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Chapter 1

Theories and Perspectives

More than two years since the downfall of Tunisia’s president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the cries of al-shaa’b yurid isqat al-nizam—“the people want the downfall of the regime”—continue to reverberate through the streets of every Arab capital. The region has never before witnessed such an all-encompassing, deeply felt, popular revolt. From the Atlantic to the Gulf, millions of people have confronted authoritarian, corrupt, and feckless rulers, whose contempt for their populations has been matched only by the fear of losing a grip on power. These regimes met the explosion of popular rage with characteristic brutality, killing, maiming, and torturing tens of thousands in a desperate attempt to restore the passivity and obsequiousness that autocrats expected of generations past. Concurrently, Western states scrambled to rearrange their domination of the region and identify new mechanisms of stable rule in one of the most strategically significant areas of the world, responding to the uprisings with their standard amalgam of military intervention, promises of financial aid, and constant political intrigue. Despite this growing specter of counterrevolution, the initial hope manifested by the uprisings persists, witnessed most prominently in the ongoing mobilizations in Egypt and Tunisia. It is, moreover, a conjuncture that has inspired millions across the globe. From demonstrations in Gabon, Nigeria, and Djibouti to the Spanish indignados, the Occupy movement, and the dramatic confrontations in Greece, the repertoire of protest tactics and slogans born in the Arab uprisings continues to be generalized, molded, and transformed to fit circumstances and struggles elsewhere. From the vantage point of late 2012 it remains unclear where these revolts will end up—it is certain, however, that the region will never be the same.

Beyond the profound and largely uncharted political implications of these revolts, one of their most enduring ramifications will undoubtedly be the renewed interest they have awakened in the Middle East’s political economy. Questions of political economy were clearly paramount in the minds of the demonstrators themselves, as the widespread slogan aish, hurriyah, ‘adalah ijtima’iyah (“bread, freedom, social justice”) testifies. The popularity of this cry points to the numerous social crises that faced much of the region in the decade preceding the uprisings, a period marked by extremely high levels of unemployment, poverty, rising food prices, and the growing precariousness of daily existence. These intense social problems worsened in the wake of the 2008 global economic collapse, further contributing to the deep malaise and frustration experienced by those living under repressive regimes. As many observers have noted, these are the proximate roots of the uprisings, indisputably confirming that the political and economic spheres remain inseparable and intertwined. They remain central to any assessment of the future trajectories of the region.

Yet much of the discussion around these issues of political economy has been frustratingly superficial. Even in radical accounts of the Middle East, analysis tends to remain overly focused on the surface appearances of poverty and relative measures of inequality rather than engaging with the nature of capitalism as a systemic totality that penetrates every aspect of social life. This is a major weakness in the understanding of the region. The unequal distribution of wealth is not an unfortunate consequence of wrong-headed economic policy or a “conspiracy” of elites but rather a necessary presupposition of capitalist markets themselves. The challenge of mapping the essence of this social system remains largely unfulfilled—tracing the patterns of capital accumulation in the Middle East, the structures of class and state that have arisen around it, and their interconnection with capitalism at the global scale.

This book is intended as a contribution to such an analysis. It by no means purports to provide a comprehensive account of all aspects of the region’s political economy, a detailed narrative of the uprisings, or an in-depth study of every country in the region. Its goal is to trace in broad outline some of the most significant transformations of the Middle East through the lens of Marxist political economy. Its novelty lies in the emphasis on capitalism and class as crucial pivots of analysis, two categories frequently downplayed in standard approaches to the Middle East. It further attempts to take seriously the nature of the region as a region—to trace the changing hierarchies at the regional scale as an integrated unity that shapes social formations at the national level. In this manner, the book hopes to sketch the essential backdrop to the revolts while demonstrating how important political economy is to understanding the Middle East.

Approaching the Middle East

Conventional accounts of political economy in the Middle East tend to adopt a similar methodological approach, which begins, typically, with the basic analytical categories of “state” (al-dawla) and “civil society” (al-mujtama’ al-madani).1 The former is defined as the various political institutions that stand above society and govern a country. The latter is made up of “institutions autonomous from the state which facilitate orderly economic, political and social activity”2 or, in the words of the Iraqi social scientist Abdul Hussein Shaaban, “the civil space that separates the state from society, which is made up of non-governmental and non-inheritable economic, political, social and cultural institutions that form a bond between the individual and the state.”3 All societies are said to be characterized by this basic division, which sees the state confronted by an agglomeration of atomized individuals, organized in a range of “interest groups” with varying degrees of ability to choose their political representatives and make demands on their political leaders. The institutions of civil society organize and express the needs of people in opposition to the state, “enabling individuals to participate in the public space and build bonds of solidarity.” 4 The study of political economy becomes focused upon, as a frequently cited book on the subject explains, “strategies of economic transformation, the state agencies and actors that seek to implement them, and the social actors such as interest groups that react to and are shaped by them.”5

