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Title: Against Apolitical Squatting! Author: SHA Collective Date: 2015 Language: en Topics: squatting Source: https://en.squat.net/2015/11/14/london-against-apolitical-squatting/
In Camden, an eight-month squat is evicted by pigs and three are
arrested under Section 144, the 2012 ban on residential squatting. A man
in a SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SQUAT t-shirt waits for NELSN to forward a text.
Two arrive from a council-estate squat further north. Builders begin to
secure the building. Against Section 144, against increasing precarity
and repression, broken self-identity and fractured organisation, London
squatting seems to have begun a coming-to-terms.
Attempts to surround the fragility of the squat scene with nostalgia
have come thick and fast: Remember the Squattersâ Union; remember
unrestricted residential squatting; remember squattersâ rights. As ever
this nostalgia is a thinly disguised dose of forgetfulness: Squatting
has always meant struggle; and no mourning for a golden age can deny the
permanence of our struggles and the permanent need to politicise them.
In the blur of this permanence, however, squatting has been increasingly
forced into the temporary. Court papers are served quicker and quicker,
evictions become fortnightly rituals, and the looming ban on commercial
squatting places squatters before an ever shortening horizon. The loss
caused by the 2012 ban is a collective memory permanently recalled by
the imminence of the next.
For those who do not find comfort in a false unity of the past â and
whose future seems to have heard its end already â we must come to terms
with our present.
Moving when evicted, served when moved, evicted when served.
Contemporary squatting is a series of defensive and reactive acts.
Ritualistic and cyclical, squatting is determined by forces always
separate from squatters themselves.
The promise of âdropping-outâ has dropped to the floor of every squat
rave. Standing up, it has become the reality of crossed imperatives. The
balance between resistance, self-determination and self-preservation is
impossible to strike; and, unable to live up to any, collective stress
seems organic as organisation.
In larger activist circles too, squatters have offered up liberated
spaces only to become the silent facilitator among other rebels and
radicals. Seen mainly as preparation for actions and events, squatting
features more in the context than the content. In a political and
economic situation where content dominates context â where legalistic
ideology sees no variance in the same â preparation does not validate
whoever prepares.
Abolishing the artificial roles of âfacilitatorâ and âfacilitatedâ
ultimately means that everyone must help to facilitate everyone else.
Finding themselves repeatedly in the former role, squatters have not
demanded the mutual solidarity they need. Even the most politically
active squatters now seem to fall into the dominant consensus from
anti-capitalists and are absent at the daily eviction resistances.
From this lack of validation and solidarity has grown silence. Most of
the political activity squatters do falls under any banner but squatting
â and this is one that stretches far: Not only housing, but all
struggles have basis in the liberation of space. If there are squats in
the struggle, then it is a squatting struggle too.
This is squat-for-squat-sake politics: where flying the squatting banner
comes simultaneous to flying others. To emphasise squatting as the
liberation of space and temporary expropriation of property demands that
it is seen as legitimate direct action in itself.
Against the unachievable duties of âResist all Evictionsâ, new squatting
politics must find a place for self-preservation in resistance. The duty
to resist in all cases contradicts maximum expropriation in some and the
self-preservation of squatters in many. It surrenders self-determination
to agitprop painted as unreachable duty. It decreases the times when we
can actually resist in keeping them out, not just longing them out.
A planned eviction resistance at a council estate occupation begins with
a collective meeting on the potential roles of newly arrived recruits.
The punch-line is that Russia Today live-streamed the whole event â
which turned out to be a non-event altogether.
Often as theatre and often seeming farce, the Left is playing eviction
resistance to an audience of corporate media and well-meaning
professional activists. The show is titled something like
Awareness-Raising or Mass Appeal.
Eviction resistance is rarely something for the cameras. The forces of
populism rush to condemn or ignore the less watchable aspects of
resistance â the messy violence and dull labour required to defend our
squats and occupations. Squatters are left with the spectacle of
resistance and a trolley of possessions in the street.
The need to defend squats and the political creativity they have is
urgent. The political creativity drained from squatting by leftist
tokenism and the strategy of passive resistance goes hand-in-hand with a
situation drained of politics itself.
In Amsterdam, squatting and gentrification has often had an
uncomfortably close relationship. In areas of London too, such as
Shoreditch or Camden, in occupying empty, sometimes derelict buildings
in poor areas, squatters bring refurbishment, street art, and a look of
âalternative authenticityâ so appealing to trendy middle-class
house-buyers. And so: the process goes from dereliction, to squats and,
in turn, to regeneration and invasive economic power. That the squatters
themselves were evicted sooner or later to make way for yuppiedom is
important to note.
