Photo by Ellias Abboud
Montreal – Students have occupied the grounds of the CEGEP Saint Laurent and released a “Manifesto for a global occupation,” that “advocates the importance of community, citizen participation, community life and solidarity” in order to illustrate “the possibility to exist otherwise.”
About a hundred people set up a self determined camp outside the college beginning on Monday morning to continue to protest against the government’s austerity measures and the ways police have been violently enforcing an injunction banning recent protests. Despite a night of rain, more tents were added since this morning, according to students on the premises. Students are using the #OccupeToute & #OccupyEverything hashtags encouraging others to join them and start other occupations across the province and the world.
View a video of the protest here.
The camp, equipped with a working kitchen is so far being tolerated by the school administration. School officials met with the protesters on Monday and are scheduled to meet again on Tuesday. The school’s communications director Louise Lavallée told CTVthat “The CEGEP is in solution mode.”
Manifesto for a global occupation (rough translation follows – read here in French on 99media.org)
We walk on the ruins of a society. Dilapidated buildings overlook the streets jostled in the indifference and conformity of individuals brutalized by the tyranny of advertising. The images are lying. Our consciences are cracked by the idea that progress is observed only in the “technologization” of our infrastructure, the completion of their aesthetics as well as the optimal realization of economic activities which base their existence. Large buildings that dominate the financial centers subject us to their requirements and impressed by the systematic, elaborate and mysterious neoliberal methodology that exists inside their walls. Think again. We are on the ruins of a society. The spirits stranded on the reef of capitalism, break, erode and deteriorate into a bottomless pit. The bond that unites us all is increasingly tenuous. The Common breadcrumb runs out and fades slowly. A minotaur approaches, step by step. His warm breath caressing our skin, we grunt and collide as a painful and honeyed rumor, with the trickling energy we have left, but with that we continue to move forward, forward, head held high.
We stumble on the ruins of a society. However, a portion of the rubble remains untouched and defended beyond all odds by a powerful economic elite that opposes social movements with a corrupt army and a brutal police force. Behind its columns, fences and towers, capital protects its wealth ruthlessly, greedy. Those who hold power based on a fortune that we can not even conceive so it boggles the mind and reason. Like a dragon who watches and challenges anyone who would attempt to seize the treasure, the rich hide in their ivory tower, untouchable and insensitive to the clamour that rises and destabilizes. A revolution is on. A revolution that tramples the ruins and pounds on these dungeon doors. A revolution that equips stones that dot the floor and dust contamination, air to fight a system that is trying somehow to inhibit and suppress the tensions that assail it.
We walk on the ruins of a society and it is one minute to midnight. Nature slowly takes over on the remains of our humanity. War, death, poverty and misery torment our existence while others shy away to hide behind the walls of their illuminated screens in this unreal world of the cyber space. The community spirit is leaving us. This spirit, this hope is oppressed by a fragmented and separate body of the community and trying by all means to escape the prison that encloses it in values such as individualism and selfishness. Although we like to pretend to channel this common sense in social networks or in the cloud, even if we are consolidating with certain allegedly altruistic practices, were isolated and our communications are summed up in a series of symbols, indifferent and impersonal. This context of radical separation between individuals gives those in power impunity in governance. How de we resist if we conceive ourselves as individuals operating in full separation of other individuals and society where social interaction is seen as marginal, bizarre or abnormal? We live in a community crisis. While governments still account for more powers and rights, our self-centeredness always recognizes the authority. In the militant movements, resistance bites itself. Rather than to unite and to act in solidarity, everyone trying to give an image to the fight which will be what they will, and they desired. Basically, promoting the ideas of everyone remains an advantageous tactic, it allows the broadest and most universal inclusion. But in the context of individualism decried earlier – one in which our actions are justified by the primacy of individual rights over the rest, not one who seeks to exalt the human ability to realize the creative potential that lives within us and transforms us – the difference of opinion appears to be a personal ideological confrontation provoking an emotional commitment. Reclaiming the spirit of community is urgently needed. The unit will be the only way to build a relationship of sufficient strength.
It is in this perspective that we have decided to launch this occupation project. We want to enable the means to reclaim the spirit of community. Aside from the all-out attack that the government is waging against public services, the project we start, we do it to free us from the yoke of individualism and capitalism, to free us from alienating daily. The project we start, we do it to protest against a system based on domination, exploitation, violence and murder.
The bubbling effervescence and colorful past few weeks, forms of opposition to neoliberal government that rules with an iron fist in Quebec have resulted in embracing the synchronization of a revolutionary frenzy. Building Momentum for a prolonged struggle. Maintain the pace. Develop actions. Multiply the attacks.
Staying the course.
The accounting suites, the litany of numbers and economic theories stripped all of humanity that justify the charges of neoliberalism confront us with a void with which we can communicate. The system is vague and elusive. And the more we try to understand it, the more it loses us in a maze of procedures. So we stopped at the important existence.
Facing this sprawling attack, we will organize a sprawling response.
Hence the need to oppose the power in place an form of resistance that will denounce and condemn what we have shown earlier. By creating a self-determining space that advocates the importance of community, citizen participation, community life and solidarity, we illustrate the possibility to exist otherwise. We wish to express that we do not exist only as individuals but also as an active community member.
It is time to take our future and stop guffawing and alienating at the spectacle of capitalism.
Reclaim our space.
Invest the scene.
Humanize the actors and actresses. Redraw the background.
Burn the scenarios.
By uniting, we will take what is ours, we will create what we create, we will destroy what is to be destroyed and we will love what is love.
This occupation is itself a step in that direction. We invite all those and all those who seek to revolutionize the order of things, time and the future, to trigger from the dawn of the occupation movements and orchestrate a protest momentum.
Screaming, hitting, laughing or crying. To act.