regulations, small claims
courts and the like. Rather, the demand to
end corruption stood for a more significant
14 CITY
rejection of an entire politico-economic
system that had enabled a crony regime elite
to siphon off massive amounts of capital,
while rural and working-class Syrians found
they could no longer afford even the most
basic items of social reproduction. It is then
not for nothing that one of the first protests
of the uprising ended with crowds burning
down the Syriatel offices in Daraaa
mobile phone company with a monopoly
share held by Bashar al-Assads cousin,
Rami Makhlouf (Badran 2011; MacLeod
2011; Shadid 2011).
Laclaus example of these processes of
populist articulation comes from Russia in
1917. Lenin unified deep socio-economic
antagonisms through his slogan, Bread,
peace and land. These particular demands
were evidently not the conceptual denomi-
nator of all Russian social demands
rather, through a process of over-determi-
nation, grievances which had nothing to do
with those three demands nevertheless
expressed themselves through them (Laclau
2005, 98). This is what an empty signifier
is. But, unlike Russia of 1917, the Arab upris-
ings of 2011 can be said to have lacked a dis-
tinct unifying charismatic leader. Regardless,
through the networking of individuals,
bread still emerged as a popular demand
through the popular slogan: al-khobz wa
al-horia [bread and freedom] (Cavatorta
_
2012; Dayoub 2012; Lynch 2011). In
Arabic, khobz [bread] holds similar meta-
phorical associations as it does in English
meaning sustenance in general. As with
20th-century Russia, what was being
expressed through the word bread were
also notions of social justice vis-a-vis increas-
ing poverty, inequality and a more general
opposition toward the material outcome of
neo-liberal policy. In short, revolutionary
language is not a directly transparent
mediumit is necessarily vague because the
forces uprisings of this ilk are trying to
unite are often vague (Laclau 2005, 98).
Despite many wrangling with informants
what society would you prefer to live in,
one with liberty or one with equality?
they would simply refuse to see the contra-
diction, for the people bread means
freedom and freedom means bread.
Assumptions that populism results from
some marginal or primitive political logic
are best avoided (Laclau 2005, 99). For
Laclau, there is always a performative aspect
to language and especially performative
language; that is to say, rhetoric is not
only vacant and moving but also potent
and constitutive. In this sense, Shadis rhe-
torical speech acts can be seen as working
toward (re)constituting the people and it is
the people who once were suppressed that
woke up and stood for all of society. The
people aimed to overthrow what was under-
stood as an exploitative and parasitic alien
class of ruler. This process of alienating
and distancing of the state and its apparatus
from the people goes some way to explain-
ing why very rarely would opposition-com-
mitted individuals refer to the conflict as a
civil war [harb ahla], at least without clari-
_
fication. In these earlier moments of the
uprising they were the civil, that is: the
whole, and supporters of the regime and
the regime itself are external to this. It also
explains why the language of Ba,th ideology
was avoided.
At the same time, Shadi and Jamals awa-
kening narratives were not then orientalist
tropes but performative gestures. These ges-
tures were not intended to be historically
accurate expressions of Syrian political pas-
sivity; rather, the root of Shadis awakening
might be better located in the verbal suffix,
na, that is, the first person plural pronoun:
we. It is this we that then goes on to point
to that military service as exploiting the idea
of liberating Palestine when he says we
are not even liberated; we are not free.
This is expressive and constitutive of the
emerging and widening chasm between what-
ever hold the regime once had over the
masses. Its also the heart of the simplifica-
tion which critics of populism oppose, yet
such simplification appears a necessary
content for all radical political projects
only in a world where politics has been

replaced entirely with an administration
dealing with particularised differences
would we find this tendency eliminated
(Laclau 2005, 74). A differential response to
the worsening economic conditions for
Syrias rural base was not made available by
the state. This would have entailed, for
example, a progressive taxation system pro-
viding for welfare safety nets or employment
in new industrial projects. Instead, average
citizens, as we have seen, were increasingly
forced to navigate alone, through migration,
the weight the liberalisation agenda was
placing on social reproduction. March 2011
was understood to rupture this socio-politi-
cal order. In this sense, Shadis use of we and
his use of al-sha,b [the people] are linked.
