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Egypt’s problems stem from the weakness of the private sector and the "rent-seeking" of state officials. The solution is to open Egypt’s markets to the outside world, lift restrictions on investment in key sectors of the economy, liberalise ownership laws, end subsidies to the poor for food and other necessities and increase market competition.

The mechanisms of this conditionality are discussed further below, at this stage, it is simply important to note that there has been an unassailable link established between aid and the fulfillment of neoliberal reforms.

This policy shift, however, does not represent a turn away from the logic of neoliberalism. Rather, it actually serves to reinforce this logic, by tailoring institutions to the needs of the private sector and removing any ability of the state to intervene in the market.

In the case of Egypt, the discourse of institutional reform has allowed neoliberal structural adjustment to be presented not just as a technocratic necessity – but as the actual fulfillment of the demands innervating the uprisings.

his fundamental message has been repeatedly emphasised by US and European spokespeople over the last weeks: this was not a revolt against several decades of neoliberalism – but rather a movement against an intrusive state that had obstructed the pursuit of individual self-interest through the market.

The political demands heard on the streets of Egypt today – to reclaim wealth that was stolen from the people, offer state support and services to the poor, nationalise those industries that were privatised and place restrictions on foreign investment – can be either disregarded or portrayed as "anti-democratic".

Precisely because Egypt’s uprising was one in which the political and economic demands were inseparable and intertwined, this effort to recast the struggle as "pro-market" is, in a very real sense, directly aimed at undercutting and weakening the country’s ongoing mobilisations.

There are two common elements to all the financial support offered to Egypt to date – an extension of loans (i.e. an increase in Egypt’s external debt) and promised investment in so-called public-private partnerships (PPPs).

n other words, contrary to popular belief, more money actually flows from Egypt to Western lenders than vice versa. These figures demonstrate the striking reality of Egypt’s financial relationship with the global economy – Western loans act to extract wealth from Egypt’s poor and redistribute it to the richest banks in North America and Europe.

Of course, the decision to borrow this money and enter into this "debt trap" was not made by Egypt’s poor. The vast majority of this debt is public or publically guaranteed (around 85%), i.e. debt that was taken on by the Mubarak government with the open encouragement of the IFIs. Egypt’s ruling elite – centred around Mubarak and his closest coterie – profited handsomely from these transactions (estimated in the many billions).

It is actually a debt swap – a promise to reduce Egypt’s debt service by $1 billion, provided that money is used in a manner in which the US government approves. This debt swap confirms the relationship of power that is inherent to modern finance.

The US is able to use Egypt’s indebtedness as a means to compel the country to adopt the types of economic policies described above.

Unless these loans are refused and the existing debt repudiated, Egypt will find itself in a cul-de-sac from which there is little chance of escape. Foreign debt is not a neutral form of "aid" but an exploitative social relation established between financial institutions in the global North and countries in the global South.

OPIC’s mandate is to support US business investment in so-called emerging markets; it provides guarantees for loans (particularly in the case of large projects) or direct loans for projects that have a significant proportion of US business involvement and may face political risk.

In the case of Egypt, this is likely to take place primarily through the use of US government funds to establish public-private partnerships (PPPs). A PPP is a means of encouraging the outsourcing of previously state-run utilities and services to private companies. A private company provides a service through a contract with the government – typically, this may include activities such as running hospitals or schools, or building infrastructure such as highways or power plants.

OPIC’s intervention in Egypt has been explicitly tied to the promotion of PPPs. An OPIC press release, for example, that followed soon after Obama’s speech, noted that the $1 billion promised by the US government would be used “to identify Egyptian government owned enterprises investing in public-private partnerships in order to promote growth in mutually agreed-upon sectors of the Egyptian economy.”

