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?
You could call it a form of Arab secular bourgeois nationalism that is also very left-leaning despite really being state capitalist, and as a result not free from capitalism’s inherent contradictions. Not nationalism as in chauvinism (which is the case for Western nationalism), but nationalism as in national liberation. It believes in the nationalization of key industries and most of all sovereignty, emerging as an anti-imperialist / anti-colonial ideology in its core. Where it differs from de facto “socialism” is that it usually doesn’t advocate for the abolition of private property, hence the “state capitalist” factor. Nationalization of key industries, as mentioned, in a resource rich region, was the reason it was a threat to Western imperialism in the first place and the US had to destroy Ba’athist countries.
It was born due the fact that capitalism in West Asia and North Africa was not an organic development, like in most of the world. It was a colonial imposition as these regions, which had a wide array of different pre-capitalist modes of production, were forced to vanish on a large scale, meaning a significantly smaller national bourgeois class existed that was responsible for leading a sovereign movement.