Youssef Darwish passes away
I received more troubling news in the morning–another prominent leftist figure passed away. Youssef Darwish, an Egyptian Jewish Communist legend, died today at the age of 91. Darwish joined the communist movement in the 1930s. He was an active campaigner against the British occupation, the Egyptian royal system, and the Zionist movement.
Darwish, the son of a Jewish jeweler, devoted his life to working class issues. He, together with veteran lawyer Ahmad Nabil el-Hilaly, led a split from the underground Egyptian Communist Party (ECP) in the late 1980s, protesting Ref3at el-Sa3eed’s authoritarian command over the organization. Darwish and Hilaly formed a faction inside the ECP around 1984, denouncing el-Sa3eed’s revisionist views on Mubarak’s regime and the state of Egyptian capitalism. El-Sa3eed then claimed there were divisions within the regime, between the institution of the presidency, which he claimed represented the “progressives” (sic), and other institutions like the interior ministry, etc. El-Sa3eed also claimed there was a difference between “parasitic” capitalism and “patriotic” capitalism. The job of the Communists, he stated, was to support the latter against the former.
The two veteran activists also opposed el-Sa3eed’s drive to merge the ECP with the licensed Tagamu3 Party. They were careful to outline the limits of “legalism†in the Egyptian context, and the necessitiy for the Egyptian working class to organize itself independently in a revolutionary party.
The faction finally split from the ECP sometime between 1987 and 1989, forming the People’s Socialist Party (PSP), which maintained presence in Ain Shams University, Cairo University and some industrial centers.
There was also a debate within the left then on the position towards the rising Islamist giant. El-Sa3eed’s line on Islamism regarded the Muslim militant groups as “fascists,” who should be repressed by the government at any cost. Thus, during the 1990s, the Egyptian Communist Party foolishly allied itself with Mubarak’s regime in his “war on Islamic fascists.”
Darwish and Helaly, refused allying themselves with Mubarak. For sometime before the outbreak of the Islamist insurgency in 1992, there were conflicting views within the PSP towards the Islamists. Some inside the PSP, regarded militant Islam as an “armed movement of the oppressed,” that should be supported. Hilaly reportedly subscribed briefly to that view. Darwish did not support this view, but neither held the Islamists as fascists. A raproachment happened between the PSP and the Trotskyte-leaning Revolutionary Socialists in the 1990s. Darwish and Helaly expressed sympathy to Trotsky’s theory of the “Permenant Revolution,” which stands opposite to the Stalinist legacy Egyptian communism was also trapped in. Still, Darwish was more cautious when it came to alliances with Islamists. He remained hesitant to adopted the RS’s position which states that “Socialists should be sometimes with the Islamists, but never with the state.” That stand produced interesting scenes last year, with a National Alliance declared between the Muslim Brothers and the Trotskytes. It was interesting to see unveiled Socialist women activists waving red flags, together with bearded Brothers in the same demo.
Darwish enjoyed a saint-like place among the hearts of leftists and activists from all political shades.
He will be missed.
Categories: Activism, Egypt, Left.
10 Responses to “Youssef Darwish passes away”
- 1 Pingback on Jun 18th, 2006 at 8:22 am
- 2 Pingback on Jun 28th, 2006 at 2:33 am
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Both Darwish and Roza were people i was highly looking forward to meeting in the summer as part of a research project on student/youth movements in Egypt over different periods of time. My thoughts on reading more about them, were focused on how important it was to document such experiences, to preserve them, and truly learn from them.
Most importantly i think we need to really focus on building on their work, or picking up what they left off..
Hopefully we’ll eventually give meaning to what they spent their lives working towards.. or who or what they spent their lives working for.
God bless them both, we Allah yer7amhom..
Sorry, the last comment mistakenly got sent before I finished:
The challenge, however, is to find a new language, new organizational forms, and new alliances appropriate to the current situation.
It seems the first part of my comment got lost altogether, so:
The passing of Youssef Darwish is agreat personal loss to me. He was a long-time friend and confidant. His passing along with that of Mohamed Sid-Ahmed a few months ago mark th4e end of an era. From the 1940s to the 1960s the Egyptian left tried to link anti-imperialism and the struggle for social justice in a cosmopolitan and internatonalist framework.
That struggle was renewed by the new left of the early 1970s, in which Amed Abdalla played such a major role. His passing, too marks the end of an era.
