Left out

"Next, I would suggest that any new leftist groups need to come to terms with the huge changes that have taken place in their economies and their societies since the Arab left last considered these matters in detail more than forty years ago. In the case of Egypt these include rapid urbanization, the down-grading of the importance of factory industry in development at the expense of services, including banking and finance, the discovery of new resources like oil and natural gas, the increasing importance of desert agriculture at the expense of that located in the Nile valley, and the impact of the global economy, all of which have enormous consequences for economic management and for the well-being of those directly involved.

The present gap between the logic of security which informs the Mubarak regime and the liberal IMF logic which informs its economic policy would seem to me just such a contradiction, with the possibility that it is the latter which will eventually triumph, taking Egypt into a new system of competitive capitalism - and so into a set of new economic and social tensions it has never experienced before."

Roger Owen on the new arab left.