The Reawakening of the Arab World
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The Reawakening of the Arab World

Challenge and Change in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring

Samir Amin

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eBook - ePub

The Reawakening of the Arab World

Challenge and Change in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring

Samir Amin

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About This Book

According to renowned Marxist economist Samir Amin, the recent Arab Spring uprisings comprise an integral part of a massive "second awakening" of the Global South. From the self-immolation in December 2010 of a Tunisian street vendor, to the consequent outcries in Cairo's Tahrir Square against poverty and corruption, to the ongoing upheavals across the Middle East and Northern Africa, the Arab world is shaping what may become of Western imperialism – an already tottering and overextended system.

The Reawakening of the Arab World examines the complex interplay of nations regarding the Arab Spring and its continuing, turbulent seasons. Beginning with Amin’s compelling interpretation of the 2011 popular Arab explosions, the book is comprised of five chapters – including a new chapter analyzing U.S. geo-strategy. Amin sees the United States, in an increasingly multi-polar world, as a victim of overreach, caught in its own web of attempts to contain the challenge of China, while confronting the staying power of nations such as Syria and Iran. The growing, deeply-felt need of the Arab people for independent, popular democracy is the cause of their awakening, says Amin. It this awakening to democracy that the United States fears most, since real self-government by independent nations would necessarily mean the end of U.S. empire, and the economic liberalism that has kept it in place. The way forward for the Arab world, Amin argues, is to take on, not just Western imperialism, but also capitalism itself.

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Year
2016
ISBN
9781583675991

1

An Arab Springtime?

