I don’t know much about the ideology other than it allegedly fuses Arab Nationalism with Socialism and is divided between a Syrian and an Iraqi interpretation.
Beyond that I’ve heard a lot of claims about it ranging from accusations of it basically being Arab Fascism to being a genuinely non-Marxist Socialist project to being simply an anti-colonial bourgeois revolutionary movement.
English sources that aren’t inherently biased against it (thanks Langley) are rare so I’m looking for an actually informed take on Ba’athism both as a theory and as a practice. Was it good? Was it bad? Was it good but flawed? Was it bad but had some genuine upsides? Was it good in context but bad generally (e.g. deserves critical support)?
What’s the deal, exactly?
Eh, it sorta does but it’s a bit confusing to an outside observer because obviously enough Iraqi ba’athism is probably more closely related to fascism of National socialism then it is actual socialism, while typically the Ba’athism practiced in Syria was more closely aligned to actual socialism, well for a time at least (Bashar Al Assad eventually decided to drink the lib juice and effectively torpedoed the Syrian economy with liberal economic reforms, and hence kicked off the Syrian civil war so, fun.)
Either way the more accurate statement would be to say is that ba’athism is ultimately a Arab nationalist ideology that has two, almost entirely distinct branches.
Right-wing Ba’athism, the sort of Ba’athism practiced in Iraq before the Americans decided to invade and then effectively turn the country into an Iranian puppet state.
Left-wing Ba’athism, practiced in Syria which then eventually got dumptered by liberal infiltration (Bashar Al Assad) and then hit the shits at mark 8 velocity.
Either way Ba’athism is for all intense and purposes a dead ideology, that failed due to the inherent contradictions of all regimes (even socialist ones) built without a class base, this is the same reason why Nassarism failed as well, btw, so yeah, tl’dr, even your trying to make a socialist state then your first priority should be to root your politics on that of a class line, something that Nassarism, Left wing Ba’athism, and quite a few others failed to do (though Nassarism could in my opinion but still, and maybe left wing Ba’athism, maybe.)
Was Kadaffi a baathist?
He wasn’t. He was inspired by Nasser initially, but ultimately developed his own socialist theory in the 70s, called the Third Universal Theory (Green Book), which was the manifesto of the Jamahiriya, and he opposed capitalism. The Jamahiriya, which basically means a “government of the masses” was an actual socialist state which abolished private property, and proposed the end of the rule of one group over another. Gadaffi was originally highly pan-Arabist, but later on he pivoted towards pan-Africanism due to the material reality of pan-Arabism being dominated by a national bourgeois current. This made him an even bigger threat to the West than any pan-Arabist, knowing African resources sustain the West’s wealth.
Qaddafism is an Arab-African nationalist ideology of his own.