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It seems that Ghannouchi, good Muslim that he is, gets more of his ‘spiritual guidance’ these days in Washington  than in Mecca. As in the past, he was given a red carpet treatment by important American Middle-East think tanks. He spoke to audiences at both the Brookings Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations. At Brookings, Ghannouchi was introduced by Martin Indyk, an indication that whatever else is happening in Tunisia and throughout the Middle East, that Ghannouchi and Ennahda still enjoy the support of the Obama Administration.

There is some talk, that in gratitude for continued Obama Administration support, Tunisia might offer AFRICOM its African headquarters in Tunis. Whatever, Washington’s support did not come without some kind of major offer in return.

Although both Qatar and Saudi Arabia have carefully supported US security and economic interests in the Middle East – enough so that for Washington it matters little on a political level which one dominates – the growing Qatari growing political influence at Saudi Arabia’s expense was creating a dangerous rift between allies.

Ghannouchi’s fear – not without merit – was that as Washington had abandoned Morsi in Egypt that it could likewise cease its support for Ennahda in Tunisia, given Ennahda’s intimate relationship to the Brotherhood and Qatar.

Ghannouchi’s party is engaging in two forms of damage control to hold on to power. Internally, they are eliminating all the potentially pragmatic opposition leaders, be they secular or religiously inclined towards the Saudis externally. Caught in this web, it is likely that externally Ennahda would accommodate any demand that the IMF makes and any string that US attaches to its support –  from military bases to mega embassy to whom Washington would like to bring into the Ennahda-led government.

The media succeeded in playing on this by portraying that what Egyptians want is by no means a kind of »secular« society, or state, but they don’t want religious extremists either. And the discourse leading up to the summer of 2013 was increasingly pointing out the extremism of the MB.

the armed militants in Sinai fighting the military were quickly identified with the MB although again there is no proof of this connection. The situation there is very difficult to assess and I have serious doubts about a lot of media stories, especially if they are based on statements by the Ministry of Interior or the military. They use these kinds of situations to spread rumors and fear. So, all this is happening in the background leading up to the summer of 2013.

But I personally do not believe that the MB had the agenda of becoming religious extremists. Up until now, all the examples the media, the military and Sisi have used to portray the MB as some kind of terrorist entity, there is zero proof of any of that. That is not to say that it could not ever happen. But I do not believe that it has happened. It wouldn't be in the interest of the MB whatsoever. But this narrative has succeeded and provided the perfect enemy required to increase patriotism and suppress a lot of civil rights.

t was in the interests of the security regime in Egypt, the military and the Ministry of Interior and so these apparatuses co-opted it. Fights occurred on various occasions, MB headquarters were attacked and vandalised, and every time the Ministry of Interior would support the protesters.

Some people would say that this kind of plan, to eventually scapegoat the MB, had already been organized when the MB came to power. I don’t think this was the case. The MB was by far the entity with the most following in the streets. When the elections happened, in 2012, the generals were not seen as that favorable. Because this was the end of the period of the military junta known as SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces), where some of their violence against the population was becoming more and more known and there was actually a growing harsh criticism. Many people opposed the idea of a new military regime taking power and I don’t think the generals considered this strategic at the time. So there was this common sentiment for civilian leadership, and the MB was the best entity to fill that role.

Here we cannot exclude foreign interests. The USA, the Russians, the Europeans, all of them have some push and pull. When members of the American Congress came to visit they were very happy with the MB because they agreed on all the major points. They were not going to change any of the previous agreements, so Camp David agreement with Israel was going to be maintained, according to their promises. And the MB promised to continue the neoliberalisation of the economy. There are a lot of military links between Egypt and the US, and it was clear that it was an acceptable scenario for the MB to take power at that time.

two things happened. One, the MB were not able to maintain enough popularity. So the streets remained unstable; protests continued, especially spontaneous protests with increasing violence. This increasing instability was to nobody’s interest. Not to any of the foreign powers interests, because anyone with money and power is interested in a stable Egypt. It does not really matter who is in power – whether they are a military dictatorship or have a religious agenda – as long as they can maintain a stable situation. And the MB were proving themselves increasingly unable to do that. Secondly, as mentioned before, a lot of the government structure that the MB inherited remained to a certain extent loyal to the old regime. So there was this constant competition, and this internal, slow, everyday opposition to what the MB could do. But at the same time, part of this opposition was also to the MB trying to place their individuals in positions of power.