Anyone who has any illusions about the goals of the EBRD’s investment in Egypt would do well to read carefully the EBRD 2010 Transition Report. The report presents a detailed assessment of the East European and ex-Soviet republics, measuring their progress on a detailed set of indicators. These indicators are highly revealing: (1) Private sector share of GDP; (2) Large-scale privatisation; (3) Small-scale privatisation; (4) Governance and enterprise restructuring; (5) Price liberalisation; (6) Trade and foreign exchange system; (7) Competition policy; (8) Banking reform and interest rate liberalisation; (9) Securities markets and non-bank financial institutions; (10) Overall infrastructure reform.[5] Only countries that score well on these indicators are eligible for EBRD loans. A research institute that tracks the activity of the EBRD, Bank Watch, noted in 2008 that a country cannot achieve top marks in the EBRD assessment without the implementation of PPPs in the water and road sectors.

Moreover, fully embracing the pro-market ideological discourse discussed above, the Egyptian government promised to relax control over foreign investments through committing “to overcoming the previous shortcomings of excessive government centralisation. In addition, we will build on existing initiatives to achieve a greater level of decentralisation, especially in terms of local planning and financial management”.

As the decades of the Egyptian experience of neoliberalism illustrate all too clearly, these measures will further deepen poverty, precarity and an erosion of living standards for the vast majority. Simultaneously, the financial inflows will help to strengthen and consolidate Egypt’s narrow business and military elites as the only layer of society that stands to gain from further liberalisation of the economy. The expansion of PPPs, for example, will provide enormous opportunities for the largest business groups in the country to take ownership stakes in major infrastructure projects and other privatised service provision. Alongside foreign investors, these groups will gain from the deregulation of labour markets, liberalisation of land and retail activities, and the potential access to export markets in the US and Europe.

These measures also have a regional impact. Their other main beneficiary will be the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman), which are playing a highly visible and complementary role alongside the IFIs. Saudi Arabia has pledged $4 billion to Egypt – exceeding the amounts promised by the US and EBRD.

As with the investments from Western states, these financial flows from the GCC are dependent upon the further liberalisation of Egypt’s economy, most likely through the mechanisms of PPPs. Indeed, Essam Sharaf, Egypt’s interim prime minister, and Samir Radwan, finance minister, have both travelled frequently to the GCC states over recent months with the aim of marketing PPP projects, particularly in water and waste water, roads, education, health care and energy.

In essence, the financial initiatives announced over recent weeks represent an attempt to bind social layers such as these – Egypt’s military and business elites, the ruling families and large conglomerates of the GCC, and so forth – ever more tightly to the Western states. The revolutionary process in Egypt represented an attack against these elements of the Arab world.

Since the death of Nasser 30 years ago, the top leadership of the army has been controlled by the US and corrupted by the money of the US and the Gulf countries; and they accepted the polices of submission of Mubarak and Morsi. But everybody should know that the Egyptian army is not just its top leaders but also thousands of officers who remain patriotic. They are not necessarily progressive, nor socialist, but they understand that the people don’t want Morsi. The new Prime Minister, Hazem Al Beblawi, I knew him personally. He was a brilliant student of economics. I don’t know what his mind is like today, but he’s a clever man, able to understand that continuing neoliberal policies would be a disaster.

Hundreds of thousands who are organized. They are those who started Tamarod. These young people are politicized, they discuss politics continuously. They do not accept following parties; they have no confidence in bourgeois parties, democratic parties or even socialist parties.

To have a movement getting together with a minimum common program is important: there are discussions among various partners, particularly with the organizations of the youth. There is a need for a common program which is to meet the immediate challenge; it is not a program for socialism, but a program to start moving out of the trap of neoliberalization by restoring the power of the state, and the other dimensions of starting to move out of the rut of the alliance with the US, Israel, and Gulf countries, and to open new relations with partners, particularly with China, with Russia, with India, with South Africa, so that we can start having independent policies and therefore reducing the influence of the US, of Israel, and of the Gulf countries.