A conspicuous feature of the Middle East, according to both Arabic- and English-language discussions on these issues, is the region’s apparent “resilience of authoritarianism”—the prevalence of states where “leaders are not selected through free and fair elections, and a relatively narrow group of people control the state apparatus and are not held accountable for their decisions by the broader public.”6 While much of the world managed to sweep away dictatorial regimes through the 1990s and 2000s, the Middle East remained largely mired in autocracy and monarchical rule—“the world’s most unfree region,” as the introduction to one prominent study of authoritarianism in the Arab world put it.7 A dizzying array of typologies for this authoritarianism has been put forward, characteristically dividing the region between authoritarian monarchies (the Gulf Arab states, Morocco, Jordan) and authoritarian republics (Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Yemen, Tunisia).8 These authoritarian regimes are typically contrasted with a third category, the so-called democratic exceptions, in which “incumbent executives are able to be removed and replaced.”9 Israel is frequently held up as the archetype of this latter group—with Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, and Iraq (following the 2003 US invasion) also included, each with a varying “degree” of democracy.10

An entire academic industry has developed around attempting to explain the apparent persistence and durability of Middle East authoritarianism. Much of this has been heavily Eurocentric, seeking some kind of intrinsic “obedience to authority” inherent to the “Arab mind.”11 Some authors have focused on the impact of religion, tracing authoritarian rule to the heavy influence of Islam, and the fact that “twentieth-century Muslim political leaders often have styles and use strategies that are very similar to those instituted by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia some 1400 years ago.”12 Similarly, others have examined the source of regime legitimacy in places such as Saudi Arabia, where the “ruler’s personal adherence to religious standards and kinship loyalties” supposedly fit the “political culture” of a society whose reference point is “Islamic theocracy coming from the ablest leaders of a tribe tracing its lineage to the Prophet.”13 Other more modern explanations for authoritarianism have been sought in intra-elite division,14 leaders’ skills at balancing and manipulating different groups in society—so-called statecraft,15 natural resource endowment,16 and the role and attitudes of the military.17 All these approaches share the same core methodological assumption: the key categories for understanding the Middle East—and, indeed, any society—are the state, on one hand, counterposed with civil society, on the other.

This state/civil society dichotomy underlies another frequent (although not unchallenged) assertion made in the literature on the Middle East—that of a two-way, causal link between authoritarianism and the weakness of capitalism.18 According to this perspective, authoritarianism not only means that political and civil rights are weak or absent but also that the heavy hand of state control interferes with the operation of a capitalist economy.19 Individuals are prevented from freely engaging in market activities while state elites benefit from authoritarianism by engaging in “rent-seeking behavior”—using their privileged position to divert economic rents that pass through the state for their own personal enrichment and consolidation of power.20 Authoritarian states seek to dominate and control economic sectors through their position of strength, allocating rents to favored groups in order to keep society in check.21 In the Middle East, as a result, “private property is not secure from the whims of arbitrary rulers . . . [and] many regimes have yet to abandon allocation for alternative strategies of political legitimation, and hence must continue to generate rents that accrue to the state.”22

Within this worldview, the agency of freedom is neatly located in the realm of the market, while tyranny lurks ever-present in the state. The history of the region is thus characteristically recounted as a long-standing struggle between the “authoritarian state” and “economic and political liberalization.” Told from this perspective, the narrative usually begins with the emergence from colonialism in the aftermath of World War II, when various independence movements sought a definitive end to British and French influence in the area. These independence movements were typically led by militaries or other elites, which seized power in the postcolonial period and began an era of “statism” or “Arab socialism.” By the 1980s, however, these authoritarian states would come under severe strain due to the inefficiencies of state-led economic development and the desire of increasingly educated populations for greater economic and political freedom. These pressures for economic liberalization were compounded in the era of globalization by the ethos of “democratization” that swept the globe through the 1990s. There was—as two well-known scholars of the Middle East put it—a “direct correlation between economic performance and the degree of democracy . . . the more open and liberal a polity, the more effective has been its economy in responding to globalization.”23 Authoritarian states that had “waged literal or metaphorical wars against their civil societies and the autonomous capital that is both the cause and product of civil society” might sometimes choose the “right” economic policies, but these were inevitably “dead letters in the absence of implementation capacity, which only a dynamic civil society appears to be able to provide.”24 Capitalism was, in short, best suited to—and a force for—democracy.25

