In January 1977, Abd al-Mun’im al-Qaysuni, head of Anwar Sadat’s Economic Council announced the termination of state subsidies on flour, rice, tea, sugar, and cooking oil. He went on to declare that state employees would no longer receive bonuses or pay increases. Qasyuni hoped to stave off the growing pressures of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund while heroically leading Egypt onto a path of economic “reform.” The government’s efforts to encourage private investment had already produced a broad disparity between the growing wealth of a select few and the entrenched impoverishment of the majority. Now the government sought to take their plans one painful step forward and reduce public expenditure. It was the stuff of everyday life, those basic goods that many depended on, that were now the targets of “liberalization.” Prices rose immediately. Students, workers, and a broad swath of Egyptians, commonly scripted in journalistic and conventional accounts as “hundreds of thousands of lower-class people” took to the streets from Aswan to Alexandria. For two heady days, the voices resonating across the country protested. For many Egyptian activists, the bread intifada of 1977 secured a victory over a neoliberal attack on state services and public subsidies. In other accounts, the shifts that began in 1977 facilitated the slow and steady withdrawal of the state from basic public services. This paper traces the strategies, discourses, and approaches that policy-makers, economists, and intellectuals inaugurated in this period. It attends to the bread intifada of 1977 as both continuity and rupture. This paper focuses in particular on the policies and representations of poverty as at once a national security threat and domain of pity. In the government’s official announcements as well as in the texts of various intellectuals, including Naguib Mahfouz, Tharwat Abaza and Yusef Idris, the poor in 1977 appear as objects of sympathy and containment. Activists, who self-defined as leftists, similarly understood the urban poor, or the lumpenproletariat, as agents of potential danger and irrationality. By centering the poor and the hungry, this paper traces the emergence and appeal of neoliberalism in economic and political thought. By tracing the innovations of the open-door policy and how these innovations transgressed both political and religious/secular divides, it provides an alternative trajectory of the right in Egypt.