Egypt’s workers were employed by private businesses. A swift move against capitalists was necessary. In October 1961, Zakaria detained 40 prominent investors, and in mid-November sequestrated the financial assets of another 767. The government then took over 80 banks and insurance companies, and 367 commercial companies.49 The Socialist Laws of 1961 were a logical next step. They eliminated the private sector in banking, insurance, international trade, heavy industry, transportation, large hotels, and the media. Even in light and medium industries and commercial companies—the last domain of private enterprise—the public sector became a partner with no less than 50 percent control. By 1967, the Supreme Council for Public Organizations supervised 48 public organizations, which in turn ran 382 affiliated companies.50
The bureaucracy and public sector were swelled further by state welfare laws passed during the same period. In 1962, Nasser’s cabinet decided to admit all secondary school graduates to university, and to secure a job for every college graduate. As a result, state employment in the civilian sectors alone jumped from 770,000 in 1962 to about 1.1 million by 1967. At the same time as state employment rates were as high as 70 percent between 1962 and 1969 (employing more than 60 percent of university graduates), state salaries increased by 102 percent.51 Needless to say, that expansion reflected neither population nor economic growth. It was part of Nasser’s attempt to expand and consolidate his civilian social base.
The expansion of the urban managerial class offered the middling landowners a golden opportunity to extend their influence to the city. They now pushed their offspring to find employment in the bureaucracy and public-sector companies. That is why the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, which doubled in size between 1962 and 1965, was overwhelmingly composed of the sons of rural notables. Soon these young bureaucrats transformed the public sector into a labyrinth of commercial and financial fiefdoms, which supplemented the agricultural fiefdoms their families had established in the countryside. Strategically placed in the city and the countryside, this new elite now represented the bulwark of the ruling party, the ASU. This leads us to conclude that the guiding rational for both the land reform and socialist laws was political, not economic.* In effect, this alliance between a class of wealthy landowners and the state bourgeoisie that sprang out of it pushed the economy toward commercial and real estate investment rather than industry. Even agriculture suffered as middling landowners passed a considerable part of their returns to their urban offshoots to double it through short-term economic ventures instead of reinvesting it in the land. Land was treated as a source of prestige, not a productive asset.
But the regime had only itself to blame. The poverty of its economic policy really stemmed from the poverty of its politics. Rather than focusing on development, the regime was motivated by the need to curtail capitalist interests, on the one hand, and the need to “bribe” society to excuse its dictatorial methods, on the other. The costly commitments imposed on the bureaucracy and public sector included employment of all university graduates, the provision of cheap housing and free health care and education, and so on. In the sixties, for instance, public-sector companies were forced to increase wages by 40 percent to absorb the quadrupling of university students without a corresponding increase in productivity or profit. In the bureaucracy alone, Egypt had one million civil servants on the payroll by 1967.52 The price was administrative chaos and corruption, but now there were millions of white-collar employees ready to root for the ASU. Clearly, Nasser perceived state institutions more or less as political power structures, as incubators for a new class of citizens whose interests were tied to his ruling party.
To empower a stratum of conservative village notables and civil servants appeared much more expedient to Nasser’s security coterie than to mobilize urban activists or unruly peasants. Egypt’s long experience with elections (dating back to 1866) had laid down certain political practices in the countryside, such as having village notables register peasants to vote for their landlords or mobilize them to show support for a particular candidate. All Nasser’s faction needed to do was to utilize this preexisting setup for its own purposes; that is, all it had to do was to lock into existing authority structures instead of creating new ones. In that sense, the emasculation of the upper class in the village was symbolic; its political influence was simply passed on to those next in line.
With peasant support channeled by rural notables, and employees and workers’ support channeled by their supervisors in the bureaucracy and public-sector companies, the ASU had a considerable social base. These notables and managers, in turn, dominated the apparatuses of the ruling party and got themselves elected to the various representative bodies. That is not to say that this stratum constituted a new “ruling class,” because its role was rather one of sustaining those in power. Its influence was mostly local, and its aspirations were limited to increasing its wealth and status. In Gaetano Mosca’s terms, it represented the “second stratum of the ruling class,” one that mediates power between regime and society without actually holding the keys to political authority.53 According to another political scientist, Timothy Mitchell, Nasser’s experiment provides a good case study of the complex set of relations that constitute the state: “These no longer appear primarily in the form of a central power intervening to initiate change, but as local practices of regulation, policing, and coercion that sustain a certain level of inequality … The center did not initiate change, but tried to channel local forces into activities that would extend … regime influence.”54
The fingerprints of Nasser’s security elite appear all over this power-building process. The president himself aimed for a wider popular base. For example, in a speech delivered on October 16, 1961, he criticized the National Union for including fewer than 2,000 urban activists among its 29,520 committee members, with the rest representing the forces of reaction in the countryside, and pledged that the new ASU would come up with preventive measures against the infiltration of these elements, the most important of which was that its membership would include 50 percent workers and peasants. The presidential initiative was quickly frustrated when Sabri and the rest of the security crew agreed to include those who owned 50 feddans in the peasant category, and to consider those who sat on the boards of public-sector companies as workers.55 Nasser then delegated to his security men the task of filtering out conservative elements during the transition from the NU to the ASU. The result was that only 1.5 percent of NU members who applied to join the ASU were disqualified, and a striking 78 percent of those in charge of NU village units, and 60 percent of those heading NU secretariat positions in the cities, continued to occupy the same posts under the new organization.56 Not only that, but while village notables occupied 11.7 percent under the NU watch in the 1957 parliament, their share more than doubled (to 30 percent) in the ASU-supervised parliamentary elections in 1964.57 It was the typical “the devil we know” mentality that governs security thinking that assured the continued predominance of the rural middle class and its urban offshoots. As the senior intelligence official Abd al-Fattah Abu al-Fadl concluded after his five-year tenure at the ASU, the new party was not only formed of the same social material as that of the old, but of the exact same people.58
It is this group of middle-class opportunists that would run and benefit from the ruling party for the next five decades—although it would have to share the spoils with more affluent businessmen after the seventies. Instead of undermining the new class of security officers, the ASU provided this mostly urban class with a bridge to the countryside, thus tightening relations between security and politics more than ever. Eventually, this security-political alliance would succeed in marginalizing the military, but at the price of fortifying the dictatorship. An early demonstration of the fatal consequences of this emerging alliance was there for all to see in 1966 in a small village on the Nile Delta known as Kamshish.
THE KAMSHISH AFFAIR
The Kamshish Affair brought into sharp focus the alignment of forces in place during the final days leading up to the climactic 1967 war. This small village of perhaps 10,000 inhabitants and 2,120 feddans in al-Munufiya province on the Nile Delta in northern Egypt (the home province of Sadat and Mubarak) became an international cause célèbre in 1966, receiving extensive coverage from Egyptian and world media, and attracting visits from