This logic was widely replicated outside of academia through the 1990s and 2000s, forming the core justification for a wide range of so-called democracy promotion programs. Integral to this was the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established in 1983 and funded by the US State Department. NED, in turn, supported other organizations such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI)—linked to the Democratic and Republican parties respectively—and bodies such as the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and the Solidarity Center (affiliated to the AFL-CIO). A host of other private corporations and NGOs were also involved. Through these institutions, the US government focused on programs that twinned the extension of neoliberal policies with the democracy promotion agenda in the global South. As then president George W. Bush noted in 2004, this policy was based around “free elections and free markets.”26 It was a form of democracy understood in the narrow sense of regular electoral competitions, usually waged between different sections of the elite, which largely aimed at providing popularly sanctioned legitimacy for free market economic measures.27 While organizations such as NED, NDI, and IRI were the most visible and explicit face of this policy orientation, all international financial institutions were to employ the same basic argument linking “free markets” and “a vibrant civil society” with the weakening of the authoritarian state.28

In this vein, the response of Western governments and institutions to the revolts of 2011 and 2012 was largely predictable. Instead of viewing the Arab uprisings as protests against the “free market” economic policies long championed by Western institutions in the region, they were framed as essentially political in nature. The problem, according to the Western angle, lay in authoritarianism, which stifled markets, and the popular rage expressed on the streets of the Middle East could thus be understood as pro-capitalist in content. US president Barack Obama noted, for example, in a major policy speech on the Middle East in May 2011, that the region needed “a model in which protectionism gives way to openness, the reins of commerce pass from the few to the many, and the economy generates jobs for the young. America’s support for democracy will therefore be based on ensuring financial stability, promoting reform, and integrating competitive markets with each other and the global economy.”29 Likewise, the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, argued that the revolts in Tunisia occurred because of too much “red tape,” which prevented people from engaging in capitalist markets.30 This basic argument would be repeated incessantly by Western policy makers throughout 2011 and 2012—autocratic states had stifled economic freedom; “free markets” would be essential to any sustained transition away from authoritarianism.

A Marxist Framework of Class and State

Instead of the state/civil society dichotomy that characterizes these standard approaches, this book adopts a radically different framework for investigating the political economy of the Middle East. Its basic starting point is the notion of class as the key social category from which to comprehend the dynamics of any society, distinct from the catchall notion of civil society (as it is conventionally understood). This focus on class leads to fundamentally contrasting perceptions of the role and nature of the state, the relationship between markets and political democracy, and the assessment of social struggles such as those that spread through the Arab world in 2011 and 2012.

Class, according to the conception developed by Marx, is understood as an expression of the relations that people form between each other around the process of producing society’s needs. This differs from the way it is typically viewed by standard sociological approaches, in which class is seen as a category of income or a group of people who do the same type of work.31 Capitalist society is characterized by the private ownership of the means and products of social production. The essential class division is thus between those who own the means of production (capitalists) and those who have little choice but to sell their capacity to work in order to be able to meet their needs in the marketplace (workers). Capitalists draw their profit from the ability to force workers to produce commodities that can be sold at a greater price than the money spent on production itself.32 Rather than taking private property and private interests as naturally given, Marx emphasized that they are socially determined, “achieved only within the conditions laid down by society and with the means provided by society; hence . . . bound to the reproduction of these conditions and means.”33 Class, in other words, is always a social relation, which is continually being made and remade in an ongoing process of accumulation and contestation.

An emphasis on class does not mean that other divisions do not exist within a given society. Class formation is a process involving real human beings, and this means that the concrete conditions of class always carry specific characteristics—of gender, race, age, national origin, and so forth—that are given particular social meaning through their process of coming into being.34 Approaching class in this manner helps to guard against economistic views that tend to set up class as an abstract category shorn of its particularities. It means, for example, that it makes little sense to speak of class in a concrete sense without also acknowledging that it is simultaneously gendered as it forms. Moreover, in the Middle East context, as well as globally, class formation cannot be understood without tracing movements of people across and within borders—it is thus also marked by distinct and concrete relationships between geographical spaces.35 These processes need to be considered concurrently if a full picture of class formation is to be grasped.

