Although Ba’athism belongs to a different ideological tradition from Marxism-Leninism, it deserves far more attention from the Pakistani left than it currently receives. Lenin himself did not confine his study to Marxist movements. He drew lessons from the Paris Commune, the Jacobins, and even Bismarck’s Germany because revolutionary strategy develops through the study of successful political experience, not ideological isolation.
Across much of the Arab world, communist parties frequently possessed the richer theoretical tradition. Yet when the decisive political struggles arrived, it was almost always the Ba’athists—not the communists—who captured the state and carried out many of the social and economic transformations communist parties advocated for decades. That alone should make every serious Marxist curious.
The Ba’ath Party was founded in the early 1940s by the Syrian intellectual Michel Aflaq and his colleague Salah al-Din al-Bitar. Having encountered Marxism during his studies in France, Aflaq concluded that orthodox Marxism was inapplicable to the conditions of the Arab world. Ba’athism therefore emerged around three interconnected ideas—Arab nationalism, Arab unity, and socialism.
In 1953, the Party merged with Akram al-Hawrani’s Arab Socialist Party, which brought with it a substantial rural following. Simultaneously, the Ba’athists expanded their influence among students, professionals, and, most importantly, the armed forces—building clandestine organizations among junior and mid-ranking officers. Future Syrian leaders such as Salah Jadid, Hafez al-Assad, Muhammad Umran, and Ahmed al-Mir all emerged from these underground military networks.
The Ba’athists also cooperated with the Syrian Communist Party during this period. Fundamental differences gradually emerged, however. Whereas the communists subordinated questions of Arab nationalism to the changing priorities of the Soviet Union, the Ba’athists attached greater importance to Arab unity. Those differences came to a head over the proposed United Arab Republic between Syria and Egypt, ultimately bringing their alliance to an end.
Syria’s secession from the United Arab Republic, brought about by a military coup, marked a turning point in the country’s political development. The collapse of the union was followed by a caretaker civilian government and reinforced the military’s growing role in Syrian politics. While civilian politicians remained divided and unstable, the Ba’athists quietly continued building their organization within the armed forces.
The Military Committee emerged as the movement’s most disciplined organizational center, and by March 1963, Ba’athist officers had amassed sufficient influence within the military to overthrow the civilian government and bring the party to power.
Power, however, soon exposed new contradictions within the movement. Tensions emerged between the party’s civilian leadership—represented by Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar—and the younger generation of military officers who had carried out the revolution. Those tensions culminated in the 1966 coup, which shifted power decisively to Salah Jadid and the party’s more radical, military-led faction.
Under Jadid, Syria embarked upon one of the most ambitious experiments in Arab socialism. Nationalization accelerated, agrarian reform deepened, and the Syrian state became a leading supporter of Palestinian resistance organizations. Yet the period also demonstrated the limits of revolutionary enthusiasm when it becomes detached from material realities.
Jadid’s regional ambitions often exceeded Syria’s military and economic capabilities. The Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War exposed profound weaknesses within the Syrian state and armed forces. Rather than moderating Syria’s revolutionary posture, Jadid often responded with even more uncompromising rhetoric, widening the gap between political objectives and available means.
It was within this context that Hafez al-Assad—a long-time friend of Salah Jadid—emerged as his principal rival. The decisive rupture between the two came during the 1970 crisis in Jordan. As fighting intensified between the Jordanian monarchy and Palestinian resistance groups during Black September, Jadid ordered Syrian intervention in support of the latter. Assad, serving as Minister of Defence, refused to commit the Syrian Air Force under conditions he believed would end in disaster. Shortly afterwards, he launched the Corrective Movement, removing Jadid from power.
Contrary to later portrayals that portray Hafez Al Assad as a “right wing” element of the party, Assad continued pursuing socialist policies, supporting Palestinian resistance forces, and maintaining an independent foreign policy. What changed was his emphasis on state capacity, institutional discipline, military modernization, and patience.
The Ba’athists’ greatest strength was not a particular doctrine but a particular way of approaching politics. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, dysfunctional and factional civilian governments in Syria rose and fell in rapid succession, causing the military to intervene in political life to restore order. Rather than treating these interventions as interruptions to inherently glorious constitutional rule, the Ba’athists recognized that the balance of political power inside the Syrian state was changing. Their strategy changed with it.
Pakistan underwent a political transformation similar to the one that Ba’athists observed in newly independent Syria. Following a decade of one unstable coalition government to the next and struggling to produce a constitution, the military assumed an increasingly central role in Pakistan’s political life, culminating in Ayub Khan’s coup in 1958. The underlying civilian dysfunction, however, did not disappear with the end of his rule. Instead, Pakistan settled into a recurring cycle of confrontation between civilian politicians, provincial tensions, and the armed forces. At the same time, many civilian parties continued to act as centrifugal forces, while the military remained one of the country’s few genuinely national institutions.
The Ba’athists responded to civilian-military friction by treating the military as a field of political struggle. Much of the Pakistani left reached the opposite conclusion, approaching the civilian-military contradiction through the liberal objective of “restoring democracy.” Once that framework was accepted, virtually any force opposed to the military—from separatists and peripheral feudal elites to liberal constitutionalists—could be understood as a potential ally. Questions of class, anti-imperialism, and centralization became secondary to the struggle against “military domination”.
The consequences of this approach extend beyond political alliances. They also help explain why revolutionary organizations in Pakistan have made so little progress within the armed forces. One cannot expect to build influence within an institution while rejecting many of the historical assumptions through which that institution understands the country it exists to defend.
For decades, large sections of the Pakistani left have rejected the Two-Nation Theory, aligned themselves with ethno-nationalist movements, and adopted conciliatory approaches towards India. Whatever one’s assessment of these positions may be, they leave little common political language through which revolutionary ideas can gain traction within the armed forces.
The Ba’athists understood that revolutionary propaganda is never universal. Workers, peasants, students, civil servants, and military officers occupy different positions within society and therefore respond to different political languages. Their message to officers emphasized patriotism, sovereignty, modernization, anti-imperialism, and national renewal; their message to workers and peasants emphasized agrarian reform, social justice, and economic transformation. The underlying political program remained coherent, but its presentation was adapted to the audience.
Ultimately, the purpose of studying Ba’athism is not to search for an alternative ideology, but to better understand revolutionary strategy. History rarely presents itself in identical forms, and no movement can simply reproduce the experience of another country. The value of the Ba’athist experience lies in demonstrating that revolutionary movements confronting similar contradictions can arrive at fundamentally different strategic conclusions. Those conclusions deserve to be examined on their own merits rather than dismissed simply because they emerged outside the Marxist tradition.