... And Yemen also once attempted to be a progressive socialist state. Funny that...

Yemen’s strategic position, with its port of Aden, has exposed it to foreign domination for hundreds of years. The British took Aden in 1839, ruling it as part of British India – Aden’s culture even into the 1950s was predominantly Indian rather than Arab as result. Britain was ousted from the southern region in 1967 by an armed uprising, while a bloody civil war raged in the north between Saudi-backed royalists, who’d ruled since the end of Ottoman rule in 1918, and an Egyptian-backed army coup. Of the two rival nationalist groups in the south, it was the more left-wing National Liberation Front (NLF) that emerged the stronger, partly because Egypt’s defeat by Israel in the 1967 war discredited Nasser’s model of nationalism. After independence on November 30, 1967, ties were strengthened with the USSR, Eastern Europe and China.

The new state redistributed privately owned land to co-operative farms, under the authority of a peasant militia. The means of production were nationalized and central planning introduced, including in retail. In 1970 southern Yemen was renamed the People's Republic of Yemen (PDRY) and all political parties were then amalgamated into a communist party, which became the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) in 1978. Alongside the militia, other mass organizations of workers, youth, women and peasants covered most parts of the country. A Family Law, brought in to a chorus of protests by conservatives, began to transform women’s lives, making Yemen’s constitution the most feminist in the Arab world. Islam was marginalized, and religious endowments nationalized; the state paid the clerics’ salaries and controlled any foreign funding of the mosques. A mass literacy campaign was begun.

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With the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, unity with the north was forced through, and nationalized land in the south was returned to private hands. Women’s rights were removed and sharia became the basis of law-making. A civil war in 1994 ended in defeat for the southern secessionists, with returning Yemeni mujahedeen from the Afghan war enlisted by President Saleh to defeat the ‘socialist’ south. The regime is now fighting these very same forces, the jihadists and tribal leaders.

/... http://21stcenturysocialism.com/article/yemen_new_front_in_the_war_on_terror_01969.html

“The picture that emerges is one of a desperate US-backed dictator, Yemen’s President Saleh, increasingly losing control after two decades as despotic ruler of the unified Yemen. Economic conditions in the country took a drastic downward slide in 2008 when world oil prices collapsed. Some 70% of the state revenues derive from Yemen’s oil sales. The central government of Saleh sits in former North Yemen in Sana’a, while the oil is in former South Yemen. Yet Saleh controls the oil revenue flows.” Lack of oil revenue has limited Saleh’s ability to buy off opposition groups.

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“An excuse for a US or NATO militarization of the waters around Bab el-Mandab would give Washington another major link in its pursuit of control of the seven most critical oil chokepoints around the world, a major part of any future US strategy aimed at denying oil flows to China, the EU or any region or country that opposes US policy. Given that significant flows of Saudi oil pass through Bab el-Mandab, a US military control there would serve to deter the Saudi Kingdom from becoming serious about transacting future oil sales with China or others no longer in dollars, as was recently reported by UK Independent journalist Robert Fisk. It would also be in a position to threaten China’s oil transport from Port Sudan on the Red Sea just north of Bab el-Mandab, a major lifeline in China’s national energy needs.”

/... http://21stcenturysocialism.com/article/yemen_new_front_in_the_war_on_terror_01969.html

In the years up to 1967, a revolutionary wave in the British colony of Aden compelled the British Imperialists to withdraw. During the revolution, it soon became clear that the bourgeois and petit bourgeois democrats in the National Front were incapable of doing away with landlordism and solving the burning problems of the masses. The most revolutionary wing of the National Front was pushed to the foreground, and they were compelled to take power in 1969.

But in order to eliminate feudalism and landlordism they were compelled to go further and eliminate capitalism or rather those elements of capitalism that existed in South Yemen at that time. In 1970, South Yemen declared itself a “Marxist” state. In reality it was a military-police dictatorship which based itself on a nationalised economy but with the support of the overwhelming majority, especially of the active population. The Yemeni revolutionaries had as their model the revolutions in Cuba and China, and the regime that existed in Stalinist Russia.

Although South Yemen was one of the poorest countries in the world (and remains so), the abolition of landlordism and capitalism (or rather, those elements of capitalism that existed in South Yemen) allowed for some strides forward to be made. The country’s infrastructure was much improved. Education was made free. There was full employment. This period plays a significant role in the consciousness of the southern Yemeni masses, in a certain sense like the memories of the welfare benefits and planned economy of the GDR period for East Germans.

In the 1980s, the economy in South Yemen entered into crisis and stagnation (even though oil findings in the late 1980s helped somewhat). The bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy, combined with the isolation of the revolution in a backward country with scarce resources, became an absolute fetter on further development. Farmers refused to deliver food for the miserable prices they could get. Often, the only food available in Aden market was potatoes, bread and onions.

It was this impasse that led the leaders in the South to try to reach a compromise with the north through unification. In reality, this showed the complete bankruptcy of the Stalinists. What failed in the PDRY was not Marxism or Socialism, but Stalinism – i.e. the idea of “socialism in one country” and bureaucratic police-military rule without democracy for the workers and peasants.

... snip - jump to present day ...

The Southern Movement reflects a deep-rooted discontent in South Yemen. At the same time, the fighting in the north between Houthi rebels, as well as the fight between tribal jihadists (ex-mujahideen who used to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, and later fought against the “socialist” PDRY) and the government forces, reflects the fact that the regime has entered into conflict with the very same social forces that it used to lean on in order to crush the left wing. It is a reflection of disintegration in the regime, which again is a reflection of the complete impasse of the economy under the present feudal-imperialist order.

The Southern Movement remains an extremely heterogeneous force. Nevertheless, it is a real mass movement, through which the active layers of the population are fighting for better conditions. What is needed is a programme that breaks with landlordism and capitalism and seeks to spread the revolution across the whole of the Yemen.

Marxists support the struggle against opression and theft perpetrated by the Sana'a government and the landlords - but the fight must be carried out along socialist lines. The struggle against Sana'a must be based on the demand for re-nationalization of the economy, but it must also seek to spread the revolution to the North as well as to Oman, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the region. A socialist South Yemen enveloping the whole of the country, north and south, could be the first step in the socialist revolution throughout the region.

/... http://www.socialistappeal.org/content/view/821/72/