Hanssen, Communism chapter final

Studies in Comparative Communism, 1989

2020

The struggle for political participation, social justice and legal equality was a key element of radical socialist and communist movements that emerged in Arab countries before and after World War I. These movements mobilized the masses, organized the workers, formed political parties and called for political demonstrations or, in some instances, for armed revolution. The spread of radical ideas among workers, the middle class, and intellectuals mirrored the growing integration of Arab societies into a globalized economy from the nineteenth century onwards. Ideologically, the main domestic opponents of Marxist/Communist movements in many Arab countries were Arab nationalist and Islamist movements both of whom connected citizenship rights to national and/or religious identity and strove to establish a homogeneous nation. In contrast, the radical left recruited followers from all sectors of Arab societies, especially from religious and ethnical minorities as well as members of foreign nationalities. Women participated also in communist/Marxist movements, but sources reveal the male-dominated cultures inside these movements and the little attention they gave to the struggle for women’s rights. In spite of the political differences, communists throughout history formed part-time alliances with nationalist, Islamists and authoritarian states, often with detrimental results. Moreover, the rigid structures of communist parties did not favour internal democracy. After 1990, the communist movement lost influence and many former supporters moved onwards to liberal or Islamist ideas, as part of an often bitter learning process. The remaining as well as newly emerging leftist groups are experimenting with new forms of organisation, mobilisation, action, and ideological mixture. A higher sensibility for questions of citizenship rights is characteristic for the post-Communist left. In the recent civil uprisings of 2010/11 and 2019/2020 in many Arab countries, many leftist movements are present, but they represent mainly one contested ideological current among others. Related topics: 1. Socialist and Communist Movements before and after World War I 2. Women Participation and Women Rights in Marxist/Communist Movements 3. Communist/Marxist Movements and Religion 4. Leftism in the Recent Uprisings in the Arab World For further information, see: https://nahoststudien.philhist.unibas.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/nahoststudien/CfA_MUBIT_2020_Arab_Marxism_Final.pdf

Digest of Middle East Studies, 1999

Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel, 2020

Mahdi Amel (1936–87) was a prominent Arab Marxist thinker and Lebanese Communist Party member. This collection brings for the first time to an English audience lengthy excerpts from six major works by Mahdi Amel. These include the two founding texts on colonialism and underdevelopment in which Amel began to grapple with the question of dependency, his treatise on sectarianism and the state, his critique of Edward Said’s analysis of Marx, his exposure of emerging Islamised bourgeois trends of thought as part of a broader critique of everyday thought, and his reflection on cultural heritage as perceived by Arab bourgeoisie. Amel’s writings serve as a reminder of the need to renew Marxist thought based on the concrete and particular social realities like colonialism.

Arab Liberal Thought after 1967, edited by Meir Hatina und Christoph Schumann, 2015

With the end of Soviet communism, liberalism triumphed, not only as political language, but also as a philosophy of history. The following chapter draws mainly on examples from Lebanon and Syria in order to show the multifaceted reactions of (former) Arab communists and Marxists to this challenge and to sketch their trajectories from the end of the 1960s to the present day. The central thesis is that Arab Marxists have increasingly adopted a liberal vocabulary and that, because Marxism has become marginalized in the political field, many former communist partisans have migrated not only to other political shores, but also to cultural activities.

International Journal of Physical and Social Sciences, 2014

The Arab region experienced minor to serious revolts from 18 December 2010. This study sought to establish whether the causes of revolutions identified by Karl Marx are consistent with what prevails in contemporary politics. This entails revisiting Karl Marx's ideas and weighing them against what is obtaining in contemporary politics. The researchers first established points identified by Karl Marx as providing fertile grounds for revolutions through analysing his social class theory. From the population of the Arab region, Syria was purposively chosen as a case study. This was due to the fact that its unique geographical location, history, ethnic, religious complexities and recent events provided a wide spectrum for the purposes of this study. The findings show that, indeed, class struggles, class consciousness, alienation, among other things identified by Karl Marx existed in Syria. These are the conditions that Marx identified as prone to trigger revolutionary spirit. In Syria these conditions also created fertile ground for revolts. However, the study in addition established aspects of geopolitics and religious factors that Karl Marx did not foresee in the genealogy of revolutions. The researchers recommend that countries must be wary of these emerging aspects alongside those identified by Karl Marx as causing revolutions.

The seminars resulted from research collaboration between two projects at Roskilde University in Denmark and the OIB on the history of socialist and communist movements and ideas in the Levant. The location of the seminars in Lebanon and the focus of the research groups partly explain why, out of the fives articles herein, four deal with Lebanese case studies and one focuses on Egypt. Another reason is simply circumstance. Other presentations at the seminars-dealing with Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen-did not make it into this special section for various reasons. As a result, we admit to perpetuating a tendency to overexpose Lebanon and Egypt in research on the Arab left. Having said that, these two countries have indeed been central locations for the intellectual and cultural production of Arab com-

Arab Studies Quarterly, 2024

Inspired by the broad reading of the works of Ghassan Kanafani, necessitated through the collective process of translating his Selected Political Writings, this article charts the influence of Leninism among a key group of Palestinian revolutionaries. It defines the process of radicalization among activists of the Arab Nationalist Movement, locating an engagement with scientific socialism that pre-dates the June 1967 defeat of Nasser-led forces – often seen as the watershed of Palestinian recruitment to Marxism-Leninism. This article explores publications where Kanafani played a leading editorial role, including al-Hadaf newspaper and other works he developed as a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Here, Kanafani is seen as the main theoretician of the Front, in a period where questions of organization, theory, and military action formed a Lukácsian totality in his reading. It is argued, moreover, that the trajectory of Kanafani, George Habash, Leila Khaled, and other activists shared similarities to the embrace of Marxism by socialist-led national liberation movements in China, Cuba, and Vietnam, among other examples.

Journal of Palestine Studies, 2007

This article discusses how the official communist position on the Zionist project in Palestine went from hostile condemnation in the early 1920s to wary support after World War II. In so doing, it focuses on the ideological struggle between the traditional party line and “Yishuvism,” a theory that sought to reconcile Zionist and communist ideas, as it played out in the two bodies most closely involved in shaping Comintern policy on Palestine (the Palestine Communist Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain). In following the tortured justifications for evolving positions, the author identifies the key actors shaping the debate and turning points impacting it, especially the 1936–39 Arab Revolt, Britain's 1939 White Paper, and the wartime fight against fascism. The author contends that an important reason for the USSR's post-war about-face on Palestine was the success of the Yishuvist ideological campaign. Published as "Communism versus Zionism: The Comintern, Yishuvism, and the Palestine Communist Party", Johan Franzén, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Winter 2007) (pp. 6-24). © 2007 by the Regents of the University of California. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the Regents of the Univ. of California for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® on JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/r/ucal) or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center, http://www.copyright.com.

2020

The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.