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Why did the Egyptian Middle ClassMarch to Tahrir Square?Hazem Kandil aa Department of Sociology , University of California Los Angeles(UCLA)Published online: 18 Jul 2012.

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Why did the Egyptian Middle ClassMarch to Tahrir Square?

HAZEM KANDILDepartment of Sociology, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)

ABSTRACT Building on the extensive literature on relations between the state and socialclasses, this article examines the reasons leading important sectors of the middle class torevolt against Egypt’s Mubarak regime. The role of the middle class in the Egyptian uprisingis both crucial and somewhat paradoxical. It is crucial because it was the middle class thatoverwhelmingly mobilized against Mubarak, with workers and peasants remaining, at leastinitially, on the sidelines. It is also paradoxical because the Mubarak regime had courtedthe middle class for a long time and the latter did benefit from its privileged relations with theregime. However, the neo-liberal reforms undertaken more recently undermined many of thematerial and political achievements of the middle class, favouring instead a new class oftycoon capitalists linked to the regime. This created extensive dissatisfaction within themiddle class, which seized on the opportunity provided by the circumstances of the ArabSpring to demand political change.

Introduction

Revolution theorists agree that economic hardship alone does not drive the masses to

revolt. And only the most hopelessly idealistic believe that a popular uprising could

accomplish anything tangible if the army was willing and capable of repressing it.

The Egyptian revolt of January 2011 was no exception. It could neither be wholly

attributed to the economic deprivation of the great majority of Egyptians, nor

could it have succeeded if it had been met with overwhelming military force.

Having discussed elsewhere why the military acted with such restraint during the

preliminary stages of the revolt (Kandil, 2011, 2012),1 here I turn to the motivation

of the participants in this decidedly middle-class uprising. Why was the middle class

at the forefront of the demonstrations while the peasants remained conspicuously

absent, while the workers hesitated, while the slum dwellers watched from the

sidelines, and while one half of the upper class defended the regime fiercely and the

other half had their jet engines running?2 Perhaps more importantly, why would

1362-9395 Print/1743-9418 Online/12/020197-19 q 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2012.694044

Correspondence Address: Hazem Kandil, Department of Sociology, University of California Los Angeles

(UCLA), 264 Haines Hall, 375 Portola Place, Los Angeles 90095-1551, USA. Email: hkandil@ucla.edu

Mediterranean Politics,Vol. 17, No. 2, 197–215, July 2012

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a class which had for decades been courted by the regime end up demanding its

overthrow?

Even more interesting theoretically, why would a class that is supposed to remain

docile in modern industrial societies revolt at all? Though writing at the heels of the

most spectacular bourgeois revolution in Europe, Alexander De Tocqueville still

insisted that the middle class is essentially composed of ‘isolated individuals

preoccupied with the well-being of themselves, their families, and immediate

friends . . . Their passions are involved in making money, and hence do not usually

become political, let alone revolutionary’ (quoted in Richter, 1967: 110). So how did

the Egyptian middle class transcend (at least momentarily) its narrow-minded

individualism and obsession with stability, which normally inclines it towards

gradual reform, lest it be overthrown by a radical lower class? Why did it lose faith

in a society where the economy was liberalizing, where the margin of free speech

was relatively wide and where political reforms, though agonizingly slow and

revocable, were not entirely lacking?

Advocates of the democratization paradigm preached that socio-economic

development places opposition parties and civil society groups in a position to

pressure (inherently unsustainable) authoritarian regimes to mend their ways and

move toward democracy. Sceptics, by contrast, insisted that neo-liberal reforms

guarantee the loyalty of a hopeful middle class, and thus help produce an upgraded

and more resilient authoritarianism (Heydemann, 2007). Neither of those schools,

however, predicted that the economic policies of the regime might erode its social

basis and provoke unintended reactions from the very beneficiaries of these reforms

(a notable exception is Cavatorta & Haugbølle, 2011). This is because few nowadays

treat social classes with sufficient analytical rigour, although, as Michael Mann

(2012: 111) stressed, whether or not it is considered fashionable ‘class always

matters’, and its recent neglect by social scientists is simply ‘indefensible’.

This article aims to contribute to our theoretical understanding of the

revolutionary potential of the middle class in economically open and politically

closed regimes – what many neo-liberals consider ‘good enough liberals’. By

tracing the long and complicated relationship between the regime and the middle

class in Egypt, this study shows how the political elite shaped and reshaped the

middle class repeatedly to sustain authoritarianism, and how this process allowed

the uppermost crust of this class to encroach on the seat of political power and upset

the established social balance, driving the rest of the middle class into the streets to

deliver the final blow. In other words, this article does not attempt to explain how the

Egyptian regime was decapitated (rather than overthrown), but to understand why

the middle class, with its mildly reformist temperament and long-standing role as

a bulwark of the regime, sparked such a massive revolt. More generally, what

happens to patronage-based regimes and rentier states once patronage networks

become overstretched and the financial resources needed to sustain them inevitably

diminish? After briefly surveying the prevalent views on the nature of the middle

class and its relationship with the state, historical institutional analysis is utilized

to highlight how this relationship unfolded in Egypt between the July 1952 coup

and the January 2011 revolt.