First is the task of social justice: it is not socialism. It is a set of good and important reforms of management of enterprises; the end of privatization; recapturing of the enterprises which have been given at very low prices to private companies; a new law of minimum wages; a new law for working conditions, a new law of labor rights – strikes and so on; a new law of participation of the working people with the management of the enterprises in which they would have a say.

second task is to address the national question. It is a question of dignity. People want a government that represents Egypt with dignity and self-respect. It means a government which is independent, not one accepting the US’s orders, not standing with Israel’s repression of Palestinians. A government independent of the Gulf countries who are allies of the US, they can’t be anything else. In this context, China has a big responsibility. It would be great if some people in China say frankly : “we are with you and we are prepared, if you ask, to help you solve your economic problems.” Such a declaration would have a tremendous echo in Egypt. There are slogans on the streets of Cairo, “we don’t need US aid, we can also get it from other countries”. We don’t need US aid - which is associated with corruption and political submission. This is called a national independent policy, in order to be able to develop a sovereign Egyptian project.

We should have a popular parliament, which is not an elected parliament. It is a parliament which consists of people sent by the organizations of the movement, by the trade unions, by the women organizations, by the youth organizations. This is the true parliament, more than a so-called elected parliament in which the distribution of party is so unequal and biased. You can call it not-a-socialist-program, but a national, democratic, sovereign, and progressive program.

On one hand, we can say the US accepted and supported the army and the new government, but on the other hand, they tried to put pressure to bring back the old reactionary, which is not Muslim Brotherhood but the salafists. This is the plan of the US, which is not to help Egypt out of the crisis, but to use the crisis to destroy more.

These groups are coming from Libya. Since Libya has been destroyed by the western military operation, Libya has become the base for all kinds of Jihadists. There are Jihadists with strong arms including missiles coming from the desert, this is the real danger. Also in the Egyptian peninsula of Sinai small Jidahist groups supported by Israel and the Gulf countries are carrying out terrorist actions.

The Egyptian military saw the MB as too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, in particular, Hamas in Gaza, and feared the MB was distancing itself from the Egypt-Israel peace treaty

The MB were also beginning to move the Israeli mountain by refusing polite negotiations, working directly with Hamas (and mediating Hamas-Fatah talks) and developing an ambitious plan to transform the Sinai, including building civilian infrastructure, creating industry, and strengthening its internal and military security, in defiance of the US-Israeli assumption that it was a no-man’s buffer zone.

Conventional wisdom - or more accurately, perhaps, corporate media - would suggest that this is happening because the growing middle-class have rising expectations for individual freedom, mobility, money, private health and education, luxury commodities, cars, and so on. It is suggested that what is fuelling the discontent with autocratic regimes is middle-class aspiration for an unfettered market and their frustrations with the regimes that prevent them enjoying these benefits.

Almost without exception, the same set of social and economic policies were implemented under pressure from the IFIs (international financial institutions) across the African continent - the so-called structural adjustment programmes (later rebranded as Poverty Reduction Strategy Programmes), all to ensure that African countries serviced the growing debt. But the agenda of the creditors was also to use the debt ‘crisis’ to open avenues for capital expansion, through extreme privatization and liberalization of African economies.

The net effect was to reduce the state to having a narrowly prescribed role in economic affairs, and precious little authority or resources to devote to the development of social infrastructure, its primary role being to ensure an ‘enabling environment’ for international capital and to police the endless servicing of debt to international finance institutions.[8]

the most serious consequence of these policies was not simply the reversal of the many gains of independence, but the erosion of the ability of citizens to control their own destiny. Self-determination, originally such a powerful motor force for mobilisation in the anti-colonial movement, was gradually suffocated. Economic policies were no longer determined by citizens and their representatives in government, but by technocrats from the international finance institutions and the World Bank, with hefty support provided by the international aid agencies.

And where progressive developments occurred – as in Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara – assassinations, support for military coups and economic isolation were some of the weapons used to prevent citizens having the audacity to construct alternatives to the crass policies of neoliberalism.

