Workers, youth continue demands for full democracy, economic reforms, and an end to military ‘soft coup.’
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remained filled until Morsi was declared the winner.
Now the question is whether the Brotherhood lead ership—which at a number of points since Mubarak’s downfall has aligned itself with SCAF against pro-de mocracy protesters—will continue to support mass mobilizations to challenge the military’s legal and constitutional maneuvers.
An early test of the MB leadership’s fortitude came with Morsi’s swearing in. The military had insisted it be done in front of the SCAF-appointed Supreme Con stitutional Court, but activists demanded he come to Tahrir Square and take his oath before the masses. In the end he went first to Tahrir, and then to the Court.
The Brotherhood—which, under its religious over lay, is a bourgeois party whose leadership consists overwhelmingly of rich businessmen—is trapped be tween the awareness of its ranks of the need to mobi lize against the soft coup, and its fear of those same ranks. The leaders, like the ranks, realize that they are in danger of becoming a ruling party that isn’t allowed to rule—or perhaps even to exist. Yet the leadership fears far more a coming together of its mostly work ing-class and peasant base with the revolutionaries in the squares and workplaces who want to pursue to the end this revolution, whose main slogan remains “Bread, Freedom, and Social Justice.”
The MB leadership is particularly scared because it had been able to keep its ranks from joining mobili zations called by radical groups since the revolution, even when those groups were being violently attacked by the military, and it was able on occasion to turn some of its members toward slander and violence against them. But in June the squares of Egypt once again became a place where the rank and file of the MB and various Islamist groups stood shoulder to shoulder with secular radical elements in opposing military rule and in dialogue with each other about how best to do so. Clearly, this unified, quick, and mas sive mobilization convinced SCAF not to steal outright the election but rather to rely on the new laws and ap pointments that it had just made to maintain the vast bulk of real power.
The demands in the statement by a broad alliance of radical groups calling for the Tahrir mobilization gives a good sense of the dangers posed by the soft coup, and the steps needed to roll it back. The groups demand ed a mass mobilization against the military’s consti