Once again I've found one of the most trenchant analysis of the forces driving the upheavals occurring across North Africa and the Middle East at Al Jazeera. This time from an Egyptian author writing under the pseudonym 'Abu Atris'. He brings his first hand view of recent events in Egypt and the region to bear in eaxamining the world wide problem of Neoliberalism.
A revolution against neoliberalism?
If rebellion results in a retrenchment of neoliberalism, millions will feel cheated.
By 'Abu Atris'
the pseudonym for a writer working in Egypt
What is neoliberalism? In his Brief History of Neoliberalism, the eminent social geographer David Harvey outlined "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade." Neoliberal states guarantee, by force if necessary, the "proper functioning" of markets; where markets do not exist (for example, in the use of land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution), then the state should create them.
Guaranteeing the sanctity of markets is supposed to be the limit of legitimate state functions, and state interventions should always be subordinate to markets. All human behavior, and not just the production of goods and services, can be reduced to market transactions.
And the application of utopian neoliberalism in the real world leads to deformed societies as surely as the application of utopian communism did.
Rhetoric vs. reality
Two observations about Egypt’s history as a neoliberal state are in order. First, Mubarak’s Egypt was considered to be at the forefront of instituting neoliberal policies in the Middle East (not un-coincidentally, so was Ben Ali’s Tunisia). Secondly, the reality of Egypt’s political economy during the Mubarak era was very different than the rhetoric, as was the case in every other neoliberal state from Chile to Indonesia.
Neoliberalism is all about fostering Plutocracy and the "free" markets Plutocrats use to multiply their wealth.
Abu Atris shows how Egypt's government services were systematicly hollowed out, government assets liquidated, and sold off to Murbarak's cronies at bargain basement prices.
The only people for whom Egyptian neoliberalism worked "by the book" were the most vulnerable members of society, and their experience with neoliberalism was not a pretty picture. Organised labor was fiercely suppressed. The public education and the health care systems were gutted by a combination of neglect and privatization. Much of the population suffered stagnant or falling wages relative to inflation.
As neoliberal dogma disallows any legitimate role for government other than guarding the sanctity of free markets, recent American history has been marked by the steady privatization of services and resources formerly supplied or controlled by the government. But it is inevitably those with closest access to the government who are best positioned to profit from government campaigns to sell off the functions it formerly performed.
Social media may have helped organize the kernel of a movement that eventually overthrew Mubarak, but a large element of what got enough people into the streets to finally overwhelm the state security forces was economic grievances that are intrinsic to neoliberalism. These grievances cannot be reduced to grinding poverty, for revolutions are never carried out by the poorest of the poor. It was rather the erosion of a sense that some human spheres should be outside the logic of markets. Mubarak’s Egypt degraded schools and hospitals, and guaranteed grossly inadequate wages, particularly in the ever-expanding private sector. This was what turned hundreds of dedicated activists into millions of determined protesters.
Its the same neoliberal snake oil Republicans are now trying to force down Americans' throats in Washington D.C. Madison Wisconsin, and in every State Legislature where Republicans are in control. In Madison the corrupt neoliberal agenda has sparked a wave of popular resistance. Americans in the rest of those states where Teamocracy is on the offensive, launching new attacks against working Americans, need to take to the streets.
Tell these corrupt shills and their hoodwinked followers that we're not going to let them destroy the Middle Class in order to further enrich the Plutocrats!
I hope you'll take the time to read the whole piece, its time well spent IMHO.