- Introduction
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- Most accounts of the Arab revolts from Egypt, Tunisia,
Libya, Morocco, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, Iraq and elsewhere have focused
on the most immediate causes: political dictatorships, unemployment, repression
and the wounding and killing of protestors. They have given most attention
to the "middle class", young, educated activists, their communication
via the internet, (Los Angeles Times, Feb. 16, 2011) and, in the case of
Israel and its Zionists conspiracy theorists, "the hidden hand"
of Islamic extremists (Daily Alert Feb. 25, 2011).
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- What is lacking is any attempt to provide a framework
for the revolt which takes account of the large scale, long and medium
term socio-economic structures as well as the immediate 'detonators' of
political action. The scope and depth of the popular uprisings, as well
as the diverse political and social forces which have entered into the
conflicts, preclude any explanations which look at one dimension of the
struggles.
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- The best approach involves a 'funnel framework' in which,
at the wide end (the long-term, large-scale structures), stands the nature
of the economic, class and political system; the middle-term is defined
by the dynamic cumulative effects of these structures on changes in political,
social and economic relations; the short-term causes, which precipitate
the socio-political-psychological responses, or social consciousness leading
to political action.
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- The Nature of the Arab Economies
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- With the exception of Jordan, most of the Arab economies
where the revolts are taking place are based on 'rents' from oil, gas,
minerals and tourism, which provide most of the export earnings and state
revenues(Financial Times, Feb. 22, 2011, p. 14). These economic sectors
are, in effect, export enclaves employing a tiny fraction of the labor
force and define a highly specialized economy (World Bank Annual Report
2009). These export sectors do not have links to a diversified productive
domestic economy: oil is exported and finished manufactured goods as well
as financial and high tech services are all imported and controlled by
foreign multi-nationals and ex-pats linked to the ruling class (Economic
and Political Weekly, Feb. 12, 2011, p. 11). Tourism reinforces 'rental'
income, as the sector, which provides 'foreign exchange' and tax revenues
to the class clan state. The latter relies on state-subsidized foreign
capital and local politically connected 'real estate' developers for investment
and imported foreign construction laborers.
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- Rent-based income may generate great wealth, especially
as energy prices soar, but the funds accrue to a class of "rentiers"
who have no vocation or inclination for deepening and extending the process
of economic development and innovation. The rentiers "specialize"
in financial speculation, overseas investments via private equity firms,
extravagant consumption of high-end luxury goods and billion-dollar and
billion-euro secret private accounts in overseas banks.
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- The rentier economy provides few jobs in modern productive
activity; the high end is controlled by extended family-clan members and
foreign financial corporations via ex-pat experts; technical and low-end
employment is taken up by contract foreign labor, at income levels and
working conditions below what the skilled local labor force is willing
to accept.
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- The enclave rentier economy results in a clan-based
ruling class which 'confounds' public and private ownership: what's 'state'
is actually absolutist monarchs and their extended families at the top
and their client tribal leader, political entourage and technocrats in
the middle.
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- These are "closed ruling classes". Entry
is confined to select members of the clan or family dynasties and a small
number of "entrepreneurial" individuals who might accumulate
wealth servicing the ruling clan-class. The 'inner circle' lives off of
rental income, secures payoffs from partnerships in real estate where they
provide no skills, but only official permits, land grants, import licenses
and tax holidays.
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- Beyond pillaging the public treasury, the ruling clan-class
promotes 'free trade', i.e. importing cheap finished products, thus undermining
any indigenous domestic start-ups in the 'productive' manufacturing, agricultural
or technical sector.
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- As a result there is no entrepreneurial national capitalist
or 'middle class'. What passes for a middle class are largely public sector
employees (teachers, health professionals, functionaries, firemen, police
officials, military officers) who depend on their salaries, which, in turn,
depend on their subservience to absolutist power. They have no chance
of advancing to the higher echelons or of opening economic opportunities
for their educated offspring.
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- The concentration of economic, social and political
power in a closed clan-class controlled system leads to an enormous concentration
of wealth. Given the social distance between rulers and ruled, the wealth
generated by high commodity prices produces a highly distorted image of
per-capital "wealth"; adding billionaires and millionaires on
top of a mass of low-income and underemployed youth provides a deceptively
high average income (Washington Blog, 2/24/11).
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- Rentier Rule: By Arms and Handouts
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- To compensate for these great disparities in society
and to protect the position of the parasitical rentier ruling class, the
latter pursues alliances with, multi-billion dollar arms corporations,
and military protection from the dominant (USA) imperial power. The rulers
engage in "neo-colonization by invitation", offering land for
military bases and airfields, ports for naval operations, collusion in
financing proxy mercenaries against anti-imperial adversaries and submission
to Zionist hegemony in the region (despite occasional inconsequential criticisms).
