into a political Gestapo.42 Worse still, instead of performing the role of ideological spearhead, the VO dragged its mother organization (the ASU) down the same road, converting it from a potentially mass-mobilizing party to a giant security edifice centered on surveillance and political control.
But was Nasser’s real aim to create a programmatic organization to infuse political consciousness in the masses? Several reasons suggest otherwise. To begin with, it seems that Nasser understood socialist doctrines as means of achieving managerial control of politics and economics, rather than revolutionary purposes. Reviewing the minutes of a secret meeting he held on March 7, 1966, at the VO’s Cairo branch provides a firsthand view of what the president aspired to. He began by proclaiming: “We can achieve a lot … not through punishment and the military police … We can change people through the [new] political organization,” but then he quickly added: “Sabri [his security aide, VO founder, and now acting prime minister] has a point, we need believers within the executive branches and administration … these can actively and effectively supervise employees … they can also recruit more members to help them in surveillance and oversight.”43 With this stress on surveillance, it is hardly surprising that Nasser entrusted the VO not to leftist intellectuals but to intelligence officers, who by disposition and training prioritized security over ideology. It would have been very naïve of the president to believe that the VO could transform his security associates into ideological cadres, rather than the other way around. In the end, the gap between the intentions he professed and the actions he carried out could be explained only by the fact that Nasser’s real goal was to create a civilian network of vested interests to enhance his power vis-à-vis the military. This was natural considering not only his struggle with Amer, but also the fact that there had been eighteen attempted coups against Nasser so far. “There has been continuous intrigue over the last fourteen years and it is likely to continue,” he said at that same meeting in March. “But I believe that it would be impossible for the army to prepare for a coup [without political support].”44 In the opinion of one VO veteran, Nasser’s motives were not to create a real popular (let alone socialist) organization, but rather to counter the power of the field marshal.45 And the ASU, and its secret VO, did indeed become a power to be reckoned with. But rather than deriving their power from a broad mass base, they relied on an insular class of political opportunists, thriving on state patronage and closely supervised by an expanding security elite. Nasser’s failure at building a mass-mobilizing party was particularly significant to the military sociologist Eric Nordlinger, who concluded quite emphatically:
Egypt constitutes an especially telling example of the inability of praetorian rulers to build a mass party capable of monopolizing the population. For this particular failure occurred under exceptionally favorable conditions. The officers who took power in 1952 … have had ample time to create one … the government was headed by one of the few truly charismatic figures capable of eliciting emotion-charged support, loyalty, and energy at the mass level. Egyptian society is not divided along ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, or regional lines that would have made the building of a nationwide party a highly problematic undertaking. And the presence of a powerful and much hated neighboring state has given rise to a nationalist fervor that could readily be used to recruit and energize a mass party … The people needed only to be offered an organizational framework … [Yet the ruler still assumed] that what applies within the military sphere also applies within the political realm … [he] visualized Egypt in managerial terms, as an organization instead of a polity.46
To the extent that the ASU and VO had a social power base at all, it was the aspiring rural middle class and its urban offshoot in the state bureaucracy. This distinctive social composition characterized Egypt’s ruling parties during the crucial decades of the 1960s and 1970s, and remained well in play until the final years of Mubarak’s rule; these middling landowners and their offspring in the bureaucracy wound up constituting the backbone of the ruling party.
Recall that one of the first things the new regime did in 1952 was initiate land reform. The coup took place in a semifeudal society where 2,500 large landowners (with 147 elite families) and 9,500 middling owners controlled a third of arable land and half of the parliament’s seats. There were also more than 2.5 million smallholders, and 11 million tenant farmers and landless peasants.* Aside from the rich absentee landlords, all the rest coexisted in the countryside, running their affairs with the aid of traditional social mores and hierarchy. The land reforms placed progressively lower limits on land ownership: 200 feddans in 1952, reduced to 100 in 1962, and finally 50 in 1965 (though the ceiling for family ownership was always higher). This was more than enough to run profitable agricultural projects. On the other hand, land redistribution granted each poor peasant five feddans or less—barely enough land to subsist on. While economically the peasants could not achieve independence, they were politically grateful to the revolution for providing them with a plot of land they could call their own. Therefore peasants could have offered a solid base for popular mobilization, but the insecure Nasser chose to blunt the revolutionary potential of the peasants lest they get out of control. Instead, he kept them tied down through reproducing traditional authority structures. He achieved this by allowing a prosperous rural middle class to occupy the apex of the patronage networks that were already set in place by large landlords, and thus perform the same political control function of their predecessors. So instead of redistributing all the surplus land among the peasants, or providing them with loans to buy it from the government, large owners were allowed to sell whatever exceeded their ownership limit on the open market where only financially solvent peasants could afford to buy. The relatively cheap divested land allowed small owners (controlling between 10 and 50 feddans) to become middling landowners (possessing between 50 and 200 feddans), and middling owners to become even wealthier. So the agricultural reform laws enabled the rural middle class, which had expanded modestly in number from 22,000 after the first installment of the land reform law in 1952 to 29,000 in 1965, to increase its land ownership by 29 percent, its annual income by 24 percent, and its share of state loans and subsidies by 80 percent during the same period.47 By enhancing the economic power of the middling landowners, land reform shifted the balance of political power from large landlords to these new kulaks, who now enjoyed undisputed hegemony in the countryside. Security and stability were thus prioritized over the potential for mobilization, a potential that might have served the regime today, but could have been used against it tomorrow. Conservative village notables were considered a safer bet.
The arbitrarily passed July 1961 Socialist Laws, which crowned Nasser’s drive to bring the economy under state control, further enhanced the position of the rural middle class by undermining the economic power of the wealthy urban stratum. Though one could scarcely argue that Nasser’s version of state socialism was detrimental to the interests of private enterprise, capitalists and former large landlords (with a lot of cash on their hands after forcibly selling their land) were reluctant to subject themselves to the whims of what they considered a totalitarian regime and so they held back on investment, preferring to make a profit in nonproductive fields, such as real estate speculation. Nasser tried his best to lure them back to productive investments through various tax exemptions, but this could not substitute for the lack of trust.* Following the Suez Crisis, it was estimated that out of £E45 million redirected away from agriculture, only £E6 million was invested in industry, while the rest went to real estate. In 1956 alone, real estate investment constituted 75.8 percent of all private investments. Nasser first responded in January 1957 by nationalizing foreign companies and forming the Economic Agency and the High Committee for National Planning to manage economic development. He then brought Egypt’s largest banks under state control in February 1960, and formulated the first Five-Year Plan, for 1960–1965.48
Although the upper bourgeoisie was forced to work for the state as executive managers after the nationalization laws, it remained obstinate. In 1961 Zakaria reported that a group of thirty high-ranking officers had been meeting regularly with Egyptian capitalists, and that together they were pushing Amer to help them end the dictatorship and restore private liberties. Zakaria’s report also highlighted that two-thirds of the economy was still in the hands of the private sector (that included 80 percent of commerce, and 70 percent of construction
