The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movement in Iraq

"This book is over 1,000 pages and took Batatu over 20 years to write. It is based on primary sources that had never been accessible before. I am not sure how he managed to have such good access but I know when he dined with relatives of mine in the past he spoke of the access he had to police files from the 1950s and 1960s. All of that makes for a truly remarkable book that is, in fact, not one book but many different books rolled into one. “The escalation of cruelty and violence in Iraqi society during the 1980s is something which we still live with.” On the one hand The Old Social Classes tells the story of the formation of the landed classes of modern Iraq and in the same process the polarisation and eventual impoverishment of Iraq’s peasantry. As the 20th century moves into the 1940s and 1950s they start to turn to the Iraqi Communist Party. And this is something that we don’t often think about today. The other side of the story that his book tells is the story of the rise of the Iraqi Communist Party. It is one of the few Communist Parties in the Arab world to become a mass party and it was the main opposition force in the 1940s right through to the 1970s. It never came to power but it did help shape the course of Iraqi politics. The cause of its eventual downfall was the Ba’ath Party which came to power for the second time in 1968 and was not overthrown until US-led military action brought it down in 2003. In 1968 the Ba’ath Party was very weak. To cement their hold they adopted a policy of divide and rule which resulted in the Communist Party breaking up into various different factions. The Ba’ath Party allied itself with one faction in order to crush the other and then moved their way through the different opposition groups in society. It is a complicated story which Batatu manages to tell in all its intricate details. The Communist Party was overwhelmingly Shi’ite in its composition. It is the sons and grandchildren of these first generations of communist Iraqi Shi’ites who would turn away from the Party in the late 1970s and early 1980s and move into Islamic politics which is where they are today. I always find it interesting and important to remember that Islamism in Iraq, of the Shi’ite variety anyway, has these roots in the country’s early experiences with Communism."

"Hanna Batatu was the great Iraqi historian – a man of perception and gigantic knowledge of the social, sectarian and ethnic background in Iraq. If you read this, you will find out everything from the different sectarian communities to the growth of the Ba’ath party, which was the instrument from which Saddam Hussein rose to power. Then you will know what Iraq is all about – its divisions, its unity and everything else. This is the great classic work. It was in the past, and I think it still is. Yes, which shows that there is a demand for it. And it is right that there should be a demand for it, because it is still a wonderful work."

