An emphasis on class does not mean that other divisions do not exist within a given society. Class formation is a process involving real human beings, and this means that the concrete conditions of class always carry specific characteristics—of gender, race, age, national origin, and so forth—that are given particular social meaning through their process of coming into being.34 Approaching class in this manner helps to guard against economistic views that tend to set up class as an abstract category shorn of its particularities. It means, for example, that it makes little sense to speak of class in a concrete sense without also acknowledging that it is simultaneously gendered as it forms. Moreover, in the Middle East context, as well as globally, class formation cannot be understood without tracing movements of people across and within borders—it is thus also marked by distinct and concrete relationships between geographical spaces.35 These processes need to be considered concurrently if a full picture of class formation is to be grasped.
It is also important to acknowledge that there exists a wide variety of labor relations within any capitalist society. In the global South, the working class rarely manifests in the “pure” form that Marx emphasized in Capital, made up of individuals, each of whom “as a free individual can dispose of his labour power as his own commodity” with “no other commodity for sale.”36 In reality, capitalism continues to reproduce and integrate into the process of accumulation various “forms of labor exploitation,”37 including slavery, indentured labor, child labor, sharecropping, dormitory systems for migrant workers, and forms of subcontracting. Workers frequently depend upon non-wage activities in order to reproduce themselves (such as the farming of small plots of land or unpaid family labor). Within both rural and urban spheres, classes are typically stratified according to varying levels of wealth and power. In the Arab world, all of these complexities are crucial to describing the specificities of capitalism and class.
Keeping these subtleties in mind, it is nonetheless accurate to state that conventional accounts of the Middle East generally downplay questions of class, reducing it to just one of many different “interest groups,” such as “business elites.” This is a fundamental flaw in mainstream conceptions of civil society, which, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has pointed out in her seminal analysis of the notion, is a “conceptual portmanteau [that] indiscriminately lumps everything together from households and voluntary associations to the economic system of capitalism.”38 In this manner, the state/civil society dichotomy serves to “conceptualize away the problem of capitalism, by disaggregating society into fragments, with no overarching power structure, no totalizing unity, no systemic coercions—in other words, no capitalist system, with its expansionary drive and its capacity to penetrate every aspect of social life.”39 Academic approaches that present the ideal of liberal democracy as the desired policy goal—supposedly guaranteeing the same rights and responsibilities for all “civil society actors” regardless of wealth, social status, or accident of birth—act to obfuscate this reality of class power. The economic realm is separated from the political sphere. Capitalism itself is rendered invisible through a juridical scrim of “equal rights” that posits equality where none exists.
An emphasis on patterns of class formation leads, furthermore, to a sharply different notion of the state than that employed in conventional frameworks of analysis. According to Marx, the nature of political institutions such as the state is a historically determined social form—or form of appearance—of the class structure that has arisen around capitalist accumulation. The state serves to represent and defend this class structure while mediating conflicts that inevitably arise between (and within) the ruling class and other classes and strata.40 It is, in other words, not a separate sphere of politics that stands apart from the economic sphere but a social relation, or, as Bertell Ollman describes it, “the set of institutional forms through which a ruling class relates to the rest of society.”41 Ollman’s use of “relate” here has a very specific meaning, based upon his reading of what he describes as Marx’s “philosophy of internal relations.” Within this perspective, the relations existing between objects should not be considered external to the objects themselves but as part of what actually constitutes them. Any object under study needs to be seen as “relations, containing in themselves, as integral elements of what they are, those parts with which we tend to see them externally tied.”42 Objects, in other words, are not self-contained; they are constituted through the relations they hold in their stance with the whole. The relationships in which all things are embedded do not exist “outside” these objects (or externally) but are intrinsic to their very nature. Utilizing this approach, analytical emphasis moves away from taking for granted the isolated categories presented to us by the empirical world (such as the authoritarian state) toward an attempt to comprehend reality through the totality of internally related parts.43
From this standpoint, the state is not an independent, separate feature of society, severed from the class structure that generates its character. The relationship the ruling class holds with the state is actually part of what constitutes it as a class; state and class need to be seen as mutually reinforcing and co-constituted, with the latter providing the conditions of existence for the former. An analysis of the state, therefore, must begin with an “examination of the ‘anatomy of bourgeois society,’ that is, an analysis of the specifically capitalist mode of social labour, the appropriation of the surplus product and the resulting laws of reproduction of the whole social formation, which objectively give rise to the particular political form.”44 Seen in this manner, class formation—the ways in which classes coalesce around the production, realization, and appropriation of profit—becomes a central element to understanding social formation and the nature of state power.
The eschewal of this consideration is a major weakness of standard approaches to authoritarianism and the form of the state in the Middle East. By treating the state as a disconnected, all-dominating “thing” rather than as a social relation formed alongside the development of class, these perspectives treat the institutional forms of society as determinant rather than determined.45 In contrast, within the Marxist framework, the secret behind the state’s form is not to be found in contingent factors such as culture, religion, resource endowment, leadership styles, or the institutional arrangements of ruling families but rather in the specific nature of capitalist accumulation in that particular society. The authoritarian guise of the Middle East state is not anomalous and antagonistic to capitalism, but is rather a particular form of appearance of capitalism in the Middle East context. The task becomes one of demonstrating how and why this is the case—not beginning with the appearance of the state and investing it with determinant explanatory power.
In line with this basic methodological approach, a major goal of this book is to convey some of the principal aspects of the intertwined development of class and state in the Middle East—tracing where and how various classes in the region (both capital and labor) originated, what their accumulation is based around, how this has shifted over time, and the ways in which this process of class formation links to the nature and changing attributes of the state. With this perspective in mind, there are three key concepts employed throughout this book that require further elaboration: the internationalization of class and state, imperialism, and neoliberalism.
Internationalization of Class and State
Marx himself famously noted that capitalism always acts to “tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e., to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market . . . [as capital develops] the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market.”46 This observation has been strikingly confirmed in the contemporary world economy, where the production of a typical commodity involves labor and inputs from across the globe. The place where a given commodity is eventually sold is very likely not the same place as where it is produced. The largest capitalist firms consider their production and marketing decisions from the perspective of a global marketplace, not simply from within their own national borders. These processes indicate, as Christian Palloix noted in the 1970s, that the commodity is “conceptualized, produced, and realized at the level of the world market.”47 Palloix termed this fundamental characteristic