Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: Workers and the Egyptian Revolution
by Anne Alexander and Mostafa Bassiouny
(Zed Press, £16.99)

IN THE aftermath of Hosni Mubarak’s recent acquittal on murder charges for his regime’s attacks on protesters in 2011, a cynic might ask “Egyptian revolution? What revolution?”

The see-saw struggles between the entrenched Egyptian military of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and the Muslim Brotherhood of Mohammed Morsi seem, at least superficially, to have led to the refurbishment, if not quite the restoration, of the ancien regime.

In the face of these realities, Anne Alexander and Mostafa Bassiouny’s work is welcome because it restores the concept of class struggle as a crucial element in understanding wider Egyptian and Middle Eastern politics. And it allows access to the voices of workers and trade unionists who have largely been sidelined in Western narratives of the “Arab Spring.”

The authors’ clear commitment to putting the working class at the centre of events in Egypt is the book’s great merit and we are given snapshots of a whole series of strikes and stoppages in the years leading up to the ousting of Mubarak in 2011.

The account is a powerful corrective to those who claim that Twitter and Facebook are the keys to toppling governments — such platforms may reflect social conflict but they don’t create it. It is also a corrective to the myth that democracy is a project solely owned by the emerging middle classes in developing countries.

But the authors’ attempts to support their broader analysis of the Egyptian crisis with the shop-soiled dogmas of state capitalism and deflected permanent revolution lead them astray.

Both support the International Socialist Tendency (IST), the group which includes the British Socialist Workers’ Party and Egypt’s Revolutionary Socialists (RS), the latter a minor and at times controversial actor in the 2011 events.

Egypt is thus viewed from the “state capitalist” perspective and classified as having an essentially similar social and economic structures to Cuba, created by radicalised but not genuinely socialist middle-class elites.

Not surprisingly this muddled historical analysis leads the authors astray on key issues.

They argue that the post-Nasser leaders shifted from “state capitalist policies” to a “new amalgam of state and private capital” in a neoliberal direction.

Leaving aside the redefinition of state capitalism as a set of policy choices rather than a social system, the authors overstate the continuity of the Nasser period with developments after his death begun by Anwar Sadat.

Nasser, after all, encouraged the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and fought Israel several times. Today Sisi, like Mubarak before him, enforces Israel’s Gaza blockade.

Nasser opted for non-alignment, Sadat and Mubarak for the cosy embrace of Washington. Nasser launched significant land reform and nationalised key industries, while Sadat and Mubarak privatised them.

According to the IST’s perspective, due to its mass base the Muslim Brotherhood was a “reformist” movement, comparable to Western social democratic parties, a formulation justifying the RS’s one-sided courtship of the Brotherhood during the anti-Mubarak campaigns and their eventual endorsement of Morsi’s presidential election campaign despite his sectarian and neoliberal policies.

Finding a path to democracy, while avoiding the pitfalls of tailing the military or Islamists, is the “riddle of the sphinx” that has confronted the Egyptian left for decades.

This book is proof that there is still no easy answer.