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Since the death of Nasser 30 years ago, the top leadership of the army has been controlled by the US and corrupted by the money of the US and the Gulf countries; and they accepted the polices of submission of Mubarak and Morsi. But everybody should know that the Egyptian army is not just its top leaders but also thousands of officers who remain patriotic. They are not necessarily progressive, nor socialist, but they understand that the people don’t want Morsi. The new Prime Minister, Hazem Al Beblawi, I knew him personally. He was a brilliant student of economics. I don’t know what his mind is like today, but he’s a clever man, able to understand that continuing neoliberal policies would be a disaster.

Hundreds of thousands who are organized. They are those who started Tamarod. These young people are politicized, they discuss politics continuously. They do not accept following parties; they have no confidence in bourgeois parties, democratic parties or even socialist parties.

To have a movement getting together with a minimum common program is important: there are discussions among various partners, particularly with the organizations of the youth. There is a need for a common program which is to meet the immediate challenge; it is not a program for socialism, but a program to start moving out of the trap of neoliberalization by restoring the power of the state, and the other dimensions of starting to move out of the rut of the alliance with the US, Israel, and Gulf countries, and to open new relations with partners, particularly with China, with Russia, with India, with South Africa, so that we can start having independent policies and therefore reducing the influence of the US, of Israel, and of the Gulf countries.

First is the task of social justice: it is not socialism. It is a set of good and important reforms of management of enterprises; the end of privatization; recapturing of the enterprises which have been given at very low prices to private companies; a new law of minimum wages; a new law for working conditions, a new law of labor rights – strikes and so on; a new law of participation of the working people with the management of the enterprises in which they would have a say.

second task is to address the national question. It is a question of dignity. People want a government that represents Egypt with dignity and self-respect. It means a government which is independent, not one accepting the US’s orders, not standing with Israel’s repression of Palestinians. A government independent of the Gulf countries who are allies of the US, they can’t be anything else. In this context, China has a big responsibility. It would be great if some people in China say frankly : “we are with you and we are prepared, if you ask, to help you solve your economic problems.” Such a declaration would have a tremendous echo in Egypt. There are slogans on the streets of Cairo, “we don’t need US aid, we can also get it from other countries”. We don’t need US aid - which is associated with corruption and political submission. This is called a national independent policy, in order to be able to develop a sovereign Egyptian project.

We should have a popular parliament, which is not an elected parliament. It is a parliament which consists of people sent by the organizations of the movement, by the trade unions, by the women organizations, by the youth organizations. This is the true parliament, more than a so-called elected parliament in which the distribution of party is so unequal and biased. You can call it not-a-socialist-program, but a national, democratic, sovereign, and progressive program.

On one hand, we can say the US accepted and supported the army and the new government, but on the other hand, they tried to put pressure to bring back the old reactionary, which is not Muslim Brotherhood but the salafists. This is the plan of the US, which is not to help Egypt out of the crisis, but to use the crisis to destroy more.

These groups are coming from Libya. Since Libya has been destroyed by the western military operation, Libya has become the base for all kinds of Jihadists. There are Jihadists with strong arms including missiles coming from the desert, this is the real danger. Also in the Egyptian peninsula of Sinai small Jidahist groups supported by Israel and the Gulf countries are carrying out terrorist actions.

Empirical evidence does not support either of these assumptions – witness the European ISIS volunteers who arrive in Syria with copies of Islam for Dummies or the alleged leader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was reported to have drunk whisky and smoked cannabis

Yet radicalisation theories have been officially accepted and popularised. This is because they provide a rationale for surveillance (it is easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to find ideologues than terrorists). And they conveniently disavow the cycle of violence we have entered.

What radicalisation theories ignore is that violence in the ‘war on terror’ is relational: the individuals who become ISIS volunteers are willing to use violence; so too are our own governments.

These recruits are not corrupted by ideology but by the end of ideology: they have grown up in the era of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”, of no alternatives to capitalist globalisation. They have known no critique, only conspiracy theory, and are drawn to apocalyptic rather than popular struggle. Nevertheless, for all its lack of actual political content, the narrative of global war against the west feels to its adherents like an answer to the violence of racism, poverty and empire.

The intellectual reaction to the Paris attacks has continued these patterns. The dominant feature is a narcissism that describes ISIS as simply the polar opposite of whatever we value in ourselves. For liberals, ISIS is intolerance, racism and oppression of women. For conservatives, ISIS is the ideal enemy: fanatical, non-western and barbaric. In this mode, ISIS is merely the absolute ‘other’ that enables the construction of a positive image of ourselves.

This means that the most appropriate response to ISIS is to see it as a symptom of the ‘normal’ functioning of the modern, global system, rather than as an external element corrupting the system from outside or from the pre-modern past. Its use of social media, its rejection of the national borders of the twentieth century and its linkages to the petroleum economy all demonstrate that ISIS is a child of globalisation.

ISIS is certainly a monster but a monster of our own making. It was born in the chaos and carnage that followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its sectarian ideology and funding has come from the Saudi and Gulf ruling elites, the west’s closest regional allies after Israel. Russia and Iran have also played their role, propping up the Bashar al-Assad regime – responsible for far more civilian deaths than ISIS – and prolonging the war in Syria that enables ISIS to thrive.

The left should be much bolder in asserting that only an anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics can provide a genuine alternative to jihadism; that more radicalisation, in the genuine sense of the word, is the solution, not the problem; that terrorism thrives in environments where mass movements advancing visions of social progress have been defeated.

We must therefore defend the spaces of radical politics, for the right to dream of another world.

there are two broad approaches to making sense of ‘Islamic extremism’: there are conservatives who regard Islam as an inherently violent culture defined essentially by its founding texts, and liberals who think the enemy is a totalitarian perversion of Islam that emerged in the twentieth century.