From Egypt to Wall Street

For­mer Egypt­ian pres­i­dent Hosni Mubarak had already stepped down, fol­low­ing a pop­u­lar move­ment that estab­lished a micro-republic, the Gumhuriyyah el-Tahrir (Repub­lic of Lib­erty), which con­tra­dicted the per­vad­ing logic of the inter­na­tional eco­nomic sys­tem. And now pro­test­ers in Wis­con­sin were occu­py­ing the state house to pre­vent the pass­ing of leg­is­la­tion that would effec­tively sus­pend bar­gain­ing rights for pub­lic work­ers. Sit­ting in a Wash­ing­ton news­room, we needed a head­line. I very quickly sug­gested some­thing along these lines: “Mid­dle East unrest spreads to the Mid­west.” I got a side eye. After all, how could a free and open soci­ety, the demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety, be tak­ing its cues from, of all places, Egypt, an antique land with back­ward ways, Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists, and Arab dic­ta­tors? The edi­tors went with a more mod­est title.

How­ever, for many in the Arab world, the con­nec­tion was not lost for a minute. They saw in the occu­pa­tion of the Wis­con­sin State Capi­tol the same spirit that was present in Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation: the refusal to accept the finan­cial order’s demand to oblit­er­ate decades of pro­gres­sive strug­gle and negotiation.

Maybe my own time in Cairo made me see the easy con­nec­tion that my edi­tors missed. I lived there for a almost a year and a half on the largess of the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment. The con­di­tions of my pres­ence were a reminder of the struc­tural inequal­i­ties of the global sys­tem. Any old Amer­i­can can arrive to the air­port with­out a visa, lit­tle train­ing in any use­ful domain and quickly find gain­ful employ­ment and a life of com­fort. An Egypt­ian, how­ever, even with years of edu­ca­tion, has to strug­gle to make a living.

As many set out today to occupy every­thing, let us take a moment to remem­ber the real ori­gins of this global move­ment and allow it to guide our ongo­ing politics.

Deep in the land of Han­ni­bal the Carthagin­ian, who once chal­lenged the power of another global empire, Bouaz­izi was born to a con­struc­tion worker, liv­ing his entire life in Sidi Bouzid, an agrar­ian town. The 26-year-old scraped together an exis­tence for him­self and a large fam­ily by sell­ing fruit. Rel­a­tively speak­ing, he did well to have even that hus­tle, as the New York Times reported that unem­ploy­ment reaches as high as 30% in his area. There was a nearby fac­tory, but that only pays around $50 a month. Even the col­lege edu­cated were head­ing to the coast, where they too strug­gled with underemployment.

A vet­eran fruit ven­dor, Bouaz­izi was used to the author­i­ties that policed the fruit stands. Some­times he paid a fine, other times a bribe. But on the morn­ing of Decem­ber 17, Bouaz­izi refused to do either. He also refused an attempted con­fis­ca­tion of his fruit, com­modi­ties that are often bought on credit by the para-legal ven­dors. The rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the state even­tu­ally won the first bat­tle. Beaten and humil­i­ated, Bouaz­izi quickly tried redress­ing his griev­ances at the governor’s office, request­ing that, at the least, his scale be returned. Ignored at the governor’s, he was reported to ask, “how do you expect me to make a liv­ing?” He set him­self ablaze and ignited a global movement.

Protests started hours after the inci­dent. Bouazizi’s fam­ily and friends threw coins at the governor’s gate. “Here is your bribe,” they yelled. As the unrest grew, police started to beat pro­test­ers, fir­ing tear gas and even­tu­ally bul­lets. But the spirit wouldn’t be sti­fled. Orga­nized labor joined in the strug­gle, iden­ti­fy­ing the cen­tral prob­lem as eco­nomic. After all, it was global cap­i­tal that had denied Bouaz­izi and his sup­port­ers their dig­nity; it extracted sur­plus value from human objects down to the last drop of blood.

For­mer colo­nial power France offered to lend a hand with its secu­rity savoir-faire. Or maybe they would have just hired a pri­vate firm to han­dle the con­tract. Later acknowl­edg­ing the mis­step, Sarkozy tried to jus­tify his government’s sup­port of the author­i­tar­ian regime with reveal­ing, if trite, argu­ments. “Behind the eman­ci­pa­tion of women, the drive for edu­ca­tion and train­ing, the eco­nomic dynamism, the emer­gence of a mid­dle class, there was a despair, a suf­fer­ing, a sense of suf­fo­ca­tion. We have to recog­nise that we under­es­ti­mated it,” Sarkozy said in a press con­fer­ence.

Sarkozy under­es­ti­mated the effect that the “eco­nomic dynamism” of the rul­ing elite had on the major­ity of the coun­try. He under­es­ti­mated the dimin­ished eco­nomic prospects that resulted from Tunisia’s decreased agri­cul­tural and man­u­fac­tur­ing exports to Europe. He under­es­ti­mated the Tunisian people’s reac­tion in the face of poten­tial anni­hi­la­tion by eco­nomic violence.

The move­ment quickly spread to nearby Egypt, where con­di­tions have been even worse, the socio-economic divide between the top 1% and the rest even more dra­matic. Sev­eral self-immolations occurred through­out the coun­try, prompt­ing the Cheikh of al Azhar, the most respected insti­tu­tion in the Sunni Islamic world, to issue a fatwa against the prac­tice. Youth with degrees but with­out jobs started to occupy Tahrir Square, to call for the dig­nity that global neolib­eral poli­cies had denied them. They took the recent tac­tics of Egypt’s young but grow­ing labor move­ment and added others.

