Results of Manipulating the Foundations of Democracy

Over the past weeks, we have demonstrated the success of an attempt by three Arab regimes in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, immediately following the retreat of Western colonialism, to build a self-reliant Arab economy composed of state capitalism and the utilization of its surpluses to construct socialist society. However, the absence of political reforms to protect, regulate, and develop this model led to numerous setbacks in these promising progressive economic endeavors. The most significant flaw in the failure of the required political reform project stemmed from the three ruling systems and their political leadership imitating the actions of the renowned Russian leader Lenin after the success of the popular revolution in Russia in 1917. Lenin convinced the victorious Russian Communist Party of the necessity of passing through a transitional political stage under the banner of Leninist Marxism, which would be implemented as a revolutionary movement led by a single Marxist revolutionary vanguard party—the Communist Party—with no political or party pluralism whatsoever. Furthermore, the leadership of this revolutionary party was to be a centralized, undemocratic bureaucracy, meaning there was no democracy in society nor within the Communist Party until the full objectives of the Bolshevik Revolution were achieved and the transition from transitional socialism to full communism was realized. Consequently, the leaders of the three regimes decided to apply the same logic to democracy in their societies: they insisted on rejecting the existence of political parties, or at best tolerating them only under the condition of their subordination to the idea of the vanguard party that dominates political life and all state power forces. The Zionist colonial attack and the occupation of most of Palestinian land added another reason to postpone the transition to a pluralistic electoral democracy based on the rotation of governing power among parties and the will of the electorate as a whole. Thus, instead of the three Arab fronts becoming convinced that a complete socialism cannot be achieved without simultaneously building and consolidating democracy, and that democracy itself must proceed alongside profound social revolutionary changes, these systems completely distanced themselves from democratic requirements. This left the partial self-reliant economic system they sought to build exposed to reactionary forces within the country on one hand, and to external colonial and Zionist forces on the other. The result was that neither the promising self-reliant economy achieved its goals nor the required democracy materialized, plunging Arab society as a whole, not just the three countries, into the gloom we all currently experience. What the youth of the nation need to embrace is assigning major importance and an active role in their daily and periodic revolutionary struggle to rescue the Arab economy, which has been led into a dead end by neoliberal global capitalism, and to prioritize the steps toward transitioning to a reasonable, balanced democratic system that evolves progressively upward. It is also necessary for committed Arab intellectual activists to focus on launching awareness campaigns among the young men and women of the nation, addressing every detail of any transition to a self-reliant Arab economic system emerging from the wreckage of the previous promising Arab economy, and any required social changes for transitioning to the construction of democratic systems. One can only hope that such awareness campaigns take into account the lesson of not repeating the errors and sins committed by most of the world’s economic and political democratic systems, about which highly critical writings and discussions regarding the past and highly progressive visions for the future are published daily. We, in turn, will humbly contribute modestly to building that awareness in the coming weeks, beginning with a discussion on which struggle for which self-reliant Arab economy and which progressive Arab self-reliant democracy should be directed, after the long period of intellectual vacuum imposed on the Arab self in all Arab lands.