Marxism or Left-Wing Nationalism? The New Left in Egypt in the 1970s

The trajectory of the New Left in Egypt is peculiar within the history of Arab radical Marxist politics. In 1965, Egyptian communist parties decided to offi- cially dissolve themselves and be absorbed into Nasser’s (pseudo-)revolutionary platform. While both Nasser and these co-opted communists of the ‘Official Left’ somehow survived the June Defeat of 1967, a new wave of younger and more radical Marxists made its appearance on campuses and, later, in the fac- tories, challenging the established ‘revolutionary credentials’ of the regime and their older comrades. On the basis, mostly, of unpublished archive material and personal inter- views, this chapter aims to shed light on the theory and political praxis of the Egyptian Radical Left in the 1970s. In particular, this chapter focuses on the experience of the ‘far left’, embodied by the al-tanzim al-shuyu‘i al-misri (TshM), formed in 1969, which became the Egyptian Communist Workers’ Party (ECWP, hizb al-‘ummal al-shuyu‘i al-misri) in 1975. While this group attracted many radical intellectuals, and helped to spread the ideas of the new radical Third World Left (Vietnam, Cuba, Mao’s China, etc.), this chapter argues that both TshM and ECWP remained trapped within a nationalist and pan-Arabist discourse, by de facto focusing on the national question at the expense of the social question.