Socialism in Egypt as a political movement dates back to the early 20th century, with the founding of the first Egyptian Socialist Party in 1921. Despite facing severe state repression throughout the years, Egyptian organized labor has consistently fought for workers' rights. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser developed a special type of Third-World Socialism, dubbed Nasserism, which has inspired many Arab and African socialist movements, such as the FLN in Algeria and the Third International Theory in Libya. While Egypt transitioned towards capitalism under President Anwar Sadat, Egyptian socialists have remained harsh critics of privatization and neoliberalism in Egypt. Workers' uprisings in the early 2000s Egypt under President Hosni Mubarak eventually exploded into the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.
History
Kingdom of Egypt
'Capitalism without Capitalists' During the reign of Muhammad Ali Pasha in the early 1800s, the Egyptian economy began to enter the modern capitalist era. Muhammad Ali focused on growing grain and cotton for European markets in exchange for capital for industrialization. Cotton was grown at such a scale that by 1836 it accounted for 80% of Egyptian exports. The government maintained a monopoly on cotton production using workers who were conscripted in a semi-feudal system, with historian Mourad Wahba describing this stage of the Egyptian economy as "capitalism without capitalists". The government grew cotton production through intermittent, unpaid forced labor to manufacture a class of day laborers or tenants who could not easily afford rent.(Brooke, Steven & Koehler-Derrick, Gabriel: April 6th 2020) "When Redistribution Exacerbates Poverty: Evidence from Gamal Abdel Nasser's Land Reforms", pages 7-9 The Egyptian state seized large swaths of what was then privately owned peasant land; by 1907, over 90% of Egyptian rural families either did not own enough land for subsistence or had no land at all. To live, they either worked for large estates, rented land, or became wage workers. Peasant revolts broke out against this new system; one in 1864 was described by Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon as a 'communist' uprising. Muhammad Ali's successors borrowed irresponsible amounts for foreign debt to pay for their lifestyles.
Due to a struggling economy and failed expensive projects, the Khedive of Egypt formed the Caisse de la Dette Publique, a national debt council, to oversee repayment. This council, which was run by wealthy foreign investors, gradually eroded the national sovereignty of the Egyptian state, especially after Egypt declared bankruptcy in 1876. Further financial concessions sparked the 1882 uprising against the government and its ruling landlord class. After a British intervention defeated the uprising, Britain established the 'veiled protectorate'. Egypt became a de facto British colony run by the Consuls-General, beginning with Lord Cromer. Cromer resolved the deficit but damaged native industry, as historian Afaf Marsot explains:
Economically, the Egyptian state was still heavily reliant on agriculture, namely cotton, which grew to 93% of exports by 1914. While a small industrial sector existed, the British administration's significant austerity measures reduced the Egyptian state's ability to develop an indigenous economy, instead preserving power in the hands of a small, British-friendly, large land-owning class. Native Egyptian workers were paid little, and often subject to fraud or abuse. The first unions and strike actions hit Egypt by the turn of the 20th Century, when coal dockworkers in 1900 and cigarette rollers in 1899 organized the first unions in Egyptian history. At the start of World War I, the legal fiction of the Khedivate itself was abolished in place of the Sultanate of Egypt, a more explicit British dictatorship under martial law, after the British feared that Khedive Abbas II was planning to join the Central Powers. During the conflict, the Egyptian Labour Corps (ELC) was drafted by the British during their campaign against the Ottoman Empire. The workers were responsible for back-breaking work such as draining swamps and building railroads for the British army. Laborers in the corps were subjected to a distinct collective racial oppression, such as flogging by British overseers. As William Knott, a British conscientious objector, wrote:
By recruiting Egyptians from all over the country and subjecting them to abysmal conditions, the British had inadvertently linked the national movement with the labor movement. Up to 200 police officers were killed in Upper Egypt in incidents directly related to Labour Corps recruitment. ELC workers who fought against brutal conditions launched major mutinies against the British, exploding in 1917. As one British soldier noted:
Early Socialists and the Labour Movement
While no socialist party existed until the 1919 Egyptian revolution, Marxist ideas began to spread among Egyptian students in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. By 1908, there were around 600 Egyptian students in Europe, mostly in France but also in the UK and Germany, who founded student organizations with close ties to the local socialist movements in their respective countries. Salama Mousa studied in England and joined the Fabian Society, while students in France had a close relationship with French socialists. Mousa's first writings on socialism in 1913 are considered the first Arabic works regarding the topic. In 1915, Mustafa al-Mansuri wrote Tarikh al-Mathahib al-Ishtirakiyah (The History of Socialist Ideologies), declaring on the industrial revolution:"There is no sane person who wants to return to the dark ages ... Thus, we have to have the machines serve man rather than compete with him. But how can we do this when the morals of the machines cannot be changed and the capitalists have the expense of the pain and toiling of the laborers? ... The only way to bring happiness to mankind is to abolish private ownership and the place capital in the hands of the workers themselves."Later in 1919, al-Mansuri published two books, one a translation of Tolstoy and the other a commentary on economist Henry George with regard to how Georgism can be applied to Egypt. Another early Arab socialist around this time was the Syrian Niqula al-Haddad. Haddad had met the American socialist Eugene Debs and started an Arab socialist society in New York in 1910, later moving to Egypt. Haddad argued against reformists, instead making the case for a socialist system where "every individual should enjoy all the result of his labor on the basis that people who share labor should also share its fruits, each according to his work".
