In the second leg of his Latin American tour, Alan Woods of the International Marxist Tendency enjoyed a rapturous reception across Brazil as he launched the newly updated edition of Trotsky's final masterpiece: his unfinished biography of Stalin.

“The lot of young Arabs is worsening: it has become harder to find a job and easier to end up in a cell. Their options are typically poverty, emigration or, for a minority, jihad. Astonishingly, in Egypt’s broken system university graduates are more likely to be jobless than the country’s near-illiterate.” (The Economist, August 2016)

These words are now a year old and the situation for young Arabs in general – and young Egyptians in particular – has only gotten worse. In its lead article of an issue entitled ‘The Ruining of Egypt’, The Economist showed a graph placing Egypt’s youth employment rate consistently between 40% and 46% over the previous six years. The only Arab countries whose youth fared worse between 2010 and 2016 were Libya and Mauritania.