A banner reading No Pasaran flies over the breakfast table in the Exarcheia neighbourhood of Athens. A long-standing symbol of anti-fascist resistance, the translation reads “they shall not pass”. At the table sit displaced people- refugees, asylum seekers- come to break bread at this ‘Breakfast of Resistance’ outside of Notara 26, a refugee squat. This was the picture painted by journalists visiting Exarcheia in 2019, a fiercely political community rallied around the principles of communal living, anarchism in action. Following the ejection of the police from Exarcheia in 2008 in response to their murder of a 15 year old boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, the neighbourhood was a place where- as one undocumented Afghan refugee told a New York Times reporter- “it is peaceful for me”, a place where state-sanctioned violence is not tolerated, a place where, though tear gas still flies one way, rocks fly the other. 

This changed with the election of the New Democracy party. On November 20th 2019, the Greek government gave squatters fifteen days to evacuate their squats. On August 30th 2020, in the midst of ever-present police violence (smashing windows, beatings, tear gas) that had been ramping up since the 2019 eviction order, eight bullets were fired into K*VOX, one of the remaining squats in the area. In February 2021, the Greek transport minister (and ex-PM) proposed a metro link running to Exarcheia, a move that would open the area up to ‘economic development’ (read: economic cleansing), stating that “the government has the obligation to not abandon any district to the twilight of ghettoization, and the darkness of ideological obsession.” The fetid hypocrisy of this comment is almost laughable. These purported anxieties come from a government so slavish to their ideological obsession with ‘law and order’, nationalism and the border that they quite literally dissolved the ministry of migration in the middle of a migration crisis, a government that has actively and gleefully ghettoized and immerisated refugees by revoking their access to social security and healthcare. But, duplicity aside, the more pressing point stands that any government insistence to open up Exarcheia to gentrification willfully ignores the fact that it is not theirs to open up. The government is claiming the rights to something that is not theirs to claim, pretending they have jurisdiction in a self-governing district where the only way they can exert control is through violence. There, the Greek government is an invading army. For a political party with the word ‘democracy’ in their name, they do not appear to understand the concept of governance by consent. Exarcheia in its embodiment of self-ownership in response to oppression, economic crisis and state-sanctioned violence is a community that humiliates and threatens the ruling class by virtue of its existence. Exarcheia is both protest and solution, a haven and a stronghold. 

There are substantial precedents for squatters’ settlements acting as places of resistance and sanctuary in the face of economic and political crises. In Latin America in the mid-20th century, many squatters’ settlements arose as a response to the abject failure of the economy to provide housing to people in the urban centres of countries such as Peru, Chile and Argentina. Sometimes called shantytowns, sometimes called ‘self-help settlements’, sometimes called slums, the catalyst behind them is structural and runs deep: uneven economic development, poverty, lack of affordable housing, migration, ineffective government. These squatters’ settlements are the fruit of years of hunger and employment; they are seen as the living embodiment of the failures of the state to provide. The response of Latin American governments to squatters’ settlements have been inconsistent; in Chile the position went from one of tolerance in the 60s to one of active encouragement under Allende in the early 70s to the policy of eviction and oppression started by the military junta from 1973 onwards. In Peru, the 1980s saw the beginning of the construction of the “Wall of Shame”, a ten-foot high, six mile long, barbed wire and concrete wall separating Lima’s poor from the wealthy, a physical manifestation of the Peruvian elite’s very publicly segregationist approach to the residents of the barriadas in Lima, and a symbol of how those residents were kept marginal. The infrastructure of a city reveals much about its inhabitants; as it goes, walls are to an inclusive society what cancer is to a healthy brain. 

