Also media, Hey, what's up and welcome to it could happen here. I'm Andrew Sage. I'm andrews I on YouTube and I'm joined by James.
It's me. It's nice to be back with you, Andrew once again. Yeah.
Indeed, indeed, in a time of poly crisis, unfortunately, Yeah, the housing crisis. People are pretty familiar with the lack of affordability of housing, the way that housing has been speculated upon, you know, the way that more and more people are finding it difficult to get something as simple as shelter. Yeah, and it's particularly generational, right, Yeah.
Yeah, Like I don't generally love generational discourse, but it is a marked difference for our generation compared to the previous generation in terms of, yeah, housing security.
The data bears it out in terms of the age at which people have previous generations were able to get house in versus you know what millennials and our gen z are dealing with where housing is concerned.
Yeah. Absolutely.
And then on top of that, we're also lacking a lot of public spaces, places to gather, places to reflect, to socialized game to explore, to interact, to discuss land and housing and social spaces are really what at the heart of human survival. You know, we speak of the hearth as in that space where you know, humans were gathering. But unfortunately that that ownership of that space has been concentrated in the hands of a few people, you know,
ritually's and corporations, the state, and some cases still literal aristocracies. Yeah, I'm sure you're you're very much familiar with that.
Oh yeah, just thinking about the land I grew up on for people who were not privy to Andrew and I talking before the show. I just spent some time with the gwitch In people in the very north of Alaska there, just in the sub Arctic, and someone was asking me about like how I related to my ancestral land. I was thinking about it, like the village I grew
up in was entirely owned by one family. They owned our house in every other house, and my dad worked for them, and so did almost everyone else who lived there, like an extremely feudal relationship.
Yeah, that's unfortunately the experience of a lot of people through human history, or the experience of landlessness or homelessness.
Well, homelessness is.
Relatively recent all things considered, but or being extortion and rents, which a lot of people unfortunately would have experienced throughout that feudal period into a capitalism.
Yeah, definitely.
But the thing is, for as long as humans have been humans, long before the states existed, and long after the states existed, people are going to stay where they want to stay. They're going to be where they want to be. Right all those take a coup with all these laws and restrictions and property rights, all these things and criminalize a very natural human inclination, people are still going to do it right. And that thing that people do is now known as squatting, right, but it wasn't
always so chastised and criminalized with that terminology before. It was just you know, I find a piece of land, nobody else is living there. You going to use that piece of land to survive. So today we'll be talking about issues with land ownership, looking into its history as a resistance practice in England, and seeing where politicized approach to squatron could take us in the future. Oh cool, Crime thinks article on squating was really helpful for this, so I'll link it.
In the show notes.
Land ownership and governance are inextricably linked. Private property and land didn't emerge out of peaceful agreements, but violence was of conquest. Colonialism, slavery, and steel repression have been the true foundation of these now considered noble and official property titles. What we call ownership today is just violence legitimized by law, and it follows a very similar structure whether you're talking
about feudalism and empire, land inclosure, colonization. Your start of the violence, it becomes officialized, and then rent is extracted. This is not something that people took lining down.
Of course.
People have long resisted it, you know, but this is why the government responds with the police and the armies to protect the landlords. And the people have criticized and have called out these practices. Thinkers like Ricardo Flores Margon and Alexander Berkmann, peterko Potkin Qunan, all of these hammered home the point of the absurdity at the heart of land ownership, the idea that tod they could just pull up somewhere, claim an area of land as theirs, and
back it by soldiers and pieces of paper. Now, anarchists not in the business of fixating on just one system of domination or the other, because they're very connected. You know, landlords and governments and all the other authorities contribute to the system of domination that we all live under as and its core rights.
In anarchists squat in and land use.
In the West, land ownership and government use exploitation and manipulation in a similar manner. Where a landowner builds a fence, the government erects a boundary. Where landowner charges rent, a government levies taxes. Where a landowner advertises a vacant house so as not to waste it as an income producing property, a government encourages migration to those of its territories which
are not producing adequate revenue. Where landowner evicts a tenant, a government wages war against the population.
Right now, in the United States, as.
We can see, the government issueesian war not only against its indigenous population, its black population, but also it's migrant population and a few other populations.
