Good luck

It wouldn't be an overstatement to say that the egyptian left got crushed in the last parliamentary elections, especially since the MB urged all of its voters to vote the socialist Tagamooa party candidates out of office after the bitter attack that the party launched against the MB in the media. It may seem strange to observer that the left may have problems in Egypt, especially that the economic conditions are just ripe to be exploited using leftist rhetoric : Poverty is rampant, government is corrupt as all hell, and the middle class seems to all but dissappeared from our class structure. The problem that the left in Egypt has, besides having almost no solid street presence, is that the current islamization of Egypt has managed to alter the perception of the leftist. The Equation now is: Leftist = Communist = Godless Infidel, and we wouldn't want Infidels to gain power in our great islamic republic now, would we? The trick to bring it back to its prominence seems to be that they have to erase this image from the average egyptian Mo's mind and make it seems possible to be both Muslim/christian and a socialist or a marxist. To strike that balance that is pro secularism and yet not anti-religion. Altough, honestly, it seems that they are just not getting that memo: He listed other reasons why the left was no longer a presence on the political scene. It is too scattered and divided, and on too many occasions the various factions have squandered whatever political capital they possessed on squabbling among themselves. "We need to unite, we need a party," he continued, "an Egyptian communist party that can Egyptianise Marxism... An elected, democratic party... we communists have never experienced democracy [from within].We know only centralisation." But you can not egyptianize marxism with the whole "religion is the opiate of the masses" part being a pillar in that ideology. Sorry man, just not happening. It would be far easier for them, if they wanted to win, to get rid of that part, and try to remind people how "nicer" the living conditions were when the country was socialist under Nasser. Do they do that? Nope. Instead, they waste their time talking about the palestinain problem, engaging in anti americanism, going on demonstrations against the normalization of relations with Israel, and all of that hollow slogan bullshit that-as the egyptian saying goes- "doesn't feed anyone bread". But, will they do that? Probably not. They are too "intellectual" for their own good and too stuck in nasserite ideology to even see that it was this same line of thinking that screwed us back then and continues to screw us now. Unless they change their modus operandi completly, the egyptian left is doomed to just fade away. And I don't really want that for my own selfish reasons, one of which is that I would rather fight socialists than political islamists for starters. The other is that their presence is a necessary balance to the islamists, which in turn can only benefit the secular capitalists, which is the group I belong in. Wishfull thinking? Perhaps. The left is all but dead, and secularism will probably follow. It seems more and more everyday that the islamist revoloution is all but inevtiable. Oh well..