To the Occupy Movement - the occupiers of Tahrir Square
are with you

    In many ways we in Egypt are part of the same
    struggle, and we are watching in solidarity.
    Keep going, don't stop, occupy more

From Comrades from Cairo 
Guardian (UK) 
October 25, 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/25/occupy-movement-tahrir-square-cairo

To all those across the world currently occupying
parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo
are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much
advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we
thought it's our turn to pass on some advice.

Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same
struggle. What most pundits call "the Arab spring" has
its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and
occupations taking place all around the world, its
foundations lie in years-long struggles by people and
popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in
is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been
fighting against systems of repression,
disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global
capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a system that
has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its
inhabitants. As the interests of government
increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of
private, transnational capital, our cities and homes
have become progressively more abstract and violent
places, subject to the casual ravages of the next
economic development or urban renewal scheme.

An entire generation across the globe has grown up
realising, rationally and emotionally, that we have no
future in the current order of things. Living under
structural adjustment policies and the supposed
expertise of international organisations like the World
Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries
and public services were sold off and dismantled as the
"free market" pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to
foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those
freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other
countries in the south found their immiseration
reinforced by a massive increase in police repression
and torture.

The current crisis in America and western Europe has
begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that
as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our
backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not
content with carving out the remnants of the public
sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the
austerity state now even attack the private realm and
people's right to decent dwelling as thousands of
foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves both
homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them
on to the streets.

So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring
down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not
protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we
ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying.
We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice
that have been commodified, privatised and locked into
the hands of faceless bureaucracy, real estate
portfolios and police "protection". Hold on to these
spaces, nurture them and let the boundaries of your
occupations grow. After all, who built these parks,
these plazas, these buildings? Whose labour made them
real and livable?

Why should it seem so natural that they should be
withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming
these spaces and managing them justly and collectively
is proof enough of our legitimacy.

In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people
entering the square every day in tears because it was
the first time they had walked through those streets
and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not
just the ideas that are important, these spaces are
fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These
are public spaces. Spaces for gathering, leisure,
meeting and interacting - these spaces should be the
reason we live in cities. Where the state and the
interests of owners have made them inaccessible,
exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure
that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and
must continue to open them to anyone that wants to
build a better world, particularly for the
marginalised, the excluded and those groups who have
suffered the worst.

What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and
abstract nor as quotidian as "real democracy"; the
nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being
made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and
stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has
come to represent. And so the occupations must
continue, because there is no one left to ask for
reform. They must continue because we are creating what
we can no longer wait for.

But the ideologies of property and propriety will
manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt
opposition of property owners or municipalities to your
encampments or the more subtle attempts to control
space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or
health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict
between what we seek to make of our cities and our
spaces and what the law and the systems of policing
standing behind it would have us do.

We faced such direct and indirect violence, and
continue to face it. Those who said that the Egyptian
revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that
police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance
and even force that revolutionaries used against the
police to defend their tentative occupations and
spaces: by the government's own admission, 99 police
stations were put to the torch, thousands of police
cars were destroyed and all of the ruling party's
offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were
erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with
rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition
on us. But at the end of the day on 28 January they
retreated, and we had won our cities.

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it
is even less our desire to lose. If we do not resist,
actively, when they come to take what we have won back,
then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics
that we used when we shouted "peaceful" with
fetishising nonviolence; if the state had given up
immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they
sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that
there was no other option than to fight back. Had we
laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested,
tortured and martyred to "make a point", we would be no
less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend
these things you have occupied, that you are building,
because, after everything else has been taken from us,
these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.

By way of concluding, then, our only real advice to you
is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy
more, find each other, build larger and larger networks
and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social
life, consensus and democracy. Discover new ways to use
these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and
never give them up again. Resist fiercely when you are
under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you
are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all
watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say
that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all
for what you are doing.

___________________________________________

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