Egypt's Class Conflict: Zewail's 4 Point Plan For Cairo
03 February 2011By Juan Cole
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. The channel stopped being
broadcast on Egypt's Nilesat. (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.
Zewail's 4 Point Plan For Egypt
Nobelist in chemistry, Dr. Ahmed Zewail of the
California Institute of Technology, is an
Egyptian-American who has sometimes been mentioned as
a candidate for president of Egypt. He has served as a
science envoy to the Arab world of President Obama.
In an interview on Aljazeera Arabic, Zewail called for
fundamental change in Egypt, not just cosmetic
alterations. He gave as the causes for the current
uprising:
1. Power games among the elite, competition over the
succession to President Hosni Mubarak, lack of
transparency and phony elections.
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.
3. Corruption and constant demands for bribes by
officials.
4. Education: The deterioration of the education
system, which is central to every Egyptian household's
hopes of progress, to a state that does not in any way
reflect Egypt's standing in the world.
(Zewail is right about that. You have poorly paid
professors with 2000 students in the class, and what
learning gets done is often rote, then there are not
enough jobs for the graduates; the state spends its
money on something else, and the best Egyptian minds
have been attracted by the much better salaries and
working conditions in the Oil Gulf or the West.)
Being a chemist, Zewail seems to like sets of four. So
he also put forward four resolutions of the crisis:
1. The Constitution: A constitutional assembly of wise
men should be assembled to draft a new constitution,
based on liberty, human rights, and the orderly
transfer of power
2. the independence of the courts must be guaranteed
3. Free and fair elections must be conducted for the
upper and lower houses of parliament and for the
presidency, overseen by the independent judiciary.
4. Government: A new transitional government of
national unity must be appointed. The military must
intervene to keep order and to protect the nation in
this transitional period.
—
Zewail's suggestions for a transition to an Egypt with
a rule of law and regular, transparent elections show
where the educated middle class would like things to
go. But he needs to specify the precise mechanisms
whereby you get the constitutional assembly and the
government of national unity. In Tunisia, it was the
former speaker of the house become president who took
the lead in fostering a transition, and everyone on
the cabinet resigned from the former ruling party. In
Egypt, it would now be Omar Sulaiman, of military
intelligence, who became president were Mubarak to
step down, and he seems a poor candidate for playing
the role of midwife to Zewail's new institutions. And,
the existing parliament is dominated by the National
Democratic Party of Mubarak, so is likewise unlikely
to take these steps.
Moreover, it is not clear that these procedural, legal
changes would actually have the slightest impact on
poverty or class stratification. In fact, the US,
among the world's most vibrant democracies, has been
spiralling down into epic inequality, with masses of
unemployed and poverty-stricken while the tiny class
of super-rich at the top has seen its wealth
quadruple.
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