[News] Letter to the Occupy/Decolonise Movement from "Comrades from Cairo"

[Anti-Imperialist News]

From Facebook - definitely worth sharing for those who haven't seen it already!

Letter to the Occupy/Decolonise Movement from "Comrades from Cairo"

Posted by 
<http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=518906462>Mika 
Minio-Paluello on Monday, October 24, 2011 at 3:30pm

[This is a letter of solidarity from some 
anonymous awesome Cairo revolutionaries to the 
occupying folks in the US - and elsewhere. I 
(Mika) didn't write it, but received it as an email.]

To all those in the United States 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 
years­long 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 realizing, 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 
organizations 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 austerity­state 
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 onto 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, privatized 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 labor 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 marginalized, excluded and for 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, anti­camping 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 the 28thof 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 fetishizing 
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 other wise 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.

Comrades from Cairo. 24thof October, 2011.



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