Arab workers and 'Arab Socialism'

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countdown he price of oil, enormously Sadat opened up the Egyptian acreasing the financial reven- economy to foreign investments es of these states. The exist- and moved towards a new politNasser: the spearhead of radical Arab nationalism le East can break the back of imperialism HOW have events in the region shaped working class politics?

One of the Nasser regime's first actions was the crushing of independent working class action. Strike leaders were executed.

Then the Nasserite state set out to develop Egyptian capitalism by centralising capital in the hands of the state, and ultimately by relying quite heavily on the Soviet Union.

It nationalised Egyptian industry and started to talk about 'Arab socialism' As did the radical regimes in Syria and Iraq, the Egyptian state also introduced a land reform that broke the power of ence of vast monetary surpluses in these countries has been major factor in the deep social changes that have taken place in the Middle East over the last decade.

As the 1970s wore on, the storm centre of the Middle East shifted. Forced inte Lebanon after the Jordanian disaster, the Palestinians became embroiled in a bloody and largely communal civil war in which, between mid-1975 and mid-1976 50,000 people died.

Various international forces played a role in Lebanon - not least the Israeli state, which backed the reactionary Falange militia and has a vested interest in 'neutralising' Lebanon as a potential enemy by seeing it divided between its warring Christian and Moslem communities. Prefiguring its murderous invasion of 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 in an effort to destroy PLO bases.

In Iran, the Shah was overthrown in February 1979, a significant step in the making of the current 'cold war'. The US recognised the precariousness of its 'strategic" interests' -principally its investments (notably in oil) and the oil The Egyptian state under the big landowners and, potentially at least, cleared the way for the development of capitalist agriculture.

Perhaps inevitably, the Nasser regime, the longestlasting of the 'radical' ', 'socialist' regimes in the Arab world, thus generated confusion in the small but militant Egyptian workers' movement and in the left.

A somewhat fractious communist movement reacted to Nasserism with confusion. Initially, tor the most part, supportive of the regime, it moved to condemnation of it as 'fascist' . Finally it suffered a total ideological collapse when ical alliance with the US.

Israel - despite near disaster in the October war - developed increasing military strength. In 'special relationship' with the US as its major ally in the region was secure. Colonisation of the occupied territories and their effective annexation proceeded apace.

Conservative Arab states have become increasingly significant for imperialism due to their oil (or in the case of Egypt due to its strategic position and military weight). But Israel had remained their number one ally.

Then, suddenly, in 1977, president Sadat did the unthinkable and visited Israel. By 1979 Israel and Egypt had signed a "separate peace', agreed upon in joint talks with the US at Camp David. Universally condemner in the Arab world, the Camp David Agreement has been a vital factor in the Middle Eastern situation since then.

In a region so plagued by wars, the peace treaty seemed to many in the West to be eminently desirable. It is, however, a sham. Sold to the Egyptian people with the claim that it would enable prosperity to be built with resources no longer diverted to war, it has done nothing of the sort.

In fact, Egyptian military spending has increased since the signing of the peace treaty, and an indigenous arms industry is slowly but surely thriving. Israeli military spending has also increased.

The Camp David Agreement was supposed to solve the Palestinian question. It did not. Nothing has been done of any significance by the Israeli state under the terms of the agreement even to move towards the limited autonomy for the West Bank that was proposed for the Palestinians.

In fact, it was precisely because Egypt was militarily neutralised, that Israel was able Nasser embarked upon his state capitalist 'Arab socialist' path. The mainstream of the Stalinists disbanded to join the Nasserite 'party', the Arab Socialist Union in 1965.

At only one point did the Nasserite state capitalist regime constitute a particularly serious threat to imperialism - in 1956. But on that occasion its opponents were the declining imperialisms in the region.

Internally, the regime combined its heavy-handed repression of all opposition with attempts to gain mass support for the state by various means.

The working class had been rendered politically and indusIraq's Saddam Hussein to invade Lebanon in 1982 without fear of serious resistance.

Sadat's trips to Jerusalem and Camp David were in reality a response by the Egyptian state to mounting internal opposition, an attempt to offer 'peace' as a supposed solution to buy time.

Mass strikes, culminating in two days of national rioting against increases in the cost of basic goods in January 1977 rocked the regime several times in the mid-'70s.

One wing of the opposition -the Islamic fundamentalist one - was to claim Sadat's life in October 1981, bringing home to the Egyptian regime and to its international allies the continuing instability - the crisis of the capitalist states, in this instance - of the region.

Israel

So overall, the period since the 1960s can be seen to be one of the decline of radical Arab nationalism and the rise of conservative regimes. Within that process, the US has become the dominant foreign power. Syria, far from being evidence of the Soviet Union's creeping influence, is its last foothold in a region it was once extremely powerful in.

