Lineages of Revolt

Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East

Adam Hanieh

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781608463527
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While the outcomes of the tumultuous uprisings that continue to transfix the Arab world remain uncertain, the root causes of rebellion persist. Drawing upon extensive empirical research, Lineages of Revolt tracks the major shifts in the region's political economy over recent decades. In this illuminating and original work, Adam Hanieh explores the contours of neoliberal policies, dynamics of class and state formation, imperialism and the nature of regional accumulation, the significance of Palestine and the Gulf Arab states, and the ramifications of the global economic crisis. By mapping the complex and contested nature of capitalism in the Middle East, the book demonstrates that a full understanding of the uprisings needs to go beyond a simple focus on "dictators and democracy."

Chapter 1

Theories and Perspectives

More than two years since the downfall of Tunisia’s president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the cries of al-shaa’b yurid isqat al-nizam—“the people want the downfall of the regime”—continue to reverberate through the streets of every Arab capital. The region has never before witnessed such an all-encompassing, deeply felt, popular revolt. From the Atlantic to the Gulf, millions of people have confronted authoritarian, corrupt, and feckless rulers, whose contempt for their populations has been matched only by the fear of losing a grip on power. These regimes met the explosion of popular rage with characteristic brutality, killing, maiming, and torturing tens of thousands in a desperate attempt to restore the passivity and obsequiousness that autocrats expected of generations past. Concurrently, Western states scrambled to rearrange their domination of the region and identify new mechanisms of stable rule in one of the most strategically significant areas of the world, responding to the uprisings with their standard amalgam of military intervention, promises of financial aid, and constant political intrigue. Despite this growing specter of counterrevolution, the initial hope manifested by the uprisings persists, witnessed most prominently in the ongoing mobilizations in Egypt and Tunisia. It is, moreover, a conjuncture that has inspired millions across the globe. From demonstrations in Gabon, Nigeria, and Djibouti to the Spanish indignados, the Occupy movement, and the dramatic confrontations in Greece, the repertoire of protest tactics and slogans born in the Arab uprisings continues to be generalized, molded, and transformed to fit circumstances and struggles elsewhere. From the vantage point of late 2012 it remains unclear where these revolts will end up—it is certain, however, that the region will never be the same.

Beyond the profound and largely uncharted political implications of these revolts, one of their most enduring ramifications will undoubtedly be the renewed interest they have awakened in the Middle East’s political economy. Questions of political economy were clearly paramount in the minds of the demonstrators themselves, as the widespread slogan aish, hurriyah, ‘adalah ijtima’iyah (“bread, freedom, social justice”) testifies. The popularity of this cry points to the numerous social crises that faced much of the region in the decade preceding the uprisings, a period marked by extremely high levels of unemployment, poverty, rising food prices, and the growing precariousness of daily existence. These intense social problems worsened in the wake of the 2008 global economic collapse, further contributing to the deep malaise and frustration experienced by those living under repressive regimes. As many observers have noted, these are the proximate roots of the uprisings, indisputably confirming that the political and economic spheres remain inseparable and intertwined. They remain central to any assessment of the future trajectories of the region.

Yet much of the discussion around these issues of political economy has been frustratingly superficial. Even in radical accounts of the Middle East, analysis tends to remain overly focused on the surface appearances of poverty and relative measures of inequality rather than engaging with the nature of capitalism as a systemic totality that penetrates every aspect of social life. This is a major weakness in the understanding of the region. The unequal distribution of wealth is not an unfortunate consequence of wrong-headed economic policy or a “conspiracy” of elites but rather a necessary presupposition of capitalist markets themselves. The challenge of mapping the essence of this social system remains largely unfulfilled—tracing the patterns of capital accumulation in the Middle East, the structures of class and state that have arisen around it, and their interconnection with capitalism at the global scale.

