I remember an Irish couple, who where supporting in Menza, Ljubljana, having said that it was healthier to the organizers of the squatted houses not to live there. In this way, they wouldn’t be emotionally attached to the houses and could have a more efficient management and perspective… I asked João what he thought about this issue… here you’ve the answer:
I know well that opinion; it s very common among middle-class squatters; I had plenty of discussions in this regard (including punk “mama’s boyz” that squat as a hobby, in between holidays, with their parents in New York); the point is that our project wasn’t charity to justify our laptops and cell phones and cars and houses with pool, kind of “pat on the back” or kind of “leave it there, you’re a capitalist but you help the poor”; we created a community based on an anarcho-syndicalism philosophy and lived in the community; we designed the house so that all resources were shared, and each one would give what he could and had what he needed; we also lived there because we had a less “hierarchical” perspective of the things; me and everyone else were equals there, no matter if you had college or fourth grade; if you were an illegal immigrant or a “mama’s boy” from the United States; we were all equal and entitled to the same opinion; to “manage” means that one does that for some “superior” reason in relationship to those who live there, kind of “boss”: you pay and manage a building and also the penniless who go there; these dehumanize the essential question: the housing shortage, capitalism as a machine to brainwash, the street as the only escape for people with fucked up life stories, etc.. is much easier to “manage” from long distance, without promoting any empathy or human relationship; to state they are all junkies and they just want drugs; to go there to give some parties and “box in” a lot of money (that’s what most of the parties gain, there’s plenty of “dole” in this shit); all the alleged “organized squatters“ I met were little more than middle class youths in a hypocritical process of “scrubbing their image”, in our case, management (more self-management) worked quite well, mostly because we lived there; basic issues such as, water and electricity were solved in weeks because we were all working in the same direction; in 6 months of work we have done a lot, in fact, we made the alleged “junkies” and “lazy” ones to work and share a building process, the only boycott of the work was started by (guess who) one of the punks ... son of a rich dad of Rio de Janeiro, the only bourgeois, like “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, was a street punk with tattoos all over his body; we asked the drug addicts to participate actively in the construction and design of the community; we allowed the share of space and ideas regardless of class or country, we live in anarchy pure and simple. and with that, we took the rest of the shit, it’s natural that people turn away, get to say will have to face facts that invalidate certain preconceived ideas, to live in anarchy means that you must lead with what you do not like Which invariably will happen when things fode who are you, and above all, you’ll realize that anarchy does not work with people raised in a capitalist society, everything is like in these scenes. I always see things this way, who is to benefit the project? Who needs it? or is the one who manages? if it’s someone who “manages”, we live in a capitalist system too, kind of “Che Guevara’s Berska t-shirt”. For these and other reasons we’re no longer linked to the supposed “okupa” (squat) movement and, the guys of the block and so on are “mama’s boyz” with Che Guevara’s Berska t-shirt that during the weekend go to “posh Cascais” and address to their families by the formal ”you” and use these experiences to justify all the crap they do later when they manage daddy’s company, kind of Durão Barroso (1); when he was young he was a Maoist, now is one of the biggest Portuguese savage capitalist, but there isn’t a month that he doesn’t state “I fought against Fascism”; fuck you! sorry there, I realize I gave an answer out of the topic, but I had so many of these discussions that I had to leave all these clear! abc (1) Durão Barroso is the current President of the European Commission. Some years ago, he was for a brief moment, Portugal’s Prime Minister. He abandoned this political Office to go to Brussels and be in charge of the European destiny.
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