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‘The Embarrassment of the Middle Class’: A Theoretical Review

The middle class has always been a problematic social category. We have certainly

come a long way from the traditional Marxist reduction of the middle class into the

exploiting bourgeoisie, with everyone else (other than labourers, landlords, peasants

and intellectuals) lumped together into the residual category of the petite

bourgeoisie. We have also learned from analysing specific historical situations that

the bourgeoisie itself is divided into competing fragments depending on the type of

activity it conducts, and that many of these fragments are riven by significant

individual antagonisms. Still, Erik Olin Wright (1989: 6–7) argues that post-World

War II societies present Marxism with what he refers to as the ‘embarrassment of the

middle class’, a dilemma posed by the fact that the ‘concrete class structures of

contemporary advanced capitalist societies look anything but polarized’. The

growth of bureaucracies, civil society organizations and large economic enterprises

produced countless numbers of managers, administrators, bankers, stockholders,

teachers, professionals and others who accumulate wealth in return for ‘cultural

capital’, in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1996: 273) words, rather than economic capital. The

hope of most members of this irrepressibly expanding class rests on a system of

social mobility that allows them to improve their fortune over time.

If we move away from the advanced economies of the West to the postcolonial

world, we notice an even sharper upsurge in the size of the middle class following

the modernizing coups, which offered their emancipated populations free education

and a chance to serve in rapidly growing bureaucracies and public projects.

Moreover, the political influence of this state-nurtured middle class was immense

due to the relative weakness of industrialists in colonized economies. The socio-

economic failures of many postcolonial regimes, however, turned this aspiring

middle class fragment into what Asef Bayat (2011) terms ‘the middle class poor’:

a social group harbouring middle-class aspirations by virtue of its white-collar

education and modern outlook, but whose income is steadily diminishing. This all

leads to the conclusion that the middle class had become much broader, more diluted

and impoverished than traditional definitions of the bourgeoisie suggest.

Yet this should not be an invitation to abandon the relational aspect of the Marxist

approach, which centres on the objective conflict of interests in society. The key

element we need to retain in our analytical toolbox is ‘exploitation’. Wright (1989:

8–10) explains that contemporary societies involve ‘complicated combinations of

different kinds of exploitation relations, and this generates a particularly complex

map of corresponding class relations . . . [with many class fragments becoming]

simultaneously exploiters and exploited along different dimensions of exploitation

relations’ (emphasis original). He also extends the concept of exploitation from the

narrow confines of economic exploitation to any type of objective relation where

one social group benefits at the expense of another. Particularly important, for our

purposes, is political exploitation of the middle class at the hands of the ruling elite.

This brings us to the even more problematic issue of determining the relationship

between the state and the dominant social class. Conceptualizing this relationship

has initially followed two opposing logics. One school of thought divests the state

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of any autonomy, and considers it a passive instrument in the hand of the dominant

class. The other school conceives the state as an autonomous institution that

exercises full control over society. Both approaches regard the state as an

independent entity that enters into an external relation with various social classes,

one of either submission or subjugation. More nuanced readings highlight the

interdependence between the economically dominant class, which is ‘politically

helpless and unable not only to lead its nation but even to take care of its particular

class interests’ (Schumpeter, 1942: 137), and the state, which is ‘nothing more

than the organization of social forces that have a political significance’ (Mosca,

1939: 158). It is only normal, according to this view, for the political and economic

elite to be integrated into a coherent power structure that serves them both

(Domhoff, 1990: 21). Later formulations granted the increasingly powerful state

more and more autonomy. Goran Therborn (1982: 243) held that sometimes the state

could act against the wishes of economic magnates, even though he still maintains

that these actions ultimately further the dominant mode of production. Nicos

Poulantzas (1978: 155–7) championed the view of ‘relative autonomy’, whereby

state officials could clash with the economic elite to preserve their political

hegemony. Theda Skocpol (1985: 9) went further by advocating that state rulers

could formulate and pursue their own agendas regardless of the interests of the

influential social classes.

In order not to get held up in this debate regarding who pulls the strings in

modern societies, we should try to qualify some of the above suppositions. Instead of

discussing the role of a reified ‘state’, we could focus on the ruling bloc, and, among

those, we could further distinguish between members of various state institutions.

For, according to Mann (1993: 55), the state is most usefully analysed as a

‘differentiated set of institutions and personnel’. Also, Poulantzas (1978: 127)

reminds us that every state branch or group of officials could constitute the power-

base of a favoured social faction. This focused approach helps us realize, for

example, that among ruling institutions, the military is particularly given to

defending its corporate interests, whether in conjunction with or in opposition to the

capitalist elite. This is because of officers’ ‘marked superiority in organization . . .

highly emotionalized symbolic status, and . . . monopoly of arms’ (Finer, 1962: 6).

Military men perceive themselves as the custodians of the state’s national interest,

and are therefore extremely sensitive to being manipulated by ‘moneymakers’

(Mills, 2000: 222).

Another qualifier is temporal. One should be mindful of the difference between

times of stability and those of crisis. In a stable environment, state decisions usually

reflect the interplay of various social forces. But during crises, members of the ruling

clique tend to take matters into their own hands. Fred Block (1987: 67) notes that

war, revolution, economic depression and other momentous episodes cause a

‘dramatic increase in the state’s role’. In times like these, the political leadership

exerts its utmost effort to prevent its dislocation by hitherto subordinated groups.

Crises therefore ‘precipitate the formulation of official strategies and policies by

elites or administrators who otherwise might not mobilize their own potentials for

autonomous action . . . [in an attempt to reinforce the] authority, political longevity,

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and social control of the state organizations’ (Skocpol, 1985: 14–15). It is in the

course of these power struggles that state policies could generate new relations of

production or curtail existing ones. This is why Mann (1993: 52) suggests that states

are governed, for the most part, by the ‘autonomous logic of definite political

institutions, arisen in the course of previous power struggles and . . . constraining

present struggles’.

If we combine these institutional and contextual qualifiers, we can see that the

coup-installed regimes of the postcolonial world tend to be particularly autonomous.

The ruling bloc is composed of officers who seize power using military support

and remain dependent on it for quite some time. They also perceive their coming to

power as a clear break from conventional politics, and constantly justify this rupture

by reference to a seemingly perpetual state of emergency. Their ‘revolution from

above’, which aims to create a strong, independent and modern state, requires the

total submission of all social groups, including the economically dominant class.

