What We’re Reading is a new vertical we’re introducing at The Cairo Report.
The daily news cycle treats a workers’ strike, a government’s collapse, or a war’s eruption as isolated events, detached from each other and the forces that produced them.
This vertical offers another way of reading the world.
Rather than disconnected episodes, it sees these moments as expressions of class society and the contradictions of current sociopolitical and socioeconomic models themselves. It pushes us to look past the headline for the human story underneath: how decisions made by corporations, governments, and the ruling classes to maximize power and profit land on the people living with the consequences.
That’s the lens we read with, but it is not the only standard we curate by.
Our reading spans books, academic papers, investigations, and policy reports, and along the way, we kept noticing pieces worth passing on.
This list is built around what’s worth engaging with, whether we agree with it or want to argue with it. The payoff, we hope, is the same either way: a deeper sense of the present, a clearer view of the structures beneath the headlines, and a more sustained engagement with the world than the breakneck pace of daily news allows.
However, even we hit a wall on how much darkness we can stomach in one sitting. So you’ll get the good kind of story too, the ones that Saher found amusing and hilarious, or renewed Fadila’s hope. Stories where people fight back, all scrappy and clever, and, more often than not, come out on top.
Every other Wednesday, you will receive a “What We’re Reading” roundup of the most important stories we’ve encountered over the previous two weeks.
Expect good reading and an introduction to the outlets, journalists, and thinkers whose work continues to shape our own.
The World
Should we celebrate the American Revolution? — Hope Ryan, Socialist Worker
Most July 4th takes fall into “celebrate” or “cancel”, but great historical events are rarely so simple as to fall into a binary. Ryan argues the American Revolution was genuinely radical from below, but its promises were betrayed by the slaveholders and land-grabbers who ended up running the new republic. Genuinely radical and genuinely compromised, held as one verdict.
The tragedy of Spain’s defeated revolution—how the left lost — Andy Brown interviews Spanish organizer and author Héctor Puente Sierra, Socialist Worker
The Spanish Revolution, the wave of worker and peasant self-organization that broke out alongside the 1936 coup, from factory committees to collectivized land in Aragon, is widely considered the most profound social revolution since 1917.
This Q&A argues the left’s defeat came as much from counterrevolution within its own ranks as from Franco’s army: Stalin’s Comintern shaped the Republic’s strategy, and the anarchists chose not to take state power when they had the chance. Sierra develops the argument at length in his book Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the Spanish Civil War, out on July 30 from Bookmarks.
The history behind maternity scandals — Judy Cox, Socialist Worker
Cox traces a direct line from the 16th-century witch-hunts, which targeted women’s traditional knowledge of childbirth and forced midwives to renounce it, through forced sterilizations of tens of thousands of Black and Puerto Rican women in 20th-century America, to today’s Ockenden Review, which exposed staff shortages, bullying, sexism, and racism behind needless deaths in Britain’s maternity wards.
In the July 5 labor dispatch of The Cairo Report, we covered the prosecution of physician and filmmaker Omnia Swedan for exposing obstetric abuse at Alexandria’s El Shatby University Hospital.
This is a clear reminder that capitalism is a world order, and that our struggle against exploitation and oppression is one.
Why do revolutionaries fight for reforms? — Judy Cox, Socialist Worker
Cox opens by naming a common objection: workers with homes, laptops, and holidays supposedly have too much to lose to become revolutionaries, and people who hold this view tend to oppose reforms altogether, worried that improving conditions will just reconcile workers to the system.
However, suffering is not what produces revolutionary consciousness. Collective resistance does. When struggles don’t happen or when they’re lost, workers feel powerless, but unionizing and winning strikes build real confidence in their collective power.
“Reformist” demands are not a distraction from the path to revolution, but part of it. Rosa Luxemburg tells us this in Social Reform or Revolution, the crux of which is, “Not a reformist, but with every reform.”
Journalism and trade unionism: two canaries in the same coal mine? — Marta Checa and Jose Alvarez Diaz, Equal Times
Writing the final sign-off for the progressive outlet after 13 years, the authors argue that independent journalism and trade unionism serve the same democratic function: connecting isolated worker struggles into a shared class consciousness that exposes abuses and proposes solutions. They reflect on the essential role of a free press as the “fourth estate” in a time marked by neoliberalism and disinformation.