Equally important is the use of squatting as resistance to
gentrification. The squatted council estates at the Aylesbury in
Elephant and Castle and Guinness in Brixton â additional to the presence
of squatters in street-based resistance â continue the legacy of Gospel
Oak and 144 Piccadilly before them. Squatters at 10 Otterhaken in
Hamburg put up a fierce resistance which continued the escalation of
their neighbourhood. Young squatters in the Basque Country continue to
make the liberation of space the basis for insurrectionary action.
That these two forms of squatting â to create alternative forms-of-life
and larger class-based resistance â have had such different effects
should not suggest a natural contradiction between them. The political
use of squatting culture to add to larger cultures of resistance should
not be denied. Oppositional self-identity, whether on the streets or in
squats, continues to make squatting a threat to cultural power.
The cooption of this self-identity in the name of middle-class warfare
falls at the feet of squatters also. In splitting squatting culture from
squatting politics, they have been left with a culture unable to defend
itself.
A squatted space not used for politics soon loses the politics of
squatted spaces. Creating spaces intolerant to social hierarchy and
state surveillance, for organising and consciousness-raising, is
integral to the creation of effective resistance in squats and on the
streets.
Further along to apathy, squatters build lists of recommendations from
ex-landlords in hope of a longer stay. A reversion to comfortable
hierarchy in the present always means uncomfortable coercion in the
future. The creation of the âlandlord-friendly squatterâstrips squatting
of its oppositional nature and, with it, its political potential.
In the social realm too, radical forms-of-life created by communal
living and unusual shared experience are replaced with family,
precedence and guilt. While benefiting from the organic mutual aid
within familial relations, being restricted by them restricts the
potential for subversive forms-of-life.
All squatting starts from a level of anonymity. The flow of bodies in
and between squats, hostels, social centres, streets, council-estates
and university occupations causes a contradictory coupling of
familiarity and anonymity. Making new, more effective squatting
collectives and networks means recognising this interplay between the
familial and anti-familial. Groupings must be strategic and personal â
recognising one in the other â and must work for both political action
and self-preservation.
The withdrawal from risky politics into comfortable normalcy in the
street and squat is a core symptom of increasing repression. The 2012
ban on residential squatting, a Left dead-set on passive resistance and
a depoliticised squatting movement has left squatters with increasingly
fewer lines of defence and political creation.
Organic as this repression seems, resistance is sprouting everywhere.
Squatting continues to prove itself as direct action against power.
People rip down the fences at the Aylesbury; squatters refuse to stop
squatting residential. On the continent, in Naples, Amsterdam, Calais
and elsewhere, mass occupations continue in the context of illegality.
In Naples, autonomists occupy empty buildings in solidarity with
homeless migrants. âHomes for Allâis not a request but a strategy. In
Amsterdam, squats were cracked in solidarity with occupations at the
University, providing bases for mobilisation and support. The mass
squats by migrants and small numbers of anarchist comrades still exist
in the cracks of state power and violence in Calais. Occupations stand
as clear markers of self-determination and the will to create
communities and cultures of resistance wherever people stay.
The forms of squatting able to resist repression will fit the changing
needs of larger struggles while emphasising squatting as struggle. In
escalated situations, such as Naples or Calais, squatting is generalised
by its use in creating temporary autonomous zones and communities of
resistance. In Amsterdam, squats broaden the free education struggle
beyond the University while providing the mechanisms for its escalation.
In situations where squatting is increasingly deescalated and isolated,
the task is to generalise and escalate the squatting resistance. The old
networks and forms-of-life are dragging into a state of alienation and
disassociation: between squatters and larger struggles, between the
varying and sometimes contradictory uses of squatting, between squatting
collectives who know nothing of one another, between comrades. In the
vacuum of this disassociation, new informal organisation and radical
action must continue to grow.
FUCK REGENERATION! FUCK SECTION 144! FUCK PASSIVE RESISTANCE!
AGAINST APOLITICAL SQUATTING!
FOR AUTONOMOUS CLASS-STRUGGLE SQUATTING!
Squatters and Homeless Autonomy is a London squatting collective working
to combat gentrification and establish autonomous anti-capitalist
spaces. Squatting the RBS building on Charing-Cross Road over Christmas
2014, they were also involved in the Institute of Dissidents â the
occupied Institute of Directors building on Pall Mall â and have run
temporary anarchist spaces at Neal Street and St Jamesâs Square. In
September the collective occupied the Mamelon Tower pub to oppose the
eviction of tenants there and plans to turn it into upmarket flats.
Squatters and Homeless Autonomy