[News] Revolution and reconstruction in Egypt

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Revolution and reconstruction in Egypt



Horace Campbell

2011-02-17, Issue <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/517>517
<http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70964>http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70964

The task ahead for the Egyptian people may be 
enormous. But the same will, determination and 
sense of collectivism and focus with which they 
triumphed over Mubarak should be drawn upon for 
the reconstruction phase of the revolution,’ writes Horace Campbell.

Today the victory of the peoples of North Africa 
over one of the most repressive police states in 
the world is shifting the balance of power in 
international politics; it is also strengthening 
people’s power against exploitation, sexism, 
domination, police repression and those forms of 
rule that have been associated with neo-liberal 
capitalism. After resisting 18 days of protest 
from millions of Egyptians who want the birth of 
a new Egypt, Hosni Mubarak stepped down from his 
30-year presidency on Friday 11 February. From 
Djibouti, Libya and Yemen, to Bahrain, Iran and 
Algeria, youths are standing up for freedom as 
the ripple effects of the Tunisian and Egyptian 
revolutions act as a school for new revolutionary processes.

As the people of Egypt move to consolidate their 
victory there is a sense of dual power – that of 
the people organised in the streets, and the 
power of the military that took the reins of the 
state in the aftermath of Mubarak’s exit. Though 
they have dissolved the Mubarak puppet parliament 
and suspended the Mubarak-serving constitution, 
these military officers continue to dither on 
crucial issues, such as the lifting of emergency 
powers and the release of political prisoners.

In order to exercise their newly gained freedom 
and express their lack of confidence in military 
government, workers extended their industrial 
actions after strikes broke out in all sections 
of the economy. Even the police who were the 
frontline repressors came out on strike, seeking 
support from a public that they had oppressed a 
few weeks before. There are reports that in some 
enterprises bosses are running away and workers 
have to begin to manage the institutions because 
the bosses have been implicated by their 
collusion with the police state. These actions by 
workers, along with actions by the rural farmers, 
signalled to the military that the exit of 
Mubarak was only a minor step and that the tasks 
of the revolution were not yet accomplished. The 
ultimate task is to end oppression and give dignity to the people.

In my previous articles, I drew attention to the 
issues of self-organisation and self-emancipation 
in this context of the uprising to remove Hosni 
Mubarak from power, and I outlined four 
significant stages that make up the first phase 
of the revolution. The stepping down of Mubarak 
has now paved the way for the second phase of the 
revolution, which is that of reconstruction. In 
the second phase, the challenge is how to deepen 
the victory of the people so that what was won 
politically is not taken away by a transition 
that is built on the ideals of ‘liberal 
democracy,’ where there are no fundamental 
changes in the economic edifice that was built by 
Sadat and consolidated by the clique around 
Mubarak. This is the stage where questions of 
reconstructions are linked to the structural 
transformation of revolutionary societies.

RECONSTRUCTING A DEFORMED SYSTEM

Mubarak could never have accumulated a fortune of 
US$40-70 billion through control over the state 
alone. Such an accumulation is a reflection of 
how the neoliberal-driven global capital 
(financialisation of capitalism) is being played 
out; it reveals that global capital’s junior 
partners in developing societies are not in 
politics or the military alone. They are economic 
agents with links to the military or political 
power. In a sense, the location of where the 
primary accumulation of wealth occurs is shifting 
away from control over the state, to links with 
global capital and access to the state. Thus, 
access to and consolidation of political power 
becomes a way of securing and legitimising global 
capitalist partnerships to cover up looting, 
corruption, greed, and obscene accumulation, 
especially in developing countries.

The above framework is helpful in understanding 
where the focus of the next phase of the struggle 
must be placed, but it is also critical for 
successfully countering what is soon to come from 
the West, as it seeks to engage Egypt in the name 
of democracy in order to shape or prevent any 
emergence of alternative modes of economic 
organisation. It could be recalled that some 
media reported that the people rose up against 
the dictatorship’s refusal to allow more economic 
freedom. We must interrogate the notion of 
economic freedom that these media were referring 
to. There was economic freedom in Egypt in the 
so-called ‘free market’ sense of the word. But 
this freedom defied the deformed ‘trickle-down’ 
economic logic. While the state did use some 
tools to maintain itself as a source of 
accumulation (in a sense competing with global 
capital), we must clearly understand that Egypt’s 
most powerful economic elites had been ‘freeing’ 
up the economy from the state for decades, but 
replaced by the control of the alliance between them and global capital.