1919 Revolution
After the war, a group of nationalist politicians led by Saad Zaghloul formed an Egyptian delegation (Arabic: Wafd) to demand Egyptian independence at the Paris Peace Conference. However, the British colonial administrators refused, sparking the 1919 Egyptian revolution. The resulting mass protests of Egyptians and the struggle between the liberal Wafd party, the conservative monarchy and the British eventually culminated in the Declaration of Egyptian Independence in 1922, the Egyptian Constitution of 1923, and the election of Zaghloul as prime minister in 1924. Egyptian workers were pivotal during the revolution; labor uprisings and strikes paralyzed the economy in what was the first mass movement in Egyptian history, as Egyptians began to develop both a national and class consciousness. Peasants (called fallaheen in Arabic) cut railway and communication lines to weaken British retributive violence. After Zaghloul and the Wafd were arrested on March 8, tram workers and taxi drivers went on strike, a few days later, all forms of transportation ceased to exist. By the 29th, management agreed to create a council to investigate claims of abuse by tram workers, but the workers demanded that representatives participate in the council on an equal basis. In the end, the government agreed to the workers' demands, including higher wages. Wage workers refused to work unless Zaghloul and the Wafd were freed and demanded complete independence. The British compared the situation in Egypt with the Russian Revolution around the same time: Landowners and omdehs generally were reported seriously alarmed at the attitude of the fellaheen, the damage done to property, cattle lifting, danger to the water supply and the likelihood of further unrest. They were becoming exasperated with Cairo and the "effendi" agitators to whose activities their losses were attributable; while they were uneasy at the appearance amongst the fellaheen of what, from their point of view, they regarded as the worst symptom of Bolshevism, namely the proposal to partition large estates for the benefit of the small holders and landle. The connections between the Wafd in 1919 and the Bolshevik movement are unclear. According to the Egyptian politician Hafez Afifi Pasha, the Russian delegation at Paris promised to drive the English out of Egypt by financially supporting the Wafd and supporting the movement in their propaganda. However, the historian Mohammed Nuri El-Amin argues that a Wafd-Bolshevik alliance was exaggerated by British intelligence. While in Paris, Zaghloul instructed his group to only focus on Egyptian independence to "the exclusion of all other targets that are usually apt to discredit political movements". In June 1919, Zaghloul sent a letter to leaders of the Wafd movement back in Egypt, declaring:"The Wafd does not approve the leaflets which indicate that the Egyptians depend on the Germans and applaud the victory of the Bolsheviks. These leaflets benefit our enemies in their claim that the Egyptian movement has connections with the Germans and the Bolshevik movement".Zaghloul was not interested in socialism and, as did the Wafd party as a whole post-Zaghloul, rejected a revolutionary approach, instead pushed for gradualist negotiations - only using mass protests for leverage in negotiations and not as a means in and of themselves to achieve independence. The Indian socialist M. N. Roy criticized Zaghloul for abandoning revolutionary struggle, writing:The latest political events in Egypt signify the collapse of opportunist centrism. They prove how history has deprived the colonial bourgeoisie of a consistent revolutionary role. ... In a rather peculiar way, Egypt is enjoying all the sensations of a bourgeois revolution. Feudalism and reactionary bureaucracy are defeated; imperial exploitation will be carried on in the future through the medium of the native bourgeoisie. The basis of imperial rule is widened, but the revolutionary consciousness of the anti-imperialist hosts will also be quickened. Thus grows the struggle, and the day is drawing nearer when the people of Egypt will be free, in spite of the fact that British Imperialism, embodied in King Fuad, has secured the loyally of Zaghlul Pasha. It will simply help the revolutionary forces to lose another illusion.
First Egyptian Communist Party