27.11.2008

Arab agency and a Marx-Engels analogy

Jack Conrad concludes his two-part article on Palestine, arguing for working class leadership of the Arab revolution

No democratic solution for the Israel/Palestine conflict can be achieved in isolation. Objective circumstances simply do not permit it. That is as certain as anything can be certain in this uncertain world.

Top Israeli politicians either implicitly threaten yet another bout of horrible ethnic cleansing, or, at best, offer a so-called two-state solution whereby Palestinians are left with nothing but Gaza and a “cantonised” West Bank. Sad to say, the leaders of Kadima, Shas, Likud, National Union, Labour, etc are thoroughly representative. There can be no doubt about it. A clear majority of the Israeli population, including the trade unions and the working class, desire an oppressor’s peace. Polls show most Israeli Jews - ie, 64% of respondents - want to see Israeli Arabs removed from the country.¹

By themselves the Palestinians - debilitatingly split between Hamas and Fatah - palpably lack the ability to achieve anything beyond abject surrender or hopeless resistance. Certainly not a single Palestinian state where Israeli Jews have “full” religious rights but no national rights (advocated by the Socialist Workers Party, etc). Nor, for that matter, two geographically roughly equal democratic and secular states (which this writer favours). Economic resources, military power and international connections all massively favour the Israeli side and militate against the Palestinians.

Hence the question of agency and the determining relationship between means and ends. A democratic, two-state solution for Israel/Palestine must be seen as part of the process of creating a progressive counterbalance to US power in the region.

In isolation, establishing two secular, democratic republics - one in a redrawn Israel, the other in a redrawn Palestine - would be constantly blocked and undermined. In the first place, of course, by the existing Israeli regional guard dog. That failing (an unlikely event), US imperialism would intervene, using its full might (the same applies to a single Palestinian state imposed against the will of the majority of Israel’s population).

Strategic front

There is, however, a way to cut through the Gordian knot. Widen the strategic front. There are nearly 300 million Arabs in a contiguous territory that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean, across north Africa, down the Nile to north Sudan, and all the way to the Persian Gulf and up to the Caspian Sea.

Though studded here and there with national minorities - Kurds, Assyrians, Turks, Armenians, Berbers, etc - there is a definite Arab or Arabised community. Despite being separated into 25 different states and divided by religion and religious sect - Sunni, Shi’ite, Alaouite, Ismaili, Druze, Orthodox Christian, Catholic Christian, Maronite, Nestorian, etc - they share a strong bond of pan-Arab consciousness, born not only of a common language, but of a closely related history.

Arabs are binational. There are Moroccans, Yemenis, Egyptians, Jordanians, etc. But there is also a wider Arab identity which has its origins going back to the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. Admittedly the Arabs were politically united for only a short period of time historically: eg, under the Ommayid and Abbasid caliphates. After that the Arab nation broke up into regional units (superficially reunited by the Ottoman empire).

Not that the Arab world coincides with the Muslim world. Muslim conquests rippled out from the Meccan heartland in concentric waves. Conquered peoples in the Mashreq, Egypt and the Meghreb learnt Arabic, converted to Islam and in turn became conquerors and carriers of the Muslim faith and Arabic language. But on reaching Persia Arabisation met an insurmountable cultural barrier.

There is a small Arabic-speaking minority in today’s eastern Iran. Around one percent of the country’s total population. But there Arabic stops. As to the rest of the Muslim world, it continues eastwards. Into Pakistan, more faintly through into India, to reappear strongly in Bangladesh and then Indonesia … all without Arabic as a common language. Although Persian, Urdu, Pashtu, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Kurdish and Malay all use  modified versions of the Arabic alphabet.

There is also a non-Arabic-speaking northern Islam that resulted from the Ottoman and Mongol conversions and conquests in the form of Turkey, Afghanistan and former Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Tadzhikstan. And, of course, the Koran and Muslim liturgy is universally Arabic.

If the unity of the Arab world was merely the unity of various diverse peoples who had conquered and been conquered, who spread or adopted the same language, then the probable fate of Arabic would have been to evolve in divergent directions once political unity was removed. That is what happened in the western Roman empire. Latin became Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.

Today there are some 27 varieties of colloquial Arabic (dialects) which are typically unwritten. At their extremes they are virtually incomprehensible. Someone from Baghdad who stubbornly insisted on sticking to Iraqi Arabic would find it a struggle to be understood by Maghrebi Arabs in Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria.