It is important to restate the paradox that 
Mubarak’s billions are not just the work of his 
personal corruption. They are a logical outcome 
of the economic structure that has been built for 
Egypt’s economic elite class and financed through 
links with foreign capital. Thus, the more 
challenging task of the reconstruction phase of 
the revolution is how to achieve a structural 
transformation from the neoliberal economic 
framework that strengthened the nexus between 
money, power, and politics. This conceptual 
clarification is necessary so that in the phase 
of reconstruction, Egyptians could move away from 
the kind of economic freedom that enabled local 
and global capitalists to prey on their economy.

RECONSTRUCTION AND CAPITAL CONTROLS VS DEREGULATION

The deregulation and privatisation of Egypt’s 
economy under Mubarak, as it was in many other 
societies, meant that government corporations 
were sold to private capitalists, and that the 
government drastically cut back its regulation of 
capitalist activities to accumulate wealth on the 
back of the working class and at the expense of 
the environment. In Egypt, this privatisation 
ensured that Egyptians owned up to 51 per cent of 
stakes in private corporations. But ‘Egyptians’ 
in this case became Mubarak, his family and their 
elite cronies, who control bank accounts and 
assets worth billions of dollars of Egyptian 
people’s money in various countries, including Switzerland.

However, these local elements did not act alone 
in their corruption and accumulation by 
dispossession. They were backed up by a global 
‘free market’ system of capital flow, championed 
by the global financial institutions like the IMF 
and enabled by the global banking and financial 
sectors. As one commentator opined, ‘[t]here is 
no democracy for its economy. The tyrant here is 
not only Mubarak, but the IMF, the World Bank, 
the Banks, the Bond Markets, the Multi-National Corporations.’

In my view, the Egyptian revolution challenged 
this model, so there should not be a 
reconstitution of this structure or model after Mubarak’s exit.

The outflow of the money meant for education, 
health care, housing, sanitation, and living 
wages is now bringing the question of capital 
control to the fore in the international 
financial system. Egyptian youths have to follow 
this debate in their bid to forge a new course 
for societal reconstruction. This question of 
capital control is one of the realities that make 
structural transformation imperative.

Capital control is one of the policy tools that 
has emerged to strengthen the health of the real 
economy in a society against the stranglehold of 
the global financial sector. The corruption and 
dangers of the neoliberal global finance were 
exposed by the recent financial crisis that 
started in the USA. This structural corruption is 
what we mean when we assert that Mubarak and his 
own corruption cabal are not the only problem – 
an entire global architecture facilitated the 
Mubarak regime’s illicit accumulation and 
financial outflow. This outflow took various 
forms, including bribery, theft, kickbacks, tax 
evasion and other forms of illicit financial 
transactions from the major exporters of oil in 
Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab 
Emirates. Egypt was a regional hub for international capital.

Elsewhere, the debate that there has to be some 
measure of popular and domestic control over 
financial mobility or outflow has arisen out of 
awareness that the global financial oligarchs, 
their proxies and partners-in-corruption thrive 
on a ‘free market’ ideology based on the economic 
disenfranchisement and dehumanisation of the mass of the population.

We know that in today's capitalist crisis, many 
emerging markets and developing nations are using 
capital controls to counter the quantitative 
easing policies of the USA, in order to protect 
the domestic sources of growth of their real 
economies against the financial 
speculation-driven asset bubbles and upward 
pressures on their exchange rates. Of course, we 
can be confident that the West will offer ‘aid 
and support’ for Egypt's next government and 
expect in return that it does not consider such 
alternative policies as capital controls. But for 
the revolution to go beyond removing Mubarak and 
seeking the return of the wealth he accumulated, 
to exploring how to initiate processes of 
structural transformation, one policy litmus test 
for a future government would be whether or not 
it considers the use of capital controls as a 
tool to support the growth and development of 
Egypt's ‘real economy’ for the creation of jobs 
and small business development beyond tourism.

