Juan Cole: Egypt’s Class Conflict | Informed Comment
Egypt’s Class Conflict
Posted on 01/30/2011 by Juan
On Sunday morning there was some sign of the Egyptian military taking on some security duties. Soldiers started arresting suspected looters, rounding up 450 of them. The disappearance of the police from the streets had led to a threat of widespread looting is now being redressed by the regular military. Other control methods were on display. The government definitively closed the Aljazeera offices in Cairo and withdrew the journalists’ license to report from there, according to tweets. (Aljazeera had not been able to broadcast directly from Cairo even before this move.) The channel, bases in Qatar, is viewed by President Hosni Mubarak as an attempt to undermine him.
Why has the Egyptian state lost its legitimacy? Max Weber distinguished between power and authority. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, and the Egyptian state still has plenty of those. But Weber defines authority as the likelihood that a command will be obeyed. Leaders who have authority do not have to shoot people. The Mubarak regime has had to shoot over 100 people in the past few days, and wound more. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have ignored Mubarak’s command that they observe night time curfews. He has lost his authority.
Authority is rooted in legitimacy. Leaders are acknowledged because the people agree that there is some legitimate basis for their authority and power. In democratic countries, that legitimacy comes from the ballot box. In Egypt, it derived 1952-1970 from the leading role of the Egyptian military and security forces in freeing Egypt from Western hegemony. That struggle included grappling with Britain to gain control over the Suez Canal (originally built by the Egyptian government and opened in 1869, but bought for a song by the British in 1875 when sharp Western banking practices brought the indebted Egyptian government to the brink of bankruptcy). It also involved fending off aggressive Israeli attempts to occupy the Sinai Peninsula and to assert Israeli interests in the Suez Canal. Revolutionary Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (d. 1970) conducted extensive land reform, breaking up the huge Central America-style haciendas and creating a rural middle class. Leonard Binder argued in the late 1960s that that rural middle class was the backbone of the regime. Abdul Nasser’s state-led industrialization also created a new class of urban contractors who benefited from the building works commissioned by the government.
From 1970, Anwar El Sadat took Egyptian in a new direction, opening up the economy and openly siding with the new multi-millionaire contracting class. It in turn was eager for European and American investment. Tired of the fruitless Arab-Israeli wars, the Egyptian public was largely supportive of Sadat’s 1978 peace deal with Israel, which ended the cycle of wars with that country and opened the way for the building up of the Egyptian tourist industy and Western investment in it, as well as American and European aid. Egypt was moving to the Right.
But whereas Abdel Nasser’s socialist policies had led to a doubling of the average real wage in Egypt 1960-1970, from 1970 to 2000 there was no real development in the country. Part of the problem was demographic. If the population grows 3 percent a year and the economy grows 3 percent a year, the per capita increase is zero. Since about 1850, Egypt and most other Middle Eastern countries have been having a (mysterious) population boom. The ever-increasing population also increasingly crowded into the cities, which typically offer high wages than rural work does, even in the marginal economy (e.g. selling matches). Nearly half the country now lives in cities, and even many villages have become ‘suburbs’ of vast metropolises.
So the rural middle class, while still important, is no longer such a weighty support for the regime. A successful government would need to have the ever-increasing numbers of city people on its side. But there, the Neoliberal policies pressed on Hosni Mubarak by the US since 1981 were unhelpful. Egyptian cities suffer from high unemployment and relatively high inflation. The urban sector has thrown up a few multi-millionaires, but many laborers fell left behind. The enormous number of high school and college graduates produced by the system can seldom find employment suited to their skills, and many cannot get jobs at all. Urban Egypt has rich and poor but only a small “middle class.” The state carefully tries to control labor unions, who could seldom act independently.
The state was thus increasingly seen to be a state for the few. Its old base in the rural middle classes was rapidly declining as young people moved to the cities. It was doing little for the urban working and middle classes. An ostentatious state business class emerged, deeply dependent on government contracts and state good will, and meeting in the fancy tourist hotels. But the masses of high school and college graduates reduced to driving taxis or selling rugs (if they could even get those gigs) were not benefiting from the on-paper growth rates of the past decade.