However, official documents, literature, school textbooks, religion and the media - television, radio, newspapers, etc - throughout the Arab world use literary Arabic (based on and derived from the Koran). As a result, instead of divergence there is convergence. Even those Arabs with nothing more than a standard primary and secondary school education therefore find no difficulty switching from colloquial to literary Arabic (diglossia). They do this in their day-to-day life depending on the social situation and when they meet an Arab from another country. So our Baghdadi would effortlessly switch to literary Arabic when visiting Casablanca, Algiers or Tripoli. Hence the binationality of Arabs. Moroccans, Yemenis, Egyptians, Jordanians, etc also intellectually think and emotionally feel themselves to be Arabs.

Obviously the Arab nation predates capitalism. No problem for non-dogmatic Marxists. Joseph Stalin’s Marxism and the national question (1913), however valuable, is hardly the last word. Stalin linked the nation to the rise of capitalism. The great civilisations of China and Egypt, which go back thousands of years, and were far from being ephemeral empires, also had definite national features. Unlike them, however, Arab unity was not based on riverine agriculture and the exploitation of the peasantry. The Arab nation, though initially created by military conquest, was cemented by language, culture, religion … and long-distance trade (with the obvious exception of Egypt and the far south of what is today Iraq).

The Arab aristocracy was, to begin with, a class of petty warrior-merchants. With the Muslim conquests, they suddenly found themselves masters of vast territories and fabulously wealthy. They shifted their base of operations from the Hejaz and established themselves as religious rulers and secular bureaucrats in the opulent surroundings of Damascus and Baghdad. The caliphates. Exacting tribute from east-west trade, they continued their alliance with the nomadic tribes (who acted as their caravaneers). Peasants in the oases and the uplands were relatively marginal. The warrior merchant elite held the Arab world together. Equally at home in Cordoba and Fez, Aleppo and Medina, their systemic redundancy explains the Arab world’s rapid descent into parochialism, decay and incoherence.

Once the sea captains of the European Atlantic found their way round the Horn of Africa, breaking the Arab monopoly on east-west trade forever, the stage was also set for the penetration, takeover and division and redivision of the Arab world by Spain, France and Britain in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

It was, however, the disintegration of the Ottoman empire, through the combined efforts of Russian tsarism and Anglo-French imperialism, that triggered the birth of modern Arab nationalism. Hence European capitalism both helped to disunite the old Arab nation and create the conditions for a rebirth.

Hopes invested in the Young Turks quickly passed. So did illusions in platonic imperialism. Britain encouraged Arab nationalism against Ottoman Turkey in World War I. Only to disappoint and betray. France and Britain greedily carved up the Middle East between themselves. Pleas for a single Arab state in the Mashreq fell on deaf ears. The creation of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq suited the needs of Britain and France, but was a crime as far as Arab nationalists were concerned. It ran completely counter to their aspirations.

Inevitably the two imperial robbers generated independence movements. The Balfour declaration (1917) and Zionist colonisation in Palestine fed Arab nationalism too. However, the Saudi and Hashemite royal houses agreed to serve as puppets and, together with their British and French masters, again and again stymied the forces of pan-Arabism.

After 1945 and the triumph of US superimperialism, the Arab countries successively gained formal independence. But the Arab world remained Balkanised along the neat lines on the map drawn by the old colonial powers. Oil money brought huge riches for the elites in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, etc. While that allows for a degree of clowning and posturing, the military, political and economic control exercised by the US cannot be hidden.

Oil revenue is recycled through the purchase of US and British arms, invested in the money markets of London, New York, Frankfurt, Zurich and Tokyo, or fritted away on palaces, luxury jets, gambling and vanity projects. Meanwhile, the vast bulk of the Arab population - workers, peasants and small traders - endure appalling poverty. Eg, in Egypt, by far the most populous Arab country, the already low living standards have further declined since 1990. Some 20% to 30% of the population live below the official poverty line.²

Hence the situation in the Arab world is broadly analogous to Italy, Poland and Germany in the 19th century Europe. The national question remains unresolved.

Germany

It is worth taking a detour to discuss the case of Germany, not least because of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. When they began their lifelong political partnership, Germany was a patchwork of rival absolutist states, ranging from the medium to the micro. Internal disputes and wars of foreign intervention were endemic. Fragmentation went hand in hand with different currencies and different weights and measures. Customs posts were everywhere. In short, Germany desperately required radical unification. Without unity there could be neither capitalist progress nor hope for working class rule - so reasoned Marx and Engels.