The list unfortunately goes on.
Yeah, like the two are so tied, right that, Like in many parts of the United Kingdom, like as it was moving towards like before, we have a universal franchise right where people could vote if it were citizens and over a certain age they had a property owner franchise, right, Like if you owned land, you could vote, and if you didn't then you couldn't landed voting.
Yes, yeah, and in a sense that is still reflected in the way that the government operates today. You know, the land owners, the capitalist they still have far outsized influence with anyone else, considering the laws and the policies that our governments carry out.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And this is really.
Get into the heart of it, because you know, I have had the abolition of slavery and the abolition of selfdom, but in no way that the formal abolition of those things end exploitation at all. It has continued in new and old forms. You know, without the police and armies
and laws propping them up, private property would collapse. But those things still exist, and it is through those things that the power to exclude, extract, and dominate continues throughout our society and continues to uphold violence throughout her society. You know, slavery may have been formally abolished, but we still find it in the prison system safe They may have been formally abolished, but we still find it in
slightly different forms. With debt and the way that people are tied on by debt, and as long as that principle of extraction and expectation and rent is not dealt with, we will continue to see new forms and old forms bringing up Yeah, I want to play the devil's advocate for a moment, right and say that maybe, you know, the problem is just the violence of its origins, the problem with land ownership and property. If it just came from violent origins and no other violence continued, maybe it
could be excused. Maybe we could say, okay, well that's in the past and we can do stuff about that. But we could leave the system as it is. But the violence didn't stop with the way that the system originated. The violence continues, you know, and as Core notes, quote, ownership is enforced through eviction, you know, families are thrown out of homes, squatters beaten back by police, villages raised
to expand mining operations, et cetera. Yeah, and then these economic theft and cultural destruction involved as well, you know, because communities are uprooted, Indigenous traditions are severed, neighborhood cultures getting raised by gentrification. And then all this dispossession drives unemployments because without access to land, people are forced into
wage labor on the terms of capitalists. This is really how that rapid period of industrialization got started, you know, with the enclosure of the commons.
Yeah, I was just thinking about that. With the folks are with with right there. Their lifestyle is to hunt caribou. That is how they've lived for twenty thousand years. They also fish for salmon, but there are still salmon. There are fewer salmon due to climate change and the downstream effects of that. Right, But like they have their own land,
a large portion of land. But like it's the fact that someone in this case a drump administration, could lease oil rights in other land, which would directly impact their land, because in this case, the caribou can't carve if there are oil wells where they want to have their carves, right yeah, And so like it's not just that them having some land of their own does not provide a solution to the issue, which is that people can under
our current system own exploit and destroy a resource. It should be common.
I mean, it really highlights the absurd notion that you can just cut up.
Land, right yeah, exactly, which you can separate it by by boundaries, and that its self contained in that way, all the land and wars on the earth is connected. Yeah, through all the cycles and systems is one big biosphere.
Right.
The damage done in one place will have an impact on another place. And I mean that's so very obvious to most of us now, but that our system of land ownership ignores that. Our pretend it doesn't happen.
Right, Yeah. Yeah, Instead, we're upholing this ridiculous notion that you can maintain exclusive lordship, literal land lordship over a couple of weeks of property and just do whatever you want with it because it's under your.
Name, right, Yeah, And that's that's your problem, because it's your landrease. It's completely ridiculous to make that claim.
Yeah.
And on top of all of these consequences, you know, were also dealing with poverty and hunger because when people are producing lots of food, rent and mortgages continue to keep people in a permanent state of paying just to exist, right, And then this concentrated ownership of land and of property produces inefficient production and environmental degradation because property ends upsitting Idle was used to speculate even though millions of people are in need of that land are starving as a result.
Of lack of access to that land.
Yeah.
Also because so much land gets traded around as assets, as property, rather than you know, it being what it is, which is our commonwealth. There's no need for the owner at the point in time to really care about, you know, the quality of the soil, the impact on its ecosystems. They don't have to. All they're concerning is their only need is to concern themselves with profit.
Right, Like, it's an asset to be traded, not a thing that has inherent value and should be protected, not just because of its economic value, but because it's all that we can leave future generations, right exactly.
