All the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) transformed over the past decade – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE- boast of world’s tallest building, biggest shopping mall, and largest aluminium, plastic, ceramics, and petrochemical complexes. Save coastal China, no other region has seen such a remarkable transformation in such a brief time span.
What lies behind GCC’s spectacular transformation? The first thing that springs to mind is oil generating phenomenal revenues, particularly from 2000 to 2008: at the peak of this price, the GCC’s GDP climbed to over $1 trillion (roughly 2 percent of the world’s total: $61 trillion). In 2008, the GCC was the 14th-largest economy in the world, and registered a per-capita GDP three times the world average. Yet while oil wealth is clearly key to the economic transformation of the recent decades, a recent book by Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States, describes a different side to the GCC’s development. Hanieh, a Marxist scholar of Arab origin, argues that “much like its desert cousin, the mirage-what visitors actually see in the region’s oil-fuelled boom is not the full picture.”
In order to fully comprehend these changes, Hanieh argues, it is necessary on the one hand to map the process of capitalist class formation in the Gulf. On the other hand, the internationalisation of Gulf capitalism is the most vital element.
In Hanieh’s perspective, the Gulf class formation has evolved within the development of a global capitalist system in which oil has assumed primacy owing to certain specific factors. In this process, ironically, Gulf billionaires have not minted money by appropriating oil revenues but they have pocketed spin-offs from oil revenues (i.e., construction contracts, logistics, banking, etc.).