Tasks of national unification and the social revolution interweave. Germany was a cultural expression reflecting common language and common historical experience, but not a unified politico-economic unit. During medieval times this was, of course, true for most of western and central Europe. Feudalism is characteristically decentralisation and fragmentation in extremis. Only England - because of the thoroughgoing nature of the 1066 conquest - constituted a partial exception.

However, by the mid-19th century Germany was a backwater compared with France, Belgium, Holland and above all Britain. Migrants were Germany’s biggest export. If they had put themselves at the head of the German people, the bourgeoisie might have been able to refound the country. That is what the English/British bourgeoisie did between 1640 and 1688 and the French did in 1789. Yet, trapped in the numerous petty states, the middle classes in Germany proved impotent. The spirit of 1640 and 1789 was utterly alien to them.

A young Engels seethed with angry contempt. He compared them to shit, or in polite translation, dung: “Germany is nothing but a dunghill, but they [the bourgeoisie] were comfortable in the dung because they were dung themselves, and were kept warm by the dung about them.”³

Hence the theory of permanent or uninterrupted revolution, whereby the working class, albeit a minority of the population, takes the lead in the struggle to refound Germany. Towards this end, on behalf of the Communist Party in Germany, Marx and Engels outlined a series of immediate demands - the first being that the whole country “shall be declared a single and indivisible republic”.⁴

Moreover, to ensure a democratic and lasting unification, the ‘giants’ of Germany, Austria and Prussia, had to be broken up into autonomous provinces. The interests of the proletariat forbade either the Prussianisation or Austrianisation of Germany just as much as the perpetuation of its division into petty states.

Because of its autocracy, relatively large size and long militaristic tradition, Prussia was viewed by the Marx-Engels team as the main obstacle. Prussia might move to unite Germany as an act of counterrevolution. But even then, it could only unite Germany by tearing Germany apart. Prussia would have to exclude German Austria. The same would apply to Austria - the most reactionary German state. An Austrian Germany would have to exclude Prussia. Under either Prussia or Austria there could only be a ‘smaller Germany’. That is why, in the name of “real unification”, Marx and Engels wanted to see the “dissolution” of Prussia and “disintegration” of the Austrian state.⁵ If Germany were ever to achieve anything worthwhile, there could be neither an Austria nor a Prussia.

It should be stressed that Marx and Engels sought the “dissolution” of Prussia and the “disintegration” of Austria in the context of bringing about a centralised revolutionary and social republic. A country like Germany, which had suffered from extreme fragmentation, if it was to survive, needed the most “stringent revolutionary centralisation”. This was especially so because the Germany of 1848 contained “20 Vendées” - an allusion to the peasant counterrevolution in France - and found itself sandwiched between the two most powerful and most centralised European states: ie Russian and France.

Such a country cannot, in the present period of universal revolution, avoid “either civil war or war with other countries”, proclaimed Engels.⁶ Specifically Marx and Engels advocated a revolutionary liberation war against Russia - that would unite Germany on the basis of democracy and hold out the promise of Polish independence and reunification.

After the failure of the 1848 revolution some disillusioned liberals hankered for unity under Prussia. But, as explained above, such a little Germany meant excluding Austria. Reactionary nationalists pinned their hopes on the restoration of the feudal Holy Roman empire. A dream which, if it ever came to fruition, would be in the form of a greater Austria. Austria  and the rest of Germany were to be united into a federal state and proceed to Germanise Austria’s Hungarian and Danube empire by means of schools, colonies and gentle violence. The formerly Austrian Netherlands would be incorporated as a vassal state too. Rightly, Engels damned these “patriotic fanatics”.⁷ Meanwhile ignorant radicals sank into admiration of the Swiss constitution. Only the communists remained committed to a German republic “one and indivisible”.

As the reader well knows, in 1866 the armies of Prussia defeated those of Austria in an eight-day war. From this moment onwards Prussia stopped viewing the rest of Germany as prey. Prussia became nationalised; Germany was its protectorate - even if that meant excluding a large part of it: ie, Austria. War with France followed. Once again Prussian forces scored a swift and resounding victory. France surrendered. Napoleon III was replaced by a republic. Prussia could now impose its terms on the rest of Germany and in 1871 Wilhelm I of Prussia became the German emperor.

