Michel Aflaq
The party was founded in 1966 by Yasin al-Hafiz, as a Marxist splinter group of the Ba'ath Party. The party rejected the Ba'athist ideology of Michel Aflaq as reactionary and backward-looking. Instead the party opted for scientific socialism. Another early prominent leader of the party was Ali Salah Saadi. This split in the Ba'ath Party emerged parallel to the growth of leftist dissent in the Arab Nationalist Movement.