An important reminder of the vital, irreplaceable, and sadly narrow spaces for independent reporting, and a dynamic that hits especially close to home in Egypt, where both the state's control over and the relentless crackdown on independent unions and critical media prove exactly how much power this alliance holds.
Gig workers are endlessly exploited. AI could make more of us share their fate — Arielle Pardes, The Guardian
In this piece, Pardes argues that the real threat of AI isn’t mass job replacement, but the dismantling of full-time employment as companies use automation to justify shifting workers into precarious, gig-economy contracts.
From an “Uber-type set-up” for customer service to algorithmic composers training the systems meant to replace them, the piece traces how the exploitation once limited to rideshare and delivery drivers is rapidly expanding to white-collar and creative fields, almost entirely reframing the AI debate from a technological inevitability to a deliberate labor and class offensive.
Scam compounds are a natural product of global capitalism — Michael G. Vann, Jacobin
Vann refuses the reductionist framing that the explosion of cyber-scam operations across Southeast Asia is a fringe criminal enterprise, instead, he argues that they are the logical evolution of capitalist extraction, where human trafficking and extreme labor exploitation meet financial speculation and technology.
Mapping these digital fraud factories onto historical sites of colonial extraction and modern special economic zones, the piece reveals how organized crime utilizes the very infrastructure of global business, from unregulated real estate to high-speed internet, to industrialize deception on a massive scale.
A grim, Marxist read of a system where globalization functions exactly as designed, except instead of manufacturing consumer goods, it manufactures coercion and fraud.
Hyperpolitics in command? — Anton Jager, New Left Review
Jager turns his concept of “hyperpolitics,” the frantic, online politics of outrage, personality, and short-lived mobilization, upward, arguing that it now describes the Western ruling classes as well as their electorates.
Donald Trump, on this account, is less the author of the West’s disorder than its most vivid symptom: a figure able to exploit elites fragmented by financialization, hollowed-out party institutions, and their inability to construct either a durable cross-class bloc or a long-term strategy.
A bracing attempt to shift attention from popular “polarization” to the strategic incoherence at the top, though its contrast between Western disarray and China’s politics raises as many questions as it answers.
The Invisible Heart of Modern Life Is the Garbage Worker — Alex N. Press, Jacobin
Press reviews Simon Paré-Poupart’s memoir Trash! (Melville House, 2026)
For twenty years, Paré-Poupart has lugged garbage across Montreal and its outskirts.
The memoir exposes the backbreaking toil of the sanitation worker, whose work is what makes the rest of civilization’s convenience possible. It exposes how every decision by manufacturers to make goods cheaper and more disposable becomes, quite literally, someone else’s physical burden to carry.
Paré-Poupart’s writing, Press tells us, swings from philosophical (Bataille, Descartes, and Sisyphus all make appearances) to visceral (and often profane). Beautiful and grim in equal measure.
The Region
Misbar’s Investigation Uncovers What Lies Behind the “June 26 Movement” — Mujamma Haraket
Anyone who is closely watching Gaza’s internal politics, not just the Israeli genocide on the strip, would have clocked the #June26Revolution a few weeks back, which called for mass protests against Hamas and other resistance factions.
Fact-checking site Misbar launched an investigation to find out everything there is to know about where this call to protest came from, who engages with it, and why now.
It reveals a campaign engineered to look bigger than it was. The hashtag traces back to a single Facebook account that posted nothing but a date on June 8, then a “Day of Rage” graphic hours later. From there, growth was almost entirely manufactured through reposting. Nearly 60% of the roughly 1,150 posts using the hashtag were reposts, against just 7% original replies or comments. Misbar also traced the accounts and pages driving it to a small network with ties outside Gaza, including operators based in Belgium, Egypt, the US, and the UAE.
It is an interesting window into what’s often called the ‘collaborator’s file’ in Gaza, the network of local figures cooperating with Israel or its allied factions.
Social Protection in Lebanon: Not Rights, Just Scraps of Cash for the Poorest — Anees Al Jermani, Sifr [in Arabic]
This piece is structured as a rebuttal to a rebuttal, and it’s more devastating for it.
