Asad Abu Khalil: The Sorry Legacy of Arab Communism

"The death of Arab orthodox communism has been a gradual process. It started as early as 1947, when Arab communists — out of strict loyalty to the motherland of communism, the U.S.S.R. — supported the partition plan for Palestine, thereby ceding part of the historic Palestinian homeland to Zionist forces.

Arab people were furious that Arab political parties would accept a partial occupation of Palestine — an occupation that necessitated, according to the partition plan — the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian natives. Arab communists never recovered and were accused by their Arab nationalist enemies of being out of touch, and even of betrayal.

The organization of Arab communists was tightly in the hands of the Soviet Union, and local communists were expected to comply with Moscow’s wishes regardless of whether those wishes offended Arab political sensibilities. Arab communists have ever since been trying to justify the partition plan and some still defend it.

While Arab nationalist parties and organizations were preaching armed struggle as the only way to recover Palestine, the head of the Lebanese Communist Party, Farajalla Al-Hilu, spoke in 1942 of a “political conflict” with Zionism, not a military one. Arab communists were late in adopting armed struggle — even as a slogan — out of deference to their Soviet sponsors.

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But Arab communists also betrayed their own cause: they never strove to develop their own version of local communism and did not, in their indoctrination campaigns, attempt to marry communist ideology with Arab culture and heritage.

Their reading materials covered only the West. They failed to produce programs and agendas that reflected local needs and realties. Progress Publishers (the publishing arm of the U.S.S.R.) produced Arabic translations of communist literature, but the translations were woefully inadequate and censorship was employed in the translations. ... Arab communists also opposed Nasser when he was the champion — in the Arab world and beyond — of the anti-Western camp in the world. At a time when Nasser was leading a real revolution in Egypt, Egyptian communists were joining forces with right-wing parties in calling for political elections. Those elections would have certainly returned the traditional right-wing parties to power.

Nasser, while not a communist, achieved more for the Egyptian working and peasant class, than all the efforts of Arab communists. It was rather inexplicable that communists in Arab countries would not join forces with the most progressive project in the contemporary history of the Arab world.

Later, Egyptian communists had no problem aligning themselves with dictators against the Muslim Brotherhood. Many leftists supported the regime of Abdul-Fattah Sisi in order to undermine the representative powers of the Muslim Brotherhood, who won the first free election in Egyptian history after the collapse of the Husni Mubarak regime in 2011.

Since the collapse of the U.S.S.R., Arab communists have been trying to shed their ideology. In Syria, communist leader Riad Al-Turk called for Western intervention in the Middle East, while the other branch of the Syrian communist party of Khalid Bakdash supported the Syrian regime.

The Iraqi Communist Party joined the occupation council which was set up by the American colonial power after 2003 invasion. Paul Bremer actually praised the Iraqi communists for their cooperation with the occupiers.

The Sudanese Communist Party has recently called for intervention by “the international community” — a sinister code for NATO and its allies.

In Lebanon, the communists have been split. Early in 2005, many Lebanese communists who had been coopted by the right-wing billionaire Rafiq Hariri joined the right-wing coalition known as March 14. Communist Action Organization and the Yasar Dimiqrati (two organizations with Marxist pasts) were a mere tool for Hariri (an MP from Yasar Dimuqrati was elected to parliament in 2005 on the list of the Hariri family).

The mainstream Lebanese Communist Party stayed outside that framework and supported resistance against Israel. But since 2019, the Lebanese Communist Party has developed into another version of a liberal NGO and seems to be copying the model of liberal Yasar Dimuqrati. It even held “coordination sessions” with the right-wing, anti-communist, Phalanges Party, during the protests that followed the Lebanese collapse in 2019.

And in the last two years, the party has distanced itself from the resistance against Israel and bogusly claimed that leftist parties did much of the resistance against Tel Aviv.

There are still active communist parties today in Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Morocco, as well as Marxist or progressive leftist parties in many Arab countries. But many are shedding the communist label and picking Che Guevara as their symbol because he is good looking and does not bring up the baggage that Marx or Lenin brings.

Arab communism is dead, and neoliberal forces rise with various slogans — some from the right and some from the left. The cause of the left is more imperative than ever, but Arab communists have become least qualified to carry it out."