And in the course of this extended state-formation process, several unintended

consequences arise.

But although these regimes usually succeed in subduing all economic agendas to

their grand political vision, they still need to ally themselves with one or more social

classes in order to consolidate their hold over society and create a loyal support base.

In postcolonial societies, their choice is limited. Traditional landowners are usually

co-opted by the colonial master to tame the peasants, and keep the raw material

flowing to the imperial centre. Rich industrialists and their workers are held in check

by the distrustful colonial authority, lest the country becomes too economically

independent or politically radical. Coup makers thus find themselves driven toward

the lower sections of the middle class. That is not to claim that they carry out the

coup on their behalf, for in those settings the middle class is too rudimentary to

prompt a military takeover. But it is precisely this embryonic status that allows the

new rulers to incorporate the middle class into their political orbit, and reinvent it

continuously to fit political imperatives and demands. Expectedly, changing

political contingencies splinter the middle class, since different fragments prove

useful in various circumstances. And as the new regime produces more and more

fragments, it becomes no longer capable of satisfying them all. Those who fall out of

favour gradually move toward opposition, thus narrowing the regime’s social basis.

In the end, only the tiny fragment linked directly to the political apparatus remains

loyal, while the majority of the middle-class fragments become rebellious after the

state rescinds its longstanding promises to them. Revolt, in this case, seems

inevitable. As Antonio Gramsci (1971: 210) wrote almost a century ago, the ‘crisis

of the ruling class’s hegemony’ occurs when ‘huge masses have passed suddenly

from the state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands

which taken together . . . add up to a revolution’.

Invented and Unleashed: The Story of Egypt’s Middle Class

Now that we have considered various theoretical approaches to the relationship

between the state and social classes, let us analyse the concrete historical situation,

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which crystallized over time through the intercourse and struggle of Egypt’s

political leadership and the various middle-class segments it nurtured between 1952

and 2011. Such a detailed historical analysis is decreed by the fact that the origins

and trajectory of each of the fragments that participated in the uprising were

different. Exclusive focus on the Mubarak era provides an incomplete and certainly

distorted picture of the motivations of those who took to the street on the morning of

25 January 2011.

Dragged in Chains: The Middle Class under Nasser

The 1950s saw Egypt’s aspiring capitalists in an unenviable position. The traditional

elite remained politically dominant, as evidenced by the fact that landowners

constituted 63 per cent of the last parliament elected in 1950 before the coup, with

capitalists tailing behind with 14 per cent (Helal et al., 1986: 243). Moreover, the

landed class not only resisted land reform or the commercialization of agriculture,

but it also squandered its revenues on imported luxuries, thus hurting domestic

production and demand (Abdel-Malek, 1968: 39). A modernizing coup that would

industrialize the economy was certainly in the interest of capitalism, and its

likelihood increased with the infusion of middle-class elements (mainly the sons of

professionals and middling landowners) into the army after the 1936 Anglo-

Egyptian Treaty. Nonetheless, Egyptian capitalists, similar to their counterparts on

the eve of the French and Russian revolutions, expressed only lukewarm support for

an extra-legal takeover of power. They believed there was still time for reform. The

working class was too small and fragmented to warrant concern and peasant revolts

were rare and ineffectual (Al-Bishri, 2002: 282–4). So while some capitalists

welcomed the Free Officers cautiously, none of them had a role in either prompting

the July 1952 coup or influencing its early policies.

The first far-reaching economic policy adopted by Gamal Abd al-Nasser and his

colleagues was the Agricultural Reform Law, on 9 September 1952. The law might

have reflected the Free Officers’ modernizing vision, but we know for sure that it

was implemented under considerable pressure from the Americans, who believed

that revolutions in Russia and China could have been avoided if the position of the

peasants was not so dismal. Three weeks before the law was drafted, the State

Department sent a telegram to its ambassador in Cairo to instruct the new rulers on

the urgency of land redistribution in order ‘to lessen the causes of agrarian unrest

and political instability’ (Ahmed, 2007: 131). Another highly symbolic step in

Nasser’s attempt to win over Egyptian capitalists (as well as the Americans) was his

brutal suppression of the first workers’ strike following the coup (the Kafr al-Dawar

Strike) on 13 August 1952.

Despite these capitalist-friendly attitudes, it soon became obvious that neither

local nor foreign investors could provide solid support for the regime. Industrialists

and wealthy merchants held back investment under what they considered to be

a whimsical and arbitrary political order, preferring to freeze their assets in real

estate, which consumed three-quarters of all private investments in 1956. Out of an

estimated 45 million Egyptian pounds (LE) directed away from agriculture in the

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first five years following the coup, over 85 per cent went to real estate, with only

13 per cent directed to industry. At first, Nasser seemed set on luring them back

to productive investment by reducing taxes on commercial and industrial profits,

and encouraging exports. But their continued scepticism compelled him in 1957

to nationalize foreign companies and entrust the economy to a High Committee

for National Planning. Then the silk glove came off. With the proclamation of

the Socialist Laws of July 1961, dozens of banks and private companies were

nationalized, the properties of hundreds of capitalists were sequestered and 40

prominent investors were imprisoned on charges of subversion (Abdel-Malek, 1968:

81, 108, 160). By 1967, the Supreme Council for Public Organizations ran the

economy through 48 public organizations, which in turn supervised 382 affiliates

(McDermott, 1988: 121–2).

But while capitalists fell from favour, and while intellectuals and independent-

minded professionals and merchants could not be counted on, two other middle-

class fragments gradually came to represent the regime’s social backbone: middling

landowners and bureaucrats.