And I mean with all these issues of the land in mind, I think we can talk now about how people have resisted, particularly in England.
Yeah, which is really why I want to talk to you in particular with this episode.
Yeah, okay, I'm excited to hear which which particular moveing you want to talk about.
I mean, the story can begin in the first century, yeah, right, with the British tribes resisting the expansion of the Roman Empire.
Yeah.
We could also speak about the diggers of the seventeenth century in England, in massacred for trying to reclaim common land. Yeah, England has a very long history of land struggles.
Yeah, definitely, and it's completely or it's not lost to us now. People have reclaimed, especially at the Diggers, right, but there are still commons to an extent, but they're nothing like what they were, right, Like, you can you can go out to Clapham Common and just get grads a sheep if you wanted to. And it's really sad that we've lost that. We've completely as a nation like accepted that land is the thing that people can only shouldn't just be for everyone.
Yeah, I mean I kind of see how that would get to the extent that it did, because you know, it was the capital of the British Empire, and in many ways the British Isles was the laboratory where that sort of experimentation with the control of people and land got started and was then able to expand elsewhere.
Yeah, very much, sir.
Yeah, So, I mean there's a long timeline that we could go through, but I really want to focus on the all the ways the people have been squatting in England over the twentieth century. You know, after the Second World War, it's no surprise anyone that Britain was going through it. Whole neighborhoods were flattened, housing stock was in ruins, and for the six years while the bombs were fallen, not a single new home was built. So people took matters into their own hands.
You know.
Across the country, families and veterans began to squat because they came home from the war and they had nowhere to live. In Brighton, a group of ex servicemen calling themselves Virgilantes, led by the legendary Harry Cowley, started cracking houses for families. The spirit of it eventually spread like wildfire, and abandoned army camps which were once mean for demolition,
soon became makeshift neighborhoods. By nineteen forty six, over forty five thousand people were squatted in more than a thousand locations, and I mean the government was concerned this could only lead to anarchy, but faced with tens of thousands of people who had self freehoused, the state didn't really have any choice but to step back, right, you know, direct actions solved an issue that their bureaucracy.
Couldn't solve, and the pr of kicking out a.
Bunch of veterans from homes was not a line they seemed willing to cross at that point in time because times changed.
But yeah, they wouldn't have any fear of doing that.
Now there's only English that were squatting in the UK. You know, you also had Bangladeshi immigrants that end up coming into the UK, particularly around the nineteen seventies, and the issue was that single men couldn't get council housing unless they had a family, but they couldn't bring their families over into the UK without housing, So it's like
a cash twenty two. They had all these rows of council flats sitting empty, rotten, and young men who wanted to bring their families over can't bring their families over, can't get housing, What are they going to do?
They end up squatting. Organizers like Terry.
Fitzpatrick, working with groups like Race Today and later the Bengali House and Action Group opened up derelict blocks to Bengali families. Pelham House, for instance, which was slated for demolition, was transformed into homes for three hundred people. By the end of nineteen seventy six, Over one thousand Bangladeshis ended up living in East End squads during that period, and eventually, through that taking that full step of direct action, they won.
By the early nineteen eighties, the Council caved rehoused the squat as locally and they ended up getting to live right where they wanted to live. But unfortunately, as you might expect, this came with racist violence. In nineteen seventy eight, altub Ali was stabbed to death by three skinheads in Whitechapel and there's now a park that was renamed in his memory where the history of his people can be
remembered and live on. Beyond the English Shandi Bangladeshi immigrants, you also had another marginalized group that took on the
tactic of squatted in Brixton. The Gay Liberation Front took over houses along Relton Road and Mile Road, creating a network of communal homes which shared gardens and as you can imagine, in the seventies, eighties and nineties, you know, this was really a refuge, you know, for queer people dealing with isolation and hostility from their families, from their communities. These squats ended up becoming places where they can find
love and solidarity and theater and radical politics. Railton Road was also home to black radicalism and black radicals squat in in that territory. Olive Morris and Liz Obi squatted in the nineteen seventies and resisted multiple eviction attempts, and their space evolved into Sabah Bookshop and later the anarchist one two one Center, which lasted until nineteen ninety nine. Now, this intersection of black queer and anarchist squatron created Brixton's
reputation as a frontline of resistance. Police harassment, racist violence and neglect would boil over into days of rioting in Brixton in nineteen eighty one, and amidst that chaos, the gay squads of Realton threw open their doors, even dragon tables and chairs into the streets for a kind of riot party, a mix of drag and defiance. And through all this these squats allow people to survive. They became places where people can experiment with alternative living, even had
some people declare on independence. There's a space in West London called Frestonia, which issued its own stamps and had a two year old as Minister of Education.