A coalition called CAMEALEON published a report on Lebanon’s cash-assistance system, covering the “Aman” program, humanitarian cash aid, and informal community support, concluding the system is fragmented, dependent on foreign funding, narrowly targeted, and unable to respond adequately to mass displacement.
Minister Hanin Sayed pushed back, accusing the report of relying on limited evidence and risking donor confidence. Al Jermani goes point by point through her response and argues it confirms rather than refutes the report’s diagnosis.
It is data-packed, people-focused, and damning.
Tyre: The City of Heavy, Deferred Sorrow — Imadeddine Raef, Assafir Al-Arabi [Arabic]
A window into a city that has borne the brunt of the Israeli war on Lebanon since October 2023.
Raef lingers over dust, blocked streets, overpriced apartments, power cuts, and the familiar phrases people repeat to make sense of another shattered summer. The refrain, “We cried for Hussein, now we’re crying for ourselves,” captures a city whose inherited rituals of mourning have become inseparable from its present grief.
What makes the essay especially moving is its refusal to flatten Tyre into a symbol. It remains a living city, with its old neighbourhoods, processions, arguments, opportunists, and acts of endurance. Even as it records the destruction, it pays close attention to the people trying to rebuild a semblance of normality amid the rubble, while others profit from their desperation.
Not only is Israel continuing to rain hell on the south of Lebanon, but the war’s impact, now that there is a “lull” compared to the initial weeks after 2 March, can be felt in other, streneous, ways. Rents cannot be paid, government compensation that never arrives, and the deep exhaustion of people who have had to mourn, intermittently, for the past 3 years.
“May God curse the poor [man] and his life!”
A Reading of Three Novels from Syrian Prison Literature — Wedad Salloum, Al-Jumhuriya [Arabic]
The collapse of the Assad regime has understandably renewed interest in Syria’s prison literature. For many readers, the canon begins with Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s Bil-Khalas Ya Shabab: 16 Years in Syrian Prisons and Mustafa Khalifa’s Al-Qawqa’a (The Shell).
This essay is a useful introduction to three other works in a literary genre that has, especially in the last couple of decades, become almost notoriously synonymous with Syria.
Salloum traces how each writer grapples with a world in which time itself is broken.
Whether through Ratib Sha’bo’s philosophical reflections on prison as a self-contained universe, Mohammad Berro’s harrowing testimony from Tadmor, or Malek Dagestani’s lyrical dreamscape of freedom, these books insist that survival is as much an act of narration as endurance.
And while these books present a record of torture and arbitrary detention, they also weave stories about the forms of humanity that persist behind prison walls; gossip, improvised games, shared lessons, and whispered conversations. Some of it painful, and some of it beautiful.
There is, after all, no one way to write about, or even experience, atrocity.
Read together, these books remind us that every dictatorship seeks to monopolize history, and that every survivor who writes refuses to surrender history to the state.
Egypt
Egypt’s military landlord economy and its limitations — Yezid Sayigh, Carnegie Middle East Center
In his latest paper, Yezid Sayigh argues that Egypt’s military economy has entered a distinct phase, away from directly running an ever-wider set of businesses and toward “landlord capitalism,” in which military agencies derive rent by controlling, leasing, and monetizing state land, infrastructure, and public assets. The model rests less on producing goods than on converting political and coercive power into commercial advantage through control of land allocation, special “strategic” zones, non-competitive contracting, military jurisdiction, and the ability to push financing risks onto state banks and private contractors.
The payoff is immediate revenue and a durable mechanism for military patronage, but Sayigh is clear about its limits. Debt-funded new cities, luxury coastal schemes, and desert reclamation projects absorb enormous investment while producing underused infrastructure, precarious low-skill work, displacement, ecological risk, and little productive spillover.
The underlying costs also remain largely impossible to audit behind the military’s national-security firewall. Rather than resolving Egypt’s foreign-currency and debt problems, the paper contends, this strategy makes their reproduction central to the regime’s survival: Gulf capital, borrowing, and geopolitical support sustain a system that must continually monetize land in order to maintain elite loyalties.
This is perhaps one of the most comprehensive accounts yet of the military’s move from “entrepreneur” to landlord, producing a more entrenched form of command over its most valuable assets. Essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the interconnected land grabs, evictions, empty new cities, coastal sell-offs, and permanent fiscal crisis that have come to define Sisi’s New Republic.