Over half of Egypt’s population (around 21 million in the 1950s) was employed

in agriculture. Yet only 12,000 of them controlled a third of the country’s arable land

(an estimated 2 million feddans). Nasser’s successive land reforms set a ceiling on

ownership, starting at 200 feddans in 1952, down to 50 in 1965. But instead of

redistributing the land to peasants, the government allowed large landowners to sell the

surplus on the openmarket to wealthy peasants. Politically, a token amount of divested

land was enough to win the sympathy of the peasants, but the regime opted against

emancipating them from traditional authority structures, preferring to create a rural

middle class to occupy the apex of the patronage networks that were already set in

place by large landlords, and thus inherit their predecessors’ political control function.

In other words, the new regime tapped into the existing power structure, rather than

disrupting it. Between 1952 and 1965, these new kulaks (perhaps 25,000) expanded

their holdings by almost 30per cent, and through receiving 80per cent of state subsidies

and loans managed to increase their income by 25 per cent (Yunis, 2005: 69). Clearly,

the function of these village notables was to block independent mobilization by

the peasants, the same function the large landlords performed under the ancien regime.

The July 1961 Socialist Laws further enhanced the position of the rural middle

class by undermining the economic power of the wealthy urban stratum. But more

important perhaps, these laws inflated the public sector considerably, especially

after the regime pledged to hire all university graduates. Public employment

swelled from 770,000 to 1.1 million between 1962 and 1967 (Brooks, 2008: 72–3).

Immediately, middling owners got into the habit of sending their offspring en masse

to state-funded schools so they could later join the bureaucracy. The new managerial

class provided rural notables with access to state funds, jealously guarded permits

and business opportunities. Now that they were strategically located in the city and

the countryside, these two state-nurtured middle-class fragments could both serve

and benefit from the new regime to the fullest.

On the economic front, the results were disappointing. Although economic

growth during the first Five-Year Plan (1960–65) reached 6.9 per cent, it still fell

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short of the projected 9 per cent. Also, the price for such an expanded bureaucracy

was administrative corruption and chaos. More alarming was the soaring budget

deficit, which reached LE 417 million in 1967, and the recession that followed

(Yunis, 2005: 64). The state had clearly taken on more commitments than it could

fulfil. From a political viewpoint, however, the regime’s alliance with wealthy

landowners and their state bourgeois progenies proved invaluable. These were the

people who manned the regime’s political apparatus, delivered the necessary votes

in elections and popular referendums, and organized pro-Nasser demonstrations. It

is true that the Nasserist middle class did not represent a new ruling class in the full

sense, but its role in building and maintaining authoritarianism was indispensable. It

acted as a ‘second stratum of the ruling class’, mediating between regime and

society without aspiring to control the political order (Binder, 1978: 13). But even

though the rural middle class and its urban offshoot in the bureaucracy remained

influential well into Hosni Mubarak’s reign, beginning in the 1970s, they were

forced to share the spoils of state patronage with a newcomer: the new business elite.

Facing Westwards: Sadat’s New Business Elite

President Anwar Sadat, who came to the helm after Nasser’s premature death in

1970, felt compelled, due to a host of internal and external factors, to dramatically

swing Egypt from a non-aligned (though slightly pro-Soviet) country to a loyal

American asset.3 The price was high: the United States expected (and received)

numerous political and military concessions, and on the economic front, it insisted

on opening up the economy to foreign investment. This last demand coincided with

Sadat’s analysis of what was needed on the home front. Nasser’s village notables

and bureaucrats proved unreliable in the intra-regime struggles the new president

confronted. Civil servants became paralysed when their superiors bickered, and

notable landlords remained provincial in outlook and interests. Both middle-class

fragments could cast their votes for the regime, and demonstrate in support if

necessary, but this type of passive backing was deemed insufficient for the rocky

road ahead. The political apparatus now required the devotion of an active social

force, a faction invested in the regime deeply enough to identify with and

aggressively defend it.

But where could one find these desperately needed power brokers? Relying solely

on military or security officials would end the hard-won autonomy of the political

apparatus, and was therefore ruled out. Who then? Sadat’s strategic realignment

with the US, as well as the fact that leftists led opposition at home, dictated

a rightward course designed to win over a powerful bourgeois fragment, a business

elite with strong American connections and a real stake in the authoritarian regime.

There was a slight problem, however: there was no such business elite. Once again,

the political leadership was forced to tailor a middle-class fragment to fit its needs.

This was the aim of the president’s notorious open-door policy, known as Infitah,

beginning in 1974.

The president supervised Infitah personally, creating an economic group within

the cabinet to facilitate business. When prime minister Abd al-Aziz Hegazy,

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a business professor, proved too cautious, he was replaced in 1979 with interior

minister Mamduh Salem to, in Sadat’s words, ‘tear down all measures and

constraints that inhibit economic freedom’ (Kandil, 1986: 90). The fast results Sadat

required, in addition to American pressure, determined the aim: to transform Egypt

from a potentially ‘industrial state to a service state’ (Bahaa al-Din, 1987: 90). A vast

sum of cash was sucked into real estate speculation, tourism, and foreign trade.

During the 1970s, 53.5 per cent of the land owned by the state on the Mediterranean

Sea was ‘passed into private hands without any payment being made’ (Heikal, 1983:

183–4), and resold on the private market for LE 4 billion. Construction increased by

107 per cent, with over 90 per cent devoted to luxury housing and vacation cabins.

