Co-hosted by Suzi Weissman and Alan Minsky
Guests: Joel Kovel, Dan La Botz, Seth Adler, Hillel Ticktun, and William Tabb
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Live from the Left Forum – Show #1
Category: Communiqués
To the Arts, Citizens: it’s a fantastic title. Hearing it, anyone who’s been involved in political activism will probably think: “At last we’re getting somewhere.” The idea that art is part of citizenship, that there is a democratic exercise of the arts within the framework of public life, and that this appeal to the citizen-artist can be supported by a major cultural institution, is about as progressive as you could get today. Especially since this is a direct echo of the French republican tradition, where the phrase, Aux armes citoyens, is nothing less than a call to rise up and institute democracy against tyranny – in other words, a call to revolution. The Portuguese know the meaning of this revolutionary call to arms from decisive historical events that are still in living memory. So one can imagine that the organizers of this exhibition did not take their title lightly.
The call to arts is a recognition that citizenship does not stop at the ballot box, that an expressive politics is essential to a democracy, and that in an era saturated with media and advertising, the aesthetic dimension has become a crucial field of social interaction. What’s more, this call to arts is an acknowledgement that censorship continues to exist in all societies and is often intensifying; that archaic values and beliefs raise a barrier to free expression even more powerful than the force of the law; and finally, that citizens’ day-to-day participation in the shaping of their own societies is as urgent an occupation today as at any time in the past, precisely because of the professionalization of politics and the tendency to treat any disruption of the norm as a security issue. All this assigns challenging roles to institutions that attempt to take up the call to arts. Among them is not only that of exhibiting politically engaged art to the public, but also of mediating the ensuing debates, sustaining the inevitable critiques and scandals, archiving the results and thereby helping to build a culture of democratic exchange, which is never easy to maintain and never flourishes without the people involved taking an individual stand, beyond all bureaucratic limits and guarantees. Quite a tall order – as though we were going to wake up and start living again.
Could anything like this dream be achieved in reality? Based on work carried out with a wide range of collaborators over the last decade, what I would like to outline in this short essay is a critical and constructive program that necessarily goes beyond any single exhibition. At a minimum, such a program would have to address the relations of art to financial capital, the issues of national identity and race in artistic representation, and finally, the question of citizenship itself as a frame for the individual’s involvement in society. The call to arts requires us to face certain paradoxes. But it is a chance to examine how democratic and egalitarian ideals can be expressed right now, in the world where we are actually living.
Forces of desire
In the developed and rapidly developing countries, the most impressive urban project of the last thirty years has been the redefinition of cities as competitive nodes in a global financial network. The aesthetic-economic phenomenon of iconic “starchitecture” – including a large number of luxurious new museums – has been the most obvious sign of this competition for visibility within the world hierarchy of cities. At the level of lived experience, the process translates into the gradual reclassification of decaying residential areas as consumption zones for the new professional and managerial classes, i.e. gentrification. Here, the role of artists as “urban pioneers” who brave the difficulties of life among minority and immigrant populations has been well documented since the 1980s – often via highly critical shows in the new museums of the financialized city centers. Yet despite some radical attempts to work with social movements, the failure of critical artists to achieve anything concrete on the level of urban planning demonstrates the trap of career paths dependent on the same flows of investment capital that have reshaped the cities, driving poorer inhabitants far away from the urban centers. In this story, the “call to arts” has mainly involved, not citizenship or democracy, but the valorization of urban real estate as a speculative commodity, leading directly to the current economic crisis.
The place of the arts within the gentrification process derives from their capacity to foster specific kinds of desire. Over the thirty-year period of financialized globalization, it has become obvious that certain forms of vanguard art – for example, the dadaist practice of visual montage, the situationist theory of the construction of ambiances, and the pop-art embrace of exuberant exoticism – have been functionalized to fit the perceptual and expressive repertoire of a networked corporate culture. Just as pictorial abstraction offered a visual vocabulary for the dominant forms of industrial capitalism in the Cold War period, so the recombinant signifiers and improvised performance practices of relational art have shown their adaptation to today’s computerized economy of images and signs. The homogenization of the urban landscape under the cover of glittering lights and exotic attractions poses a serious challenge to cultural and educational institutions, whose long-term capacities for the generation of alternative values are increasingly reduced by demands for budget-cutting and box-office type profitability – demands which can only be satisfied by the transformation of those institutions into leisure facilities and corporate innovation centers. However, it is now possible that the economic crisis and the diminishing appeal of kaleidoscopic urban experiences will offer new missions to public culture, if anyone is willing and able to invent them.
