Socialism continued to be a male domain, since women were only a small minority of members holding party or union cards. The favorable political climate in the 1930s accounts for some increase in women's involvement with socialism. Although the UGT established lower membership fees for women in 1932, female membership was just over 4 percent of UGT affiliates (with 41,948 female members at the time of its over a million membership peak in 1932). A highly significant number of female unionists did not come from an urban, industrial background; the greatest increase in female membership was in the Agrarian Union (FNTT), which accounted for over a third of the overall female affiliation of the UGT in 1932. Agrarian workers represented 34 percent of female membership followed by smaller representations in the traditional trades of garment and canvas sandalmaking, leather and furs, textiles, commerce, and chemicals. The female constituency of socialism was quite different from that of anarchism as it was composed mainly of women in nonindustrial occupations. By the early 1930s a slight shift in the professional profile of female members can be detected, although traditional occupations still predominated. A majority of women members of the Madrid organization gave their profession as "their labors," that is, housewives. Wives and daughters of male militants amounted to 51 percent of the total female membership. Nonetheless, there was a significant increase in the presence of new female professions in the 1930s, with 25.7 percent coming from the more modern careers of primary and secondary schoolteachers, office workers, stenographers, typists, and nurses.

The history of cooperatives, community development, and local self-government approaches to rural development in the low-income countries has on the whole been a somber one. Everywhere, it seems, there has been some combination of takeover and subversion at the local level by village elites, sabotage at the national level by landed interests, overextension of very limited bureaucratic capacities for supervision and funding, government apathy and inattention, or, conversely, administrative control and strangulation of any meaningful participation and involvement from the peasants themselves.

 

There have been several exceptions to this melancholy experience, almost all of them in countries with quite strong, if not indeed coercive, regimes. Taiwan, China, and Japan are all examples of relatively successful rural development under strong government leadership. But elsewhere the story has been different. Where the regime has had less capability in obtaining compliance from the citizenry, where the bureaucracy at the periphery has been less capable of carrying out programs and policies decided at the center, where corruption and venality in public life have been the norm, where vested interests have had a large and even overweening voice in determining policy at all levels--that is to say, where Gunnar Myrdal's "soft state" syndrome has been manifested to a greater or lesser extent, rural development has been markedly less successful.

 

Egypt represents an interesting case study--a classic example of this "soft state" syndrome, with frustrating counterpressures between the landed urban elites and the landless or near-landless peasants in rural areas who make up the majority of the population. The emphasis in this article is therefore to review the pre- and post-1952 economic and political institutions and processes in rural Egypt and to assess their impact on the quality of life available to the Egyptian peasant.

Several feasible explanations have been suggested. We may refer to the analysis by George Lefebvre, the historian of the French Revolution, concerning the conditions that preceded that event. Lefebvre inductively reached the conclusion that what he calls a "revolutionary crowd"--one that follows the revolutionary leadership in its drive for radical social change, or demands change in the socioeconomic order--will not exist unless an "appropriate collective mentality" was created prior to the revolutionary events (namely, "the outbreak of the revolution"). By "appropriate collective mentality" Lefebvre meant a new system of concepts, attitudes, and images to which the crowd clings. Such a new normative system has enormous power and constitutes one of the elements that imparts to the masses their revolutionary qualities: the drive, sometimes the frenzy, to tear down the existing social, economic, and political order and the willingness, sometimes the demand, to set up a new political and social order.

 

Egypt at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s was indeed in the throes of a profound social and political crisis. However, the change in the collective mentality--if such existed at all--was most limited in its extent and power. This assessment is based, among other things, on the fact that following the seizure of power in Egypt in 1952 by the Free Officers there was no broadly based popular movement, organized or spontaneous, that joined in the protest, far less the struggle, against the existing political, social, and economic order. There were attempts, to be sure, by the Muslim Brethren on the one hand and the Communist party and the workers' unions on the other to activate the masses, particularly in the large cities, but these were largely devoid of any manifestations of change in the collective mentality. This was of course even more true in the villages than in the cities. Expressions of pent-up anger long harbored by the peasants against their masters were rare in the revolution of 1952. The combination in Egypt of a revolutionary political elite lacking a crystallized conceptualization of the desired political, social, and economic order, and urban and rural masses who had experienced no radical change of attitude regarding the existing order, could produce no more than a "soft revolution."

