1. The organization of landed property, of the
landed estate, and of landed labor in Egypt was driven and determined by that
which could not truly be appropriated as property—water. Water and the lack thereof, regulated, so to
speak, the oscillations between scarcity and abundance. Water and the lack thereof imposed an
approximate egalitarianism; a communalism among those who settled along the
banks of the Nile, just as water and the lack thereof compelled a rough
equality among the Bedouins, the nomads of the desert.
The medieval village of both Upper and Lower Egypt was a
communal economic unit. Village land was
held in common. In Upper Egypt in
particular, village lands were periodically redistributed among the
cultivators, a redistribution based on the pattern and degree of the Nile
floods.
The village was a fiscal unit, responsible as a unit for the
payment of taxes to the intermediaries of the most recent conquerors.
The village was a labor unit, responsible for maintaining
the irrigation works upon which agriculture depended.
The village was also responsible for supplying the corvée labor
required by the governors, the bey, the wali, the pashas, viceroys for road
building, or for labor on their estates.
Land itself did not exist as private property. It was “held in trust” for the sovereign, the
conqueror.
Those who worked it were
cultivators, proprietors, “custodians.”
Regardless of the formal, jurisdictional designation of land, the tenure in land still resolved itself
along the lines of oppressed and oppressor; exploited and exploiter, the taxed
and the tax-collector, fellahin and shaykhs, fellahin and notables, fellahin
and multezim.
Under successive invasions and occupation—Byzantine, Arab,
Mamluk-Ottoman, Ottoman-Mamluk, the village retain its functions as the basic
unit of production. Through
successive invasions and occupations, the system of appropriation of that
production was modified, altered, but never transformed. The collectors changed, their mode of
reproduction did not. The economy remained one of surplus product but subsistence
production.
“Tribute is better
than booty,” said the Caliph Umar after the victory of his army in Egypt. “It lasts longer.” Indeed it does, but tribute is not value; tribute is not the accumulation
of the means of production, in land, labor or instruments, for the purposes of
increased accumulation.
Egypt was the prize of the Middle East. It was the granary; it was the center, the
entrepōt, of cross continent trade. It
was however, an economy almost completely dependent upon nature.
It was, often, a benevolent nature. The Nile floods covered the fields with
layers of rich silt, replenishing the soil with the organic elements necessary
to cultivation to the degree that no additional fertilizing was necessary. In the 16th and for much of the 17th
centuries, basin irrigation, in which the Nile waters were channeled through
the elevated banks of the Nile to the lower lands, the basins, required much
less labor per acre and per unit of output than the French peasant agriculture
of the same period.
Regardless of how benign, how accommodating nature might or
might not be in any year, the demands of the sovereign upon the tax farmers,
upon the shaykhs, upon the notables for tribute did not slacken but rather
increased. Between the 16th
and 18th centuries, average real taxes increased 35 percent per
feddan (approximately an acre).
Additionally, the lands
cultivated by the fellahin were taxed at a rate higher than that assessed on
the lands of the notables, the wealthy, and the portions of land that the tax
farmers reserved for themselves.
The distinction between booty and tribute, between plunder
and taxation, became immaterial. The compulsory labor service on the estates of
the wealthy, the public works, the pressure of increasing taxes, and the
variation in tax rates all drove greater masses of land into the hands of the
tax farmer, and greater numbers of the fellahin off the land completely. The agricultural system broke down under the
burdens that did not allow for its reproduction. Famine, plague, pestilence, depopulation,
those hand-maidens of the “natural economy” under social stress cycled through
Egypt during the 17th and 18th centuries. By the time of Napoleon’s invasion, the
population of Egypt had declined to less than 4 million. During Roman times, the population had been
accurately measured at over 7 million.
At the time of the Arab conquest, the population may have been as high
as 14 million.
The village system was capable of providing some protection
to the fellahin from the demands of the conquerors. It could not, however, resist both those depredations
and compensate for the short-comings of the natural economy. The village
organization was inimical to capitalism in its “classic” form, of the yeoman
farmer in England dedicating all production to the market in order to
accumulate the values necessary for further accumulation, and thus achieving a
measure of welfare, of well-being.
The decomposition of the village unit that occurs under the
pressure of taxation, and that increases as the failure of the economy obscures
the line between tribute and looting, was not more conducive to an indigenous,
incipient modern capitalism.