This book is intended as a contribution to such an analysis. It by no means purports to provide a comprehensive account of all aspects of the region’s political economy, a detailed narrative of the uprisings, or an in-depth study of every country in the region. Its goal is to trace in broad outline some of the most significant transformations of the Middle East through the lens of Marxist political economy. Its novelty lies in the emphasis on capitalism and class as crucial pivots of analysis, two categories frequently downplayed in standard approaches to the Middle East. It further attempts to take seriously the nature of the region as a region—to trace the changing hierarchies at the regional scale as an integrated unity that shapes social formations at the national level. In this manner, the book hopes to sketch the essential backdrop to the revolts while demonstrating how important political economy is to understanding the Middle East.

Approaching the Middle East

Conventional accounts of political economy in the Middle East tend to adopt a similar methodological approach, which begins, typically, with the basic analytical categories of “state” (al-dawla) and “civil society” (al-mujtama’ al-madani).1 The former is defined as the various political institutions that stand above society and govern a country. The latter is made up of “institutions autonomous from the state which facilitate orderly economic, political and social activity”2 or, in the words of the Iraqi social scientist Abdul Hussein Shaaban, “the civil space that separates the state from society, which is made up of non-governmental and non-inheritable economic, political, social and cultural institutions that form a bond between the individual and the state.”3 All societies are said to be characterized by this basic division, which sees the state confronted by an agglomeration of atomized individuals, organized in a range of “interest groups” with varying degrees of ability to choose their political representatives and make demands on their political leaders. The institutions of civil society organize and express the needs of people in opposition to the state, “enabling individuals to participate in the public space and build bonds of solidarity.” 4 The study of political economy becomes focused upon, as a frequently cited book on the subject explains, “strategies of economic transformation, the state agencies and actors that seek to implement them, and the social actors such as interest groups that react to and are shaped by them.”5

A conspicuous feature of the Middle East, according to both Arabic- and English-language discussions on these issues, is the region’s apparent “resilience of authoritarianism”—the prevalence of states where “leaders are not selected through free and fair elections, and a relatively narrow group of people control the state apparatus and are not held accountable for their decisions by the broader public.”6 While much of the world managed to sweep away dictatorial regimes through the 1990s and 2000s, the Middle East remained largely mired in autocracy and monarchical rule—“the world’s most unfree region,” as the introduction to one prominent study of authoritarianism in the Arab world put it.7 A dizzying array of typologies for this authoritarianism has been put forward, characteristically dividing the region between authoritarian monarchies (the Gulf Arab states, Morocco, Jordan) and authoritarian republics (Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Yemen, Tunisia).8 These authoritarian regimes are typically contrasted with a third category, the so-called democratic exceptions, in which “incumbent executives are able to be removed and replaced.”9 Israel is frequently held up as the archetype of this latter group—with Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, and Iraq (following the 2003 US invasion) also included, each with a varying “degree” of democracy.10

An entire academic industry has developed around attempting to explain the apparent persistence and durability of Middle East authoritarianism. Much of this has been heavily Eurocentric, seeking some kind of intrinsic “obedience to authority” inherent to the “Arab mind.”11 Some authors have focused on the impact of religion, tracing authoritarian rule to the heavy influence of Islam, and the fact that “twentieth-century Muslim political leaders often have styles and use strategies that are very similar to those instituted by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia some 1400 years ago.”12 Similarly, others have examined the source of regime legitimacy in places such as Saudi Arabia, where the “ruler’s personal adherence to religious standards and kinship loyalties” supposedly fit the “political culture” of a society whose reference point is “Islamic theocracy coming from the ablest leaders of a tribe tracing its lineage to the Prophet.”13 Other more modern explanations for authoritarianism have been sought in intra-elite division,14 leaders’ skills at balancing and manipulating different groups in society—so-called statecraft,15 natural resource endowment,16 and the role and attitudes of the military.17 All these approaches share the same core methodological assumption: the key categories for understanding the Middle East—and, indeed, any society—are the state, on one hand, counterposed with civil society, on the other.