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- In the middle term, rule by force is complemented by
paternalistic handouts to the rural poor and tribal clans; food subsidies
for the urban poor; and dead-end make-work employment for the educated
unemployed (Financial Times, 2/25/11, p. 1). Both costly arms purchases
and paternalistic subsidies reflect the lack of any capacity for productive
investments. Billions are spent on arms rather than diversifying the economy.
Hundreds of millions are spent on one-shot paternalistic handouts, rather
than long-term investments generating productive employment.
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- The 'glue' holding this system together is the combination
of modern pillage of public wealth and natural energy resources and the
use of traditional clan and neo-colonial recruits and mercenary contractors
to control and repress the population. US modern armaments are at the
service of anachronistic absolutist monarchies and dictatorships, based
on the principles of 18th century dynastic rule.
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- The introduction and extension of the most up-to-date
communication systems and ultra-modern architecture shopping centers cater
to an elite strata of luxury consumers and provides a stark contrast to
the vast majority of unemployed educated youth, excluded from the top and
pressured from below by low-paid overseas contract workers.
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- Neo-Liberal Destabilization
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- The rentier class-clans are pressured by the international
financial institutions and local bankers to 'reform' their economies: 'open'
the domestic market and public enterprises to foreign investors and reduce
deficits resulting from the global crises by introducing neo-liberal reforms
(Economic and Political Weekly, 2/12/11, p. 11).
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- As a result of "economic reforms" food subsidies
for the poor have been lowered or eliminated and state employment has been
reduced, closing off one of the few opportunities for educated youth.
Taxes on consumers and salaried/wage workers are increased while the real
estate developers, financial speculators and importers receive tax exonerations.
De-regulation has exacerbated massive corruption, not only among the rentier
ruling class-clan, but also by their immediate business entourage.
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- The paternalistic 'bonds' tying the lower and middle
class to the ruling class have been eroded by foreign-induced neo-liberal
"reforms", which combine 'modern' foreign exploitation with the
existing "traditional" forms of domestic private pillage. The
class-clan regimes no longer can rely on the clan, tribal, clerical and
clientelistic loyalties to isolate urban trade unions, student, small business
and low paid public sector movements.
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- The Street against the Palace
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- The 'immediate causes' of the Arab revolts are centered
in the huge demographic-class contradictions of the clan-class ruled rentier
economy. The ruling oligarchy rules over a mass of unemployed and underemployed
young workers; the latter involves between 50% to 65% of the population
under 25 years of age (Washington Blog, 2/24/11). The dynamic "modern"
rentier economy does not incorporate the newly educated young into modern
employment; it relegates them into the low-paid unprotected "informal
economy" of the street as venders, transport and contract workers
and in personal services. The ultra- modern oil, gas, real estate, tourism
and shopping-mall sectors are dependent on the political and military support
of backward traditional clerical, tribal and clan leaders, who are subsidized
but never 'incorporated' into the sphere of modern production. The modern
urban industrial working class with small, independent trade unions is
banned. Middle class civic associations are either under state control
or confined to petitioning the absolutist state.
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- The 'underdevelopment' of social organizations, linked
to social classes engaged in modern productive activity, means that the
pivot of social and political action is the street. Unemployed and underemployed
part-time youth engaged in the informal sector are found in the plazas,
at kiosks, cafes, street corner society, and markets, moving around and
about and outside the centers of absolutist administrative power. The
urban mass does not occupy strategic positions in the economic system;
but it is available for mass mobilizations capable of paralyzing the streets
and plazas through which goods and services are transported out and profits
are realized. Equally important, mass movements launched by the unemployed
youth provide an opportunity for oppressed professionals, public sector
employees, small business people and the self-employed to engage in protests
without being subject to reprisals at their place of employment dispelling
the "fear factor" of losing one's job.
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- The political and social confrontation revolves around
the opposite poles: clientelistic oligarchies and de clasé masses
(the Arab Street). The former depends directly on the state (military/police
apparatus) and the latter on amorphous local, informal, face-to-face improvised
organizations. The exception is the minority of university students who
move via the internet. Organized industrial trade unions come into the
struggle late and largely focus on sectoral economic demands, with some
exceptions - especially in public enterprises, controlled by cronies of
the oligarchs, where workers demand changes in management.