Dispossession of the small producer, flight of the small producers,
accumulation of property in land is necessary, but it is not sufficient. The small rural producer has to be
transformed into the laborer. The
dispossessed rural producer has to have somewhere to go… to be able to materialize the loss of holdings, of
usufruct, of cultivation as the raw capacity to labor.
One or more places the fellahin could not go were the
cities, for production and services in the cities were tightly controlled by a
guild system that included merchants, artisans, and transporters.
There was no free labor market in the cities. Moreover, the cities in Egypt lacked a
separate corporate status. They were
seats of administration, of transfer trade, or artisan production, but there
were no separate, dedicated, independent municipalities. Immigration from the rural areas was
restrained by both of these factors, and both, the guild system and lack of
municipal governments, persists until the close of the 19th century.
Already said but it bears repeating, Egypt was the prize,
the jewel; granary and entrepōt. It was
the headquarters of the Red Sea version of the galleon trade, the transfer trade. Reaching its peak between 1690 and 1725, this import and re-export trade, with Egypt straddling Africa, the Arabian
Peninsula, and Europe accounted for one-quarter of all Egypt’s imports, and
almost half of all Egypt’s exports.
Like all good middlemen, the merchants facilitating this trade, lived
well living off the arbitrage, the difference between purchase price and sale
price. And the successive invaders and
occupiers taxed the arbitrage.
In this transit trade, Egypt balanced the deficits it ran
with Africa and Arabia by the surplus it ran with Europe. The import and re-export of coffee was the
key to maintaining this balance. The
coffee trade is estimated to have provided rates of return in excess of 30
percent at its peak.
Egypt’s encounter with European markets, however, was Egypt
encountering Europe encountering the “New World;” encountering Europe and its
colonies in the Caribbean. France
initiated coffee cultivation in its colonies.
By the close of the 18th century, “French” coffee had
captured one-fifth of the market in the Levant.
Cloth exports also declined.
However in the last three years
of the 18th century, while Egyptian agriculture was declining under
the demands of the Mamluks, Egypt exported 120 million kilos of wheat to
Europe. Still,
the surplus Egypt accrued in the European markets had become a deficit.
2. Napoleon came, he saw, but he never
conquered. He was able, however, to
break the power of the Mamluks in Lower Egypt and drive them into Upper
Egypt. Then Napoleon abandoned his army
in Egypt. The Ottomans and the British
combined to the force the French from the country.
The French Revolution is the midwife, la sage-femme, attending the birth of “modern Egypt.” What Napoleon’s Army could not do, conquer
the Mamluks, Muhammad ′Ali could,
massacring them in 1811.
′Ali’s goals were not the liberty, fraternity, equality of
the Revolution. Nor was his goal the
establishment of private property, although his desire to break, and break-up,
the power of the large estates was real enough since the large estates
represented competition to his rule, and his
revenues.
Revenues were the thing for ′Ali, or rather, one of two main
things, the other being independence from the Sublime Porte, from the Sultan of
the Ottoman Empire. Either/or, or both,
′Ali’s transformation of Egypt’s agricultural production was not the product of
some “incipient capitalism,” nurtured in the bosom of peasant production, and
for several reasons. First, and perhaps
foremost, is the historical reality that peasant-based production, that is to
say small cultivator subsistence production,
or “subsistence plus” [surplus] production
does not give rise “naturally” or automatically or even generally to capitalist
agricultural production. Secondly, in
the case of Egypt, the fellahin were never really a peasantry, individual
owners, and individual cultivators. The
village as an economic unit endured. Not
serfs, not a peasantry, and certainly not the “yeoman farmers” at the origins
of English capitalism, the fellahin as a social class, in its fragmentation, differentiation,
and recomposition is the point of intersection for Egypt’s uneven and combined
development.
′Ali’s transformation of Egypt’s agriculture was the product
of Egypt’s encounter with the “world markets”—actually the markets of European
capitalism.
Revenues were the thing that would make the wali a king; or
at least the pasha a khedive. Revenues
meant producing commodities for markets; production for the capitalist markets
of Europe meant all production would
present itself as production for
exchange. Subsistence was derivative to,
derived from, that exchange.
Cash crops, indigo, sugarcane, wheat, and most importantly
cotton—commodities-- meant revenues
for Egypt. Commodities meant
accumulation for the European market as each commodity was purchased and
consumed in the reproduction of value.
Wheat had been the
primary cash crop exported to Europe, but the Corn Laws in England and the
introduction, and maintenance, of tariffs upon Egyptian wheat by successive
French governments, along with growing competition from production in Russia,
dramatically reduced the cash the crop was garnering. ′Ali brought saw big money in the superior long-staple
cotton of Egypt.