Research by the Tax Justice Network (TJN) estimates that a staggering US$11.5 trillion has been siphoned 'offshore' by wealthy individuals, held in tax havens where they are shielded from contributing to government revenues.

Many criticise SAPs/PRSPs as being the product of bad policy - neoliberal policies that are said to be dogmatic and an expression of 'market fundamentalism'. But, as Prabhat Patnaik has argued recently, the policies that are being insisted upon by the international finance institutions are the result of the structural needs of financialised capitalism in the present era, something that began as early as the 1970s and today dominates all parts of the global economy.

If a country is graded well by credit-rating agencies then that becomes a matter of national pride, no matter how miserable its people are.

But perhaps the most serious dispossession that we face is a political dispossession. Our governments are more accountable today to the international financial institutions, to the corporations who extract wealth without restriction, to the international aid agencies that finance institutions such as the IMF, than to citizens. In this sense, our countries are increasingly becoming more akin to occupied territories than democracies.

The sweeping away of Ben Ali in Tunisia and of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt took the imperial governments, who had been ardently supporting those regimes financially, economically, politically and militarily, completely by surprise. The corporate media sought to present the uprisings as sudden and spontaneous, despite the evidence in both countries that the eventual pouring of people on to the streets was the outcome of years of attempts to organize protests that had been brutally suppressed. Corporate media sought to present the mobilizations as being the product of Twitter and Facebook, obscuring the agency of people and conveniently forgetting that in Egypt the largest mobilization occurred after both the Internet and mobile phone networks had been blocked.

Imperial response to the uprisings has been, in essence, to establish in Tunisia Ben Ali-ism without Ben Ali, and in Egypt, Mubarak-ism without Mubarak.

With the fall of Mubarak, it is hardly surprising that the US has been eager to push for the formation of a government comprising the remaining components of Mubarakism - the military and the Muslim Brotherhood.

If the events in Tunisia and Egypt inspired hope, its twin, despair, is perhaps what is dominant in relation to Libya, Côte d'Ivoire and Somalia.

the current crisis of capitalism is different from the earlier one in that the scale of concentration and centralization of capital is unprecedented, and accompanied by a financialisation of capital also on an unprecedented scale. As one person recently characterized it: General Motors used to produce cars and occasionally speculated; today General Motors speculates on the stock markets, and occasionally produces cars!

In Africa we have seen the devastation of Somalia, the destruction of the natural environment in places such as the Niger Delta, the military interventions in Libya and Côte d'Ivoire, to say nothing of the arming of regimes that ensure the illegal occupation of the territory of Western Sahara. At the same time we see the emergence of social movements seeking to reassert the dignity of our people, the protests and uprisings that have developed over the continent. The outcome of all these events cannot be foreseen. But there are grounds for optimism, I believe.

What this approach ignores is that while citizens may have a chance to vote once every four to five years, finance capital votes every day on the stock markets, voting that has a direct consequence on every aspect of production, and on the price of every day goods, fuel, land prices, and so on.

Secondly, one of the striking features of the current period is the degree to which there is growing recognition across the global South of the commonalities in experience of the dispossessed. Indeed, there is even recognition of those commonalities emerging in the North - viz the recent uprisings in Wisconsin, Spain and Greece. For the first time in many years, there is a potential to create solidarity links with people in struggle based not on charity and pity, but on an understanding of the common cause of our dispossession.

while recognizing that there are many struggles against those who seek to exploit Africa, there are opportunities also to create today the alternatives to profit-driven motives of corporations. For example, African farmers’ organisations are confronting the onslaught of foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, backed by oligopolies like Monsanto, that are ‘pushing agro-chemical crops using multi-genome patents.

‘You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen.’