Evidence of the success of countries using the 
capital control policy tools dates back to the 
post 1997 economic reconstruction, when Malaysia 
(unlike Thailand and South Korea) went against 
the IMF, US Treasury, and World Bank policy 
dictates on how to respond to the Asian financial 
crisis. Malaysia was strongly criticised and told 
that foreign investment would never come back to 
its territory. The threats turned out to be 
wrong, as 10 years later the IMF admitted that 
Malaysia’s was a legitimate policy response. In 
recent years, other countries that have adopted a 
variety of capital control measures include Thailand, South Korea, and Brazil.

That said, capital control measure is one thing, 
and releasing the capital for the benefit of the 
mass of the people is another. The constant 
mobilisation and vigilance of the people will be 
required to ensure that the country’s resources 
are used to improve their standards of living.

The Egyptian people must learn from the 
neoliberal capitalist crisis in the West, where 
there continue to be cuts in the provision of 
social services, tight state budgets, and all 
forms of austerity measures, while the corrupt 
financial sector is being propped up in the face 
of the failure of trickle-down economics and the 
free market ideology of deregulation. The 
Egyptian reconstruction process is thus faced 
with the choice of an alternative path that 
prioritises the interests and well-being of the 
people over that of corrupt local, regional and global financial oligarchs.

The dominant one per cent of the Egyptian ruling 
class will manoeuvre to hijack the reconstruction 
process in order to maintain their economic 
stranglehold. They would want to deploy their 
ill-gotten wealth to dominate the discourse on 
elections and the new politics, as well as buy 
access to power or prop up a section of the 
military that could help them maintain their 
privilege. To sustain capitalism in Egypt, 
military forces backed up by Israel and the USA 
will be needed to crush the fledgling revolutionary process.
The challenge of the second phase of the 
revolution is therefore poised between the 
reconstruction of the society for the betterment 
of the quality of lives of the people and the 
reconstruction of capital for a new dominant 
class of elites along with the external forces 
who have supported the dominant one per cent elites of the population.

INFORMATION AND THE OPENING OF THE FILES OF MUBARAK

‘Now we open all the files,’ said George Ishak, 
head of the National Association for Change (one 
of the networks of networks organizing in 
differing spheres of this unfolding revolution). 
‘We will research everything, all of them: the 
families of the ministers, the family of the president, everyone.’

There are now calls for the repatriation of the 
wealth stolen by the ruling clique as the 
Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions call on 
progressives everywhere to pressure the UN to 
give meaning to the question of asset recovery. 
For the past decade, the international capitalist 
forces have paid lip service to the question of 
asset recovery. But as the stories of the wealth 
of the Mubarak clique is compared to the debt of 
Egypt, there is no question whether Egypt can use 
US$70 billion for reconstruction projects that 
will serve the needs of all Egyptians. This is a 
major issue that some international capitalists 
may want to avoid as they focus solely on 
constitution and elections. The United Nations 
Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) was 
supposed to be the most comprehensive global 
legal framework for combating corruption, but 
Western banking and media circles ensure that 
this UN convention is not in the popular consciousness.

The top echelons of the Egyptian military, who 
were ensnared in the top tiers of the Mubarak 
police state, will work hard for a situation 
where the rich will prevail. As Robert Fisk 
pointed out, the generals are concerned about 
‘the size of the archives left behind by the 
regime and the degree to which the authorities, 
especially the lawyers and ‘the reformed 
judiciary’ will be drawn into the information 
freedom so that the full corruption will be 
exposed.’ Information freedom must be an integral 
part of Egypt’s reconstruction.

The archives of information on the theft 
challenge the young revolutionaries to build on 
the power of the control over news and 
information to prolong the exposure of local and 
international forces that looted Egypt.

