The Arab bourgeoisie: a revisionist interpretation.

• Author: Springborg, Robert

THE MODERN HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE EAST is littered with dashed hopes for developmental leadership by a succession of social classes. The "Liberal Age" ended when the landed notability and its urbanized offshoots proved unequal to the tasks of defending Arab homelands and providing compelling images of an Arab future, along with plans appropriate for their realization. The "new middle class" that shouldered aside Arab ancien regimes has now exhausted its reservoir of ideas and resources. The etatist development model it espoused has fallen into global disfavor. It is left with the problems of supporting over-developed states with inadequate revenues, and of reconciling interventionist, bureaucratic authoritarian government with the requirements of neo-classical liberalism. Never contenders for political leadership, workers and peasants, who were cultivated as support groups during populist phases of bureaucratic authoritarian rule, are being stripped of residual political resources as their share of national wealth declines.

The way thus has been cleared ideologically and politically for a resurgence of the bourgeoisie. The new orthodoxy of development, which calls for exportled growth under private sector auspices, champions bourgeois entrepreneurialism. While Arab states have been among the most reluctant in the Third World to subscribe to the new orthodoxy, one by one they have begun cautiously to endorse its principles and adopt piecemeal its basic tenets, if only to attempt to preserve the essence of the status quo. Accompanying this change has been the emergence of an "infitah (opening) bourgeoisie," almost universally said to be composed of an amalgam drawn from three elements: the old bourgeoisie that had been sitting it out during the radical nationalist/populist phase; the state bourgeoisie that mushroomed during that phase and is now seeking to privatize its wealth and employment; and arrivistes, or those who have seized opportunities provided in the early stages of the opening of formerly closed economies. A critical issue in the political economy of the Arab World is whether this newly amalgamating bourgeoisie will acquire sufficient coherence and power to curb state autonomy, if not to convert the state into its own executive committee.

The new Arab bourgeoisie's past is prologue for its future. But what indeed was that past? Modern scholarship provides conflicting interpretations of its accomplishments and failures in approximately the first half of this century. Disagreement does not extend to the issue of the composition of the bourgeoisie. Almost universally it is seen as a class whose wealth was based in land and/or in commerce and which in many instances was comprised of minorities and resident foreigners. Progressive elements of this "first" Arab bourgeoisie put the wealth generated in agriculture and trade into industry. By the time it was shouldered aside by radical military officers, this bourgeoisie, at least in Egypt and Syria, if not Iraq, had become a class in itself, albeit one comprised of different factions.

INDICTMENTS OF THE FIRST ARAB BOURGEOISIE

The standard historiography of the first Arab bourgeoisie is one of indictment. The class is seen as having failed its historic obligations to develop economies rapidly and to provide political leadership. In this matter scholarship has followed flags. The Arab coup makers, who sketched the rough outlines of state and nation building histories for apparatchik intellectuals to then elaborate, ascribed to the bourgeoisie roles as traitors or, at best, incompetent reactionaries who failed to modernize agriculture, to industrialize, or to appreciate and prepare for the Zionist-imperialist threat. Independent Arab thinkers further to the left added their considerable intellectual weight to this indictment, labelling the bourgeoisie as comprador and condemning it as a handmaiden of dependent development, which is to say no development at all.

Paradoxically, the first Arab bourgeoisie fared no better in the hands of official or even unofficial America.(1) The US government, seeking to supplant British and French imperial presences in the region, orchestrate negotiations between Israel and the Arab states, and avert communist takeovers, championed the cause of coup makers. It claimed Nasser and al-Zaim and their ilk represented the new middle class wave of the future. Ancien regime bourgeoisies were written off by Washington as too weak to conclude peace treaties with Israel or to counter the growing communist threat. American scholarship endorsed this view, and to a large extent still does. A leading scholar of modern Syria, for example, routinely adds the pejorative adjective "reactionary" to the bourgeois elite of the pre-1949 period.(2) Criticisms continue to be levelled at the first Arab bourgeoisie on the grounds that it was insufficiently capitalist and too traditional by nature; that its performance in the agricultural and industrial sectors was mediocre; and that it failed to mobilize the population behind its political leadership.