It is also important to acknowledge that there exists a wide variety of labor relations within any capitalist society. In the global South, the working class rarely manifests in the “pure” form that Marx emphasized in Capital, made up of individuals, each of whom “as a free individual can dispose of his labour power as his own commodity” with “no other commodity for sale.”36 In reality, capitalism continues to reproduce and integrate into the process of accumulation various “forms of labor exploitation,”37 including slavery, indentured labor, child labor, sharecropping, dormitory systems for migrant workers, and forms of subcontracting. Workers frequently depend upon non-wage activities in order to reproduce themselves (such as the farming of small plots of land or unpaid family labor). Within both rural and urban spheres, classes are typically stratified according to varying levels of wealth and power. In the Arab world, all of these complexities are crucial to describing the specificities of capitalism and class.

Keeping these subtleties in mind, it is nonetheless accurate to state that conventional accounts of the Middle East generally downplay questions of class, reducing it to just one of many different “interest groups,” such as “business elites.” This is a fundamental flaw in mainstream conceptions of civil society, which, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has pointed out in her seminal analysis of the notion, is a “conceptual portmanteau [that] indiscriminately lumps everything together from households and voluntary associations to the economic system of capitalism.”38 In this manner, the state/civil society dichotomy serves to “conceptualize away the problem of capitalism, by disaggregating society into fragments, with no overarching power structure, no totalizing unity, no systemic coercions—in other words, no capitalist system, with its expansionary drive and its capacity to penetrate every aspect of social life.”39 Academic approaches that present the ideal of liberal democracy as the desired policy goal—supposedly guaranteeing the same rights and responsibilities for all “civil society actors” regardless of wealth, social status, or accident of birth—act to obfuscate this reality of class power. The economic realm is separated from the political sphere. Capitalism itself is rendered invisible through a juridical scrim of “equal rights” that posits equality where none exists.

An emphasis on patterns of class formation leads, furthermore, to a sharply different notion of the state than that employed in conventional frameworks of analysis. According to Marx, the nature of political institutions such as the state is a historically determined social form—or form of appearance—of the class structure that has arisen around capitalist accumulation. The state serves to represent and defend this class structure while mediating conflicts that inevitably arise between (and within) the ruling class and other classes and strata.40 It is, in other words, not a separate sphere of politics that stands apart from the economic sphere but a social relation, or, as Bertell Ollman describes it, “the set of institutional forms through which a ruling class relates to the rest of society.”41 Ollman’s use of “relate” here has a very specific meaning, based upon his reading of what he describes as Marx’s “philosophy of internal relations.” Within this perspective, the relations existing between objects should not be considered external to the objects themselves but as part of what actually constitutes them. Any object under study needs to be seen as “relations, containing in themselves, as integral elements of what they are, those parts with which we tend to see them externally tied.”42 Objects, in other words, are not self-contained; they are constituted through the relations they hold in their stance with the whole. The relationships in which all things are embedded do not exist “outside” these objects (or externally) but are intrinsic to their very nature. Utilizing this approach, analytical emphasis moves away from taking for granted the isolated categories presented to us by the empirical world (such as the authoritarian state) toward an attempt to comprehend reality through the totality of internally related parts.43

From this standpoint, the state is not an independent, separate feature of society, severed from the class structure that generates its character. The relationship the ruling class holds with the state is actually part of what constitutes it as a class; state and class need to be seen as mutually reinforcing and co-constituted, with the latter providing the conditions of existence for the former. An analysis of the state, therefore, must begin with an “examination of the ‘anatomy of bourgeois society,’ that is, an analysis of the specifically capitalist mode of social labour, the appropriation of the surplus product and the resulting laws of reproduction of the whole social formation, which objectively give rise to the particular political form.”44 Seen in this manner, class formation—the ways in which classes coalesce around the production, realization, and appropriation of profit—becomes a central element to understanding social formation and the nature of state power.

The eschewal of this consideration is a major weakness of standard approaches to authoritarianism and the form of the state in the Middle East. By treating the state as a disconnected, all-dominating “thing” rather than as a social relation formed alongside the development of class, these perspectives treat the institutional forms of society as determinant rather than determined.45 In contrast, within the Marxist framework, the secret behind the state’s form is not to be found in contingent factors such as culture, religion, resource endowment, leadership styles, or the institutional arrangements of ruling families but rather in the specific nature of capitalist accumulation in that particular society. The authoritarian guise of the Middle East state is not anomalous and antagonistic to capitalism, but is rather a particular form of appearance of capitalism in the Middle East context. The task becomes one of demonstrating how and why this is the case—not beginning with the appearance of the state and investing it with determinant explanatory power.

