Preface
The current Arab revolution forms part of the colonial revolution that has been irresistibly developing since the last world war. This revolution, furthermore, is only one aspect of the accelerating and irremediable break-up of the capitalist regime, and consequently forms part of the proletarian revolution by which the end of the capitalist regime will be completed and the new socialist social order will begin.
The text contained in this pamphlet had as its purpose the opening of a discussion in the organized movement of the Fourth International on some fundamental aspects and problems of the Arab revolution as seen in its proletarian and socialist dynamic, i.e., independently of its present bourgeois-democratic stage, from the viewpoint both of immediate tasks to be accomplished and of its present leadership.From this point of view, this text was conceived for a discussion among revolutionary Marxists familiar with the terms employed and the ideas developed therein. In order to render it clearer and more up-to-date, we think it useful in this preface to emphasize the following points:
The Idea of the Arab Nation
The notion of the Arab nation is based above all upon the criteria of language and historical formation, more than on geographic or economic unity. Given the diversity of the geographic limits and the historical peculiarities of the Arab world, the aspiration for Arab unity within the frame of a centralist state or of a federation is above all peculiar to the Arab revolutionary masses.
The Arab ruling classes are too heterogeneous, too bound up with local and regional interests, too marked by their particularist formation and their different links with imperialism, to blend without resistance, spontaneously and under their own impulse, into an organized Arab unity. Their present cleavages and oppositions are eloquently significant of the organic inability of the Arab ruling classes to attain Arab organic unity under their leadership.From this point of view, the unity of the Arab nation will prove to be historically the exclusive result of the victory of the Arab revolution under proletarian leadership in its socialist stage. In the meantime, the particularist resistance of the Arab ruling classes, profiting by the regional attachments of the masses, will have to be faced.
These considerations do not at all have as their purpose any attenuation whatever of the historical reality of an Arab nation currently seeking its organic unity. They aim rather at emphasizing the fact that Arab national consciousness, as well as the aspiration for Arab unity, are characteristic above all of the Arab masses struggling against imperialism and its native allies, and that only these masses will be able to bring about the unity of the Arab nation.
The Problem of the Land and Agrarian Reform
Underdeveloped countries, the Arab lands are characterized by the predominance of an agricultural economy and a peasantry that is far the most numerous class in the population.
As a result of the facts that the decisive part of the cultivated land is in the hands either of feudalists (the Middle East) or of European settlers (the Maghreb), and that native small properties, whether individual or communal, are endangered by the competition of big properties exploited in a capitalist way and by lack of technical and financial aid from the state, the agrarian question in all these countries takes on capital importance.For a radical solution it would be necessary not only that the lands (generally the best ones) of the feudalists and settlers be recuperated, hut that the state should also take dispositions to help the peasants – as individuals or as organized in collectives – to keep up their lands, improve their output, and recuperate new lands by various public works. That is to say, there would be needed, in addition to a revolutionary agrarian reform, a revolutionary state, which could not be other than the workers’ and peasants’ state.
In the absence of such a social solution, bourgeois agrarian reforms could not have any result other than, in the best of cases, to replace the class of native feudalists or the settlers by a layer of rich peasants who would easily dominate those peasants devoid of sufficient land and of adequate technical and financial means to keep it up in a competitive market economy.
This last-mentioned form of agricultural economy, which is currently prevalent everywhere in the Arab countries, has as a further result an irrational utilization of land – a situation which, under the very unfavorable climatic conditions of the Arab countries, soon ends up in the sterilization of production over vast areas of land.
The social consequence thereof is the speeded-up impoverishment of great masses of the peasantry, aggravated by the continued population increase.
To maintain the existent land in a productive state, and to include therein other arable areas, requires a state able to provide such an effort for the benefit of the peasant masses.
We thus fall back once more on the imperious need for a truly popular state, that of the power of the workers and peasants.
Concerning the forms that the agrarian revolution may take on, our text emphasizes the profit that it would have to derive from the continuance of pre-capitalist communal customs in matters of land ownership in the Arab countries, which might in certain cases facilitate the adoption, right from the beginning, of measures of collectivization rather than individual parcelling out. But this does not at all obviate the capital importance of giving the land or a life-interest in it to those who really work it and to win their democratic consent to any measure planned in this field.
Industrialization
In order to back up the agricultural effort and to solve the question of the unemployment of the great masses of the Arab countries, the industrial development of these underdeveloped countries must naturally be speeded up. The question of industrialization is also conditioned by the nature of the social regime. Without statification of the surplus value which the imperialist and capitalist firms, oil companies and others, are extorting from the Arab masses, as well as the land rent of the feudalists and the big settler owners, the question of the large-scale industrialization of the Arab countries will naturally remain insoluble. And yet these countries possess immense power resources (petroleum, sunlight) which, together with the financial resources and the abundant labor power formed by the majority of their currently non-productive populations, could rapidly solve the question of their industrialization on a vast scale.
The Question of the National Bourgeoisie
The classic bourgeoisie of the Arab countries is of trading origin and formation. It has historically developed a special trait – very important for its attitude toward the agrarian question and its faculties for an effective struggle against imperialism and especially against the feudalists – its role as a usurer toward the peasants.
It is wrong to believe that the peasantry is the victim solely of the feudalists. The trading bourgeois of the towns exploit the Arab peasantry, composed of share-croppers and poor peasants, in a way which, although more subtle, remains no less rapacious – whence the fundamental opposition of these parasitical layers of the bourgeoisie to a genuine agrarian reform.The revolutionary proletariat in the Arab countries will not be able to carry out properly its struggle for the completion of the revolution unless it takes into account this reactionary nature of the commercial bourgeoisie.
It is true, however, that, side-by-side with this classic bourgeoisie, there are developing at varying degrees some still limited strata of an industrial bourgeoisie, which is trying to shake off the tutelage, stifling for its own development, of imperialism and the feudalists.
With these strata, temporary alliances for precise goals, which do not alienate the autonomous objectives and policy of the class party of the proletariat and the poor peasants, are possible and indeed necessary. But this party must at no moment forget that the goal of the industrial bourgeoisie is not the extermination of imperialism but a coexploitation of the native masses, a coexploitation pushed in the best of cases to an overturn of the present relationship between foreign capital and native capital, in favor of the latter. Next, that the struggle of this bourgeoisie against the feudalists also cannot go beyond certain limits, for the feudalists keep up various economic relationships with this bourgeoisie, which furthermore, by its nature (because of its weakness), does not at all want to support a decisive fight against imperialism and against the feudalists, by basing itself(necessarily in this case) on the revolutionary masses.
The crime of the past and present policy of the Communist Parties consists, not in their seeking under certain circumstances an alliance with the colonial bourgeoisie, but in their idealizing it – which prevents defining the limits of its progressive action and hinders the autonomous class organization and policy of the proletariat.
The examples of Nasser’s Egypt and Kassem’s Iraq are in this connection highly instructive.
In both cases we are dealing with a revolution that is bourgeois-democratic from the viewpoint of the immediate tasks to be accomplished, led by political staffs of national officers who ideologically represent what car, be called the Arab national bourgeoisie, i.e., the bourgeois strata which to a certain extent are opposed to imperialism and the feudalists.
These strata are generally those of the industrial bourgeoisie in the making. Both Nasser’s and Kassem’s regimes are, from the political viewpoint, Bonapartist regimes, of an unstable balance between the classes, while destined to cast their weight finally in favor of a single class.
In the case of Nasser, it is now clear that his Bonapartism is operating decisively in favor of the Egyptian industrial bourgeoisie. Furthermore, to the degree that the class struggle develops in Egypt and in the Arab world generally, and that the Nasser regime proves unable to solve the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the Arab revolution – viz. real independence from imperialism (with a real liquidation of all its economic after-effects), unification of the Arab nation, agrarian revolution, emancipation of women – the Nasser regime is turning against the masses and again drawing close to imperialism.
The true face of the Arab “national” bourgeoisie was unmasked on the occasion of the Iraqi revolution.
This revolution forms, at the present stage, the most advanced point of the Arab anti-imperialist and social revolution. Despite the fact that its official leadership is still assumed by a staff of “national” officers who would like to keep it within “Nasserist” (i.e., bourgeois-democratic) limits, the drive of the masses is infinitely more powerful than in the case of Egypt. This causes the Bonapartist character of Kassem’s regime to be far more strongly marked than Nasser’s, for Kassem does not have at his disposal a broad social base of his own.
In Iraq, because of the weakness of the industrial bourgeoisie, the hostility of the feudalists, and the successive purges of pro-Nasser elements in the army, Kassem has been seen to yield gradually to the pressure of the revolutionary masses, who form his real support against imperialism, Nasser, and domestic reaction. To the degree that the Iraqi revolution deepened, with creation by the masses of their own organs of dual power, including militias, and the increased politicisation of the expanding trade-union organizations, the social aspect of the revolution predominated over its initial national and anti-imperialist aspect.
These developments were far from pleasing to Nasser, hence his violent attacks against the Iraqi revolution and his spectacular anti-Communist and even anti-Soviet shift. This attitude, far from being accidental or personal, is in reality characteristic of the colonial bourgeoisie faced by the internal class struggle and the social problems of the revolution.
Khrushchev himself, disappointed and exasperated by Nasser’s anti-Communist and anti-Soviet attacks, was forced to stammer out a few elementary notions of revolutionary Marxist policy in the matter of the national bourgeoisie, but without drawing therefrom lasting conclusions defining a coherent line. Criticizing ‘nationalism”, i.e., the alliance, in colonial and dependent countries, of all classes, under the political leadership of the bourgeoisie, Khrushchev differentiates the struggle’s “anti-colonialist” phase, properly so called, from the social phase during which “the interests of different classes can possibly not coincide.” [1] “The attempts, by covering oneself with the banner of nationalism, to disregard the interests of the various layers of the population, and those of the workers, are inconsistent.” [1]
In reality the life-and-death struggle with the national bourgeoisie is inevitable in all cases where the revolution must be led from its anti-imperialist bourgeois-national phase up to its socialist proletarian social conclusion. The question is one, not of persons, but of classes.
From this point of view, it is not enough to criticize Nasser at a given moment, only to paint him in rosy colors at another moment, or to embrace Kassem, but to define a clear class line toward the colonial bourgeoisie which the Bonapartist regimes of both represent.
The now evident “betrayal” of Nasser was inevitable, inherent in the class nature of the colonial bourgeoisie confronted by the social deepening of the revolution. The “betrayal” of Kassem, to whom the favors of the Kremlin are now being given, is no less inevitable, in case the Iraqi Communist Party should prove unable to complete the revolution under its own leadership, backed by the country’s masses democratically organized in their committees, militias, and trade unions.
Kassem is only the super-Kerensky of the Iraqi revolution, i.e., the representative of a Bonapartist regime of an extreme fragility, which is trying to maintain a precarious balance between the revolutionary drive of the masses and the conservative and reactionary forces, still unable for the moment to go over to a counter-revolutionary offensive.
Under the rising pressure of the masses, Kassem is obliged to make progressive concessions, while resisting the social completion of the revolution and trying to stay within bourgeois limits. All the real gains of the masses – militias, trade-union organization, promises of a new emancipating status for women, etc. – are in reality the results of their struggles driving through Kassem’s resistance. His opposition to the legalization of the Communist Party and to the free political activity of the masses is in this connection significant of his limitations and class resistances.