The number of agents for foreign companies increased from a few dozen in 1974 to

16,000 in 1981. ‘Cairo became a city of middlemen and commission agents for

Europeans and Americans . . . shuttling between luxury hotels and government

ministries, wheeling and dealing on an ever-increasing scale’ (Heikal, 1983: 185). In

a country that had no millionaires, over 17,000 sprang into existence during Sadat’s

single-decade rule (Heikal, 1983: 183–91, 85–91). The short-term effects were hard

to miss. An economic study conducted in the mid-1980s revealed that Egypt’s non-

industrial sectors (mainly services and construction) represented 60 per cent of GDP

and employed 53 per cent of the workforce, while industry represented a mere

19 per cent of GDP and employed 14 per cent of the workforce (Oweiss, 1990: 9).

As a prominent Egyptian economist commented, the country’s de-industrialization

under American tutelage in the 1970s surpassed the de-industrialization forced

upon Muhammad Ali by European powers after his 1840 defeat (Abd al-Fadeel,

1983: 27).

Expectedly, the US won the lion’s share. American investors were both the

architects and benefactors of Infitah. The president himself proudly celebrated the

fact that his primary advisor on economic affairs was David Rockefeller (Bahaa

al-Din, 1987: 114). American goods flooded the Egyptian market; imports from

the US between 1974 and 1984 were estimated at $2.8 billion, over a third of all

Egyptians imports, while American non-oil imports from Egypt were worth

a ridiculous $5 million (Al-Mashat, 1986: 61). In addition, US investors acquired 70

per cent of the profits made in the Egyptian oil business, and during the first five

years of the open-door policy, a mushrooming of American banks (that had never

operated before in Egypt) drew $9.9 billion worth of foreign currency deposits.

In short, from an American viewpoint, Infitah brought about ‘phenomenal growth

in exports to Egypt . . . as well as large profits from its investments in Egypt’s

petroleum and banking sectors’ (Handoussa, 1990: 122). This could not have been

possible without the political leadership’s forceful lobbying for American interests.

The president frequently intervened to close deals, such as the ones with Boeing and

Chase-Manhattan (Heikal, 1983: 182–5; Kandil, 1986: 91). Thus, through making

itself useful, the regime secured US support for its authoritarian rule, highlighting

the importance of international support, which provided over time significant

resources to solidify authoritarianism. In this respect, the cases of Tunisia and

Morocco examined in this special issue are quite similar, as foreign actors condoned

authoritarianism in exchange for favourable economic policies.

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In bringing forth the new business elite, the top echelon of the state bourgeoisie

was cast in the role of catalyst. Some 34,000 public sector managers, and 11,000

senior administrators were allowed to forge alliances (mostly illegal) with a select

group of local and foreign entrepreneurs, where in return for lucrative commissions

investors received public land, trade and building permits, business licences, tax

breaks, discounted loans from public banks and valuable inside information about

future economic decisions (Waterbury, 1983: 424–5). The state bureaucracy was

being transformed from the leader of economic development to some sort of

middleman, letting out business to a new class of capitalists. One observer described

this more accurately as ‘state-fostered corruption’ than state-fostered capitalism

(Saleh, 1988: 16).

The new business elite was an amalgam of truly incompatible human material.

There were pre-1952 landed elites (some 600 families), which Sadat decided in

December 1970 to rehabilitate by returning most of their sequestered land and

property, in order to turn yesterday’s landowners into today’s capitalists and give

character to his rising bourgeoisie (Abd al-Magid, 1998: 111). These old moneyed

families operated side-by-side with the nouveau riche: mostly poor migrants

(numbering 58,000 in 1970, and reaching 5million by 1980) whomade huge fortunes

through serving in Gulf countries and invested their petro-dollars back home (Abd al-

Fadeel, 1983: 11). What this odd combination produced was a parasitic bourgeoisie

‘unprepared to give up opportunities for commercial and speculative enrichment or to

trim its new life of consumption’ (Hinnebusch, 1990: 192–3), a class which ‘devoted

their activities to short-term trade, reaping high cash profits that have . . . often been

hoarded in the form of cash or jewellery, or spent on unnecessary luxuries, lavish

consumption, or otherwise invested or saved abroad’ (Oweiss, 1990: 34). This was

Nasser’s greatest fear. He believed that a country ‘which only furnishes rawmaterials

to industrialized nations, and whose own “capitalists” are largely traders (as opposed

to manufacturers), shortly has on its hands an unpatriotic, corrupted wealthy class

which contributes nothing substantial to the product of the country and which is

inclined to export its profits to Switzerland’ (Copeland, 1970: 216).

All the above notwithstanding, Sadat finally had his new elite of state-nurtured

capitalists, wholly invested in the regime, and towering over the two middle-class

fragments from before, middling landowners and public administrators. The political

vessel of this new alliance was a revamped ruling party, renamed in 1978 the National

Democratic Party. Little did Sadat realize that he infested the ruling party with

a germ whose covetousness would eventually pull the roof down in January 2011.

A Time for Plunder: The Long Road to Tahrir Square

Mubarak’s first task, upon assuming power in 1981, was to deal with the country’s

disastrous economic situation. Sadat’s ten-year reign increased Egypt’s civilian

foreign debt from $1.3 billion to $19.5 billion, with three-quarters of this debt

wasted in financing consumption. Eager to provide Egyptians with a quick taste of

the prosperity he associated with peace with Israel, Sadat had placed himself at

the mercy of foreign aid. A decade into the tenure of his successor, debt had reached

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the incredible figure of $53 billion (Mitchell, 2002: 276). Worse still, the country

had shifted from being a net exporter to a net importer of food, as agricultural

exports fell from 41.4 per cent to 15.5 per cent of total exports between 1973 and