Political activity and contestation before
2011 were marked by specific underlying
demands, but these demands had not
linked up with other demands across Syria,
or even in the region more generally. The
point is that remittance flows from migrants
were more or less able to plug these gaps in
welfare provision. It is the linking of unmet
demands and the establishment of solidarity
across these equivalential chains that deter-
mined the emergence of the people as a pol-
itical force (Laclau 2005, 77).
In sum, instead of trying to define what
Syrian rebel-workers mean specifically by
words like freedom, human rights and so
on, it appears more fruitful to reveal, and eth-
nographically embed, what demands were
being tied together by such terms.
Freedom in this reading is a rhetorical
response to a lacking of fullness which
requires a solution to a host of grievances to
which Shadi attributed his non-freedom,
running from cancelling/reforming military
service via reforming the oppressive state
apparatus to reducing inequalities and cor-
ruption more generally.
Shadis demands have contextual and histori-
cal specificities. While we may have an idea
about what these empty signifiers are
PROUDFOOT: THE SMELL OF BLOOD 15
doing we dont know why this signifier?
Why these demands and not others? These
historical contingencies play a major role
yet they remain absent in Laclaus more
abstract philosophical model.
To begin, populism, as political practice,
is nothing new to contemporary Syrian
history (Hinnebusch 2004, 1 16). I described
above how, in the early days, the Syrian Ba,th
party quelled conflict amongst an establish-
ment of traditional elites and landholders,
and it endeavoured to group together the
masses through the promulgation of egalitar-
ian discourse and policy. Unity, Liberty
and Socialism were not simply hollow
words throughout the entirety of the Ba,th
partys rule. This Syrian popular authoritar-
ianism incorporated professionals, military
officers, marginalised religious minorities
and a significant proportion of the fallahn
_
(ibid., 3).
Since the 1990s, however, these words have
increasingly rung hollow. Yet the official
ideology of anti-imperialist struggle, resist-
ance, socialism, etc., has remained in circula-
tion via the school curriculum and in official
state media. Moreover, beyond words, certain
institutions like military service, which were
conceived of as essential to the anti-imperialist
struggle, also remain in place. What this means
is that in a case of authoritarian upgrading the
long-standing socio-economic pact disinte-
grated and bourgeois accumulation was
increasingly permitted. Yet, at the same time,
the repressive state apparatus with its anti-
imperialist discourses was left untouched
(Hinnebusch 2012).
The military has long been central to the
Ba,th state, with the Syrian Arab Army
standing as key institutional foundation
block for the regime (Van Dam 2011).
However, the military has also increasingly
taken on a sectarian dimension (ibid., 34
48). The sectarianism within the armed
forces resulted partially from the ever-
present threat of state-level fragmentation
thanks to a history of imperialist divide-
and-rule policies. Sectarian manipulations
have been intensified historically when
16 CITY
colonial powers strengthen patronage net-
works, in this case, it meant the favouring
of Alawi men in the French Mandates mili-
tary academies. For Syrias impoverished
rural communities in post-independence
Syria, there were two options for self-
advancement, either a career in the army or
education. It is little surprise that these two
professions came to dominate the Ba,th
party. Indeed, in the wake of the Ba,th
coup, these loyal Alawi men filled key
officer positions, and its these men who
became the states chief power brokers
(Hinnebusch 2004).
So, in short, the disarticulation of the
regimes populist body has required both an
alternative language and an alternative set of
demands to the those of unity, liberty and
socialism. This is because such a rhetoric
has been monopolised and discredited by
the regime itself. Fundamentally, this does
not mean anti-neo-liberal social and econ-
omic demands were off the table, rather
perhaps just that these demands were
instead made through a populist rhetoric of
civil and political rights.