At a later stage, in case of a retreat of the masses because of fatigue or disorientation the Kassem regime would try to annul some of these gains and to stabilize the bourgeois regime. [2]
The greatest danger now lying in wait for the Iraqi revolution is the Stalinist policy of the Iraqi CP. This party, the strongest of all the Arab Communist Patties, is at present torn between the tendency that is subject to the revolutionary pressure of its rank and file and of the masses, and the executive tendency that is docile to the Kremlin’s directives.
The former is instinctively seeking a class line, distrusting Kassem (and with good reason), and trying to base itself above all on the autonomous organization and action of the revolutionary masses. It is embodied, at the leadership level, by the party’s native cadres, who were formed in “the dungeons and the camps” of the old regime and remained steadily in contact with the masses. [3] But the dominant tendency in the leadership is represented by the hardened Stalinists formed in exile, in the USSR and the Popular Democracies, who subordinate the party 5 autonomous class policy to the changing interests of Soviet diplomacy. It is this tendency that gives Kassem unconditional support, that paints his regime in bright colors, and that calls for the disastrous Menshevik policy of the revolution by stages, Iraq allegedly needing to pass through a whole period of bourgeois-democratic development before there ripen the economic and social conditions that permit visualising the possibility of the socialist revolution under the leadership of the proletariat.
In case this tendency proves more powerful than the revolutionary pressure of the masses, the Iraqi revolution will inevitably experience defeat, either in the form of an overthrow of the present regime by the concerted and unexpected action of foreign and domestic forces, pro-Nasser for example, or else by the stabilization of the Kassem regime on a bourgeois basis.
The hope of a progressive development of the revolution lies only in the masses’ revolutionary dynamism, which might under certain conditions push the Iraqi CP beyond the limited goals of Soviet diplomacy, and make it outline a revolutionary orientation toward power.
The Kremlin is interested in the Iraqi revolution only in connection with its foreign policy, where it is a matter of utilizing the Iraqi trump card to bring pressure on Nasser and the imperialists. By this pressure Nasser might be prevented from being integrated in the imperialist orbit, while imperialisms such as England, which have great interests in Iraq and in the Middle East, might show more understanding toward for example the European goals of Kremlin diplomacy.
In general, the Kremlin is at present seeking, not to develop the social dynamics of the Arab revolution and to help it to victory under proletarian leadership, but simply to win the favors of the colonial bourgeoisie and to draw it away from coalition with imperialism.
In this way, as against ephemeral successes on the diplomatic level, as the experiment with Nasser once more clearly demonstrates, the Kremlin sacrifices the fundamental interests of the colonial revolution, which would be able to triumph only under proletarian leadership, in an inevitable and necessary struggle against the national bourgeoisie.
The criminal embellishment of the national bourgeoisie by the Kremlin and the Communist Parties at its disposal, whether it is question on any occasion of Nasser or Kassem, of Sukarno or Nehru, of Fidel Castro [4], et al., is at present the most powerful brake on the progressive development of the colonial revolution.
Once more, we repeat, it is not a question, in colonial and dependent countries, of avoiding alliances with the national bourgeoisie to the extent that it engages in an effective struggle against imperialism and the feudalists. It is a matter of considering these alliances to be temporary, to make them about precise goals of common action, to maintain the complete organizational and political independence of the party of the proletariat, to avoid painting this bourgeoisie in glowing colors, to prepare the masses ideologically for the bourgeoisie’s inevitable turn against themselves as soon as they begin the struggle in the field of the social deepening of the revolution, its completion on the bourgeois-democratic level and its socialist development.
Social Revolution and Unity of the Arab Nation
The social development of the Iraqi revolution soon raised a new question: what attitude to take toward Arab unity under present conditions.
Where it is a question of Arab states of the same social regime, the imperative need of Arab unification in a centralized state or a federation must have priority over the political nature of the regime under which the process of unification is carried out. But where it is a question of Arab states of social regimes that are different or are becoming so, the imperative need of unification must be subordinated to the necessity of defending the social conquests of the revolution, its proletarian and socialist future.To take a concrete example: in the case of relations between Iraq and the UAR, it is certainly necessary to take into account the fact that the Iraqi revolution currently constitutes the socially most advanced outpost of the Arab revolution, and that consequently its gains cannot be simply annulled by just simply putting it under the whip of Nasser’s reactionary dictatorial regime – and this allegedly in the name of the highest interests of Arab unification.
But the Iraqi Communist Party, now the fierce defender of the country’s independence, should have justified the temporary subordination of unification to the imperative needs of the development of the social revolution in Iraq on the basis of quite other arguments than those it is at present using [5].
The Iraqi CP’s only justification for temporarily suspending unification with the UAR could in reality be only its determination to carry out the proletarian revolution in Iraq and to avoid compromising this process by subjecting it to Nasser’s reactionary regime, which Nasser, in case of unification, would spread throughout Iraq as well.
But instead of such an attitude, the Iraqi CP, nowise facing toward the perspective of the proletarian revolution, puts forward fallacious pretexts that compromise its cause and the communist cause among the Arab masses who ardently long for Arab unification: the so-called need of better guaranteeing the country’s economic (in reality, capitalist) development within the limits of Iraqi national independence, and the anti-democratic nature of Nasser’s regime.
We repeat: this last argument could be valid only if the Iraqi CP were setting up, as opposed to the unification demanded by Nasser, the need to complete the victory of the social – i.e., proletarian – revolution in Iraq. Otherwise, it is Nasser who is right in implicitly considering that, both social regimes being equal, it is unification that must take priority over the more or less democratic nature of the political regime.
The Algerian Revolution
If the Iraqi revolution constitutes at present the most advanced stage, socially and from the viewpoint of proletarian perspectives, of the Arab revolution, the Algerian revolution, at the other end of the Arab world, represents a no less important peculiarity of that revolution. In Iraq, the tone was set by the strength of the revolutionary movement of the masses and the presence of a Communist Party that has a real base and plays an important role in the revolutionary process. In Algeria, the lack of an important proletarian and communist movement is combined with an equally extreme weakness of the bourgeoisie and the resultant importance of the plebeian masses: poor peasants, agricultural and industrial workers, impoverished petty-bourgeoisie.
It is the cadres arisen from these masses and basing themselves upon them who are leading the present revolution under the banner of the FLN.Despite the still essentially national-democratic slogans inscribed on that banner, the revolutionary strength of the plebeian mass movement in Algeria proves to be enormous and impressive. The Algerian people’s armed struggle has now been invincibly maintained for almost five years against the bulk of the military forces of one of the main imperialist powers of our century, which is trying with an unheard-of savagery to keep under its yoke Algeria, the key-country of its African colonial empire.
Never has the disproportion between the means utilised by imperialism and a small colonial country been so overwhelming; never has so broad-scale an attempt been made to exterminate physically the great masses of an oppressed people, in order to break its indomitable will to struggle. The atrocious colonial war of Algeria, which has unfortunately been going on up till now amid a shameless passivity on the part of the proletarian masses of France and of the so-called civilized capitalist countries, will be written down in history as the most sanguinary and infamous colonialist enterprise of imperialism before it finally leaves the stage.
Just the fact that under such unfavorable conditions the Algerian revolution, practically alone, continues the combat, growing more solid and profound, should be sufficient to justify not only the immense respect that the proletariat of Europe ought to feel toward its heroic Algerian brothers, spurring it to support them in their well-justified combat against imperialism, but also respect for the organization that began the revolution and was formed in the struggle itself, the FLN.
This organization, really a united front of diverse tendencies of Algerian opinion in the anti-imperialist struggle, is certainly not a homogeneous revolutionary party, and cannot within its present structure evolve toward such a party. But what is sure is that it includes all the valid revolutionary forces of the Algerian people, from which tomorrow there will emerge the cadres of the revolutionary Marxist tendency who will know how to lead the Algerian revolution to its complete victory.
The weaknesses which characterize and the dangers which lie in wait for the present leadership of the Algerian revolution should be neither covered up nor minimised. The lack of a precise doctrine, of a clear and precise programme, can lead the best-intentioned cadres of the revolution to become objectively servitors of a bourgeois, pro-imperialist, and anti-democratic cause, following the example of the Bourguibist leadership of the Tunisian revolution, or of the King of Morocco, of the Moroccan revolution.
The lack of a clear and radical social and political doctrine corresponding to the true interests of the peasants and workers who embody the Algerian nation in its struggle, means practising a policy that is in the final analysis bourgeois, with a future that will inevitably be “Bourguibist.”
The FLN would be unable to avoid such an evolution unless, starting right now, a coherent tendency within it should fight perseveringly to endow it with a precise and radical social and political programme and with a more definite and strict organizational structure that links it ideologically and organizationally to its militant base, especially the fighters and the Algerian masses of the interior, and their effective and permanent control.
It is of course not a question of fostering illusions about transforming the FLN in its present structure and entirety into a proletarian and socialist party. But what can and must be contemplated is transforming it into a transitional political formation by means of working up a definite programme and a structure that links it to its base and ensures that base’s control over it.
The programme must include a radical agrarian reform, the statification of the principal enterprises and means of production, the emancipation of women, the federation of the Maghreb and its confederation under certain conditions with the rest of the Arab nation of the Middle East, of Egypt, the Sudan, and Libya, the democratic structure of popular power (constituent assembly; people’s committees, which are already administering those parts of the country that are liberated or under de facto control).
Such control must include the transfer to Algeria itself of the principal organs of the revolutionary government and their attachment to the ranks of the fighters and the masses of the interior, while maintaining and developing delegations and various services abroad.
Only such political and organizational measures can effectively counteract the bureaucratic corruption of the leadership, fight against the trend to “Bourguibist” – i.e., pro-bourgeois and pro-imperialist – formations in the leadership, increase the flexibility of the organization of the revolution, deepen its close liaison with the masses, and inspire them with a new energy.
What is more, to the degree that the Algerian revolution makes clear its social and democratic aspect, it cannot fail to meet with an increasingly sympathetic echo among the popular masses of the other Arab countries, and even of European countries, including France, and its soldiers, workers and peasants in uniform.
The reactionary and barbarous enterprise of imperialism would appear in the eyes of the masses to be even more infamous as it struggles against the steadily deeper revolution of the Algerian people.
Even the conduct of the war, from the strictly military viewpoint, would prove to be modified by such measures, for the main strength of the Algerian combatants at the present stage lies in their mobility and their close fusion with the population. But whoever says mobility and close fusion with the masses is really saying social and political deepening of the revolution, rendering individual combatants conscious of their mission, and the masses conscious of the goals of the struggle and more and more involved in its victorious completion.
The possible generalization of the revolutionary war throughout the whole Maghreb would, furthermore, be enormously facilitated by such an orientation.
Naturally it is question here only of suggestions for a programme, a tactic, an organization, whose more precise details must be worked out by the revolutionary Marxist tendency of the great Algerian revolution.
The Fourth International considers it its duty at present to help unconditionally and unreservedly this revolution as well as the colonial revolution in general.