Building Khartoum, Losing Sudan — Hossam el-Hamalawy, State & Barracks
In a brilliant reading of a 1936 dual memoir by Egyptian military officers stationed in colonial Sudan, as part of his ongoing series exploring the history of the Egyptian army in Sudan, el-Hamalawy unpacks the contradictory position of the Egyptian army: a subordinate force serving British imperial interests that enthusiastically embraced its role as an occupying power.
Reviewing accounts of railway construction, barracks building, and the eventual 1924 expulsion of Egyptian troops by their British overlords, the article exposes the bitter irony of officers who felt humiliated by British power but remained entirely blind to their own violence against the Sudanese. It’s a brilliant exploration of how Egypt’s military internalized, as el-Hamalawy puts it, an “Egyptian version of the ‘white man’s burden’,” treating the Sudanese as mere objects of administration while demanding a greater share of the colonial spoils.
The Army Was Born in Sudan — Hossam el-Hamalawy, State & Barracks
For the third installment of his series on the Egyptian army in Sudan, el-Hamalawy reviews Egyptian historian Khaled Fahmy’s canonical work, All the Pasha’s Men, through a Sudan-focused lens.
He argues the 1820s Sudan expedition was not a side campaign of Mehmed Ali’s state-building, it was foundational to it, particularly since conscripting Egyptian peasants directly would have drained his agricultural tax base.
He tells us how the bureaucracy of capture worked: people rounded up, sorted by usefulness, warehoused at purpose-built barracks in Aswan, some kept for military service and others routed to Cairo’s slave markets, what el-Hamalawy calls “violence in ledgers.” The dehumanization shows up in the archive’s own language, which tracks, because Mehmed Ali treated Sudanese people as “military raw material.”
His sharpest point is causal: Egyptian conscription, often narrated as a national awakening, only began once the Sudanese slave-soldier project collapsed under disease and mortality, and Ottoman troops balked at southern deployment.
“Sudan appears here not as a footnote to Egyptian modernization, but as one of the terrains through which that modernization was made possible. Sudanese labor, Sudanese suffering, and Sudanese resistance are part of the story from the beginning,” el-Hamalawy writes. “Fahmy’s work [...] compels us to see colonial Sudan not as an afterthought, but as a constitutive site in the making of the Egyptian military state.”
This is the piece that supplies the origin story the rest of the series assumes.
The History of Guardianship Over Egyptian Labor Unions — Hoda Kamel, Sifr [Arabic]
This essay’s opening claim sets the terms for everything that follows: Egyptian labor only enjoyed genuine independence in its embryonic phase, before these small worker associations were even called “unions,” when a few hundred workers organized with techniques brought by Armenian, Greek, and Italian immigrant workers.
Everything after that, Kamel argues, is a long history of wisaya (guardianship), from the 1899 cigarette rollers’ strike that founded the first modern union, through British wartime repression, Wafd governments that dissolved federations the moment labor’s power threatened their own base, and the execution of Kafr al-Dawwar workers Khamis and al-Baqari in 1952 as an early warning shot from the new military regime.
The essay’s clearest structural argument concerns Nasser’s 1957 nationalization. Kamel explains that while workers received real, substantial gains, including profit-sharing, a shortened work week, doubled minimum wage, job security, healthcare, free education, the price was the surrender of their organizational independence entirely.
That bargain unraveled under Sadat and Mubarak’s economic liberalization, and Kamel is extremely thorough in explaining the resulting rupture. Between the late 1990s and 2010, two to four million workers took part in roughly 3,400 to 4,000 strikes and protests, culminating in the 2007 Real Estate Tax Authority workers founding Egypt’s first independent union in half a century.
The 2011 revolution, which split open the horizon for workers’ organizing and produced up to 1,500 independent unions, was defeated. Thus, most, if not all, of these unions collapsed under a mix of repression and internal weakness.
By 2026, the ITUC still ranks Egypt among the ten worst countries in the world for labor rights, with at least 14 independent unions barred from operating despite meeting legal requirements.