Fenced-in nations
Perhaps the greatest challenge to an egalitarian and radically democratic stance in art today comes from the resurgence of conservative electoral rhetorics based on national identity. This resurgent conservatism and outright racism grows in direct proportion to the destabilization of traditional customs and labor relations by the individual mobility and ethnic mixing that accompanies financially driven globalization. Threatened with joblessness, established citizens attack the migrants whose cheap manpower used to make their lives so easy. In the United States, major progress in the cultural integration of ethnic minorities was countered, from the late 1980s onward, by the outbreak of the neocon “culture wars.” Since then, the US has witnessed the construction of physical barriers as well as a network of electronic security systems along its 3000-kilometer border with Mexico. The situation is even worse in the European Union, whose member states have not had such long experience with inbound immigration and have not been able to generate the political and cultural representation that can bolster the claims of recent arrivals to full citizenship. At this point, the political systems of all these democracies are prey to racist sloganeering, resulting in the intensification of repressive policing, the arbitrary denial or suspension of visas, outbreaks of violence at street level and increased legitimacy for the seemingly endless wars in the Middle East.
The important question is, to what extent can contemporary art institutions become effective sites of social integration, beyond the mere display of exotic signifiers? At least three pathways offer real possibilities. The first and still most common is the high-culture elaboration of motifs and cultural practices borrowed from the heritage and everyday experience of minority groups, which is exactly what modernist art did with European folk motifs in the early twentieth century. The second involves the collaboration of artists with neighborhood groups on activist campaigns for equal rights and protection from violence and discrimination – a kind of work which gives minority publics a direct stake in the institution. Unfortunately this remains rare in contemporary art because of a class bias that uses the criterion of aesthetic purity as a way to screen out most local participation. The third possibility is to support and display vanguard practices from non-Western countries as a way to explore world society and to encourage the complex process of cross-cultural interpretation. All these possibilities challenge the former concept of artistic institutions as the guardians of a national identity. And the most interesting thing about them is that they all point directly to the limits of current conceptions of citizenship.
Human ecology and progress
The fundamental political problem now facing the developed nations is that the values of citizenship are conceived exclusively in terms of economic growth. The only imaginable progress lies in rising profit margins and increasing levels of consumption. But the endless search for competitive advantage requires at least four things: an aggressive expansion of markets at the expense of other countries; a cheapening of labor either through automatization or recourse to a work force not subject to national standards; a predatory use of credit to extract savings from individuals and governments; and finally, a negligence of the human and ecological costs, which are treated as “externalities” and left off the account books of a social order that is regulated only by monetary accounts. Under these conditions, the “citizen” is redefined as an increasingly cheap worker (whose economic rights should continually be diminished) and as a voracious consumer (whose pockets must be filled with borrowed money). At the same time, the “non-citizen” is invited to work for even less than the most ill-paid sectors of the national population while simultaneously being reviled and declared illegal, so as to stave off demands for expensive social programs. Clearly these are the ingredients of not one but several disasters, all of which are at least partially underway: economic penury even within the developed nations; climate change for the entire world; generalized alienation manifesting itself as terrorism; and finally, outright war. The twenty-first century is likely to see a major crisis, different from those that marred the twentieth, but perhaps equally violent.
In this threatening configuration, the artistic sphere remains a place where philosophical inquiry, sociological analysis and radically egalitarian political concepts can be articulated with common forms of perception and intimate experiences of daily life. Yet such uses of art are rare, by comparison to the major role that aesthetic production has taken in the financialized economies. And they are paradoxical, compared to the reigning doxa or dogma of financial capitalism and consumer citizenship. To sustain the democratic potential of artistic invention will ultimately require a reworking of the very notion of progress, whether through the kind of fiery debate that attends upon scandalous transgression, or through the pleasure that comes with a generous exploration of diverging values. Art institutions, if they want to survive as something other than corporate design labs and pay-per-view leisure centers, will have to show larger numbers of people that they can serve as social sites for participation in the development of alternatives. Really, it’s no joke to associate the historical call to arms with a contemporary call to the arts. At stake is a new practice of what it means to be a citizen.