Conscious of the terrible lag of the workers’ movement of the advanced capitalist countries in comparison to the colonial revolution, it realizes that, in order to bring together and weld the joint between the two branches of the world revolution, political propaganda is not enough. There are needed acts of real practical solidarity with the colonial masses in struggle, now in the vanguard of the revolutionary assault against imperialism and capitalism.
MICHEL PABLO
June 1959
June 1959
Notes
1. Khrushchev statements on 17 March 1959.
2. After this preface was written and was being set in type, Kassem started a trial of strength with the Iraqi CP and the revolutionary masses.
He is now trying to suppress the militias once more, and is proceeding to purges and even arrests of revolutionary elements. Kassem in his turn is taking Nasser’s anti-Communist road.
“Paradoxically, General Kassem’s strongest asset in the present struggle for power,” writes the British ex-cabinet minister Anthony Nutting in the 28 June New York Herald Tribune “is that the Communists have built him up to a position from which they cannot now tear him down.” (My italics.)
3. For this tendency, “what matters is the radical and immediate transformation of the social and economic structure” of Iraq. “It is the one that demands the nationalization of enterprises, the sharing out of land, the hanging of traitors, the purge of the army and the administration. It is this tendency that worries General Kassem. And it is likely that it is against it that the government is – in the shadows – furbishing its arms.” (Study by E Sablier in Le Monde of 28 May 1959.)
4. Fidel Castro is at present the latest “hero” discovered by the Communist Parties of Latin America, to whose regime they attribute the revolutionary gains of the Cuban masses. Fidel Castro, however, is only the Bonapartist representative of the bourgeoisie, who is undergoing the pressure of the masses and is forced to make them important concessions, against which his bourgeois teammates are already rising up, as has just been clearly shown by the opposition set going inside his own government against the – timid enough – agrarian reform.
5. As well as, for that matter, the other Arab Communist Parties, beginning with that of Syria, led by Bagdasche.
The Arab Revolution
This is not meant to be a really complete and exhaustive report on the Arab revolution. It is rather an introduction to the question and a preliminary discussion concerned more especially with the Arab revolution in the Middle East as well as with the Algerian revolution.
The Arab revolution is part of the colonial revolution of this post-war period and at times it becomes the dominant feature thereof. It embraces the countries of Moslem religion, of Moslem civilization, and of the Arabic language in Africa and the Middle East, and in particular Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, the Sudan, the countries of the Arabian peninsula, and Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. To a certain extent Iran must also be included in spite of its pre-Islamic language, as more particularly forming part of the revolution in the Middle East; in all, some 70 million Arabs and “Arabized” peoples, or about one-sixth of the total Moslem population of the world.It is a question of a national unit, historically developed as such, whose various elements, despite their different backgrounds on a purely racial basis [1], are conscious above all of being Arabs and belonging above all to the Arab nation.
This Arab or rather “Arabized” national community is, however, widely dispersed geographically from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Persia and the Caspian Sea and is riddled with many national minorities: Kurds, Assyrians, Jews, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Persians, Berbers, and Arabized Negroes of many different African races, etc, certain of whom, however, despite national origins, religion, and some different customs, are now highly Arabized, and in practice form part of the Arab nation.
From the point of view of religion likewise, there is a diversity of sects and beliefs: Mohammedans: Sunnites, Shiites, Alaouites, Druses, Ismailis, etc. Christians: Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants, Gregorians, Jacobites, Maronites, Nestorians, etc. This religious mosaic is especially striking in for example Libya and Syria.
While the Maghreb, having lived in isolation for a long time, has managed to remain relatively outside the Mohammedan theological quarrels, in the rest of the Moslem world sects abound (Mohammed foresaw 72!) and though they completely agree on the strict observance of the Koran, there are many different interpretations of the importance of traditions and even more of the sense of destiny of the Prophet and of his successors.
Thus on a national foundation which is indubitably Arab or Arabized, a diversity of real ethnic and cultural structures is built up, resulting, among other things, from the extraordinarily turbulent past of these countries, most of which had suffered successive occupation by the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols, and the Turks, before being subjected to that of the European imperialists in the XIXth and XXth centuries.
As capitalism made only a late and slight penetration in these countries, the centuries-old economic, as well as social, cultural, and ethnic structures, though upset and even in places overthrown, have nevertheless not been eliminated, and at the present moment are being interwoven in the reconstruction taking place in the Arab countries.
From the Marxist point of view the basic argument in favor of the existence of an Arab nation despite these factors is the existence of such a common national consciousness in the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of these countries, developed through the history of these peoples, a history which is marked by a common language, a common geographical location, and a common social and cultural system.
A brief historic survey of this question will best show how well-founded this argument is.
Historic Formation of Arab National Consciousness
Arab national consciousness appeared early, as early as the XIXth century, that is, at the very time when the modern capitalist nations in Europe were being formed, following the decline of the feudal empires of the West and the Ottoman East
It was the fall of the Ottoman Empire as well as the imperialist aims and undertakings of the great capitalist countries of the Europe of that period (England, Prance, Germany) which awoke Arab nationalism at the end of the last century.In the Arab commercial and cultural centres of the period – Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus, Bagdad, Alexandria, Cairo, as well as in Constantinople and the Persian cities, sometimes in Kabul or even in Delhi – the intellectual forerunners, tinged by European liberalism of the time, hoped to see the West helping to liberate the Arabs from the yoke of Turkish despotism and oppression.
But the attitude of the West soon brought disappointment and the liberalism of these forerunners was converted in to a more resolute Arab nationalism, like that of the main promoters of the Salafi movement (appealing to the Ancients), a reform movement and the cradle of Moslem and Arab aspirations in the 1890s.
For a time the “Young Turks” reform movement put an end to the specifically Arab awakening by absorbing it into the more general framework of an “Ottoman liberalism” claiming equality for all the oppressed nations of the Turkish Empire.
But as early as 1910 “Ottomanism” and “Ottoman-Arab fraternity” came to an end, since the “Young Turk” ideologists of the then rising Turkish bourgeoisie could not and would not genuinely break down the feudal system and the national oppression which the Ottoman Empire had created. From then onwards, the Arabs strove to organize themselves independently, first on a cultural level and then politically, but always under the main inspiration of the intellectuals, especially the Syro-Lebanese: the Literary Club (al Muntada al-Arabi) in Constantinople (1909), a discussion centre of which several members, Al-Khali, a Lebanese Moslem, Haidar, a Baalbeck Moslem, and Sallum, a Christian from Homs, were hanged as traitors by the Turks during the First World War; the Qahtan Society (those of Qahtan, the legendary ancestor of the race), a secret society more or less affiliated to the Literary Club, which aspired to the creation of a dual Turkish-Arab state on the Austro-Hungarian model; Al Faat, the Young Arab Society founded in 1913-1914 in Paris, with branches in Beirut and Damascus; the “Decentralization Party,” founded in Cairo by the Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians in 1912, with committees in Syria and Iraq and appearing as the spokesmen for Arab aspirations; and the Young Algerian Party, also formed in 1912.
On the eve of the 1914 war, the Arab national movement became a mass movement in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. The war accelerated the evolution, since the English realized that Arab nationalist support was essential in the fight against the Turks and their German allies. In the Spring of 1913, the members of Al-Fatat and of Al-Ahd, the former springing from the feudal and intellectual elite in the Syrian countries and the latter mainly representing the Mesopotamian officers in the Turkish army, drew up the “Damascus Protocol” which provided for the independence of the Arab countries situated between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. They were soon to be decimated by the brutal repression of the Turkish Pasha Jemal.
This repression, however, was to whip up nationalist fervor and to produce decision to take action by the principal chiefs in Arabia, such as Emir Feisal, son of Hussein, afterwards the founder of the Hashemite dynasty, the Emir of Mecca, who learning at Damascus on 6 May 1916 of the latest executions of Arab patriots, gave the signal for the armed revolt against the Turks with the cry of “Death has become sweet, O Arabs!” And it was the same Feisal who, having believed the lavish promises showered on him by the English and French during the 1914-1918 war, submitted “the Arab problem and its solution” to the Peace Conference in the following terms:
As the representative of my father who, at the request of Great Britain and France, led the Arab revolt against the Turks, I have come here to ask you that the Arabic-speaking peoples of Asia, from the Alexandretta Diarbuakr line to the Indian Ocean in the South, be recognized by the League of Nations as independent and sovereign peoples. [...]. I base my request on the principles enunciated by President Wilson and I am confident that the powers will attach more importance to the bodies and souls of the Arabic-speaking peoples than to their own material interests. [29th January 1919.]
But as might have been expected, it was the latter that prevailed and divided up the Middle East in accordance with the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (May 1916) into two spheres of influence, one English and the other French, and set up the infamous system of “mandates.”
For the Arabs 1920 was the year of catastrophe – Amal Nakba.
For all Arab nationalists [wrote one contemporary reactionary writer [2]] the decisions of the League of Nations in San Remo seemed to be an abominable iniquity. The creation of the states of Syria, Lebanon, Transjordania Palestine, and Iraq appeared to them as an absurdity contrary to all historical, cultural, and religious traditions.
Thus the Arab states of the Middle East were created “as by virtue of a jigsaw puzzle,” a colonialist attempt par excellence at “Balkanization.”
Under the shock of this disappointment, Arab revolutionary fever abated here and there, but elsewhere the national awakening burst out with greater force, as in Egypt and Iraq in the ‘20s, and later in Morocco. [3] The gradual evolution of Turkey under “Kemalism” and of Iran under Raza. the founder of the Pahlevi dynasty, stimulated Arab nationalism. In Egypt, the “Wafd,” the Independence Party, was created, and wore itself out in a struggle against the king installed by the English in 1922, the latter wishing to maintain their de facto tutelage of the country. The same struggle was going on in Iraq, where the British persisted in maintaining an artificial administrative structure in order to hold in check the forces working for the real independence of the country.They granted most of the political power to the Sunnites forming the feudal and commercial aristocracy, held out hopes of autonomy to the Kurds and Assyrians, and allocated some districts to Shiite chiefs. As for the nature of the parliamentary system which later masked this regime, Nuri-es-Sa’id, “the Englishman,” defined it most aptly in these words:
The selection of candidates at the elections is arranged to include all former prime ministers, all ministers who have held posts more than twice, members of the Bureau of the Assembly, retired high officials, heads of communities, tribal chiefs, etc. They represent nearly 60% of the Chamber; the rest depend largely on the power of the government.
This fake system bred fierce struggles, like those of the anti-imperialist revolts of 1921 and the internal convulsions which endangered the cohesion of the Iraqi state.
In the Lebanon, in Syria, and in Palestine, the struggle against the “Mandates” between the two wars also stimulated Arab nationalism and brought the hour of formal independence nearer.
The case of Palestine, the most Arab country of the whole “Fertile Crescent,” deserves special mention. The Balfour Declaration in 1918 recognized the right of the Jews to found a “National Home” in this Arab country under mandate. As the Jewish community grew in size – 190,000 in 1929 – political Zionism became more virulent, against which the Arabs, especially starting from that date, have reacted violently. For they saw in it an ever more serious obstacle to their own political development, a danger to their own economic independence, and a policy of territorial expansion by the Jews to their own detriment.It must be noted, however, that even at that time the Arabs would have agreed to negotiate with the Jews as citizens of the state of Palestine, to sanction their holding of land, to respect their cultural autonomy and perhaps even their local self-administration, in brief would have granted them a national minority status; but they intended to stop further immigration and the purchase of new lands, activities feverishly pursued by the Zionist Agency.