The Islamists are (provisionally) the great beneficiary of a movement they call “Islamic awakening”. The main Islamist parties have abandoned the revolutionary utopian goal of the Islamic State and progressively transformed into conservative political parties accepting the parliamentarian game. These parties are rooted in urban middle class, professionals, civil servants, etc. the kind of people who aspire to law and order more than to the turmoil of Islamic  revolution.

New forms of action developed in the 2000s.

The future and the past are still competing.

At the end of protracted negotiations it was agreed that Morsi was the "winner" of the second round.  The assembly, like the president, was elected thanks to a massive distribution of parcels (of meat, oil, and sugar) to those who voted for the Islamists.

We will see how the revolutionary movement, which is still firmly committed to the fight for democracy, social progress, and national independence, will carry on after this electoral charade.

And the Muslim Brotherhood is very well placed to take advantage of this decline and perpetuate its reproduction.  Their simplistic ideology confers legitimacy on a miserable market/bazaar economy that is completely antithetical to the requirements of any development worthy of the name.  The fabulous financial means provided to the Muslim Brotherhood (by the Gulf states) allows them to translate this ideology into efficient action: financial aid to the informal economy, charitable services (medical dispensaries etc.).

Of course, African protest movements do not face an easy route. Confronted with the deregulatory pressures of global development frameworks these movements must contend with mushrooming food and utility prices, and the violence meted out by states when faced with meaningful opposition to neo-liberal economic programmes. Indeed, the negativity questioned by the audience member in London referred to the state-sponsored violence visited upon African protestors which the different protestors repeatedly referred to.

social change takes time, and requires a broader social base than just the urban middle class elite which characterised the Tahrir Square phenomenon.

Calls for greater democracy in Africa are not framed purely within the actions of specific corrupt ruling elites. Rather it is the relationships between these ruling elites and the agents of global free-market capitalism which are the source of much public anger. It is these relationships which have amongst other things shrunk public services and robbed the continent of the bulk of the profits from its most valuable natural resources. And these relationships have been enabled by international donor policies which have shrunk the state in Africa in the belief that it is the state which has been the source of African’s problems. 

And so, if we search for images of recent African protests what we will find is not an overwhelming number of crowds with placards calling for greater openness in government, but a set of explicitly socio-economic demands relating to price rises and unemployment, or the withdrawal of affordable public services and utilities, all brought on by the skewed position of Africa in the global economy, and the enforced privatisation of land, energy and other resources which have largely fallen into the hands of foreign profit-extractive companies and their collaborators in the ruling elites of African countries. 

African elites are not uniquely corrupt, nor do they exist in a vacuum of African corruption, but neither is Africa a pure victim of contemporary economic imperialism.  African elites are as complicit in processes of resource and profit extraction as the multinational corporations such as Shell Oil who so often come in for the vitriol of social justice and anti-corporate activists.

It is not enough for international donors to call for ‘free and fair’ elections, only for them to enforce, by dint of the implicit threat of aid withdrawal, a complicity amongst all the candidates with neoliberal economic orthodoxy. This is what we find repeatedly in African elections, and in this respect at least it would be fair to say that African elections differ very little from elections in many other parts of the world, including the UK. 

African activists have much to teach the rest of the world in resisting austerity, and the many obstacles that lie in the path of such resistance, and it is about time more of us started to listen.

What now emerges, because of the Israeli public-relations campaign through its embassies and consulates in world capitals on behalf of the Egyptian military (atrocities and all), known to analysts anyway, is the close ties between the two military commands. 

the Pacific-first strategy draws upon the entire arsenal of military resources, now pivoted to Asia, naval power to the front, for the purpose of cordoning off China so to prevent its military-economic challenge to American dominance.  This already appears futile, for without resorting to intervention or war, China has successfully gained entrance into world markets, has an investment record, as in Africa, second to none, and has undertaken massive projects in infrastructure, obviously at home, but also throughout the Third World.

