“VICTORY HAS a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”
Those words of Italian diplomat Count Galeazzo Ciano sprang to mind at the nauseating spectacle of Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and the rest claiming if not parenthood, then a least favorite-uncle status to the newborn revolution in Egypt and its older Tunisian twin.
But from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the Persian Gulf, everyone knows that these leaders would have strangled both babes at birth if they could. Having failed in infanticide, they will now seek every means to stunt the child’s growth. The dizzying momentum of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, however, is now ricocheting around the Arab and Middle East region, while at the same time profoundly radicalizing struggles and politics within those two countries.
The revolutionary overthrow of Hosni Mubarak is already world-historic, to deploy an oft-overused term. Together with Tunisia, it has, not yet two months in, marked 2011 as one of those years of revolutionary turmoil we find in the history books.
A revolution, successful in its first phase, has erupted in a critically important country, and onto the world’s television screens every night for two weeks at a time–at a time when global capitalism is in its most profound crisis for three generations and the U.S.-led imperialist state order is losing its coherence. It is a real, popular revolution, not some color-coded counterfeit with its imagery dreamed up by a Wall Street ad agency.
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THE FOCUS of the movement that crescendoed in Egypt over 18 days was the removal of Mubarak. As dictator for three decades, he crystallized the wider discontents in Egyptian society. His regime accelerated the process of opening the economy to the world market, which began in the early 1970s, and away from a state-led model of economic development in alliance with some big business interests.
Over the last decade, neoliberal policies were adopted at breakneck speed. The IMF proclaimed in 2006 that the privatization of two-thirds of state companies and the liberalization of laws on land ownership had “surpassed expectations.” This process, as elsewhere, led to a big concentration of wealth at the top, among some state officials, military and civilian (usually former military), and new layers of businessmen (especially the circle around Mubarak’s son, Gamal). It also brought massive job losses, pressure on wages, longer working hours, and one in ten small farmers driven off the land.
At the same time, the regime followed the logic of subordination to the U.S. and Israel that Mubarak’s predecessor had begun in 1978. These last 10 years have seen an intensification of Israel’s assault on the Palestinians–from the suppression of the Al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000, to the siege and then assault on Gaza two years ago, to the complete refusal to give anything in “negotiations” to a Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas, which was prepared to surrender virtually everything to Israel.
U.S. aggression intensified too, from the Iraq invasion to support for Israel’s war on Lebanon and then to attempting to secure a pro-U.S. regime in Beirut. Mubarak supported it all as outrage around the Arab world, including Egypt, increased.
As the anger grew, so did Mubarak’s reliance on a repressive apparatus–on rigging elections and suppressing political opposition. So the issues of repression, miserable economic conditions (half the population lives on $2 a day) and shame at being led by a regime that pimped the country to U.S. and Israeli interests were all fused in the personality of Mubarak. As activist scholar Adam Hanieh puts it:
Over the last two decades, the linkages between the political and economic configuration of U.S. power in the Middle East have become even more explicit. United States policy has followed a two-pronged track that ties neoliberalism with the normalization of economic and political relations between the Arab world and Israel. The broader goal has been the creation of a single economic zone from Israel to the Gulf states, linked under the dominance of the USA…
The bond between normalization and neoliberalism is powerfully illustrated in the character of [U.S. free trade area agreements], which include as part of their conditions a requirement to lift any boycott or refusal to trade with Israel…These regional processes thus further confirm the impossibility of separating the “economic” and “political” aspects of the current uprisings…
Two-thirds of the Egyptian population is under the age of 30. This means that the vast majority of the Egyptian population has not only spent their entire lives under the rule of Hosni Mubarak; they have also endured a very brutal form of neoliberal capitalism. The demonstrations were a direct result of the naked class power embodied by Mubarak’s rule.