What was the situation like when the military began massacring people? The situation was really shocking. At the end of the day, it was a military strategy of divide and conquer. The military really succeeded in dividing the opposition, by creating a scenario where you are either with the MB or you are not. There is nothing else. Protests that were not pro-MB, but simply criticized the military, were quickly portrayed by the media but also by military spokespersonS as supporting of the MB and therefore immediately delegitimized. Sadly, a lot of intellectuals, a lot of previously very active and well-known figures in the revolution, took this position to not criticize the military yet and to rather give them a chance and see what kind of transition they would be able offer us because our main concern right now was making sure the MB do not have another chance at power.

Is this also true for the workers? First of all, there is no workers movement. There was a wave of workers’ strikes. I have written about this in my article '2011 is not 1968'. Tunisia, for example, has a very different historical background as far as labour organizations are concerned. In Egypt, they were very harshly suppressed. So strikes continued, but they always happened in a separate sphere from street protests. Sadly, these two processes are quite separate.

In my view, there wasn’t a kind of momentum of a workers’ movement. There was a very significant wave of worker actions, but it was extremely difficult to mobilize workers even to have solidarity to a nearby strike or action. Because jobs are so threatened, you do not want to lose your job. In certain periods people were willing to risk their jobs in order to improve their situation, but very rarely for political ends.

When the MB won, strikes quieted down for a while because there was a broad perception that things would change. I remember having conversations where people were saying: »This age of corruption is over, privatization is over.« There had been promises that there would be no more privatization …

As I mentioned earlier, the powerful players both inside and outside of Egypt have as their main interest a strong stable state. And the way the cards have been played is in the interests of this kind of stability.

Capitalism is not a thing, I would rather want to speak of the spirit of capitalism that in the Egyptian context has manifested itself as a convoluted oligarchy, where the power lies with those with capital, with control of militarized statist institutions. Capitalism in this form in Egypt will only drive people that are not a part of this club of rulers deeper into crisis. Prices are rising excessively as neoliberal policies are maintained by the Sisi government as they were by Morsi. Gas prices have gone up, transport and food prices are constantly going up and wages remain constant, jobs are hard to get ahold of. The more the guarantees for a decent way of life wane, the more capitalism approaches its end. The next battle will be much more violent.

A further question on the economic prospects: the general situation seems to be very shaky but there have been massive capital inflows from the Gulf states and grandiose development plans more recently. Many people are still convinced of the good interests of the current regime. With prices going up, there is a perception of foreign funds flowing into the country as a positive thing.

The Suez canal is seen as a national treasure. So we are going to make more money out of it? Great. As far as we know, all the income from the Suez canal used to go straight into Mubarak's coffers. I was part of a group that was working on debt in the past couple of years and we don't know where that money went. So if they are going to increase the profits from there, where is that going to go?

I don't think this is going to happen in the next few months, but it will come back. The conditions that brought people to the streets in 2011 are already here and so protest will return in the near future. And I think that it will be much more violent the next time, from both sides. I think you can't discredit what happened in the past three years, even though many people paid with their lives or are paying with heavy prison sentences. The kind of consciousness that has been created through these moments of revolt and the various different debates and mobilizations that have occurred, it can’t be undone. It has left a very deep impression on the population at large. We have gone through a lot of waves in the past four years. In 2011, in 2012, there were already heavy moments of depression and almost regret for what has occurred. It is far from over.

Looking back on the years since the so-called revolution in 2011 one can see that people were able to topple governments, there were massive workers‘ struggles and a strong youth movement striving for freedom rights. At the same time, however, people first supported the military against Mubarak, then the MB against the military and finally the military against the MB… After the coup in July 2013, there was widespread acceptance of the military’s massacres. How could the next wave of struggles look like?

I think the system really needs to collapse in order for some kind of better form of society to emerge. But what that means, I have no idea. And maybe that is not such a bad thing. I think one of the important lessons to learn here is that things cannot easily happen in Egypt in a vacuum, apart from what happens elsewhere in the world. Because you constantly have this influence from the outside, whether it is from the Gulf or from the western states that are sending in at this point weapons and military training and financial support and maintain their trade agreements in order to shape the power constellation. So for things to significantly change in Egypt there needs to be a significant change in those different centers of power as well.