I would like to talk about something that everybody knows, but that, so it seems, no one has the boldness to say. That is, that the time for indignation is over. Those who get indignant are already starting to bore us. Increasingly, they seem to us like the last guardians of a rotten system, a system without dignity, sustainability or credibility. We don’t have to get indignant anymore, we have to revolt.
Arise. In the dictionary, the word ‘Insurrection’ is described in different ways. But I stick to the etymology. To me, the word insurrection means to rise up, it means to take on ourselves our dignity as human beings, as workers, as citizens in an uncompromising way. But it also means something else. It means to fully unfold the potency of the body and of collective knowledge, of society, of the net, of intelligence. To entirely unfold what we are, in a collective way. This is the point. Those who say that insurrection is a utopia are sometimes cynics, sometimes just idiots. Those who say that it is not possible to revolt, don’t take into account the fact that, to us, almost everything is possible. Only, this ‘almost everything’ is subjugated by the miserable obsession for profit and accumulation. The obsession for profit and accumulation led our country and all European countries to the verge of a terrifying catastrophe, into which we are now sinking, and we should realize we are already quite far into it. It is the catastrophe of barbarism and ignorance.
In Italy, the reform of the Berlusconi government and of his crawlers has already taken 8 billion euros away from the school, university and the education system, and soon it will take away even more. Everyone knows what the consequences will be, and not only in Brera, which is still a privileged place within the Italian education system. I have also taught in 3 or 4 other schools in this country, and I know what are, for example, the consequences of the reform of the crawler-minister Gelmini for an evening school for adults in Bologna. The Gelmini reform meant that the available budget for that school has shrunk to one third of that of three years ago. In the face of this process of devastation and barbarization produced by this reform, we can’t continue complaining. We must say: first of all, you all have to go, then we will take care of it. They have to go, just like the citizens of Tunis and Cairo said. I don’t know how the revolutions and insurrections in the Arab countries will end. A lot is up to us, I believe: whether or not Europe will be able to open a secular and innovative perspective. I don’t know how it will end up, but I know that they revolted and they won. What did they do? They said: we won’t leave this place. We won’t leave this square, we won’t leave this station, we won’t leave this parliament. We won’t leave until the tyrant and his crawlers go. This is what we have to say, what we have to do. By the end of spring 2011, this is what has to happen in Italy. We will occupy the central train stations in Milan, in Bologna and we will hold them until the tyrant and his crawlers will go.
But the tyrant and his crawlers are not the real problem. The real problem is an obsession, embodied in financial power, in the power of banks and in the idea that the life of society, the pleasure, well-being and culture of society is worthless. The only worthy things are accounting books, the profits of a minuscule class of exploiters and murderers. From our point of view, at the moment, these two problems, that of the tyrant and of his crawlers and that of the European financial dictatorship are one single problem. But we must understand that it would be useless to get rid of the tyrant and of his crawlers, if their places were taken by the murderers, by people like D’Alema or Fini, who are just as responsible. The destruction of the Italian school did not start with the tyrant and his crawlers. From what I know, it started with the Rivola Law, of which few have memory. It was a law issued in 1995 by the Emilia Romagna region, and it was the first law to give private schools the right to receive public funding. That is, it opened the door to the destruction of the public school and the sanctification of private universities such as Cepu.
So, there is one immediate problem: to hold the country, the squares and stations until the tyrant and his crawlers will go. But at the same time we have to be aware that power, true power, is no longer held in Rome. The Minister of Economy, Tremonti, said this. In an interview that appeared in La Repubblica on 30 September 2011, Tremonti replied to a silly journalist, who was trying to criticize him and instead fell in his trap, saying: ‘Why are you so angry at the Berlusconi government? Listen, we don’t decide anything. Decisions are taken in Brussels.’ Well, we don’t know it very well – who should tell us? La Repubblica, maybe? – but since 1st January 2011 the economic, social and financial decisions over individual countries such as Italy, France, Portugal or Greece are no longer taken by national parliaments. They are taken by a financial committee, formally constituted at European level. This is the rule and the ferocious application of the neoliberal, monetarist principle, according to which the only worthy things are bank profits and nothing else. It is in the name of growth, of accumulation and profit at the European level, that you are forced to live a shit life. And your life will be more and more of a shit life, if you do not rebel today, tomorrow, immediately! Because with every passing day your life increasingly, inevitably becomes a shit life.
