1 comment
  1. alistairliv
    alistairliv
    October 15, 2007 at 9:25 pm

    Here is a question: were free festivals like Stonehenge and the others a kind of ‘rural squatting’? I reckon they were.

    Ditto peace camps (more than just Greenham, there were dozens in the eighties), road protest camps (dozens in the nineties) down to the recent Heathrow one – which Protag went to.

    And traveller sites – another form of squatting/ reclaiming the land?

    Finally, had a nice e-mail the other day from Mark Moore (S-Express) confirming one of Pinki’s stories that Mark was a punk squatter circa 1978.

    Hang on (see my comment on anarcho-punk) just spotted that Ben Frank’s book on British anarchism has a section ( pages 332-335) on squatting. Turns out there are two kinds of squatters – radical squatters and reformist squatters. Radical squatters:good, reformist squatters: bad. Apparently, “by cauterising possible links of solidarity, reformist squatters embrace free market relations rather than opposing them”.

    Radical squatters ‘try to break down the separation between themselves and other local residents in order to avoid elitism and to find avenues of effective solidarity. In an effort ot counteract this separation of roles and fixing of oppositional identities, contemporary anarchist squatters reject a vanguard approach and, as a result, inted many of the squatted properties to have a wider community use.”.

    Centro Iberico/ Harrow Road : vanguardism or solidaritism? Discuss.

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