Since the Lebanon war, the Soviet influence in the Middle East has grown - but the US is dominant there. One of its problems is that its dominance rests in part on its 'special relationship' with Israel which is a somewhat wayward ally, but vital all the same. The growing strength of Israel vis-a-vis the Arab states is also a feature of the period since 1967. The October 1973 war was only a very partial break in this pattern. Today the Israeli army is the third or fourth most powerful in the world. trially docile. The state granted the workers fairly important reforms until a severe economic crisis undermined the basis for this state patronage.

After 1967 the working class (along with other social forces - the urban poor generally, and the students) increasingly moved into open opposition in factory strikes and on the streets In Iraq, the regime of Qassem relied heavily for support upon an extremely powerful workers' movement, led by the Communist Party which was included in the government.

Between March and July 1959, a clearly revolutionary situation had developed, in which the CP, had it been prepared to break with the capitalist elements represented by Qassem, could well have seized power. It was not prepared to do so and the opportunity was lost. The CP even agreed to Qassem's war against the Kurds living in Iraq. It demobilised the working class. In February 1963 the Ba'athist coup drowned the communists and workers movement in blood.

In Syria, a truly appalling Communist Party led by a despotic Stalinist called Khaled Bakdash, has never been anything other than a junior partner to the Ba'ath.

The only organised political voice that the bulk of the workers in the region have had, WHAT forces can offer a way out of the Middle East minefield where various flashpoints - the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, Lebanon, the Gulf, Afghanistan _threaten world peace?

First, from the tribal resistance in Afghanistan through to the New Holy War group that killed Sadat, there are the Islamic fundamentalists. They led the Iranian revolution and hold power there.

Drawing inspiration from Khomeini, these represent powerful forces in, especially, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and to an extent Iraq.

In Syria a whole town, Hama, was laid seige by the Syrian army in February 1982 when an 'Islamic revolt' broke out. In Lebanon, various Islamic fundamentalist organisations fill out the complex picture of the country's competing groups.

In Egypt there are large networks of Islamic underground organisation, and in Sudan the Moslem Brotherhood - from which the Egyptian and Syrian organisations derive -are a mass movement (currently collaborating with the Numeiri regime).

In Saudi Arabia the Mecca mosque was beseiged by Islamic fundamentalists in 1979.

These groups are fundamentally regressive. Opposed to women's liberation, opposed to communism, they are backwardlooking and reactionary. The Khomeini regime is an object lesson in this respect.

In Egypt they are also largely middle class. One Egyptian organisation openly looks forward to a nuclear war that will destroy both the US and the USSR.

Although to a greater or lesser extent a reflection of a profound social crisis and an attempt to find a solution, they represent has been the CP's. But, partly as a result of Stalinist ideology and partly as a' result of specific experiences in the region, these CPs have long-since been reduced to being a tame 'left' wing of the bourgeois nationalist movements.

Consequently, even where the working class has broken in practice with the populist state structures for example, Nasser's - the only political alternative on offer has been some other grossly inadequate and sometimes almost identical nationalist alternative, Ba'athist. or Stalinist.

Independent working class politics has been weak, even where working class action has not.

Much of what has happened in the Middle East over the last twenty-five or thirty years has to be measured against the weakness of the working class.

What is often seen as the regime's 'instability' is in fact an expression of the failure of the working class at various crucial moments to impose its will upon society and the simultaneous political and economic crisis of the bourgeoisie. Whilst the Arab capitalist classes and their states have slipped from one crisis to the next, the workers' movement has been politically disarmed and therefore unable to fundamentally change the situation. no acceptable alternative.

The Palestinian resistence has suffered a long series of defeats. The recent defeat of the PLO in Tripoli at the hands of Syria and Syrian-backed rebels amounts to a near-completion by bourgeois Arabs of something Israel failed to do in Lebanon.

Arafat, since 1974, has looked for a 'diplomatic solution' that has not materialised. The PLO remains an important political force, of course, but a successful revolutionary struggle is going to need to outgrow it.

Especially in Egypt, the working class has emerged as a vital political force. Huge factories group together vast numbers of workers who since 1971 [and especially from 1975-77] have come into violent conflict with the state. It is here, and with other working classes in the region — such as on the West Bank, in Syria, Iraq and Iran, and including in Israel - that the social power necessary to break the back of imperialism and its local capitalist allies _ Arab and Jew alike _ will lie.

As the Middle East grows more militarised, as the threat of nuclear war builds up -Israel already possesses a nuclear capacity - the urgency of a socialist solution increases.

Part of a struggle against war must be a fight for solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the Middle East - not just against Israel and for the Palestinians, although that is, of course crucial, but against all the répressive regimes of the area, and for working class action against them.

*Note: Much of the information in the first part of this article is based on MERIP Reports Nos. 111 and . 112 and the Middle East Re view 1983.

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Organiser January

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