For more than three decades, the dominant mode of analysis in the Arab world has stressed private sector–led development. An enabling environment for the private sector has gradually taken shape, but development has correspondingly retreated. The freer the markets and the flows of trade and finance, the greater the private-property wealth held by the ruling classes became, and the less free and less propertied the working class became. History shows that there are few complete socioeconomic impossibilities; almost certainly, one of them is to achieve development in non-sovereign states that fall on the war-and-oil side of accumulation. In these countries, capital injections and stabilisation efforts resemble filling a sieve with water. Their poor developmental showings should be understood from the standpoint of imperialist power relations and their manifestation in aggression against working classes.

In such a context, primacy is not so much the operational side of monetary or fiscal policy; it is the ownership of such policies. In Arab monetary policy, the history of growth in money supply shows that money expands principally to satisfy foreign-exchange demand or the demands of merchant classes that will convert national funds into dollars. Meanwhile fiscal policy has retrenched: many primary budgets have been maintained in surplus in order to subvent the convertibility of the national currency into the dollar. Had the working classes owned macro policy (that is, driven it by their power within the state) the policies of deindustrialisation, lopsided openness and the rest of the social and economic policies that have so deeply compromised national security would never have been implemented.