50 years ago: Syria nationalizes factories The Syrian Baathist regime on January 3, 1965, announced the partial or full nationalization of 107 enterprises that formed the backbone of the Middle Eastern country’s industrial production. Twenty-two factories in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hama were fully nationalized, while for another 24 enterprises the government assumed 90 percent control, and the remaining 61 firms were 75 percent nationalized. The program of nationalization had begun in 1958 at the start of the abortive union with Egypt known as the United Arab Republic. In spite of a series of coups, failed coups, and counter-coups that broke Syria from the UAR and ultimately brought the Baathists to power, the nationalizations, largely controlled by the military, continued. By 1961, the regime had gained control of natural resources, and in 1963, agrarian reform stripped much of the holdings of big rural landlords, and commercial banking and insurance were nationalized. By 1966, the pricing of many commodities and much of the wage system was under bureaucratic government control. The Ministry of Industry controlled most factories and sought to promote Syrian production through a program of import substitution. The US embassy declared January 1965 in Syria “the date of no return from when full-fledged socialism was reached.” Though calculated to emphasize its “anti-imperialism” and capitalize on the broad appeal of socialism among the masses, the regime’s nationalization was not socialization. There was no democratic control by workers. Management, engineering, and skilled-labor jobs were doled out not based on skill or competence, but loyalty to the military-dominated regime. As a consequence, many skilled workers emigrated. Import substitution and government pricing controls distorted and masked the real cost of production. The manufacturing growth rate index, measuring value added over the previous year, grew at only four percent annually through the remainder of the decade. The Syrian Baathist “road to socialism” won the backing of the Soviet Union, in spite of the fact that the neighboring Iraqi Baathists had cooperated with the American CIA in the 1963 slaughter of members of the Iraqi Communist Party, which had been one of the largest political parties and trade union movements in the Arab world. Their pretensions of socialism and “pan-Arabism” notwithstanding, the Syrian and Iraqi Baathists did not come close to uniting their adjoining countries, much less Egypt, where Gamal Abdel Nasser also proclaimed “Arab socialism” and unity. https://wsws.org/en/articles/2014/12/29/twih-d29.html#50
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 01:44:37 +0000
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