Al-Ahram Weekly | Books Supplement (November 2002)

		21 - 27 November 2002 Issue No. 613 Books	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Inconsistencies on democracy
Rigal Al-A'mal, Al-Dimoukratiya wa Huqouq Al-Insan (Businessmen: Democracy and Human Rights), Mohamed El-Sayed Said, Cairo: Cairo Centre for Human Rights, 2001. pp171

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The Cairo Stock Exchange, 2000
The works of Mohamed El-Sayed Said are characterised as much by their encyclopaedic breadth and scholarly depth as they are by their stylistic eloquence and provocative treatment of the contemporary issues relevant to those working in the public domain in Egypt. The book that is the subject of this review is no exception.
Businessmen, Democracy and Human Rights is unique in its blend of empirical and analytical approaches. The study takes as its starting point a survey of Egyptian businessmen based on a questionnaire on the problems of democracy and human rights, and proceeds to a systematic discussion of various ideological propositions, with an emphasis on the Marxist, on class formation and composition in the Third World, and especially in Egypt. It concludes with the author's attempt to project his conceptual framework upon the Egyptian bourgeoisie, and, in particular, on the entrepreneurial part of this class, on the basis of the respondents' answers to the questionnaires.
Said distinguishes between "businessmen" and "bourgeoisie", the latter class being associated with the legal ownership of property in general, and the former comprising those who manage assets for the purpose of profit. The distinction dates back to 19th-century European economics, which paid attention to the social category of entrepreneurs as a distinct, and influential, social and economic force in modern capitalism. It is on this distinction that Said grounds his critique of 20th century Marxist tenets, as these have been applied to capitalist development in non-industrially advanced nations, such as Russia, China and the countries of the Third World.
The author examines the extent to which there existed in these countries the historical conditions necessary for a socialist-style coup d'etat that aimed to replace the bourgeoisie at the helm of power. In Marxist terms, this would amount to transferring control of the democratic capitalist nation-state to a Marxist-Leninist party as the embodiment of new, proletarian power. This party would then pursue its goals either in the form of Trotskyist continuing revolution, or in the form of the "People's Democracies" experienced in many Eastern European countries from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Said maintains that the necessary conditions did not exist, and that the premature application of the Marxist-Leninist paradigm generated many pernicious results.
It must be said that the book presents a rather academic, abstract version of the violent political ferments that swept Europe from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. Not that one could have conceived, in the midst of the violent clashes between the diverse political and social forces ranked against one another and in the conflict over markets that brought widespread poverty and the millions of dead and wounded in two world wars, that the various socialist parties and revolutionary groups would stop to conduct surveys to discover the attitudes of their local bourgeoisie towards questions of democracy and human rights. However, Said makes little attempt to conceal his own ideological convictions, not always with consistent results. For example, he remarks that European and Russian socialists supported the European colonisation of the underdeveloped world because of the progressive consequences that this would allegedly stimulate. But he then states just the opposite, saying that "this theory changed after the Russian revolution to reflect the exigencies of conflicting factions, and, specifically, the political needs of Soviet Marxism, especially following the outbreak of the Cold War."
Such inconsistencies emanate from the author's having overlooked certain realities. Firstly, socialist and Marxist forces on the eve of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution were too numerous and diverse to permit the sweeping assertion that all of them supported European colonialism, for progressive reasons or otherwise. Secondly, Lenin's transition to proletarian socialist revolution -- a transition brought about by harsh economic and social circumstances and the Trotskyist influence within the Bolshevik Party -- engendered a commensurate "qualitative shift" in the perspective of members of the Comintern towards the national bourgeoisie in Third World countries and the European colonialist movement. It is thus difficult to contend, as Said does, that European Marxists regarded colonialism as a progressive force.
However, it is perhaps oversights such as these that allow Said to make criticisms of the "dependency school" economic theories formulated by prominent Marxist theoreticians from the Third World, including Samir Amin and André Gundar Frank. These writers have maintained that it is impossible to realise economic and social progress in Third World countries under the leadership of the local bourgeoisie, with Said countering that any such assertion is unfounded and pointing to the successes experienced by the four so-called "Asian tigers" under the leadership not only of local capitalists, but also under the authoritarian direction of the state bureaucracy, as was the case under General Park in South Korea and Suharto in Indonesia. On this basis, he goes on to argue that there is no evidence to support these Marxists' contention that there is a pervasive and inextricable bond between the entrepreneurial classes and the military juntas in South America and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, however, if Said finds fault with these theorists' tendency to generalise, he is not immune to the same pitfall himself. He holds, for example, that "the involvement of all social forces, groups and classes in producing the crises that beset society is such that it is impossible to attribute responsibility to a single social group or class," continuing that "in order to understand this problem, scholars must reconceptualise the contexts that produce a particular political choice."
Said thus encourages us to reread the crises that beset capitalist societies from an entirely new perspective, one that exonerates the class that steers state and society from all responsibility in producing these crises. This contention conflicts with Said's many writings on the current economic crisis in Egypt that have appeared in Al-Ahram, in which he assigns the blame for Egypt's recalcitrant economic problems on the ruling capitalist class and the nature of its choices. In the study under discussion, however, he writes that "certainly, the left and the revolutionary movements bear a portion of responsibility for this crisis." This, in turn, leads him to the wild generalisation that "in other words, leftist extremism generally precedes and paves the way for right-wing backlashes."
How can this statement be made to conform to the circumstances of the unprecedentedly bloody CIA-sponsored coup, carried out in collusion with multinational companies, against Allende in Chile in 1973, or, for that matter, the coup carried out against Musaddaq in Iran in 1953? Was the democratic election of Allende, or the attempt by the Iranian government led by Musaddaq to recuperate some of Iran's petroleum resources, an instance of left-wing provocation?
