Early in the post- independence years, major socialist Arab states such as Iraq, Syria and Egypt undertook massive land reform measures, nationalised industry and financial institutions, provided universal healthcare and education and clamped down on the cycle of resource usurpation. This class of Arab states sought self- sufficiency in production, endorsed import- substituting industrialization and effected public investments in heavy industry while synchronizing the demands of a growing industry with adequate human skills. In social and economic dynamics, the Arab socialist model has outperformed the ongoing neo- liberal model, which began to be implemented in the early 1980s (see Annex to this chapter for tables on economic growth records and other economic indicators for three major Arab socialist countries: Egypt, Iraq and Syria). In popular culture, this period is dubbed Alzaman Aljamil: ‘beautiful times’. Although standards of living are historically determined, the period 1960– 1980 represented an epoch in which Arab countries exhibited dynamic performance in terms of real wages growth, more equal income distribution and improvements in infant mortality and life expectancy as well as many other social indicators. Arab socialist regimes in particular have not only outshone the rest of the Arab countries, but also scored high growth averages in social and economic indicators relative to the rest of the world. With the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2011, nearly all the previous Arab socialist states experienced collapse, save Algeria, which staggers along depending more on oil revenues than on auto- development or an economy that grows and develops by relying on its own productive capabilities. The Arab socialist model may not have been super but, in comparison, neo- liberalism had stripped the working population of its previous social gains and raised the measure of repression.

Development outcomes depend on the commitment of the social class in power to real- resource mobilisation. This chapter addresses the issue of Arab socialism and investigates the structure of the class formation that shaped development in the post- independence years. The class of military officers and its adjunct ally, the intermediate stratum – composed of professionals, small capital holders, including sections of the small land- holding peasantry, which together formed the state bourgeois class (by virtue of their control over state resources) – assumed the role of agent of development during the Arab socialist phase.