The year 2011 began with a series of shattering, wrathful explosions from the Arab peoples. Was this springtime the inception of a second awakening of the Arab world? Or will these revolts bog down and finally prove abortive – as was the case with the first episode of that awakening, which was evoked in my book The Awakening of the South (L’éveil du Sud)? If the first hypothesis is confirmed, the forward movement of the Arab world will necessarily become part of the movement to go beyond imperialist capitalism on the world scale. Failure would maintain the Arab world in its current status as a submissive periphery, prohibiting its elevation to the rank of an active participant in shaping the world. It is always dangerous to generalise about the ‘Arab world’, thereby ignoring the diversity of objective conditions characterising each country of that world. So I will concentrate the following reflections on Egypt, which is easily recognised as playing and having always played a major role in the general evolution of its region.
Egypt was the first country in the periphery of globalised capitalism that tried to ‘emerge’. Even at the start of the 19th century, well before Japan and China, the Viceroy Mohamed Ali had conceived and undertaken a programme of renovation for Egypt and its near neighbours in the Arab Mashreq (Mashreq means ‘East’, i.e., eastern North Africa and the Levant). That vigorous experiment took up two-thirds of the 19th century and only belatedly ran out of breath in the 1870s, during the second half of the reign of Khedive Ismail. The analysis of its failure cannot ignore the violence of the foreign aggression by Great Britain, the foremost power of industrial capitalism during that period. Three times, in the naval campaign of 1840 and then by taking control of the khedive’s finances during the 1870s, and then finally by military occupation in 1882, England fiercely pursued its objective: to make sure that a modern Egypt would fail to emerge. Certainly, the Egyptian project was subject to the limitations of its time since it manifestly envisaged emergence within and through capitalism, unlike Egypt’s second attempt at emergence – which we will discuss further on. That project’s own social contradictions, like its underlying political, cultural, and ideological presuppositions, undoubtedly had their share of responsibility for its failure. The fact remains that without imperialist aggression those contradictions would probably have been overcome, as they were in Japan. Beaten, emergent Egypt was forced to undergo nearly 40 years (1880–1920) as a servile periphery, whose institutions were refashioned in service to that period’s model of capitalist/imperialist accumulation. That imposed retrogression struck, over and beyond its productive system, the country’s political and social institutions. It operated systematically to reinforce all the reactionary and medievalistic cultural and ideological conceptions that were useful for keeping the country in its subordinate position.
The Egyptian nation – its people, its elites – never accepted that position. This stubborn refusal in turn gave rise to a second wave of rising movements which unfolded during the next half-century (1919–67). Indeed, I see that period as a continuous series of struggles and major forward movements. It had a triple objective: democracy, national independence and social progress. These three objectives – however limited and sometimes confused were their formulations – were inseparable one from the other, an inseparability identical to the expression of the effects of modern Egypt’s integration into the globalised capitalist/imperialist system of that period. In this reading, the chapter (1955–67) of Nasserist systematisation is nothing but the final chapter of that long series of advancing struggles, which began with the revolution of 1919–20.
The first moment of that half-century of rising emancipatory struggles in Egypt had emphasised – with the formation of the Wafd in 1919 – political modernisation through adoption (in 1923) of a bourgeois form of constitutional democracy (limited monarchy) and the reconquest of independence. The form of democracy envisaged allowed progressive secularisation – if not secularism in the radical sense of that term – whose symbol was the flag linking cross and crescent (a flag that reappeared in the demonstrations of January and February 2011). ‘Normal’ elections then allowed, without the least problem, not merely for Copts (native Egyptian Christians) to be elected by Muslim majorities but for those very Copts to hold high positions in the state.
The British put their full power, supported actively by the reactionary bloc comprising the monarchy, the great landlords and the rich peasants, into undoing the democratic progress made by Egypt under Wafdist leadership. In the 1930s the dictatorship of Sedki Pasha, abolishing the democratic 1923 constitution, clashed with the student movement then spearheading the democratic anti-imperialist struggles. It was not by chance that, to counter this threat, the British embassy and the royal palace actively supported the formation in 1927 of the Muslim Brotherhood, inspired by ‘Islamist’ thought in its most backward ‘Salafist’ variant of Wahhabism as formulated by Rachid Reda – the most reactionary version, antidemocratic and against social progress, of the newborn ‘political Islam’.
The conquest of Ethiopia undertaken by Mussolini, with world war looming, forced London to make some concessions to the democratic forces. In 1936 the Wafd, having learned its lesson, was allowed to return to power and a new Anglo-Egyptian treaty was signed. The Second World War necessarily constituted a sort of parenthesis. But a rising tide of struggles, resumed as early as 21 February 1946 with the formation of the worker–student bloc, reinforced in its radicalisation by the entry on stage of the communists and of the working-class movement. Once again the Egyptian reactionaries, supported by London, responded with violence and to this end mobilised the Muslim Brotherhood behind a second dictatorship by Sedki Pasha – without, however, being able to silence the protest movement. Elections had to be held in 1950 and the Wafd returned to power. Its repudiation of the 1936 treaty and the inception of guerrilla actions in the Suez Canal Zone were defeated only by setting fire to Cairo (January 1952), an operation in which the Muslim Brotherhood was deeply involved.