Revolution became unimaginable without the imagery of a model demonstrator who protected you from the potential of being faced with the unknown: a collectivist uprising against a global system of domination within which there is no place for an onlooker.

There was no ideology but the ideology of desperation, the unbearable weight of hypocrisy and the limits of a people living in denial of it. The rising militancy amongst organized workers, and the growing opposition through small middle class movements like Kefaya — “Enough”– and the 6th of April movement, as well as through internet-based groups like Kolina Khaled Said (“We are all Khaled Said”) came about in direct reaction to the political ruling class’ ongoing repression of an entire population.

Similar to the uprising in Argentina in 2001, street protests in Egypt were marked by widespread participation across class, generational and gender lines. Like in 1968, students and workers both participated but in Egypt never as workers and students, but rather, and simply, as part of a collective and popular movement.

A significant moment that made the January 25 revolution thinkable was the rising wave of worker protests that started in 2004. The 27,000 textile workers that went on strike in the industrial city of Mahalla al-Kobra in Egypt’s Nile Delta in December 2006 enabled countless Egyptians that caught a glimpse of that mighty act, or of the multitude of protests that followed, to begin to imagine revolution.

The insults of a police officer towards an elderly woman on the street sparked an uprising. April 6 was significant in that the protest moved beyond the geographical lines of one industrial site and was carried out by an entire community. In 2006 workers had broken the social rules of conduct through their public protest.

1968 would have been impossible without the waves of worker strikes and factory occupations in parallel with student protests. In the case of the January 25 revolution, while participants spanned all social classes, bringing together the middle class, the unemployed, workers and farmers, it was precarious workers and not Egypt’s traditional working class that acted as the radicalizing factor of the revolution. This may sound like a trivial differentiation but it is at the crux of the distinction between 2011 and 1968.

Workers reacted directly — even if rarely specifically articulated in these terms — to the implementation of the Western economic paradigm of neoliberalism. This meant the government eased the entry of foreign capitalists into Egyptian industry, they privatized factories and public sector enterprises, reduced subsidies while strongly encouraging production for export markets.

Precarious workers often maintain two or three jobs in order to make ends meet. Compared to them, Egypt’s traditional working class lives in more secure conditions. Though for usually pitiful pay, outrageous hours in the private sector, poor working conditions and minimal benefits, the traditional working class has fixed contracts and steady incomes which gives them a luxury standing within a working class milieu with few guarantees. Consequently, the working class begin to mimic the middle class’ cautious life style unwilling to risk losing their jobs.

The last challenge remaining is economic

Everywhere neoliberalism has been tried, the results are similar: living up to the utopian ideal is impossible; formal measures of economic activity mask huge disparities in the fortunes of the rich and poor; elites become "masters of the universe," using force to defend their prerogatives, and manipulating the economy to their advantage, but never living in anything resembling the heavily marketised worlds that are imposed on the poor.

It is not just Republicans who are implicated in this systemic corruption. Clinton-era Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin’s involvement with Citigroup does not bear close scrutiny. Lawrence Summers gave crucial support for the deregulation of financial derivatives contracts while Secretary of Treasury under Clinton, and profited handsomely from companies involved in the same practices while working for Obama (and of course deregulated derivatives were a key element in the financial crisis that led to a massive Federal bailout of the entire banking industry).

However, in the current climate the most important thing is not the depredations of deposed Mubarak regime cronies. It is rather the role of the military in the political system.

it is almost unthinkable that the generals of the Supreme Military Council will willingly allow more than cosmetic changes in the political economy of Egypt. But they could be compelled to do so unwillingly

The period of military government probably will be as short as advertised, followed, one hopes, by an interim civilian government for some specified period (at least two years) during which political parties are allowed to organise on the ground in preparation for free elections. But interim governments have a way of becoming permanent.

In each case when governments (communist or apartheid) collapsed, "technocrats" were brought in to help run countries that were suddenly without functional governments, and create the institutional infrastructure for their successors.

