Privatizing the Commons: Protest and the Moral Economy of National Resources in Jordan

Abstract This article interrogates the social impact of one aspect of structural adjustment in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: privatization. In the mid-2000s, King Abdullah II privatized Jordan's minerals industry as part of the regime's accelerated neoliberal project. While many of these privatizations elicited responses ranging from general approval to ambivalence, the opaque and seemingly corrupt sale of the Jordan Phosphate Mines Company (JPMC) in 2006 was understood differently, as an illegitimate appropriation of Jordan's national resources and, by extension, an abrogation of the state's (re-) distributive obligations. Based on interviews with activists, I argue that a diverse cross-section of social movement constituencies – spanning labour and non-labour movements (and factions within and across those movements) – perceived such illegitimate privatizations as a moral violation, which, in turn, informed transgressive activist practices and discourses targeting the neoliberal state. This moral violation shaped the rise and interaction of labour and non-labour social movements in Jordan's “Arab uprisings”, peaking in 2011–2013. While Jordan's uprisings were largely demobilized after 2013, protests in 2018 and 2019 demonstrate the continued relevance of this discourse. In this way, the 2011–2013 wave of protests – and their current reverberations – differ qualitatively from Jordan's earlier wave of “food riots” in 1989 (and throughout the 1990s), which I characterize as primarily restorative in nature.

moral economy of commodities with what I conceptualize as a moral economy of national resources. In Jordan, mass unrest in response to austerity policies and rising prices in  and  exemplify the "modern" food riot, defined by Waldon and Seddon as "protest incidents […] triggered by visible and abrupt exactions which simultaneously generate palpable hardship, a clear perception of responsible agents, and a sense of injustice grounded in the moral economy of the poor".  By contrast, as a modality of adjustment, the privatization of public assets stands as perhaps the most structural -systematically reconfiguring and dispossessing livelihoods and communities as much as companies.  Correspondingly, I want to suggest that, in the aftermath of King Abdullah II's accelerated programme of privatizations after , social resistance in Jordan has become more systemically oriented and transgressivebelying the notion that the Arab uprisings "missed" Jordan.
In what follows, I trace the development of a moral economy around Jordan's national resources, specifically (but not limited to) phosphate and potash.  I draw primarily on data collected through interviews with activists as well as Jordanian newspaper accounts of protest events. Because my discussions were limited to those either directly or indirectly involved in activism during events that occurred nearly ten years prior to my fieldwork, my aim is not to reconstruct a "collective subject" (see Mélanie Henry's contribution) or to assert that the discourse described by my interlocutors was homogeneous, nor, indeed, to claim that it constituted a counter-hegemony. Rather, my goal here is to demonstrate that a diverse cross-section of social movement constituenciesspanning labour and non-labour movements (and fractions within and across those movements) -perceived privatizations as a moral violation, which, in turn, informed transgressive activist practices and discourses.

A M O R A L E C O N O M Y O F N AT I O N A L R E S O U R C E S
In E.P. Thompson's early and influential formulation, the grievances of working-class rioters in eighteenth-century England "operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices" in the sphere of inherently unequal market relations.  This focus on ground-up, popular conceptions of legitimate state, market, and social practices is central to the conception of moral economy developed in this article. We can see a slightly different perspective in James C. Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant, wherein moral economy expresses the shared social understandings governing the terms of just economic distribution grounded in an "implicit moral threshold" of basic subsistence.  While retaining an emphasis on shared perceptions of legitimacy and redistributive ethics between unequal classes, recent scholarship has eschewed readings of Thompson and Scott that limit the applicability of moral economy primarily to pre-capitalist or transitional contexts or actors.  As Palomera and Vetta assert, any prevailing socio-economic orderincluding capitalism and its neoliberal variantnecessarily reflects past struggles through which the institutional, material, and discursive elements of hegemony were set into motion and became embedded into daily experience.  Thus, moral economy in this sense serves as a way to capture the localized symbolic and material arenas in which prevailing social orders (as the product of past struggles) are legitimated, (re-) produced, and (re-) interpreted.  In some conceptions, the moral economy also demarcates the outer limits of social struggle. For example, in Walton and Seddon's global study of "IMF riots" (incited by austerity programmes), the horizon of struggle often ended at a demand for prices to return to their previous levels, rarely endangering the globalized circuits of structural adjustment and free market capitalism.  