The anti-Zionist movement (soon to become anti-British by the very force of circumstances) of the Palestinian Arabs dates from the ’30s and grew in strength, reaching its climax on the outbreak of the Second World War. Zionism, an instrument of the imperialists, thus became a powerful reagent in creating Arab nationalism. In the ’30s, Palestine, together with Syria, became the main centre from which the ideas of the unity of the Arab world radiated again with new force. A Palestinian newspaper, Al-Arabi, issued this catechism in 1932 under the spiritual direction of Shakib Aslan and Abd er Rahman Azzam:
The Arabs occupy in their own right half of the Mediterranean circle. They look on the Atlantic Ocean on the one side and on the Indian Ocean on the other. Everywhere, common customs, identical culture. Arab unity is therefore a present reality and a historical reality.
With a view to strengthening cultural unity, plans were made to set up an Arab University in Jerusalem, as well as an Arab Academy – the fatter was established in Egypt late in 1933.
In the Autumn of 1932, the Executive Committee of the Arab Congress, which met in Jerusalem in 1931, prepared for a new congress to study the discontinuance of customs offices and the unification of the monetary systems and the postal services in the Arab countries.The period from 1930 to 1933 (during which King Feisal of Iraq died) was marked by various other endeavors to effect Arab unification, but all were sabotaged by imperialism and its native agents. On the outbreak of the Second World War imperialist domination in the Arab countries was already tottering but was still far from being abolished. In Palestine, however, a veritable war against the British had been raging since 1936 while the French had great difficulty in maintaining their position in Syria.
The new war crowned the process towards formal political independence of the Middle East states who profited from the inter-imperialist war, from the decline in the power of England and France, and from the dissensions between them.
The most outstanding events in this period were: the Iraq revolution against the English in May 1941; the evacuation of Lebanon and Syria by the French in November 1943; the Conference of Alexandria in September 1944, which laid the foundations for the League of Arab States (Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordania, Saudi Arabia, Yemen). But the interested patronage of London and the antagonism between the royal families of the Saudis and the Hashemites were also present at the birth of the Arab League.
And that is why the aspiration towards Arab unity retreated before the “respect of the independence and the sovereignty of the Arab State” simply “wishing to affirm and consolidate these ties,” as the Charter of the League proclaimed.
Since 1945 the Arab states of the Near East have become formally independent and have become members of the United Nations. [4]
On the other hand, the Arab countries of North Africa still had to wait for their hour of independence. Libya became independent in 1952, followed by the Sudan and then Morocco and Tunisia (1956). In Africa there are only Algeria and the Sahara regions attached to France, and the Spanish Sahara, which have not yet been liberated.
A new phase of the Arab revolution began after the end of the war, aimed at obtaining real independence from imperialism; it raises fundamental economic and social problems arising from the very widening of the Arab revolution.
The Economic and Social
Structures of the Arab Countries
Arab society is that of the arid countries of a good half of the Mediterranean circle, the peasant population of which, whether sedentary, nomad, or intermediate, clings to the lands bordering the sea, or to those on the banks of the great rivers, in the high mountains, in the oases, or to the grazing “steppes” with which the extensive deserts of the interior are dotted; where the system of land-holding has in general been shaped by Islamic law and Turkish feudalism, with urban centres populated by a mercantile and money-lending bourgeoisie living parasitically on trading profits and rents; a society which has long remained compartmented, closed off, and turned in on itself, and – whether in the Middle East or in the Maghreb – with relationship of family and tribal hierarchy and subordination, with the imprint of slavery sometimes still fresh upon it, a society not yet overthrown by imperialist penetration as such, except in small islets and in the peripheral fringes of the countries.
This is, roughly, the customary picture that we had of the Arab countries and which substantially corresponds to present reality. But in this general sketch, the concrete individual structures are necessarily blurred, and so are the essential lines of the evolution in progress. Hence the need for a more profound analysis.1) The Problem of the Land
In general, and in spite of undoubted progress made in industrialization which has made great strides, especially during the last war, the Arab countries are still characterized by the overwhelming preponderance of an agricultural economy dominated by relationships which are substantially feudal in the Middle East, and capitalist in the colonialist-owned big estates of the Maghreb countries.
The parasitic and usurious bourgeoisie of the towns has a direct interest in maintaining the present conditions in the country since it is these conditions which enable it often to own lands – which it sub-lets at a profit – and to manage, as it were, the finances of the fellahin who are constantly short of money and overwhelmed with debts. There are only nuclei in formation – but growing steadily despite everything – of an industrial bourgeoisie properly so called, whose interest it is to curb the power of the feudalists and the usurious bourgeois, to carry out certain reforms, and to raise the standard of living of the peasants, thus creating the home market which is indispensable for its own development.It is these nuclei of the industrial bourgeoisie, as well as the intellectual or even military circles – linked ideologically to the industrial bourgeoisie – who, in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, and Iraq, have really led the Arab revolution in the post-war period. (This is apart front the special case of the Algerian revolution which we shall study later.)
Let us make clearer, by means of some essential data, the present economic and social structure in the rural districts of the Arab countries:
From 5 to 45% of the land area is suitable for cultivation and an even smaller percentage has been cultivated, between 2 and 33%, but in general less than 10% The primary problem of water and irrigation weighs heavily on the exploitation of the land. In the six following countries – Lebanon, Syria, (Turkey), Transjordan, Iraq, and Iran – less than 1/8 of the cultivated lands is irrigated. In Iraq, 2,620 square miles are irrigated out of 19,100 square miles that could be, and in Syria, 1,250,000 acres out of 8,750,000 acres.
The limited area of cultivated land, aggravated by irrigation difficulties, occupied by an agricultural population forming the overwhelming majority of an ever increasing total population, lowers the average available land per capita to a level comparable with that of India, namely 1.48 acres.This extremely low proportion of cultivated land, as well as the very low yields of crops, are due to outmoded social relations rather than to insurmountable natural obstacles.
Islam forbids tenant farming at fixed rents; it has stipulated share-cropping and has allowed the most drastic rates. Furthermore, the inheritance laws laid down by the Koran have favored the splitting up of estates to an extreme degree, each male child inheriting two parts and each female child one part.
In addition, the principle of state control under the Ottoman Empire bore heavily on the land for a long time. It first allowed the creation of fiefs burdened with a rent and this favored absenteeism of the vested “lords,” bad cultivation, stagnation, and consequently extremely diversified systems of tenure.
The rights of the Moslem cultivator of the land (share-cropper or owner) are in general – whether in the Maghreb or in the Middle East – confirmed by custom, tradition, and the arbitrariness of the heads of the family or of the tribes, who fix the rents and periodically redistribute the lands inside the land collective of the family or tribe (muchaa system).
This keeps the cultivator in a state of uncertainty regarding his rights and the future of his plot. This uncertainty is in its turn reflected in poor routine cultivation of the soil.
By a certain simplification, it is possible to distinguish, in the Middle East, side-by-side with “mulk” lands, corresponding to the individual peasant holdings in European countries, the fief and the tenure which predominate. Originally property of the state, or rather of the sovereign, the “miri” lands have passed to the feudal lords, for services rendered, in the form of “mulk,” or else in the form of more or less long-term leases, and, in either case, sub-let by the feudal lords to the peasants. The “matruki” are lands reserved for public use and the “waqf” represent property in mortmain, religious or charitable donations.
The “miri” are characteristic of Iraq, the “matruki” of Iran; and for a long period the “waqf” represented one-tenth of the cultivated lands in Egypt.
In the Maghreb, the large agricultural estates, established on the best land, are generally in the hands of capitalist settlers and of a few native big landowners. They are cultivated according to modern methods, thanks to the use of an abundant and cheap native labor force, the landless peasants. As for the lands left for the native population, they are divided into “mulk” lands, the indivisible family lands – characteristic of the mountainous regions (each household of the agnatic family having the right to the yield in proportion to the area) – cultivated by the members of the family or by share-croppers on a 1/5 basis (khammes) in the case of land belonging to semi-nomads of the Sahara oases, of collective lands of peasant communities or of pastoral tribes; and of public or private “habous” lands equivalent to the Egyptian “waqf.” The latter category is still particularly important today in Tunisia.
In a general way, there is social predominance everywhere of landlords as well as of the “notables” of the tribe or of the community and of their merchant and usurious bourgeois allies in the towns; in their hands are concentrated the economic power, the financial power, and the civil authority; on the other hand, small landowners, especially all precarious landholders, who, for that very reason, do not see the necessity and the possibilities of long term cultivation.
The leasehold rent is often demanded in cash by the owners who live in the town. In order to subsist, the peasant must almost regularly resort to credit – an advance in cash or in kind -the formula varying but giving interest of 100% or more to the “merchants” or to the lending capitalist proprietors, acting as managers of their “clients,” paying their taxes, taking over their extraordinary family expenses, etc.
It is only the peasants in the mountainous regions like those in Algeria or Morocco – where the system is one of indivisible family and communal property and where a great spirit of mutual help prevails – who escape from this rule relating to the condition of the Arab peasant. But on the other hand, the population in these regions is constantly increasing on a poor and limited land-area, already minutely split up, fully settled, and overpopulated. This is what has given rise to emigration on an hitherto unknown scale.
In Egypt, before the 1952 agricultural reform, the land under cultivation broke down into some 5,600,000 feddan [5] of privately owned land, 592,000 feddan of waqf lands and 2,500,000 feddan of state land or land for common public use. Small holdings of less than 5 feddan per family accounted for 37% of the total; but this was in the hands of 94% of the owners. Medium-sized holdings of between 5 and 10 feddan represented 31.6% of the privately owned property, in the hands of 5.3% of the owners. The large estates of more than 50 feddan and representing more than 31% of the private property (without counting the waqf lands) was owned by less than 0.5% of the owners.
It is estimated, however, that it is impossible subsist on less than two feddan. Now before 1952 there were more than two and a half million owners with less than 2 feddan, and the tendency, in view of the growth of the population, was towards a reduction even of this area. And the average share of the crop paid to the landlord was 80% of the total income!
In Lebanon the very tiny estate of between 1.2 and 12 acres predominates, but a few years ago, 2% of the owners still owned 40% of the land.
In Syria, before the recent land reform, the large estates of more than 250 acres, contrasting perhaps even more than in Egypt with the small one of under 25 acres, accounted for more than 15% of the cultivatable area. In the north of the country, the big landowners hold from 80 to 90% of the land; and 60 to 75% in the Damascus region[6].
In Iraq, “property is the most subinfeudated, the system is vague, and the most outstanding feature is the development of the large estate. Under the Turkish regime, outside the urban areas, all the land was miri,” [7] and this was seized in various ways by the feudalists and the “notables.”
