Arab Development Denied

Ali Kadri

Description

An examination of the Arab world’s de-development over the last three decades, under a barrage of wars and neoliberal policies.

Ali Kadri examines how over the last three decades the Arab world has undergone a process of developmental descent, or de-development. He defines de-development as the purposeful deconstruction of developing entities. The Arab world has lost its wars and its society restructured to absorb the terms of defeat masquerading as development policies under neoliberalism. Foremost in this process of de-development are the policies of de-industrialisation that have laid to waste the production of knowledge, created a fully compradorial ruling class that relies on commerce and international finance for its reproduction, as opposed to nationally based production, and halted the primary engine of job creation. The Arab mode of accumulation has come to be based on commerce in a manner similar to that of the pre-capitalist age along with its cultural decay. Kadri attributes the Arab world’s developmental failure not only to imperialist hegemony over oil, but also to the rising role of financialisation, which goes hand in hand with the wars of encroachment that were already stripping the Arab world of its resources. War for war’s sake has become a tributary to the world economy, argues Kadri, and like oil, there is neither a shortage of war nor a shortage of the conditions to make new war in the Arab world.

Introduction; Chapter 1: Stocktaking and Assessment; Chapter 2: De-development and Conventional Policies; Chapter 3: Class Politics Masquerading as Democracy; Chapter 4: The Stillborn and Decomposing Arab State; Chapter 5: War and Oil Control; Chapter 6: Dislocation under Imperialist Assault; Chapter 7: Arab Disintegration and the Rising Power of Imperialism; Chapter 8: Commodification of Labour Coming to Conclusion in Times of Socialist Ideological Retreat

Sujets

• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Political economy

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783082681
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Arab Development Denied

Arab Development Denied

Dynamics of Accumulation
by Wars of Encroachment

Ali Kadri

Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2015
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

First published in hardback by Anthem Press in 2014

Copyright © 2015 Ali Kadri

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Kadri, Ali.
Arab development denied : dynamics of accumulation by wars of encroachment / Ali Kadri.
pages cm
laceferrgoiihpas deblbiIlunc.nd indexrences a
epap .kla : revodcar(h4 7-268-3079-8-187IBS N r) –
ISBN 1-78308-267-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. raAcob trunditions. 2.ei–scEnomocic no onecn igel ricomrtnuoc beroF–seiArasn.taoi
3. 4n.tric yc.o upcoolnioemsi–cE rAba .esrintou cab–mrAlasibireeNlo I.eltiT .
HC498K33 2014
330.917’4927–dc23
2014020401

ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 432 6 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 1 78308 432 4 (Pbk)

Cover image © Joshua Rickard

This title is also available as an ebook.

To Maged

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

References
Index

C

O

N

TEN

Stocktaking and Assessment

TS

De-development and Conventional Policies

Class Politics Masquerading as Democracy

The Stillborn and Decomposing Arab State

Wars and Oil Control

Dislocation under Imperialist Assault
Arab Disintegration and the Rising Power
of Imperialism
Commodification of Labour
Coming to Conclusion in Times
of Socialist Ideological Retreat

ix

1
27
49
71
93
115
137

159
181

205

223
245

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to too many people to name for the completion of this work.
However, I would like to particularly thank Professors Martha Mundy and
Adam Francis Cornford for their helpful comments. I also would like to thank
Professors Timothy Dyson and Stuart Corbridge from the Department of
International Development at the London School of Economics. I would
especially like to thank the National University of Singapore for providing me
with research facilities.

INTRODUCTION

Over the last three decades, the Arab world (hereafter referred to as the AW,
as per the definition of the Arab League) has undergone a process of reverse
development. edop tI sahd-edleveTh. que italed, ciatalitap cts iofy erped sah kcots
median incomes have plummeted, unemployment has soared, and restrictions
on already constrained civil liberties have tightened. When wars and civil
wars in Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria
are considered, the scale of humanitarian disasters could possibly compete
with those of the Congo. In short, the AW has failed the test of development,
broadly defined as a process of economic growth, with expanding output and
employment, technological progress and institutional transformation that
1
steadily improve the well-being of working classes (ESCCHR 2004). That
the Arab ruling classes would bring about development was the lie that their
bought intellectuals peddled. Instead of development, or ‘the realisation of
the right to development and the fulfilment of a set of claims by people,
principally on their state but also on the society at large, including the
international community, in a process that enables them to realise the rights
set forth in the International Bill of Human Rights’, working classes in the AW
have experienced the reverse (ESCCHR 2004).
Most astounding is not the obliviousness of the ‘international community’
to violations of human rights and gutting of working-class living standards by
Arabregimes; it is the degree of US-led intervention and overt support for the
these s litnU .semigerace pleo palerevea d thross the AW burndet ehsmleev sot
in the street, the mainstream’s assessment of Arab development was as rosy