If cotton was money, was to become money in the markets of European capitalism, then the market-driven production of cotton
required extension of the area devoted to this production and more intensive
cultivation of the land already given over to its production. ′Ali
brought in European experts, providing them with entire villages to direct in
the planting and harvesting cotton.
Cotton cultivation is one thirsty business. More cotton requires more land and much more
water. Cotton required much more
labor. Egypt’s shift to commodity production
is marked by a shift in the technique of cultivation—from basin irrigation of
fields, where the Nile’s water and silt flowed
into low-lying fields, to perennial irrigation, where water is lifted, pumped through canals to lands
above the water level.
It’s a thirsty business, and a labor intensive one. That labor was provided by the fellahin, of
course, through the corvée, of course.
“Modernity,” “Progress!”
demanded it.
Progress indeed. In
the 16the century, corvée labor was provided with a wage. By the 18th century, no
compensation was provided. In the 19th
century, the corvée laborer might or might not receive a meager wage, but more
often than not had to provide his own water and food.
Progress indeed. The
area under cultivation more than doubled between 1800 and 1830. Those plots that had been abandoned by the
fellahin in the last years of the 18th century and the first years
of the 19th century were absorbed into the large landed
estates. Those plots that were not
abandoned were impaired by the corvée.
Perhaps 400,000 fellahin were supplied to the corvee᷄ for
periods up to four months every year
Progress indeed. The
fellahin responded to the corvée with passive resistance, active rebellion, and
flight.
Again, smaller plots were absorbed into the larger plots as
the fellahin fled, or fell into arrears on taxes, or defaulted on debts to, not
banks which had little penetration of the countryside, but to individual money
lenders, in large part foreigners, protected from Egyptian law by their foreign
status and the “mixed courts” which were created to protect that status.
Progress indeed. ′Ali’s introduction of military
conscription, “opening” the ranks of the army to “citizens” increased the
burdens on the fellahin. Forced away
from the means of their subsistence, and their families’ subsistence, for
periods even greater than those of the corvée, again the fellahin responded
with resistance, flight, and in this instance, self-mutilation. Such is the meaning of progress.
A whole century of progress was unfolding. There was progress in extending and
intensifying cash crop production. Progress established private property in land.
There was progress in building railroads, constructed by the
fellahin, of course, since there was no “free labor” market in the cities.
There was progress in constructing the Suez Canal, a modern
product of corvée labor.
There was progress in irrigation, in output and land
productivity, for a time at least. In
the 19th century, areas under cultivation more than doubled. Labor
productivity was not, however, a measure
of, or measured by, such progress, as the fellahin worked more days, longer
hours to a degree that exceeded the increases in output.
Progress: the pashas,
about 12,000 in number now owned, as private property, about 45 percent of
the cultivated area. The rich peasants
and village officials (shaykhs) comprising about 15 percent of those owning
land, owned 35 percent of the cultivated area.
Small peasants (0-5 feddans), making up 80-90 percent of landowners
owned 20 percent of the cultivated area.
There was progress in banking, and even more progress in
bankruptcy. At the end of the century,
37 percent of the fellahin working plots of 0-5 feddans (with 3 feddans
considered the minimum size required to meet subsistence requirements) were in
debt. Three-quarters of that debt was
owed to the moneylenders. More than 40
percent of fellahin families were landless.
There was progress in national bankruptcy as the de facto subjugation of Egypt to its
foreign debts became the de jure rule
of the Caisse de la Dette Publique.
There was not so much progress in that critical component of
extended and intensive irrigation, drainage. Lack of drainage allowed salts to build
up in the soil eventually reducing yields, and raised the below ground water
levels such that the roots of the cotton plants drowned.
Progress indeed. Here’s progress in a nutshell: Due to the increased amounts of standing
water in the irrigation canals and the raising of the ground water levels,
insect pests, parasites, and pathogens proliferated. Malaria increased. Schistosomiasis,
blood parasites attacking humans after germinating in the snails living in the
irrigation canals, infected more than half the agricultural population.
Emerging from all
this progress was a specific configuration of Egyptian capitalism. The reorganization of Egyptian agriculture,
its engagement with the European markets, the penetration of European investment,
and the demands of the European banks did not throttle some sort of historical
progression from feudalism to “modern” capitalism in favor of the mis-named,
mis-apprehended “primitive accumulation.”
