Fred Halliday, Arabia Without Sultans, Penguin Books, £1.00
Fred Halliday's new book is the most important marxist contribution to the study of the class struggle in the Arabian Peninsula yet to be published. Its greatest asset is that the author is writing about a subject he has thoroughly assimilated. The wealth of information and perceptive analysis that the book contains will undoubtedly contribute to the work of Arab revolutionaries in the area. However, rather than dwell on its obvious merits, it is important to focus on what is, in our opinion, a structural weakness of the whole book.
Do the Arab people, scattered as they are in twenty-odd states, each with its own particular class structure, constitute a nation? This question has haunted the Arab left for almost half a century. And now we notice it has returned to haunt Halliday's book.
At first glance it might seem a little odd to readers who have spent their time pouring over the fascinating details of the revolutionary developments in the Yemen, Dhofar. Oman and the rest of the Gulf, that such a criticism should even be raised. After all, the entire question occupies less than one page out of a total of 527! In spite of this we shall argue that the book as a whole has been conceived and organised on the basis of the erroneous conclusions of this one page. Let us review the author's analysis: 'It is ahistorical to argue that imperialism simply created the divisions between the Middle Eastern countries . . . the differences themselves pre-existed imperialism. They are now partially independent of imperialism; and their autonomy is embodied in the class interests of the regimes in different countries . . . ' (page 20). A little later on in a footnote the author says: 'Nations do not exist in an abstract form but only [?] when a unified [?] ruling class bring them [??] into existence. In this way an Arab nation could be established through a future unification movement [surely this is circular reasoning?], it does not exist in a concrete sense at the moment' (page 30). Finally, in concluding, the author says: 'While the Arab world is divided into distinct states, there exists among all classes consciousness of a common Arab identity and a desire for unity' (page 20).
There are a number of problems in this analysis. A national all-Arab consciousness is indissolubly bound up with the objective socio-economic processes that are involved in the formation of an Arab nation. Either this is the case, or this 'consciousness' is a temporary delusion of the Arab masses. But the author has cogently demonstrated throughout the book that in the case of each separate 'piece' of the peninsula (Saudi Arabia, the two Yemens, Dhofar . . . ) a nationalist all-Arab consciousness is a continuously operating historical force that, for the last decade at least, has moulded and shaped the class struggle in the whole region. The history of the South Yemeni NLF or the Dhofari DLP, and the forever hovering general influence of the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN) are all examples that underline the fact that something more than a mere 'consciousness' of a 'desire for unity' is at work.
But what is this something? We would argue that it is the process of imperialist penetration itself and the forced—although limited—extension of capitalist relations of production throughout the peninsula— beginning in the coastal areas—that provided the objective basis for the growth of an Arab nationalism as opposed to say a Yemeni or Dhofari nationalism. This is not to say that particularist or tribal forms of consciousness did not exist. On the contrary, as Halliday himself points out, the spread of Arab nationalism was interwoven into a hard and bitter struggle against the remnants of various tribal formations (notably in the Yemen civil war and the various tribal alliances with the British). The interesting point, however, is not that these struggles took place, but that on the whole Arab nationalism came out on top.
Undoubtedly there does not exist a unified ruling class in the Arab world. But just how devastating is this as an argument against the existence of an Arab nation?
Capitalism penetrated the Middle East in different ways and at different times. Thus, for example, Egypt was transformed into a cotton-producing satellite of British imperialism much earlier than Saudi Arabia was transformed into an oil producing goldmine for American imperialism. This process of uneven and combined development fragmented the emergence of Arab landowning, comprador and bourgeois classes creating objectively conflicting interests between them. In this situation the unsolved tasks of the Arab nation fall squarely on the shoulders of the organisations of the Arab proletariat and peasantry. Permanent revolution in this sense is completely confirmed in the cases of Dhofar and South Yemen, where revolutionary and socialist organisations (such as PFLOAG) emerged out of an Arab nationalist one (the DLF) in the course of a long struggle against imperialism and Arab nationalism.
Finally, is it contradictory to argue that 'imperialism creates divisions between Middle Eastern countries' at the same time as it creates objectively the basis for the existence of a single Arab nation? Yes, there is a contradiction. But the point is that it is buried in reality and not in our heads.
The question of an Arab nation is far too complicated to be resolved in one book review. Our argument has not 'proved' its existence. Nevertheless we have shown that the author has not demonstrated its nonexistence either.
Let us now bring this discussion to bear on the major portion of the book. Two important structural flaws flow from the author's incorrect starting point. First, the class struggle in the different Arab states gets treated as a series of isolated aspects of the same phenomenon. The important lessons of the revolution, which are buried not in any case study but in their inter-relation, get passed over. The 'external' influences of, for example, the Egyptian revolution of 1952, the 1956 Suez invasion, the Egyptian-Syrian unity (1958-61) and the 1967 war on the different regimes in the peninsula, are introduced separately as influential factors in the analysis, rather than integral components of the same class struggle occurring in some other part of the Arab world. But, each time this is done it only begs the question: why the decisive influence of these 'external' factors? Why did the 1967 defeat of the Arab armies by Zionism have such a traumatic effect on the DLF in Dhofar for example? What are the objective interrelations of the Arab regimes that give rise to these political and organisational effects?
Second, the term 'anti-imperialist' tends to get grossly misused. It is incorrect to lump together under a single 'anti-imperialist' umbrella, organisations like PFLOAG and the South Yemeni NLF on the one hand, and the Nasserite regime and movement and the Iraqi Baathists on the other. Anti-imperialism, from a marxist point of view, is a purely descriptive category and not an analytical one. Hence whenever these two functions of description and analysis are either isolated from or dissolved into each other—as they frequently are in the book—a very fundamental distinction is blotted out between the objective dynamic of a movement and the character of its leadership. Neither the Nasserite regime nor the Iraqi Baathists have ever developed fundamental differences with imperialism, although they may very well have developed some tactical ones. In fact it is even more absurd to call the Iraqi regime anti-imperialist today than it was to call Nasser's regime anti-imperialist yesterday, because the Iraqi Baathists, unlike Nasser, have historically never been isolated from any major imperialist power (like Nasser was in 1956). Britain has always been, and still is, the major imperialist investor and exporter of commodities into and out of Iraq. Furthermore, there is some evidence to indicate that British imperialism had a hand in the 1963 coup which first brought the Baathists to power. Essentially the Nasserite and Baathist regimes are state capitalist formations. It just does not make sense to characterise them as 'anti-imperialist'. On the other hand, PFLOAG and the NLF are anti-imperialist in a qualitatively different meaning of the term. They have consciously identified themselves with the historical interests of different classes of Arabs—the Arab working class and poor peasantry.
The dilemma in which Halliday has entangled himself is the product of his need to find a common denominator for the struggle across the whole peninsula while rejecting the fact that the Arab world is a single artificially divided nation. 'Anti-imperialism' is merely a label that is being used to gloss over the uncomfortable fact that the class struggle in the Arab world spills over from one State to the next.
In conclusion, it should be pointed out that this critique in no way tries to diminish the important merits of Arabia Without Sultans. Rather, what we have been trying to do is to argue that the source of the book's greatest strengths— the fact that the author has assimilated the class struggle in the Arab world—is also the source of its greatest weakness. For in our opinion the author has simultaneously assimilated the theoretical mistakes of the post-1967 generation of Arab revolutionaries. In this sense the debate is not academic, but intimately related to the programme and strategy of the Arab socialist revolution.
S. Jaafar