The revolution which began in Egypt in January 2011 may be a unique example
worldwide of popular engagement in political action. For month after month
millions of people have participated in street protests, strikes, occupations,
community mobilizations and electoral campaigns. When archives of the revolution
are finally examined it seems likely that the scale, range and continuity of these
initiatives will show the Egyptian upheaval to be unmatched in modern history….

We are publishing this blog as a companion piece for our podcast by Ahdaf Souief, Egypt: the ongoing revolution.  It is an extract from an article by Professor Philip Marfleet, of the School of Law and Social Sciences (LSS), University of East London which analyses how, with the encouragement of international financial institutions and Western governments, the Egyptian state of Hosnei Mubarak became a means of channeling public resources into private hands, using complex relations of privilege among officials and oligarchs.

The article, Mubarak’s Egypt – Nexus of Criminality, was first published in the State Crime Journal published by Pluto Press, which is administered by the International State Crime Initiative at Kings College London.

Here is the extract from Phil Marfleet’s paper, the full text of which is in the State Crime Journal. You can find the rest of the article here.

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….Many untimely obituaries have declared the [Egyptian] revolution to be over, the peoples’ energies exhausted and their aspirations unfulfilled.

But drawing on a deep reservoir of resources including anger, hope, confidence and creativity, activists have defied all expectations. At the time of writing, in July 2013, there was no sign that the process was coming to an end: indeed, the unprecedentedly large demonstrations of 30 June 2013, said to have involved some 17 million people in protests against the presidency of Mohamed Mursi, suggested that the movement of the streets was continuing with vigour.2

This article considers a motivating force for the Egyptian upheaval: the struggle for justice after decades of rule by a
state synonymous with crime. Above all, the Egyptian revolution is a contestation
of state deviancy in all its forms, in which the mass of the people have applied
their own sanctions to dictatorship, terror, corruption, dispossession and theft. The
article focuses on networked criminality characteristic of the Mubarak regime –
the nexus of deviant practices centred on the state and its domestic agendas but
which have also embraced governments and agencies worldwide.
Egypt is one of many states in which public institutions have been used
increasingly openly against the population at large. Since the colonial era a series
of Egyptian regimes has monopolized power, inhibited development of civil
society and violated human rights, including basic rights to which the Egyptian
state is formally committed. Egypt’s rulers have had much in common with their
peers across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and with the practices of some
states of the Global North. What makes Egypt distinct, however, is the emergence
since the 1970s of networks of criminality centred on the state, and which have
been endorsed and sustained continuously by international bodies with full
knowledge of their impact on the mass of the population. Here, deviant practices
of the Mubarak state are part of an agenda for global development supervised
by transnational financial institutions including the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the World Bank. Egypt was among the first post-colonial states to
adopt neo-liberal policies introduced by these agencies during the 1970s: 40
years later the regime that emerged with their support was widely seen as a
criminal enterprise which required removal by means of direct intervention by
the people.“uprising against Crime”

Writing in 2012, the independent film-maker Philip Rizk argued that Egypt’s
revolution was “an uprising against crime… This crime was structural and
legalised – made legal by the political leadership of Egypt and their friends and
business partners that practise it” (Rizk 2012). Husni Mubarak came to power in
1981, inheriting a regime that was already centralized, elitist and authoritarian,
and tied to commercial interests focused on speculative activity and short-term
business gains – the “fat cat” associates of his predecessor as president, Anwar
Sadat (Hirst and Beeson 1981). Mubarak confirmed and strengthened these
links; he also launched a programme of economic reform that abandoned public
ownership of much of the economy and dismantled the welfare state. By the 1990s,
Egypt had become a laboratory for neo-liberal policies promoted by governments
of the Global North and by transnational financial agencies including the IMF and
the World Bank. Mubarak and his collaborators embraced these approaches with
enthusiasm: the president shortly became one of the agencies’ global exemplars
and Egypt “an IMF poster child” (Mabrouk and El-Bakry 2004). In 2008 the World
Bank’s International Finance Corporation declared Egypt its global “top reformer”
(Doing Business 2008). A minority of Egyptians associated with Mubarak and his
networks of patronage were rapidly enriched while an unprecedented proportion
of the population fell below official poverty lines, as social inequality became
more and more marked (Marfleet 2009).

