In Egypt, the internationally integrated ruling class imposes a schismatic relationship on the development of society, the symptom of which is the growing gap between the working and the ruling classes. The rift deepens by the extent to which the ruling class submits to US- led imperialism. The sources of growth in such a disjointed economy after 30 years of liberalisation (1980– 2010) depend little on standard macroeconomic recipes or whether the interest rate or the currency is undervalued or overvalued. Growth originates in the United States sponsored geopolitical rents, financial flows and trade considerations needed to stabilise, or to destabilise if need be, the socioeconomic formation. In any case, principal macroeconomic variables have become the tools for imperialist plunder.

The mainstream's economic concept of efficiency derived via prices obscures the workings of economic-transfer mechanisms. More than elsewhere, in Africa and the AW prices are generated by repressive power structures, and much of value is snatched by forcible dislocation of people and resources or by aborting the gelling of working class revolutionary consciousness and organisations. The means of fiscal or financial intermediation between the public and private spheres in the forms of redistributive taxation and recirculation of rents/ profits within the national economy are calibrated to imperialist desires. The tax base of the state depends less and less on direct or progressive taxation, and the assets of the public and private sectors are de facto dollarised as a result of openness, multiple internal and external deficits and the informally pegged exchange rate. In 2010, the year of the uprising, Egypt's indirect taxes were at 8 per cent of GDP, more than twice the rate of direct taxation (UN 2015). Under neo- liberalism, Egypt developed two economies over its territory – one national and the other extra- national – with very few welfare- promoting linkages between them. To have arrived at the point where value usurpation undermines basic subsistence, Egypt lost two principal wars, entered into the Camp David Accords and introduced a process of economic liberalisation, beginning roughly in 1980, which eviscerated the nation of its nationalism. Instead of a post– Camp David peace dividend leading to development, Egypt experienced a slide into misery: hence, the title for this chapter.