Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how ruptures in temporality informed revolutionary subjectivity amongst Syrian rebel-workers. My analysis — building on the work of Laclau — identifies how a set of ‘future inhibiting’ socio-economic grievances came to be imagined resolved should ‘the people’ achieve victory.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about the formation of revolutionary subjectivity amongst rebel-workers in Beirut. A decline in socio-economic stability structured these men's decisions to migrate from the countryside to the city and this decline resembles the material foundations for the uprising. Indeed, migration to Lebanon was once temporary and a means of securing extra cash to be productively re-invested in dowries, land holdings and the like. Even before the uprising this future-orientated pattern of labour migration had shifted into a present-orientated lifeline for families back home.

I argue that the regime has not always relied on its repressive apparatus, or on the manipulation of external political threats, but once built legitimacy through a politico-economic system that guarded against total impoverishment. This changed in the 1990s and 2000s when a series of liberalising reforms were enacted. Agricultural subsidies were stripped; price capping was removed; guaranteed purchase on crops was cancelled, and import barriers fell. Shanty towns encircled Aleppo and Damascus. Thus, the welfare pact between urban bourgeois and rural workers was abandoned. By building on the theoretical models of populism as developed by Ernesto Laclau, I reveal how this gradual tearing away of legitimacy moved toward more encompassing ruptures. This process was narrated through awakening narratives in which a prior passivity was disavowed and a discursive frontier was emphasised that divided Syrian society into two recognised camps: 'the people and the regime'. The Baʿth party's remaining thread of a social contract snapped and rebel-workers saw in the revolution a means of reclaiming their promised futures.