A first coup d’état in 1952 by the Free Officers, and above all a second coup in 1954 by which Nasser took control, was taken by some to ‘crown’ the continual flow of struggles and by others to put it to an end. Rejecting the view of the Egyptian awakening advanced above, Nasserism put forth an ideological discourse that wiped out the whole history of the years from 1919 to 1952 in order to push the start of the Egyptian revolution to July 1952. At that time many among the communists had denounced this discourse and analysed the coups d’état of 1952 and 1954 as aimed at putting an end to the radicalisation of the democratic movement. They were not wrong, since Nasserism only took the shape of an anti-imperialist project after the Bandung Conference of April 1955. Nasserism then contributed all it had to give: a resolutely anti-imperialist international posture (in association with the Pan-Arab and Pan-African movements) and some progressive (but not socialist) social reforms. The whole thing was done from above, not only without democracy (the popular masses being denied any right to organise by and for themselves) but even by abolishing any form of political life. This was an invitation to political Islam to fill the vacuum thus created. In only ten short years (1955–65) the Nasserist project used up its progressive potential. Its exhaustion offered imperialism, henceforward led by the United States, the chance to break the movement by mobilising to that end its regional military instrument: Israel. The 1967 defeat marked the end of the tide that had flowed for half a century. Its reflux was initiated by Nasser himself, who chose the path of concessions to the right (the infitah or ‘opening’, an opening to capitalist globalisation, of course) rather than the radicalisation called for by, among others, the student movement (which held the stage briefly in 1970, shortly before and then after the death of Nasser). His successor, Sadat, intensified and extended the rightward turn and integrated the Muslim Brotherhood into his new autocratic system. Mubarak continued along the same path.
The following period of retreat lasted, in its turn, almost another half century. Egypt, submissive to the demands of globalised liberalism and to US strategy, simply ceased to exist as an active factor in regional or global politics. In its region the major US allies – Saudi Arabia and Israel – occupied the foreground. Israel was then able to pursue the course of expanding its colonisation of occupied Palestine with the tacit complicity of Egypt and the Gulf countries.
Under Nasser Egypt had set up an economic and social system that, though subject to criticism, was at least coherent. Nasser wagered on industrialisation as the way out of the colonial international specialisation which was confining the country in the role of cotton exporter. His system maintained a division of incomes that favoured the expanding middle classes without impoverishing the popular masses. Sadat and Mubarak dismantled the Egyptian productive system, putting in its place a completely incoherent system based exclusively on the profitability of firms most of which were mere subcontractors for the imperialist monopolies. Supposed high rates of economic growth, much praised for thirty years by the World Bank, were completely meaningless. Egyptian growth was extremely vulnerable. Moreover, such growth was accompanied by an incredible rise in inequality and by unemployment afflicting the majority of the country’s youth. This was an explosive situation. It exploded.
The apparent ‘stability of the regime’, boasted of by successive US officials like Hillary Clinton, was based on a monstrous police apparatus counting 1,200,000 men (the army numbering a mere 500,000), free to carry out daily acts of criminal abuse. The imperialist powers claimed that this regime was protecting Egypt from the threat of Islamism. This was nothing but a clumsy lie. In reality the regime had perfectly integrated reactionary political Islam (on the Wahhabite model of the Gulf) into its power structure by giving it control of education, the courts and the major media (especially television). The sole permitted public speech was that of the Salafist mosques, allowing the Islamists, to boot, to pretend to make up ‘the opposition’. The cynical duplicity of the US establishment’s speeches (Obama no less than Bush) was perfectly adapted to its aims. The de facto support for political Islam destroyed the capacity of Egyptian society to confront the challenges of the modern world (bringing about a catastrophic decline in education and research), while by occasionally denouncing its ‘abuses’ (like assassinations of Copts) Washington could legitimise its military interventions as actions in its self-styled ‘war against terrorism’. The regime could still appear ‘tolerable’ as long as it had the safety valve provided by mass emigration of poor and middle-class workers to the oil-producing countries. The exhaustion of that system (Asian immigrants replacing those from Arabic countries) brought with it the rebirth of opposition movements. The workers’ strikes in 2007 (the strongest strikes on the African continent in the past 50 years), the stubborn resistance of small farmers threatened with expropriation by agrarian capital, and the formation of democratic protest groups among the middle classes (like the Kefaya and April 6 movements) foretold the inevitable explosion – expected by Egyptians but startling to foreign observers. And thus began a new phase in the tide of emancipation struggles, whose directions and opportunities for development we are now called on to analyse.

