The Long Revolution of the Global South. Samir Amin
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SUMMARY, QUITE UNREMARKABLE for the Arab reader, supplements what I wrote in the first volume of my memoirs concerning the positions taken in May 1948 and subsequently by the Arab states and the main political forces at that time (the nationalists, Islamists, and communists). It is up to the reader to take all this into account.
These Memoirs
I experienced the Bandung Conference as an Egyptian, first as a student in Paris and then as a functionary in Cairo.
My analyses never led me to underestimate the responsibilities of the established governments, particularly that of Nasser. Quite the contrary, I attributed decisive responsibility for the failures to the inadequacies of these governments. Without false modesty, I will say that the book that I wrote in 1960, published under an assumed name, Hassan Riad, was prescient.14 I envisaged that the regime would pass away with a return to peripheral capitalism. The infitah gave concrete form to my prediction ten years later.
My return to the Egyptian political scene through my participation in the Egyptian Social Forums beginning in 2002 led me to formulate critical positions with regard to the false alternative of political Islam or “democracy.” Needless to say, my positions are not always shared. Today, political conflicts in Egypt and in the region as a whole involve three sets of forces: those that claim to adhere to the nationalist past (but are in reality only the degraded and corrupt inheritors of the bureaucracies from the national-populist era); those that follow political Islam; and those that are attempting to form around “democratic” demands compatible with liberal economic management. None of these forces is acceptable to a left concerned about the interests of the working classes and the nation. In fact, the interests of the comprador classes associated with the imperialist system are expressed through these three tendencies. U.S. diplomacy works to keep these three irons in the fire, hoping to benefit from their conflicts. Attempting to become “involved” in these conflicts by allying with one or another of these forces (choosing the established governments to avoid the worst—political Islam—or seeking to ally with the latter to get rid of the governments) is destined to fail. The left must assert itself by becoming involved in struggles to defend: (i) the economic and social interests of the working classes, (ii) democracy, and (iii) the assertion of national sovereignty. What is more, all these struggles should be viewed as inseparable.
The “Greater Middle East” region is now central in the conflict between the imperialist hegemon and the peoples of the entire world. To defeat the project of Washington’s establishment is the condition for the possibility of successful advances in any region of the world. Otherwise, all these advances will remain extremely vulnerable. This does not mean that the importance of struggles conducted in other areas of the world—Europe, Latin America, elsewhere—can be underestimated. It only means that they should be placed within a global perspective that contributes to Washington’s defeat in the region it has chosen for its criminal first strike.
Consequently, the insistence that I place on continuing debates within the Arab left, in particular its Marxist wing, goes without saying.
In Egypt, in the 1950s, I was in favor of Arab unity—like all my communist comrades—without being a “nationalist” (in the Arabic sense of qawmi), without accepting its stupidity (“Arabness flows through the blood of Arabs …”), without sharing the superficial but common opinion that the division of the Arab world into distinct states was mainly, if not exclusively, the result of “imperialist plots,” etc. Rather, we simply thought that liberation and social progress required in our time the construction of large entities, and that the unity of language and culture offered to Arabs a historical opportunity that should be seized.15
ONCE AGAIN, I REFER the reader to the first volume of these memoirs for a narrative of my participation in Egyptian political life during the Nasser era. Later, I shall give an account of my activities in post-Nasser Egypt up to the current revolution, which erupted in 2011.
MY ACTIVITIES IN THE MAGHREB AND MASHREQ
I began my discoveries of the Arab world beyond Egypt with the countries of the Maghreb, which very few Arabs from the Mashreq knew at that time. Within the context of my teaching at the IDEP, I gave myself the objective of closely studying the three experiences of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, still in the initial stages of their development in the middle of the 1960s.
Tunisia and Morocco
It was, I believe, in 1963 that the first opportunity arose to visit the Maghreb. The Plan administration in Tunisia wanted to establish a new framework for its national accounts. It confided this task to two experts: a Syrian statistician, Nazhat Chalaq, and me (recommended by SEEF). We fulfilled our mission, properly I believe, in stays of fifteen days that, for me, were spread over several months. Hussein Zhall and other colleagues at the Plan assisted us with great effectiveness, friendship, and Arab hospitality. Chalaq was a very talented statistician who was able to uncover the contradictions and absurdities in the figures submitted by various people. Having a good sense of humor, he said to me one day: “They cheat everyone, but not to the same extent; the President will have to decide by decree the proportion of compulsory cheating for all services.” We pushed the fun to the point of including this proposal in our final report! That report was very well received, and its reception reassured us about the Tunisian administrators’ sense of humor.
My stays in Tunis allowed me to meet many intellectuals, professors, and political leaders of the Tunisian left. (These same intellectuals, with well-established reputations, later led teams in the TWF.) Students also asked me from time to time to give them a lecture, a request I never refused. But I did not meet the “big leaders” of the Destourian system, those of the Bourguibist camp or those of the Ben Salahist and Ben Youssefist camps. I met Ben Salah much later, after his release from prison. I only knew of the system’s internal contradictions through their interpretation by the left opposition.
Obviously, I visited Tunisia subsequently on numerous occasions and I followed its change of direction—the failure of its attempted insertion into the international system via a strategy of welcoming outsourcing operations in free trade zones—and the rise of fundamentalist Islam. Tunisian society remains, despite everything, one of the least backward in the Arab and Muslim world in an important area: the status of women. In the long term, I believe this advantage is decisive. Habib Ben Ali Bourguiba should be credited with this advance, whatever one thinks of his—quite limited—political views, his illusions concerning the West, particularly the United States, his penchant to autocracy, and perhaps his unbearable vanity. That certainly does not suffice to excuse Ben Ali’s odious regime of its everyday villainy.
I began to have a small reputation as a good technician at creating a framework for national accounts tailored to planning needs. This reputation is probably what lay behind the invitation, circa 1964, from the Moroccan Minister of the Economy (or Planning?) Driss Slaoui. I had known the young Slaoui, a communist student in Paris. He had put a lot of water in his wine, but remained, in his own way, faithful to his youthful ideals. The Moroccan comrades with whom I have spent time since this first opportunity, followed by repeated visits, are friends I respect. But despite my respect for the activities of these militants, their party (the PPS) does not appear to me to have succeeded in going beyond the limitations of a narrow elite circle lacking solid grassroots support.
Militants of the left-wing of the USFP—during the heyday of this party—certainly benefited from a much wider popular audience. But all those whom I met left me with the feeling that they would only move beyond the limitations of Nasserist/Boumediennist/Baathist populism with great difficulty. This turned out to be the case, while they gradually and inevitably slid to the right, participating in the great game of the monarchy anxious to expand the system’s legitimacy by integrating—beyond the traditional classes that have formed its historical base (the Fassi and Soussi merchants, landed and tribal aristocracies, more recently the new comprador bourgeoisie)—the middle strata of the technocracy and bureaucracy and the urban and rural petite bourgeoisies. From that, there followed the anger and revolt of the new generation in the 1970s, the March 22 movement, and what emerged from various organizations. Their leftism was certainly commensurate with their exceptional courage.
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