When the Left Applauded Its Own Executioner: Why the Egyptian Left Supported the 2013 Coup

By: Fares Hakim

In August 2013, only days after the Rabaa al-Adawiya massacre, when over a thousand Egyptians were killed within the space of a few hours, Rifaat al-Said—the long-time leader of the Tagammu Party and one of the oldest figures of the Egyptian left—made his now infamous declaration: “I love El-Sisi because, on 30 June, he saved my neck.” It was no slip of the tongue. It was the expression of a coherent political position.

The Tagammu Party had welcomed the suspension of the democratic process, endorsed the branding of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists, applauded the dispersal of the sit-ins, rejected Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) report on the massacre, and instead praised the findings of the regime’s own fact-finding committee.

Faced with this history, the easiest answer is to say that the left betrayed its principles or lost its way. Yet, for all its moral comfort, such an explanation misses the more unsettling point. Betrayal presumes the existence of principles that were later abandoned; deviation assumes a straight path from which one strayed. The argument advanced here is altogether different: what happened in 2013 was not a departure from the traditional logic of the Egyptian left, but its most faithful and internally consistent enactment. The question, then, is not “Why did the left betray its ideals?” It is “What were those ideals that led, almost inexorably, to this outcome?”

The answer requires a journey backwards from 2013. July cannot be explained by July alone. It can only be understood through the seventy years that preceded it: the gradual formation of a left born from the womb of a particular social class, shaped by a distinct intellectual outlook, and carried—by the inner logic of its own assumptions—to precisely this destination.

I. Who Produced This Left? The Intelligentsia of State Capitalism

Before asking why the Egyptian left acted as it did, we must first ask a more fundamental question: What was this left, sociologically speaking? From which class did it emerge? In what milieu was it formed? And whose material interests did it articulate when it clothed them in the language of theory?

The answer leads us to a specific historical formation: the intelligentsia brought into being by state capitalism in the postcolonial era. When post-1952 Egypt embarked on a project of state-led industrialization, it necessarily generated a new middle class; civil servants, military officers, managers of the public sector, engineers, doctors, teachers, journalists: all those educated in the institutions of the new state and endowed by it with social standing. The social mobility this project enabled was genuine. The sons and daughters of peasants and workers became engineers, physicians, administrators; and it was this opening, more than rhetoric alone, that gave the Nasserist project its extraordinary popular appeal.

It was from within this social stratum that most of the cadres of the traditional Egyptian left emerged. Here lies the central point that must be grasped before we can proceed: the intelligentsia does not hover above society. It is always rooted in a particular social class, translating that class’s material interests into the language of ideology, theory, and political programmes. As Marx and Engels argue in The Communist Manifesto, a section of bourgeois intellectuals may indeed break with their class and join the proletariat, but only insofar as they attain a theoretical understanding of the historical movement as a whole. Class origin, then, is not an inescapable destiny. Yet unless such a theoretical rupture occurs, it remains a powerful constraint upon consciousness.

What, then, were the material interests of the middle class fashioned by state capitalism?

Its fundamental interest lay in preserving the state itself; the very apparatus that had produced it, secured its existence, and guaranteed the continuity of its privileges. It could scarcely imagine a world beyond that state, because its own social existence was inseparable from the state’s. What appears, on the surface, as an ideological commitment or an intellectual conviction is, at a deeper level, the expression of a profound material interest.

There is, however, an important qualification. To recognize this is not to lapse into the very mechanical materialism under critique. Class origin does not determine consciousness in any automatic or deterministic fashion. Rather, it establishes the horizon of what can be seen, imagined, or dismissed. The difference between the traditional left that arrived at the events of 2013 and those who rejected that trajectory was not one of social origin, but of method. The former embraced a mechanical materialism that substituted the state for the working class as the agent of history; the latter broke decisively with that logic and adopted a genuinely dialectical materialist approach. This distinction forms the thread that runs through the argument of this essay.

II. The Closed Circle: How State Capitalism Produced a Left That Reproduced It

Before turning to a closer examination of the Nasserist project itself, one crucial point must be established. The original fault did not begin with Nasser; it preceded him. During the 1940s, the second wave of the Egyptian communist movement had already embraced the Stalinist orthodoxy imported from Moscow: the doctrine of mechanically predetermined stages of revolution, and the supposedly inevitable alliance with the “national bourgeoisie” as a historical necessity. What Nasser did was to furnish this doctrine with its ideal social habitat. He created a broad bureaucratic middle class born of the state itself, a class that would go on to reproduce, from within its own material circumstances, a logic that had initially arrived as an imported ideology.