When Mubarak, whose 30-year reign had been marked by the open­ing of the coun­try to West­ern busi­ness inter­ests, started to crack down on the pro­test­ers as the empire’s strong man, the peo­ple said he had to go. The pub­lic began to protest against dic­ta­tor­ship, but only inso­far as they were protest­ing the global eco­nomic empire.

Some­how a pop­u­lar nar­ra­tive has emerged in our media that the Arab spring protested against dic­ta­tor­ship, against mur­der­ous regimes. These pop­u­lar strug­gles have been reduced to rebel­lions against the vil­lainies of a Qaddafi, an Assad, a Saleh.

But the Arab Spring started as a protest against global finance and its hench­men. Almost across the board, pro­test­ers claim­ing pub­lic space were demand­ing mostly eco­nomic reforms. It was only after Arab dic­ta­tors, whose decen­nial rules offered up their coun­tries to the jaws of the global mar­ket, started to repress this pop­u­lar strug­gle with vio­lence, that dic­ta­tor­ship became the tar­get of regime change.

Occupy Wall Street and the sub­se­quent Occupy move­ment were ini­ti­ated in the same spirit of eco­nomic jus­tice. Zuc­cotti Park, iron­i­cally taken and renamed Lib­erty Plaza by its occu­piers, is a micro-republic where the logic of empire doesn’t work. Peo­ple take pride in dis­com­fort, in being arrested and work­ing for free. Altru­ism has become nor­ma­tive and hier­ar­chy repug­nant. To be sure, there is inner dis­sent and strug­gle within the body politic of the micro-republic. Nev­er­the­less, the audac­ity to live a utopian prac­tice has become lib­er­at­ing in itself.

Yet this move­ment can’t con­tent itself with grant­ing young peo­ple the right to take on more debt to live the lives the world can’t sus­tain, or reform­ing the way can­di­dates fund their cam­paigns. The despo­tism that west­ern pow­ers decry in the name of human rights is a symp­tom of a wider sys­tem of eco­nomic exploita­tion, which at home man­i­fests itself in the attack on the Amer­i­can work­ing and mid­dle class. They are connected.

The repres­sive mea­sures states use against their own pop­u­la­tions has also been imported from the Mid­dle East. A recent post by Max Blu­men­thal con­nects the dots behind recent alarm­ing exam­ples of social con­trol and police militarization:

The police repres­sion on dis­play in Oak­land reminded me of tac­tics I wit­nessed the Israeli army employ against Pales­tin­ian pop­u­lar strug­gle demon­stra­tions in occu­pied West Bank vil­lages like Nabi Saleh, Ni’lin and Bilin. So I was not sur­prised when I learned that the same com­pany that sup­plies the Israeli army with tear­gas rounds and other weapons of mass sup­pres­sion is sell­ing its dan­ger­ous wares to the Oak­land police. The com­pany is Defense Tech­nol­ogy, a Casper, Wyoming based arms firm that claims to “spe­cial­ize in less lethal tech­nol­ogy” and other “crowd man­age­ment prod­ucts.” Defense Tech sells every­thing from rub­ber coated tear­gas rounds that bounce in order to max­i­mize gas dis­per­sal to 40 mil­lime­ter “direct impact” sponge rounds to “spe­cialty impact” 12 gauge rub­ber bullets.

One vet­eran of the war in Iraq knows the effects of the police-sponsored vio­lence first­hand. After being hit by a tear gas can­is­ter launched by the Oak­land Police Depart­ment, Scott Olsen suf­fered a frac­tured skull and a swollen brain. As though that were not enough, video footage shows a police offi­cer throw­ing a flash bang grenade next to the blood­ied man to dis­perse the crowd of peo­ple com­ing to his aid. But such police bru­tal­ity is noth­ing new in Oak­land, home of a rad­i­cal black pol­i­tics that has strug­gled against struc­tural eco­nomic and phys­i­cal vio­lence against the work­ing class, the poor, and minorities.

We should remem­ber that the pol­i­tics forged by the Black Pan­ther Party in the late 1960s and 1970s made deep ties with the anti-imperial projects of North Africa, the hotbed of today’s van­guard move­ment. Alge­ria made the Pan­ther head­quar­ters in Oak­land their embassy, pro­vid­ing a sort of diplo­matic shield against police sur­veil­lance. When Eldridge Cleaver went into exile, Alge­ria hosted him and the inter­na­tional sec­tion of the party. A chap­ter was also cre­ated in Cairo, then, a nerve cen­ter for the world wide free­dom struggle.

Much is rid­ing on the direc­tion of the Occupy move­ment in Amer­ica. While vis­it­ing the Wall Street occu­piers, two of Tahrir’s lead­ing activists empha­sized the impor­tance of the Occupy move­ment for the renewal of the Arab Spring. To Amer­i­cans who asked how they could help the ongo­ing Egypt­ian strug­gle, Asmaa Mah­fouz replied, “get your rev­o­lu­tion done. That’s the biggest help you can give us.” What Mah­fouz was count­ing on was the pos­si­bil­ity that strug­gles in the United States could pres­sure the gov­ern­ment to cut off the $1.3 bil­lion yearly pay­ments that sus­tain Egypt’s military.

Long-time activist Ahmad Maher reminded the crowd of the immense task the Arab Spring con­fronted, and which activists around the world still con­front. An Amer­i­can asked him the most fun­da­men­tal ques­tion: “how do you over­throw a sys­tem?” Speak­ing as a grass­roots polit­i­cal orga­nizer who has been on the Egypt­ian street for years, Maher replied, “It’s eas­ier to over­throw a dic­ta­tor than an entire system.”

There is a rea­son that the Occupy move­ment does not have a sin­gu­lar mes­sage, tied to one polit­i­cal body; its suc­cess or fail­ure will lie in the degree to which it changes everything.