Shana Cohen is Senior Research Fellow in Social Policy and Social Care at Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield, England.

Searching for a Different Future

THE RISE OF A GLOBAL MIDDLE CLASS IN MOROCCOBy SHANA COHEN

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2004 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3351-7

Contents

Preface………………………………………………………………………viiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………………….xiNote on Translations and Transcriptions………………………………………….xiii1 Global Market Capitalism and Social Change……………………………………..12 National Development and the Formation of the Modern Middle Class…………………353 New Social Groups for a New Era……………………………………………….674 A Generation of Fuyards………………………………………………………106Conclusion: Economic Insecurity and Social Formation………………………………136Notes………………………………………………………………………..145References……………………………………………………………………163Index………………………………………………………………………..169

Chapter One

Global Market Capitalism and Social Change

Economic insecurity is a broader and subtler question than it seems at first sight.-“Learning to Cope,” The Economist, April 6, 1996

Bend, ya habibi, until the storm passes.

In the force of the bow my back became a bow. When do you release your arrow? …

When the storm dispersed both of them, the present was screaming to the past: you are the reason.

The past was changing its crime into law. Yet the future alone was a neutral witness.

When the storm quieted, the arc was completed. It changed into a circle where you could not tell the beginning from the end. -Mahmud Darwish, “The Bow and the Circle,” in Yowmiyyat al-huzn al-‘di, 1988

A hotel clerk in Morocco once explained how his friends would fantasize about the lives of relatives or friends working in Europe in order to temper anxiety about the present and find hope in the future:

When I was a kid of 14 or 15, Moroccans would come from Belgium with soap and chocolates. They were heroes. We never imagined that they would suver during the winter because they came in the summer. We never imagined that they worked hard, that it was cold in Belgium during the winter. They were heroes. My friends that have gone to Saudi Arabia, they go just to get on a plane, to breathe, to have space. They say we want space. But most of them that have gone to Saudi Arabia come back after four months. The pay was weak, they were near to the border with Yemen and they said that there were no cafs, no women, no movies. We couldn’t breathe, they said. Driss stayed a year and a half. Sometimes when he is weak, he thinks about going back. The problem in Morocco is a crisis of identity. People are afraid. Once they get a job, they want to take revenge. They go out and buy expensive clothes, shoes, a car. They are not cool. I say take it easy, calm down. They are afraid of being the last person on a full bus and being cheated. That is why they go to a public space like a park and they destroy it. They see it as being private, that when they return, it won’t be there. They do this in buses. That they will come back and they won’t have it.

A teacher gave her own impression of migration, real or desired, from Morocco:

I know people in a very good situation here, at least to me, who want to leave. They say that there is nothing to do in Morocco. But there are a thousand things to do. I have seven friends who are going to leave for Canada. One is a professor at the university. He wants to leave because he says that he cannot do research here. They have already left for Montreal to look for work. They are afraid that their children won’t adapt, but the children don’t want to come back…. There is a discrepancy in Morocco between what people see as their life and what is their life.

In the discussion that follows on the transformation of the middle class in Morocco during market reform, I attempt to analyze the restlessness and existential anxiety conveyed in these remarks. More broadly, I try to understand how younger generations in Morocco conceive of the present and future, how they interpret the material, social, and political conditions of their existence and their options to change them.

I situate individual interpretation of life circumstances within the study of class formation. Inherently, I am also suggesting that class analysis represents a viable and productive method of theorizing the social dimension of our contemporary era of globalization. In this class analysis, global market integration has led both to the decline of an older modern middle class fundamental to the legitimacy and historic evolution of the nation-state and to the rise of a younger global middle class critical in its alienation, awkwardness, and dislocation to the evolution of globalization.

In the theoretical approach outlined below, I distinguish conceptually between globalization as a period in process, and thus without precise definition, and global market integration. Global market integration implies the construction of a universal economic structure through the implementation of uniform reform policies, the dominance of neoliberal ideology, and the global production of consumer culture. Reform policies include liberalization of the financial sector, enforcement of efficiency and transparency in state management and corporate governance, establishment of an independent judicial system, deregulation of the labor market, and investment in general human capital through combating negative social trends like poverty and illiteracy. These policies contribute to the development of a liberal market economy by encouraging private sector growth while reversing historic political and social priorities in government spending and regulation. Ideally, market reform should attract greater foreign and domestic investment, provoke more domestic competition and consumption, and promote sufficient overall economic expansion to diminish social problems related to inequity.

