Let Anarchy Soar Perfect Okupas: 10 years of LASPO

SQUAT THE PLANET!

From Freedom News UK

Let anarchy soar

Perfect okupas

Love all scum, piss off

Landowning arseholes:

Sitex property opened!

Lone ape sleep park, or,

Leech a sick pink orc?

Let’s all squat!

Proudly organise

Liberate, and shout:

Police out! Landlords – attack!

Squat punks oi!

The Tao of Squatting

I keep having a weird experience. I have to clean my squat.

In 13 years of squatting, previous records for staying in a single building personally were around 10 months in 2020 during lockdown and an apocalypse, and previously a tantalising 11 months and two weeks back in 2017.

Sure, back in the good ol’ days, when squatting was easy and every street was lined with crusty-packed rezzies and there was a bissette in every estate, I’d visited a number of squats (commercial and residential) that were lasting a year or more, and most people said averages for evictions were around 6 months, especially in council properties.. Back then, squatted social centres were still a thing, with RampART in East London, RatStar in south, and a host of other short-lived attempts. Practical Squatters ran every week and was regularly packed with newbies.

September 2012; the shit hits the fan, the law changes, and suddenly everyone is on the move. After a year-long consultation in 2011 where 90% of respondents, including the Met Police, said “don’t criminalise squatting”, an 11th-hour amendment slipped the criminalisation of residential squatting into the LASPO Bill. It seems possible the Tories anticipated the coming waves of evictions and wished to not only protect the vast empty luxury spaces of land-bank London, but prevent a similar situation to Spain where many families continue to squat their homes after repossession by the banks.

“This is the death of squatting” I heard, during that horrible summer of 2014 when IPOs were more abundant than empties, and every eviction haemorrhaged more friends out to the squatter retirement homes of boats, vans and Cable Street studios. We met more and more forlorn and exhausted-looking mateys on the curbside surrounded by their possessions looking haggard and lost.

However, against all logic and rationality, squats are not only lasting, but thriving, and still taking the piss.

Meaning that we now have to clean the fuckers.

Actually, it is of course up to you how you want to live.

Not only that; the dreaded, draconian, IPO that criminalises any occupants who remain after 24 hours, has repeatedly been resisted or ignored.

Similar legislation drove the Amsterdam squatters to ever greater militancy, and Berlin as a model has been battling the legalisation and criminalisation of the housing project movement for 30 years. Spain, Italy, Poland, Greece, all over, the anticapitalist movement continues to resist, bitterly and bloodily, ever more defiant as it kicks and screams against the aching terror of capitalist logic.

And fuck me if we aren’t still going.

I reflect upon Victor Serge’s ideas on the differences between political radicals and poets, and offer that squatters in aspect be more like artists than revolutionaries, though the difference might mostly be in terms, rather than possessing a grand narrative and glorious, inevitable future, the squatters exist at the dangerous cusp of creation and destruction, a space of limbic non-being that allows far more potential than any politico’s scheme:

“Poets and novelists [and squatters] are not political beings because they are not essentially rational. Political intelligence, based though it is in the revolutionary’s case upon a deep idealism, demands a scientific and pragmatic armour, and subordinates itself to the pursuit of strictly defined social ends. The artist, on the contrary, is always delving for his raw material into the subconscious, the pre-conscious, in intuition, in a lyrical manner that is rather hard to define: he does not know with any certainty either where he is going or what he is creating.”

-Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary

So, happy 10 year fuck-you-adversary to the bullshit legislation and criminalisation of residential squatting of the LASPO Bill, and big up the squat massive of yore, now and future, be they dirty hippies, sneering punks, idealistic students, drug-ravaged miscreants, technoheads, Autonomous Nations of Anarchist Libertarians, Space Hijackers, House of Braggers, Republicans of Frestonia, Vigilantes, working class heroes, middle-class squat tourists, sluts, scum, anyone and everyone whoever has or ever will squat, apart from Piers-fucking-Corbyn. Let those afraid of the new laws being brought in by Priti Patel take solace in the consistent failure of the Tories’ centuries old war on the people to quash our collective efforts. Our struggle is against the enclosures of centuries, the dominion of private property, and for the very soul and future of our collective world.

To paraphrase Rebecca Solnit, hope is not a lottery ticket, it is a crowbar to smash open doors in an emergency.