The first aspect of this argument concerns the nature of the Nasserist project. The traditional left has long portrayed it as a form of Arab socialism; a progressive, anti-imperialist experiment deserving of socialist support. Yet this narrative mistakes appearance for essence. What Nasser built was not socialism but state capitalism.

The distinction is far more than semantic. As Tony Cliff argued in his analysis of state capitalism, wage labour remains in contradiction with capital, while surplus value continues to be extracted and accumulated as capital. What changes is merely the identity of the accumulator. Instead of private capitalists appropriating surplus value, it is the bureaucratic state that does so. The worker, however, remains a wage labourer, producing surplus value that does not belong to him and subjected to forms of control over which he has no meaningful power.

For Marx, socialism was never synonymous with nationalization alone. It meant the democratic control of the means of production by the organized working class, together with the gradual withering away of the state as an instrument of coercion, not its expansion into every sphere of social life. As the Socialist Workers have put it succinctly, these regimes were socialist in name alone; in reality, they constituted a form of state capitalism.

The second—and deeper—dimension of this analysis extends beyond a diagnosis of the political economy of Nasser’s Egypt. It reveals a foundational closed circle. Nasserist state capitalism produced the bureaucratic middle class from which the traditional left emerged; in turn, that left, through its mechanical materialist outlook, reinforced the marginalization of the independent working class and helped reproduce the very conditions upon which state capitalism depended. The relationship, then, did not run in a single direction, from economic structure to ideology. It was dialectical. Stalinist mechanical ideology furnished state capitalism with the theoretical justification for disarming the working class as an autonomous historical force.

The historical record bears this out. As Abdel Ghaffar al-Awady has documented, Nasserism rested upon the nationalization of trade-union life, the state’s domination of all working-class organizations from 1957 onwards, the appointment of trusted representatives of the ruling elite to every leadership position, and the destruction of independent workers’ organizations together with the right to strike.

In other words, the Nasserist project deepened precisely the division upon which the traditional left depended for its own political function: the gulf between a theorizing vanguard and a populace conceived not as the subject of history but as the object of modernization. The bureaucratic intellectual requires the masses as the audience of his discourse, not as an independent force capable of surpassing him.

The circle reached its most tragic completion in 1965, when Egypt’s two principal communist parties voluntarily dissolved themselves and instructed their members to join the Arab Socialist Union, Nasser’s sole authorized political organization.

The irony, captured with devastating clarity by Sameh Naguib, was that this occurred only a few years after many of those same communists had endured torture in the prisons of the very regime they now embraced—and that the decision came at the urging of the Soviet Union. The result was the extraordinary spectacle in which “the progressives colluded with the regime and merged into it, while the reactionaries opposed it and died on its gallows.”

This was not a betrayal of communist principles. It was their logical culmination. Once the mechanical theory of revolutionary stages accepts that the national state is fulfilling the historical tasks assigned to its phase of development, it possesses no independent criterion from which to oppose that state. The dissolution of the party therefore appears not as a capitulation, but as a theoretically sound conclusion.

It should be noted, however, that a number of individuals and smaller groups refused to dissolve the party. At the beginning of the 1970s, new Marxist circles re-emerged in the universities, eventually forming a renewed Egyptian communist current. This movement grew rapidly, particularly through the Egyptian Communist Workers’ Party, as the student uprising of 1972 breathed new life into the revolutionary left.

III. Sadat and the Price of the Void

When Anwar al-Sadat inherited the July State and embarked upon al-infitāḥ (the Open Door Policy)—economic liberalization, the gradual dismantling of the public sector, and strategic alignment with the West—the real test arrived. The simplest reading of what followed is this: the left had wagered everything on the state, and fell when the state turned against it. There is truth in this, but it remains a superficial truth. It presents the collapse as an external misfortune that befell an otherwise sound political project. The deeper reading, which encompasses rather than replaces the first, is that there was little left to collapse by then. The decisive fall had taken place a full decade before Sadat came to power.