Posusney makes a similar claim with regards to "restorative" labour protests in Egypt under the developmentalist order of President Gamal Abdel Nasser.  In this framing, social mobilization arising from moral economies is seen as conservativethat is, principally concerned with "resurrecting the status-quo ante" -rather than as capable of producing a "new consciousness" or raising transgressive demands against the state.  By contrast, contemporary struggles against neoliberal orders, such as the "Pink Tide" in Latin America in the s and, as I argue, struggles against privatization in Jordan, open up the possibility that innovative social . James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT, ). Scott also emphasizes "reciprocity" as a pillar of moral economy, a concept which plays less of a role in Thompson's account  movements, capable of articulating new and transgressive discourses, may emerge as moral economies break down.  Indeed, as Wood has argued, Thompson's overall intellectual projectincluding his work on moral economyshould be read as demonstrating how consent to rule is always partial and never entirely top-down: rather, unequal power relations are often incompletely tolerated and unevenly (re-) produced across space and time.  Moreover, in such moments of rupture, as Chalcraft has shown, social actors may come to question and challenge the hegemonic "common sense" that keeps subaltern consent in place.  In this article, I build on this conception of moral economy as reproducing hegemony while also providing openings for its dissolution. At the same time, I also move beyond a focus on specific commodities linked to subsistence (e.g., bread, rice, fuel),  to propose that national resources can underpinboth materially and symbolicallymoral economies, while also forming the basis, however ambivalent, for transformative discourses of resistance.
To do this, I draw on Lyall's work on the "moral economy of oil" in Ecuador, which explains how state elites "cultivated expectations that oil resources ought to ensure for all citizens a minimum level of development (i.e. public works, employment and welfare programmes)".  In the process, Lyall also sketches out a key distinction between subsistence-based food riots and revolts around national resources, which "manifest not only in local settings of protest, but also on a national […] scale".  While Lyall's focus is on the top-down manipulation of redistributive ethics, we can also expand it to incorporate the bottom-up (historical and current) struggles that are always a part of moral economy. In this sense, the moral economy of national resources serves as a prism through which the working class and the urban and rural poor alike experience what Harvey has theorized as "accumulation by dispossession", or the process through which the "corporatization and privatization of hitherto public assets 'enclosing the commons'".  Hence, more than other aspects of structural adjustment, privatizationby commodifying national assets and, indeed, the public sector itselfprecludes the possibility of a return to the status quo ante.
The argument: Moral economy and protest To summarize, in certain cases, privatizations may be experienced as a breach of legitimate state-society practices, creating the possibility for innovative social movements and transgressive demands to emerge. In turn, I argue that through the moral economy of national resources, differently situated social movement constituencies across Jordanworkers, the urban and rural unemployed, denizens of "special economic zones", university graduates, professionals, and many otherswere mobilized to challenge the hegemonic "common sense" of the state's neoliberal project.  This occurred, in reciprocal fashion, across two levels. Firstly, negative experiences of privatization revealed to disparate actors the contradictions between the king's neoliberal promisesfor example, that state-run enterprises had failed, and privatization was the only path to prosperityand the deleterious material consequences wrought by many privatizations. Even actors not directly affected by privatizations came to associate them with their own poor material circumstances and the highly unequal distribution of economic prosperity in Jordan. Secondly, those localized experiences of privatization were focused, articulated, and transformed by different social movement constituencies so as to include and appeal to local and trans-local movement constituencies, mass audiences, and media commentators.  Denouncements of "bad" privatizations were articulated by demonstrators through accusations of pervasive corruption (fasad) and by vilifying those most closely associated with illegitimate privatizations as thieves (haramiyya). Taken together, those articulations worked to generate a mutually comprehensible discourse of resistance to the state's neoliberal project, as reflected in the images, poster slogans, and chants of demonstrators between  and , and as expressed to me in interviews with activists. It should be noted that this discourse had significant limitations. Specifically, while between  and  some protesters became increasingly daring in their calls for the "overthrow of the regime" (isqat al-nizam), popular consensus generally remained limited to demands for the "reform of the regime" (islah al-nizam).  Nevertheless, the fact that an anti-neoliberal discourse continues to pervade mass demonstrations and strikes (most recently in  and ) warrants further inquiry into its originsto which I now turn.
