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From Spain to Egypt: Lessons from an ‘Unfinished’ Transition
| Content Provider | Scilit |
|---|---|
| Copyright Year | 2014 |
| Description | Book Name: Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring |
| Abstract | The new global cycle of protest stands in direct connection with the global economic crisis. The profound structural crisis of capitalism is the concretion of a ‘single crisis of financialised capitalism’ (Aglietta 2012: 15) that responds to the highly unstable dynamics related to the financial deregulation and internationalization of capital initiated in the 1970s. The transformation, and weakening, of the social and redistributive role of the states contributed to the growing dependency on international capital and the changing of its functions in the global economy. This turned them into ‘competition state[s] … centrally aligned towards ensuring the optimal conditions for the valorisation of capital’ (Hirsch 2002). The particular accumulation regime was characterized by dynamics of expansion of corporate power related to the tendencies of ‘financialisation’, global outsourcing of production and delocalization. All of this brought together an even bigger competitive pressure on labour rents worldwide through a particular international division of labour, lowering the social, economic and environmental regulative standards, and progressively dismantling the contention barriers to the forces of capital. While the crisis of over-accumulation and profit is the underlying motor of aggressive neoliberal politics, the disintegration of broad layers of society is the actual consequence. While this process was, or is, happening much slowly in the global North, it is affecting the global South with much more celerity and violence. The expressions of unrest of the Arab Spring seem to be ‘inextricably tied to broaderquestions of capitalism in the Middle East’ (Hanieh 2011). In the particular case of Egypt, this occurs as wholesale privatisation since the 1970s (‘infitah’) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment plans in 1990-1991. These plans, and an agrarian reform to re-establish a landowner caste, made the economy highlydependent on foreign investments and capital, and also considerably dependent on exports to the European Union. The consequence was the subjugation and domination of the population through debt. The economic impact in Egypt was that ‘year-on-year growth rates of merchandise exports to the EU dropped from 33 per cent in 2008 to 15 per cent by July 2009’ (World Bank, cited in Hanieh 2011). ‘Bread, freedom and social justice’ was the dignified outcry for the urgent improvement of living conditions. In the case of Egypt, labour movement unrest preceded the rupture point that the incidents of 25 January implied. In Egypt, ‘between 2004-10 … 3,000 labour actions took’ place, centred mostly in the ‘textile and clothing sectors’ but also expanding to other sectors (Maher 2011); during the ‘2007 world food crisis … massive bread riots’ also took place (Maher 2011), as well as movements in solidarity with Palestine and Iraq, for the independence of the judiciary in 2006, and so on (Beinin 2013). Thus, labour movements played an important role in the expansion of social conflict and in the latter overwhelming force of the uprisings. Alliances generated between these and urban youth sectors and other sectors of society were also crucial. All of this contributed to the spontaneous collective assumption of protagonist conditions and later the entrance of the masses into the political scene. |
| Related Links | https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9781315763026-67&type=chapterpdf |
| Ending Page | 636 |
| Page Count | 12 |
| Starting Page | 625 |
| DOI | 10.4324/9781315763026-67 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited |
| Publisher Date | 2014-12-17 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Book Name: Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring Cultural Studies Functions Society Crisis Optimal Capital Unrest Expansion Economy |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Chapter |
