by Stephen Maher
Monthly Review
Not long after Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that Hosni Mubarak would resign his post as President, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flew to Egypt to congratulate the Egyptian people on a job well done. The revolutionaries had accomplished their goal, she said. Everyone could go home and feel proud of their historic achievement and leave the cleaning up to the responsible adults—the United States and the closely allied Egyptian military, which has ruled Egypt since 1952. To prove that there were no hard feelings against the Egyptians for overthrowing one of the closest and most important U.S. allies in the Arab world, the IMF, World Bank, the G8, and the United States itself—the very entities responsible for supporting Mubarak’s thirty-year rule and imposing draconian neoliberal programs on Egypt—have extended as much as $15 billion in aid and credit to Egypt and Tunisia to assist in their transitions to democracy. This generosity begs the question: why are Western governments, and the international financial institutions (IFIs) that are closely linked to them, falling over one another to show their generosity to the revolutionaries and to display their support for progress in the Middle East?
Western ideological systems and establishment propaganda in Egypt have largely reproduced Clinton’s implicit message of “bad” versus “good” capitalism: Mubarak and his gang of “corrupt” associates have been driven out, and now the system’s benevolent equilibrium can be restored by replacing the bad guys with good guys chosen through elections overseen by the U.S.-backed Egyptian army. Accordingly, as recent events make clear, the commitment of IFIs and Western governments to “social justice” comes predicated on continuing the neoliberal transformation of Egyptian society that has been underway for decades. But is the problem the Egyptians face merely a long series of corrupt anomalies, or the system as such? Is a liberal capitalist democracy adequate to meet the demands of the revolution? And is there the potential for something more? Here we cannot avoid the essential question: how does the Egyptian uprising and the new reality it is helping create relate to global capitalism?
The Egyptian revolutionaries are directly confronting the rule of capital, consciously or not. Afraid of the consequences if the movement turns explicitly anti-capitalist, Western governments and IFIs have worked to ensure Egypt remains integrated into the global capitalist system. The “generosity” of the West serves as a means to establish powerful leverage over Egypt’s future. By keeping it indebted, the power to shut off the credit spigot can be used to keep Egypt closely linked to foreign capital and strengthen the rule of the Egyptian Army and allied bourgeoisie in the face of popular upheaval. These measures are being carried out under the veil of an orderly transition from Mubarak’s rule, economic assistance for the poor, and free and fair parliamentary elections. In enacting them, the West and its allies within Egypt are attempting to demobilize the popular uprising and limit the potential of the revolution to reshape Egyptian society.
Egypt’s Neoliberal Transformation
Since the death of nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser thirty years ago, Egypt has embarked on a process of neoliberalization, largely at Western instigation. In bringing Egypt out of colonialism and feudalism, Nasser created an authoritarian and highly centralized economy. After Egypt’s crushing defeat by Israel in 1967, his successor, Anwar Sadat, signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1978 with Washington’s sponsorship, opening the door to Egypt’s inclusion within the U.S. imperial system. U.S. aid to the Egyptian regime grew rapidly, while Sadat commenced a policy of infitah (or openness) that set in motion Egypt’s neoliberal transformation and tied its economy to international capital, a process accelerated by Mubarak after Sadat’s assassination in 1981. When the Egyptian debt crisis of 1982–90 forced it to go to the multinational Paris Club to restructure its debt, the IMF imposed a neoliberal structural adjustment program as a condition for continuing the flow of credit. The IMF conditions forced the government to cut spending on social services, relax price controls, cut subsidies, deregulate and privatize industries, target inflation, and liberalize capital flows. This program would break the powerful Arab Nationalist regional solidarity of the Nasser years and consolidate the power of a ruling class linked to global capital, with whatever disastrous consequences that entailed for the lower classes.
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