The military regime in Egypt initially gained popular legitimacy in part by its pluck in facing down France, Britain and Israel in 1956-57 (with Ike Eisenhower’s help). After the Camp David accords, in contrast, Egypt largely sat out the big struggles in the Mideast, and made what has widely been called a separate peace. Egypt’s cooperation in the Israeli blockade of Gaza and its general quiet alliance with the US and Israel angered most young people politically, even as they racked up economic frustrations. Cairo’s behind the scenes help to the US, with Iraq and with torturing suspected al-Qaeda operatives, were well known. Very little is more distasteful to Egyptians than the Iraq War and torture. The Egyptian state went from being broadly based in the 1950s and 1960s to having been captured by a small elite. It went from being a symbol of the striving for dignity and independence after decades of British dominance to being seen as a lap dog of the West.
The failure of the regime to connect with the rapidly growing new urban working and middle classes, and its inability to provide jobs to the masses of college graduates it was creating, set the stage for last week’s events. Educated, white collar people need a rule of law as the framework for their economic activities, and Mubarak’s arbitrary rule is seen as a drag here. While the economy has been growing 5 and 6 percent in the past decade, what government impetus there was to this development remained relatively hidden– unlike its role in the land reform of the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, the income gained from increased trade largely went to a small class of investors. For instance, from 1991 the government sold 150 of 314 state factories it put on the block, but the benefit of the sales went to a narrow sliver of people.
The world economy’s [pdf] setback in 2008-2009 had a direct and horrible effect on Egyptians living on the edge. Many of the poor got hungrier. Then the downturn in petroleum prices and revenues caused many Egyptian guest workers to [pdf] lose their economic cushion. They either could no longer send their accustomed remittances, or they had to come back in humiliation.
The Nasserist state, for all its flaws, gained legitimacy because it was seen as a state for the mass of Egyptians, whether abroad or domestically. The present regime is widely seen in Egypt as a state for the others– for the US, Israel, France and the UK– and as a state for the few– the Neoliberal nouveau riche. Islam plays no role in this analysis because it is not an independent variable. Muslim movements have served to protest the withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities, and to provide services. But they are a symptom, not the cause. All this is why Mubarak’s appointment of military men as vice president and prime minister cannot in and of itself tamp down the crisis. They, as men of the System, do not have more legitimacy than does the president– and perhaps less.
Posted in Egypt | 18 Comments | Print
§ 18 Responses to “Egypt’s Class Conflict”
Juan, Thanks for all your work and perspective on Egypt.
Can you recommend any history books? I’m interested in both the long version (not so much the ancient history, although I don’t know a lot about that either), esp the transition to Islam, and much more detail on post-WWII. Esp the details of the ‘peace’ with Israel. From what I’m picking up on al Jazeera, it sounds like the terms Israel got were completely humiliating toward Egypt.
That would also explain why Abbas gave into everything & still couldn’t get a country out of it. Israel hadn’t humiliated him & the Palestinians enough.
Are these remains of the Cold War ? Did it start with the removal of Mossadegh ?
Thanks. I relie on sources other then TV for my information and appreciate clear intelligent writing. I talk with my clients about world events and I desire to have non inflammatory information to calm fear and avoid the panic that makes people stressed.
Do you think the Egyptian people would accept Omar Suleiman as their transitional president, or is he too closely linked with the regime? Would Mohamed ElBaradei be a possible president, or is he not dynamic enough?
It started before modern medicine and has gone on longer than most
Excellent !!!
as Dr Zewail said and you implied
“2. The economic situation: the masses of the poor have been left behind, the situation of the middle class has actually gone backward, while a small elite at the top benefits from what economic progress there is– because of a marriage of power and capital.”sounds familiar doesn’t it
a description of the whole capitaist world, the US in particular – there will be an explosion in more places than the middle east150 dead according to Al Jazeera. Without in any way wishing to show the Iranian regime in a good light, contrast the coverage of that with the coverage of one dead in similar circumstances in Iran. There are worthy and unworthy victims, as John Pilger explains.
I await the subterfuge and provocation necessary to paint the opposition to Mubarak as some kind of fundamentalist madness that threatens us all. However, Egytians are a bright lot and I imagine they are pretty good at chess.This excellent writing provides much needed sociological, economic and historical context for the events unfolding in Egypt today, and by analogy in other states in the Middle East.
I think this sentence in the last paragraph of “Egypt’s Class Conflict” needs to be highlighted and placed in the first, not the last, paragraph –
“Islam plays no role in this analysis because it is not an independent variable.”
What is happening in Egypt right now is about the foundations of state authority. Is a state’s authority with its people based on “power,” brute force, or is it based on its perceived “legitimacy” in the minds of its citizens? Prof. Cole clearly explains the reasons why and how the legitimate, citizen-acknowledged authority of the Egyptian state disintegrated into government-rule maintained through the barrel of a gun!