In line with this basic methodological approach, a major goal of this book is to convey some of the principal aspects of the intertwined development of class and state in the Middle East—tracing where and how various classes in the region (both capital and labor) originated, what their accumulation is based around, how this has shifted over time, and the ways in which this process of class formation links to the nature and changing attributes of the state. With this perspective in mind, there are three key concepts employed throughout this book that require further elaboration: the internationalization of class and state, imperialism, and neoliberalism.

Internationalization of Class and State

Marx himself famously noted that capitalism always acts to “tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e., to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market . . . [as capital develops] the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market.”46 This observation has been strikingly confirmed in the contemporary world economy, where the production of a typical commodity involves labor and inputs from across the globe. The place where a given commodity is eventually sold is very likely not the same place as where it is produced. The largest capitalist firms consider their production and marketing decisions from the perspective of a global marketplace, not simply from within their own national borders. These processes indicate, as Christian Palloix noted in the 1970s, that the commodity is “conceptualized, produced, and realized at the level of the world market.”47 Palloix termed this fundamental characteristic of global capitalism “the internationalization of capital”—a tendency signaling that capitalism was “a social system driven by the encompassing accumulative imperatives of a world market.”48

Internationalization takes place through a variety of means, including the establishment of joint ventures, the expansion of foreign direct investments (FDIs), the listing of companies on overseas stock markets, and the licensing of brands and agency rights. Moreover, as the geographical scale of accumulation grows, the costs of doing business rise exponentially, generating the need for global financial markets and international banking systems. The development of highly complex global production and marketing chains means dealing with potentially disastrous fluctuations in currencies, interest rates, and other variables. Thus internationalization is also linked to the increasing power of financial instruments, such as derivatives, which enable capitalists to manage the risk associated with fluctuations in value that occur across time and space—and make money by speculating on this risk.49 All these mechanisms, which increasingly set the production and realization of value at the level of the world market, necessarily signify a growing interpenetration of ownership and control of capital.

Internationalization also necessitates a rethinking of the nature of state functions within the contemporary world market. Accumulation is always territorialized—it demands “a certain ‘coherence’ and ‘materialization’ in time and space.”50 This means that internationalizing capital is faced with the challenge of generating the necessary conditions for accumulation in all spaces of the global economy. The traditional functions of the state within a given national territory—disciplining labor, protecting private property rights, ensuring adequate financial conditions, and maintaining contracts, laws, and so forth—are thus increasingly oriented toward the international scale. This does not mean that the state has lost its importance or has been superseded by the global; in fact, the internationalization of capital often means that processes of state formation are strengthened.51 The national state apparatus has become ever more important “for managing its domestic capitalist order in a way that contributes to the managing of the international capitalist order.”52 The internationalization of the state thus develops in tandem with the internationalization of capital.

These tendencies of internationalization raise significant questions around conceptualizing class and state at the national scale. The vast flows of capital and labor across borders means that processes of class and state formation striate national boundaries; for this reason, the nation-state cannot be understood as a self-contained political economy separate from the ways it intertwines with other spatial scales, namely the regional and global. Following Ollman’s notion of “internal relations,” the relationships with these other scales are not external to the social relations existing in any particular country but actually part of what constitutes them. It is thus impossible to understand processes of class formation without tracing the way these cross-scale relations develop and interpenetrate—how these relations become part of the very nature of the nation-state itself. It is necessary, in other words, to be wary of “methodological nationalism”53—a privileging of “national” social relations without acknowledging the ways these relations are actually constituted through their relationships with other spatial scales.

In his pathbreaking account of global labor history, Marcel van der Linden makes a powerful case for the importance of overcoming such methodological nationalist biases. Van der Linden notes that methodological nationalist approaches “consider the nation state as the basic, self-evident analytical unit for historical research … Cross-border or border-subverting processes are perceived as distractions from the ‘pure’ model.”54 While it is clear that “[I]n a global perspective, the existence of nation-states obviously remains an essential aspect of the world system,” Van der Linden argues that the existence of these states need “to be thoroughly historicized and relativized vis-a-vis sub-national, supra-national and trans-national aspects.”55 An important aim of this book is to highlight the saliency of this approach to the Middle East. In a region that is so integral to the way that the world system has developed, state and class formation should be reconceptualized through this multi-scalar lens.

One useful way of thinking about these notions was elaborated by the Greek theorist Nicos Poulantzas during an earlier set of debates regarding the relationship between US and European capital in 1970s Europe.56 Poulantzas argued that internationalization was leading to the growing interiorization of “foreign” capital within the domestic social formation. In other words, in contrast to positions that posited a ceaseless conflict between national and foreign capital, Poulantzas asserted that all capital—regardless of its national origin—was compelled to orient to the global scale and, simultaneously, foreign capital had become internalized as a largely indistinguishable component of the “national bourgeoisie.”57 This did not mean that nation-states had lost their significance, or that there existed a single, transnational capitalist class, but rather that capital needed to be regarded as increasingly existing beyond any locally specific identities.