The 1952 revolution came at the height of demographic and economic developments that had been in progress for several generations: high natural population increase rates, low domestic saving rates, fitful economic growth dependent on occurrences exogenous to the economy and on the import of capital. The revolution, which in many respects was the indirect offspring of these developments, was sooner or later to resolve to interrupt them and to halt the processes that had so threatened to worsen the economic conditions of Egyptian society. The Nasser regime indeed tried to change the course of events in the areas of natural population increase, domestic saving patterns, and economic structure, but the measures taken did not, in the final analysis, succeed in breaking the forces of continuity. In fact, the 1970s and the 1980s sometimes witnessed even the strengthening of the trends that had existed between the two world wars and perhaps before.

 

The effort failed, possibly because it lacked determination and resolution and because the revolutionary regime drew back from the possible political price the changes might extract. This brings us to two of the basic characteristics of the revolution. First, it lacked the kind of coherent ideology that could provide a solid conceptual base for the changes the regime wished to effect. Attempts to elaborate and develop such an ideology met with only partial success, as did efforts to win broad support from the masses via simplistic slogans. Second, from its inception, the revolution lacked the social basis whence would emerge forces striving for its goals. Its social basis was very narrow (the military and the bureautechnocracy) and by its very nature was incapable of recruiting the masses in the service of reform. Nasser was aware of this weakness and strove to create a broad social base for a revolution, but to no avail. This failure perhaps lies at the heart of the entire matter. The absence of broad social support for the revolution obliged the regime to "buy" such support: subsidized commodities for the urban masses, guarantee of employment for university graduates, allocation of ever-growing resources to the army, and the like. For these and other reasons, no economic and social coup de grâce was dealt the upper classes of the monarchy. It is on account of this need to gain the support of the masses and other social groups through granting material benefits--even at the price of perpetuating processes disastrous for the economy and society--that the 1952 revolution may be termed a "soft revolution."

No period like the dozen years from 1974 through 1985, in which the Egyptian economy achieved high economic growth--unequaled in rates and duration by anything it had previously attained during this century--is able to demonstrate the power of continuity. The prominent patterns that stood out during the four periods of growth since the 1860s existed in the years of infitah. On the one hand, gross domestic products grew on account of the swell of income through oil exports (and alternative income through the supply of domestic demand); on the other, there was a significant increase in imports during these years as a result of investment by foreign firms, grants and loans to the government, and an element that had not existed in the past--remittances by Egyptian workers employed in the Arab oil states. However, the rate of growth in agriculture and in industry lagged behind that of the gross national product as a whole. Not only did industry fail to trigger economic growth in the post-Nasser period, it did not even undergo any marked change despite the great influx of resources into the country. As in the past, high growth rates achieved in these years were all the result of exogenous changes, and, as in the past, they did not bring about any fundamental structural change. The attempt, albeit limited, to achieve structural change was greatly impeded by the Nasserist etatist legacy.

 

It is also striking that, as in the first period of growth in the 1860s but with greater intensity, the years of growth at the end of the 1970s and 1980s were characterized by increasing foreign debt. By 1984 this had swollen to $3.2 billion. Once again the Egyptian economy had become weighed down by the burden of debt (payments against interest and principal). The sums that the economy began to send abroad in the mid-1980s on account of debt amounted to $3 billion annually  --in other words, more than Egypt's total commercial exports excluding oil or exceeding in value the total annual aid (civil and military) received from the United States. And most significant, like previous booms, that of the 1980s has not created forces that would be able to maintain the level of growth should there be any deterioration in the influx of revenues and capital from external sources.

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