Abstract
Employing a Marxist framework, this article examines how neo-liberal agendas for development pursued by successive regimes in Egypt have been associated with violence, fraud and corruption. Encouraged by international financial institutions and Western governments, the Egyptian state became a means of channelling public resources into private hands, using complex relations of privilege among officials and oligarchs. The article examines a growing conviction among Egypt's people that the presidency and the ruling party represented a criminal enterprise. Addressing notions of “crony capitalism”, and the idea that the revolution of 2011 punished an aberrant political leader, it argues that bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been party to consolidation of corrupt networks and development of an authoritarian state acting with impunity vis-à-vis the mass of Egypt's people. The article raises pressing questions about global responsibilities for state crime manifested at the local level.
Highlights
Employing a Marxist framework, this article examines how neo-liberal agendas for development pursued by successive regimes in Egypt have been associated with violence, fraud and corruption
The term appeared widely in academic and political discourse in the late 1990s, usually applied pejoratively by free-market economists to “transitional economies” – especially states of the former Eastern Bloc and of the Global South – in which economic affairs were said to operate imperfectly.26. It was at this time that Michel Camdessus, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), addressed political leaders in Central Asia about the dangers of “crony capitalism”: one cannot help but observe the similarities between the relationships that existed among enterprises, banks, and government in some East Asian countries under the system of “crony capitalism” and the tendencies one can observe – which still survive or start developing again – in a number of transition economies
They were going to instruct the Egyptian government how to run its economy on sensible Western lines; they were going to help repair or replace the country’s groaning, overburdened infrastructure; they were going to teach the fellaheen of the Delta how to “maximise” their grain output, and bring Harvard Business School methods to dark, insanitary Cairo shopfloors. (Hirst and Beeson 1981: 207)
Summary
The nexus of criminal practices that sustained Mubarak’s regime originated in the earlier post-colonial state. For the first time since the pharaonic era, ordinary Egyptians had direct access to the country’s most important resources – land and water Nasser and his associates were committed to highly centralized rule by senior military men, around whom they consolidated a new bureaucratic elite. They were increasingly intolerant of opposition, targeting many activists of the earlier anti-colonial movement, incorporating trade unions into the state and outlawing independent political parties (Baker 1978; Beinin 2009). Nasser died in 1970 and was replaced by Sadat, who soon revealed a very different vision for the country
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