ABSTRACT
Nasser's Arab socialism developed in accordance with Egypt's particular socio-economic conditions, but its intellectual crystallisation was influenced by external ideologies. 1 Haikal modestly admitted that Egypt did not invent the ‘third way to progress’ between capitalism and communism. This ‘third way’ he described as one of the most important questions dealt with in the Charter, and claimed that earlier attempts had failed to formulate a clear philosophy. Egypt, he stressed, had arrived at the ‘third way’ through its dedicated revolutionary experience, its appreciation of shifting global conditions and its conclusion that capitalism and communism were inappropriate models for Egypt. The capitalist method, he said, had only succeeded by plundering the riches of Europe's colonies. The capitalists had not faced the problems which forced Egypt to resort to extreme policies of economising, borrowing and accepting aid in order to develop its economy. The ‘colonialists’, he concluded, had made others pay the price. 2 As to why the communist road to progress did not suit Egypt, Haikal said that the Stalinist era must serve as the acid test for measuring the communist system, since Stalin had ruled the USSR with no domestic opposition for almost 30 years. Though Soviet communism had great achievements to its credit during the era in which the Soviet state was built,the price had been exorbitant and the Soviet peoples were at an impasse: the exploitation of the masses was formally at an end, yet they had no real freedom. In other words, communism had solved the technical problem of production but not of true human liberation. As Haikal saw it, the dictatorship of the proletariat had evolved into the dictatorship of the Communist Party, culminating in the dictatorship of one individual or of a group surrounding one individual. Freedom could not coexist with such absolute power. Moreover, a guiding principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat was the destruction of the other classes, which