The notion that the economy is in ruins — tourists staying away, investor confidence shattered, employment in the construction sector at a standstill, many industries and businesses operating at far less than full capacity — could well be the single most dangerous rationale for imposing cosmetic reforms that leave the incestuous relation between governance and business intact.

Ideologues, including those of the neoliberal stripe, are prone to a witchcraft mode of thinking: if the spell does not work, it is not the fault of the magic, but rather the fault of the shaman who performed the spell.

Egypt and Tunisia are the first nations to carry out successful revolutions against neoliberal regimes. Americans could learn from Egypt. Indeed, there are signs that they already are doing so. Wisconsin teachers protesting against their governor’s attempts to remove the right to collective bargaining have carried signs equating Mubarak with their governor. Egyptians might well say to America 'uqbalak (may you be the next).

While France toyed with the idea of a Mediterranean Union to compete with US military penetration of North Africa, Gaddafi was fast becoming a close ally of the United States as Condoleezza Rice flew into Libya to proclaim that ‘nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests’.

On top of this economic relationship, Gaddafi agreed to act as the police for the European Union, arresting and detaining Africans who believed that the freedom of labour should be the same as the freedom of capital.

I want to draw attention to my submission last year when I wrote that despite the statements of Gaddafi that he supported African unity, his leadership represented an obstacle to the future unity of the peoples of Africa.

It was after this that Gaddafi called the extra-ordinary meeting of the Organisation of African Unity and set in motion the convergence of forces that resulted in the Constitutive Act of the African Union. From the moment this Constitutive Act came into force, Gaddafi worked with those elements who wanted to turn the African Union into a club of dictators. It must be clarified here that, contrary to reports from many quarters, Gaddafi is not the original champion of the vision of a United States of Africa. Neither did his brand of Pan-Africanism capture the essence of the kind of grassroots Pan-Africanism that had been envisioned for the unity of African peoples and for the uplifting of the dignity of African peoples. When visionaries like Kwame Nkrumah and Cheikh Anta Diop championed the idea of a federated African state in the 1960s and 1970s, they did not envision one which would be ruled by corrupt dictators and an arrogant king of kings.

Western news agencies used the antics of Gaddafi to discredit the AU. But pan-Africanists at the grassroots worked hard to give meaning to the AU by building networks among the various constituencies of Africans who wanted to build a genuine union of peoples across borders. African women who were fighting for their rights joined with workers and oth

The ECOSOCC, which is an official civil society general assembly of the AU, was launched in September 2008, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Its membership includes trade unions, non-governmental organisations, women’s groups, human rights campaigners and anti-poverty campaigners.

Gaddafi feels that he is in good company when he unleashed mass violence against the people, but the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions had changed the political calculus in Africa. While Africa is silent, Gaddafi goes back to those elements that he supported in the past to recruit mercenaries to suppress the uprising of the Libyan people. It is in the midst of this uprising where the forms of solidarity have to be very sophisticated and clear so that the machinations of foreign incursions are not engineered in an opportunistic manner to impose a solution on post-Gaddafi Libya that could rob Africa of the kind of revolutionary breakthroughs in Tunisia and Egypt.

With the rise of popular protest against neoliberalism globally – as we are witnessing inside the United States with massive demonstrations in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio – the US militarists and barons of Wall Street are on the defensive. Despite the isolation and repression of the people of Libya under Gaddafi, after one week of protest people have learnt enough from the Tunisian and Egyptian phases of the revolution to neutralise the armed forces of Gaddafi. This neutralisation of the armed forces means that Gaddafi and his sons are isolated.

Now that there is the possibility of the democratisation of Libyan society, progressive persons everywhere must stand in solidarity with the peoples of Libya against the repression of Gaddafi while opposing all forms of divisive manipulations. Progressives in Europe and North America want to take Libya, Egypt and Tunisia out of Africa and term the process an Arab awakening. There are many in North Africa who may call themselves Arab, but as Firoze Manji rightly corrected some progressives in Europe, ‘Egypt is an African country.’

Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun

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 that document, IMF staff worried that "managing popular expectations and providing some short-term relief measures will be essential to maintain social cohesion in the short term," and that this would come at a price: "external and fiscal financing gaps of US$9-12 billion... which would need to be filled with exceptional support from Egypt's multilateral and bilateral development partners, particularly given the limited scope for adjustment in the short term."

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]