These debates bear particular significance in the Middle East because, as later chapters will demonstrate, the regional political economy has come to occupy a prime position in national economies over the last two decades. This means that it is necessary to reject the Linnean style of categorization typical of comparative politics, which divides the Middle East into “authoritarian republics” and “authoritarian monarchies” and delineates the differences and similarities of neatly ordered states whose social relations are bounded by national borders and externally related to one another. Most important to this reconsideration of the regional scale is the role of capital from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—a regional integration project bringing together the six oil-producing monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman. A chief premise of this book is that the internationalization of GCC capital has transformed the political economy of the region, becoming internalized in the class structure of neighboring states.

These trends carry far-reaching political connotations. Most significantly, they bring into question one of the favored concepts of much of the Arab nationalist movement (and parts of the Left)—that of the “patriotic bourgeoisie” (ra’s al-maal al-watani), which is viewed as a potential ally against foreign capital. In Egypt, for example, one of the most prominent voices of the uprising, the Nasserist leader Hamdeen Sabahi, has emphasized this notion as an important plank of his political vision. Sabahi’s Arabic-language electoral platform in the 2012 presidential elections (in which he came in third, with 20.72 percent of the vote)58 called for putting “Egypt on the road to comprehensive renaissance, moving from the ranks of the Third World to emerging economic countries, and competing with the strongest economies of the world order.”59 While Sabahi listed a long line of important social-justice goals, including rights to food, housing, health care, education, work, fair pay, comprehensive insurance, and a clean environment, his plan for achieving these goals rested upon—in addition to the state and “cooperative sector”—what he described as “private sector–led national capital.” In this electoral program, he called upon national capital to “play the primary role that is expected of it in the Renaissance project.” He promised, if elected, to support this orientation with “investment incentives . . . and laws against monopoly that would guarantee the ability of national capitalism to achieve its social duty.”60 One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate the weaknesses inherent to this type of strategy. The conjoined internationalization tendencies of state and capital—particularly as they are expressed in a region such as the Middle East—mean that notions of independent development driven by an alleged patriotic spirit of the capitalist class offer little hope of achieving genuine liberation.

Centrality of Imperialism

The concept of internationalization captures the inexorable drive of capital to scour the globe in the search for profitable markets, raw materials, and production sites, bringing ever-larger spheres of human activity into its ambit. As this process plays out, control of capital becomes held in fewer and fewer hands. There is thus a very close connection between the internationalization of capital and its concentration and centralization.61 This relentless drive toward the domination of space is a defining feature of imperialism—the division and control of the world market by a handful of rival companies backed by the largest states. The notion of imperialism captures the tendency of dominant capital to increasingly draw the world market in on itself, forcibly extracting profits from all corners of the globe and thereby actively accentuating the unevenness of the system as a whole, while simultaneously deepening the interdependency of states as a necessary prerequisite for this extraction to take place.62 Imperialism thus consolidates the combined and uneven nature that characterizes the world market in contemporary capitalism—one in which varying temporalities of development are harnessed within the totality of the world market.63

In contrast to many conventional approaches to the Middle East—which tend to treat imperialism as synonymous with colonialism and date its end to the close of World War II—this book highlights imperialism as an essential and ongoing theme in the shaping of the region’s political economy. As later chapters will discuss in some detail, the Middle East differs from other areas of the globe in that its vast supplies of hydrocarbons confer upon it an immensely significant geopolitical weight. For this reason, the major imperialist states—headed by the United States throughout the contemporary postwar period—have placed the highest priority on exercising power over the region and preventing any challengers from gaining a foothold.

There are two foremost aspects to imperialism emphasized throughout this book. The first of these is the dialectic of rivalry and unity of interests that characterizes the relationship between the major imperialist powers. On the one hand, the internationalization of capital has generated heightened levels of competition between the large corporations that dominate the global economy, and this is refracted through increased interstate competition. Consequently, inter-imperialist rivalry remains a salient feature of the world market. On the other hand, the very nature of internationalization demands greater coordination and cooperation between states in order to maintain the required conditions for accumulation as a whole. This is all the more relevant in contexts such as the Middle East, which has been in a constant battle to free itself from imperialist control—a path that, if successful, would have enormous ramifications for the entire capitalist system. For this reason, the importance of controlling the Middle East not only stems from inter-imperialist rivalry—an attempt to command a “potential chokehold on other leading powers”64—but is also driven by a common existential interest on behalf of all imperialist powers in preventing the peoples of the region from determining their own future. These dual tendencies of cooperation and rivalry are vital to understanding the ways that imperialism continues to interact and shape the political economy of the Middle East.