Prior to , state hegemony in Jordan was maintained through welfare institutions, employment inducements, price subsidies, and a developmentalist discourse premising the state as the buffer between Jordan and the vicissitudes of global capitalism.  As summarized by Greenwood, Jordan's social "bargain" -dating back to the nation's colonial founding under Emir Abdullah (r. -) in the s -"offered citizens economic security in exchange for their political loyalty (or at least acquiescence) to the Hashemite monarchy".  The material inducements provided by the state, in order to mobilize society to productive ends and stave off social unrest, constituted two distinct, but related, moral economies. The first revolved around the provision and pricing of commoditiessuch as bread and fuelwhile the second functioned through the intervention of the state as the most important conduit of national development and employment. Both of these moral economies were disrupted in the wake of neoliberal reforms beginning in  and accelerating after King Abdullah's ascension in .

The moral economy of commodities
Born out of the struggles between the British-controlled colonial state under Emir Abdullah and the pre-existing tribal communities of Transjordan, the moral economy of commodities became fully realized in the s under King Hussein (r. -).  As Martínez has demonstrated, the critical moment came with the establishment of the Ministry of Supply (MoS) in , which did much more than centralize the "pricing and distribution" of basic goods (its raison d'être) but also embodied an "image of a managerial state that could intervene to combat the instabilities of capitalism".  Almost overnight, the king began to reinforce this image by publicly articulating a "middle way somewhere between the nationalization of the means of production and the unregulated free market".  The cornerstone of this "middle way" was the provision and distribution of Arabic bread (khubz 'arabi)along with a bundle of other basic commoditiesat a reliably low price.

The moral economy of national resources
While Jordan lacks the oil reserves of its neighbours in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, natural resourcesspecifically phosphate and potashnonetheless have constituted "the foundation for the enhancement of Jordanian private and public investments, modernisation of its infrastructure and the expansion of public services in health and education".  In economic terms, the mining industry in Jordan (also including the extraction of cement and calcium carbonates) has significantly contributed to GDP and national exports since the s (see Table ). Finally, while the mining sector represents a relatively small percentage of total national employment, the sector has been qualitatively vital as a major employer and trainer of two important regime constituencies: educated workers (e.g. engineers and geologists) and Jordanians living in and around the main extraction and production sites.  The connection between Jordanian national interests and natural resources is enshrined in the  Constitution, which stipulates that "[a]ny concession granting any right for the exploitation of mines, minerals or public utilities shall be sanctioned by law" -that is, via parliament (Article ).  Originally, however, through their  treaty with Emir Abdullah, it was the British who first had the power to issue mineral concession rights in Jordan.  Consequently, British colonial priorities determined the initial pace of mineral exploration and the timing of the first mining concessions in Jordan ( for phosphate and  for potash).  Later, in the s, "nationalist bureaucrats" such as Hamid al-Farhan struggled with hostile American and British donors to secure the autonomy to develop the nation's resources (see Figure ).  It was not until the s and s that a measure of resource autonomy was achieved, though Jordan's mineral concerns have always been supported, even proudly so, by high levels of foreign involvement, "from planning and implementation to financing".  Following the civil war between the monarchy and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in , state-provided employment began to skew disproportionately towards East Bank Jordanians, who, since the founding of the Hashemite monarchy in the s, had constituted the state's most important social base.  With these internal and external struggles in mind, we can read the following statement from King Hussein, regarding the state's massive investments in the exploitation of Dead Sea minerals for potash production in the s, as articulating the (top-down) terms for the moral economy: This project has special significance for our national growth and development. Its progress, after many years of hard efforts, delays, and difficulties, is great proof that we have assumed control over our national capabilities, and that we have set ourselves on the path of practical planning for our economy and that we are now able to mobilize qualified Jordanian youth to carry out the responsibilities  of development […] The Arab Potash Project is a splendid model for our strife against backwardness and stagnation. It is a courageous and ambitious attempt at the utilization of our natural resources.  Given the symbolic and material importance of natural resource exploitation to state hegemony, as reflected in this statement, it becomes easier to piece together why, despite mounting domestic and international pressures in the s and s to privatize national resource companies, King Hussein remained reluctant until his death.  