This state/civil society dichotomy underlies another frequent (although not unchallenged) assertion made in the literature on the Middle East—that of a two-way, causal link between authoritarianism and the weakness of capitalism.18 According to this perspective, authoritarianism not only means that political and civil rights are weak or absent but also that the heavy hand of state control interferes with the operation of a capitalist economy.19 Individuals are prevented from freely engaging in market activities while state elites benefit from authoritarianism by engaging in “rent-seeking behavior”—using their privileged position to divert economic rents that pass through the state for their own personal enrichment and consolidation of power.20 Authoritarian states seek to dominate and control economic sectors through their position of strength, allocating rents to favored groups in order to keep society in check.21 In the Middle East, as a result, “private property is not secure from the whims of arbitrary rulers . . . [and] many regimes have yet to abandon allocation for alternative strategies of political legitimation, and hence must continue to generate rents that accrue to the state.”22

Within this worldview, the agency of freedom is neatly located in the realm of the market, while tyranny lurks ever-present in the state. The history of the region is thus characteristically recounted as a long-standing struggle between the “authoritarian state” and “economic and political liberalization.” Told from this perspective, the narrative usually begins with the emergence from colonialism in the aftermath of World War II, when various independence movements sought a definitive end to British and French influence in the area. These independence movements were typically led by militaries or other elites, which seized power in the postcolonial period and began an era of “statism” or “Arab socialism.” By the 1980s, however, these authoritarian states would come under severe strain due to the inefficiencies of state-led economic development and the desire of increasingly educated populations for greater economic and political freedom. These pressures for economic liberalization were compounded in the era of globalization by the ethos of “democratization” that swept the globe through the 1990s. There was—as two well-known scholars of the Middle East put it—a “direct correlation between economic performance and the degree of democracy . . . the more open and liberal a polity, the more effective has been its economy in responding to globalization.”23 Authoritarian states that had “waged literal or metaphorical wars against their civil societies and the autonomous capital that is both the cause and product of civil society” might sometimes choose the “right” economic policies, but these were inevitably “dead letters in the absence of implementation capacity, which only a dynamic civil society appears to be able to provide.”24 Capitalism was, in short, best suited to—and a force for—democracy.25

This logic was widely replicated outside of academia through the 1990s and 2000s, forming the core justification for a wide range of so-called democracy promotion programs. Integral to this was the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established in 1983 and funded by the US State Department. NED, in turn, supported other organizations such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI)—linked to the Democratic and Republican parties respectively—and bodies such as the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and the Solidarity Center (affiliated to the AFL-CIO). A host of other private corporations and NGOs were also involved. Through these institutions, the US government focused on programs that twinned the extension of neoliberal policies with the democracy promotion agenda in the global South. As then president George W. Bush noted in 2004, this policy was based around “free elections and free markets.”26 It was a form of democracy understood in the narrow sense of regular electoral competitions, usually waged between different sections of the elite, which largely aimed at providing popularly sanctioned legitimacy for free market economic measures.27 While organizations such as NED, NDI, and IRI were the most visible and explicit face of this policy orientation, all international financial institutions were to employ the same basic argument linking “free markets” and “a vibrant civil society” with the weakening of the authoritarian state.28

In this vein, the response of Western governments and institutions to the revolts of 2011 and 2012 was largely predictable. Instead of viewing the Arab uprisings as protests against the “free market” economic policies long championed by Western institutions in the region, they were framed as essentially political in nature. The problem, according to the Western angle, lay in authoritarianism, which stifled markets, and the popular rage expressed on the streets of the Middle East could thus be understood as pro-capitalist in content. US president Barack Obama noted, for example, in a major policy speech on the Middle East in May 2011, that the region needed “a model in which protectionism gives way to openness, the reins of commerce pass from the few to the many, and the economy generates jobs for the young. America’s support for democracy will therefore be based on ensuring financial stability, promoting reform, and integrating competitive markets with each other and the global economy.”29 Likewise, the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, argued that the revolts in Tunisia occurred because of too much “red tape,” which preven...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Chapter 1. Theories and Perspectives
• Chapter 2. Framing the Region:Imperialism and the Mid
• Chapter 3. Mapping theNeoliberal Experience
• Chapter 4. Capitalism and Agrarian Change in North Africa
• Chapter 5. Class and State in the West Bank: Neoliberalism under Occupation
• Chapter 6. The Regional Scale: Bringing the Gulf Arab States Back In
• Chapter 7. Crisis and Revolution
• Bibliography
• Notes
• About the Author