"This book is empirically rich and conceptually sophisticated. One of the first books to use primary documents in Iraq extensively. Batatu had access to the police records from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Unlike many Middle Eastern specialists, Batatu did not just use American, British and French sources. It was a scholarly miracle that he was able to get to the police and security forces records in the 1960s and 1970s. But it gave him an insight into what was happening within the state structure and society. His use of internal records sheds original lights on the Iraqi political landscape. Batatu was also able to interview many everyday Iraqis. Before him, many books on Iraq and the Middle East in general were diplomatic history, relying on interviews with the elites, kings, emirs and their advisors, decision makers, and civil society leaders. Batatu interviewed ordinary, common Iraqis, so this is a book from the bottom up, as opposed to top down. It’s one of the first books that examines the lives and struggles of every day Iraqis. It’s not a diplomatic history. It’s not the history of the ruling elites in Iraq. It took Batatu 20 years to write this book and he turns conventional wisdom on its head. Conceptually, the book is original, too. Previous studies on Iraq and the Arab/Islamic world and the global south took the traditional approach for granted by focusing on tribe, sect, ethnicity and religion. In contrast, Hanna Batatu’s book basically applies a Marxist -Weberian analysis, using Marxian and Weberian theoretical frameworks to try to understand the formation of social classes in Iraq and the power struggle over the state. In this particular way Batatu defies the conventional wisdom, which tended to look at the Middle East through the lens of tribe, ethnicity, sect and religion. He argues that you cannot make sense of the social and economic history of Iraq (or the modern Middle East), without understanding the role of capitalism and how it shaped the formation of the social classes and the landed classes. Batatu zeroes in on two key historical eras of development, the Ottoman Empire and British colonialism . The Ottoman Empire destroyed the traditional mode of production in Iraq, by employing technology—the railway and the telegram. The Ottomans shifted the focus from the tribe and the sect and ethnicity into property. So it was the Ottoman Empire that produced the first great transformation of Iraqi society. Then, simplifying somewhat, British colonialism destroyed the old order and created a new ruling class, favouring the dominant landed classes, as opposed to the middle class or the lower middle class. Thus, the Ottoman Empire and the British rule that ended in the early 1950s saw the development of capitalism. Capitalism created a very large working class as well as the beginnings of a new middle class. Under the Ottoman Empire, but even more so under British colonialism, there occurred massive migration from the countryside into urban areas. What you have in the city is an educated, relatively small, middle class, and a huge disenfranchised class. And these two classes coalesced and created a new political party in opposition to the ruling landed class. People don’t realise that the Marxist party in Iraq in the 1940s, and 1950s and even the 1960s, was the largest political party in Iraq. And not just in Iraq, but also in Egypt, Iran and Syria. In fact, the Marxist parties in Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Syria could have had ownership of the states, if it hadn’t been for social dislocation and intra-fighting among the various social and political elements and classes within the Communist parties. So, the landed classes, instead of integrating the middle class, marginalised it, and the peasants also felt marginalised by the local elite, not just by the colonial powers. This particular convergence, this alliance between the middle class and the working class and peasants produced the 1958 revolution. The 1958 revolution was carried out by the local Marxist party in Iraq which included the working class, the peasants and the middle class. One point must be made clear: the Marxists in Iraq were motivated by local conditions. They were not Stalinist, Leninist or Maoist. They were inspired by bread-and-butter concerns. They wanted to be integrated into the existing social and political structures. But they were denied access to social goods and power because the local elites and the landed classes would not allow it. In this sense, the landed classes were their own worst enemies because of their unwillingness to integrate the rising social classes, both the middle class and the peasants, into the political and social space. “The Marxists in Iraq were motivated by local conditions. They were not Stalinist, Leninist or Maoist” Another interesting thing about the Marxist party in Iraq is that it was Shia-dominated, while Arab Sunnis were co-opted by colonial Britain, which turned them into the ruling class. The Shias who migrated to the cities, to Baghdad, Basra and Mosul joined the Marxist party en masse, playing a significant role in the 1958 revolution. That is why Batatu’s book is called ‘the old social classes and the revolutionary movements’. It examines not only the formation of the social classes but also their transformation. After the revolution in 1958 this alliance between the middle class and the lower-classes splintered and fragmented into Ba’athists or nationalists and the Communists. The Ba’athists/nationalists succeeded in splintering the Marxists into factions, and then systematically eliminated them, most brutally. This repressive policy against the Communists was most aggressively pursued in the 1960s, with the rise to power in the Ba’ath Party of Saddam Hussein’s faction, which at the time was really a minority. The book is fascinating because, instead of providing a political and religious history of Iraq, it really uses Marx and Weber to help us navigate the complexity of the Iraqi social scene, and its transformation. In the 1970s and 1980s, the same groups that formed major blocs in the leftist and Marxist parties turned to Shia Islam. Unfortunately, we don’t have all-encompassing comparative books to help us make sense of the social formations across the other countries in the region, that would tell the story of the rise of dominant groups, whether Shia-dominated or Sunni-dominated. If we did we would find that Iraq is not really an exception to the rule. In fact, it is the rule. Batatu wrote the book in English, even though he was a Palestinian exile living in the United States. The impact of the book on Middle Eastern scholarship has been significant. Unlike most books on Iraq and the Middle East at the time, Batatu’s is neither a religious history nor a political-diplomatic history. Rather, it’s an original study about the socio-economic history of Iraq, using Marx and Weber to flesh out the formations of social classes and their subsequent transformation."