REVIEW
The Arab Revolution: its character, present state, and perspectives. IMG Publications, 1975.
The English translation of this pamphlet on the Arab revolution, [produced] by organisations affiliated to the Fourth International inside the Arab world, draws the attention of British revolutionaries to the central programmatic questions involving the nature of the revolutionary dynamic in the Arab world. Has there historically evolved a single Arab nation, or many different Arab nations? Does the class struggle simply spread out from individual Arab countries to affect other Arab countries, or, does it on the contrary have a uniquely all-Arab level of existence which structures the more local aspects of the class struggle in each Arab country? What was the nature of the all-Arab defeat in 1967? Is there a need for a single Arab revolutionary party, or for many parties? What are the programatic and practical links between the struggle against Zionism and that for unification? These are some of the fundamental questions that underlie the pamphlet's historical treatment of the class struggle in the Arab world over the last two decades. The pamphlet arrives at the important conclusion that there is a single Arab nation, and consequently that the concept of an Arab revolution — as opposed to an accumulation of [national struggles in] Egypt, Syria, and Palestine — is [based on] something real in the life history of the Arab masses. The logical practical extension of these theoretical conclusions is the call for the establishment of a single all-Arab revolutionary party, founded on the objective existence of an Arab nation and on the reality and permanent character of the all-Arab revolutionary dynamic. The significance of these general conclusions on the character of the [revolution] in the Arab countries cannot be underestimated. In fact it would be accurate to say that the debates around these conclusions occupy the same place inside the Arab world [as] did the debate around the turn of the century amongst the Russian vanguard on the character of the Russian revolution. It will be recalled that the pivot [around which] structured the development of the Russian left was the Agrarian question. Russian Social Democracy was born out of the struggle against peasant populism (Narodnikism) in the course of fierce programmatic battles waged on the role of the peasantry in the Russian revolution. Later, Social Democracy itself split into two opposing wings, with the Mensheviks calling for an alliance of the working class with the liberal bourgeoisie and the Bolsheviks insisting upon the necessity of an alliance between the workers and poor peasants. In the Arab world it has been the national question, and in particular the question of Arab unification, that has played the role of the agrarian question in Tsarist Russia. The Stalinisation of the Third International led to the Arab Communist Parties' abandonment of the concept of an Arab revolution, in favour of the concept of a democratic first stage of the revolution in each of the Arab countries. It suited the multifaceted diplomatic needs of the Soviet bureaucracy to have the flexibility generated by the whole multitude of Arab Communist Parties (as opposed to a single Arab party) each pressurising in varying degrees their own local Arab ruling class. Following the defeat of the Arab armies in 1948, however, and the establishment of the Zionist state, this policy was crowned by abysmal failure. From that time onwards the Arab CPs became increasingly marginal to Arab political life in the context of a new and vigorous rise of the Arab nationalist movement. The conception of the revolution that had arisen from the degeneration of marxism under Stalin was replaced by a conception that arose from the radicalisation around what was fundamentally a bourgeois ideology — i.e. Arab nationalism. The dramatic rise of Nasserism and all-Arab nationalist organisations at the expense of the [Communist Parties] best expressed this new situation. The nationalist mystification of a classless and eternal Arab nation dating back to the Caliphates, was in many ways an inverted version [of] the reasoning [of those who argue] that there is no Arab nation. However it too failed the acid test of a war with [Zionism]. The Arab military debacle in 1967 left a political vacuum which was filled as fast as it was created by the meteoric rise of the organisations of the Palestinian resistance movement. The conception of an exclusively Palestinian revolution appeared to replace that of an Arab revolution. But this was in appearance only. For in reality the organisations of the Palestinian masses acted objectively, and in many cases despite themselves, as a vanguard for the whole of the Arab world. A process of generalised, though uneven, radicalization swept the Arab countries. But this process which was unfolding at the objective level was not translated by the leaderships of the Palestinian resistance into a programme for Arab revolution. On the contrary, these leaderships tended to further the isolation, particularization and localization of the situation of the Palestinian refugees. A strategy of 'non-interference in the internal affairs of the Arab regimes' on the basis of the thoroughly utopian program of a 'Palestinian revolution', was adopted. This in the final analysis, is what led to the catastrophic massacre of September 1970 at the hands of the Jordanian wing of the Arab ruling class. Thus time after time, Arab political history has driven home its verdict. Either the struggle against Zionism and the Arab ruling class and the struggle for socialism and economic development are combined and waged under the banner of an overall programatic conception — which is best captured in the formula of an Arab revolution — or else, the revolutionary process will be thwarted and defused. To put it in a nutshell: The Permanent revolution, in the concrete circumstance of the Arab world, has in fact the character of an all-Arab revolution. To quote the pamphlet in which this concept is systematically developed: 'The Arab revolution will be socialist, or it will not be a revolution'.
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