Before the recent agrarian reform, about one thousand landlords owned some 20 million acres out of a total of 30 million acres of arable land. Certain “notables” owned estates of 100,000 acres worked by veritable serfs who often received only 30% of the harvest. [8]
In Jordan the small holding of less than 25 acres predominates. From 30 to 40% of the villagers are probably landless. The system of the large estate, concentrated in the hands of a few hundred landlords, is still increasing.
In Iran, 85% of the land workers do not own the land on which they work: it belongs either to the state or to a limited number of big landowners.
In the Maghreb the situation is as follows:
In Tunisia, out of about 22 million acres of “productive” land, about 9,300,000 acres of which are actually cultivated, the colonists recently still owned 1,900,000 acres of the best land. The rest is divided among a few large native feudal owners of habous lands and a multitude of small native owners.
In Algeria, out of nearly 30,000,000 acres of arable land, 10 million of which are cultivated, 25,000 European colonists own or have the concession of a little more than 7 million acres of the best lands. In 1950 the lands owned by the European colonists represented 38% of the cultivated land. It is estimated on the other hand that the rural land owned by the Moslems consists of about 600,000 holdings of which 70% are not viable (less than 25 acres).
There is therefore an agricultural population of almost 700,000 peasant families without land (three to four million people).
In Morocco, 12,200,000 out of the 37 to 50 million acres of arable land (and 10 million acres of forest) were actually under cultivation in 1953 (about 10 million under cereals). Six thousand European colonists owned about 2,500,000 acres of arable land (with 900 farms of more than 750 acres), of which 1,500,000 acres are actually worked. The yields, however, are often three times as great as those of Moroccan farmers.
The few thousand Moroccan big feudalists own one quarter of the cultivated land in Morocco, i.e., 4,500,000 acres. About 1,300,000 Moroccans cultivate nearly 10,000,000 acres of land. In 1954 it was estimated that there were 500,000 peasant families without land.[9] A quarter of the land cultivated by the Moroccans is in the form of collective lands.
Everywhere, whether in the Middle East or in the Maghreb, there is an immense rural proletariat side-by-side with a mass of impoverished peasants and nomads, [10] a surplus population without any possibility of obtaining really productive employment.
The living conditions of this population are among the most miserable in the world: an annual income per capita – and sometimes per whole family, as in Egypt – of less than 50 dollars; total illiteracy; numerous diseases due to under-nourishment or the conditions of work and the climate (tuberculosis, malaria, trachoma – which does not spare the eyes of even an Ibn Saud – bilharzia, ancylostomiasis, etc), all of which undermine their already weakened organisms.And while the tendency of evolution is towards concentration and modernization of the large estates, the surplus peasant population, which is not economically employed and consequently not economically viable for the cultivation of the land, increases because of the progress that is nevertheless made in hygiene, the sedentarization of the nomads, and the increased productivity of the soil, which does not expand in proportion.
Thus there is clearly sketched out the primary importance, side-by-side with the national struggle for real independence from imperialism, of the agrarian problem in these countries. This problem, furthermore, can be satisfactorily solved only by a complete agrarian reform in the framework of an overall revolutionary policy that will give the peasant sufficient land and will increase its productivity. To recover new land by various hydraulic projects, to eliminate disease and illiteracy, to increase the productivity of the soil, and, by making great strides in agriculture, to back up the indispensable parallel of industrialization of the Arab countries, demands more than an agrarian reform, it requires an overall state policy.
The agrarian reform in the Arab countries should aim at giving the land to those who actually work it, that is to say, to the small landowners, the share-croppers and agricultural workers, removing all the uncertainties which now weigh so heavily on the small plot, expropriating without compensation the lands of the large native and colonist owners as well as the waqf and habous lands, and enlarging the existing lands by hydraulic and other projects wherever possible and necessary.
As regards the forms to be taken by such an agrarian reform, they must take into account both the community customs which still characterize the Arab family and tribal society (although on the decline because of the penetration of capitalism) and the requirements of an irrigated cultivation, no less on a community basis.
This means that it is possible to foresee on a broad scale for these countries an agricultural reform which will right from the outset bring into being communal or tribal collectives (which will be amalgamated later into larger collectives) and convert the best of the large agricultural holdings of the native feudalists and the colonists into state undertakings, managed by collectives of the agricultural workers or sharecroppers now working on them.
In fact, the standard of living of the Arab share-cropper or agricultural worker is at present so low (perhaps horrifying would be the better word) that any appreciable economic improvement, including for example in the form of wages, can inspire these masses to greater productivity on a collective farm of which they would be the managers.
Naturally, the concrete case is different for each country and sometimes even for this or that region.
2) Bourgoisie, Proletariat, and Industrialization
Quite recently the Arab bourgeoisie was still composed essentially of the merchants and rentiers to whom the greatest part of the profits from agricultural production accrued in one form or another. These strata consumed, redistributed, or exported the produce of the earth, hoarding their gains in the form of gold, or investing them in real estate or in large estates sublet to sharecroppers or cultivated by agricultural workers, along the lines of a capitalist undertaking [11].
These strata likewise engaged in the usurious exploitation of the peasants, bound to them “by a complex system of debts, of commercial relations, or as clients.” Merchants playing an important part in trade (textiles, cereals) or in transport, were a characteristic feature also in the basic composition of the Arab bourgeoisie in the towns in the Maghreb.This structure of the Arab bourgeoisie, essentially parasitical, still predominates at the present moment.
But the economic transformations that occurred in the Arab countries as a result of imperialist penetration, the opening up of the oil fields, and the slow but steady process of industrialization, have given rise, side-by-side with these strata, to nuclei of an industrial bourgeoisie properly so called and consequently to a modern proletariat.
In the Middle East, in addition to the trade bases and undertakings such as the Suez Canal, it is the oil fields which have been the greatest influence in the economic and social transformation of the countries of this region. Today there are 600 oil wells in the Middle East supplying one quarter of the total production of the Western world, while the reserves in this area are estimated at 2/3 of the total of the “Atlantic” reserves.[12] The total output of the Middle East is worth more than one thousand million dollars per annum. The income obtained from petroleum forms the major part, if not the whole, of the budget of the oil-producing Arab states. Only a very tiny part of this income, however, is now used for the benefit of the national economy.
Nevertheless, the technical needs for exploiting the petroleum and the profits arising from this exploitation have completely overthrown the traditional life on the whole of the “Persian” fringe of a country like Arabia for example, where slavery still prevailed quite recently: denomadization and proletarianization, road construction, urbanization.
Furthermore, a modern industry has been developed to varying degrees in the different countries of the Middle East, especially since the First World War and still more since the Second: extractive industries (other than that of petroleum which is entirely in the hands of the imperialists) or processing industries.
By far the main industry is the textile industry, especially in Egypt (which, in addition to cotton, processes linen, rayon, and natural silk in very large factories as well as in a multitude of artisanal workshops). Then come the Lebanon and Syria. In Iraq, the textile industry is only in its initial stages, and only cotton and rayon are processed.
Then come the foodstuff, the metal, the chemical, and the building industries, all of recent development and concentrated chiefly in Egypt, with a few undertakings in the Lebanon and Syria. As a general rule, these industries, including the textile industry, do not as yet, in spite of their constant progress, even cover internal demand, and consequently it is very exceptional if there is surplus for export.
Their development is important, however, because of its social consequences, strengthening the formation of a real industrial bourgeoisie and of a modern proletariat.
The contingents of the latter are still weak numerically; but, often concentrated and holding key economic positions in these countries, they are steadily growing: a vanguard of some 200,000 oil workers in Iran, in the Persian Gulf protectorates, in Saudi Arabia, in Iraq, in Syria, and in the Sahara; workers in the textile and building industries in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad; workers in transport, dockers in the various ports from Alexandria to Lattaquieh.
Egypt alone – by far the most industrialized of the Arab countries – has 1,300,000 workers at the moment, but most of them (90%) are unskilled workers scattered among several thousands of small workshops; only 65 factories employ more than 500 workers.
In the Maghreb, the economy is dominated by colonial agriculture whose aim is exportation. Nevertheless,
processing industries have been established in the towns, first with the object of satisfying the needs of the internal market, especially of the Europeans: flour mills, alimentary paste factories here and there, modern oil-processing plants, and a few canneries. But before 1945 at least, they supplied practically nothing for export. Most of the other produce of the soil and the subsoil were also scarcely ever processed, either. [13]
Before the war not one of the countries in North Africa had
a metal industry apart from foundries and repair workshops. Not textile industries, either, although cotton fabrics were one of the most important import articles. There were just a few workshops processing wool, especially in Morocco. The chemical industry was limited on the whole to the production of sulphuric acid and superphosphates used almost exclusively by the European settlers. The building industry was unable to satisfy the needs in these countries under construction. Algeria, for example, imported two thirds of its cement, one half of its lime, and even a substantial proportion of its tiles and bricks. [14]
This situation has changed very much since the last war. Industrialization then appeared to be essential for the war effort itself. From 1943 on, in the three countries in North Africa cut off from the mother country, there was soon a shortage of the most essential manufactured goods. It was therefore necessary to improvize a whole series of new industries: foodstuffs, metallurgical, household goods, chemical and glass industries, building industries, etc.
A number of these industries, being unable to face the competition of the better equipped industries in the mother country, failed as soon as the war ended. But the impetus given to industrialization was able to be maintained nevertheless, thanks to fresh investments of capital fleeing from France or of international capital, due likewise to the strategic importance of the Maghreb countries, which favored large-scale undertakings and heavy expenditure. Industry benefited greatly from these investments (public or private).In addition to some local capital invested in the foodstuff and textile undertakings,
large concerns in metropolitan France established branches, such as Pont a Mousson, Air Liquide, Solvay, Pechiney, Saint-Gobain, Lafargue, Niederwiller, Boussac, Amieux, etc, and some Anglo-American undertakings (Nord-Africaine de Plomb in Zellidja, Gulf Oil and Shell in Tunisia). [15]
Thus various factories sprang up: metallurgical, textile, chemical, etc. Some of these factories (foodstuff industries) are at the place of production, but most of them have been erected near the ports and have given rise to vast industrial quarters (the famous “bidonvilles” being among them)
Neither in the Middle East nor in the Maghreb has the industrialization process now taking place brought about as yet any qualitative transformation of the traditional economic structure of these under-developed countries dominated by agriculture and trade.Technically, the large-scale development of industry is handicapped by the absence of a heavy industry which could efficiently and cheaply equip the light industries and consequently reduce the exorbitant cost price of the goods made by the home industries which, in order to survive. have to be protected by no less exorbitant tariffs.
Economically, the feudal structure in the rural regions and the usurious role of the merchant bourgeoisie of the cities are impeding the creation of a vast internal market capable of spurring the development of industry.
Financially, the development of industry is impeded by the lack of sufficient resources for primary accumulation of capital, native capital preferring the rapid and substantial profits to be obtained from mercantile and money-lending operations and foreign capital being willing to invest only cautiously, likewise with the hope of quick profits, while the state, in the hands of the native feudo-capitalists or of imperialism, in its turn favors this speculative activity and itself absorbs, by the phenomenon, well known in these countries, of an officialdom as plethoric as it is incompetent and parasitical, a high proportion of the resources which would otherwise be available for the development of the national economy. [16]
Furthermore, because of their very nature as underdeveloped countries, an immense productive force, represented by the working potential of their population, remains for the most part without any possible productive employment: two thirds of the 18 million fellahin in Egypt, 7 persons out of 9 of the Algerian native population, etc.