Second, imperialism is too often viewed—even by many theorists on the Left—as solely a question of military or political domination. While this book explores these aspects of imperialism in some detail, it emphasizes the fact that imperialism is primarily a question of exploitation—one that necessitates, and is principally bound up in, forms of economic domination. Much of the analysis of this book is concerned with tracing the projection of economic power in the Middle East by imperialist states—the attempt to integrate the forms of accumulation in the region into global production chains and subordinate local classes to the exigencies of capital in the core countries of the world market. This tendency is linked to the dialectic of rivalry and cooperation noted above, but more generally it has had vital implications for class and state in the Middle East. It means—as later chapters will show—that capitalist class formation in the Middle East has become increasingly tied to the ebbs and flows of accumulation at the global scale. One of the effects of imperialism, in other words, has been to generate a domestic capitalist class internal to the Middle East that is to a great extent aligned with the interests of global (imperialist) capital. This observation further confirms the point made earlier—it makes little sense to speak of a “patriotic bourgeoisie” in the Middle East that is somehow counterposed or in confrontation with international capital and in which hopes for a national project for liberation can be invested.

Neoliberalism

The main period that this book focuses on is the neoliberal phase of capitalism, which had its origins in the global crisis of the 1970s, was consolidated during the mid-1980s, and continues through to the current day.65 Drawing from a range of sources including classical liberalism and Austrian and monetarist economics, neo­liberalism’s policy prescriptions are now familiar across the globe: privatization, cutbacks to social spending, the reduction of barriers to capital flows, and the imposition of market imperatives throughout all spheres of human activity. The Middle East was no exception to the worldwide embrace of these policies by governments and ruling elites—and a major aim of this book is to consider the profound consequences that they continue to hold for class and state in the region.

As later chapters will outline, however, neoliberalism needs to be seen as much more than the familiar litany of economic policies with which it is typically associated. Its essence lies, as David Harvey points out, in an attempt to reconstitute and strengthen class power in the favor of capital.66 Its policies emerged out of the systemic needs of capitalist social reality. Specifically, the turn to neoliberalism reflected the accumulation needs of capital in an era of internationalization, i.e., capital with accumulation spaces increasingly spread across a global level. Its logic came to penetrate all national social formations and was specifically concerned with the ways in which these formations were integrated into global circuits of accumulation. By speeding up the rate at which capital moves across and through national spaces, and widening the spheres of human activities subject to the imperatives of accumulation, neoliberalism aimed to ensure the conditions for capitalist reproduction at a global scale.

The widespread adoption of neoliberal policies was facilitated by the restructuring of the world market that took place during the 1980s and 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the integration of China into the global economy, capitalist social relations spread throughout the world, compelling all states to comply with norms set at the international scale.67 In regions such as the Middle East, this process was closely related to the economic crises of the 1980s and the pressure countries faced to earn foreign exchange revenues in order to service their debt obligations. A range of international institutions drove the technical implementation of neoliberal policies—notably the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—while governments from the United States and Europe pursued bilateral trade and financial agreements with the region.

This book traces the neoliberal transformation of the Middle East over the last two decades. Its focus goes beyond the policies themselves to examine the ways in which neoliberalism has underpinned the modalities of class and state formation. Specifically, the penetration of neoliberalism has been a pivotal force in shaping the production and development of working classes as well as the nature of capitalist class formation around the new internationally connected circuits of accumulation. It has also lent a particular dynamic to the nature of the state apparatus, closely connected to the spread of authoritarian regimes. As always, these processes must be tackled across national, regional, and international scales.

A final core feature of neoliberal ideology—echoed in conventional academic accounts of Middle East development—is the claim to an apparent neutrality and “objectivity” of analysis. A key intention of this book is to unpack these claims and to demonstrate that they not only are false but actually conceal a discursive attempt to defend, maintain, and extend the uneven and exploitative nature of capitalism in the Middle East. Assertions of an ideologically detached or impartial methodology (even, as is often the case, when such assertions are only made implicitly) deny the inherently partisan nature of all attempts to comprehend social reality. In contrast, this book is unequivocally framed as a challenge to the status quo. This partisanship is not a weakness of the analysis but rather a potential source of strength. If it is true that capitalism is the root source of the region’s problems, then confronting this critically and openly provides the best route to capturing the reality of the contemporary Middle East, precisely because it opens up the right kinds of questions and ways of thinking about the problems posed. If it is not true, and the region’s difficulties stem from the antimonies of authoritarianism and the free market, then the analysis will fall. The point is to be explicit about this fact—recognizing that a certain political perspective and standpoint on reality is inevitably embedded in any set of methodological assumptions. There is no claim here to neutrality: the book openly takes sides.