Some of his comrades remain politically active. Their historic and current contributions to the struggles for democracy, human rights, and social justice must be acknowledged.
Then to comment above
Further thoughts about Youssef Darwish and Ahmed Abdalla
Youssef Darwish and Ahmed Abdalla passed away within days of each other. They were both major historic figures of the Egyptian left. In some ways they were very different from each other. But ultimately they shared the most important thing – a commitment to working closely with Egypt’s working people in their struggles for social justice and equity.
Darwish became a Marxist and an orthodox communist while studying law in France during the 1930s. His political trajectory when he returned to Egypt was inevitably influenced by the heyday of Stalinism, including an unyielding conception of class struggle and a unified international communist movement. Despite this commitment to a rigid ideological framework, Darwish was one of the most successful of all the Egyptian communist intellectuals in forming deep and lasting bonds with important elements of the industrial working class. As a labor lawyer from the late 1930s to the 1950s he represented many trade unions in the textile producing region of Shubra al-Khayma and the surrounding area. Darwish’s relationship with the trade unionists he represented was very close, both physically and personally. He was not afraid to get his hands dirty. Over the course of the two decades of our personal friendship, I met several former trade union leaders in his home, decades after he ceased to be active in this arena. It was clear that they retained deep bonds of respect and affection for him.
Darwish was one of the few communists of his generation who opposed the dissolution of the two Egyptian communist parties in 1965. While he acknowledged the anti-imperialist achievements of the regime of Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, he believed until the day of his death that the Egyptian working class needed its own political party. He was active in the reformation of the Communist Party of Egypt and during the 1970s and 1980s served as the party’s representative to the Cominform in Prague. Among the most important contributions of his later years was his role as a supporter and advisor of the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services under the leadership of Kamal Abbas, a former steel worker who was fired for leading wildcat strikes at the Iron and Steel Company in the mid-1980s.
When Darwish came to the conclusion that the Communist Party conciliated too much with the regime of Husni Mubarak he led a split that resulted in the formation of the People’s Socialist Party. However one judges the political efficacy of this action, it is testimony to a lifelong commitment to revolutionary struggle, not merely on behalf of, but most importantly alongside, the Egyptian working class.
Ahmed Abdalla is a political being of a different time and temperment. He was shaped by the global new left of the 1960s and early 1970s, which rejected both anti-communism and pro-Soviet orthodoxy. His main field of struggle, as was the case for much of the new left, was the university campus. He was a brilliant and successful leader, ultimately forcing President Anwar al-Sadat to acknowledge him, even if only to proclaim that he would not negotiate with Rozza (Ahmed’s nickname). Like Yousef Darwish, Abdalla spent much of the 1970s and 1980s in political exile. The chief product of this period is an important scholarly book, the first of many he wrote, The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt, 1923-1973 (London al-Saqi, 1985). The title indicates the new left’s openness to the radical potential of strata other than the traditional working class.
Some years after Abdalla returned to Egypt, he established Markaz al-Jeel, a center for impoverished children in ‘Ein al-Sira. Whenever I visited Egypt he urged me to visit him, not at home, but at the center so that I could be reminded concretely and in the flesh of the conditions of the majority of the Egyptian people. Many taxi drivers were more than a little surprised that a foreighner wanted to go to such a place. Ahmed believed that educating the children he worked with to be curious, critical, and broad-minded was the most important socially transformative activity one could do in Egypt. I remember one conversation at the center with a twelve year old girl about the difference between Zionism and Judaism. She had more sophistication on the subject than many journalists three times her age – a testament to Ahmed’s success as an educator.
Youssef Darwish and Ahmed Abdalla, each in their own way, were different than most of Egypt’s leftist intelligentsia. Neither of them came from a wealthy background. Their political differences are minor compared to their deeep commitment to working at the grass roots and on the basis of equality with the people in whose name and for whose causes they struggled.
Thanks A LOT Joel for sharing this brief, yet excellent, account of the lives and views of the two activists. Their departure is a great loss for the Egyptian left, and for Egypt.
Many thanks, Joel. Readers might be interested to know that Prof. Joel Beinin is a leading historian of the Egyptian left, having written among other works the now classic “Workers on the Nile.”
He was a great man and a trow beliver i saw him once when he was celebrating his 90 th aniverseray ,he was wearing a red T-Shirt with the pic. of Che Givara on it .Lei in Peace ,one of the last of the moekans .