At the time of writing this introduction, in early 2016, the richest countries on earth, the Gulf States, were bombarding Yemen, possibly the poorest of all countries. Conditions of malnutrition, conflict, or a combination of both, characterise most Arab countries today. But things were not always as bad. As in much of the developing world, the immediate post- independence period represented an age of hope and relative prosperity. Yet, imperialism does not fall asleep while the Third World develops. No sooner than it could intervene with the assistance of its class allies to destroy Arab post- independence achievements, imperialism did so in a big way. Two principal defeats by, and losses of territory to, Israel in 1967 and 1973, and many others that followed, left behind more than mere destruction of assets and loss of human lives; the Arab World (hereinafter the AW) lost its ideology of resistance, Arabism, and its associated socialism. This book is a modest attempt to understand why Arab development declined from its peak in the heyday of Arab socialism to the present desolate conditions.

Reversing this defeat and ideological defeatism requires a metamorphosis of the multitude into the masses and of the working class into a proletariat. It requires people who espouse an ideology – the actualisation of which, through policy, assigns a greater share of wealth to the security of the working classes. A living security, nonetheless, which obtains from an anti- imperialist struggle because the higher share of wages in the aristocratic nations have for long created the colonial mercenaries who pillaged the developing world. Undoubtedly, all ideologies will represent a system of thought shaped by the conditions of the class struggle. Revolutionary theory regards reigning ideology, even its own, as involving a biased perception of real processes. Capitalistic ideologies, however, are either the prefab social dicta meant to discipline labour or the unexamined assumptions upon which theory is built to strengthen the rule of capital. Deciphering positive from negative ideology requires more than just the Debord (1967) criterion: the true is a moment of the false. In revolutionary praxis, the true is not any moment of the false; the true is its determining moment; the true is its state of becoming in continued anti-imperialist struggle and all-round development.