One of he prominent rallying calls of the revolution was “the people want to bring the system down”. The major features of the system where:
- Opacity: nobody had a clue of what goes on the in corridors of powers where destinies were being shaped.
- Insularism: the population felt helpless and that the voices are not heard and their needs are not answered. There was a general feeling that a things were getting worse, not much could be done about it.
- Overbearingness: the state was the all powerful and would stifle any attempts of independent or group action. NGO work was often restricted and subject to intrusive governmental oversight.
- Duplicitousness: the state promoted lies and engaged in disinformation campaigns to justify its existence. It made life difficult for dissenters and free thinkers and tried to isolate (and when no one was looking eliminate) them to prevent any nascent challenge to their authority.
Those feature gave rise to cronyism and wide spread corruption that made daily life very bleak for the average Egyptian. Hence, the popular chant in the early days “Bread, Freedom, and Social Justice”. Now the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is engaged in a power struggle with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Both of them have shown very clearly, during the past year and a half, that they are eager to maintain the promulgate those features.
The power struggle between MB and SCAF has little bearing on what I see as the a key implicit demand of Egyptian revolution:
To create an open and transparent econo-political system with maximum latitude for popular initiative and collective problem solving.
This can never come about while the above features remain intact. I do not see it worth the effort of the revolutionaries to engage in “symbolic wars” against SCAF or to come to the aide MB as long as those features remain intact. There should be instead a concerted intellectual effort to chart and path that would eliminate those rotten features and supplanting them by novel and efficient ones.
Chanting in Tahrir against the symptoms (or emergent properties) of the said features will not bring about positive change. The battle now is for outlining a clear plan for system wide transition and forming popular consensus about it.