1980. By the time Mubarak took office, Egypt was importing 60 per cent of its food

requirements (Abd al-Mo’ty, 2002: 174, 145). Furthermore, the non-productive

nature of Sadat’s business stratum failed to generate jobs, leaving the state with

the role of primary employer. Despite talk of downsizing the public sector, state

bureaucracy swelled from 1.2 million in 1974 to 4.8 million in 1986 (Springborg,

1989: 136–7), eventually reaching 5.5 million by 2000. Meanwhile, public wages

could not keep up with the rising inflation (reaching a record 35 per cent in 1979, and

remaining at a two-digit level ever since), nor could the government afford the sort

of social subsidies promised by the July 1952 regime. Sadly, this came at a time of

staggering inequality. According to World Bank statistics, while the income share of

the top 5 per cent of earners rose from 17 per cent to 22 per cent during Sadat’s rule,

and while the richest 10 per cent controlled a third of the national wealth, the income

share of the lowest 20 per cent of earners dropped from 7 to 5 per cent (Ahmed,

1993: 474–5). For the first time since 1952, society was neatly divided between ‘the

“fat cats” and their hangers-on, perhaps 150,000 people at most, on one side, and the

rest of the population on the other’ (Heikal, 1983: 88).

Mubarak was initially inclined to reverse some of these trends, and rebuild the

welfare state that kept the regime in place since 1952. At the very least, he thought

he could freeze the structure Sadat had put in place, whereby state-nurtured

businessmen would remain under the control of the ruling party. His greatest

concern was to see the party ‘colonized by the bourgeoisie’ (Springborg, 1989: 137).

But Sadat’s parasitic businessmen gave way to a select group of monopoly

capitalists, who had no intention of limiting themselves to the subsidiary role they

have been cast into. For the first time, a middle-class fragment fostered by the state

began to articulate clear political demands. While the countryside bourgeoisie, like

most peasants (rich or poor), wanted to be left alone; and while the state bourgeoisie

aspired to move up the bureaucratic hierarchy, and maybe make a little fortune on

the side; and while the parasitic bourgeoisie of the 1970s and 1980s were satisfied

with amassing wealth through shabby deals with public officials (i.e. flourishing in

the shadow of power), the billionaires of the 1990s wanted to move up the political

ladder, to bend the regime to their purposes rather than being manipulated by

it, and they had the power to secure their ambitions. The predatory behaviour of

members of the president’s family or inner circle find a parallel in the Tunisian case,

as Cavatorta and Haugbølle detail in their contribution to this themed issue.

Where did this new class fragment come from? And from where did it derive

its power? In terms of social origins, the new oligarchs belonged to the merchant

and construction class, whose business was kicked off through state contracts and

partnerships with foreign (mostly American) corporations. Before the end of the

1990s, the country’s economy came under the control of perhaps two dozen family-

owned conglomerates. The construction, tourism, telecommunication, transpor-

tation, food processing and other dynasties employed a relatively small workforce,

and catered mostly to the upper class (an estimated 5 per cent of the population),

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which they quickly came to dominate. No other middle-class fraction could hope to

compete with, let alone dislodge Egypt’s new economic masters – not even the

political leadership dared resist.

That is because the country’s super-rich drew on five major sources of power.

First, opening the doors wide for free commerce and foreign trade created a

consumer society that the state could no longer satisfy. Politically, the most

dangerous segment of this new demand curve was bureaucrats. Though the political

leadership had initially encouraged state employees to partner with the rising

parasitic bourgeoisie (62 per cent of public sector projects were subcontracted to a

handful of entrepreneurs during the 1970s), the links between bureaucracy and

business could no longer be disrupted (Abd al-Mo’ty, 2002: 117–27). Endemic

corruption became a way of life for the overwhelming majority of civil servants,

who have, in turn, become avid consumers and would not surrender their new

lifestyle under any circumstances. In short, the regime could no longer block

capitalists out of the state bureaucracy, even if it wanted to.

Second, though Mubarak managed to resist the pressure to privatize the economy

by relying on oil revenue, derived mostly through oil exports, remittances of workers

in oil-rich countries, and traffic in the Suez Canal, once oil prices plummeted (from

$36 a barrel in 1980 to $12 in 1986), oil exports were cut in half (from $2.26 billion

to $1.2 billion), and Suez Canal tariffs quickly fell (from $1 billion to less than $900

million). The persistence of Egypt’s high import bill led to a crippling drop in

foreign currency reserves, and the ensuing debt crisis forced the government to

declare its bankruptcy in 1989 (Suleiman, 2005: 54, 9). A cornered political

leadership now had to adopt a 1991 International Monetary Fund (IMF)-tailored

Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Programme, which dictated

reductions in subsidies, but more importantly the privatization of the public sector.

In less than a decade, the government sold 124 of its 314 companies (Mitchell, 2002:

280). The regime was thus losing its grip over the economy.

Third, during the 1960s the state remained solvent by relying on sequestered

properties and financial assets, nationalized companies and generous Soviet aid.

The hope was that state-led industrialization and large agricultural projects would

produce enough revenue for welfare policies to continue once these resources

dried up. But the alliance with the West replaced Soviet aid with the expensive and

condition-ridden US aid, and America’s economic liberalization requirements

not only eroded state revenue, but moved the economy away from industry and

agriculture. Mubarak thus inherited a country with deteriorating finances. For a host

of reasons, including corruption, the government failed to collect the taxes needed to

cover public expenses. As a result, domestic debt rose from 67 to 90 per cent of

GDP between 1992 and 2002. And because ruling-party finances were merely an

extension of the state’s finances, both were now running on debt. The need to remain

solvent compelled the political leadership to draw on the support of the wealthy

businessmen, who had first relied on the ruling party to make their fortunes, but were

now becoming its creditors (Suleiman, 2005: 192–6, 218). Gradually, politically

motivated philanthropy gave way to concrete political demands. Egypt’s monopoly

capitalists now expected to have a say in public policies.

