Whenever you voice criticism of Capitalism, or rather, a criticism of Neoliberalism and Austerity, it is common that people will say you are influenced by Marx, or that you are a full-blown Communist. I get this a lot. And, considering the fact that most of the Islamist parties are deeply tied to business and financial elites, they tend to be pro-Capitalist by default, and generally uneducated about economics. And of course, when they call you Marist, they are saying you are a Leftist, secularist, atheist devil, and no one should listen to you, ever.
Most of them, if not all of them, have never read Marx, nor, for that matter, Adam Smith; so they don’t really know what they are talking about (which has never prevented them from talking about any other subject anyway).
For myself, I have never read Marx either. I have tried, but I find the language too pretentious, heavy, and over-complicated with esoteric Leftist jargon. No, I am not influenced by Marx. I am influenced by poverty. My parents divorced when I was a child, and my brother and I stayed with my mother. We faced financial insecurity for as long as I can remember. I had my first job at 7 years old. My perspective is informed by an intimate knowledge of what it is like to have to struggle to survive on a daily basis. My mother worked 2, sometimes 3 jobs; I worked night shifts while I was in school. I used to work “day labor” jobs on my days off; waiting in line at a homeless shelter to be given some menial work to do in exchange for cash at the end of the day (digging ditches, clearing cactuses from fields, laying concrete, etc). And yet, with all of this hard work, we could barely pay our bills, because the pay was so low and the costs of living so high. The city I lived in was small and mostly affluent, so I had the uniquely isolating experience of being poor in a rich community, which let me see the stark contrast of the income gap vividly every day.
When I was growing up, those of us in the underclass were marginalized; but these days, that margin is becoming most of the society, particularly in a place like Egypt. Look, we are living in a world where literally 62 people own more wealth than half the population of the earth. The economic structure of society that used to be pyramid shaped, has become an obelisk, with a huge base of extremely poor people, and a tiny group of super-rich elites radically high above them. Even if you are a committed Capitalist, you will recognize that this is completely unsustainable. It is bad economics and it is bad politics. You don’t have to be a Leftist to comprehend that, you just have to not be brainwashed. And if you deny that economic justice is part of this Deen, you have to enroll yourself in a course on the fundamentals of Islam.