Jordan's moral economy of national resources is perhaps most physically embodied by the so-called Big Five companiesincluding the Arab Phosphate Company (APC) and the Jordan Phosphate Mines Company (JPMC) -which were first established as private enterprises in the s.  Yet, the "poor capacities" of the private sector necessitated heavy state involvement from the very beginning.  By the end of the s, the level of state intervention in these companies was significant and included ownership of controlling stakes and the ability to appoint and displace actors from company boards. For example, prior to its privatization in , the JPMC was ninety per cent state-owned and its operations were conducted in "extensive" coordination with the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Natural Resources Authority.  In return, from the s, the mining sector (phosphate, potash, and cement) propped up Jordan's export sector.  Hence, beyond their importance to the economy, according to Piro, the phosphate and potash companies were positioned by the state as "symbol[s] of national will, development, and modernization".  The national symbolic nature of these resources emanated from three central dynamics related to Jordan's status as a "late developing" country.  Firstly, resource exploitation required massive mobilizations of foreign and domestic capital on top of substantial investments in national infrastructure. These investments, in turn, were justified in terms of the national project to "modernize" Jordan.  Relatedly, the state-controlled enterprises provided employment for key professionalclass workers, as well as Jordanians living in the otherwise economically overlooked mining regions.  For example, in the southern governorate of Ma'an, the development of the Al-Shidiyah mine in  was followed by consistent increases over the following two decades in education and health indicators, as well as secular decreases in the unemployment and poverty rates ( Figure ).  Finally, mining employees, in return for their privileged place in national development (along with an array of material benefits), were pushed to submit to state-controlled unions.  Consequently, similar to khubz 'arabi, the national resource-exploiting enterprises came to represent a material juncture through which historically constructed social pacts and multivalent understandings of legitimacy, distributive justice, and national development While the moral economy of national resources remained largely sacrosanct until , the economic crisis of the late s marked a major disruption in the moral economy of commodities. From , the global price of oil plunged and Arab foreign aid began to shift to Iraq (to aid in its war against Iran), jeopardizing the state's access to rents. Debt skyrocketed and the

Matthew Lacouture 
dinar lost thirty-five per cent of its value between November  and February .  This led Jordan to the doorstep of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whom "policy-makers considered the only source of relief".  The resulting Standby Arrangement (SBA) with the IMF, signed in  and implemented in , was conditional upon the privatization of public sector investments, trade liberalization, cuts in state employment, and the removal of subsidies. However, for the first decade of structural adjustment, King Hussein was reluctant to go beyond modest price hikes, which were nevertheless met with widespread social unrest.
Despite the restrained nature of these reforms, "[w]ithin hours" of the  IMF-mandated freeze of public wages, salaries, and hiringcoupled with increases in domestic petroleum pricesthe largest protest wave in two decades erupted across Jordan.  Beginning in the southern city of Ma'an in Aprila historical bulwark of regime supportprotests quickly spread throughout the country. The social and spatial character of these "bread riots" signalled a dramatic shift in the nature of social protest in Jordan.  Historically, opposition to state polices sprung from the "usual suspects" of "leftist parties, Islamists, and/or Palestinian Jordanian activists".  However, after , opposition to state policies was increasingly characterized by the predominance of East Bank Jordanians. Indeed, many of my East Bank Jordanian interlocutors viewed  as their political awakening. According to one activist from the southern city of Karak, this was the moment that "changed everything": the Jordanian economy had "become naked", newly exposed to private sector interests and foreign capital.  While  represented a new and potentially existential threat to the prevailing order, King Hussein was able to stave off a unified national challenge to state power by quickly orchestrating a series of top-down reforms, including the lifting of martial law, in effect since , and the revival, albeit limited, of electoral politics in Jordan. Additional "bread riots" erupted in  and , the trajectory of which largely conformed to Walton and Seddon's description of austerity protests as spreading "quickly and contagiously" and yielding "short-term successes" without disrupting processes of "long-term depredation and socioeconomic restructuring".  Hence, while the waves of unrest precipitated by periodic price hikes in the s prefigured the social bases of the - uprisings in many ways, they also differed in important respects. The principal difference had to do with the political-economic context: according to Tariq Tell, "in contrast to , neoliberal reform was now the policy of choice for the Palace, rather than a necessary expedient imposed by the IMF".  