The original accumulation transforming Egypt
in the 19th century was that of the shaykhs, the pashas, and the
khedive, of accumulating property in land, that is to say, separating the
fellahin from the means of their own subsistence, transforming the fellahin into a rural labor force and thereby
creating private property in
land.
The point of original
accumulation is the establishment of the social relations of capital
accumulation, that is to say the dispossession of the producers; the transformation of the
producers into the
laborers. This was accomplished by ′Ali and his
successors, Abbas, Said, and Ismail.
3. It is almost axiomatic to the analysis of, and analysis of a country through, uneven and combined development
that “backward” relations of production remained embedded in the rural economy
while the “modern” relations— of industrial capitalist and industrial
proletariat—are implanted into the urban centers. From this axiomatic misinterpretation of
history, it is concluded that the backward rural economy is “feudal” or
“semi-feudal” or “neo-feudal” and that the agricultural laborers are peasants toiling under “serf-like”
conditions.
The real content of
history, happily, is blind to axiomatic interpretation, even those from an
astute, and acute, a critic of capitalist reproduction as Rosa Luxemburg. In her Accumulation
of Capital, one of the great, flawed, works of materialist analysis, Rosa
argues that the history of Egypt in the second half of 19th century
is the history of the interplay of large-scale capitalist enterprises, public
debt, and the collapsing peasant
economy. The fellahin were never a peasantry as the
word is usually construed, as the peasantry that existed in England in the 15th,
16th, 17th centuries.
Rosa had missed the
critical, determining factors in the development of Egypt’s relations with the
world markets:
That capitalist relations
had already developed in and transformed the rural economy prior to the second
half of the 19th century:
That by 1858 private
property had achieved its “ultimate” title, winning legal sanction;
That the
codification of private property does not turn fellahin into peasant,
ex-peasant, or farmer;
That the formal right to private ownership has no economic content
for the fellahin in that the average size of the fellahin holdings is too small
to provide subsistence for the
individual cultivator much less the cultivator with family;
That land ownership
by fellahin serves to veil the
relationship of fellahin to shaykh, fellahin to pasha, fellahin to khedive—which
relationship is that of the wage-laborers
to the capitalists;
That establishment in
the 19th century of capitalist relations in agriculture does not
penetrate the urban centers of Egypt.
The inability of
cities in Egypt to establish for themselves a separate, economically
independent, corporate status as cities had established in Europe. made the
cities refuge, not for those dispossessed from the land, not for those fleeing
conscription or the corvée, not for those possessing only their labor power to
exchange, but rather for the absentee landlords, the pashas, the notables, the
government and military officials, the merchants, the money-lenders of Greek,
Lebanese, Italian origin, and for the guilds who maintained tight control over
providing the services to patrons that a city would have provided to its
citizens.
The city was the
area where the wealthy could live as if their wealth was a wealth through land
rather than through aggrandizement of the labor power absorbed in the rural
production of values. The “semi-feudalism”
in Egypt persists not in the dominant relations of agricultural production by
in the affectations and poses of the urban wealthy.
This fact is of
utmost significance for the course of class struggle in Egypt, the “national
revolution,” for “economic development,” in that Egyptian capitalism never
produces a class capable of undertaking such development. Egyptian capitalism never produces a class
capable of “substituting” for an industrial bourgeoisie.
The Egyptian state
whether under the Khedive, the heel of the Caisse de la Dette Publique, the Wafd Party, the Revolutionary Command
Council, the Liberation Rally, or the National Democratic Party can only
maintain itself to the degree that it prevents social revolution. Indeed, the accommodation with the “national
revolution” forced upon the advanced capitalist countries, the occupiers of
Egypt, is established on the ability of the “national revolution” to more
effectively suppress the proletariat and the prospects for social
revolution.
Where Umar said “tribute
is better than booty, it lasts longer,” Foster Dulles said, “better Nasser than
Lenin. We’ll last longer.”
Marx remarks the
wage relationship “veils” the unpaid labor at the origin of capital accumulation,
of value production. In the history of
the countries of Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, the wage relation
itself is veiled in the organization of rural production. But a wage relation it is. So the issues and conflicts within the capitalist
markets are never, and never simply, issues and conflicts of economic
development, but rather of class struggle; of the emancipation of labor from
the social obsolescence of capital.\
November 17, 2012
Next: The Death
Agony of Anti-Imperialism, Part 3: Egypt,
Part 2