Thus the social and economic conditions of the feudo-capitalist regime in these countries, still economically dominated – with very rare exceptions – by imperialism, constitute a major obstacle to the industrialization of these countries and render absolutely unattainable any prospect of catching up with the industrial countries in the foreseeable future.
And yet natural conditions are nowise unfavorable to a rapid industrialization of the Arab countries.
Even though the problem of hydraulic power or power based on coal is generally difficult for any of these countries to solve, on the other hand most of them can benefit, apart from the solar power of tomorrow, from the extraordinary abundance of petroleum, resources which, combined in an inter-Arab pool, would be fully sufficient for all the needs of their industrialization.
Mineral resources, although poorly prospected and ill known, seem to be abundant:
In the Middle East: Bituminous limestone in the Yarmouk valley in Syria, vast deposits of salts in the whole Syrian desert, in the Dead Sea [17], on the shores of the Red Sea, etc; iron ores to the east of Assuan in Egypt, and in the Lebanon; coal, copper, and lead in the Yemen; gold at Mahad Dahab in Saudi Arabia; phosphates in Egypt and in the Libyan desert, etc.
In North Africa: Phosphates in Tunisia and especially Morocco which produce nearly one third of the world output; iron deposits, especially in Algeria, such as those of Bone (centre of Ouenza), the working of which is now contemplated with an estimated production of 400,000 to 500,000 tons of iron per annum; lead and zinc deposits in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco; manganese, cobalt, and other rare minerals in Morocco; very large mineral resources of many kinds in the Sahara; petroleum, gas, the Colomb-Bechar coal basin, iron deposits in Gara Djebilet and Fort Gouraud, copper at Akjoujt, various mineral deposits in Hoggar, etc.
To these mineral resources of the Middle East and North Africa must be added the raw materials from vegetable and animal sources: cotton, cane and beet sugar, various oils, wool, etc.
With regard to the financial conditions for the industrialization of the Arab countries, they are fully satisfied by the existence of the petroleum resources combined with a vast and currently idle surplus labor power of the population of these countries. Theoretically, the colossal profits from the production of petroleum [18] should be sufficient to finance the industrialization of a united Federated Arab Republic. But the greater part of these profits returns to the foreign imperialist companies and to the ruling oligarchies (governments, kings, sheikhs). [19]
The fabulous incomes of the Sheikh of Kuwait and of the royal treasury of Saudi Arabia are well known: more than $500 million and $300 million respectively per annum! The Sheikh of Kuwait uses about one third for his family (70 people) and another third is invested in “international shares of the first order by an investment committee” set up by the Sheikh in London, the famous Kuwait investment Board! Only one third is used for the so-called “general good.”
As regards the petroleum income of Saudi Arabia, $50 million are used in maintaining the 300 members of the royal family and the 24 “1001 Nights” palaces (against only $13 million for agriculture between 1952 and 1954, $80 million for the army in 1955).
In Iraq, on the other hand, 70% of the revenue from petroleum was used by a “Development Board” to improve the national economy, especially agriculture, thanks mainly to works controlling the floods of the Tigris and the Euphrates for irrigation purposes.
The imperialist grip on petroleum also impedes home consumption, partly because of the difficulties it sets up to the refining of any quantity of crude petroleum on the spot, but mainly because of the imposition of a price much higher than the production price in the Middle East since it is calculated on the basis of the price of American oil.
In conclusion, expropriation without compensation to the imperialists and feudalists is a primary condition if the very vast Arab petroleum resources are to make an effective contribution to the rapid development of the national economy of these countries.
There is another very important resource in these countries which by itself could at least partly solve the difficult problem of primary accumulation of the capital required for a rapid and large-scale commencement of industrialization; this resource is the productive mobilization of the labor power of millions of men and women now partially or totally unemployed. This force, engaged in irrigation works, reforestation, and diverse civil construction, as well as in local industry, within the framework of a state-controlled and planned economy, could very quickly make considerable productive forces available, beginning by substantially increasing agricultural production. The effective mobilization of this resource is likewise a question of the social system.
Balance Sheet of the Present Bourgeois Leadership of the Arab Revolution
It is these data that must be taken into account when judging the role played by the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois leadership of the Arab revolution in this post-war period, to draw its trial balance, and to evaluate its prospects.
The outstanding events in the Middle Eastern and Arab revolution in general, in the new stage opened since the end of the Second World War, are: the Mossadegh experiment in Iran; the 1952 Egyptian political revolution and the rise to power of Nasserism; the liberation of Tunisia and Morocco; the Algerian revolution of November 1954; the formation of the UAR; the 1958 Lebanese and Iraqi revolutions.In all these events a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois leadership of the revolution asserted its authority, heading up the national anti-imperialist struggle. In some cases, the leading political role played by the bourgeois parties and personalities – themselves of bourgeois social origin or definitively attached ideologically to the bourgeoisie – was perfectly clear: Mossadegh in Iran; the Istiqlal in Morocco; the Neo-Destour and Bourguiba in Tunisia; various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois formations in Lebanon and Syria. In other cases, such as those of Egypt and Iraq, the leadership of the revolution was taken over by a Bonapartist officers’ group, whose social essence and orientation should be better grasped. This is more generally the case of Nasserism.
Events have completely demonstrated, it seems to me, the correctness of the essential theses of revolutionary Marxism on the development of the colonial revolution in our time and the role of the native bourgeoisie. They have confirmed the possibility for the bourgeoisie to struggle, up to a certain point, against imperialism, and this in turn confirms the necessity of a national anti-imperialist united front rallying all classes, in the case of colonial and semi-colonial countries.
But events have equally demonstrated the limitations of the native bourgeoisie in all essential fields: real independence from imperialism; national unification; agrarian reform; industrialization; the emancipation of women. Because of the fact that the native bourgeoisie, including the nucleus of the industrial bourgeoisie, is in all these countries both economically weak, too tied up economically with imperialism, with the feudalists, and with the other native exploiting strata (mercantile and usurious bourgeoisie), and afraid to base itself firmly on the peasant and worker masses, events have shown that this bourgeoisie cannot achieve and complete the aforementioned essential tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. [20]
Mossadegh’s failure in the nationalization of oil in Iran; the balance sheets of the Istiqlal regime in Morocco and the Neo-Destour regime in Tunisia; today’s trial balance of the Iraqi revolution – all this experience is present to show clearly the limitations of a revolutionary leadership that is in the last analysis bourgeois. (We shall treat separately the case of the present Algerian revolution.)
These limitations are all the more flagrant in that the international conditions of the post-war period have in reality given the national hourgeoisies of the colonial and semi-colonial countries exceptional possibilities and chances, because of the antagonism between the East and West and the quite new possibilities of diplomatic, military, financial, commercial, and technical aid at the disposal of the USSR and the other workers’ states. [21]
Owing to these new circumstances, the national bourgeoisie has the possibility of pushing its relative independence from imperialism much further than in the past, and at the same time to stand up victoriously to possible aggressions by imperialism, as was the case at the time of the Anglo-French 1956 Suez expedition, and again at the time of the events following the 1958 revolution in Iraq.
But the class nature of the national bourgeoisie prevents it from profiting by such an exceptional situation to make radical riddance of the economic consequences of imperialism and the feudalists, whose existence is a major obstacle to the extension of the internal market and to a rapid and large-scale industrialization. The economic positions of imperialism are nowhere completely eliminated in the Arab countries, including Egypt – far from it.
In the case of certain expropriations and statifications, which took place under the drive of the masses and of urgent political and economic needs – such as those of the Suez Canal and other enterprises in Egypt – the imperialists have been given fat compensation, which loads the national economy with burdens which reduce to just that extent the possible resources that could have been devoted to industrialization.
The case of petroleum, which is determinant for the economic future and the industrialization of the Arab countries, is characteristic of the general weakness of the bourgeoisie confronted by imperialism. The new relationship of forces set up between the two might be able to lead the bourgeoisie to negotiate the terms of the contracts with the oil companies in a way more favorable to itself. This process has already started. [22]
But the stage of the statification without indemnization of these companies, a primordial precondition for ensuring the primitive accumulation necessary to get industrialization started on a big scale in the Arab countries, will not be entered without the revolutionary drive of the Arab masses and without a leadership that goes well outside the bourgeois framework.
The task of the unification of the Arab nation is no less compromised under the present bourgeois or petty-bourgeois leadership of the Arab revolution, Arab unification is too progressive a task not to subordinate to it the character of the regime under which it might be able to be brought about,
The unification of the Arab nation would form the most propitious framework for the economic, social, and political flowering of the Arab revolution. From this point of view, the political forms in which this process is carried out are less important than the content itself. If for example Arab unification could be brought about in the framework of a single centralized state, governed by Nasser, however anti-democratic this state might be, one would not be able to be against such a unification. One would be satisfied merely to continue the struggle for democratic freedoms and for socialism within such a state.
But it is in practice improbable that Nasserism unify the Arab nation under the form either of a centralized inter-Arab state, or even of a confederation of Arab republics. All forms of association of the Arab states as transitional forms toward unification in a single centralized state or an effective federative republic[23] must be considered progressive and supported if they tend to be carried out.
The present difficulties within the UAR between Egypt and Syria, as well as the attitude of reserve on both sides between the UAR and Iraq about extending unification also to the latter country; Bourguiba’s hostility toward the UAR; the dissensions even within the Maghreb – these are so many important indications of the organic, and not merely conjunctural, inaptitude of any one of the Arab bourgeoisies – even of the relatively most dynamic among them – to set itself up as the assimilating and unifying element of the Arab countries as a whole.
The different fractions of the Arab feudocapitalist ruling classes are too heterogeneous from the viewpoint of economic and social structure, each too differently tied up to imperialism, too particularist, to polarize themselves by their own will and movement around a single axis in a single national framework. Only a strong political power endowed with great economic dynamism would be able to break the centrifugal particularist tendencies and bring about unification, which is above all the common revolutionary aspiration of the Arab masses. [24]
Nasserism does not have this scope. Nasserism represents par excellence a Bonapartist power which exploits the strength of the mass movement in Egypt and in the Arab countries as well as the antagonism between the East and West, to the final profit of the social stratum – still limited but steadily being re-enforced – of the national industrial bourgeoisie. This bourgeois]e, capitalist par excellence, does not at present have sufficient strength to rule through a parliamentary democratic party and government. To impose its rule it needs a strong state able to face both imperialism and the economically backward native feudo-bourgeois strata, without being outflanked on the left by the autonomous revolutionary movement of the masses.
The military power of the “anti-imperialist” “national” officers – offspring mostly of the middle bourgeoisie of the towns and country, sons of medium-large landowners, businessmen, or functionaries – who aspire in vague social terms to “modernize” their country, to “catch up with” the West, etc. – such a power is, for this stratum of the bourgeoisie, a dream come true as a political tool.
Basically Nasserist Bonapartism works in favor of the development of capitalism, both through the fact that part of the state administration, growing wealthy because of its functions, becomes capitalist, i.e., an owner of capital, and through state action as a whole, which is trying to make up for primitive capitalist accumulation and is aiding industrial capitalist development [25] against the limitations to this development produced in the past by the omnipotence of imperialism and feudalism.