The reason lay in the logic of mechanical materialism itself. In theoretical terms, it had already concluded that building an independent class base outside the supposedly “progressive” Nasserist state was, at best, unnecessary and, at worst, an act of sabotage against the progressive national project. If the state itself was carrying out the historical tasks of the age, why construct an autonomous force alongside it? Thus, when the state eventually turned against the left, the left discovered that it possessed neither independent trade unions, nor genuine workers’ organizations, nor even confidence in the working class as an autonomous historical actor. This was not merely an organizational weakness, but the outcome of a theoretical choice. The void was not created by Sadat; it had been fashioned by the left itself a decade earlier.

Then came the Intifadat al-Khubz (The Bread Uprising), also known as the January Uprising of 1977. Sparked by the lifting of food subsidies, it became the largest mass mobilization Egypt had witnessed between 1952 and 2011. It erupted from below, driven by workers and the urban poor, without centralized leadership.

The left did not lead the uprising; it followed it. This was neither an accident nor simply another organizational failure. It demonstrated a deeper historical reality: a left that had abandoned the task of forging an organic, independent relationship with the working class over the course of two decades could hardly expect to lead that class when it finally moved into action. And the working class, when it enters history under its own momentum, has a habit of overtaking those who were never truly with it.

Here the dialectic of the period becomes fully visible. Sadat did not bring about the failure of the left; he merely exposed it. The real failure lay in the earlier theoretical decision that rendered the construction of an independent class base “unnecessary.” Once the Nasserist social compact began to unravel after the defeat of 1967, and Sadat proceeded to dismantle it economically, the traditional left found itself trapped between two equally bitter alternatives. It could confront the state without an autonomous popular base—a path leading to political isolation—or it could remain attached to the state in its new guise. Consistent with its own internal logic, it chose the latter course again and again. Each choice reinforced the same circle first established under Nasser: without an independent class base there could be no political independence; without political independence the left returned to the state; and each return to the state reproduced the absence of an independent class base.

It would nevertheless be unjust, and historically misleading, to treat every current of the Egyptian left as though it had followed the same trajectory. The accommodationist stance of the Tagammu Party was not the only response available. By the late 1960s a more radical current had emerged, one that consciously broke with the dominant Stalinist framework. Its clearest expression was the Egyptian Communist Workers’ Party, founded in December 1969, whose leading theoreticians included Ibrahim Fathi, Khalil Kalfat, and Salah al-Amrousi.

The decisive distinction between this current and the traditional left lay in its class analysis of Nasserism itself. Whereas the established left regarded Nasserism as a progressive project deserving support, the Workers’ Party advanced an explicitly proletarian critique. Salah al-Amrousi challenged those who described Nasserist and Ba’athist regimes as forms of “petty-bourgeois rule” possessing an inherently progressive character, exposing instead their underlying logic as one of state capitalism.

Even more strikingly, Ibrahim Fathi predicted—before the October War of 1973 and before Sadat’s transformation had fully unfolded—that “the ultimate destination of the Nasserist regime would be surrender to American imperialism.” History would vindicate that judgement with remarkable precision.

Nor was this current confined to theoretical debates. It maintained genuine links with workers and students alike, played a significant role in the student movement of 1972–73, and contributed through both student and labour activism in 1975–76 to preparing the ground for the Bread Uprising of 1977. Yet here lies the painful paradox. Even this current, whose analysis proved the most penetrating, failed to translate its insights into effective political leadership when the uprising finally erupted.

This exception matters for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that mechanical materialism was never an unavoidable fate for the Egyptian left; it was a theoretical choice, and one that some consciously rejected. Second, it reveals that correct analysis alone is insufficient. What matters equally is the construction of an organization capable of transforming sound analysis into effective political leadership. The current that possessed the sharper diagnosis remained too small to lead, while the larger and institutionally stronger left remained captive to the very logic that continually drew it back towards the state.

That distinction would persist, in different forms, until 2013, when, despite profound differences in degree, timing, and enthusiasm, nearly every current of the traditional left either endorsed the coup or acquiesced in it through silence.

IV. Political Islam: The Dilemma the Left Created for Itself

This is the analytical fulcrum of the argument, for it is here that we encounter the knot upon which every serious attempt at political transformation in Egypt has continued to founder.