How did Marx-Engels assess this Prussian version of German unity? Bismarck - Prussia’s uncrowned Bonaparte - had, they said, carried out a “revolution” and a “revolution with revolutionary methods”. Only, because it was carried out from above, it was “not revolutionary enough”; this half-unification of Germany was only a “half-revolution”.⁸

Real measures which unified the country were welcomed as a step forward: eg, the common legal code and Bismarck’s legislation creating common banking laws and a common currency over 1873-75. Engels expressed the opinion that it would have been better if the mark could have been pegged to one of the big three - dollar, pound or franc.

Yet Prussia had not dissolved into Germany. Instead Bismarck introduced the Prussian system throughout most of Germany. Bavaria and the southern states retained a degree of autonomy. In certain ways it was as if the semi-feudal Scottish highlands had managed to conquer England in 1645. Political power resided with the emperor, a caste of aristocratic bureaucrats and the military top brass. Universal male suffrage was granted, but the emperor appointed the chancellor and the relatively feeble Reichstag could not turn down tax demands. A carbon copy of the 1850 Prussian constitution. Put another way, there existed pseudo-constitutionalism. The Reichstag served as a fig leaf for absolutism. Germany was in fact a police-guarded military despotism with parliamentary embellishments.

But this was no return to the past. Germany set itself on a course of rapid industrialisation and with that the bourgeoisie came to exercise a decisive influence. There also came into existence a powerful, well organised and highly educated proletariat.

It was in these promising circumstances that Marx - writing in 1875, in what became known as the Critique of the Gotha programme - took issue with his comrades in the infant Social Democratic Party. They were reluctant to highlight the demand for the abolition of the monarchy. By contrast Marx renewed his call for a “democratic republic” against the Prusso-German monarchy.⁹ A theme Engels elaborated some 15 years later in his Critique of the draft programme in 1891 - unlike our friends in the SWP, the parties associated with Marx and Engels regarded programmes as vital and took great pains in writing and perfecting them.

Anyway, Engels attacked Prussianism and the peaceful illusions being entrained by some party leaders in Germany. There could conceivably be a peaceful transition to socialism in countries where the “representatives of the people concentrate all power in their hands, where, if one has the support of the majority of the people, one can do as one sees fit in a constitutional way; in democratic republics such as France and the USA, in monarchies such as Britain ... where this dynasty is powerless against the people”.¹⁰ But not in absolutist Germany.

Engels admits that due to police censorship and legal restrictions it may not be possible for the SDP to feature the abolition of the monarchy in its programme. Some devious formulation ought therefore to be concocted. Either way, Engels is insistent that the working class “can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic”. He calls this the “specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat”: that is, the rule of the working class.¹¹

So as to open up the road to power, Engels argues for the “reconstruction of Germany”. The system of small states within Prusso-Germany “must be abolished”. How, he asks, can you revolutionise society while there are special rights for Bavaria-Württemberg and even the small state of Thuringia consists of statelets? Again he balances off the abolition of the small states with the call to abolish Prussia and break it up into “self-governing provinces”. For Engels the system of small states and Prussianism are the “two sides of the antithesis now gripping Germany in a vice”, in which one side “must also serve as an excuse and justification for the existence of the other”.¹² What should take the place of Prusso-Germany? Engels opposes federalism and repeats the demand for the “one and indivisible republic”.

Working class lead

The Saudi monarchy, the sole remaining Hashemite kingdom in Jordan, the Gulf sheikdoms, etc have abysmally failed when it comes to Arab unity. Nowadays they are tied to US imperialism hand and foot and that means opposing pan-Arabism all along the line. So no Arab Prussia. No Arab Wilhelm I. No Arab Otto von Bismarck. Though there might just conceivably be an Arab Austria. Pan-Islam can legitimately be cast in that role. Note, the Muslim Brotherhood is organised throughout the Arab world and is certainly the strongest political party in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood envisages a reborn caliphate and a theocratic empire that unites Arabs as Muslims and then all Muslims as Muslims.

The most likely candidate for Arab unifier was Gamal Abdul Nasser (1918-70). This uncrowned Bonapartist led the Free Officer’s revolution in 1952, which overthrew the pro-British monarchy of Farouk I. Nasser then oversaw a radical agrarian reform programme, nationalised the Suez canal, allied Egypt with the Soviet Union and put his country on the course of state-capitalist development. This went hand in hand with crushing both the Muslim Brotherhood and the working class movement.