The inter-Arab policy of Nasserism in trying to create a vaster inter-Arab market from which imperialist and feudal obstacles would be at least partly eliminated, and in trying on such a basis to bring other fractions of the Arab bourgeoisie to tie into this undertaking, is also purely capitalist in its economic essence.
We have just seen the limits of the anti-imperialist struggle of the national bourgeoisie as well as those of its struggle for national unification and industrialization. It remains for us to demonstrate the limits of its struggle against the feudalists, which clearly appear in the extreme timidity of the agrarian reforms undertaken since the war by the national bourgeoisie.
In Egypt, the agrarian reform has to date benefited less than about 10% of the immense mass of the fellahin, while having accorded fat indemnities to the “expropriated” proprietors. [26]
The extension of the agrarian reform now going on in Syria sets the ceiling on private property left to the feudalists at 200 acres of irrigated land, increased by 100 acres in case of children, plus 750 acres of non-irrigated land. For the rest of his land taken over by the state, the owner is indemnified on the basis of a price for the land equal to ten times the average annual rent (which is often, as in Egypt, four times greater than the rent of an equal area in Europe).
As for the land distributed to the peasants, it will be formed of plots of 20 acres of irrigated land or 75 acres of non-irrigated land, payable in 40 years at an interest rate of l.5%. This reform also will not affect at the end of the five years required for its application, more than an infinitesimal part of the more than three million landless peasants in Syria.
As for the agrarian reform in Iraq, which in a sense precipitated the extension of the agrarian reform in Syria, it is even more moderate “in view of the fact that Iraq possesses three times more cultivatable land than Syria”! – as certain Arab apologists for the reform very paradoxically argue (cf. the Oct 1958 Arab Review, published by the Arab Students’ Union in England).
This reform, also spread over five years, proposes that the upper limit of private property shall be brought down to 618 acres of irrigated land and 1230 acres of non-irrigated land. In all these cases, the class of former big landowners will be succeeded by a stratum of rich peasants who, sheltered from financial troubles – if only because of state indemnities – will have no difficulty in economically dominating, one way or another, the small peasants who have become owners of tiny plots, in a thankless climate, without suitable material and technical aid from the state.
As for the liberated countries of the Maghreb – Tunisia and Morocco – apart from limited expropriations, with indemnity. of a few settlers’ estates, no serious attempt at agrarian reform has yet been undertaken.
Under these conditions it can be affirmed without any exaggeration that the crucial problem, the agrarian problem, remains essentially intact in the Arab countries, and that it is an illusion to expect a radical solution thereof from the present leadership of the Arab revolution.
As for the emancipation of women, whose condition in these countries, as a result of Islamic prescriptions and the feudal past, is among the most anachronistic and grievous in the world, the solution of this task also is tied up with the radical economic and social transformation of these countries, which cannot be accomplished under the present feudo-capitalist regime. [27]
For a New Revolutionary Marxist Arab Leadership
Both to wind up and complete the Arab revolution’s bourgeois-democratic tasks, properly so called, and to tackle the socialist reconstruction of the Arab nation, it is necessary to cause a new leadership of the revolution to arise, representing the proletariat and the poor peasant masses of the Arab countries. In other words, a revolutionary Marxist leadership.
It must be admitted, however, that this task is running very late as against history’s time-table, and that it has been terribly complicated, in the Arab countries as elsewhere, by the changing foreign policy of the Soviet bureaucracy. By their thoroughly opportunist and class-collaborationist policy, the Communist Parties, docile instruments in the Arab countries just as elsewhere, have in reality so far sabotaged the creation of autonomous class political parties that stimulate the autonomous organization and action of the proletariat and the poor peasants.Granted, such a necessary class policy does not mean to minimize in any way whatever the alliance with the national bourgeoisie in the effective struggle against imperialism and the feudalists. But this equally necessary alliance must take the form of a united front among autonomous class organizations with a view to effective action, for precise goals, each of the participants in the front fully safeguarding its own political physiognomy and its full right to criticism of its conjunctural allies. That is the Leninist policy of the united front. In colonial and dependent countries, in view of the dual role of the national bourgeoisie, this policy involves the merciless ideological criticism of the inevitable limitations of the national bourgeoisie, and the no less inevitable class struggle against it, in order to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution and to tackle the socialist tasks properly so called.
Instead of following such a line, the Communist Parties of the Arab countries were forced by the Kremlin to line up, sometimes with the positions of the metropolitan bourgeoisie, sometimes with those of the national bourgeoisie, thus betraying both the struggle for national independence and the struggle for social liberation.
Every time the Kremlin wagered on the alliance or the neutralization of a metropolitan bourgeoisie, it cynically sacrificed to this goal the interests of the anti-imperialist struggle and of the social revolution in the countries dependent upon this metropolis. Before and during the Second World War, in order to maintain its alliance with Great Britain and France, the Kremlin forced the Arab Communist Parties to tone down their struggle for national independence, and even flatly to sabotage this struggle just so as not to hinder its imperialist allies. After the war, at another stage, when the movement for national independence became in spite of everything irresistible, in order to win the good graces of the national bourgeoisie in its own struggle against the Atlantic powers, the Kremlin forced the Communist Parties here and there to line up completely with the positions of the national bourgeoisie, to tone down and even openly to sabotage the autonomous class struggle for the social revolution in these countries.
Is it necessary to recall the sabotage of the anti-imperialist struggle in which the Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian, and other Communist Parties engaged during the war, a struggle sacrificed on the altar of the Kremlin’s alliance with Great Britain, France, and the United States? Is it necessary to recall how, “full of understanding” for the “historical bonds” allegedly existing between their respective countries and France, the Communist Parties of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in fact long sabotaged the struggle for the national independence of these countries and then were taken into tow by the nationalist leaderships which took the initiative in such a struggle? Is it necessary to recall the almost unconditional support that the CPs of Egypt and Syria gave Nasser from 1955 on, after the big arms agreement between Egypt and Czechoslovakia, a support that went even to the extreme of self-liquidation and open sabotage of any class policy in these countries?
It is true that this unconditional support to Nasserism now seems to have been partially withdrawn from him, in a new turn-about by the CPs of Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, which are criticizing Nasser, taking stands against the extension of the UAR to Iraq, and singing the praises of the sovereignty of each Arab state, now Iraq first of all.
Naturally, what is mainly responsible for this policy, at first sight puzzling, is also the Kremlin itself, which probably considers it dangerous to strengthen Nasser any further, for fear lest he soon do without the Kremlin’s support and swing over to the Western side. This zigzaging and utterly opportunist policy – determined by the changing objectives of the Kremlin’s foreign policy and not by the well understood imperative needs of the anti-imperialist and social revolutions in the colonial and dependent countries – is applied by the Kremlin through a few key men in the Communist Parties, for the majority of their members and even of their cadres have no consciousness of the role of simple pawns that their parties play on the chessboard of the Kremlin’s foreign policy. It well might be, in the case of a very strong revolutionary movement of the masses, that they might drag certain of these parties beyond the limits assigned to their action by the Kremlin, as was the case with the Algerian CP, joining – tardily and against the line of the French CP – the Algerian revolution led by the FLN; and this might tomorrow be the case with the CP in Iraq.
In general, however, these parties, with the exception of the CPs of Iraq and now again of Syria, are at present largely discredited and isolated from the broad Arab masses. This raises the problem of the creation of the new, revolutionary Marxist, leadership in the Arab countries, with prospects of working not essentially in the CPs but by other ways specific to each country.
The primordial task in all the Arab countries currently consists in grouping together, on the integral programme of revolutionary Marxism, i.e., of the Fourth International, a nucleus of Arab cadres who at the same time are inside the real mass movement of their respective countries, and who begin to work up a platform, a transitional programme, that takes into account the peculiarities of their countries. This concrete transitional programme must combine anti-imperialist and national democratic demands with socialist slogans properly so called, in order thus to show in each country the concrete specific road that leads from the present situation to the radical, socialist, solution, within the Arab context. The preparation of such a programme must go hand-in-hand with the definition and propaganda of the transitional party that will work for this programme.
The struggle for the socialist solution is inseparable from the struggle for the formation of the revolutionary Marxist mass party, the indispensable instrument for socialist victory. But the creation of the revolutionary Marxist mass party passes in each case by concrete transitional paths.
In this way it may be that the revolutionary Marxists of countries like Morocco or Tunisia reach the conclusion that the formation of the revolutionary Marxist party takes the path of the creation of a Labor Party based on the trade unions [28], in view of the strength of the trade-union movement and the tendencies to spontaneous politicization it has shown (Tunisia) and currently continues to show (Morocco). This way can, furthermore, turn out to be of a more general interest, for the trade-union movement is called upon to play an identical role, also of a politically pioneer nature, in a whole category of countries.
Such a party will have to work up a general programme as advanced as possible, and especially a transitional action programme, giving a concrete answer to the unsolved problems of genuine independence from imperialism, Arab unification, agrarian reform, economic and industrial development, and the emancipation of women.
In the more special case of Algeria, it is obvious that both the revolutionary Marxist tendency and the essential forces of a mass Labor Party of tomorrow will emerge from the inevitable social and political differentiation within the present FLN. The FLN, at its beginnings an anti-imperialist national united front, is constantly undergoing a differentiation through the deepening, the experience, and even the difficulties, of the revolution. Its base is essentially plebeian, composed of rural laborers of the big colonial estates, of poor peasants from the mountain regions and the oases, of khammes [29], of nomads from the Sahara, craftsmen, petty traders, and workers from the cities of Algeria and from the proletarian emigration in France. Its leadership is taken by elements who have emerged from these milieux, mixed with intellectual elements and a few rare representatives of middle-bourgeois strata.
The disproportion, much greater than elsewhere, between plebeian elements and petty-bourgeois and especially bourgeois elements, which is in favor of the numerical and social importance of the former, causes the Algerian revolution to be far deeper and harder to “bourgeoisify,” to “Bourgibify,” than the Tunisian or even the Moroccan revolution.
Nevertheless the fact must not be minimized that, for lack of a clear revolutionary Marxist ideology, even the best-intentioned and most pro-plebeian petty-bourgeois elements inevitably fall back into the orbit of a policy which, finally, is bourgeois.
This danger is always lying in wait for the leadership of the FLN: I am speaking, of course, not of the openly pro-bourgeois if not themselves bourgeois elements, like Ferhat Abbas, but of its left intellectuals and its military leaders of peasant stock. This is all the more the case in that the Algerian revolution is now burdened by the weight of: the de Gaulle regime with its “economic and social overtures,” its ambiguity about Algeria, and also its stepped-up repression; the pressure of the Tunisian and Moroccan bourgeoisies attracted by the prospect of coexploiting the riches of the Sahara together with imperialism; the prostration of the French workers’ movement; and also – it must be said – the ineffectiveness of the political programme and general leadership of the Algerian revolution.