Raymond Hinnesbusch's many writings on Syria exemplify typifications of the bourgeoisie as having failed their historic mission because of inherent shortcomings, due partly to lingering precapitalist attitudinal and behavioral residues. The rise of the Ba'th occurred, according to Hinnebusch, because "the emergence of a capitalist class differentiated from the semi-feudal agrarian commercial bourgeoisie was so delayed and incomplete that a capitalist road to development could not be consolidated."(3) Syria lacked a tradition of estate management and "an indigenous ruling class committed to economic development." When the bourgeoisie finally did emerge, their mentality "remained that of the merchant: seeking quick profits through the maximum exploitation of labor, evasion of taxes, and a neglect of quality made possible by their market monopoly."(4) The Syrian bourgeoisie, according to Hinnebusch, failed to consummate a bourgeois revolution a la Francaise, because it was insufficiently bourgeois and entrepreneurial, an unavoidable shortcoming because of the traditional nature of the political economy within which that bourgeoisie emerged and by which it was shaped. Syria never experienced development-oriented political leadership, so there was no model to copy.(5)

Marxist and dependency writings on the Third World have echoed American development theory's contempt for the non-European bourgeoisie. According to Franz Fanon, "The national bourgeoisie of underdeveloped countries is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor in building, nor labor .... Because it is bereft of ideas, because it lives to itself and cuts itself off from the people ... the national middle class will have nothing better to do than to take on the role of manager for Western enterprise ...."(6) Samir Amin similarly discounts any possibility that the national bourgeoisie might contribute to development in the Third World, a process which, according to him, has been rendered impossible by capitalism's "inherent tendency to cause a polarization between centres and peripheries."(7) Bourgeoisie of the periphery, moreover, "are and will be less and less divided between their national tendency and their tendency to surrender to global constraints, and will increasingly join the camp of the acquiescent compradors." Given this inevitability, Amin says "Cutting out the bourgeoisie is an increasing historic responsibility for the popular classes and the intelligentsia."(8)

Draconian methods of dealing with a recalcitrant bourgeoisie have been on the agenda not only of Arab Marxists, but also have been endorsed by western development theorists and practitioners. Since the first Arab bourgeoisie were primarily agrarian, the method recommended to free their dead hand from control over land, specifically, and the economy, generally, was agrarian reform. The accepted wisdom of that age was that large landowners were an obstacle to both agricultural and industrial development. Because of factor endowments and their own shortsightedness, landowners would continue to seek surplus value from exploitation of tenant sharecroppers rather than through modernization and increased production. Pre-capitalist residues of status anxiety would cause landlords to direct their ill-gotten gains to conspicuous consumption rather than to invest in industry. Some forty years later this assessment of the Arab landowning bourgeoisie remains current, as Raymond Hinnebusch's assessment of that class in Syria suggests:

The landlord played little role in the agricultural cycle; he preferred the

sharecropping tenure precisely because it enabled him to derive revenue

without making a substantial contribution of investment or management....

Instead of agricultural investment, the landlord funneled his money into

status-maintaining consumption and display.(9)

Some contemporary explanations of the failure of Arab agricultural sectors to expand productivity at a sufficiently rapid pace still emphasize inegalitarian land tenure and the need for further agrarian reform, although other critiques and remedies are also now available.(10)

Indictments of the first Arab bourgeoisie for having failed adequately to industrialize their respective countries take two forms. The first is that their accomplishments in this sector prior to seizures of power by the military were limited, and that subsequently, despite efforts by nationalist regimes to enlist their support in industrialization efforts, they remained recalcitrant, exporting their capital and frequently themselves. A second line of attack on the capitalist-led industrialization of this era is to claim that whatever success was achieved was due to special conditions, e.g., tax exemptions, protectionism, high prices, accumulation of capital surpluses during World War II, etc.(11) Industrialization, moreover, was...