Yeah, and then you had other squats.
Ending up becoming seeds for future cooperatives and social centers and even some businesses.
But this goal and age of squat and.
Kind of came into a decline by the nineties and two thousand sons gentrification and new laws.
To tighten the screws.
You know, streets like Barrington Square or Saint Agnus's Police, which were once thriving squatted communities.
Were cleared up.
You know, the law was changed to make couldn't quote adverse possession harder, so long term squatters could no longer as easily clean ownership. And then sitt councils like Lambeth Council began selling off properties that it had ignored for decades, evicting people who have been living there for decades or reason families.
Yeah, I guess post thatcher like when they could sell off the council houses like that massively contributed to the decline of working class communities, right. And then Britain went through this extreme manoliberal turn in the late nineties with like New Labor, and Labour's entire thing came to be punting down on the young people and the working class.
So like it lines up with our general political like that was that I was a teenager at that time, Right, I remember how belie it felt to be like all the time getting this like oh cool Britanni, you know, you know, like Britain is having its like renaissance as this, like like like outside of empire, like as a cultural capital or whatever. Meanwhile people are struggling to get by and people that finding it hard to put food on
the table. It was just such a I mean, looking back, it was the way things were going to be for the rest of my life, at least up to now, I guess. But at the time I remember it being such a jarring experience.
Yeah, that's quite an interesting quote unquote end of history, right.
Yeah, right, yeah, it's just the end of caring. Like it was just such a yeah to be to be told that we'd like perfected human existence. Meanwhile, racialized violence was on the increase, right, Like people were struggling. We like had become more connected and aware of each other struggles.
Like we could see people around the world, not just in the UK struggling, right, or the communities that like my parents grew up in, just gut it by the withdrawal of the failure of the industries that were there before the whole towns with like no reason for existing anymore, and then to come on top of that and have like, oh yeah, but it will cost you more just to exist in this town which is shit now and there's nothing to do, but we're going to use all the
power of the state to try and extract every penny that you have.
To squeeze everything out of you.
Yeah, just a bleak vision going home now. I just see the continuation of that decline of like some of those towns you know, where there's no particular reason people to live there and it's where they're from and it's where their community is, but it's getting harder and harder for them to live there. And you know, the industries that used to at least give people a chance to
like have a dignified life there are now gone. Yet the ability of landlords to extract you know, get landlords now right, These giant corporations building these generic homes, although for the UK it's still very much there and the state has doubled down on supporting them and completely refused to support its own people.
Yep, in London, as and elsewhere, the state and the capitalist market of hand in hand to relea erase our autonomy, our independence, our ability to live and survive.
Yeah, you know, ivan as places like.
Berlin and Amsterdam and Copenhagen had some leaps forward where squadron was concerned, you know, legalized housing cooperatives and that sort of thing. Particularly in London, that was the opposite of the case. You know, things got harder.
Yeah, Like Britain led the charge in like this kind of particularly cruel and callous neoliberalism right from the nineties to today, like with absolutely no concern for the well being of its people. Even Yeah, you would see it going to continental Europe, you know, compared to living in Barcelona, which I did later, Like, squads still existed, people economically,
things were equally dire, right, if not worse. Spain had a really rough time as fifty of two thousand and eight, but like the communities hadn't been quite so destroyed by the state as they were in many areas of the UK.
Yeah, yeah, And I mean I don't want to paint a completely dark picture of London, right because there is still anarchy, struggle, there's still radical social centers, there's still yeah, yeah, squats, and I mean some squads end up being temporary you know, short lived social spaces and centers species to help organize sorts of protest or to you know, create comment culture.
But yeah, like it's not. Yeah, I mean I've made London sound like some kind of like blade renal thing, which is not by any mean that I've not spent a great deal of my life in London. It's too much city for me.