They say: insurrection is a dangerous word. I repeat: arms are not implicit in the word insurrection, because arms are not our thing, for a number of reasons. First of all, because we don’t know where they are kept, secondly because we know that somebody has them, thirdly because we know that there are professional armies ready to kill, like they killed in Genova in 2001 and many other times. So, this is not the kind of confrontation we are looking for. We know that our weapons are those of intelligence and critique, but also the weapon of technology. For example, we learnt Wikileaks’ lesson, and we know that it is not only a lesson on sabotage and information; it is also a lesson about the infinite power of networked intelligence. This is where we will re-start. We know how to do it, how to enter your circuits, how to sabotage them, but we also know how those circuits – which are not yours, are ours – can be useful for our wealth, our pleasure, our well-being, our culture. This could be the use of those circuits that the collective intelligence produced and that capitalism stole, privatized, impoverished, that capitalism uses against us. This is the meaning of insurrection: to take possession of what is ours, to perform a necessary action of recognition of the collective body, which for too long has been paralyzed in front of a screen and needs to find itself again in a Tahrir Square.
An American journalist, Roger Cohen, wrote in a clever article: ‘Thank you Mubarak, because with your resistance you allowed the Egyptian people, who hadn’t talked to each others for years, to stay in that square for weeks and weeks.’ Like in wars, also during revolutions there are moments of boredom, and during those moments what is there to do? Talk to each other, touch each other, make love. Discovering the collective body, which has been paralyzed for too long. We will say ‘Tank you Berlusconi’, after weeks spent fighting on the streets of Italy. Afterwards, from the moment when the collective body will have awakened, the process of self-organization of the collective mind will begin. This is the insurrection I am calling you to. This is the insurrection that could even start from the Brera Academy, on a day in March 2011. Because the problem is that everyone knows what I just said. Maybe they don’t say it in such detail, but they know it. All that is necessary is to say: it is possible. There are millions of us, thinking this way. So, the next time 300,000 of us will take on the streets, let’s no go back home at the end of the day. Let’s go on the streets with our sleeping bags, knowing that on that night we won’t sleep in our beds. This is the first step, this is the step we need to take. It’s easy! Then, the rest is complicated…
I have almost finished my lecture. I just want to come back to this place. This initiative of mine was born within the situation you all know. Students, lecturers, technicians, precarious workers at the Brera Academy, like those in any other school or university in Italy or abroad, they all know well what is happening. They know that, beyond a complex dance made of ‘I’ll give it you / no I won’t give it to you / maybe I will / but not tomorrow’, beyond the smoke screen of incomprehensible baroquisms, the problem is that there is no more money. How is this possible? What happened? How come all that money disappeared? Brera used to be loaded. It’s all gone. One could say: but Europe is rich, how come all of a sudden there’s no money? Europe is rich, with millions of technicians, poets, doctors, inventors, specialized factory workers, nuclear engineers… How come we became so poor? What happened? Something very simple happened. The entire wealth that we produced was poured into the strongboxes of a minuscule minority of exploiters. This is what happened! The whole mechanism of the European financial crisis was finalized towards the most extraordinary movement of wealth that history has seen, from society towards the financial class, towards financial capitalism. This is what happened! So, what is now happening in Brera is just a small piece, one aspect of the immense movement of wealth, our wealth, the wealth of collective intelligence, which is now being counted inside the strongboxes of the banks.
Well, we decide to pay some attention to the banks. And I communicate to you that from this moment, I, as a professor at Brera, will hold my classes inside a bank. My next lecture will be held on 25th March just there, inside the building of the Credit Agricole. It will be held there. Behind this statue, of which we can now see the ass, on the other side of the square there is a bank where I ask to hold my next lecture, on 25th March, at 11.30am. I’m not doing this because I am a deranged individualist. Well, I might also be a deranged individualist… But the reason why I took this decision and I communicated it to you is that in Europe, it has now been constituted the Knowledge Liberation Front. Maybe these kids could have been a little less rhetorical… The Knowledge Liberation Front called a teach-in in 40 European cities, on March 25th. First of all in London, because, as you know, after many years, on March 26 there will be a general strike in the U.K. This is because the U.K. is now under an exceptionally strong storm of financial violence, and thus on March 26th they will strike and will take on the streets. The day before, the Knowledge Liberation Front will perform 40 teach-ins in 40 European cities. In London, but also in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Prague, Barcelona, Madrid, Bologna, Milan and many other cities. We will do something very simple: we will dress smart, will go to the offices of a bank, will sit on the ground, will take out a banana, a cappuccino and a panini, just like civilized people do, and we will talk about molecular biology, about Goethe, we will read Faust, we will read poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, someone will talk about the poetics of Kandinsky and someone else about nuclear physics. This is what we will do on 25th March, in 40 European cities. Because the time has come for the society of Europe to become, once again, what it could have been in several moments of its history: purely and simply a civil society. Thank you.
