Answer: Daraa

The name and nature of the town where the protests in Syria started. Is it by any chance an industrial town? The protests have been slow to spread to the capital. Maybe the despot Assad is too efficient for the middle classes there.

It proved impossible to verify the existence of any economic activity in Daraa that could at the same time form the ground for an organized proletariat. Even though it’s an old fortress town at the Syrian Gate to Palestine, there doesn’t seem even to be any commerce through the gate, which after all, now leads to Israel. Perhaps Israel’s long occupation of the Golan Heights stalled – really thwarted – development by the state-run economy there.

Hence the region is poor and its people unemployed. And so the revolution in Daraa, and in Syria, was started by these would-be proletarians. Though such classes have an economic interest in the outcomes of revolutions, they are better able to start them than to finish them successfully.

Syria “enjoys” a Soviet-style economy. This is the kind in which the state has become the dictatorship of the proletariat, but then finds it impossible to wither away, as Marx and Engels – in one of their comparatively few outbursts of what proved to be naïve idealism – thought it might. At any rate, it didn’t in Syria, a Soviet client state and make-weight against Israel in the ‘70’s. A substantial investment appears to have then been made.

Instead, the Assad family has joined the Stalinist model of state-run economy to their personal despotism. They’re not just thieves – I should say they’re not thieves de jure – like the Mubarek and Gaddafi families, and Ben Ali of Tunisia. As heads of this kind of state, the economy is theirs to dispose of – you can’t steal what you already own. (At the same time, concessions appear to have been made to the petit bourgeois merchant and agricultural classes from ancient times associated with the Syrian economy.)

And still, or maybe and so, the revolution cannot penetrate the capital. This is its problem. Daraa by itself, as I’ve said, is not enough. The activist port of Latakia must have stevedores, professional administrators, and movers of commerce: in other words, classes that should have an interest in the outcome of the revolution. Homs, a home of state-run industry, has also been agitated. The main thrust comes from the (middle class) suburbs of Damascus.

But extraordinary steps are being taken by the regime.

The practice of Friday demonstrations right after Friday prayers must be particularly unnerving to a secular despot like Assad. You can’t, after all, stop the praying any more than you can stop the conspiratorial whispering during prayers. How clever of the Israelis to organize the demonstrations in this way – hidden in the open!

But of course the Israelis have nothing to do with it. This lie is among the many that have held the doubly co-opted professional and administrative petit bourgeoisie of the capital – co-opted first by the debt they owe for personal favors from the despot, and second by their parasitical attachment to the state economy that the despot owns – in check.

No doubt their loyalty is sincere. It accords with their economic interests, and their political and civil interests may appear as nothing beside them. There is also real fear, not just the fake kind of fear made up to induce middle class Americans to vote against their interests, working on the side of the despot. If Assad can turn the matter into a conflict within the middle classes, he will defeat the Syrian revolution. This is how the Prussian and Austrian emperors regained their capitals in 1848…

… and Assad has not even lost his capital to the revolution – yet!