I’m sure many Egyptians do consider the Mubarak government to be either a puppet of or a part of a US-Israel-UK axis, which is standard fare for non-Islamist regimes in Middle East. However, Mr. Cole’s “class conflict” description of the roots of this crisis is somewhat seems to be at odds with reality.
It may well be true that the Egyptian public expects the government to guarantee gainful employment to all; they won’t be the only populace to hold that expectation. It is somewhat less clear that Egypt adopted “neoliberal” economic policies, if neoliberal is understood to mean reduced state intervention and greater reliance on market forces. For example Mr. Cole describes recent economic developments this way: “An ostentatious state business class emerged, deeply dependent on government contracts and state good will, and meeting in the fancy tourist hotels. But the masses of high school and college graduates reduced to driving taxis or selling rugs (if they could even get those gigs) were not benefiting from the on-paper growth rates of the past decade.” That kind of rent-seeking activity is certainly not the hallmark of a market-oriented economy. Furthermore, as the ILO study cited Mr. Cole suggests some of the steps needed to generate employment in Egypt such as “the removal of remaining obstacles to investment in general and FDI in particular; providing incentives to investors through availing land and infrastructure” (see p. 36) are standard parts of the neoliberal prescription. It may be the Egypt suffered from lack of neoliberalism rather than too much of it. It may well be that some privatizations involved insider deals and favors, but that is the fault of the mechanism used to conduct the transactions not privatization itself. Whatever the benefits on the economic policies employed by President Nasser, modern socialist societies have proven woefully inadequate at generating robust employment growth as the examples of Cuba and Venezuela show.
In short, instability in Egypt may be a result of a stagnant economy and Mubarak’s government may have mismanaged the economy but there is little evidence there was some utopian socialist alternative.
The disappearance of the police from the streets had led to a threat of widespread looting is now being redressed by the regular military.
Last night a fellow being interviewed in an Al Jazeera studio opined that some of the looting was being done by the police in plain clothes. The implication was that they were being ordered to do this. A few minutes ago on Al Jazeera a fellow on the street claimed that some of the looters arrested were found to have police IDs. I can only wonder whether any of this will prove to be true.
In every country, people (formerly the poor, nowadays the poor and middle-class) wish for a government dedicated to their good rather than to the good of foreigners, the very rich, etc.
Here, in USA, we see the bankers and various other of the very rich getting ridiculously richer — and getting bailed out when they have screwed up — while everyone else is static or worse, and the national debt increasing as if without limit, and still the government (and pols of both major parties) treat our nuttily expensive military-imperium as a “sacred cow” that cannot be touched, cannot be reduced, even as it is seen to do no good whatever.
Americans should be feeling envious of the Egyptians who, if they have nothing else, have at least their pride and their revolution.
Thanks for the refresher course on power, authority, and legitimacy.
I don’t mean to belittle the problem of inequality — it needs to be addressed, and pronto — but Egypt also faces serious resource constraints. Food prices are rising, which are closely related to oil prices. Egypt has food subsidies, but they are made possible based on oil and natural gas exports, and and Egypt’s oil exports are declining. Natural gas exports have been able to close the gap but now natural gas exports have leveled off.
Not all of these problems, obviously, are within Egypt’s power to address — not much they can do about rising wheat prices. But everyone is going to have to address resource constraints due to the inability to increase worldwide oil production since 2005; and likely within a few years, we will have a decline in worldwide oil production. Egypt is a dress rehearsal for, well, the rest of the world.
Gail Tverberg’s comments on Egypt are quite interesting:
Thanks so much for the link to the ILO paper by Samir Radwan, which is excellent.
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Just a thank you for your site and your time and effort in keeping it up to date and informative. I constantly push it on my students (who are less than supportive at times since I teach in one of the reddest of the red states!) and it has done some good in providing at least a spring board for discussions of the role of the media and alternative viewpoints. We are about to begin an entire unit on the region for the post-WWII period and I think this brief analysis contrasting Nasser and Mubarak’s policies will be required reading. Keep up the good work!
As went US-controlled Latin America, so goes the US-controlled Middle East.
Thanks Juan! I’ll be using this post in my introductory sociology class when I introduce Weber’s ideas on power and authority.
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Yep.
Posted: January 30th, 2011 under Uncategorized.