Translation and subtitles: Federico Campagna, Anna Galkina, Manlio Poltronieri
Categories
We have your best interests at heart
The streets are emptied, it would seem. After last night, mostly-Coptic Christian protestors in front of the TV Building in Maspero Square demonstrating against sectarianism and unfair treatment of Copts have cleared out. Some of their demands were indeed met, and it appears that the Army High Council met with several representatives of the Church and protests who agreed to disband the sit-in. However, others wanted to stay and many who expressed this intent were beaten by military police and forced to leave (reportedly over 200). Rumors circulating about this say that the Army wanted the protestors out before Hillary Clinton’s visit to Egypt, among other things.
With the Maspero sit in rather unceremoniously over, the Army has won a bloody victory in its efforts to quiet the country down, pretend the revolution is over and pave the way for what limited reforms it plans to dole out. And while some labor and student protests remain (despite similar attempts to break them up with force), for now at least the more holistic, civil protests have been quashed. This blog has discussed before not only the nastiness of the Egyptian Army’s true colors, but also the means by which established political forces have consistently attempted to turn this revolution into a question of piecemeal and meager political reform. Clearing the streets of protests, by force more often than by acquiescence of the protestors, is a continuation of this tactic, as the army knows well that people in the streets, participating freely and directly in democracy and political life, will not make the sort of compromises to half measures or quiet quietly accept empty promises.
Generally, as well, it has been as disheartening as it has been bewildering to see politics, having exploded into its full potential in Tahrir, slowly cornered and dragged back into the garishly-appointed drawing rooms of Old Egypt, complete with that ridiculous gold-leafed French Imperial reproduction furniture that every Egyptian knows all too well. Outside of the “Coalition of the Youth of the January 25th Revolution” a group largely around to provide legitimacy for meetings it would seem, Egyptian politics is quickly falling exactly into the old patterns. What I mean by this is not even a commentary on the types of issues being contemplated or the progress made on the revolution’s demands (which are another contested issue, to be sure), but more subtly and perhaps more troublingly, we have moved back from street politics to drawing room reform, as the appointed old men discuss what they plan to give us.
Once again we find ourselves stuck in the position of reacting to the middling, managerial proposals and policies of what is ultimately the exact same patronizing political class of old. One of the biggest issues here is that their halfhearted dilutions of the revolutions aims, when augmented by drummed-up hysteria and paranoid urgency in the media, actually manage to garner some support, causing rifts and entrenching their own consolidation of power. The coming referendum on the constitutional amendments, discussed in the previous post, is a fine example of this; where before the question of a new constitution seemed necessary, the offering of a supposed quick fix to the existing document now finds a measure of buy-in.
Besides the fact that these amendments are no way forward (even many of the supporters of the referendum only agree with it in the hope that it would speed transition to civilian government, not for its content), it is ultimately sad insofar as it is limiting the options of the Egyptian people to a menu of choices put forward by the army and a limited set in the political establishment. This false constriction of options and false dichotomy that it creates—either yes to the referendum or extend the uncertainty of the transition—is itself a betrayal of the spirit and content of this revolution. People did not willingly risk and give their lives in this revolution simply for the ability to vote on what compromises they would have to make, they did these things that they could craft their own destinies outside of the feeble interpretations of these “wise men”.
Having people in the streets, occupying, camping and demonstrating, was a perpetual reminder to the Egyptian people of the possibility of the impossible, of their right to frame their demands not in terms of what the army or a group of wizened politicians might propose or agree to, but to the full extent of their collective imaginations. The downfall of Mubarak was not brought about through negotiation, the exposure of the brutality of State Security did not happen through deliberation, the rebuilding of destroyed Churches did not happen through the benevolence of the army, and the formation of an independent trade union federation was not an enlightened initiative of the state. All of these actions, and all the goals and real changes brought about to date by the revolution have been deeply connected to an immanent, immediate politics of the street whereby ordinary people remade the world in the image of their hearts’ desires.