1

I have replaced the ‘people’ with ‘working classes’ in the definition given to development
by the Economic and Social Council Commission on Human Rights (2004). Also my
employment of the concept of freedom differs from its meaning as a set of choices
aligned with given probabilities from which the individual chooses. This is a formalised
definition of freedom. Human rights are inseparable from communal or
workingclass rights and freedom is the appreciation of the necessity in the mediation of the
individual in the particular or, simply, the complementarity between the part and the
whole.

2

ARAB DEvELOPMENT DENIED

as could be. In reality, few other regions in the world can match the rate of
developmental descent experienced in the AW and the success with which the
ideological instruments of capital have depicted bane as boon.
There is plenty of evidence to support the hypothesis of de-development.
Ironically, there is even evidence in the lack of evidence. Whereas states on
the road to development produce evidentiary statistics to assess their own
course of development, most Arab states have ceased to produce adequate
statistics. This is so not because of national security concerns—these states
have little national security left. It is because de-development has become so
pervasive that producing knowledge in the form of statistics exceeds their
productive capabilities. These nations have hollowed out the production of
knowledge, which is additional evidence that they have undergone a process
of de-development. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria and Syria
produced sophisticated input–output models meant to guide planning in the
economy. Now, the paucity of data in almost all areas of economic and social
activity tells of retrogression. The data gleaned from the available macro
records tell the story:

2rof sedaama eht (th wtroec deehrl noopromrg -get iew ethgmagldetad
average, UN data);
2)I; ,DWoleveD dlroW( htrstocadiInt enpm lerevunioent growe-depend
2 efosmo rathest hig the Indicators of teh oesunf plemmeoyg tnabol yllyeK(
Labour Market [KILM] various years);
2y uningll inequad siocemtuoirtbi saercni mos thee of somlaosi sihhc,nw t
extreme in the world (University of Texas, Inequality Project);
2 states oscillate between theoutflows ofreal and financial resources (the Gulf
third and fourth largest buyers ofAmerican debt); and
2on human rights rarely seen elsewhere (Amnesty International, infringements
2009).

What is more unusual is that when positive growth did take hold, as happened
over the last decade, absolute povertygrew. After a decade ofaround six per
cent real growth in Egypt, the Integrated Regional Information Networks
(IRIN) reported in 2009 that nearly a third ofEgyptian children suffered from
malnutrition. In Yemen, more than halfof allchildren are malnourished
(UNICEF, 2012). When one assesses the degree to which Arab ruling classes
are subordinately tied to international financial capital, one is apt to ask
why the more sophisticated organised dimension ofUS-led capital has not
intervened to halt regression when it takes so little in money capital to do so.
De-development should not be confused with relative underdevelopment
visà-vis Western formations or with a delinking ofdeveloping formations from the

INTRODUCTION

global accumulation process. De-development is the purposeful deconstruction of
developing entities. Primarily, it involves stripping by force the working classes
in those entities of the right to own and control their resources and use them
for their own benefit. The fact of de-development is an argument for capitalist
decadence, made manifest by the acute degrees of misery in security-exposed
peripheral countries. Decadence—the lethargic stage in development akin to
forms of primitive accumulation or dispossession without the re-engagement
of resources in national production, like enclosures of common land without
the rehiring of peasants in wage-labour activity—hits new lows when wars
2
socialise whole countries, leaving their resources up for grabs. This is not the
developmental locus classicus of evicting thousands of peasants from the land
and thereby transforming them into social labour in search of wage work; wars
dislodge and evict massive national resources to be more likely decommissioned