Two related items I would like to share today.
First, Robert Reich, the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, delivers an excellent short speech regarding the real public nuisance at work today:
Following the spirit of "Occupy Democracy" I have posted below several excerpts from a document published on the Occupy Wall Street website on October 25th. Entitled "Solidarity Statement from Cairo", this work speaks directly to the similarities between conditions in Egypt and those we face here in the United States. Note that in October police actions had not yet forcibly removed major Occupy encampments. The message remains, I believe, no less striking - and is perhaps even more applicable today:
"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.
[...]
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 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, 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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
Comrades from Cairo.
24th of October, 2011."
full text here
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