Kassioun Editorial 1168: A Repeated Mistake is… a Decision!

The main elements of the IMF’s formula for our countries are:

• Reducing government involvement in economic life until it is completely abolished, including the public sector and all forms and types of interventionist institutions.
• Reducing social support of all kinds until completely lifted, in addition to a number of measures aimed at reducing the wage mass from the national income in favor of the profit mass, and within the profit mass itself, steadily reducing the share of real production.
• Restructuring laws under the pretext of attracting investment so that they restrict workers and reduce their rights, even restricting private capital involved in real production, and in a way that such laws open the door to foreign investors’ money with as few conditions as possible, especially to hot, speculative money, which are irreputable and known to have bad influence.

If we look at the actual history of the development of the Syrian economy since the mid-1990s, we discover that what is being applied is this very formula, albeit slowly at first, and faster since 2005. We also discover that the current government is not only applying the formula at a record speed, but it is also finishing it once and for all and seeing the completion of its details to the end.

It should be known that this formula for the countries of the Global South is completely different from the one applied in the West. While the West imposes it on our countries, it refuses to implement it in its own countries because it knows that it only leads to destruction. Thus, it applies another formula that includes, among other things, maintaining social support (even if relatively) and keeping the state’s control over certain essential sectors.

Against this background, the logical question that poses itself is: If the West is punishing, besieging, and fighting us, why do we apply its destructive economic formulas to ourselves, while it itself refuses to apply them and chooses for itself other formulas? There are logically two answers: either we do not know and therefore “we repeat the mistake over and over again, one government after another”. The other possible answer is that we know and yet we apply, which raises the next logical question: Why?

One of Syria’s patriotic figures, Comrade Khalid Bakdash, used to repeat a true saying proven by history: “It is easier to anger the colonizer than to please him”. If this is the case with colonialism, then the saying takes a more developed form in the case of neocolonialism, which is: “Angering neo-colonialism is very easy, and pleasing it is impossible”. Neocolonialism, in the context of the structural crisis of the American center, is no longer able to deal except with completely subservient peoples and governments. Furthermore, the mere survival of national states within their borders has become a crisis for the American center, and has become inconsistent with its strategy that is based on comprehensive, hybrid chaos derived from neoliberalism, and which seeks to fragment states, their agencies, and their peoples, by all possible means. Therefore, pleasing neocolonialism has become more difficult than, as the saying goes, “Satan getting into heaven”.

Looking at the full picture of the Syrian situation prompts some to ask a question about the connection between the rapid speed in implementing the IMF’s formulas and the “step for step” project that seeks to undermine the political solution and UNSC Resolution 2254, and what is said about deals with the West under the table and above it.

Therefore, it becomes necessary to declare a blunt and clear position from the IMF and World Bank formulas, not only in words but also in action; not to mention, of course, the need to highlight a blunt and clear position from all Western plans for Syria.

(النسخة العربية)