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Fourth, besides their money, the regime’s new business cronies had another

valuable asset to trade with: their close contacts with Western investors and

governments (foreign investment in Egypt tripled between 2004 and 2007). These

contacts eased pressure on the regime to democratize – a function typically

performed by capitalists on the periphery of the world system vis-a-vis the countries

occupying its centre. This leverage was enhanced in 2004, when USAID resolved to

bypass the state and hand out aid to the private sector (Amin, 2009: 93). At a time

when many Western governments (occasionally including the American) threatened

authoritarian regimes with sanctions, remaining on their good side seemed crucial

for Egypt’s rulers.

Fifth, all the above notwithstanding, the most dangerous aspect of this new

stratum of businessmen, with their shabby alliances with bureaucrats and their

partnership with global power centres, was their eagerness for independent

organization. Throughout the 1990s, they not only infiltrated the chambers of

commerce and industry, and created lobbies and associations to defend their

interests, but they also began to encroach on the ruling party itself. In the mid-1990s,

they developed links with a valuable asset: the president’s son. Gamal Mubarak was

an investment banker who returned home in 1995 after a short stint at the London

office of the Bank of America. In 2000, his new friends convinced him to form his

own platform, the Future Generation Foundation (FGF), to promote his political

ambitions. Soon, his father had him appointed as the head of the ruling party’s Youth

and Development Committee, and in 2002 he and his business cronies and self-

styled neo-liberal intellectuals formed a new apparatus within the party: the Policies

Committee (PC), which under Gamal’s chairmanship became the nerve centre of the

entire political apparatus.

Then the sledgehammer came down. In 2004, the country followed in shock the

formation of Egypt’s first businessmen cabinet. The prime minister had studied

business in Canada, and along with other neo-liberal intellectuals (including future

executive director of the World Bank, who headed the Economics and Investment

Ministry, and a long-time IMF executive, who was entrusted with the Treasury),

he presided over a cabinet with six monopoly capitalists, put in charge of ministries

directly linked to their business portfolios. For example, the Ministry of Tourism

went to the owner of a tourism conglomerate; the Ministry of Industry and Trade

went to the head of the Middle East affiliate of one of the biggest multinational

corporations; theMinistry of Transportationwent to the chairman of one of the largest

car dealerships in the country; and so on. Those who were not included in the cabinet

were placed in charge of parliamentary committees, and the majority leader in

parliament was none other than Egypt’s iron and steel tycoon Ahmed Ezz, Mubarak

junior’s political mentor. The seizure of the cabinet and parliament was naturally

followed by an earnest ‘bourgeoisification’ of the entire political leadership, now

facilitated byGamal’s appointment as Assistant Secretary-General of the ruling party

(Amin, 2009: 207–11). The manoeuvring space of the regime’s professional

politicians thus shrunk considerably, as they stoically awaited their demise.

The stage was finally set for the most daring step of all: the presidency. Through

a series of highly controversial constitutional amendments in 2005 and 2007,

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conditions for candidacy for the top executive post were tailored to fit no other

candidate than Gamal. The transition was set to take place in September 2011,

which – as it turned out – was a little too late.

The policies pursued by this formerly parasitic bourgeoisie, which rose to the

rank of upper-class capitalists under Mubarak, alienated all middle-class fragments.

Egypt’s disheartening inequality did not deter the new economic barons from

violating the social contract that underwrote the July 1952 regime from its very

beginning: whereby the people exchanged their political rights for social benefits

(in the form of subsidies, free education and healthcare, cheap housing and services,

and so on). Egypt’s capitalists-turned-politicians seemed determined to restructure

the economy along neo-liberal lines. Ignoring the country’s severe poverty,

unemployment, illiteracy, deteriorating public services, urban congestion, pollution

and all the rest, they formulated policies that offered the people little more than

a ‘rhetoric of management, financial soundness, and market forces’ that basically

depoliticized the country’s economic troubles and ‘transformed questions of social

inequality and powerlessness into issues of efficiency and control’ (Mitchell, 2002:

230). Whatever surplus the state could use to fulfil urgent social needs was being

sucked into their pockets, thus straining the legitimacy of the political apparatus to

the limit, and eroding its social base.

Whether or not Egypt’s new dominant class believed in the healing power of

neo-liberalism, its interests required the state to deregulate the economy, privatize

public enterprises, reduce subsidies for the poor and taxes for the rich and allow

chosen investors cheap access to public resources. A new tax regime imposed 60 per

cent of the tax burden on the general population via indirect taxes and tariffs that

do not discriminate between rich and poor, and halved taxes on business revenues

from 40 to 20 per cent; the currency exchange rate was floated, costing the Egyptian

pound 25 per cent of its value vis-a-vis the US dollar, thus skyrocketing the price of

imported goods; and over 67,000 square kilometres (an area equivalent to the size of

Palestine, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain combined), worth an estimated LE

800 billion, was allocated to a select few for nominal prices (Ghoneim, 2005: 98;

Al–Gahmy & Abd al-Qawy, 2011: 7).

Egypt’s dark days were getting even darker. As the middle class followed

celebratory statements about howGDP increased from$92.4 billion in 2000 to $187.3

billion in 2009, pushing economic growth from 3.2 to 5 per cent during the same

period, the standard of living for almost all Egyptianswas getting progressivelyworse

(Abd al-Aziz, 2011: 89). Per capita income dropped 7 per cent between 2000 and

2006, and World Bank reports exposed how 47 per cent of Egyptians were making

less than $2 a day (Wahid, 2009: 134–42). In 2010, unemployment skyrocketed

to 26.3 per cent, and perhaps 3 million people were forced to join the dangerous and

unpredictable underground economy (Shatz, 2010: 6). Even more than the final

days of Sadat, the economy was now divided into two spheres: one servicing

the conspicuous consumption of the top 10 per cent, and the other throwing

breadcrumbs at the barely surviving masses. The middle class not only saw their

aspirations crushed, but to add insult to injury, they were forced to watch powerlessly

as Egypt’s minuscule upper class sent its children to exorbitant international schools,

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received treatment in highly equipped hospitals, resided in lavish compounds,

vacationed in extravagant beach resorts, drove luxurious cars and shopped at some of

the most expensive malls in the region (Amin, 2009: 12).