Mohammed Bamyeh captured the essence of the 
political earthquake that shook the foundations 
of corruption, greed, exploitation with links 
between money, power, and politics. According to him:

‘Like in the Tunisian Revolution, in Egypt the 
rebellion erupted as a sort of a collective moral 
earthquake­where the central demands were very 
basic, and clustered around the respect for the 
citizen, dignity, and the natural right to 
participate in the making of the system that 
ruled over the person. If those same principles 
had been expressed in religious language before, 
now they were expressed as is and without any 
mystification or need for divine authority to 
justify them. I saw the significance of this 
transformation when even Muslim Brotherhood 
participants chanted at some point with everyone 
else for a ‘civic’ (madaniyya) state­explicitly 
distinguished from two other possible 
alternatives: religious (diniyya) or military (askariyya) state.’

The call for a civic state was also a call to 
bring back democracy at the economic level, in 
order to end the figment of a democratic society 
where state property could become private 
property protected by a police state, with a 
media designated to pacify and dumb down the 
population. Foreign correspondents of all the 
major international networks descended onto 
Cairo, Alexandria and other cities. When the 
brutality that had been reserved for the poor 
rained down on these international journalists, 
even the conservative columnists and newscasters 
from the West had to expose the brutality of neoliberalism.

Spin and infotainment as diversions for the youth 
failed. This was most graphically exposed as 
citizens all around the world were tuned into the 
popular revolution in Egypt, and Egyptian state 
television brought out a sport programme on 
Thursday night after Mubarak had given his speech 
of defiance. Youths should now put into proper 
context the reasons why English Premier League 
football is the principal form of entertainment 
on television in Africa and the Middle East.

Two days after Thursday 10 February, media 
employees began to say that they themselves were 
stifled and that they wanted to report on the 
democratic struggles in the streets. These 
personnel in the state media will be called on to 
prove their commitment to democracy as the 
revolutionary moment called for the expansion of 
information on the theft of wealth from the 
society. This democratisation of information 
could reveal whether Egypt was one of the 
principal money laundering centres for North Africa and the Middle East.

DESTABILISING THE SPIN DOCTORS OF THE TERRORISM INDUSTRY

Egypt was one of the centres of psychological 
warfare and disinformation by the US military 
along with their allies in the Israeli military. 
Private military contractors had been deployed to 
drive home the divisions on religious grounds and 
to spread confusion among the ranks of the poor. 
But the speed of the unfolding revolution ensured 
that the public information business cannot keep up.

 From the news reports, the victory of the people 
is being called a military victory or, in some 
quarters, a military coup. In the most 
conservative sections of Western Europe there is 
an effort to mobilise Islamophobia, with a focus 
on the Muslim Brotherhood. Even this is failing 
as the revolutionary fervour spreads to all 
societies, with the popular rebellion in Bahrain 
destabilising the US military command so that the 
chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to 
be deployed to the region. As the people of 
Bahrain rise up more and more, <http://bit.ly/eeNkah>one reporter writes:

‘The tiny oil-producing state just off the east 
coast of Saudi Arabia is home to the U.S. Navy’s 
Fifth Fleet, headquarters for a U.S. Marine Corps 
amphibious unit and a crucial base for U.S. Air 
Force jet fighter interceptors and spy planes. 
Bahrain gives Washington a base in the very heart 
of the Gulf from which it can protect and monitor 
the movement of 40% of the world’s oil through 
the Strait of Hormuz, spy on Iran and support 
pro-Western Gulf States from potential threats.’

The spread of the revolution to the oil producing 
societies of the Middle East and North Africa 
brings back the centrality of Egypt in the 
regional strategy of empire. All of the ruling 
classes of the oil rich states were integrated 
into the torture practices and police state 
structure of Egypt, and their financial 
transactions internationally were interconnected 
to the private equity firms of the Mubarak one 
per cent dictatorship. If and when Bahrain 
implodes to the point where the 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Fifth_Fleet>Fifth 
Fleet can no longer prop up the dictators and 
sheikhs, would there be outright war from the US 
military against the revolutionary forces?