Mubarak’s reforms met with resistance. Countless local struggles in industry,
on the land, on campuses and at the community level gave expression to their
impact on the mass of people. The regime responded with increasing aggression.
Using Emergency Laws introduced in 1981 it targeted all those who challenged
the reforms, so that Mubarak’s economic agenda was imbricated with the political
practice of the state itself. For the majority of people, the state in its many forms
– known as al-nizam (“the order”) – was experienced as an intrusion into all areas
of life. Backed by a largely compliant judiciary and by military courts, the police
and security networks operated with extreme violence – in the streets, workplaces,
campuses and every area of formal and informal political life. As Rizk (2012)
asserts, the state itself had become a crime – one “made legal” by those who
directed it at home and those who supported and encouraged it among powerful
institutions abroad.

The revolution which began on 25 January 2011 was remarkable for both the
scale of mobilization and the expressiveness of those involved. A striking feature
of public protests was the range of banners, placards, leaflets, chants, poems,
songs, graffiti, street paintings and installations, among which the twin themes of
criminality and of justice featured prominently in words and images. Numerous
home-made notices declared against Mubarak “the thief”, against corruption and
“mafia”. The uprising was not only, however, a means of removing a dictator: it
was also an attempt to settle accounts with the regime as a whole and to summon
publicly new means of political engagement. Gribbon and Hawas (2012: 113)
note that, “Demands for ‘justice’ and ‘dignity’ were therefore central to the
revolution.” The search for justice has been expressed in widespread campaigns
of tathir – “cleansing” – with efforts to remove local officials, police chiefs,
managers of industrial and commercial enterprises, and trade union leaders linked
to the Mubarak regime. Numerous demonstrations have targeted police stations
and security headquarters associated with torture and abuse, with the aim of
securing records which can be used to bring perpetrators to justice. Thousands of
prosecutions have been brought against leading figures of the former regime and
against feloul – those said to be “remnants” of the Mubarak order. Egyptians have
challenged “the very notion of the ‘state’ and what it means to be a citizen and to
call for government accountability” (Gribbon and Hawas 2012: 112).

The Arabic term most often used since 2011 to describe the former president
and his order is baatil – false, invalid, worthless. In hundreds of protests across
Egypt the Mubarak state has been declared illegitimate. Green and Ward (2000:
76) observe that when states are considered in the context of popular legitimacy,
their conduct – including violations of domestic and international law – comes into
focus. They comment: “A state’s legitimacy must be considered in terms of the
state’s relationship to civil society and to other states, as well as of class relations
within the state” (Green and Ward 2000: 76). In the case of Egypt the uprising
of 2011 gave striking evidence of the absence of legitimacy; at the same time
it created public space within which policies and practices of the state could be
examined critically. Since the fall of Mubarak there has been a flowering of civil
society, with establishment of a host of political parties, independent trade unions,
student unions, professional associations, human rights bodies and community
groups. Most share a commitment to social justice (Arabic – ‘adala ijtamaia) and
to continuing vigilance vis-à-vis forces of the state, often expressed in the slogan:
“We’re never going back” (to the Mubarak order).

Most maintain an assertively critical stance in relation to the state itself: notwithstanding differences in policy,  strategy and tactics, this remains a unifying feature of the popular movement.

It is within the space created by their political agency that the mass of Egyptians
assess the Mubarak order and the regimes which preceded it. It is their agency,
expressed through countless acts of resistance, that brings into focus the conduct ofthe state and prompts enquiry into state power and state practices. Criminologists
have recently recognized the importance of resistance in highlighting institutional
deviance and what Stanley and McCulloch (2013: 2) call “everyday harms and
violence that are embedded within the fabric of society”.6

The present article draws upon these insights and upon recent work in Contemporary History, International
Political Economy and Development Studies. It examines Egypt in the context of
Marxist approaches to the modern state as described by Engels (1968: 577) – as a
“public power” which rests ultimately upon bodies organized to mobilize force and
on “prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds”. In this sense the modern state
– the capitalist nation-state – is never benign. It is an expression of class relations:
of the determination of those who enjoy a disproportionate share of wealth
and who exercise hegemonic influence over the wider society to maintain their
privilege. Not all states, however, are engaged in continuous, systematic activity
to deny human freedoms and general well-being. Many are subject to pressures
from below which constrain the agendas of ruling classes and some conform to
principles – including those identified in international agreements on human rights
– which may modify their conduct (albeit inconsistently) in relation to the wider
society.

In the case of Egypt, the state has been increasingly uninhibited in its
use of violence, transgressing principles of human rights and standards of public
conduct formalized in law locally and internationally. These developments have
taken place as successive regimes embraced policies for economic development
championed by international bodies notionally committed to the same laws and
principles. It is here that the popular verdict on Mubarak – baatil – also raises
questions about the legitimacy of key actors on the world stage, raising challenging
issues about the nature of state crime in an era of global change.

Tags: Croney capitalism, Egypt revolution, Mubarak, State crime