The events of the last weeks are one of those historical moments where the lessons of many decades can be telescoped into a few brief moments and seemingly minor occurrences can take on immense significance.<\/p>\n
The entry of millions of Egyptians onto the political stage has graphically illuminated the real processes that underlie the politics of the Middle East. It has laid bare the long-standing complicity of the U.S. and other world powers with the worst possible regimes, revealed the empty and hypocritical rhetoric of United States President Barack Obama and other leaders, exposed the craven capitulation of all the Arab regimes, and demonstrated the real alliances between these regimes, Israel and the USA. These are political lessons that will long be remembered.<\/p>\n
The uprisings have also shown the remarkable fragility of the nepotistic regimes across the Arab world. These regimes depended upon their networks of secret police (mukhabarat) and thugs (baltajiya), and inculcated a seemingly unassailable pessimism about the possibility of change that was reflected in the biting sarcasm of Arab political humour. But these mechanisms of control simply evaporated as people shed their fear. The Arabic word intifada conveys this sense of shaking off, and the sight of millions of people losing their fear and gaining a sense of the possible will long remain one of the most enduring memories of this revolutionary moment. The historic significance of this process should not be lost \u2013 there has quite literally never been a moment of such potential in the Arab world.<\/p>\n
The purpose of this article is not to recount the story of these uprisings or to attempt to predict the possible future scenarios of Egypt\u2019s revolutionary process. Rather, it aims to draw out some of the broader implications for the Middle East as a whole, and to argue that these struggles are best understood through the lens of class struggle. These recent uprisings show decisively that class remains the key dynamic to understanding any social transformation and, simultaneously, that the ways in which \u2018class struggle\u2019 is expressed will take a variety of forms that constantly disrupts any reductionist economistic readings.<\/p>\n
What this means is that we need to think of \u2018politics\u2019 and \u2018economics\u2019 \u2013 which we are accustomed to conceive of as separate spheres \u2013 as fused and part of the same struggle. To claim that the Egyptian demonstrators are primarily concerned with Hosni Mubarak and so-called \u2018political freedoms\u2019 \u2013 which has been the dominant narrative of U.S. and other world leaders and much of the corporate media coverage \u2013 is to distort and misread the nature of these protests. Clearly the protests have encompassed a wide variety of social layers with different demands, but their overall logic is inextricably tied to broader questions of capitalism in the Middle East. These questions include: (1) The global economic crisis and the nature of neoliberalism in Egypt, and (2) Egypt\u2019s role in sustaining patterns of U.S. domination in the Middle East. These questions are neither solely \u2018political\u2019 nor \u2018economic\u2019 but revolve primarily around which class rules Egypt and in whose interest the Egyptian state functions. The nature of Mubarak\u2019s rule cannot be separated from these questions, which is why the struggle against political despotism is inevitably inter-twined with the dynamic of class struggle. It is through this multifaceted understanding of class that these uprisings are best understood.<\/p>\n
Thousands of workers from several oil and gas companies are on strike, protesting in front of the Ministry of Petroleum, in Nasr City.<\/p>\n
The first illustration of the class character of these popular uprisings is their link to the chain of protests that have erupted over the last three years in the wake of the global economic crisis. This is the Arab world\u2019s response to that crisis and powerfully confounds the dominant narrative \u2013 unfortunately repeated by some radical economists \u2013 that the economic crisis was largely confined to the advanced capitalist core and that somehow the so-called \u2018emerging markets\u2019 had escaped the worst effects. Decades of neoliberalism have tied the Egyptian economy into the capitalist world market in a very uneven fashion and, as a consequence, the crisis was to have a devastating impact on the majority of the country\u2019s population.<\/p>\n
There have been a variety of mechanisms through which this transmission of crisis has taken place. First, the Middle East (and particularly the North Africa region) is highly dependent upon exports to Europe and these have fallen precipitously due to the drop in demand that followed economic contraction. World Bank figures show that Egypt\u2019s year-on-year growth rates of merchandise exports to the EU dropped from 33% in 2008 to -15% by July 2009.[1]<\/sup><\/a>World Bank, Global Economic Prospects: Crisis, Finance and Growth (Washington: World Bank), p.142.<\/span><\/span>