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- As a result of the social particularities of the rentier
states, the uprisings do not take the form of class struggles between wage
labor and industrial capitalists. They emerge as mass political revolts
against the oligarchical state. Street-based social movements demonstrate
their capacity to delegitimize state authority, paralyze the economy, and
can lead up to the ousting of the ruling autocrats. But it is the nature
of mass street movements to fill the squares with relative ease, but also
to be dispersed when the symbols of oppression are ousted. Street-based
movements lack the organization and leadership to project, let alone impose
a new political or social order. Their power is found in their ability
to pressure existing elites and institutions, not to replace the state
and economy. Hence the surprising ease with which the US, Israeli and
EU backed Egyptian military were able to seize power and protect the entire
rentier state and economic structure while sustaining their ties with their
imperial mentors.
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- Converging Conditions and the "Demonstration Effect"
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- The spread of the Arab revolts across North Africa,
the Middle East and Gulf States is, in the first instance, a product of
similar historical and social conditions: rentier states ruled by family-clan
oligarchs dependent on "rents" from capital intensive oil and
energy exports, which confine the vast majority of youth to marginal informal
'street-based' economic activities.
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- The "power of example" or the "demonstration
effect" can only be understood by recognizing the same socio-political
conditions in each country. Street power mass urban movements
presumes the street as the economic locus of the principal actors and the
takeover of the plazas as the place to exert political power and project
social demands. No doubt the partial successes in Egypt and Tunisia did
detonate the movements elsewhere. But they did so only in countries with
the same historical legacy, the same social polarities between rentier
clan rulers and marginal street labor and especially where the rulers
were deeply integrated and subordinated to imperial economic and military
networks.
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- Conclusion
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- Rentier rulers govern via their ties to the US and EU
military and financial institutions. They modernize their affluent enclaves
and marginalize recently educated youth, who are confined to low paid jobs,
especially in the insecure informal sector, centered in the streets of
the capital cities. Neo-liberal privatizations, reductions in public subsidies
(for food, unemployment subsidies, cooking oil, gas, transport, health,
and education) shattered the paternalistic ties through which the rulers
contained the discontent of the young and poor, as well as clerical elites
and tribal chiefs. The confluence of classes and masses, modern and traditional,
was a direct result of a process of neo-liberalization from above and exclusion
from below. The neo-liberal "reformers" promise that the 'market'
would substitute well-paying jobs for the loss of state paternalistic subsidies
was false. The neo-liberal polices reinforced the concentration of wealth
while weakening state controls over the masses.
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- The world capitalist economic crises led Europe and
the US to tighten their immigration controls, eliminating one of the escape
valves of the regimes the massive flight of unemployed educated youth
seeking jobs abroad. Out-migration was no longer an option; the choices
narrowed to struggle or suffer. Studies show that those who emigrate tend
to be the most ambitious, better educated (within their class) and greatest
risk takers. Now, confined to their home country, with few illusions of
overseas opportunities, they are forced to struggle for individual mobility
at home through collective social and political action.
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- Equally important among the political youth, is the
fact that the US, as guarantor of the rentier regimes, is seen as a declining
imperial power: challenged economically in the world market by China;
facing defeat as an occupying colonial ruler in Iraq and Afghanistan; and
humiliated as a subservient and mendacious servant of an increasingly discredited
Israel via its Zionist agents in the Obama regime and Congress. All of
these elements of US imperial decay and discredit, encourage the pro-democracy
movements to move forward against the US clients and lessen their fears
that the US military would intervene and face a third military front.
The mass movements view their oligarchies as "third tier" regimes:
rentier states under US hegemony, which, in turn, is under Israeli
Zionist tutelage. With 130 countries in the UN General Assembly and the
entire Security Council, minus the US, condemning Israeli colonial expansion;
with Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia and the forthcoming new regimes in Yemen and
Bahrain promising democratic foreign policies, the mass movements realize
that all of Israel's modern arms and 680,000 soldiers are of no avail in
the face of its total diplomatic isolation, its loss of regional rentier
clients, and the utter discredit of its bombastic militarist rulers and
their Zionist agents in the US diplomatic corps (Financial Times 2/24/11,
p. 7).
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- The very socio-economic structures and political conditions
which detonated the pro-democracy mass movements, the unemployed and underemployed
youth organized from "the street", now present the greatest challenge:
can the amorphous and diverse mass becomes an organized social and political
force which can take state power, democratize the regime and, at the same
time, create a new productive economy to provide stable well- paying employment,
so far lacking in the rentier economy? The political outcome to date is
indeterminate: democrats and socialists compete with clerical, monarchist,
and neoliberal forces bankrolled by the U.S.
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- It is premature to celebrate a popular democratic revolution.
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