David Harvey in Tahrir Square: the dispossessed, the discontented and the Egyptian revolution

Abstract

Starting from the empirical distinction between ‘discontented’ and ‘dispossessed’ created by processes of accumulation by dispossession necessary for neoliberalism to succeed, this paper suggests how the broader historical–geographical framework developed by David Harvey helps us make sense of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The paper focuses on the underlying tension between the ever more frequent encroachments of ‘the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time’ within the political sphere and the persisting relevance of forms of territorial government and governance for the success of capital accumulation itself. This seeming contradiction allows us to account both for the penetration of neoliberalism in Egypt and for the different forms of hybridisation and domestication that accompanied it. It suggests that, by looking at the social consequences of neoliberalism, one can see a sharp class polarisation, with the emergence of both a private capitalist oligarchy and embryonic forms of alliance between the dispossessed and the discontented, which had a central role in the 2011 revolution. This perspective also permits us to go beyond the dominant liberal narrative of the Arab Spring focusing on demands for freedom (horreya) and democracy (dimuqratya), recovering the neglected yet vital dimension of social justice (‘adala igtimaya).

Notes

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2 D Harvey, The Limits to Capital, London: Verso, 2006, p 417.

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4 B Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

5 Harvey, The Limits to Capital, pp 190–203.

6 Harvey, The Limits to Capital.

7 C Lapavitsas et al, Crisis in the Eurozone, London: Verso, 2012.

8 Harvey, The Limits to Capital, pp 431–438.

9 M Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban Regional Process, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

10 Harvey, The Limits to Capital, p xvii.

11 D Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, p 26.

12 Ibid, p 30.

13 G Krippner, ‘The financialization of the American economy’, Socio-Economic Review, 3(2), 2005 pp 173–208; and G Epstein & A Jayadev, ‘The rise of rentier incomes in oecd countries: financialization, central bank policy and labor solidarity’, in G Epstein (ed), Financialization and the World Economy, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005, pp 46–74.

14 D Green, Silent Revolution: The Rise of Market Economics in Latin America, London: Cassell, 1996; R Oza, The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization, London: Routledge, 2006; and G Harrison, Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering, London: Zed Books, 2010.

15 Harvey, The New Imperialism.

16 D Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp 159–165.

17 Harvey, The Limits to Capital, pp 450-1.

18 G Amin, Egypt’s Economic Predicament: A Study in the Interaction of External Pressures, Political Folly, and Social Tension in Egypt, 1960–1990, Leiden: EJ Brill.

19 Respectively, quoted in K Ikram, The Egyptian Economy, 1952–2000: Performance, Policies, Issues, London: Routledge, 2006, p 59; and S Soliman, The Autumn of Dictatorship: Fiscal Crisis and Political Change in Egypt under Mubarak, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011, p 45.

20 G Abdel-Khalek, Stabilization and Adjustment in Egypt: Reform or De-industrialization?, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2001.

21 Amin, Egypt’s Economic Predicament, p 16.

22 A Richards, ‘The political economy of dilatory reform: Egypt in the 1980s’, World Development, 19(12), 1991, pp 1721–730.

23 A Richards & J Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998.

24 Soliman, The Autumn of Dictatorship.

25 B Momani, ‘imf–Egyptian debt negotiations’, Cairo Papers in Social Science, 26(3), Cairo: American University in Cairo, 2005.

26 M Zaki, ‘imf-supported stabilization programs and their critics: evidence from the recent experience of Egypt’, World Development, 29(11), 2001, pp 1867–1883.

27 imf, The Egyptian Stabilization Experience: An Analytical Retrospective, Working Paper WP/97/105, Washington, DC: imf, 1997, p 7.

28 Ibid, p 59.

29 Momani, ‘imf–Egyptian debt negotiations’, p 48.

30 imf, Egypt: Beyond Stabilization, Towards a Dynamic Market Economy, imf Occasional Paper 163, Washington, DC: imf, 1998, p 52.

31 F Richter, ‘Finishing off Law 1991/203 and beyond: the Egyptian privatization programme during 2005’, in F Kohstall (ed), L’Égypte dans l’année 2005, Cairo: cedej, 2006, at http://www.cedej-eg.org/spip.php?article133.

32 Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Report: Egypt, November 2006, London: Economist Intelligence Unit, 2006.

33 World Bank, ‘Program Document for a Proposed Loan in the Amount of US$500 million to the Arab Republic of Egypt for a Third Financial Sector Development Policy Loan’, Report No 53277 – EG, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2010.

34 These include reserve ratios to be held on foreign exchange deposits, reserve balances held at the Central Bank of Egypt (cbe), liquidity ratios on both local and foreign currency balances and capital adequacy ratios brought in line with Basel I agreements, and expected to be Basel II compliant by 2013. Ikram, The Egyptian Economy.

35 Ibid.

36 Abdel-Khalek, Stabilization and Adjustment in Egypt, p 81.

37 E Kienle, A Grand Delusion: Democracy and Economic Reform in Egypt, London: IB Tauris, 2001; Kienle, ‘Domesticating economic liberalization: controlled market-building in contemporary Egypt’, in Kienle (ed), Politics from Above, Politics from Below: The Middle East in the Age of Economic Reform, London: Saqi, 2003, pp 144–156; O Schlumberger, ‘Structural reform, economic order, and development: patrimonial capitalism’, Review of International Political Economy, 15(4), 2008, pp 622–645; T Richter & C Steiner, ‘Politics, economics and tourism development in Egypt: insights into the sectoral transformations of a neo-patrimonial rentier state’, Third World Quarterly, 29(5), 2008, pp 939–959; and U Wurzel, ‘The political economy of authoritarianism in Egypt: insufficient structural reforms, limited outcomes and a lack of new actors’, in L Guazzone & D Pioppi (eds), The Arab State and Neo-liberal Globalization: The Restructuring of State Power in the Middle East, Reading: Ithaca, 2009, pp 97–123.