The components of the democratic movement

The Egyptian revolution now underway shows that it possible to foresee an end to the neoliberal system, shaken in all its political, economic, and social dimensions. This gigantic movement of the Egyptian people links three active components: youth ‘repoliticised’ by their own will in ‘modern’ forms that they themselves have invented; the forces of the radical left; and the forces of the democratic middle classes. Youth (about one million activists) spearheaded the movement. They were immediately joined by the radical left and the democratic middle classes. The Muslim Brotherhood, whose leaders had called for a boycott of the demonstrations during their first four days (sure, as they were, that the demonstrators would be routed by the repressive apparatus) only accepted the movement belatedly once its appeal, heard by the entire Egyptian people, was producing gigantic mobilisations of 15 million demonstrators.
The youth and the radical left sought in common three objectives: restoration of democracy (ending the police/military regime), the undertaking of a new economic and social policy favourable to the popular masses (breaking with the submission to demands of globalised liberalism), and an independent foreign policy (breaking with the submission to the requirements of US hegemony and the extension of US military control over the whole planet). The democratic revolution for which they call is a democratic social and anti-imperialist revolution. Although the youth movement is diversified in its social composition and in its political and ideological expressions, it places itself as a whole ‘on the left’. Its strong and spontaneous expressions of sympathy with the radical left testify to that.
The middle classes as a whole rally around only the democratic objective, without necessarily objecting thoroughly to the ‘market’ (such as it is) or to Egypt’s international alignment. Not to be neglected is the role of a group of bloggers who take part, consciously or not, in a veritable conspiracy organised by the CIA. Its animators are usually young people from the wealthy classes, extremely ‘Americanised’, who nevertheless present themselves as opponents of the established dictatorships. The theme of democracy, in the version required for its manipulation by Washington, is uppermost in their discourse on the net. That fact makes them active participants in the chain of counter-revolutions, orchestrated by Washington, disguised as ‘democratic revolutions’ on the model of the East European ‘color revolutions’. But it would be wrong to think that this conspiracy is behind the popular revolts. What the CIA is seeking is to reverse the direction of the movement, to distance its activists from their aim of progressive social transformation and to shunt them onto different tracks. The scheme will have a good chance of succeeding if the movement fails to bring together its diverse components, identify common strategic objectives, and invent effective forms of organisation and action. Examples of such failure are well known – look at Indonesia and the Philippines. It is worthy of note that those bloggers – writing in English rather than Arabic(!) – setting out to defend ‘American-style democracy’ in Egypt often present arguments serving to legitimise the Muslim Brotherhood.
The call for demonstrations enunciated by the three active components of the movement was quickly heeded by the whole Egyptian people. Repression, extremely violent during the first days (more than a thousand deaths), did not discourage those youths and their allies (who at no time, unlike in some other places, called on the Western powers for any help). Their courage was decisive in drawing 15 million Egyptians from all the districts of big and small cities, and even villages, into demonstrations of protest lasting days (and sometimes nights) on end. Their overwhelming political victory had as its effect that fear switched sides. Obama and Hillary Clinton discovered that they had to dump Mubarak, whom they had hitherto supported, while the army leaders ended their silence and refused to take over the task of repression – thus protecting their image – and wound up deposing Mubarak and several of his more important henchmen.
The generalisation of the movement among the whole Egyptian people represents in itself a positive challenge. For this people, like any other, are far from making up a homogeneous bloc. Some of its major components are without any doubt a source of strength for the perspective of radicalisation. The 5-million strong working class’s entry into the battle could be decisive. The combative workers, through numerous strikes, have advanced further in constructing the organisations they began in 2007. There are already more than 50 independent unions. The stubborn resistance of small farmers against the expropriations permitted by abolition of the agrarian reform laws (the Muslim Brotherhood cast its votes in parliament in favour of that vicious legislation on the pretext that private property was ‘sacred’ to Islam and that the agrarian reform had been inspired by the Devil, a communist!) is another radicalising factor for the movement. What is more, a vast mass of the poor took active part in the demonstrations of February 2011 and often participate in neighbourhood popular committees ‘in defence of the revolution’. The beards, the veils, the dress styles of these poor folk might give the impression that in its depths Egyptian society is Islamic, even that it is mobilised by the Muslim Brotherhood. In reality, they erupted onto the stage and the leaders of that organisation had no choice but to go along. A race is thus underway: who – the Brotherhood and its (Salafist) Islamist associates or the democratic alliance – will succeed in forming effective alliances with the still-confused masses and even to (a term I reject) ‘get them under discipline’?
Conspicuous progress in constructing the united front of workers and democratic forces is happening in Egypt. In April 2011 five socialist-oriented parties (the Egyptian Socialist Party, the Popular Democratic Alliance – made up of a majority of the membership of the former loyal-left Tagammu party – the Democratic Labour Party, the ‘Trotskyist’ Socialist Revolutionary Party, and the Egyptian Communist Party, which had been a component of Tagammu) established an Alliance of Socialist Forces through which they committed themselves to carry out their struggles in common. In parallel, a National Council (Maglis Watany) was established by all the active political and social forces of the movement (the socialist-oriented parties, the diverse democratic parties, the independent unions, the peasant organisations, the networks of young people and numerous social associations). The council has about 150 members, the Muslim Brotherhood and the right-wing parties refusing to participate and thus reaffirming their well-known opposition to continuation of the revolutionary movement.

Confronting the democratic movement: the reactionary bloc

Just as in past periods of rising struggle, the democratic social and anti-imperialist movement in Egypt is up against a powerful reactionary bloc. This bloc can perhaps be identified in terms of its social composition (its component classes, of course) but it is just as important to define it in terms of its means of political intervention and the ideological discourse serving its politics.
In social terms, the reactionary bloc is led by the Egyptian bourgeoisie taken as a whole. The forms of dependent accumulation operative over the past 40 years brought about the rise of a rich bourgeoisie, the sole beneficiary of the scandalous inequality accompanying the globalised liberal model. They are some tens of thousands, not of ‘innovating entrepreneurs’ as the World Bank likes to call them but of millionaires and billionaires all owing their fortunes to collusion with the political apparatus (corruption being an organic part of their system). This is a comprador bourgeoisie (in the political language current in Egypt the people term them ‘corrupt parasites’). They make up the active support for Egypt’s placement in contemporary imperialist globalisation as an unconditional ally of the United States. Within its ranks this bourgeoisie counts numerous military and police generals, ‘civilians’ with connections to the state and to the dominant National Democratic Party created by Sadat and Mubarak, and religious personalities – the whole leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood and the leading sheikhs of the Al Azhar University are all of them billionaires.
Certainly there still exists a bourgeoisie of active small and medium entrepreneurs. But they are the victims of the racketeering system put in place by the comprador bourgeoisie, usually reduced to the status of subordinate subcontrac...

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