Unrest and Change: Dispatches from the Frontline of a Class War in Egypt

The story told in much of the mass media and the rhetoric of US and European officials is that the popular uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab spring have primarily been a struggle to overthrow individual tyrants and establish democracy. But this paper argues that the anti-democratic character of so many of the regimes in the Arab world is the political form of capitalism in the region, and that the popular uprising in Egypt and the struggle to depose Mubarak from state power is in essence a class struggle against Egyptian capitalism and its dynamics.