Apart from academic specialists, business and government personnel with experience in the Middle East, and U.S. residents who have emigrated to the U.S. from the area, Americans are poorly informed about the Middle East, although Tikkun readers are probably much better informed about the Israel/Palestine issue than the average person thanks to Michael Lerner’s efforts to educate us over the years.

But ignorance about the Arab world is great, and so it is not surprising that a deep understanding of the causes of the recent revolt has not emerged from contributions to Tikkun Daily on the topic in recent days. To begin to address that gap, I call to your attention an article by Ali Kadri, “A Period of Revolutionary Fervor”, that appeared February 24, in The Bullet, the E-Bulletin of Socialist Project in Canada. Kadri is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics; he formerly served as an economic analyst for the UN regional office in Beirut. I limit myself to partial summaries, representative quotations, and a few comments of my own based mostly on recent studies of global political economy.

Two Phases of Egyptian History
“Egypt’s recent [i.e., post-1953] economic and social history could be split in two phases. A golden phase of high equitable growth, which ended in the mid seventies [this phase was associated with Nasser's nationalist regime - JG], and a leaden period of lower inequitable growth – it was lower but still high growth relative to other developing countries… “

The first phase involved a controlled economy with massive “spending on social projects financed by local means.” The second phase represented a retreat to reliance on the private market. Anwar Sadat’s “openness” to the world market caused a rise in the prices of basic necessities while “wages remained stagnant in the mid seventies.” Sadat’s economic policies were about privatizing what had been socialized and undoing Nasser’s social reforms that had characterized the previous phase.

Two Historical Agents
Kadri points to two historical agents at work in Sadat’s Egypt. First was the incompleteness of the Nasser revolution, which had its origin in a military coup in 1953. Egyptian workers did not fully participate in the process of social reform. The second agent was the role of the captains of the world political economy, which include the U.S. in its geostrategic persona. The Camp David Accords of September 1978 produced a peace dividend for Egypt – more exactly, for Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat and his allies in the Egyptian elite, including Sadat’s eventual successor Mubarak. As the article notes, “for more than thirty years, income grew” but in such a way that the workers were stripped of their rights and resources were shifted to the top two percent of the population.

Accumulation by Dispossession
In the aftermath of the Camp David Accords, much of Africa and the Arab world were “exposed to imperialist plunder,” what many analysts have called accumulation by dispossession. By direct military intervention or the threat of it the U.S. and other capitalist centers stripped peoples of the rights to own and control their own resources, to be sure with the cooperation of the local allies of the global elite.

This subordination of the local elites to the capitalist centers was rendered possible in the late 20th century thanks to the “five monopolies” of the center frequently noted by Egypt-born economist and political analyst Samir Amin: control over finance, technology, the earth’s resources, the media, and weapons of mass destruction.

The Role of Local Elites
The function and position of local elites, notes Kadri, “became so well entrenched that there is not a single Arab ruler who could retire in his own country, unless protected by tanks.”

In the states of the Arab region, Kadri tells us, the fundamental political structure is determined by a security apparatus whose head is identical to the head of state. Yet, “security arrangements in the…region are rarely the result of domestic developments or even of regional developments; they have to be understood in the context of the international division of political power, of which the Arab world represents the periphery…. The international powers have…an interest in determining [the area's] security arrangements and thus [restricting] its autonomy over its own policy.”

How Egypt Matters to the Global Power Centers
And, further, “Egypt matters more in the way it buttresses control over the geostrategic Middle East than the social surplus that would be extracted from the exploitation and pauperization of its laboring classes. The U.S. has invested several hundred billions of dollars in the Egyptian army and the security apparatus since the inception of Camp David….”

Daily Life in Egypt in Our Time
Daily life in Egypt was profoundly affected. The massive dismantling of social programs designed to support and maintain a decent quality of life for the working population, pauperization of the working class, and growth in the unemployed population reinforced commodification of human life, reducing the laborer to a completely alienated state. The process that Kadri calls commodification represents “a loss of humanity and human dignity.” That given, it is not surprising that the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia was followed by several young Egyptian men setting themselves on fire in protest of living conditions in their country.

A Surrogate Factory Floor
Kadri presents a fascinating hypothesis for understanding the spread of the revolution in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. “It is my contention that impersonal internet communication of the modern age became a surrogate factory floor, which served as the shop floor of the days past. It was received theory that the growing division of labor, its becoming more discrete, and the power of elites to divide and disperse labor have [undermined] the chances of revolution. The old factory shop floor in which workers of similar skills organized, debated, and formed a strategy for the struggle no longer represented the meeting stage of the working class…. There was what appeared to be an insuperable sociological impasse until the virtual world provided a platform for participation. It provided the possibility for communication to become impersonal and anonymous….Talking from behind a mask allows people to bare the essentials and cut through the fog to reveal primary concerns…. The internet provided the capacity in terms of numbers for the individual to hide behind and the impersonal medium or ‘mask.’”


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