Al Haraka Al Markesiya fi Misr 1968 - 1981 (The Marxist Movement in Egypt 1968 - 1981),Gennaro Gervasio, translated by Basma Mohamed Abdel-Rahman and Carmini Cartolano, National Center for Translation, Cairo, 2010. pp451

Italian by birth, leftist both by family and choice, Gennaro Gervasio stumbled upon the legacy of the so-called "third wave" of the Egyptian Marxist movement while researching his masters’ thesis on Egyptian politics after the devastating military defeat on Israeli hands in June 1967.
The history of the Egyptian Marxist movement is widely held to have fallen into three distinct phases or "waves", the first in the 1920s, with the founding of the Egyptian Communist Party, which following a initial upsurge, went into steep decline, practically disappearing altogether by the late 30s, setting the pattern for a cycle of rapid resurgence and steep decline that would come to characterize the latter two phases of Egyptian Marxism. Thus, the second phase originates in the 40s, and dramatically ends by the formal dissolution of the party, with most of its members joining the ruling Arab Socialist Union, led by President Gamal Abdel-Nasser.
The third wave also begins with a bang, in the wake of the June 1967 War, with a new generation of Egyptian leftists leading a wave of student and workers uprisings that shook the country. It was understandable, therefore, that Gervasio's research into the effects of the June defeat on the domestic political situation in the country should lead him to what was to become the topic of his doctoral thesis, the largely unwritten history of the third phase of Egyptian Marxism.
For while the history of the first two "waves" has been extensively recorded, analyzed and debated, the third phase remained, until Gervasio's book, largely ignored by scholarship.  
Gervasio’s thesis, written and published in Italian, was translated into Arabic and recently published by Egypt's National Centre for Translation. The book covers the history of Egyptian political life between 1968 and 1981, the end of the Nasser era and all of Anwar El-Sadat’s. Delving into the historical details of the period takes up more than half the book, providing the maximum background for the foreign or non-specialist reader to digest the overall political scene before getting to the core of the book – possibly far too long.
He also describes the origins of Marxism in Egypt, its founders, ideological origins and early thinking. The most interesting section of the book is where he delves into the internal history of the movement, interviewing
through personal accounts from activists who participated in the events which took place during the period of study.  
The historial narrative is informed by a fundamental thesis, which Gervasio submits as the crucial reason behind the decline of the third wave of Egyptian Marxist activism.  According to Gervasio, police repression is an insufficient explanation for the growing weakness and decline of the movement. Rather, he argues, it was the primacy of nationalism over class politics in the Egyptian Marxist discourse, that constituted that movement's Achilles heel, the main source of its inherent weaknesses.
By prioritizing a nationalist agenda, wherein the Arab-Israeli conflict took center stage, the Marxist movement was unable to push down deep roots in the society and widen its influence among the working classes, everywhere the mainstay of left-wing politics.
On another front, argues Gervasio, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as an alternative to  social reform, with its ever widening networks of social services to the poor, led to many turning their backs on the left, and opting for the ‘ways of God'.
Owing to the scarcity of surviving documents from the "banned", and constantly police-hounded movement, much of its recorded history has been lost. Gervasio attempts to assemble this through personal accounts, testimonials and interviews with surviving Marxists. However, a lot is still leaves a lot to be told, and in his own introduction, he states that this is only the beginning, but by no means the end of the account of Marxism in Egypt.
Commenting upon the extent to which today’s Egyptian Marxists have been impacted by that history, Gervasio says, “The original sin has already been paid for, and this has allowed today’s Marxists to exist with a lot more focus and distinction.  In the past, all sorts of legacies were jumbled under the same title, but today there is a clear distinction between Marxists, Nasserists and Arab Nationalists. This clarity will enable Marxism to focus on the real social struggle and labour issues, without getting entangled in the bigger questions as before."
There are many indications that this is happening, Gervasio elaborates, citing the experience of Al-Badeel newspaper (a leftist daily launched in 2007 and closed down in 2009), "which dedicated an entire section to worker’s conditions and protests, not only in Cairo, but throughout Egypt, for the first time in this country’s Marxist tradition.”
 On the future of the left in Egypt, Gervasio believes that “while there's a lot of pessimism, still there are signs that there’s an important gap that needs to be filled. The workers are now leading their own movement and the Marxists have an opportunity to interact closely with the labour movement and to integrated with it; no longer as the 'vanguard' and leadership as in the past, but more as an ally, as was the case in Brazil."