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<h2><b>Revolution and reconstruction in Egypt<br><br>
</b></h2><h4><b>Horace Campbell<br><br>
2011-02-17, Issue
<a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/517">517<br>
</a><a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70964">
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/70964</a></b></h4><font size=3>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
RECONSTRUCTING A DEFORMED SYSTEM<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
RECONSTRUCTION AND CAPITAL CONTROLS VS DEREGULATION<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.’<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br>
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. <br><br>
INFORMATION AND THE OPENING OF THE FILES OF MUBARAK<br><br>
‘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.’ <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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:<br><br>
‘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.’<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
DESTABILISING THE SPIN DOCTORS OF THE TERRORISM INDUSTRY<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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,
<a href="http://bit.ly/eeNkah">one reporter writes</a>:<br><br>
‘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.’ <br><br>
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
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Fifth_Fleet">Fifth
Fleet</a> can no longer prop up the dictators and sheikhs, would there be
outright war from the US military against the revolutionary
forces?<br><br>
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.’<br><br>
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.<br><br>
KEEPING OPEN THE ROAD TO TAHRIR SQUARE<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.’<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS<br><br>
* Horace Campbell is a teacher and writer. Professor Campbell's website
is <a href="http://www.horacecampbell.net">www.horacecampbell.net</a>.
His latest book is
'<a href="http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745330068&">
Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the
USA</a>', published by Pluto Press.<br>
* Please send comments to
<a href="mailto:editor@pambazuka.org">editor@pambazuka.org</a> or comment
online at <a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/">Pambazuka
News</a>.<br><br>
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