To establish the new common sense underlying this neoliberal political economy, King Abdullahin collaboration with Western governments and international financial institutionsbegan to articulate a new relationship between the state and its subjects: instead of state employees, citizens were increasingly encouraged to become "entrepreneurs".  Instead of a welfare and job provider, the state was in "partnership" with the private sector in creating an attractive "business environment" for domestic and international investment.  At the same time, the king increasingly began to place control over economic policy into his own handsand those of a small coterie of technocratic eliteseffectively circumventing parliament and simultaneously cracking down on dissent from below.  The differences in the pace and scope of privatization under Abdullah II versus what came before were stark. In the s, the state owned controlling shares in  enterprises; by the mid-s, the government had divested from over forty of these enterprises, including the JPMC and APC.  This acceleration of privatization, however, did not mean that the state had completely lost sight of its moral obligations. According to the government's own (post hoc) study of privatizations, undertaken between  and , privatization was not considered an unalloyed goodit was, rather, "a means and not an end in itself", the benefits of which "are numerous if the process is implemented in an environment of transparency, competitiveness, and accountability".  By these

standards, the Privatization Evaluation Committee (PEC), under Omar
Razzaz (who would become Prime Minister in ), criticized the implementation and results of a number of privatizationsin particular the  privatization of the JPMC.  According to the PEC, the JPMC privatization had "lacked many transparency standards and [a] commitment to best practices".  It is thus worth examining this privatization in more detail. The JPMC was sold under opaque circumstances, ostensibly to Bruneivia Kamil Holding Ltdthough many of my interlocutors believed this to be a smokescreen for the real buyers in the king's own circle.  Indeed, Walid el-Kurdi, the brother-in-law of the late King Hussein, "was personally involved in the process of the privatization" and became the head of the company in .  Thus, for many Jordanians, the JPMC "was not privatized but rather taken over by the Hashemite monarchy".  By contrast, the privatization of the APC in  conformed more closely to the PEC's definition of "best practices", including enhanced transparency, and was, correspondingly, viewed by many of my interlocutors in a more favourable light.  In order to untangle the social consequences of these different privatizations, in what follows I trace the protests as well as narratives of corruption and theft employed by differently situated activists in Jordan between  and . sense of illegitimate redistribution: privatizations are corrupt; they represent the end of the public sector as a source of livelihood in Jordan; and they are equivalent to "selling" off the country (and Jordanians' birthright). The protest chant quoted at the top of this article draws these different sentiments together: "Out, Out, Corruption! … We want Jordan to stay free!" Between  and , over , protests, marches, and strikes swept across Jordan, responding to decades of economic immiseration and stalled democratic reforms.  In addition to their scale, these mobilizations were unprecedented in Jordan because of the participation of groups from across the country, including the "traditional" opposition (the Muslim Brotherhood and opposition parties), as well as two new social movements: a new independent labour movement and the Hirak. The Hirak (or "movement") "encompassed nearly forty East Bank tribal youth activist groups across the kingdom, representing rural communities long thought to be unflagging supporters of the autocratic regime".  In this section, I demonstrate how labour and non-labour activists shared an understanding of privatizations rooted in moral economy, which served as the basis for a shared discourse of resistance to neoliberal reforms. In this way, privatization created the possibility for a broad-based and transgressive national discoursealbeit one that ultimately fell shortrepresenting, as one activist put it, a new "genetics" of resistance in Jordan.  Privatizations connected the daily experiences of immiseration and deprivation under structural adjustment to the (failed) promises of national development as symbolized, in large part, by Jordan's national resources. In the eyes of Hirak activists, public assets belonged to Jordanian citizens, and their "theft" was akin to "losing everything". As one activist from Amman put it: We would like to know where all that money is spent because they took that money from privatization projects. It didn't work out. I didn't sense it on my salary, I didn't sense it on my lifestyle, I didn't see it on the transportation system, the health, my education, [and] the youth are still taking loans and paying for their own salaries to the universities. […] It didn't reflect on our lives. It was a huge mistake by the governments to do this and we didn't get any benefits […] In the airport, the Port [of Aqaba], and our two big companies [the Port and Phosphate] unfortunately we sold more than % of them. This is what it feels like when you talk about the privatization. We lost everything.  