It is the history of wars to crush revolutions 
that must be part of the focus of peace and 
social justice networks all around the world, so 
that the phase of reconstruction is not hijacked 
by counter-revolutionary violence. Mohammed 
Bamyeh observed correctly that ‘the transition to 
a new order would be engineered by existing 
forces within the regime and organized 
opposition, since the millions in the streets had 
no single force that could represent them.’

Our concern is how to strengthen the popular 
power in the streets in order to dismantle the 
structures of repression and exploitation of the 
police state, so that the strengths of the 
networks of networks inside Egypt are reinforced 
by networks of peace and justice internationally.

KEEPING OPEN THE ROAD TO TAHRIR SQUARE

 From the dawn of history, the persistent 
struggles of a oppressed but resilient people or 
nation have always had tremendous impact on 
humanity, sometimes speeding up the process of 
social change. In the last three centuries there 
have been major historical changes in certain 
parts of the world that have created this impact. 
The most significant of these historical changes 
include the Haitian and French Revolutions of 
1789/1791; the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the 
Chinese Revolution of 1949; the victory of 
Vietnamese over the technologically superior 
American occupation forces in 1975; and the 
victory of the peoples of Africa over the forces of colonialism and apartheid.

The Egyptian revolution is equally an event of 
historical proportion. We hope the people can 
learn from the positive and negative lessons of 
the previous revolutionary openings. It is the 
same information revolution that has schooled the 
youths to understand that after the massive 
sacrifices of the anti-apartheid struggles in 
South Africa, international capitalism worked 
very hard to build a new class of capitalists to 
maintain the social structures of apartheid without its racial manifestations.

The optimism and inspiration generated by the 
Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions have been given 
concrete meaning by the information revolution 
that placed the initiative in the hands of the 
revolutionary forces. The confidence of the 
revolutionary forces remains high as they point 
to the fact that they brought down Mubarak. In 
the words of Abdel Rahman Yousef, a prominent 
figure in the National Association for Change, ‘I 
am optimistic [because] the people know the road 
to Tahrir Square now and they can go back if they 
do not get what they are asking for.’

The awareness of the people of the road to 
rebellion must be buttressed by the popular 
education on the logic of global capital that 
supported and maintained the ruling clique for 
the past 40 years. They must transform this 
system which extracts wealth out of Egypt, 
leaving the elites to capture the largest 
percentages kept in the country, while the rest 
of society battle for the crumbs whether as a 
state employee linked to tourism or part of the informal economy.

The Egyptian people must strengthen the 
committees that they built to defeat Mubarak, and 
use these committees as a template for people’s 
power behind reconstruction. They must seriously 
engage the military so that there is an exposure 
of the top one per cent of the top military 
officers who are themselves complicit in the 
drain of resources from the society. The 
resulting split in the army will have to be 
managed by the sophistication of the 
revolutionary forces that managed the campaign to remove Mubarak.

They must reconstitute democratic participation. 
This democracy would include political and 
economic democracy; cultural/religious democracy, 
and information democracy. They must always 
remember that their revolution serves as an 
inspiration to other revolutions. Whatever 
measure they take for reconstruction would go a 
long way to not only influencing other 
revolutions but impacting reconstruction in the 
process. So far, the popular democratic explosion 
has shaken not only Egypt but all of the Middle 
East and Africa and the destabilisation of the 
one per cent in Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, 
and Nigeria along with their external handlers 
will rapidly accelerate the global 
anti-capitalist struggles. The task ahead for the 
Egyptian people may be enormous. But the same 
will, determination, and sense of collectivism 
and focus with which they triumphed over Mubarak 
should be drawn upon for the reconstruction phase of the revolution.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Horace Campbell is a teacher and writer. 
Professor Campbell's website is 
<http://www.horacecampbell.net>www.horacecampbell.net. 
His latest book is 
'<http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745330068&>Barack 
Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary 
Moment in the USA', published by Pluto Press.
* Please send comments to 
<mailto:editor at pambazuka.org>editor at pambazuka.org 
or comment online at <http://www.pambazuka.org/>Pambazuka News.




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