CRASS
empty and unused for over a year before last Christmas. Now it is boarded up again more securely than ever. Homes are almost impossible to find. 3 million people are unemployed.That’s 3 million who can’t pay the price, whether it be in rent or on the door at a gig (not that many would want to even if they had the cash). It’s a liability to walk out of the front door, if you’ve got one, for fear of being abused by one ‘authority’ or another. We are offered nothing by the system that expects us to work and die for its progress.The healthy and privileged have neither sympathy nor understanding for the vast majority of the population.They assume that they are in control.And they are until we show them otherwise.We pay for their privilege. Not just in money- money is the meanest form of energy. Human energy should have no price tag.We will be ripped off, for as long as we let them rip us off. “What happened at the Zig Zag, we hope, was one step towards reclaiming what is ours – freedom. Free food, free shelter, free information, free music, free ideas. Freedom to do whatever does not impinge on the freedom of others.The idea of ‘squat rock’ is not purely another way of doing gigs, as we hope this handout explains. Hopefully it will have been, and is, an inspiration to other people to open up more places, whether it be for gigs, to live in, whatever...” The leaflet went on to explain in detail how you could squat somewhere, from the tactics on getting in in the first place, to the legal situation once you’re there. “By theft and murder / They took the land / and now everywhere around the walls spring up at their command” – The World Turned Upside Down – Leon Rosselson “Think of this as a window” – Graffiti painted by squatters on to the bricked-up window of a derelict house. To say that squatting has a long history would be like saying organic food has been around for a while: that is to forget there was a time when it was the only way people lived. Squatting is the oldest form of tenure in the world, of course, and everybody on the planet is the direct descendent of squatters.As time went on and the laughable concept of ‘owning’
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