Conclusion
This paper opened by juxtaposing Joseph
Massads (2011, 2012) critique of Western
liberal medias narratives of the Arab
Spring, with Jamals memories of how he
felt during the early stages of the Syrian revo-
lution. Massad was opposing the tendency
toward ahistorical reductions of the uprisings
to awakenings which he assumes amount to
an endorsement of liberal bourgeois demo-
cratic capitalism, as well as ignorance to the
forms of political contestation that have
existed in the Middle East since the end of
empire. But, perhaps, on the level of populist
revolutionary subjectivities, a certain degree
of ahistoricism appears central to the individ-
uals understanding and interpretation of
revolutionary moments?
Certainly, the Syrian rebel-workers I
know, by virtue of being caught up both
directly and indirectly within a moment of
political rupture, tended to look back on the
time before 2011 and see a radical break
with the past. I have argued that the presence
of terminology like human rights, free
speech and democracy in Syrian rebel-
worker narratives does not necessarily mean
that they are caught up in Euro-American
or Arab media discourses that neglect the
demand for economic rights that have been
increasingly denied thanks to the anti-poor
outcomes of the regimes recent neo-liberal
policy direction.
This argument has six key components: (1)
in the early stages, the Syrian uprising exhib-
ited populist sentiments and practices; (2)
this populism was re-appropriating an
already existing popular base and searching
for an alternative new discourse that was
distant from the regime; (3) the regimes
actions over the past 20 years have led to a
discrediting of the language of class struggle,
re-distribution and socio-economic rights;
(4) the dislodging of the popular base led
to the strengthening of a frontier between
the people and the regime; (5) this frontier
emerged in relation to the equivalisation of
demands; (6) these demands are collectively
articulated through empty signifiers which
are necessarily vague so that they come to
symbolically stand for other heterogeneous
demands which individuals direct at the
regime, and to which the regime could not
provide answers.
So, it might be true some of these words
first gained some prominence thanks to
their centrality within mainstream media,
but its harder to say for certain the degree
to which their meaning has been fixed.
Words like freedom and dignity appear
here not to have any positive content but
instead find their meaning only relationally,
their deployment being more attributive
performative than logico-deductive. This is
where Syrian rebel-workers are unified,
they all articulated grievances against the
regime which they saw as the main block pre-
venting freedom and dignity. Behind these
empty signifiers lies a chain of antagonisms,

like the compulsion to work low-paid jobs in
Syria, a lack of employment opportunities and
the domination of corruption. Against this
military service and the populist demand to
reform it or end it, could encapsulate the call
for freedom and dignity as well as stand for
more general socio-economic antagonisms
and contradictions that have emerged over
the past 20 years as the economic pact
between the regime and the masses eroded.
To conclude with some necessary pessi-
mism: mass populist antagonisms toward
processes of accumulation by dispossession,
in the absence of progressive social for-
mations capable of representing the interests
of labour, mean that moments of more or
less directionless uprising are particularly
ripe for exploitation. In part, this admission
explains why, in 2016, Syria can appear a
total political, economic and social cata-
strophe. This catastrophe materialised on
the basis of an initially popular uprising that
was degraded and manipulated from the
start by international-regional powers and
local comprador classes, who were able to
PROUDFOOT: THE SMELL OF BLOOD 17
latch on to mass discontent and thereby
provide misdirection for those grievances in
the service not of working Syrian people,
but US-led capital.
Thus, [. . .] at [populisms] root is the
experience of lack, a gap which has emerged
in the harmonious constitution of the
social. There is a fullness of the community
that is missing (Laclau 2005, 85; my empha-
sis). The hope of returning to a fullness of
the community, with the current lack satis-
fied and the gap in the harmonious consti-
tution of the social bridged, is what can be
promised by counterrevolutionary for-
mations, but, equally, it is also what first lay
behind those words: The People Want the
Downfall of the Regime [al-sha,b yurd
isqat al-nizam].
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my research assistant, Abdullah, for
all his invaluable hard work and willingness to introduce
me into the world of Syrian labour in Beirut. I would also
18 CITY
like to thank Ashok Kumar and Mahdi Zaidan for their
encouraging comments. Finally, I presented this paper
at the Association of Social Anthropology conference
at Durham University in the summer of 2016 and bene-
fited immensely from a very responsive and engaged
panel.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the
author.
