STOCKTAKING AND ASSESSMENT

The Arab 'development' experience of the last three decades cannot be understood outside a context of de-development. The uprisings that erupted because of misery and repression — and, foremost, because of a crisis of rule by the ruling classes (Gramsci 1971)1 — notwithstanding, wars, civil wars and the continued Israeli occupation of Palestine characterise the recent history of the region. Instead of mobilising resources for development, the surplus petrodollars of the Gulf states fund the formation of divisive sectarian identities, contribute to wasteful consumption and bolster regression. While there are differences as well as commonalities in Arab development, it is somewhat scholastic to define the various discrete shades of developmental malfunction. Rather, the scope of the research here presented addresses the social relations that repeatedly generate disasters over time. In any case, all Arab countries have fallen short of real development by different degrees. Detailing the minute differences between countries would add little to our understanding of the historical dynamics behind the collapse in development common to all Arab countries; the mere accumulation of such detailed distinctions is a form of empiricism leading to theoretical nihilism. Examining the shared social relationships that shape poor development is a more useful form of analysis, because it allows us to conceptually address the underlying causes.

Foremost among these social relationships are those linking Arab ruling classes to international financial capital. These variants of capital have much more in common with each other than they do with their own working classes. Among the many destructive manifestations of this relationship, generating sectarian/ethnic divisions in the working class within and across Arab states stands out insofar as the eruption of civil wars serves to destroy the material basis for the reproduction of working people. States such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain and Lebanon, among others, face the prospect of continued implosion or have crumbled already. The fragmentation of Arab working classes has reached a nadir in places like Syria and Iraq. There has been little effective effort to arrest the carnage.

Development bolsters security. Hence the Arab working-class population is being splintered in this way precisely because economic and social policies supporting a broader development strategy in the AW can principally be achieved through closer working-class alliances. Hence, to splinter the working population is to underdevelop it. Working-class alliances superseding rent-bolstered sectarian identities would provide crucial preconditions for the self-reliance needed for better growth and distribution, but these alliances have become difficult to form. The retrogression in socialist ideology has worsened steadily since the 1980s and implicates the labour process and its attendant working classes across the globe. Sound working-class alliances mediated through the state, had they existed in the AW, would have generated momentum within the region's policy space to promote productive investment and the environment required for the implementation of a development project. By itself, a cooperative economic infrastructure arising from working-class integration across the AW would for instance turn the Nurkse problematic — small markets or low demand levels resulting from poverty leading to low investment — on its head. But the reverse of rising investment has happened. Because of the divisiveness, all macroeconomic components have been heading in the wrong direction.

Another manifestation of the alliance between Arab merchant classes and international financial capitals is that the process of accumulation has increasingly shifted to commercial activity away from manufacturing. Buying abroad and selling at home has gradually supplanted industrialisation and the homogenising forces of an industrialised market economy. In addition to the role of the imperialist–comprador class alliance that erects and subsidises cultural modes of social segmentation, the move away from industrialisation all by itself entrenches social differences both within and across countries, rendering sacrosanct the despotic forms of political rule in each one. Also, the distinct economic structures of the Arab countries — their respective sizes, their foreign asset holdings, natural resource endowments and differential depletion rates of these endowments, and their subordinated mode of integration into the global economy — together offset the centripetal forces that would otherwise bring Arab working classes together across borders. The closing of factories (where they existed) and the creation of a mass of people employed in patronage-like schemes annul the public or collective spaces in which workers would meet to organise. The inherent and perpetual drive of capital to divide working people colludes with emerging facts that are in themselves promoters of disunity. Harmonisation for economic and social integration both within and across countries confronts the formidable forces of a local ruling class whose principal activity is commerce devoid of industry, and for whom the social contract is signed with international financial capital, not its subject population. For this ruling class, the function of the social structure is to accelerate resource and value grab. These are some of the issues that this book will deal with extensively. In this chapter, however, I start by depicting facets of the full reality by highlighting and exploring some relevant empirical facts. What follows, then, is a short economic history substantiated by data, where the availability of evidence allows us to scan the surface of the AW, before I go on to introduce the process of accumulation as it is determined by US-led imperialist policies and aggression.

A Synopsis of Economic History

The recent history of economic growth in the AW can be divided into three distinct periods: a period of high growth driven by comparatively heavy government intervention beginning in the early 1960s and ending in the early 1980s; a period of low growth typified by collapsing oil prices, 'free market' reforms and gradual structural adjustments extending from the early 1980s until early 2000; and a period of high oil prices and highly inequitable growth beginning in early 2000 and continuing to the present. Vulnerability to external shocks in the AW is crucial to capital's growth process there. In an environment fraught with uncertainty, economic shocks were further compounded by the liberalisation of the financial...