Nasser called it ‘Arab socialism’. Especially with his success in the 1956 crisis - an Israeli invasion followed by a pre-planned joint French and British intervention and then an unexpected American veto - Nasser’s popularity soared throughout the Arab world. Pro-Nasser Arab socialist parties, groups and conspiracies were sponsored or established themselves. His name became almost synonymous with pan-Arabism.

Nasser demanded that natural resources be used for the benefit of all Arabs. Hugely popular with those below. Everyone knew he meant oil.  Of course, the house of Saud instantly became an implacable enemy. Yet because of mass pressure the Ba’athist authorities in Syria sought a merger. Despite the repression suffered by their co-thinkers in Egypt, the ‘official communists’ and the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood likewise favoured unity.

The United Arab Republic was formed on February 1 1958. Nasser was appointed president and Cairo became the capital. Yet the UAR proved fleeting. Syrian capitalists did not gain access to the Egyptian market and Egyptian administrative personnel were painted by Syrian officers, bureaucrats and top politicians as acting like colonial officials. The union ignominiously collapsed in 1961. Opposition came from the Damascus street. However, from then onwards the UAR became a hollow pretence. It united no other country apart from Egypt.

The 1967 six-day war with Israel proved to be the final straw for Nasserism. Israel’s blitzkrieg destroyed the airforces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan on the ground and by the end of the short-lived hostilities Israel occupied the Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Nasser was humiliated and died soon after a broken man.

As for Ba’athism, though it succeeded in spreading from Syria to Iraq, petty bourgeois nationalism ensured that the two Ba’athist states became bitter rivals. Nor did ‘official communism’ - an ideology of aspiring labour dictators - do any better. Under instructions from the Kremlin the ‘official communists’ tailed bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalism. Working class political independence has been sabotaged again and again. So has Arab unity. Eg, the ‘official’ Communist Party opposed the incorporation of Iraq into the UAR. State independence became a kind of totem. One disaster inevitably followed another. Mass parties were reduced to rumps or were liquidated.

Evidently, Arab reunification remains a burning, but unfulfilled task. The fact that Nasser’s short-lived UAR saw the light of day is testimony to mass support for Arab unity. What was a potent sentiment in the 1950s and well into the 1970s needs to be revived in the 21st century and given a new democratic and class content.

Communists need to take the lead in the fight for pan-Arab unity. A task inseparable from the struggle for socialist revolution and the formation of mass Marxist parties, first in each Arab country and then throughout the Arab world. A Communist Party of Arabia.

What of reconciliation between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians? In my opinion this can only happen in the context of ending the US-UK occupation of Iraq, sweeping away the House of Saud, the petty Gulf sheikdoms, the corrupt regimes in Egypt, Syria and Libya, the Hashemite kingdom in Jordan and the creation of a centralised Arab republic. The form we envisage for working class rule.

Therefore our two-state solution in Israel-Palestine is another duality. Both an Arab and a proletarian solution. Doubtless an anti-Zionist Israel would be offered associate status by the Arab republic. Akin to Switzerland or Norway in relationship to the present-day European Union. A step away from merger.

Clearly there is a close relationship between the continued oppression of the Palestinians and the disunity of the Arab nation. It is not only the class struggle in Israel which is frozen or diverted. Throughout the Arab world despots and dictators exploit the hatred, fear and instability that poisonously ripples out of the Israel/Palestine conflict in order to deflect anger and stamp down upon the democratic impulse.

A programme for a democratic and secular Israel alongside a democratic and secular Palestine, to be fought for in the context of the fight for Arab national unity under the leadership of the working class, provides the most powerful leverage that can practically be envisaged when it comes to overcoming the massive economic-military imbalance between the Israeli-Jewish state and the Palestinian people.

Only through such a process of Arab unity can we expect the growth of an anti-Zionist ‘enemy within’ the Israeli-Jewish nation and the growth of trust and solidarity between the two peoples and their eventual merger.

Notes

1. weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/709/pr1.htm
2. www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Africa/Egypt-POVERTY-AND-WEALTH.html
3. F Engels CW Vol 6, New York 1976, p17.
4. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 7, Moscow 1977, p3.
5. F Engels CW Vol 26, London 1990, p124.
6. F Engels CW Vol 7, Moscow 1977, p237-38.
7. F Engels CW Vol 16, London 1980, p217.
8. F Engels CW Vol 26, London 1990, p481.
9. K Marx CW Vol 24, London 1989, p95.
10. F Engels CW Vol 27, London 1990, p226.
11. Ibid p227.
12. Ibid p228.