If reform does not yield enough positive economic impact to compensate for declining state intervention and population growth, then it may lead to an increase in unemployment, poverty, and economic and social insecurity. Reform policies can also directly and indirectly affect critical social institutions like education and public health and disrupt social trends ranging from age at marriage to the transfer of funds between generations, whether formally through social security or simply through continued financial dependence.

This book is not a critique of market integration in itself, because market liberalization has produced positive results. Proponents of privatization and deregulation policies can over plenty of examples of how good reform is for the general population, both regarding quality of life and educational and work opportunity. Statistically, improvements in basic living conditions can correspond with economic growth induced by reform. For instance, Bangladesh’s annual rate of GDP growth between 1990 and 2001 averaged 4.9 percent. From the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, access to an improved water source more than doubled in percentage, from 40 to 84. Although a crude comparison, between 1990 and 2001 Romania averaged a GDP growth rate of -0.3 and witnessed a decline in access to improved water source from 71 to 62 percent (World Development Report 2000-2001, 2003).

My concern is also not with the debate over the scope and speed of reform or the sum of negative versus positive effects. Comparing reform in China and Russia, Joseph Stiglitz (2002) praises how China’s gradualist strategy of reform yielded average growth rates of 10 percent during the 1990s. For Stiglitz, the consequence of reform in China was “the largest reduction in poverty in history in such a short time span”= and in Russia, “the largest increase in poverty in history in such a short span of time (outside of war and famine)” (181-82). He criticizes IMF management of reform in Russia, where average annual growth in GDP declined at a rate of -3.7 during the 1990s and poverty exploded, leading the World Bank to estimate that every percentage point drop in GDP places 700,000 more people in poverty (World Development Indicators 1995, 6).

Instead of analyzing issues like poverty as part of a discussion internal to the process of market liberalization, I am interested in how together the positive and negative consequences of global market integration provoke social change. Trends in unemployment, economic insecurity, and the consumption of luxury goods become not just the effects of market reform policies, but also factors in the organization of social structure and the formation of self-identity.

For instance, Driss, an unemployed doctorate I met through researching the social movement of unemployed university graduates, declared, “If there is an opportunity to leave, I am going. I regret that I left [France]. I could care less about being Moroccan. I do not have work. I do not play a part. I am not a citizen.” Driss assumed a positive connection between job and citizenship based on the principles of modernization and modernity that informed the nation-building period of the 1950s-1970s. Likewise, his conscious negative equation of unemployment and noncitizenship reflected the decoupling of national institutions of social mobility and economic security from modern ideological concepts.

Liberal market democracy, the political model disseminated in global market integration, theoretically institutionalizes rights to opportunity, representation, and happiness. However, the trajectory of liberalization lacks clear articulation of these ideals. We might in fact question in the political economy of development if the liberal conception of equality has become like Calvinism in the twentieth century, surviving just as the set of ideas that once informed the evolution of political and economic institutions.

In the Arab World, market reform has corresponded with the popularity of conservative Islamic thinkers like Yusuf Qardawi and Abdessalaam Yassine, both of whom favor religious-political control to create societies alter native and opposed to those in the West. Liberal Islamic thinkers like Sadiq Nahum, who argues that conceptual and practical bases exist in Islam for popular government, and Mohammed Arkoun, Hassan Hanafi, and Nasr Hamd Abu Zeid, who encourage rigorous scholarship on Islam, have tried to fight conservative interpretations, but they have remained politically marginal. Liberal, secular thinkers like Farag Foda, who fought for a pluralistic, secular regime in Egypt before he was assassinated in 1992, have perhaps faced even worse opposition. In response to ideological battles over religion, socioeconomic problems like unemployment, and foreign pressure to reform politically and economically, states in the Arab World have pitted internal against external issues, using one at the expense of the other. Lost in ideological conflict and state action is a clear, overarching strategy for rejuvenating society. Rather, elites, local and global, compete for the allegiance or the identification of a distant social objective of the “masses.”

In my analysis of the transformation of the middle class in Morocco, I delineate a more detailed and complex portrait of social organization and social difference during market reform. I argue that classes emerge during the process of legitimizing institutions and ideologies of economic, political, and social change, whether modernization or market reform. These ideologies and institutions reflect distinctive philosophical and material connections between economy and polity and likewise produce social structures and a subjective perception in the world that support the force of one relative to the other.