To make matters worse, the nature of the leading class fraction during Mubarak’s

rule did not lend itself to class-based cooperation. Monopoly capitalists behaved

more like competing magnates than a consolidated class leadership, and therefore

failed to incorporate top bureaucrats, middling landowners and small investors into

their fold. Abandoned by the upper class, and left to their own devices by an

incapacitated political leadership, Egypt’s middle class began sinking into the ranks

of the proletariat. At the dawn of 2011, a call went out for a mass demonstration on

25 January. And the middle class had no reason to hesitate.

Conclusion: Why did the Middle Class Revolt?

The fact that the country’s deteriorating conditions were blamed on Gamal Mubarak

and his monopoly capitalists became apparent when weeks after the January 2011

revolt the president’s son and his family and political and business associates

were all imprisoned for financial corruption and abuse of office to amass wealth.

But the question we are trying to answer here is why members of the middle class,

who had for long been nurtured by the regime, suddenly turned against it. And

the answer is that, aside from the uppermost crust of the Egyptian bourgeoisie,

all other middle-class fragments not only suffered, but also believed that the worst

was yet to come.

The rural middle class had become dispensable. The outright rigging of elections

and pro-regime demonstrations were now provided by the Interior Ministry and its

army of thugs, and financed through direct hand-outs from ruling party businessmen,

thus depreciating the value of political patronage networks in the countryside. Also,

the trend towards the capitalization of agriculture, to bring it in line with the large

monopolistic projects of the economically dominant class, threatened middling

owners, who were pressured to sell their land to allow the new super-rich to

consolidate their power.

The state bourgeoisie, the knight in shining armour of the Nasser era, and the

catalyst between aspiring businessmen and the omnipotent state during Sadat’s

reign, also had little left to do. Economic liberalization reduced the role of the public

sector, and the fact that monopoly capitalists assumed the top positions in the cabinet

and parliament made their function as middlemen redundant – the fox was now in

the henhouse. Moreover, the increasingly aggressive neo-liberal reforms promised

further privatization of the public sector, downsizing and streamlining of the

bureaucracy and deregulation of investment, thus stripping them once and for all of

their past influence. Worse still, the inflationary policies associated with neo-

liberalism eroded their purchasing power, while measures to eliminate red tape

limited their chances for extra income through bribes.

As for the country’s parasitic business class, which in the 1970s and 1980s

included small-time contractors, financiers, export-import traders and other small

fry, the concentration of wealth and economic activity in the hands of fewer and

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fewer oligarchies threatened to terminate, or at least impoverish them. The barriers

for entering the market were becoming increasingly higher, and competition with

the tycoons of the ruling party seemed hopeless. Needless to add, the staggering

unemployment and inflation rates, the direct consequence of the above changes, hurt

hundreds of thousands of middle-class youth, whose college degrees could only take

them so far in Egypt’s neo-liberal economy.

It was only natural that the prospects of ending the uneasy power-sharing

arrangement between Mubarak and his son, and transferring power entirely to

Egypt’s monopoly capitalists by September 2011 spelled the total ruin of the

country’s frustrated middle class. In such as dire situation, the chance to resist could

not have been forfeit.

This same disillusionment, however, casts a dark shadow over the country’s future.

If anything is certain regarding Egypt’s disgruntledmiddle class it is this: it is both too

fractured to provide solid support for a coherent economic policy, and too demanding

of state support rely on its own talents in a reformed political system. Themiddle class

rose up in indignation against a political leadership that was not only corrupt (that was

fine bymany), but also a leadership that selfishly refused to provide for its people. For

the revolution to be complete, angry citizens proclaimed, the state has to guarantee

free (and high quality) education for all; provide jobs for graduates; re-empower

the public sector; invest in services; redistribute wealth; in a word, reassume its

patronage role – a difficult task considering the state’s deteriorating finances. More

dangerously, these demands are no longer presented as popular expectations from a

benevolent developmental state (as Nasser and Sadat portrayed their regimes), but

rather decreed as the price that a guilty regimemust be forced to pay to compensate for

its crimes against society and its responsibility for Egypt’s economic collapse. Under

such strain, establishing the social consensus necessary for building a new democratic

regime is apparently remote. The divisiveness and desperation of the middle class not

only confronts the new rulers with seemingly insurmountable challenges, but also

suggests that stabilizing the political situation might take longer than many optimists

anticipate. Unless, of course, the repressive apparatus is recovered and unleashed

against the aspiring citizens, and authoritarian control is gradually reinstalled from

above. Even though this article focused on social classes, one cannot lose sight of the

cardinal role of coercion. As the history of landlordism and capitalism clearly

demonstrates, the social ills one fails to cure through sound economic logic could be

(at least temporarily) contained using the whip, the baton and the gun.

Notes

1 On the eve of the revolt the military perceived itself as the least privileged partner within Egypt’s

tripartite ruling bloc, and saw the revolt as an opportunity to outmanoeuvre the political and security

apparatuses and re-establish its long-lost dominance.2 Several businessmen and ministers escaped during the revolt to London, Madrid and Dubai, and many

attempted to and were arrested at the airport.3 These reasons included his belief that only the US could pressure Israel to sign a binding peace treaty

with Egypt, as well as his conviction that the Soviets (his only other option at the time) had strong links

within the military and Egypt’s leftist opposition, and could destabilize his regime at will.

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