As the Nasserist model of state capitalism receded, Sadat’s economic opening gathered pace, and the old social compact steadily unravelled, political Islam emerged as the country’s principal oppositional force. Yet the question the traditional left never honestly asked itself was the most elementary one: Where did this ascent come from? And whom did it represent?

From a materialist standpoint, the answer is disarmingly clear. Political Islam did not emerge out of a vacuum. It occupied a space left empty by the collapse of the Nasserist social contract among the popular classes. The urban poor, the new industrial workers, and the rural migrants who found themselves crowded into informal settlements without services discovered in Islamic movements what neither the state nor the left had been able to offer: functioning networks of hospitals, charitable associations, and schools; a language of identity capable of addressing a profound crisis of meaning in a society coming apart; and a form of cultural resistance to a wave of Westernization that coincided with declining wages and the erosion of social security.

The structural implication is both obvious and painful.

Political Islam did not steal or seduce what had once been “the left’s masses.” It filled a vacuum that the left itself had created when it abandoned the task of building an independent class base during the Nasserist era. Once that abandonment had occurred, the left no longer possessed the social instruments with which it could compete.
The deeper question, however, is why the left proved incapable of recognising this reality. Why did it never ask the materialist question: Why did the masses turn towards political Islam rather than towards us? The answer is that such a question would inevitably have led to a radical reassessment of the years spent dissolving itself into the Nasserist state—a reckoning that threatened the very foundations of its political identity. Instead, the left posed an altogether different question: How do we protect the masses from obscurantism?

The distinction is not merely rhetorical. It is profoundly class-bound. The first question treats the masses as historical subjects, asking what material conditions and interests shaped their choices. The second reduces them to objects of enlightenment and rescue, while casting the left-wing intelligentsia in the role of the enlightened guardian who understands the people’s true interests better than they do themselves. In this subtle shift of perspective, the class character of the bureaucratic intelligentsia reveals itself in its starkest form. Those drawn to political Islam are no longer seen as a social class acting within objective material conditions; they become an ignorant multitude requiring instruction, protection, and salvation from their own political judgement.

It is precisely this blindness that continues to frustrate every project of change in Egypt. A left committed to liberating the masses from obscurantism, rather than organizing alongside them around their material class interests, will never truly reach them. Instead, it becomes trapped in the same recurring cycle. Failing to build an independent popular base, it seeks refuge in the supposedly secular state. In doing so, it strengthens the very state whose policies deepen the impoverishment of the social groups it claims to emancipate. Those groups, in turn, move still further towards political Islam, prompting the left to cling even more tightly to the state. The circle closes upon itself, each link reinforcing the next.

The clearest expression of this logic was embodied in the Tagammu Party’s unspoken maxim: “Never with the Islamists; always with the state.” It was a slogan that reflected, with remarkable precision, the priorities of the bureaucratic middle-class intelligentsia. Its primary anxiety was not class exploitation, but the perceived threat posed to its cultural authority and professional standing by a movement rooted in the popular classes, classes that neither recognized nor required the mediation of that intelligentsia.
Perhaps the most revealing indication of the depth of this crisis is that Mahdi Amel, the most penetrating Arab Marxist thinker of the second half of the twentieth century, identified the problem in theory without ultimately escaping it in practice. Amel developed the concept of the “colonial mode of production” to demonstrate that the bourgeoisie in colonised societies was structurally incapable of leading any genuine process of emancipation, since its interests were bound to the reproduction of dependency itself.

As he insisted, “The national struggle can only be a class struggle, even when it does not appear as such; and the class struggle can only be a national struggle.” To separate the national from the class question, therefore, was to reproduce the very relations of dependence one sought to overcome.

Yet the Lebanese Communist Party, to which Mahdi Amel devoted his political life, spent its history searching for a “national bourgeoisie” to advise and accommodate, repeating in practice the very error his theoretical work had dismantled. The analysis pointed in one direction; political practice travelled in another.

This paradox is more than a personal inconsistency. It reveals that the crisis runs deeper than intention, deeper even than individual consciousness. It is a crisis in the relationship between method and practice, between theory and organization, a contradiction that no amount of intellectual brilliance, by itself, can resolve.