Whether or not Jordanians felt the outcomes of privatization "in their pockets" therefore gets to the heart of how privatizations in Jordan were  This shared sense that expectations of redistribution had gone unmet transcended divisions across society: from the local to the national and across labour and non-labour movement constituencies. This prompted a turn towards innovative forms of grievance articulation. As a prominent labour and Hirak activist explained: The [Prime Minister in ] Rifai government waged war on unions. Union leaders were imprisoned, fired, or relocated to distant sites for having organized strikes. These transfers made us think of new ways to struggle for change: using protests and echoing people's grievances about the government, such as economic policies that raised the prices of basic goods used by the poor, increased unemployment and poverty. So we founded the Jayeen movement. We organized demonstrations all over the country, calling for a new national unity government. We have also demanded a special tribunal against the corrupt individuals who sold national assets such as phosphate mines, transportation, and water [by granting foreign companies exclusive mining and management rights] at prices that didn't reflect their value.  The protest movement alluded to in the above quote, Jayeen ("we are coming"), was in many ways emblematic of the "new ways to struggle for change" emerging in Jordan. Bringing labour and Hirak activists from the governorates to the capital city, Jayeen was a major participant, along with a loose confederation of other organizations, in the largest protests of Jordan's - uprisings under the umbrella of the "March  [] Movement".  As Bouziane and Lenner emphasize,  March represented an unprecedented attempt "to form a broad coalition for substantial political and economic reforms, transcending potential divides between different population groups" -though one that ultimately failed in the face of state repression and divisions within Jordanian society.  Despite the dissolution of Jayeen shortly thereafter, there were myriad other protests, strikes, sit-ins, and public demonstrations that brought Jordanians together, united around narratives of theft and legitimacy. The privatization of the JPMC is instructive in understanding this distinction.

Revolt of the workers
In , when the JPMC was privatized, the brother-in-law of the late King Hussein, Walid el-Kurdi, was subsequently installed as CEO. His corrupt tenure, and its effects on JPMC workers, came to a reckoning in , when el-Kurdi's son's pay stubdisplaying a five-fold increase over those in similar postswas circulated to workers.  The pay stub had the effect of galvanizing phosphate workers around the issue of corruption, precipitating two general strikes between  and . These events ultimately led workers to break away from their official trade union, The General Trade Union of Mines and Mining Employees (GTUMME) -one of the seventeen officially permitted trade unions belonging to the General Federation of Jordanian Trade Unions (GFJTU).
Fioroni's detailed ethnographic exploration of the JPMC employees demonstrates how the privatization of the JPMC created various, even conflicting grievances among the employees.  On the one hand, the professional-class strike organizers were motivated by their belief that the privatization had failed to produce a rationalized, meritocratic corporation. On the other hand, those in the non-professional stratum of employees were aggrieved by the newly privatized JPMC's failuredue to el-Kurdi's circumvention of long-established clientelist recruitment/advancement practices in favour of his ownto live up to its historical obligations regarding the distribution of permanent jobs to those living in the mining regions. Because the strike leaders required the participation of those living and working in the mining regions to shut down the mines, they consciously drew upon mutually comprehensible and salient aspects of the privatizationthe "corruption" of employment practices, the "theft"/privatization of the company, and de facto royal family controlto rally a broad base of workers.  Consequently, in April , a group of about thirty JPMC employees initiated a three-day sit-in against their union, "denouncing corruption and mismanagement, asking for new [union] bylaws, a new personnel system, and the fair treatment of employees".  Initial responses to the sit-in came from both the GTUMME, which declared the sit-in "illegal and illegitimate" publications/-corruption-middle-east-limits-conventional-approaches/; last accessed  January . . Fioroni, "From the Everyday". Protest and the Moral Economy of National Resources in Jordan  (because protesters were circumventing the union), and Walid el-Kurdi himself.  At first, el-Kurdi attempted to assuage workers' concerns by signing a vague agreement with them. Instead of relenting, however, the organizers of the April sit-in proceeded to initiate two general strikes between  and  and, in June , they established a new independent unionbecoming the first workers to exit the formal GFJTU structure.  The first strike, in June , involved a massive organizing effort and brought together "employees from all the production sites, high skilled and low skilled employees, and employees from diverse tribal and local origins".  Notably, the strike resulted in the shutdown of all three phosphate mines. During this period, the demands of phosphate workers expanded from their specific grievances focused on the JPMC's management, remuneration, and organization following the  privatization, to criticisms of the official union structure, as well as the entire Palace-led privatization project.  As expressed by one of the leaders of the movement, the motivation for these actions stemmed from the illegitimate way in which the privatization had been conducted: Our movement it wasn't against the privatization. It's against the way Walid el-Kurdi is acting and stealing the company.
