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Many are now expressing anxiety over the negotiations’ lack of transparency and the possibility that the Egyptian government could agree to onerous conditions that may force it to cut back on spending on social welfare and safety nets. “Many fear that a new era of dependency will start, even after the revolution,” Amr Adly, economic and social justice director with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a Cairo-based watchdog, told IPS.

“The best way for the international community to support a fresh start for the Egyptian people would be to support an independent commission to determine if much of the debt accrued during the Mubarak era is illegitimate and thus should be cancelled, before any new debt is undertaken,” Deborah James, with the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a think tank here in Washington, told IPS.

Morsi’s government is clearly aware of its lack of economic expertise, and thus has chosen to keep around some important members of Mubarak’s government, including the governor of the central bank, Farouk Al-Okdah, and others. “These are the very members of the neoliberal team once in charge under Mubarak,” Adly says. “These bureaucrats and technocrats are quite conservative, and there is the idea that they have been kept in office in order to negotiate with the IMF and the World Bank.”

The Egyptian military, if it negotiates with the people (whatever exactly this would mean), will want to do so in the framework of the existing constitution, in which a national assembly dominated by the NDP (National Democratic Party–Mubarak’s organization) is supposed to remain in power until 2015. If the January 25 movement is not able to assert the sovereignty of the people and its special role as their representative, the chances of real democratization are minuscule.

Les Gelb, so apt a spokesman for the U.S. foreign policy establishment that he almost seems a self-caricature, sums up the reasons for worrying about any precipitous removal of Mubarak:   “The worry on Mubarak’s part is that if he says yes to this, there will be more demands,” said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “And since he’s not dealing with a legal entity, but a mob, how does he know there won’t be more demands tomorrow?”   When the people have been excluded from being a legal entity, then it is impossible for them to be one. This is a problem insurrectionaries have always faced and will always face. But it is up to those people to decide whether they are, in Gelb’s charming term, a “mob” or whether they are the legitimate expression of the popular will. If they do so, they will get no support from the United States, Europe, the United Nations, other Arab states (except perhaps Tunisia), the bien pensants of the “international community,” or Mark Zuckerberg. The will need support from the one place they may actually get it–what the New York Times dubbed the “other superpower,” global public opinion.   Of course, Gelb, reprehensible as he is, has a point. Who will the military negotiate with and how? Tunisia and Egypt are striking because they belong to that class of revolutions where, suddenly, as if out of the blue, “everybody” is on the same side. Seemingly, the whole country unites and wants the dictator out. Of course, this is not literally true; there are always, if nothing else, the pampered security forces, cronies of the dictator, and a small paid-off subgroup of the elite. But if a vast majority of all sectors of society outside the dictator’s small group is on one side, revolution can come very swiftly.

What is a strength in the tumultuous phase of rapid mobilization becomes a weakness once the question becomes, “What is to be done?” It is difficult and tiring to protest, deal with the disruption of daily life, see people be beaten and killed–at some point, it can be comforting to accept the word of some source of traditional authority that you can go home now, the problems will be fixed. I hope that will not happen in Egypt, but there is no use in anyone telling the people who are so heroically making this revolution what they should want next.

Nevertheless, the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi should not be solely held responsible for sectarian violence (even if they haven't helped matters), as the Egyptian state (especially security forces) are not under the control of Morsi and Coptic mobilization has crystallized.

Little has been done, however, to improve the state of the minorities in Egypt and recent attacks on Shiites reveal that it is not the Muslim Brotherhood but the state itself that is deeply sectarian.

The Egyptian state was reluctant to investigate such cases because security forces (who are supposed to investigate such cases) were involved. No one mentioned the rule of law.

They support a form of "lumpen development" -- to use the term originally coined by André Gunder Frank -- that imprisons the societies concerned in a spiral of pauperization and exclusion, which in turn reinforces the stranglehold of reactionary political Islam on society.

A strong, upright Egypt would mean the end of the triple hegemony of the Gulf (submission to the discourse of Islamization of society), the United States (a vassalized and pauperized Egypt remains under its direct influence), and Israel (a powerless Egypt does not intervene in Palestine).

The planned failure of the "Egyptian revolution" would thus guarantee the continuation of the system that has been in place since Sadat, founded on the alliance of the army high command and political Islam.  Admittedly, on the strength of its electoral victory the Brotherhood is now able to demand more power than it has thus far been granted by the military.  However, revising the distribution of the benefits of this alliance in favor of the Brotherhood may prove difficult.

The major challenge now lies in implementing the new constitution. The majority in the next parliament will have to further shape the new Tunisia, cleaning up laws to remove Ben Ali’s legacy and undergirding the new constitution with democratic legislation. The consensus logic of the 2/3 majority will not apply anymore in a normal parliament. Indeed the purpose of majorities is to implement their political programme.