V. 2013: The Circles Close

The January Revolution of 2011 caught everyone by surprise, the traditional left included. Yet what was truly unexpected was not the uprising itself but the people who made it. They moved without a preordained leadership or the tutelage of any party; through their own independent power, they brought down Mubarak.
It was at that moment that the traditional left confronted its deepest discomfort: the very masses on whose behalf it had always theorized had acted without it. It joined the revolution later, but hesitantly, and throughout the unfolding events its overriding concern was less the revolution itself than the prospect of political Islam ascending to power.

Then came 2013, and every circle traced throughout this essay closed upon itself. The logic that had placed the state above the working class culminated in support for a military coup against the greatest popular uprising in modern Egyptian history. The same logic that had helped create the social vacuum filled by political Islam now presented that coup as the nation’s salvation from an imminent danger. And the logic that regarded the masses as objects of enlightenment rather than autonomous historical subjects rendered the Rabaa massacre an objective necessity.

One important distinction should be noted here, though it should not distract from the central argument.

There were those who correctly grasped, through a materialist analysis of the balance of forces, that what was unfolding was a military coup rather than a revolution, yet hesitated to sever their ties with the popular mood that had gathered around it. That hesitation differs fundamentally from endorsing the coup itself. Even so, it illustrates that political crises are not resolved by analysis alone. They demand a dialectical act of decision at those moments when theoretical clarity carries a genuine political cost.
Breaking with the logic of the state is never a comfortable intellectual conclusion; it is a revolutionary practice in the fullest Marxian sense, where, as Marx wrote, “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”

History offers its own unanswerable testimony.

In China, in 1927, Stalin’s Comintern compelled the Chinese Communists to subordinate themselves to the “national” Kuomintang in the name of the united front against imperialism, only for the experiment to culminate in the Shanghai Massacre. In Chile, in 1973, the left placed its faith in the parliamentary road and in the neutrality of the armed forces, and Pinochet followed. In both cases—and in Egypt’s as well—the lesson is the same.

The bourgeois state can never become the ally of a revolution, because it is constituted precisely to suppress one. And it is the Stalinist logic of mechanical stages, embedded within mechanical materialism itself, that repeatedly blinds the left to this reality.

Conclusion: What Do All These Circles Reveal?

Having travelled through these five stages, the central question is no longer How did the left come to support the military coup of 2013? The more urgent question is: What would have to be different for such an outcome not to recur?

The analysis itself points to the answer. Every decisive defeat followed the same substitution: the working class, as an independent historical subject, was displaced by the state, the nation, or the enlightened vanguard, each claiming to act on its behalf. Every time this substitution occurred, it produced the same result. Leadership of the historical moment passed to whoever held the machinery of the state, whether Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak, or El-Sisi.

The forms changed, but the function remained the same.

It is here, too, that the inadequacy of a familiar question becomes apparent. For decades we have been asking: Why did socialism fail? The more accurate question is: When was it ever truly attempted?

What collapsed in the twentieth century, in the Soviet Union, in Nasser’s Egypt, and in the various experiments of nationalist state capitalism, was not socialism, but the replacement of the private capitalist by a state bureaucracy, while the underlying relations of exploitation remained fundamentally intact. Socialism in its Marxian sense, the democratic control of the means of production by the organized working class, accompanied by the gradual withering away of the coercive state, has appeared only in brief historical moments, extinguished almost as soon as it emerged.

Nor should the working class invoked here be confused with the narrow stereotype of the factory worker alone. Class, as revolutionary socialists have consistently argued, is first and foremost a social relation, defined by people’s position within the process of production and by their objective relationship to it.

Anyone who sells their labour power, remains subject to the command of capital, and produces surplus value belongs, in the precise Marxist sense, to the working class, whether doctor, engineer, teacher, or app-based driver. The technological transformations of our own age, from platform economies to artificial intelligence, do not dissolve this relationship. On the contrary, they broaden and deepen it, drawing ever larger numbers of people into the same social condition: selling labour power, creating value, and relinquishing control over what they produce.

Nor has this broader working class exhausted its revolutionary potential. The masses who made January 2011 demonstrated as much. The uprising of 1977 had already done so. Before that came the long history of strikes in al-Mahalla and the struggles of Egypt’s textile workers, each affirming the same truth. What has been absent is not the social force itself, but an independent revolutionary leadership capable of organizing within the working class rather than above it; one prepared to trust in the capacity of working people to lead, to govern, and ultimately to liberate themselves.