The Revolution In Egypt & Neoliberalism

"Neoliberalism describes a market-driven approach to economic and social policy based on neoclassical theories of economics that stresses the efficiency of private enterprise, liberalized trade and relatively open markets, and therefore seeks to maximize the role of the private sector in determining the political and economic priorities of the state." More

The Egyptian public is curiously silent about the wealth amassed by army generals. Instead, the aim is to freeze the billions in public assets stolen by government officials, Hosni Mubarak included. What seems to go unnoticed is the role of neoliberalism in creating the division between haves and have-nots.

The generals, of course, are only too willing to have the blame deflected from them. There is a reason for this. They and their army are depended upon to oversee the engines of change. Scoundrels they may be, but they provide the only means to regime change. The means, in this case, are seen as justifying the end.

But theirs is only one part of the role in a corrupted Egyptian government. Not only that, "calling it corruption suggests that the problem is aberrations from a system that would otherwise function smoothly."

The real culprit, according to some, is neoliberalism. Mubarak and his cronies "were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state."

In his Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey describes "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade."

If markets don't exist, then the state should create them. Often by privatizing public functions such as "water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution."

In neoliberal doctrine, markets are sanctified. "All human behavior, and not just the production of goods and services, can be reduced to market transactions."

So, against the Marxist utopia of communism, we have the neoliberal utopia of markets.