The Arab revolts against neoliberalism

Fearful of the collapse of the political order, the authoritarian political regime of President Hosni Mubarak recently conceded to the demands of the poor and the workers and promised a 30 percent wage increase for public servants and urged the private sector to offer similar compensation. [...] In the course of the 1980s, the Left allied itself with the ruling NDP (National Democratic Party) against the Muslim Brotherhood and this cost the Left the support of the poor and peasants from rural Egypt. [...] Most of the movements that have emerged over the past decade have been a response to this transformation of Egypt from epicenter of struggles against colonialism and Zionism to defender of U. S. imperialism and Israel, from a state based on the nationalization of industry and benefits for workers and the poor to privatization and the dismantling of the welfare state. [...] An Expression of the Global Crisis The first illustration of the class character of these popular uprisings is their link to the chain of protests that have erupted over the last three years in the wake of the global economic crisis. [...] There is no space to discuss the complex reasons behind this rising commodity inflation except to note that it is another aspect of the crisis itself – partially resulting from the large quantities of extra cash pumped into the system to ameliorate the crisis in the core countries, particularly the U. S. program of quantitative easing.[3] Once again, the effects have been magnified in much of the