Returning to the Arab World, the author reaches his core proposition, which is that "capitalism was condemned before it even had the opportunity to mature and before there came into being a class with a clear political and party platform and programme of action." This proposition, however, ignores disparities in the development of the industrialised capitalist nations and the indisputable effects of these on the development of the bourgeoisie in the underdeveloped world. Furthermore, it is founded upon a linear perception of historical development, according to which the progression of time, if given the chance, will produce a fully-fledged bourgeoisie in the Arab World on the model of that existing in Western capitalist societies. Do we have here an attempt to bring arbitrariness in reasoning into the service of a class agenda? At all events, were the 40 years that passed prior to the Egyptian 1952 Revolution, and the further quarter of a century that has passed following the Open Door Policy initiated in 1974, not sufficient to assess the efficacy of the Egyptian capitalist class in promoting development and modernisation?
Said's survey of this class, as reported in the present book, was based on a 27-question questionnaire presented to 532 businessmen selected to represent all sectors of the business community. However, in spite of this relative large sample, only 40.35 per cent answered, which calls into doubt the actual representativeness of the survey. As the author himself points out, only the most courageous responded, and, "consequently, the results of this survey may be biased in favour of the more independent, anti-government trends among the business community, although the significance of this bias should not be exaggerated."
He adds that the "culture of fear" in responding to the questions that he posed, together with the relationship between researcher and respondent and the general disdain for such surveys, has undoubtedly influenced the outcome. He thus states that "it is possible that the tendency to criticise government policy and the current situation with regard to democracy and human-rights issues appears greater in the results of the survey than it actually is among the business community in general." These results, therefore, should be taken as no more than "general indicators" of opinion among Egyptian businessmen.
Of those questioned in the survey, 58.8 per cent represented small business ventures employing less than ten workers, 23.5 per cent middle-sized ventures (10-50 employees), 13.2 per cent large ventures (50-100 employees), and another 4.6 per cent were involved in domestic or multinational mega- projects. The businesses sampled comprised 45.1 per cent from the commercial sector, 21.6 per cent from the service sector, 9.4 per cent in industry, and less than one per cent in agriculture. Another 23.1 per cent of the businesses were listed as miscellaneous.
In addition to background questions on education, proficiency in foreign languages and biographical details on matters such as age and marital status, the respondents were asked to answer questions on when they started their companies, how they were funded, on their administrative structure and the levels of technology involved. Another set of questions addressed political affiliations and connections. In this regard, it is interesting to note that only 7.5 per cent of the respondents were members of a political party, with a further 40.4 per cent taking an interest in politics and only 2.8 per cent declaring themselves to be politically active. In addition, the majority of those surveyed declared that they had no connections in political circles, while a small percentage (less than five) claimed to have "high" to "very high" connections, with the remainder falling somewhere in between.
Naturally, such background considerations can be expected to have an impact on the respondents' opinions on issues of democracy and human rights. To gauge attitudes towards democracy, the questionnaire drew on five indicators: legal sovereignty, the efficacy of parliament, the integrity of the electoral process, the prospects for the rotation of power and opportunities for public participation. The responses reflected a broad gap between democratic theory and practice, with more than 53 per cent of the respondents holding, for example, that there was no rotation of authority in Egypt at all.
Opinions on the state of civil liberties and human rights in Egypt were assessed on the basis of seven indicators: union rights, the right to freedom of expression, the right of assembly and to form associations, the right to form political parties, the freedom to join existing parties, the freedom of political parties, and, finally, the right to a free and fair trial. On these matters, the majority of respondents -- 61.3 per cent -- furnished generally positive answers.
The survey then addressed a number of specific issues. The majority of respondents, approximately 60 per cent, believed the reports put out by international human-rights groups concerning human-rights violations in Egypt. Respondents were also asked whether they would prefer a "strong government", even if it were not a democratic one, or even a "benevolent dictator" in the event that democracy could not be realised. From their responses to this question, Said concludes that there are reasons to doubt the depth of the commitment of the business community to democracy, and he is even more surprised to find that 25 per cent of his sample felt that their interests did not coincide with the sovereignty of law. Said confesses that many respondents may have been tempted to exaggerate their concern for democracy and human rights, in part, at least, because of the leading nature of the questions. Nevertheless, he concludes that 25 per cent of the respondents were genuinely firm in their support of democracy and efforts to combat human-rights violations, while another 25 per cent accepted the status quo and 50 per cent vacillated between the two positions.
Although Said expected the survey to reflect the absence of fundamental criteria for the democratic process, in fact the results proved the opposite, with figures ranging from 60 to over 70 per cent in support of the propositions that the government respected union rights, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to peaceful assembly and the right to a fair trial. The conclusion he draws from this is that Egyptian businessmen have not followed recent legislation and have been, instead, highly influenced by official propaganda since the mid-1970s. Interestingly, in the light of previous answers, 55.3 per cent of the sample opposed emulating the "Asian tigers" in sacrificing democracy to enable a strong government to steer the country to economic growth, while only 32.2 per cent accepted that democracy be sacrificed for the sake of economic development.
In its controversial treatment of a vital aspect of the "Egyptian civil rights movement" -- or, perhaps more accurately, of the stalled enterprise of democratisation in Egypt -- namely the attitudes of the business community towards democracy and human rights, this book is both highly readable and is certain to stir debate.
Reviewed by Abdel-Khaliq Farouk

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