Beinen and Lockman offer an eccentric reading of Egyptian history between the British colonization and the rise to power of Jamal 'Abd an-Nasir (Nasser). They argue two main points: that the early 1900s saw the urban workers "cohere into a new social class" and that by the late 1940s this class had become "a highly visible and politically significant force in Egyptian society."
The first point is no more than a matter of semantics (especially when one is dealing with so thoroughly a non-industrialized country as was Egypt in 1900), and thus bears little discussion. But the second point is demonstrably false, for the authors' own data show that the workers' efforts repeatedly met with frustration — at the hands of the industrialists, government officials, or Muslim Brethren. Further, Beinen and Lockman admit that 'Abd an-Nasir finished off the workers' power in the "historic compromise" of 1954. That does not leave much of a "politically significant force," and this reader finished well over four hundred pages of text with the distinct sense that he'd been had.
Perhaps the clue to the goal behind this odd enterprise lies in Beinen and Lockman's reliance on such terms as "the hegemonic [i.e., non-Marxist] scholarly interpretations of Middle Eastern history," "the world capitalist system," "the capitalist mode of production," "compradors," and the "reactionary and parasitical class of large landowners." Their use of these shopworn phrases suggests that this is not a book about Egypt so much as it is a statement within the closed world of Marxist scholarship.