The essay’s real subject isn’t any single crackdown, but the durability of a specific bargain: whichever regime is in power keeps offering workers (crumbs of) material concessions, but never the right to organize themselves.
A lengthy but absolutely necessary read for anyone interested in the Egyptian labor movement.
Cotton Specters: Agriculture and the making of Egyptian dependency — Osama Diab, Al Manassa [Arabic]
In this first installment of a deeply researched new series, Diab tracks the origins of Egypt's integration into global capitalism not through military conquest, but through the nineteenth-century boom in long-staple cotton.
By calculating the “net ecological flows” embedded in the cotton-for-textiles trade with Britain, the billions of labor hours, cubic meters of water, and feddans of land mobilized to feed Lancashire's mills, Diab illustrates how the very structure of the international market enforces a peripheral mode of production.
On all counts, it's a sobering environmental and economic history showing how the limits of agricultural yields versus the exponential growth of industrial productivity locked Egypt into a permanent cycle of resource extraction and unequal exchange.
Egypt expropriates 87 feddans in Sinai for railway project, pushing thousands toward a third eviction — Zawia3
This investigation documents how a 570-million-pound expropriation for the Bir El-Abd–Arish–Taba railway is forcing residents of Al-Maqata'a and Al-Kharafin, Sinai families who returned home only three years ago and rebuilt their orchards and irrigation systems after a decade of “counterterrorism” displacement, to face eviction for a third time, this time on a 24-hour notice from the army.
The piece is strongest in its legal dissection: it traces how a 1997 public-utility designation, combined with a 1990 expropriation law that bars residents from challenging the “public interest” determination itself, gives the state near-total discretion, while quoting rights lawyers and a policy analyst who argue the government routinely skips the transparency and compensation-first requirements the constitution actually demands.
What makes it land is the pattern it surfaces almost in passing, villagers who fought alongside the army against terrorism invested their own money in solar-powered irrigation on official assurances of stability, only to be told they should leave their homes again, this time for a corridor project tied to the same military-linked land economy that Yezid Sayigh has described above.
Black Spots: Bloody Hotspots on the Roads of Greater Cairo and its Suburbs — Rabab Azzam, Assafir Al-Arabi [Arabic]
Rabab Azzam’s method in this investigation is the piece’s strongest asset.
Rather than relying on official statistics, which Azzam shows are actively unreliable, with provinces recording zero accidents simply because of a data-transmission quirk tied to health insurance enrollment, she cross-references a decade of state figures against seven newspapers’ accident archives, plus field inspections of seven “black spot” highways chosen to represent Egypt’s different road types: desert, agricultural, ring roads, and internal corridors.
The core finding is a stark contradiction. While officials announced a 60% drop in accidents in August 2023, Azzam’s own count of deaths in the months surrounding that announcement shows a rising curve, and injuries kept climbing to over 76,000 by 2024.
It gets more damning, particularly on the site-level detail.
On the Shubra-Banha highway alone, roughly 1,300 accidents were recorded in a single year, and field inspections with engineers found consistent structural failures, including wrong road cambers that pool water, missing vertical lighting and warning bumps, entry ramps too short for merging traffic, informal loading zones cut directly into medians.
Seven engineers independently attributed the pattern to subcontracting practices that cut material quality to preserve profit margins, with one source estimating subcontractors meet as little as 70% of quality standards.
Azzam closes the investigation on an economic argument that reframes everything before it: road accidents consume 3-5% of Egypt’s GDP annually (11-19 billion USD), even as the state borrowed roughly 20 billion USD to build this same road network, and seized over 253 acres of land from nearly 1,700 citizens across 8 provinces to build it.
The method, the angle, the writing, the build-up, all of it is exceptional.
If you have not read it yet, check out this week’s labor dispatch from The Cairo Report:
Egypt, The New Republic: Unpaid labor, coercive evictions & punitive pacification
This issue of The Cairo Report covers four developments that took place over the past week: the renewed protests and subsequent arrest of unpaid workers at the Agriculture Ministry, a phantom exceptional grant that failed to reach informal laborers, the escalating medical neglect of detained unionist Shadi Mohamed, and the coercive utility cuts and pres…
*What We’re Reading is a fortnightly list of the stories behind the headlines, read through the lens of class and power. In your inbox every other Wednesday.