The Structure of the Book

With these initial methodological and theoretical perspectives established, it is now possible to summarize the basic structure of this book. The first point to note is the contested and controversial nature of what constitutes the “Middle East.” Different definitions of this area are used both within and outside the region. The book employs a variety of generally synonymous terms—Middle East, Arab world, and Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—depending on the context.68 Most of the analysis concentrates on the experiences in the Arabic-speaking countries of the region—these have been the focal point of the recent uprisings, show strong similarities in regards to their political economy of development, and are particularly important to understanding the regional scale. Where necessary, references are also made to Israel, Iran, and Turkey, although the nature of class and state formation in these countries is not dealt with in detail due to their distinctive historical and contemporary characteristics. In general, however, while different chapters focus on specific country case studies as appropriate, it is important to emphasize that the book should be read thematically rather than as an exhaustive account of any individual country’s experiences.

Chapter 2 outlines the development of US and European imperialism in the region from the end of World War II through the first decade of the twenty-first century. It examines the strategic pillars of Western rule in the Middle East from the perspective of military, political, and economic power. Emphasis is placed on the use of financial instruments such as debt and foreign aid as well as a range of trade and investment agreements. This process has taken place in confrontation and interaction with indigenous social and political forces in the area, reconstituting patterns of state and class and opening the way to the penetration of neoliberal reform. It has altered the patterns of accumulation internal to the region itself while differentially integrating various zones of the Middle East into the world market.

This global perspective helps to frame the account, in chapters 3 and 4, of the rise and impact of neoliberalism. The first of these chapters outlines some elements of neo­liberal strategy, including privatization, labor market deregulation, liberalization of trade and investment, and changes to financial markets. It focuses in particular on three North African countries—Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt—in addition to Jordan. The emphasis is on the logic that drives neoliberal reform and its ramifications for class development. It also discusses the ways in which neoliberalism has altered the nature of state power in each of these cases. Chapter 4 examines the impact of neoliberalism on agriculture, tracing the ways in which neoliberal reform has linked capital formation across urban and rural spaces while dispossessing people from the land and proletarianizing rural life. Its counterpoint, which is considered empirically, has been the development of large agribusiness conglomerates, linked to international agro-commodity circuits and providing a vital point of accumulation for domestic classes.

The book then turns to two important case studies that are deeply connected to the ways in which the regional political economy has formed through the neoliberal era. Chapter 5 considers these themes in the Palestinian West Bank, examining the ways that Israeli occupation has shaped the development of Palestinian capitalism along highly neoliberal lines. A core argument is that the question of Palestine needs to be viewed through the prism of capitalist development, linked to the nature of imperialism in the Middle East, not solely via a rights-based perspective that focuses on the copious examples of human rights abuse that take place under Israeli control. Chapter 6 concentrates on the extremely significant case of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. It presents an overview of class formation in the Gulf, emphasizing the pivotal position of migrant labor alongside the development of large capitalist conglomerates across the GCC. A major consequence of this has been the internationalization of Gulf capital in the Middle East; this phenomenon is examined empirically through the interpenetration of the Gulf with class formation in the representative example of Egypt.

The book ends with a discussion in chapter 7 of the 2011–2012 uprisings and their implications for further political developments in the region. The background and context are laid out for each of the most prominent revolts—Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria—as well as broad outlines of the Western and regional responses. The aim is to situate these uprisings in the context of the previous chapters. Once again, it is important to emphasize that this book does not present an exhaustive account of the politics and blow-by-blow details of any specific case study—and certainly not a definitive assessment of events that are still unfolding. Rather, it outlines some of the commonalities and specificities of the uprisings, demonstrating that their trajectory can be best understood through the evolution of state and class as mapped throughout this book. Taken as a whole, they indicate that the long-standing social crises facing the Middle East—including the prevalence of authoritarianism, the perpetual economic exclusion, and the marginalization of much of the region’s population—are not a result of too little capitalism but are direct consequences of capitalism itself. These processes of class and state formation constitute the lineages of revolt.