Lineages of Revolt. Adam Hanieh
© 2013 Adam Hanieh
Published in 2013 by
Haymarket Books
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ISBN: 978-1-60846-352-7
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Library of Congress CIP data is available.
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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