We call on our Egyptian brothers and sisters to join a common fight against all kinds of oppression. Past history bound us together under the yoke of the Sultans and the Pachas. Present history calls us to fight together to bring down all kinds of oppression and exploitation once and for all. Tahrir and Taksim provide us with the will and the power to do so!
History has once again bound the fate of our countries together. But this time it is not the Sultans and the Pachas, nor imperialism that bring us together. In both of our countries, it is the ordinary folk, workers and the unemployed, breadwinners and homemakers, pensioners and youth, youth above all, young men and women, who have come together to create a better future for our countries, for the region, and for the world at large. How encouraging and inspiring is the sight of hundreds of thousands, even millions occupying the streets and squares of Turkey on the first day of June and of Egypt on the last day of the very same month! What hope and optimism for the future of the Middle East and North Africa!
For two and a half years, you struggled against all the repressive and regressive forces of Egypt, the Mubaraks, the Tantavis, and the Morsis. You made Tahrir square an icon of the struggle of the common people against tyranny and exploitation. You created an uninterrupted revolution that puts fear in the hearts of all the oppressors of the world. You lost more than a thousand martyrs in the process, whose memory we salute.
Throughout these two and a half years, we both learned from you and yearned to foment the same kind of uprising against our own despots and exploiters. US and European imperialism presented Turkey, with its neoliberal moderate Islamist government tied hand and feet to imperialism, as a “model” for you. But we revolutionaries of Turkey, on the contrary, took Egypt as our “model”! We became determined to make the central square of Istanbul, Taksim square, another Tahrir.
And, lo and behold, the night of 31 May a popular revolt erupted in Turkey with its epicentre in Istanbul and its most contested space Taksim square! This popular revolt has, so far, gone through two stages. The first was between 1-15 June, when many squares around Turkey, including Gezi Park at Taksim, were liberated zones for the people to camp and organise life around communal principles. Then, on 15 June, Gezi Park and the others were forcibly evacuated by the repressive police forces. The movement moved to neighbourhood parks to establish “popular assemblies” and collectively discuss the future of the rebellion.
The tens of millions that came out on 30 June in Tahrir and Ittihadiya and the rest of Egypt were, once again, a powerful source of inspiration for us rebels and revolutionaries of Turkey. Morsi’s ouster was a victory for the long struggle that started with the mobilisations in November 2012 in the wake of his Constitutional Declaration, continued with the actions in January and February of this year and culminated in the mammoth demonstrations of 30 June and after. You have brought down three tyrants in the space of two and a half years!
In our case, the movement has not yet matured to the degree where it can bring down our own tyrant. But it will. This requires time, patience, courage and labour. Labour in both senses: that we should work untiringly and that we should bring in the working class. In your case, the Egyptian working class was a formidable actor from day one, with its strikes and other kinds of industrial action and with the formation of a powerful independent trade union movement. In Turkey as well we have to bring in the working class in organised form with its own demands and its specific methods of struggle.
But although our movements are at different stages, we share a very important structural aspect of politics in our two countries. The major political actors facing each other, at least in the more recent period, have been the Islamist movement and the army. This creates traps and pitfalls for the masses in both countries. The masses turn to one or the other of these forces for help, against whichever of these two may be in power at the moment. In Turkey, a majority of the forces within the popular movement wasted a good deal of energy and time in trying to support a supposedly progressive military coup for almost a decade in order to bring down the despotic and exploitative government of Erdogan. We were against this kind of “solution” to our problems: it implied exploitation and oppression at the hands of another fraction of the ruling classes.
In Egypt, you got rid of Mubarak at the expense of accepting military rule, which you then had to fight against for at least a year and a half with such self-sacrifice! Now, when the other type of tyrant is brought down on the sheer power of the masses, the military come in at the last moment to hijack the revolution and bring it under control so as to prevent it from advancing even further and growing over into a system where the workers and the toilers become the rulers of the country. Make no mistake! We are with Tahrir as against Rabaa al Adawiya. We regard the ouster of Morsi as a revolutionary act. However, we think the masses need a new leadership that acts independently of the military and the political forces of the ruling classes of Egypt.
This new leadership that we need both in Egypt and in Turkey can only be based on the solid support of the working class, the only social force in modern capitalist society that has the power, the discipline and the will to establish an alternative to the existing exploitative and oppressive system of society and state.
So let us bring our forces together in Egypt and in Turkey in order to fight for this alternative leadership in our respective countries. Let us learn from each other’s experience, from each other’s achievements as well as mistakes. Let us extend this cooperation to other countries of the Middle East and North Africa and, beyond that, to the rest of the world. Capitalism is a system that oppresses and exploits working people on the world scale. The working class and toiling masses can only emancipate themselves from its yoke through international cooperation.
We call on our Egyptian brothers and sisters to join a common fight against all kinds of oppression. Past history bound us together under the yoke of the Sultans and the Pachas. Present history calls us to fight together to bring down all kinds of oppression and exploitation once and for all. Tahrir and Taksim provide us with the will and the power to do so!
Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP)