hostility of the imperialist powers and military aggression perpetrated through Israel.
But after having achieved what they could in two decades through the means they gave themselves (reforms implemented from above, without ever making it possible for the working classes to organize themselves by themselves), these governments reached a dead end. The hour of imperialism’s counteroffensive had arrived. To preserve their power, the ruling classes then accepted being subject to the new demands of so-called neoliberalism: uncontrolled opening to the outside, privatizations, etc. Consequently, everything they had accomplished was lost in a few years. The rapid erosion of their legitimacy led these governments to resort to increased police repression, supported by Washington. The period of decline (1967–2011) also covered a period of almost a half century. Egypt, subject to the requirements of globalized liberalism and the strategies of the United States, no longer existed as an active regional and international participant. In the region, the major allies of the United States—Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Turkey—were in the forefront. Israel could then move forward with its plan of expanding colonization of occupied Palestine, with the tacit complicity of Egypt and the Gulf countries.
Depoliticization was decisive in the rise of political Islam. This depoliticization is certainly not confined to Nasserist and post-Nasserist Egypt. It was the dominant practice in all the national popular experiments of the first awakening of the South, and even in the historical socialisms after the initial phase of revolutionary ferment had quieted down. It is responsible for the later disaster. The question of democratic politicization is, then, the core challenge, in the Arab world as elsewhere. Our era is not one of democratic advances, but, on the contrary, of setbacks and decline. The extreme centralization of capital in the generalized monopolies allows and demands unconditional as well as total submission of political authority to its orders. Instead of affirming the presence of active citizens capable of formulating projects for an alternative society, so-called postmodernist ideology privileges a depoliticized individual, a passive spectator of the political scene who merely participates in elections (if that) that have no significance and lead to no real change, “political alternation,” a consumer modeled by the system, who (wrongly) thinks of him or herself as a free individual.
The apparent stability of the regime, praised by Washington, was based on a monstrous police machine that committed criminal abuses daily. The imperialist powers claimed that this regime protected Egypt from the Islamist alternative. That is actually a huge lie. In fact, the regime had completely integrated reactionary political Islam into its power system, by conceding to it management of education, justice, and major media (particularly television). The only authorized speech was that which the mosques gave to the Salafists, thereby making it seem that they formed the opposition. The cynical duplicity of the rhetoric emanating from the U.S. establishment (and on this plane, Obama was no different than Bush) serves its objectives perfectly. In fact, support for political Islam eliminates the capacities of a society to face the challenges of the modern world (it lies behind the catastrophic decline in education and research), while the occasional denunciation of “abuses” for which it is responsible (murders of Copts, for example) serves to justify Washington’s military interventions in pursuit of its so-called war against terrorism. The regime could appear “tolerable” so long as the safety valve of mass migration of the poor and middle classes to the petroleum-exporting countries continued. The end of this system (Asian immigrants replacing those from the Arab countries) led to a rebirth of resistance. Worker strikes in 2007—the largest in Africa for fifty years—the stubborn resistance of small peasants threatened with expropriation by agrarian capitalism, and the organization of middle-class protest groups in favor of democracy (the Kefaya and April 6 movements), all heralded the inevitable explosion anticipated in Egypt, even if it surprised foreign observers. We have now entered into a new phase of rising struggles for emancipation. We must analyze their direction and chances for development.
Egypt entered a new phase of its history in 2011. The analysis that I have proposed of the various elements involved in the active democratic, popular, and national movement, as well as the strategies of the local reactionary opponent and its external allies, should allow us to examine diverse possible paths to social transformation and determine whether they are promising or dead ends. In conclusion, I note that at this point in time, nothing allows us to say that Egypt is embarked on the path of emergence. But the fight will continue and will, perhaps, allow for an exit from the impasse and the reinvention of an appropriate path of emergence.
Crony Capitalism, Comprador State, and Lumpen-Development: The Case of Egypt (1970–2012)
The Nasserist project of constructing a national development state had produced a model of state capitalism that Sadat was committed to dismantle. State-owned assets were thus sold. To whom? To crony businessmen and those close to the government: senior officers, high government officials, and rich merchants, who returned from exile in the Gulf countries equipped with handsome fortunes (in addition to political and financial support from the Muslim Brotherhood). But these assets were also sold to Gulf “Arabs” and foreign companies in the United States and Europe. At what prices? At ridiculous prices, disproportionate to the real value of the assets in question. In this way, the new Egyptian and foreign “owning class” was formed, which fully deserves the label crony capitalist (rasmalia al mahassib, the Egyptian term, is understood by everyone). Property granted to the army transformed the nature of the responsibilities that it carried out in some segments of the productive system (the army factories), which it managed as a state institution. These management powers became the powers of private owners. What is more, during the course of the privatizations, the most powerful officers also “acquired” ownership of many other state assets: commercial chains, urban and suburban land, and housing estates, in particular. The fortunes in question were made by acquiring already existing assets, with no more than negligible additions to productive capacity. Foreign capital investment (Arab and others), which, as a matter of fact, is quite modest, should be viewed within this context. The whole operation culminated in the establishment of the private monopolistic groups that now dominate the Egyptian economy.
The monopoly of the new crony capitalists has been systematically reinforced by the almost exclusive access enjoyed by these billionaires to bank credit (notably for the purchase of the assets in question) to the detriment of granting credit to small and medium producers. These monopolies were also strengthened by colossal state subsidies, granted for the consumption of oil, natural gas, and electricity by the factories taken over from the state (cement, iron and aluminum metallurgy, textiles, and others). The “free markets” allowed these companies to raise their prices to match those of competing imports. The logic that underlies the public subsidies that compensated for the lower prices charged by the state sector was broken, and super profits were accrued to the private monopolies.
Real wages for the large majority of unskilled and medium-skilled workers deteriorated through the operation of the laws of the market for free labor and the ferocious repression of union and other forms of collective action. Wages are now far below what they are in other countries of the South with a comparable rate of per capita GDP. The super profits of the private monopolies and pauperization go hand in hand and result in a continual increase in the unequal distribution of income. The taxation system, which rejected the very principle of progressive taxation, systematically reinforced inequality. Light taxation for the rich and corporations, praised by the World Bank because it supposedly supports investment, quite simply ended up as an increase in super profits. These policies also made it impossible to reduce both the public deficit and the foreign trade deficit. They entailed a continuous deterioration in the value of the Egyptian pound, and led to growing internal indebtedness of extreme proportions. This, in turn, provided an excuse for the IMF to demand still more respect for the principles of liberalism.
Immediate Responses
Activists responsible for formulating a joint program responding to the immediate requirements undertook a considerable amount of high-quality work for more than a year. The following text owes much to the work of Ahmad el Naggar, to whom I had the pleasure of awarding the Samir Amin Prize in 2011. The Arab and African Research Centre established this prize in my name as a way to encourage radical critical thought. Ahmad did half or more of the investigative work with the various currents and organizations