What are the prospects for building a new Arab socialist Left? What can socialists and anti-imperialists do?
In the Arab world nowadays the space for building a socialist Left is quite marginal, the Left is ideologically isolated. Nonetheless there should be a permanent effort at rebuilding a socialist Left and that cannot be done by tail-ending Islamic fundamentalism. Left-wing activists should not let the fundamentalists occupy alone the terrain of the fight against imperialism and the Zionist state, as some sections of them tend to do, but it is clear that the Left won’t become a match for the religious forces in this respect anytime soon. In many other fields, however, the fundamentalists are no competitors—when they are not foes: in the fight for workers’ and peasants’ rights and interests, the rights of the unemployed, women’s rights, the fight against sexual oppression, for secularism, liberty of conscience and freedom from the rule of religion in social life, etc. These are issues around which the Left in the Arab world should intensely campaign—but it should do so without expecting t
