Conspiracy of Cells of Fire – FAI/IRF: Squats – the house of Anarchy

C.C.F. – SQUATS – THE HOUSES OF ANARCHY.

Some thoughts on the invitation sent by the comrades of Papamichelaki Squat, of Teflon Library, of Radiofragmata and of Continuous Deconstruction, about the Squatting issue.

The following text corresponds to snapshots and features that we can find in the current squats in Greece.

I) Property is theft.

“Property is theft” says one of the oldest anarchist slogans. It is the theft of collective life, it is the abolition of community, it is the refuge of taking distance from the commons, of fear.
Property and its twin sister power, gives birth to the distinction of people based on titles, positions and privileges… Just like the sky has no borders, the land should not be owned.
A human from a collective being becomes an owner. An owner not of their life but of walls, windows and furniture…
Squats have begun as a form of denial of property, and of self-organised expression. The course of the squat movement has many shades… Some of them are more militant, others are more harmless… There are anarchist squats and alternative squats, squats which are cores of lawlessness and squats which are dehydrated cultural centers.
Today in Greece there are much more squats than in the past, not only in Athens but also in many cities.

Every squat begins with an act of war. It annuls property (cornerstone of state power) and releases the ground from contracts, taxes, accounts, legality…
But the bet is exactly starting from that moment on… Squatting and the self-management of a place is a sharp tool, that can either stab the world of property or just become a souvenir and rust…
Certainly, a squat is changing our own small-world, but as long as our world is bordered with the world of state power, if it doesn’t arm itself in order to attack, it will become a vision of an oasis surrounded by the desert of the existent.

II) The House of Anarchy.

State power, in order to maintain its throne produces destruction.It separates people through laws, rules, racism, insecurity, locks, showcases, screens…
State power manufactures the loneliness of the crowd… “Each one alone … each one for himself.” The absolute principle of “Divide and Conquer…”
A Squat can become a meeting point without separations, an open chance to rediscover our collective self, to create communities again.
Here, old and new comrades can meet to share experiences, to discuss, to stand nexto each other, to develop bonds of solidarity, to plan their attacks, to organize the internal enemy and to strengthen the armed struggle for Freedom and for Anarchy.
Through the organisation of events, book presentations, self-education discussions, self-organised libraries, training for fighting and physical exercise, squats can become “laboratories” of the continuous anarchist revolution.
At the same time an anarchist squat is the first cell of an anarchist community. The comrades who participate in this learn how to share, to co-operate, to create a community life free from the petty-bourgeois residues of property and selfishness…
But beside the political collective processes, an anarchist squat tests itself through the revolution of everyday life. Because a squat’s assembly has not only to decide about an event or a demonstration, but also about daily living issues (housework, maintenance, cleaning, cooking, e.t.c.). There they try to break the informal everyday rules, the assignments and the gendered discrimination…
It is the self-organisation of everyday life, in practice.

III) Aquariums of Freedom.

But here, we must be careful. Because some of those who participate in self-organised projects such as a squat, often get deluded by themselves by the reading of their imaginary role and convert the means into an end in itself. They even develop a subconscious owners’ relationship with the project, forgetting that an anarchist squat is not the walls and the doors, but the relationships between the comrades with the prospect to attack against power by all means.
Frittering the totality of Anarchy, some people construct ideological shops to enlarge the project, presenting the squat as the center of the universe.
The reformist circles distort the meaning of squats, presenting them as islands of freedom that can change the world, substituting and marginalising the aggressive and armed practices.
Slandering and introversion will complete the “job”. Moreover in those cases, the “ultimate purpose” is to keep the squat open regardless of possible compromises. Because the fear to protect the squat from the danger of repression, can even reach to the creation of an “informal security zone”, with the demand by some reformists not to carry out any direct actions nearby the haunt or squat, so that they’re not charged with it and their project doesn’t close.
Obviously the aim is not to stay indifferent or to provoke the squats which were made with struggles, and certainly not to sacrifice our attack for them…
The important thing is not to forget that an anarchist squat will either be a focus of diffusing aggressive practices, or it will be assimilated…
We should not content ourselves to moments of freedom that a squat offers but demand life’s total freedom, and a squat is only a partial reflection of it. In short, we should not love our squats and haunts but the purpose they serve. The anarchist attack here and now.

IV) Visibility through fog.

So, a squat could be a point on the map of anarchy, directed towards the continuous rebellion and revolution. It could be the starting point that will pour infinite possibilities for hostilities against authority.
Far from the isolated limits of the islands of fake-freedom that simply fool real freedom internalizing it into small-worlds, there are squats that keep the prospect of anarchist attack open.
And certainly there is the possibility to create even more… Repression approaches, and the fascist arson attacks against self-managed places confirm the possibility of the squats to be an area of rebellion against authority…
From our side, the side of anarchists of praxis, we can speed up this opportunity…
Through squats, we can strengthen the public infrastructures of self-education, the counter-information media, the solidarity funds, we can create a fugitive refuge sector for comrades, and organize task-forces, not only for the squat’s protection, but also for the diffusion of attack against fascists, cops, and other targets of sovereignty, with a view to strengthening the anarchist urban guerrilla.
The fact that the squats are visible to repression (such as the presence of undercover cops close to the squats for ID verification) might lead those comrades who want to be organised to the urban guerilla, to stay away from them for conspiratorial reasons.
But staying away from the squat’s building does not mean the elimination or the depreciation of the project. Besides, a squat project is not its four walls. It is the purpose it serves. A squat can become the bridge connecting the public and the illegal sector of Anarchy.
It can be an open path from a comrades’ meeting to organising guerrilla infrastructure. That’s the way anarchist action develops, when the“public” meets the “illegal” and gets together with the destruction of power as a purpose. Squats then, can really become the House of Anarchy.

For Mauricio Morales.

This text is dedicated to the memory of Mauricio Morales who was killed while transferring a bomb, destined for the Prison Officers’ University in Chile in 05/22/2009. Mauricio took part in the “Library Sacco and Vancetti” squat making a reality of the meeting of public and illegal.

A member of a squat and a bomber at the same time, he did not separate the means of action and he wasn’t trapped in the islands of fake-freedom.
His memory does not produce anniversary memorials but triggers the detonator of anarchist practice.

For us and for them who fell in the struggle… for Anarchy.

Conspiracy of Cells of Fire – FAI/IRF.
Urban Guerilla Core

Christos Tsakalos
Gerasimos Tsakalos
Giorgos Polydoros
Olga Okonomidou