The People Want

Gilbert Achcar is Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His other works include Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy, with Noam Chomsky. Author location: London,UK. G.M. Goshgarian was born in the United States and educated at Yale and UCLA, translates fiction and philosophy from French, German and Armenian into English. He is the author of To Kiss the Chastening Rod (Cornell U.P.) and of lengthy introductions to two recent collections of the work of Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Philosophy of the Encounter.

List of Figures 7 List of Tables 8 Acknowledgements 9 Introduction: Uprisings and Revolutions 13 1. Fettered development 19 The Facts 23 Poverty, Inequality, Precarity 29 Informal Sector and Unemployment: The Bouazizi Syndrome 36 Youth Underemployment 40 Female Underemployment 43 Graduate Unemployment 47 Fetters on Development 51 2. The peculiar modalities of capitalism in the arab region 53 The Problem of Investment 55 Public and Private Investment 57 A Specific Variant of the Capitalist Mode of Production 67 1. Rentier and Patrimonial States 72 2. A Politically Determined Capitalism: Nepotism and Risk 80 The Genesis of the Specific Regional Variant of Capitalism: An Overview 88 3. Regional political factors 97 The Oil Curse 98 From "Arab Despotic Exception" to "Democracy Promotion" 108 The Muslim Brothers, Washington and the Saudis 118 The Muslim Brothers, Washington and Qatar 126 Al Jazeera and the Upheaval in the Arab Mediascape 135 4. Actors and parameters of the revolution 142 Overdetermination and Subjective Conditions 142 The Workers' Movement and Social Struggles 152 New Actors and New Information and Communication Technologies 159 States and Revolutions 168 5. A provisional balance sheet of the arab uprising 177 Coups d'Etat and Revolutions 177 Provisional Balance Sheet No. 1: Tunisia 178 Provisional Balance Sheet No. 2: Egypt 181 Provisional Balance Sheet No. 3: Yemen 189 Provisional Balance Sheet No. 4: Bahrain 195 Provisional Balance Sheet No. 5: Libya 199 Provisional Balance Sheet No. 6: Syria 209 6. Co-opting the uprising 228 Washington and the Muslim Brothers, Take Two 228 Nato, Libya, and Syria 237 The "Islamic Tsunami" and the Difference between Khomeini and Morsi 250 Conclusion: The future of the Arab uprising 263 The Difference between Erdogan and Ghannouchi ... 263 - And the Difference between Erdogan and Morsi 271 Conditions for a Genuine Solution 284 Endnotes 295 References and Sources 325 Index 347