We said it before, and we will keep on saying it:

FUCK THE LAW.

ONLY THE STATE IS GUILTY.

WHATEVER THEY SAY, SQUATTING WILL STAY.

SQUAT THE FUCKING LOT.

George F


Illustration: Rod Webber

There are 8 Comments

1- London is a terrible area to go to in order to join a squatter movement. I don't think anything's gonna change that, other than keep making squats more fun and sensual than the urban hell outside.

2- The biggest enemy of anarcho occupations is *internal*. A strong, well-organized and fluid squatter movement with commitments to anarchy can overcome even the threat of intense external police repression. Just groups of buddies starting their projects and leaving two years later coz "too busy with work" or "moving to BCN/somewhere else" won't do much good to a sustained local occupation movement.

Lately I encountered several big, well set-up squats that were rather depressing... either due to having been effectively privatized (tho informally, ya know, through in-crowd dynamics)... or, worse, effectively "left over" due lack of dynamic collectives to keep them open, where 1-2 dudes remain in charge of a villa as the keyholders.

The latter only demand to be retaken by collectives... but which, where are they? The needed countercultural base for it has got scarce, as normie crap like Reggaeton and ID pols are the new "punk", which means the abandonment of radical opposition of society's mainstream culture, and younger gens looking at squats with estranged or repulsed looks.

As for the tendency to privatize, I dunno if anything can be done as this could be a structural byproduct of a lack of radical critiques within these groups, or clinging to principles that are actually liberal. Can't be hunting political liberal spooks through all these milieus...furthermore they are profitable to the few, as usual. At some point the principle of "openness" can be easily thrown under the bus when no one notices, so that you can safekeep for your little crowd the palace that you or others started several years back.

3- The state can soft-destroy your place by competing and winning against your space due to having picked "social services" that it can offer, to divert people away and therefore make your space become irrelevant. Maker spaces, restricted bike shops, spectacular activities... and many other crap can be easily recycled by capitalist hipsters and statist reformists. Tho free access to showers? Free shops? Free illegal film screenings? Teach-ins for everyone? Affinity group or relational match-up nights? Free everything? Harder for reactionary managers to challenge, unless TRAPS! ;-)

The goal of course ain't to be saving the world or even "fighting poverty", but making accessible Free Everything to anyone who's looking for it!

Brah,
You can't expect occupations to let in with open arms every anarcho-tourist and give them all the good free shit, say, decision making "power" like the brahs that actually live there. Feel the room. Don't just roll through and think you know what's up. Don't be a tourist. Get your hands dirty, brah.

"You can't expect occupations to let in with open arms every anarcho-tourist and give them all the good free shit"

No u.

Also... many squats got a 2-nights policy for newcomers. And they tend to also have free shops and other free stuff, for the outsiders.

Also... everyone's a "tourist" unless they BOW DOWN to their state-enforced national BS. Or the simple fact of leaving your hood for random exploration makes UUUU a tourist. Sorry but it's true! :-(

Also... could be wrong tho I think u know Jack Shit about anarcho-squats.

"Get your hands dirty"

Yea, that's what I always do for the spaces that welcome me. And for those that don't, this also means giving their houses a paint job. maybe?

I see you don't read so good so I'll let you wallow in your smug misunderstanding. Come to Chile. Tell our occupations what we should be doing differently, tourist.

Haha, Chile? The country that produces the biggest crowd of sassy hipster tourists that Mexicans hate for being such bourgie pedants? Cum on...

Your own mis-reading made my comment look to you as expectations... judgwments... where all I did was sharing my critical analysis based on what I've seen of the current Euro squatting milieus, in comparison to what my experience of them over the past two decades.

Chill the fuck up, dude. I'm only pointing to potential flaws within milieus, so that PERHAPS some improvements can be made or mistakes not repeated, so that anarcho-squatting can keep going instead of disappearing into irrelevance or getting recuperated by reformist gimmicks. As yes, the latter two things have been happening in several spots and this does deserves being noted.

WTF Brah! "also means giving their houses a paint job. maybe?"
Typical conditional anarcho-crypto-tourist with bourgeois property pride showing through the Western capitalist cracks!
"Get your hands dirty" revealing hidden slave labor agenda and exploitation of youth!
Shame on you Bad Brah!

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