I am very pleased to see Jaime Litvak’s piece examining the political economy of Gulf Coordination Council (GCC) imperialism in the Horn of Africa. I don’t think I have read much quite like it, which makes it an important step forward in Marxist analyses of the GCC’s role in the world. This novelty means there will be gaps, which I aim to partially address here with the kind help of my Saudi Shia friend, whose comments were invaluable.
Litvak ignores the critical role of migrant workers in the GCC, which hampers his analysis of the GCC economy and why exactly it is so distorted by peripheral standards. He writes:
Oil is also unique among commodities in being incredibly labor un-intensive. So basically, the entire population gets a cut in resource rents. In other words, citizens of the Gulf are, in their high standards of living, not comparable to Northern labor aristocrats but rather to any other peripheral bourgeoisie. The Gulf economies are unique because they are peripheral economies where (roughly) everyone gets to be the peripheral capitalist.
This is all true, but it is not the full story. While the oil and gas industry is not labor intensive, it still requires a substantial workforce to maintain and steadily expand. The GCC lacks such a workforce, so it secures it through armies of migrant labor, which perform most of the work. Further, that oil and gas are not labor intensive does not mean that the rents thereof must flow to the entire population. It is entirely possible for it all to flow to the royals’ bank accounts, as it did for the decades after the formation of all these states. The critical element is class struggle (not necessarily of a progressive kind). Litvak alludes to King Faisal’s famous quote that ‘his people could happily return to the desert and once more live simply on goat milk.’ In the very next sentence, he correctly notes that ‘today the proposition veers into absurdity.’ However, that change was not so simple. In the intervening decades, there occurred social struggles which forced the rulers to divert a significant portion of resource rents to the broader population. King Faisal’s bedouins became urbanized parasites in large part due to their own initiative.
In addition, that the oil and gas industry is capital intensive allows (indeed encourages) GCC citizens to pursue higher education in well-paying STEM fields. This creates a feedback loop, which raises the overall wage levels and opportunities for wage hikes for citizens. Indeed, GCC citizens who work in low-skilled industries on their own do not meet the classic image of the ‘Gulf parasite.’ However, their citizenship entitles them to a wage level that can afford hiring maids and other service staff, turning them into petty capitalists in their own right. It is worth noting that the government has a massive role to play here, as does the bureaucracy and the trade establishment–this is a story for another time. The passport remains the single most important division in global labor, as Arghiri Emmanuel so often reminds us.
Next, Litvak’s brief characterization of urban-Shia relations as ‘exploitative rural’ is highly mistaken, as it bears no resemblance to the Latin American case. First, despite common belief, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia is majority Sunni. Second, although they suffer from intense sectarianism (often from the state), Saudi Shia still enjoy the benefits of Saudi society and the privileges of being Saudi citizens, e.g., access to subsidized goods, commanding higher wages, exploitation of migrants, etc. In other words, while Saudi Shia would surely benefit from democratization of the Gulf, they would not benefit from global income equalization–in fact, they would be among the losers, which highlights their membership in the global privileged minority. Third, a rural-urban exploitative relation somewhat exists in the rural west and south of the Saudi Kingdom. Here, Saudi livestock-holders employ African (typically Sudanese) migrant labor, whose cheap labor both produces affordable meat for the Saudi public and creates handsome profits for their employers. Galeano is not just in Mogadishu, he is within the Kingdom too.
Lastly, although I greatly appreciate the focus on the Horn, the omission of GCC food-imperialism in the Arab world is quite odd, as it is inextricably linked to the story Litvak tells. Importing cattle is useless if you have no means of feeding them, and it is clear that the GCC is not natively producing this feed. The GCC, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, directly control the agricultural industry of much of the Arab world, especially in Egypt. This is critical as this region produces much of the dairy products and livestock feed needed to maintain the GCC’s imported cattle stocks. For example, 40% of Egyptian dairy products in 2015 were exported to the GCC. Indeed, many Arab countries are even reliant on importing food from the GCC (which either directly exports or re-exports goods) or from GCC-owned firms.
Adam Hanieh’s work is the key reference in the above discussion, in particular:
- Money, Markets, and Monarchies: the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East
- Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States
Kind Regards,
R. Ashlar