Amidst the frustration, the recent adoption of a new constitution offers a beacon of hope not only in Tunisia, but across a region that has seen little good news lately. In agreeing the constitution, Tunisians have shown that meaningful political negotiations and agreement between widely diverse positions is possible. 

The GCC oil sheikhs ‘paid’ $15bn in aid for the July 2013 coup in Egypt, but the handouts were quickly used up on buttressing the Egyptian pound and on a dismal $4.9bn stimulus package. The Egyptian pound has continued its slide, economic growth has stalled (at best its 1% in the first quarter of 2014), the budget deficit stands at14% of GDP, unemployment is 13.4%, inflation is 10%, while public debt and foreign debt are accelerating. GCC aid is not just monetary, and includes fuel and natural gas, which Egypt was cavalierly exporting until last year.

Investors want to have their cake and eat it: no more corrupt Mubarakite officials, and at the same time no more challenges to corrupt investment deals (which often strip a state company of its assets and lay off workers, spiriting any profits abroad).

The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) government tried to square the circle. It allowed the illegal privatisations to be challenged, turned back the massive corruption, and encouraged a new class of small and more devout businessmen to build a new Egypt, emulating the Turkish miracle which unfolded under the Islamists there. Egypt is ripe for such a development, but the paranoia of the secular elite and their unwillingness to make room for a less corrupt, more dynamic, more home-grown, non-Cairene strata of entrepreneurs means that the only way forward for Egypt has been crushed “in the near term”.

The eruption of social and political unrest has followed the impact of deepening economic turbulence across the region, due to the inflationary impact of rocketing fuel and food prices.

The global food situation has been compounded by the over-dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, consuming ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food energy produced

The fuel price hikes, combining with the predatory activities of financial speculators trying to rake-in profits by investing in the commodity markets, have underpinned worldwide inflation.

When it became clear last week that the Ministry of Interior's crowd-control forces were adding to rather than containing the popular upsurge, they were suddenly and mysteriously removed from the street. Simultaneously, by releasing a symbolic few prisoners from jail; by having plainclothes Ministry of Interior thugs engage in some vandalism and looting (probably including that in the Egyptian National Museum); and by extensively portraying on government television an alleged widespread breakdown of law and order, the regime cleverly elicited the population's desire for security.

The stage was thus set for the regime to counterattack the opposition through a combination of divide-and-rule tactics, political jujitsu, and crude application of force. The pledge by Mubarak not to offer his candidacy, the implied succession to Suleiman rather than Gamal, the commitment to revising constitutional provisions that govern the presidential election, and the decision to suspend parliamentary sessions until courts have ruled on contested candidacies from the November election succeeded in convincing some opposition elements that they had gained enough to call it a victory and go home.

The military will now enter into negotiations with opposition elements that it chooses. The real opposition will initially be ignored, and then possibly rounded up

It is the slowly-accumulating momentum of hundreds of thousands of confrontations with local officials and elites, the organizing efforts of mutual assistance (including even Egyptian soccer clubs, as Dave Zirin points out), individual and group assertions of women’s rights, tireless attempts to solidify common stands of workers against bosses (as in the great waves of strikes in the textile city of Mahalla), students’ rejection of authoritarian school conditions, and efforts to defend local neighborhoods— almost always in the shadows out of sight of foreign media—that slowly develop the courage, confidence and essential horizontal networks bubbling below the surface of seemingly fixed political landscapes.

Without that growing accumulation of willful resistance by hundreds of thousands already at the grassroots level, no appeals by Twitter or Facebook, by liberal, radical or revolutionary organizations, or by charismatic national figures will inspire millions to risk the bloodshed and torture implied in confrontation with the harsh face of the regime’s police.

When certain “spokespeople” for the movement or independent “power brokers” become fixed in place—encouraged by negotiators for the old regime or by the media or by their own self-promotion—it is doubtful that those deep levels of revolutionary aspirations will be heard. This will be a key dynamic to watch in Egypt in the weeks to come.

We expressed our admiration and solidarity and we offered our support and the promise to carry their stories, their struggles and their aspirations with us and share them in whatever ways we could as our commitment to contribute to imagine and construct a better world, more just and equal, each of us in the places where we live and work.

We also explained that we wished to explore the viability of a regional and continental Social Forum in Tunisia to celebrate the revolution and support the transition.

Enthusiastic citizens discussed and negotiated their differences, exchanged their experiences, disagreed vehemently, even shouted their frustration and disappointments contributing to give form to their visions and inspiring in each other actions and daily practices towards the establishment of a new society.