[…] [We were] asking for accountability, government accountability. To audit the finances of the company.
[…] They stole the phosphate and did not privatize the company.  Thus, their grievances were in opposition to the state-articulated "common sense" that privatizations were a necessary step towards prosperity. At the same time, workers' demands transcended el-Kurdi as an individual by framing el-Kurdi's "theft" in terms of the corruption of the state (the "they" in the above excerpt).  In response to the first strike wave in , the regime eventually stepped in: [After the May  strike] [s]ome senators from the parliament, they contacted us, and the administration of the company, to solve the problem. And we signed an agreement with the senatorson one condition: that the parliament would establish a committee to investigate the privatizations. And we established our independent trade union.  . Ibid., p. . . Workers from ten other economic sectors also followed suit in establishing new unions and, in , came together to establish the Jordanian Federation of Independent Trade Unions; Phenix Center for Economic and Informatics Studies, "Freedom of Association Fact Sheet", p. . Available at: https://www.solidar.org/system/downloads/attachments////original/PDF.pdf? ; last accessed  January . . Fioroni, "Bridging the Gap", p. . . JFITU unionist, interview with author, Amman, Jordan,  July . . Salem, interview with author, Amman, Jordan,  July . . Ibid. . Ibid.; emphasis added.
The establishment of the commission to investigate the privatizationsand the resulting  reportbecame a point of significant pride for the leaders of the independent phosphate union.  Beyond the JPMC workers' movement, the privatization of the company was articulated to, and resonated with, differently situated actors across Jordanexemplifying the discursive power of the moral economy. Firstly, in the mining regions, the privatization had a mobilizing effect among unemployed job-seekers whose expectations of resource distribution through gaining jobs in the JPMC had been stymied by the hiring freeze. Specifically, though the hiring freeze pre-dated the privatization, it was both kept in place under el-Kurdi and compounded by el-Kurdi's periodic and conspicuous employment of his family members. Consequently, young job-seekers demonstrated in  to protest the company's failure to live up to its historical obligations to distribute jobs in the regions in which it extracted mineral wealth.  Secondly, by bringing to light the overt corruption and nepotism on display in the JPMC privatization, the JPMC workers created common cause with the Hirak. For instance, in their own enumeration of grievances, Hirak activists frequently echoed the phosphate workers' claims that the JPMC was sold under mysterious circumstances and at an insulting price.  El-Kurdi's name was also commonly evoked in the demonstrations that filled the streets of Amman and across the governorates throughout the - period.  Unravelling "illegitimate" privatizations As previously alluded to, recent scholarship on Jordan has suggested that Jordanian's resistance to privatization was motivated by nationalism, against either "Palestinians" or foreign capital.  In this framing, anti-privatization sentiments by East Bank Jordanians were merely a defensive ploy to regain lost patronage benefits. Evidence for this argument includes protesters' focus on Queen Rania and her family (who are of Palestinian descent) as among the most corrupt. be de-politicized and delegated to the designs of technocrats.  Moreover, in contrast to the moral economy of commodities, the violation of the moral economy of national resources could not be as easily resolved or deferred by, for example, rolling back prices.
Privatization was much more hardwired into the circuits of global capitalism. To roll back privatizations would mean reversing the flow of upward redistribution (and foreign capital) that neoliberalism is predicated upon. The best state actors could do was to project all of society's grievances vis-à-vis privatizations onto a few sacrificial elites, such as Walid el-Kurdi. This strategy mirrors Lyall's description of Ecuadorian elites' attempts to position themselves as "moral managers" of national resources through anti-corruption campaigns.  However, doing so could not turn back the clock on the articulation and spread of transgressive discourses. This was relayed quite concisely to me by a Hirak leader from a northern Amman neighbourhood: "it's all politics and economics, [they are] two faces of one coin".  For their part, labour activists also saw that the continuing suffering of workers was wrapped up in the policies of the state: In the economic path, [the] plans they are making, […] when it's wrong, the workers will pay the price. When the political policy is not right, also the workers will pay the price. For these reasons, you can't separate things.  This kind of discourse, traceable in part to the violation of the moral economy of national resources, brought diverse movement constituencies together around the realization that political and economic conditions and grievances were all intertwinedtranscending place and ideology.
