Antonio Gramsci’s adage that “the old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” is painfully apt for the Arab world.
Trapped in cycles of revolt, the region replaces one tyranny with another, endlessly recycling power under the guise of change while contending with the relentless pressures of global rivalries.
If the region was once under the iron fist of statist authoritarianism, it is now the perpetual ‘revolution’ itself that seems to be its bane: a morbid banalisation of revolutionary change itself.
If Western powers once propped up autocrats in defiance of the people's will, they now appear to champion disenchanted masses — a grotesque contradiction, symptomatic of an empire in dissolution.
Recently, as December crept into the war-ravaged Middle East, the world was met with a familiar spectacle, this time in Syria: jubilant crowds filling the streets, storming palaces and firing guns to mark the fall of another autocrat. It was a textbook scene of chaos, emblematic of late-modernity politics played out under the looming shadow of neoliberalism.
Yet again, another Arab nation looked set for a changing of the guard and a new flag, only for the dust to settle on a return to ‘business as usual’ – the eventual ‘return to normal’.
Against the backdrop of celebrations and cautious hopes, Syrian rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, emerged in an unexpected guise, donning a suit and white shirt. In his polished attire, he called for lifting international sanctions — a golden ticket back into the global fold — and proclaimed that the new Syria sought no quarrels.
Here was another former jihadist, freshly baptised in the imperial waters, harmless and tamed.
The transformation was unmistakable: carefully chosen words, a rebranded image and muted rhetoric. He was, as if to say, serving up a ‘decaffeinated revolution’, a movement watered down to fit the taste of Western palates.
Once again, the tides of upheaval gave way to mere adjustment, ensuring the Western agenda remained intact and the proverbial boat wasn’t rocked too hard.
However, Western media and certain leftist circles, quick to celebrate the ‘birth of a new Syria’, yet again overlooked how similarly radical revolutionary movements have in the past absorbed into the machinery of the neoliberal status quo with the blessings of the Empire’s security apparatus, and how all outbursts of revolt have been successfully neutralised.
But at the root of the tragicomedy lies the neoliberal order’s obsession with novelty and constant change itself – instead of real ‘evental’ transformation – which has been repeatedly exposed each time warlords become revolutionaries in the Middle East. Is it not the change itself that feeds the status quo?
As some cautious optimists noted after the fall of Damascus, the true test lay in the ‘morning after’ — when the rush of unity wore off, leaving behind the sobering weight of reality. It was then that the fervour for solidarity needed to be harnessed into concrete political action or, at the very least, a coherent administrative blueprint.
Yet the pressing question of “what now?” wasn’t just being asked locally; more often than not, its answers came from voices far removed from the region itself.
Meanwhile, caught between the false dichotomy of ‘national sovereignty’ — often a guise for tyranny — and the foreign-backed push for ‘democracy’, exemplified by interventions like the Iraq invasion, lies the breeding ground for the ‘morbid symptoms’.
For progressive politics, the pattern reflects a deeper malaise: political language itself has become a prison, muting authentic progressive voices and confining discourse within dominant narratives.
The collapse of the secular Left in the region remains the region’s greatest tragedy, leaving a void filled by Islamic fundamentalism. While the latter mimics the Left’s call for social justice, it lacks emancipatory ideals. The Syrian war devolved into ethnic and religious strife, further revealing the criminal absence of a unifying secular vision.
Amid this dearth of authentic, indigenous narratives, the challenge seems to be to break free from the cycle of pro-Western liberalism and Islamic fundamentalism, which have been perpetuating each other.
Civil society movements in Egypt—through unions, women’s groups, and intellectuals—offered glimpses of hope, but the region still contends with the West’s contradictory stance.
Despite lofty rhetoric, the West has repeatedly sabotaged progressive openings while professing to champion them. In 2011, when Arabs broke free from the binary for the first time, occupying public spaces not in the name of fundamentalism but for progressive demands, the West was successful in operating its 'ideological bomb disposal' – not by crushing the heresy but by paradoxically integrating the emergence of the crisis and eventually deadening the 'dysfunctions' and disturbances.
This has left a landscape dominated by false radicalism, dictated choices, and illusory gradualism. As a result, the only other alternative visible in the muddied waters of the region is either a capitalist-parliamentary framework, parochial identitarian freedoms at the cost of long-festering economic precarity (the cause of unrest in the first place), or tamed autocratic regimes to safeguard US-Zionist interests in the region.
The United States, in particular, has a history of channelling popular uprisings into parliamentary-capitalist frameworks, and gatekeeping revolts, as seen in South Africa post-apartheid, the Philippines after Marcos, and Indonesia after Suharto.