It is not a matter of bringing into question the enormous positive accomplishment of the FLN, the initiator of the revolution and the organizer so far of a fierce and nothing less than astonishing resistance to the extraordinarily powerful war effort of an exasperated and savage imperialism. It is rather a matter of understanding that the very deepening of the revolution under the new conditions in which it is put, requires that its social programme be made more specific, and that the structure and functioning of the FLN be made more democratic, so that the plebeian base of the revolution may be more associated with it and therein find the reasons, the prospects, and the justification of its long combat and its immense sacrifices.
The creation of revolutionary Marxist nuclei in each Arab country, inside the real mass movement, must go hand-in-hand with their inter-Arab liaison, in order to form in reality the initial nucleus of the mass Arab revolutionary Marxist party of tomorrow. The Fourth International is disposed and firmly decided to aid, by a great effort in all fields, the accomplishment of such a task. Its militants are collaborating closely and fraternally, without the faintest desire to impose their views bureaucratically, with all Arab comrades who are revolutionary Marxists or who are turning toward revolutionary Marxism, independently of complete agreement on the totality of the positions of the Fourth International in order to help them to group together organizationally both by countries and on the inter-Arab plane, to work up their platform, both inter-Arab and country by country. and to publish an inter-Arab revolutionary Marxist theoretical organ.
This is a great and urgent task. The future of the Arab revolution depends upon it. from the depths of that revolution there have already emerged admirable and heroic figures seeking more or less confusedly for its socialist future, its only future.In the lineage of a proletarian like the Egyptian Mustapha Khamis [30] or one of the first glorious moudjahidines of the Algerian revolution, Larbi Ben M’Hidi [31], the Arab revolutionary Marxists will know how to carry the revolution, for which fellahin and proletarians have accepted so many sacrifices, to its victorious goal: the Arab Socialist Republic.
November 1958
Notes
1. Even in Arabia, there is not, strictly speaking, an Arab race according to modern scientific definitions; rather there is a mixture of three main racial types: Chamite, Mediterranean and Armenoid (according to Bertram Thomas). In Iraq the basic population is “nabatee” or “Chaldean,” and “Aramaic” or “Syriac” in Syria-Lebanon. Ethnically. Egypt is Coptic. From Libya to Morocco the Maghreb is Berber; the Berbers themselves are not a race but an “ethnic complex.”
2. R. Puron: The Near East, Editions Payot, Paris.
3. There was also a movement of demands in Algeria in the ’20s, led by the Emir Khaled; and at Paris in 1923 there was created the Etoile Nord-Africaine.
4. Except Aden, the Pirate Coast, Bahrein, and Kuwait in Arabia, which are territories controlled or protected by Great Britain; Palestine and Jordan obtained only in 1948 and 1949 respectively the formal status of independence.
5. One feddan is equal to 478 square yards.
6. This property was cultivated by share-cropping. “The lots entrusted to the tenants are between 17.5 and 150 acres for dry farming, depending on the quality of the soil and the dryness of the climate, and the proportion which they keep for themselves varies in the same way from one half to four fifths. The contracts concluded for one year or for the duration of the crop rotation offer no guarantee to the tenant. He is bound to the owner only by his debts.” (The Mediterranean and the Middle East, by P. Birot and Jean Bresch, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.)
7. Ibid.
8. A law in 1933 gave the owner the right to keep the share-cropper on the land until he had paid his debt.
9. In 45 years the miserable conditions have driven one million rural people to the towns where they form the semi-proletariat of the “bidonvilIes” (shanty-towns).
10. The latter, mostly shepherds, although declining surely and inevitably, still form an appreciable component in the total Arab population, perhaps something like 10%: 300,000 in Syria, the majority of the six million inhabitants of Saudi Arabia, two million in Iran, more than half the population of the Sahara (where there are about 1.7 million inhabitants).
The conversion of the nomads to a sedentary life, now taking place both in the Middle East and in the Maghreb, is a result of the creation of the various independent states, breaking up the desert and cutting off the pasture areas, as well as of the introduction of the trade and automotive transport of the capitalist era, which make a wandering life in the desert both difficult and obsolete.
“Sedentarization is accompanied more than ever by profound economic and social changes. The tribal chiefs are being transformed into large landowners by various means: dictatorial distribution of the arable lands, sale of water, and credits,” while others become simple peasants, or even, having lost all their flocks, go to swell the number of khammes at the oases, or transform themselves into proletarians flocking to the towns or to the oil-fields as in Arabia and now in the Sahara.
11. “In Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and even in the Lebanon, except in the high mountains, a goodly section of the large estates is in the hands of the bourgeois families who bought the ‘mulk’ lands, and acquired the usufruct of ‘miri’ estates (made valuable in Iraq by harnessing the waters) on the basis of shares in the agricultural communities of muchaa structure. They place them under managers, parcel them out among the tenants [...] unless they expand the irrigation works, buy equipment, and introduce industrial crops for the purpose of speculation.” (The Mediterranean and the Middle East, by P. Birot and Jean Dresch.)
12. Estimated at 16,100 million tons. Saudi Arabia alone has greater petroleum reserves than the United States (thanks in particular to undersea strata).
13. The Mediterranean and the Middle East, already quoted.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Officialdom in the underdeveloped countries (as well as petty trading, for that matter) is a means of escaping from the poverty to which the majority of the population of these countries is condemned. In Egypt in 1951 there were 550,000 officials, 200,000 of whom had no specific task.
17. Forty thousand million tons of mineral salts; inexhaustible reserves of potash.
18. It was 150 million tons or more than 20% of world production (not counting the USSR) in 1954. Furthermore it is estimated that Middle East petroleum will have to cover at least half of world consumption, which is to be doubled in the next ten years – which will raise production in the Middle East to 800 million tons.
19. At the present moment, each ton of oil produced in the Middle East brings to governments concerned an average share of the profits equivalent to $ 5.50.
20. That is the tasks proper to the bourgeois social revolution, which, in the past, in European countries, permitted overthrowing feudalism and installing modern capitalism.
21. Egypt: The volume of trade between Egypt and the USSR increased more than 11 times between 1953 and 1957. For a whole series of goods, the USSR is now Egypt’s main supplier. Thus, in 1957, among Egyptian imports the USSR figured for: 43% of the wheat; 37% of the oil; 37% of the sawn lumber; 50% of the plywood; 27% of the tractors. The USSR, furthermore, is now buying more than 30% of Egyptian cotton, and also rice.
Syria: In 1957 Syria’s imports from the Soviet Union represented, in value: Machinery and equipment 47%; Petroleum products 24%; Rolled iron 13%; Sawn lumber 9%.
Soviet imports coming from Syria were represented mainly by cotton (more than 70%).
The product of the sale of Soviet goods, in the case of both Syria and Egypt, was entirely devoted to the purchase of these countries’ agricultural products.
The credits granted by the USSR to the UAR at present add up to about $450,000,000 (of which about $200,000,000 for construction of the Aswan Dam).
22. In the form of “integrated” companies which are set up with Japanese and Italian capital in certain cases, sharing the profits according to more advantageous formulae than the traditional “fifty-fifty,” and giving a right to share in the profits arising not only from the production, but also from the refining, the transport, and the sale of petroleum. It is in these terms that Saudi Arabia recently wanted to draw up a contract with the Standard Oil of Indiana.
23. Between the United Maghreb Republic and the United Arab Republic of the States of the Middle East, for example.
24. Arab national unification must also include real autonomy and even self-determination for the different ethnic communities that exist in certain states, for example the Kurds in Iraq. It would furthermore have to solve, in the Middle East, the question of the state of Israel and the Arab refugees. These people, 800,000 in number, are still living uprooted and unemployed in camps, generally in tents. The only fair solution for their painful and explosive problem is their reinstallation in Palestine, the Arab country par excellence, the present state of Israel being absorbed as a national minority enjoying a regime of self-government and full cultural freedoms within a United Arab Republic of the Middle East.
25. Empirically Nasserism is finding its vocation as a political regime for the development of the industrial bourgeoisie. Ever since 1952 Egypt’s effort at industrialization has been speeding up, despite still limited practical results (only 200 million Egyptian pounds industrial capital in 1956).
The policy of the Nasserist state is more and more marked by the drive for industrialization: mixed enterprises, with strong participation by the state; a “Committee of Production” given the job of speeding up the development of industry; the “Committee of the Plan” in 1956; a five-year plan in preparation, which should begin in 1959.
This plan is to concern 256 million pounds sterling – a modest sum, after all – of which 36 million granted by the Soviet Union, 44 million by West Germany, 8 million by East Germany, and 10 million by Japan.
Nevertheless, the mobilization of local capital in favor of industry, including that given to landowners in the guise of payment for their lands expropriated by the agrarian reform, has so far been a failure.
26. The law of 1952 limits property in cultivated land to 200 feddans, or to 300 feddans, for the first two children give a right to 50 extra feddans each (300 feddans = 311 acres). Uncultivated properties are not affected by the agrarian reform. Thus 666,000 untilled feddans could be recuperated, plus 180,000 feddan, belonging to the royal family. In July 1956, 500,000 individuals divided into 65,000 families had benefited by plots from the 260,000 feddans that had been confiscated. The overall agrarian reform will affect 1,500,000 fellahin in all, out of more than 18.000,000. The indemnity paid to the former owner is set at ten times the rental value of his lands, plus the price of installations, machines, and trees. It is paid in 3% Treasury Bonds payable after 30 years. In July 1956. 5,000 million francs of these bonds had been delivered, and their interest payments honored.
The land sold is payable in 30 years, at a price equal to 30 times the tax rate, plus 3%, interest, plus l5% of the expenses of exploitation. The whole is payable on the annual harvest. In theory, the plots cannot be broken up, even on an inheritance basis.
The fellahin owners cultivate their lands within a collective framework – in obligatory cooperatives – receiving their share of the harvest on an area pro rata basis. The most important aspect of the reform is the authoritarian lowering of the formerly exorbitant rental rate, changed from between 40 and 50 Egyptian pounds per feddan before the reform to between 18 and 21.
27. The participation of women in the Arab revolution in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and now in Algeria, has partly loosened but nowise broken the mediaeval yoke that still lies upon them.
It is only the Moslem women of the mountain regions or of the nomad tribes who have here and there kept a certain freedom, sometimes possibly the inheritance of the matriarchal institutions of former times (women of Kabylia, but especially women of the Chaouia Berber culture of the Aures, Touareg women of the desert, etc).
28. Worker, proletarian, in its ideology and programme; Worker and Peasant in popular nomenclature.
29. Share-croppers on a one-fifth basis.
30. Leader of the union workers of the big Kafrel-Dawar textile-mill in the suburbs of Alexandria, who on 12 August 1932 gathered before the offices of the management, demanding a raise in pay and the firing of a member of the company’s secretariat and of the head of the labor bureau, “in the name of Mohammed Naguib and the revolution!” Condemned to death by a court martial and executed, having refused to “denounce those who put him up to it,” to the last minute he shouted “Long live the revolution!” and murmured, “I shall not die.”
31. After several weeks of tortures, Ben M’Hidi, a heroic fighter right from the first hour of the Algerian revolution, still had the strength to spit out his contempt for an imperialist army of executioners, and the courage to proclaim in the faces of his tortures. “We shall win because our cause is just, and because your tortures are impotent against our faith in an independent Algeria.”
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