Part Twelve
This is a translation from the original Arabic, offered so that my grandchildren, and others of their generation, may understand something of their history— a history they were denied when they were uprooted without choice.)
So, What Did the Arab Communists Do?
In the previous part, I wrote about what Arab Islamists did in confronting the nation-state created by colonialism in the aftermath of the First World War. Today, I present my understanding of what the Arab communists did in their engagement with that same nation-state.
There is a fundamental difference between the Islamic and nationalist projects on the one hand, and the communist project on the other. The communist project does not derive from any historical root in our region prior to the twentieth century. The communist movement in Iraq, the Levant, and Egypt emerged only after the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, led by the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, who adopted his interpretation of Karl Marx’s materialism and produced a political project that Stalin later termed “Marxism–Leninism.”
In the interwar period, many young people in our region found in Lenin’s new communist thought answers to numerous problems afflicting their societies. It called for liberation, peace, the redistribution of land to those who cultivated it, and the expropriation of the means of production from exploitative hands. Our region suffered precisely from these injustices: it was not free, it did not control its own decisions of war and peace, land was held by oppressive feudal elites, and whatever means of production existed were controlled by Europeans or their local agents. Thus, the communist movement among us arose from youth aspiring to freedom and calling for peace and social justice.
For this reason, speaking about Arab communists is more difficult than speaking about Islamists or nationalists. Arab communists did not possess the same degree of political autonomy enjoyed, for example, by their nationalist counterparts. Their fate was often shaped by forces beyond their control, as the global communist movement operated according to international political balances and calculations that did not always align with the aspirations and visions of Arab communists. Any serious study of Arab communism must therefore treat global political developments as a central factor—particularly the primary conflict between the Soviet Union and the imperial capitalist camp led by Washington after the Second World War. To my knowledge, no one has undertaken such a study to this day. As a result, any assessment of the communist movement among Arabs remains incomplete and ultimately unjust unless viewed through this broader global struggle.
Yet despite the importance of this caveat, it does not prevent us from identifying both positive and negative features of the communist experience. Arab communists played a significant role in supporting liberation movements across the Arab world, in radicalizing agrarian struggles in some regions, and in contributing substantially to enlightenment efforts aimed at dismantling feudal structures. Although the attempt to abolish feudalism failed to produce a viable alternative system—leading to the collapse of what replaced it—the principle and objective themselves were sound.
Nevertheless, Arab communists suffered from a profound intellectual vacuum. With the exception of a small number of educated cadres, the vast majority knew little of Marxism beyond its name. Even those who claimed to be Marxists often lacked a genuine understanding of Marxist thought, for two reasons: first, Marxism is a complex intellectual system and a demanding philosophy; second, the available Arabic literature on Marxism was extremely limited, making serious engagement difficult. Ultimately, what was accessible in Arabic consisted largely of translations produced in Moscow, aligned with Soviet Leninist ideological priorities. The truth is that those Arabs who genuinely understood Marxism were, in most cases, not communists.
This lack of understanding led to political confusion that harmed both the global communist movement and the proper comprehension of Karl Marx’s ideas. Arab communists failed to grasp that Marx’s writings reflected his analysis of nineteenth-century Europe: the conditions of the industrial revolution, surplus value extracted through labour exploitation, and the corruption of a church that dominated people’s lives. None of this applied to Arab societies in the twentieth century. There was no industrial revolution, the working class was numerically insignificant, and religious institutions in Arab lands bore little resemblance to the church in nineteenth-century Germany.
Thus, the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” carried meaning in Europe but had little relevance in places such as Sudan, where no working class existed. Likewise, Marx’s statement that “religion is the opium of the people”—a critique of ecclesiastical domination in Europe rather than an attack on religion as such—was wrongly imported and propagated by some Arab communists. This reflected a profound ignorance of history, of the nature of Islam among Arab societies, and of the difference between Islam as a faith and the church as a political institution in nineteenth-century Europe.
Arab communists must bear responsibility for this failure, for Moscow did not impose such positions on religion. It was they who chose to alienate deeply conservative societies without justification or necessity.
Arab communists also failed to apply Marxist approaches to ownership of the means of production in societies that were not industrial. When the rift between Moscow and Beijing occurred, they aligned themselves with Moscow, despite the fact that their social reality more closely resembled the Chinese experience—one led by peasants, who constituted the majority of Chinese society and, in fact, the majority of Arab societies in the twentieth century.
The gravest failure of Arab communists, however, lay in their inability to comprehend the nature of the Arab–Zionist conflict. They genuinely believed that Moscow’s slogan of internationalism was more than a political project—that it was a principled commitment the Soviet Union sought to realize. Consequently, their acceptance of the Zionist presence on Arab land in the form of the State of Israel, in line with Moscow’s recognition of that state and in the hope that it would become a socialist model, was a catastrophic error—one they have not been able to overcome to this day.
I will not engage here in a debate over who did what, how, or why. The prevailing and widely accepted reality is that global communism, including Arab communists, accepted the Zionist settler state. And history, as I have already emphasized, is not necessarily what actually happened, but what people come to believe has happened.
By accepting Zionism as a settler project on Arab land, Arab communists forfeited their legitimacy in claiming to oppose colonialism, to defend the Palestinian right to self-determination, and to resist European domination of Arab lands.
Moreover, Israel’s establishment and Moscow’s position toward it—recognizing it within hours of its declaration—placed Arab communists before a severe test. Many found it difficult to pass, for the nationally conscious communist realized that Moscow’s decision contradicted his own existence and future. Yet he still hoped that Moscow would lead a global project of liberation and independence.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the death of the global communist movement ended this test for the few Arab communists who remained. Yet the Arab communist remains unable to reconcile his stance toward Zionist capitalist settlement—once endorsed by Moscow—with his aspiration for a homeland free of European domination and capitalist exploitation.
Soو what, then, did the Arab nationalists do?
That is what I shall attempt to examine next.
To be continued…