In such a scenario, progressive truths spoken in a language sanctioned by the international status quo hide meanings more regressive and destructive.
‘Half revolution, no revolution’
In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse introduced the idea of ‘repressive desublimation’ to describe the so-called sexual revolution: human impulses might be unleashed, yet remain tightly tethered to capitalist control.
This lens helps unpack the deeper meaning behind protests and revolts lacking a clear agenda. Their very lack of purpose speaks volumes about the ideological and political predicament.
Today’s protestor is a dissatisfied consumer who lives in a society that loudly champions choice but offers a stark reality: the only alternatives to enforced democratic conformity are either blind rebellion or destructive violence.
Opposition to the system can no longer present itself as a viable alternative or even as a utopian dream—it erupts instead as a futile, chaotic outburst.
In a consumerism-driven society that thrives not on complete unity but on dissonance, there's little difference between a new pair of sneakers from a high-end store and a political identity that, ironically, medicates the injuries of consumerism itself. Both soothe the tension of nerves.
French philosopher, Alain Badiou, a Maoist and a soixante-huitard, has argued that we exist in an increasingly ‘worldless’ social space — one where protest, stripped of purpose or vision, manifests only as senseless violence.
Or, as the philosopher succinctly puts it in his book ‘Ethics’, “not every ‘novelty’ is an event”. Mere spurious negativity and wild, mad dance of revolt only end up creating fashioning new, more ferocious idols out from the dust of the old ones.
Destruction, while cathartic, cannot replace the effort needed to rescue and protect what is good. The guiding principle is fiat iustitia, pereat mundus — justice, where the line between justice and vengeance blurs.
Blake aptly wrote:
"The hand of vengeance found the bed,
To which the purple fled;
The iron hand crushed the head,
And became a tyrant in its stead."
For instance, when the pandemic hit the world, a major break was anticipated that would eventually force a reflective pause, an opportunity to think beyond the purview and conceive a transformative "outside" to save the humanity.
Yet, as was anticipated, the force of history reigned and the crisis was responded to by a “new normal” perfectly consistent with the contradictory nature of late capitalism.
‘Refolutions’
Most accounts of the Syrian conflict focus on its internal dynamics, spotlighting the Assad regime's iron fist and the opposition's failure to get its act together, while casting international involvement as an afterthought. However, external forces were the real movers and shakers from the outset, shaping the course of events on both sides.
Though neither Assad nor the opposition were puppets on a string, foreign involvement added fuel to the fire, amplifying the war’s scale and trajectory.
Discontent across the region exposes cracks in the neoliberal order. However, responses rarely transcend its framework. The result is a cycle of futility, where resistance becomes spectacle rather than substance.
Leftist politics oscillates between extremes. On one side, unyielding radicalism refuses to compromise, just like the Maoist resolve to concede nothing. On the other, fatalistic acceptance of shallow reforms merely patches over crises without addressing their root causes. As the adage goes, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
This deadly oscillation often benefits regimes that skillfully defuse revolutionary momentum with cosmetic reforms. The outcome is a trompe-l’oeil of transformation—the illusion of progress masking unchanged oppressive systems.
The pressing question remains: Can a truly transformative vision emerge, or will Arab revolutions remain confined within the contradictions of late capitalism?
Iranian scholar Asef Bayat describes the Arab uprisings of 2011–12 as “revolutions without revolutionaries,” a term he unpacks in his book of the same name.
Drawing a stark contrast with the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran—a classic example of a revolution with organised revolutionaries—Bayat, who himself observed the Iranian upheaval closely, systematically compares these movements.
According to Bayat, the Arab uprisings were distinct for their lack of radicalism, characterized by what he calls “dissent and deradicalisation”.
Unlike the Iranian revolution, these uprisings lacked intellectual grounding in ideologies like nationalism, socialism, or Islamism, resulting in no decisive break from the old order. Instead, they represented “revolution as a movement” through mass mobilisation, but not “revolution as an outcome” that ushers in systemic change.
This liminality—existing in a transitional state without progressing to full transformation—was their defining trait. It wasn’t a stepping stone to revolutionary reconstruction but rather a stalled halfway point, encapsulated in a protester’s placard: “Half Revolution, No Revolution!”
Bayat coined the term “refolution” to describe these half-revolutions, borrowing from Timothy Garton Ash’s use of the term to describe the blend of reform and revolution seen during the collapse of Communism in 1989.
He argues that the structural adjustments imposed by the IMF and World Bank were the straw that broke the camel’s back, steering the uprisings away from radical change and into the grip of neoliberalism.
As for the Syrian revolution, a cautious hope, despite the cynical times we live in, remains, albeit stained by blood and betrayals of fourteen years. Or, as poet Robert Lowell described such situations: “The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.”