Finance, oil and the Arab uprisings: the global crisis and the Gulf states

A particularly striking feature of the 2011 Arab uprisings has been the prominent role of the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. During the course of the uprisings, these states launched a range of conspicuous political and diplomatic initiatives, acting as the single most important Arab conduits of US and European Middle East policy and working to undermine and pacify the radical orientation of the struggles across the region. This central political role intersects with the ever-widening regional economic differentiation that arose in the wake of the recent global crisis. In the GCC itself, although there were a few high profile financial casualties due to the heavy indebtedness of some large conglomerates, the crisis had the principal effect of strengthening the economic position of the Gulf’s dominant classes. Despite the primacy of the GCC states in the strategic calculations of imperialism, a thorough analysis of the Gulf’s complexities has been largely absent from radical accounts of the uprisings. This is a highly problematic lacuna. This essay attempts to step behind the question of oil as such, and contends that the reasons for the GCC’s centrality to the hierarchies of the world market are ultimately found in two immanent tendencies of capitalism – the internationalization and financialization of capital. These tendencies give the Gulf’s commodity exports and financial surpluses a particular significance within the global political economy. The analysis aims to go beyond both Marxist and mainstream analyses that treat the Gulf as simply a giant oil spigot, and refocus attention upon the region’s own processes of class and state formation. It will be shown that the particular insertion of the GCC into the world market has precipitated a process of class-formation in which a section of the Arab world has become ever-more closely tied to the continued maintenance of capitalism at a global scale. This has meant that the interests of the ruling classes in the Gulf are directly counterposed to those of the poor in the Middle East as a whole – a process reinforced by both the increasing imbrication of Gulf capital with the economies of other Middle East states and the deepening alignment of the Gulf states with the projection of US military and political power. This is the context in which the Arab uprisings have unfolded, and the ultimate reason for the GCC’s central role in buttressing imperialist interest in the region