The work of articulation occurred reciprocally between labour and nonlabour movement constituencies. Between  and , labour and Hirak activists, by making the "connection" between economic and political struggles, necessarily moved beyond "restorative" demands to articulate a systemic critique of the neoliberal authoritarian state. Through active efforts to merge labour and popular demandssuch as the Jayeen movement (see above)workers brought their grievances to the protest square, which were then picked up and further articulated by Hirak demonstrators. As one activist explained to me, "yes, we started with economic demands, but they realized for all those demands, the solution is politics; we started with economic demands and we find out that the solution is political and so our demands became politicalwe want a parliament because we want a voice".  He further clarified the role of the Hirak: "we gave to [the worker movement] a social aspect that is much more political; we understood privatization as a social problem (our economy, our companies)".  In making such pronouncements, activists also decried the inadequacies of previous "political" avenues of change, such as the top-down reforms of , or of Abdullah's "economic" pathvis-à-vis promises of modernization and economic prosperity.  The former had proven sufficient merely to perpetuate the status quo (e.g. the moral economy of commodities), while the latter, through neoliberal reforms such as the privatizations, had actually made life for many in Jordan considerably worse while delimiting civil rights in the process. It was in response to the failures of both the s and the s that some activists began to elaborate a systemic critique of the entire "situation" in Jordan. As one Hirak activist summarized: "[m]ainly it is the economic system, it is the privatization that we fight so much against, the capitalist economic system in Jordan".  Moreover, it was in the context of the uprisings that "neoliberalism" became a "new phrase" in activist circles.  In a discussion with an activist leader from Amman, he explained to me that in the s, "new faces" came into power -"the neoliberals" -who "sold everything"; he added that "you cannot survive if they are selling off all your resources".  While the societal extent of such sentiments requires further research, the fact that they were expressed by differently situated actorsacross labour/ non-labour, urban/rural, and other social dividesdemonstrates that grievances surrounding privatizations resonated with a significant crosssection of Jordanians. In part, this was due to the fact that national resources were inextricably tied to historical state obligations of economic redistribution (e.g., through jobs and state welfare). Labour activists emphasized narratives of "theft" and "corruption" in articulating resistance to privatizations in order to win over broader worker and social support. In reciprocal fashion, Hirak activists performed the discursive work to reframe privatization as a "social issue" impacting all Jordaniansnot just those who worked at privatized companies because, in the view of one such activist, "the Hirak is not a political project, it's a political experience, a political voice; Hirak, whatever it represents, it's from the people and for the people".  Together, these and similar articulations reflected activists' comprehension of the structural connections between their lived material experiences and the policies of the neoliberal state, which As argued in this article, privatization necessarily means more than simply a change in asset ownership from public to private. In Jordan, privatization was experienced by many activists as an instance of "accumulation by dispossession", or, in other words, the "reversion to the private domain of common property rights won through past class struggles".  Hence, the narratives of theft and corruption employed by my interlocutors reflected the perception that the fruits of Jordan's national resources belong to Jordanians as part of historical state-society pacts won through social struggle, the abrogation of whichthrough illegitimate (corrupt, opaque, and poorly planned) privatizationsconstituted a moral violation. In this article, I have argued that the privatization of the commons in Jordan precipitated the development of a new, transgressive framing discourse of protest, which created the possibility for a national-scale movement to resist the state's neoliberal project. Yet, this discourse was only able to go so far. By , the state had succeeded through the strategic use of material and political concessions and violence to demobilize and demoralize the resistance.  Nevertheless, through the privatization of the commons, King Abdullah II's accelerated neoliberal project has ushered in a new era of contentious politics, one that has reverberated in recent mass protests and strikes over the last two years, as many Jordanians continue to challenge the terms of neoliberalism and, by extension, authoritarianism. 