38 Harvey, The New Imperialism, p 26.

39 I am aware that using ‘national’ in this way entails the risk of conflating the state dimension with the national dimension, thus essentialising a process which is contingent (ie the emergence of the nation-state as a form of territorial organisation). Yet the Egyptian case allows for an exception in this respect, Egypt being one of the few postcolonial states where ‘state’ largely coincides with ‘nation’.

40 Y Sadowski, Political Vegetables? Businessman and Bureaucrat in the Development of Egyptian Agriculture, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991.

41 Soliman, The Autumn of Dictatorship.

42 The number of businessmen in parliament rose from 37 (12%) in 1995 to 77 (17%) in 2000 to 100 (22%) in 2005. Soliman, The Autumn of Dictatorship, pp 145–146.

43 R Bush, Economic Crisis and the Politics of Reform in Egypt, Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1999.

44 The case of Ahmed Ezz is exemplary in this respect, with one single entrepreneur—and incidentally one of the best friends of Gamal Mubarak—capable of ‘building up market leadership out of the blue’ in the steel sector and controlling about 60% of domestic steel production a mere decade after the beginning of the privatisation programme. S Roll, ‘“Finance matters!”: the influence of financial sector reforms on the development of the entrepreneurial elite in Egypt’, Mediterranean Politics, 15(3), 2010, pp 349–370.

45 Ibid.

46 Bush, Economic Crisis and the Politics of Reform in Egypt.

47 The programme aimed to modernise Egyptian industry by providing funding and technical assistance to smes supplying large companies in all sectors. However, large companies acted as intermediaries in the process—signalling small suppliers and channelling state funds towards them—with all the related consequences in terms of lack of transparency and risks of corruption. Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Report: Egypt, November 2005, London: Economist Intelligence Unit, 2005.

48 Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Report: Egypt, December, London: Economist Intelligence Unit, 2010.

49 Roll, ‘“Finance matters!”’.

50 T Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

51 N Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, London: IB Tauris, 1995, p 327.

52 At least as far as the official economy is concerned: when dealing with Egypt, one should never forget the presence of a parallel military economy largely off the book. These ‘military industries engaged in non-military production’, as Hanaa Kheir-el-Din put it, and are thought still to constitute a substantial share of the Egyptian economy, and one which was left virtually untouched by reforms.

53 Roll, ‘“Finance matters!”’.

54 Mitchell, Rule of Experts.

55 imf, The Egyptian Stabilization Experience.

56 According to the Land Center for Human Rights, more than 800 tenants have been killed in land disputes following the full implementation of the new tenancy law, and more than 7000 have been arrested. http://212.12.226.70/indexe.htm.

57 R Bush (ed), Counter-revolution in Egypt’s Countryside: Land and Farmers in the Era of Economic Reform, London: Zed Books, 2002.

58 See the Doing Business Report, at http://www.doingbusiness.org/Reforms.

59 J Beinin, ‘Neo-liberal structural adjustment, political demobilization, and neo-authoritarianism in Egypt’, in Guazzone & Pioppi, The Arab State and Neo-liberal Globalization, pp 19–46.

60 L Binder, In a Moment of Enthusiasm: Political Power and the Second Stratum in Egypt, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

61 R Assaad (ed), The Egyptian Labor Market in an Era of Reform, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002; and Assaad (ed), The Egyptian Labor Market Revisited, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2009.

62 B Rutherford, Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

63 H El-Hamalawy, ‘Egypt’s tax collectors and the fight for independent trade unions’, Socialist Review, December 2008.

64 J Beinin, ‘The Egyptian workers movement in 2007’, in H Aouadji & H Legeay (eds), Chroniques égyptiennes 2007, Cairo: cedej, 2007.

65 M Pripstein Posusney, ‘Egyptian labor struggles in the era of privatization: the moral economy thesis revisited’, in L Linda & M Pripstein Posusney (eds), Privatization and Labor: Responses and Consequences in Global Perspective, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002, pp 43–64.

66 J Beinin & H El-Hamalawy, ‘Egyptian textile workers confront the new economic order’, Middle East Report Online, 25 March 2007, at http://www.merip.org/mero/mero032507.

67 M Ottaway & A Hamzawy, ‘Protest movements and political change in the Arab world’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Policy Outlook, January 2011.

68 M Pripstein Posusney, ‘Globalization and labor protection in oil-poor Arab countries: racing to the bottom?’, Global Social Policy, 3(3), 2003, pp 267–277.

69 D Rosenberg, ‘Food and the Arab Spring’, Middle East Review of International Affairs, Herzliya: Global Research in International Affairs, December 2010, athttp://www.gloria-center.org/2011/10/food-and-the-arab-spring/.

70 E Stein, ‘Revolutionary Egypt: promises and perils’, ideas Special Reports, SR011, London: lse, May 2012, pp 23–27.

71 A Ehteshami & E Murphy, ‘Transformation of the corporatist state in the Middle East’, Third World Quarterly, 17(4), 1996, pp 753–772.