For example, during the nation-building period, nationalism and modern institutions inherently promoted internal social cohesion and equalization, if only in name, among citizens. The developing power of the nation-state as an idea and as a political economic system engendered the rise of a modern middle class that saw itself in terms of its function within the nation, the domestic economy, and the scope of state authority. Today, the social power of public institutions, the state, and nationalism have shifted to the firm, globalization, and global market capitalism, which together impose an atomistic, nonlocated vision of social order. In the legitimization process of global market capitalism, the synthesis between structure and consciousness within the enclosed nation-state has given way to sociostructural organization dependent on local economic growth and real opportunity and self-consciousness within the expansive, amorphous context of the globe.

In arguing that the alienation of young, urban, educated Moroccans reflects the formation of a new kind of class, the global middle class, I do not focus specifically on demonstration of discontent, even though in places like Argentina and Indonesia the middle classes have protested rising inflation and unemployment. Bataille (1986, 373) contends, “In historical agitation, only the word Revolution dominates the customary confusion and carries with it the promise that answers the unlimited demands of the masses.” Yet, revolution or open resistance can also hide order within the confusion. In Morocco, one unemployed young man told me that his situation was “worse than hard [pire que s ‘b].” He was not raging in the streets to protest, but his understanding of his situation was still important to understanding larger themes of social change.

Continued political stability in Morocco through market reform is due in part to simultaneous liberalization of the market and the political sphere, the latter initiated by King Hassan II and followed by his son, Mohammed VI. In principle, political liberalization should encourage nonelite groups to organize against continued concentration of capital and power, particularly if faced with the negative consequences of adjusment, such as unemployment. Yet, an absence of mass protest against market reform policies and the state and of clearly articulated, alternative political goals may not mean that the generation is “lost,” similar to images of Generation X, empty and impotent. I once asked a professor for references to young Arab thinkers who are attempting to construct a voice for their generation; he responded, “If this generation had a voice, you would not have a dissertation.” I suggest that the voice of this generation may not translate into conventional self-expression within the established public space. Instead, younger generations deny the relevance of this public space through their lack of participation in conventional politics, their sharp, reflective critiques of social and political life in Morocco, and, inversely, their idealization of alternative arenas and social relations that traverse the globe.

A fonctionnaire, a man set to retire after twenty-five years, criticized university graduates for demonstrative political passivity and for expecting a good job to come to them: “One needs to get up early in the morning and start to look for a job, not wait around. My nephew gets up early [il bosse] and earns money doing errands while he looks for a job.” Likewise, a businessman explained to me, “We would have no unemployment if people would just accept the jobs that are available.” A friend who is both a social activist and a teacher posed a rhetorical question: “Are there any young people in politics? When you look at the militants here, they are all old. Young people want the maximum of money with the minimum of evort. There is a lot of creativity at the level of the individual, but a framework for this expression does not exist, one that would allow this creativity to change [something].”

In contrast, Khalid Jama, a prominent journalist, praised what he called la nouvelle gnration. He saw hope in the grain de folie (element of madness) that possesses them, in their absolute frustration and their moments of refusal to obey rules of nepotism or bloated bureaucracy. He told me that a young woman doctor came to his office to protest obstructions in the court system and corruption that prevented her from settling family financial affairs. She wanted to launch a hunger strike to draw attention and possibly push her case through, a technique that eventually worked.

In this grain de folie that draws the whole world into individual madness, the younger generations of global market integration differentiate themselves from the generation of nationalist intellectuals born before World War II and the generation of leftist and Islamist activists of the 1960s and 1970s. Both of these older generations cited problems in economic, political, and social change as justification for their own ascendancy to power in Morocco.

Today, the university graduate resembles the isolated, stateless Palestinian Mahmud Darwish (1988) describes in Yowmiyyat al-huzn al-‘di. Darwish depicts the lonely individual stuck at border crossings, wandering through airports, and creating a life in a foreign country. This figure engages in an internal, psychological battle over his or her relation to the nation and to the world, over definition of self both for others and for self. Darwish writes of a Palestinian joking about his residence status with a lawyer friend, “I am not a citizen here and I am not a resident. Therefore, where am I and who am I?” The problem the narrator finds, however, is that to have legal status, one must prove one exists: “You are shocked that the law is with them (the authority). That the law is set up so that you must prove your existence. You say to the Minister of Interior: I am present or absent? Give me an expert in philosophy to establish that I am present.” The narrator then concludes, “You realize that you are present philosophically, but you are absent legally” (94).

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Searching for a Different Futureby SHANA COHEN Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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