“Sallam interrogates the changing roles of leftists and Islamists in relation to political power in Egypt. Why, for example, did the Islamist movement dominate the political arena in Egypt since the late 1970s? Why, in the era of neoliberal economic assault on the working class, did the Left fail to organize a class politics around economic disenfranchisement? And finally, did autocrats provide Islamist groups with a space for political organization and maneuver denied to those that challenged the state’s economic liberalization schemes?”
The Egyptian Left, “without a mass political movement to lead or organize, became obsessed with culture rather than class war, tailing the state in its fight against “terrorists” and “religious fascists.” This alienated the Left from exactly the social groups that it historically needed to challenge economic and social inequality — a recipe for political irrelevance.”
How ironic, and how similar to most of the Western Left!
“On the eve of the revolution of January 25, 2011, the Tagammu Party refused to endorse calls for protests. Other leftist groups, such as the Revolutionary Socialists, took part in organizing the revolt, but were too small to provide leadership for the uprising.”
“The left-leaning Nasserists, represented by Hamdeen Sabbahi, performed relatively better in the presidential race. Yet both the Nasserist and communist left ended up rallying behind the military junta in its “war on religious fascism” and endorsing the 2013 coup, which translated into a full counterrevolutionary onslaught.”
“Sallam’s seminal work points to the impact of Soviet policy on Egyptian Communism, but interestingly the word “Stalinism” is not mentioned once in the book despite its decisive impact (and detrimental effect) on it.”
“Egyptian Communists were heavily Stalinized from the start, and nationalism was part of that package. Communism for them had become a national liberation ideology and a patriotic project. This partially explains the ease with which notable Marxist intellectuals like Muhammad Emara, Adel Hussein, and Abdel Wahab al-Messiri could move from communism to Nasserism and finally to Islamist populism. From a class perspective, the essence is the same: a middle-class project geared toward nationalist, state-led development.”
“Attending to class would also have benefited Sallam in explaining the internal conflict in the MB between the conservatives and the reformists — or as he puts it, the “guardianists” and the “institutionalists” — he captures so brilliantly. The MB is a multiclass organization. What this has actually meant is that, at every twist and turn in its political development, the leadership has had to consider class as a decisive issue, not just the conservative-reformist divide. Any program or set of slogans had to somehow address the competing interests of different classes within the organization. This partially explains why the group never really managed to put forward a coherent social and economic program.”
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