Notes
1 Classificatory terminology is here down to informant
usage. Throughout the text I have, for example, used
the term revolution. This is not to make any
normative claim on the analytic accuracy of the term
in the Syrian context. Rather, the revolution [al-
thawra] was almost exclusively deployed by research
informants to describe what has occurred in Syria
since 2011. Furthermore, I refer to the government in
Damascus as The Regime [al-nizam]. Again, I do so
with awareness of how this terminology is often
strategically deployed in Western discourse to
delegitimise non-aligned governments (The Syrian
Regime, but more often than not the Saudi
Government). However, al-nizam was the term
universally deployed by Syrian workers (and for
reasons this paper makes clear).
2 Abdullah and Haytham are village friends from far
eastern Syria; both studied at the Lebanese
University. For academically inclined members of
Syrias more impoverished rural and semi-rural
communities, studying at the Lebanese University
represented an alluring prospect. Lebanons only
state university requires minimal registration fees.
True, it would have been cheaper for them to enter
one of Syrias universities, but being in Lebanon
meant the possibility of working in Beirut. Whatever
that work wasfrom construction site labour to
warehousingit typically meant earning twice the
equivalent wage in Syria. Balancing study with work
enabled the men to send vital remittances, often up to
$200 per month, back home to their struggling
families.
3 The term fallahn [singular: fallah] is often directly
_
translated to the English, peasant. This is, however,
not entirely accurate given that a peasant generally
implies that the worker does not own the land. In the
Middle East, by contrast, sometimes the term is used
for landless farmworkers, but it can also be applied to
those who simultaneously own and work the land. For
this reason, the general term land worker is perhaps
a more appropriate translation.
4 The term revolutionary subjectivity is used
throughout this paper and it refers here to the point at
which the individual begins to think of herself as part
of a broader collective united by a common goal of
overturning the regime and forcing a radical
transformation in the distribution of wealth and
power in society. As a concept revolutionary
subjectivity is related to the Marxist notion of class
consciousness, but differs in the sense that it
describes more general revolutionary dispositions
rather than merely class awareness, and acting in
class interests. Moreover, otherwise materially
opposed groupings might share in these similar
revolutionary dispositions (i.e. solidarity) therefore
revolutionary subjectivity can spread through the
traditional proletariat but can also be found amongst
the rural, rural urban migrants, students and
intellectuals.
5 I refer here to Syrian migrant workers who
participated in the uprising but also took up migrant
work in Beirut as rebel-workers. Direct participation
means attending protests; indirect means the
circulation of contentious political revolutionary
objects via communication technology. Moreover,
their identity is hybridised further in the sense that the
underlying politico-economic forces that appeared to
structure the decision to migrate to Lebanon for work
resemble the forces that many now suggest lie under
the Syria uprising itself.
6 The historical memory of Hamas brutal suppression
could also be argued necessary. This point is, in
reality, more nuanced. When we discussed the
1980s massacre, Abdullah suggested to Jamal this
was different for those who directly lived through the
1980s, They always remember Hama and tell us not
to protest because of it, he said. In Deir Ezzor our
parents all thought the protests would be very
dangerous.
7 An empty signifier is understood here as a word that
lacks defined content in the same way that words
like apple do. So, should I write now the word
apple (the signifier), I can presume were roughly
thinking about the same thing, and that the reader
has in her head an image of that green or red fruit
(the signified). If I wrote, instead, the word freedom,
the signified seems to have a different quality, and Im
less able to assume the image(s) in my head is/are
the same as the reader.
8 Harakat Amal (often clipped to Amal or Haraka) is
a political party typically explained to meby rebel-
workers as being popular amongst Lebanons Shia
community as well as a party known for its support of
the Syrian regime (see Norton 1987).
9 This term, the regime, is here the context-specific
instance of what Laclau (2005, 117) classifies as the
institutionalised otherregimented bureaucratic
centres of power. The people, by contrast, contains
a necessarily broad diversity of positions and

interests and thus diverse and heterogeneous
demands that, in the revolutionary moment, must be
somehow unified.
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Dr Philip Proudfoot is the Assistant Director
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