The Squatter’s Movement (part 2)

…During my ‘02 adventure I attended the first International No Border Camp in Strasburg, France. About 2000 people spent a week camped out in a city park.  It was a kind of temporary squat, with a specific political focus on immigration reform, and the camp was run through a process of direct democracy, borrowed in part from the neighborhood gatherings in Argentina that followed the economic collapse of 2001. We would vote in the morning at our local kitchen (the camp was divided into barrios, each centered on a large scale kitchen serving free meals) and then a delegate would be sent to a larger council and have it out with the other delegates. At the end of the day it was common to find oneself in a massive tent, discussing the most pressing issues with a couple of hundred people.

The tent would be divided between languages (usually at least five) and some would go back and forth with a microphone, while those who volunteered as translators frantically tried to keep up in their prospective language-area. Incredibly, the group would reach a kind of mass consensus– while those who were less emotionally invested had gone about their way long ago. I was drawn to these meetings, because they fell in line with my lingering question in its latest form; how do we model in our organizing the kind of world we want to live in?

Graffiti in Kreuzberg

Similar questions led me and Nick to New Orleans, and now push us along towards the G8 summit. As different as these two places are, we find ourselves chasing a movement. There is great crossover of politics and culture between the young people who gutted houses in the Ninth Ward, and those who are preparing now for the G8. What we find in the squatter’s movement and also the protest movement is part of the “alternative” that everyone hollers about when they blame protestors for being so “negative.”  If the proof is is in the pudding, then it helps to try it out.

Still some things are foreign. This evening I sat at the table having abendbrot (literaly ˜evening bread”) with some of the residents here at the Kinderbauernhof. As clouds of cotton-wood floated down on the warm wind like snow around us, I told them about New Orleans.  It was a slow conversation, partly because of the language barrier, but mostly because talking about the US here takes a lot of explaining. One woman wanted to know over and over again why it was that the money promised to homeowners had never reached them. “Don’t the people have some…how do you say it…control over their government? I mean this makes sense in Germany when we give aid to other countries and most of it gets lost in the process, but in your own country? I cannot believe it.”

kinderbaurnoff, squatted urban farm

man caring for a pony with an injured eye

But when I start talking about the deteriorated social safety net in New Orleans and how the privatization of services like healthcare and education has restricted access for those who need them most, the heads around this small table in Berlin nod with understanding. Neoliberalismo; this is something they are familiar with, a struggle that goes on in every continent, and one of the reasons large groups of activists are traveling from nearly every European country to protest this years G8 summit. It’s the same reason I was here in 2002 with a focus in education, because in Germany where universities are traditionally free for everyone, they are now trying to emulate the US system by introducing tuition and fees. More recently, the introduction of similar fees has cause massive and sustained student strikes in Greece.

What seems most difficult for those here to understand is how bad life has become in New Orleans, without greater social unrest in the country as a whole. The truth is, even I still have a hard time believing myself, when conversations carry me down through the layers of social issues and structural inequality in the south.  Frankly, it is hard to believe. But as I watch the faces around me I get the impression that a situation like New Orleans would be untenable here. “How can they take away so much from these people and get away with it?” I am asked.

I also get the impression that people here are more willing to fight the loss of their commons every step of the way — both legally and with their bodies. Once during my last trip, I took a walk down a street in East Berlin that was lined with squatted apartment buildings. A woman, a stranger, that I met there pointed up to a balcony, and said, “That is where I threw my first Molotov cocktail…there were a lot of police coming down the street and we thought they were going to evict us.” She told me the police had actually been coming to evict the neighbors, but they repelled them anyway.

Most of the public squats in those days had a mission to provide direct services for their communities, and that was how they gained public support. Here in Kreuzberg, it is clear that Kinderbauernhof has become a valued part of the community; it sits in a district that is mostly populated by Turkish immigrants and provides hands on education for the kids and families who visit this urban farm en mass.

Heile Haus, a squat-turned-bathhouse

Unfortunately most of the squatters I have talked to in Germany feel as if they are fighting an uphill battle — the loss of the commons may happen regardless of their efforts — it is way the world has been going for quite some time. But it also depends they say on how much resistance is given to structures like the G8, and the priority afforded to building alternative structures and methods of social organizing. The organizing that I have found both in Europe and New Orleans has made me realize that the hope lays less in electoral politics or any kind of state social programs, but in the small but internationally networked autonomous and grassroots structures, like these squats, that seem to be becoming the real backbone of democracy in our world. With one in every five people worldwide living on squatted land, the possibilities are enormous.

Public spaces like this bring people together and break the isolation enforced by the double edged sword of extreme consumerism and rising poverty. In their own way, they provide an important social foundation, and the space for grassroots movements to take place. In this regard Europe seems to be a step ahead of us.

This was highlighted during a conversation last night at a fundraiser for “Queers against the G8.” It took place at a neighborhood squat called Kopi. A large and abandoned apartment complex that was declared autonomous years ago, Kopi is a staple of the anarchist punk community in Berlin. And gloriously so: the fundraisers there could put your conservative grandmother in a coma. Not to say that it’s my scene, but the Kopi is well respected (and their parties well attended) by activists and radical politicos across Berlin. We were there with members of the international media collective that we had joined earlier that day.

'kopi" a squatt with more punks, kreutzberg

The Kopi itself is facing eviction, but conversation had to do with the autonomous spaces and squatters movements of other European cities. Nick and I were grilling those within our circle for information on how these movements and spaces have survived. It seemed strange and foreign to us that a bunch of folks occupying a building with a radical political vision, declaring it autonomous, and creating a permanent community, could be a legal and socially acceptable act.

One man from the Netherlands mentioned that in his country it is legal, so long as you contact the police within 24 hours and schedule an inspection. Then you have to prove to them that you have one bed, one chair and one table for each room. Once, he said, they occupied a building that was too large and realized at the last minute that they could not provide enough furniture. In an act of desperation they purchased a large number of Barbie sets which came with little toy beds, one for each room. When the police arrived they said look, here you go, and the police just laughed, added it to their report, and left them in peace.

In a way, this is just a funny story, but I believe that it illustrates something important — one of the seemingly small differences in mainstream values that are essential for us in understanding why Berlin, after New Orleans, feels almost utopian. It was something he had said in passing that caught my attention. It went like this:
“We were asserting our right to a collective space.” He said it so matter-of-factly.

“..And that’s a socially accepted right?” I asked him incredulously.

“Of course,” he replied, as if it were no major assertion, or stretch of the imagination. “It’s why we have laws for squatters.”

From Berlin,

Logan Price