UPDATE: Protestors reassembling in front of Maspero Square have been once again beaten by army and military police, stun batons have been used, and protestors including women have been taken into the TV building with reports of more abuse within. Same shit from the army, different day.
source: We have your best interests at heart | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=389
Categories
Plebiscites and Parasites
The upcoming referendum on the proposed amendments to the Egyptian constitution, scheduled March 19th, gives people a sense that the revolutionary process is reaching its end. The limited scope of the amendments, the majority dealing with electoral matters (such as presidential term limits, reduced length of the president’s term, judicial oversight of elections…), imply that the 11 men of the amendment drafting committee were not attempting to upend the existing order, but were attempting to establish a legal framework for the transition from Mubarak’s rule.
Yet, over the last few days, the legal community – including human rights lawyers, law professors and lawyers in general practice – has begun to coalesce around a consensus in favor of completely rewriting the constitution as the necessary next step in the political process. Many legal professionals believe that the amendments represent a dangerous step backward. As a result, many in the legal community have begun to organize a call for the referendum to be scrapped and/or for people to cast a “no” vote in protest to the entire process.
There are several principal complaints about these constitutional amendments, but the most significant is directed at the amended version of article 189 and the implications of the process it creates. The amendment calls for “A Constituent Assembly of 100 members, to be elected by the majority of the two houses of a joint meeting of parliament, to undertake outlining the new constitution during a period of time not more than six months from the time of its formation.”
The natural question on everyone’s mind regards who will make up the majority of the two houses of a joint meeting of parliament. Many political analysts predict that the remnants of the formerly ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) and the Muslim Brotherhood, together, will end up taking a majority of the seats in parliament by virtue of their being the two most organized political forces in the country. This sets up a situation where these two conservative political factions can create a coalition and essentially write their own constitution.
The general presumption in the western practice of constitutional law is that a body created to write a new constitution must be widely inclusive or it will be seen as illegitimate by the people. Similarly, many Egyptian legal analysts are extremely skeptical of the lack of an open and representative process for writing a new constitution. With so much blood and hope put in to the revolution, many people don’t want to take any chances that the constitution will be hijacked by a conservative majority, leaving other political forces locked out of the process. But, with so little time between now and the referendum, it is unlikely that an organized campaign to defeat the referendum can emerge.
This situation is particularly dangerous considering the current state of constitutional law in Egypt. The legal status of the military’s assumption of power after Mubarak’s resignation has been skeptically viewed by many lawyers. Further, one of the first acts of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces was to suspend the constitution upon taking power. As a result, there has been a constitutional crisis in Egypt since Mubarak resigned.
In strictly legal terms, some scholars argue that the military engineered a coup that invalidated the constitution when it took power upon Mubarak’s resignation. Others say that progress towards stability should move forward under a presumption that the constitution is still in place. Views, such as that of Tahani al-Gebali, Egypt’s first female judge and vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court, express the legal trouble at issue. She argues that passage of the constitutional amendments could override the suspension of the old constitution and legally block the military from a legitimate decision making role in the country’s political process, invalidating their call for presidential and parliamentary elections.
Alternatively, the Muslim Brotherhood is predictably calling for a “yes” vote on the amendments and is already making plans for their own emergence as a major political force. The prominence of Brotherhood members on the amendment drafting committee only reinforces the skepticism of the left in the honesty of this whole process. Looking down the road at a potential NDP and Brotherhood dominated constitutional committee gives many people reason to smell a conspiracy with the army.
This interplay of law, politics and power is probably the fundamental issue regarding the future of the revolution. Egypt’s current lack of adherence to legal and constitutional norms provides ample opportunity to manipulate the process while reducing the ability to challenge abuses. The ability of the Egyptian public to influence the course of these challenges will continue to evolve as the process continues.
The army is forcing us into a premature yes/no decision that is being mulled by all of us in Egypt. As everything the past few weeks where the army is involved, the consequences are yet uncertain.
source: Plebiscites and Parasites | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/?p=378