That's fair.
But I do, like I enjoy visiting friends and their projects there and that kind of thing. And I think even post COVID there's been some resurgence. It's difficult. I don't want to suggest that things are not still extremely difficult for people trying to make ends meet, because they are. But like people are aware of the concept of mutual aids who may not have been before, and that's been good. Yeah,
they're still our squad So is struggle. There is still people fighting very hard to like live a dignified life and secure that for other people as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that's that's really what I want to highlight. You know that what Squadron represents really is, you know, you know, both a struggle for necessity but also an example of where I imagination can take us. You know, our resistance does not have to take on the same old forms of protesters and to devoid we see, right, there are things that we can do as ordinary people, whether we're black, whether we're gay, whether we're a Bangadasha, immigrants,
a veteran, as an ordinary boos Son. You can also you know, take on direct action to create homes, resist racism, build communities, and fight the state.
Yeah. Like I think about a lot in Greece, right where anarchists have squatted places that were built for like the era when people could come from northern Europe to southern Europe to spend their money and then avoid the winter. And since you know, general economic decline, that doesn't happen as much, and now people have squatted those hotels to allow migrants to dignified place to live, right. Yeah, that's it's really beautiful project. It's envisioning another world literally in
the ruins of the old world exactly. I think it's a really beautiful thing that people do to to you know, take that action to address not just to protest something, but to say, like the system which deprives people of even a safe place to live, even the dignity of being able to sleep in it under a roof at night, Like we are going to take action that strikes the roots of that to ensure that we give others that the dignity that they deserve, and that's really special.
Agreed, Agreed, And I mean I don't want to.
Romanticize squat in as you know, just a easy way of life.
It certainly is not. But it's a quote crime.
Think the lesson of history is that in times of how it is in deprivation, people squat the empty is the fact that this has been made illegal.
There's not blind.
People to the empty buildings or to the use of squat And as a tactic, the crack speak in Amsterdam East promotes the slogan what neat Marg Khan knog steats, what is not allowed is still possible?
Forgive my terrible Dutch.
Yeah, mine's not much better. Yeah, I like that's a lot. Like I think the issue of homelessness in the United States in particular is something that like I think about a lot because I travel a lot. I remember sitting in a cafe in Kurdistan and I'd just been I was outside of just walking around and some people invite
me to join their dominoes game. So I was playing dominoes and you know, like practicing my terrible Kurdish and these guys were asking me like, is it true that like people, and like they were especially interested in, like the veterans who had been US soldiers, like sleep on the street in America. And I was like, yeah, that's the thing, like, and they were like, why, what's the deal with that? And the answer is that we have enough houses for everyone, but we've just treated them as
a commodity to exchange. Right, We've been told that people can't live there, even though there's space for them to live, and even though it's actively hurting them living on the street. Right, it's such a condemnation of the situation we're in as a society in need.
It is what does the future look like? You know?
None of us can really know, Yeah, but maybe we can sketch some outlines of how we can approach lanus differently. We could look to the past and a commonstrations of the past as inspiration for what might return, and we could look to our own imagination of what the future can look like as we refuse domination.
You know, we can.
Squat, of course, to show the cracks in this concept of property. You know, we can collective eze and collectively organize spaces for farming or production. You know, we can really, really could do any number of things. I think the guidance thread though, has to be equity. You know, it has to be recognition that nobody has a right to land. They don't use that absence. See landlord is some something
utterly absurd and can be rejected out right. I think we can also consider the non human in our approach to land in the future, you know, considering the rights and responsibilities we have toward animals and plants that live in spaces that you know, should have their own existence beyond human utility. There will always be conflicts about how we can use these spaces and also how we might
resolve these disputes. But I think it is clear that whereever there's somebody who attempts to monopolize land by force, we can respond adequately. I think the tactic of squat in is one small, unfinished but necessary step towards a future where we reject property, where land is shared, where domination is abolished, where we as a human community and as a living community, can free decide together how we
live on this earth. We'll just have to see that's it for me or power to all the people this has been It could Happen Here.
I'm Andrew Sage. That is James Stout and peace. It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could Happen Here listened directly in episode descriptions.
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