The Egyptian military, however, on its part must earn the respect of Washington, more rather than less bloodletting, as in the summary execution of protesters in government hands, or the skyrocketing rate of casualties who are themselves unarmed.

The US wraps Sisi’s knuckles, but refuses to cut aid. Israel, per your report, is leading a campaign in world opinion on behalf of the Egyptian massacres, exposing itself for what it has become: a pariah state because of its disregard for social decency and the rights of others.

Egypt is not even a civil war, in which case one might choose sides and read into the situation matters of principle and ideology.  In this case, massive force confronts an essentially unarmed populace, raising issues which transcend mere side-taking and reflect instead the elemental question,

Egypt is particularly vulnerable. Its oil production peaked in 1996, and since then has declined by around 26 per cent. Since the 1960s, Egypt has moved from complete food self-sufficiency to excessive dependence on imports, subsidized by oil revenues.

Due to such vulnerabilities, Egypt, as with many of the MENA countries, now lies on the fault-lines of the convergence of global ecological, energy and economic crises – and thus, on the frontlines of deepening global system failure.

“Egypt benefits from certain aid provisions that are available to only a few other countries. Since 2000, Egypt’s FMF funds have been deposited in an interest bearing account in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and have remained there until they are obligated... Egypt is allowed to set aside FMF funds for current year payments only, rather than set aside the full amount needed to meet the full cost of multi-year purchases. Cash flow financing allows Egypt to negotiate major arms purchases with U.S. defense suppliers.”

Perhaps Biden’s denial of Mubarak’s dictatorial qualities are not that difficult to understand. Since the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981, Egypt has officially been in a continuous “state of emergency,” which under a 1958 law permits Mubarak to oversee measures unnervingly similar to the USA Patriot Act – indefinite detention; torture; secret courts; special authority for police interventions; complete absence of privacy; and so on, ad nauseum. Not to mention the fact that inequality in the U.S. is actually higher than in Egypt.

When asked about the shocking findings of the 2009 report, Clinton herself downplayed the implications, describing Mubarak and his wife as “friends of my family.” So it is not that we do not know. It is that we did not care until the terror became so unbearable, that it exploded onto the streets of Cairo.

Resuming privatization and increasing the role of carefully structured and appropriately priced PPPs should assist fiscal adjustment and mobilize private resources for infrastructure investment.

In addition to expanding Public Private Partnerships (PPPs, a euphemism for services privatization and outsourcing), the IMF named its priorities: "adopting as early as possible a full-fledged VAT, complementing energy subsidy reform with better-targeted transfers to the most needy, and containing the fiscal cost of the pension and health reforms."

As Adam Hanieh from London's School of Oriental and African Studies concluded just after the G8 summit and allied Arab states pledged $15 billion to Egypt, The plethora of aid and investment initiatives advanced by the leading powers in recent days represents a conscious attempt to consolidate and reinforce the power of Egypt's dominant class in the face of the ongoing popular mobilizations. They are part of, in other words, a sustained effort to restrain the revolution within the bounds of an "orderly transition" - to borrow the perspicacious phrase that the U.S. government repeatedly used following the ousting of Mubarak.

If successful, the likely outcome of this - particularly in the face of heightened political mobilization and the unfulfilled expectations of the Egyptian people - is a society that at a superficial level takes some limited appearances of the form of liberal democracy but, in actuality, remains a highly authoritarian neoliberal state dominated by an alliance of the military and business elites.[10]

They welcomed Libya's strong macroeconomic performance and the progress on enhancing the role of the private sector and supporting growth in the non-oil economy. The fiscal and external balances remain in substantial surplus and are expected to strengthen further over the medium term, and the outlook for Libya's economy remains favorable (emphasis added).[12]

The fund's mission to Tripoli had somehow omitted to check whether the "ambitious" reform agenda was based on any kind of popular support. Libya is not an isolated case. And the IMF doesn't look good after it gave glowing reviews to many of the countries shaken by popular revolts in recent weeks.[13]