However, what is interesting in Latin America is the more recent strategies governments have developed in response to squatter’s rights. Following the example of the neoliberal economist Hernado de Soto and the (neoliberalist) World Bank, Latin American governments such as Peru and Columbia have begun to give property titles to squatters. With these property titles, squatters are able to gain access to the world of debt, leveraging their now legally-owned houses as collateral for credit cards, loans, financing schemes- effectively tying them into the same system that forced them into squatting in the first place. If they don’t pay, it will be taken away, but this time around the very squats that once gave them refuge from homelessness and total deprivation will no longer exist, erased by the legal structures of the ‘free’ market. Neoliberals like to pretend that they advocate for such arrangements as a result of an earnestly held belief in the fallacious theory that the free market can eradicate the poverty that the free market creates. The reality is, they often neither believe this nor care if people believe that they do; their aim is to extend the talons of capitalism as far as possible, enmeshing vulnerable people whose poverty can provide the basis for their own wealth. Or else, they wallow in cheerful and callous ignorance that the free market would not exist if it were not for poverty, using the terminology of ‘development’ to mask reality. So, why would the governments of Peru and Columbia buy into something so fundamentally illogical? The answer to this lies in questioning what squatting actually does, and why living beyond systems of private ownership and property rights pose a threat to the state. 

Squatting is an inherently radical practice because it is a practice that fundamentally undercuts the institution sacrosanct to capitalism: property. Free marketeers like to talk of property as a system of freedoms: freedom to buy and sell, freedom to own, freedom to do ‘whatever the fuck you want’ with the land you now have a legal claim over. This is supposedly what giving land titles to the Latin American poor is accomplishing- allowing ex-squatters freedom to engage with the free market. And yet, as the philosopher G. A. Cohen noted throughout his work, property is fundamentally a system not of freedoms but of unfreedoms. What you buy when you purchase a piece of land is the right to prosecute anyone else who sets foot on it uninvited, the right to restrict access, the right to be the sole person with the freedom to use the land and its resources. Private property is a zero-sum game; what you have is only worth anything provided that others do not have it. And so- the impoverishment of those people for whom the system does not work is the foundation of the system. Property rights enshrine inequality, they enshrine unfreedoms, they enshrine the machinations of capitalism that keep the poor poor. 

Squatting is a radical redress of that process; it is the one housing arrangement which refuses to buy into the system that oppresses the poor. It recognises that the answer to dealing with the inequalities caused by systems of property rights is not to create more private property. It provides a place where the poor do not have to hoover up the tiny biscuit crumbs that are thrown from the palace windows, where they do not have to accept that their homes should be a debt trap. Squatting, by challenging the roots of the state and capital’s power, is a threat.

Simone de Beauvoir famously pointed out that women were one of the few groups so intimately tied to their oppressors, kept subordinate by the very fact of human reproduction. I would argue that there is another: the subaltern and the hegemonic. The subaltern is a term coined by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, whilst he sat languishing in an Italian prison. It is a term that speaks to the experience of existing outside of the hegemony of the capitalist world- for those alienated from global society, existing in a “space of difference”. The term has now come to mean those whose experience of the world is at odds with the hegemonic power of global capitalism or, as Homi Bhabha writes, those ‘Others’ whose experiences and identities at once bolster the self-definition of the majority group, whilst also retaining the power to subvert it. The subaltern are those people on the ‘wrong’ side of the Wall of Shame, the refugees of Exarcheia who find themselves under constant attack from the state- and the mere fact of their existence is made political by the hegemonic powers that both fear and revile them. A vicious symbiotic relationship develops between the two classes: the suffering of the subaltern provides capitalist structures with their foundations, driving the subaltern into further impoverishment, forcing them to become more reliant upon the hegemonic classes. These marginalised people, in order to have a roof over their heads, must either sell their labour power at exploitative rates or fall back on the whims of a government that supports the system that oppresses them. They must either fill the pockets of landlords, surrendering any hope of security themselves, or rely upon the callous and ineffective social security provided by the state, which can be revoked at any time for any number of offences. Subaltern communities are backed into a corner- they cannot bite the hand that feeds them, and yet in not biting back their immiseration continues. Squatting offers a solution to this. Squatter’s settlements are a place where subaltern communities do not have to engage with their oppressors, where they do not have to work to bolster the system that is crushing them. Squatting is a channel for the disenfranchised to wrest back control, to refuse to engage in a system that profits off the exploitation of subaltern lives. 

It has become a truism amongst the anarchist community that their projects are consistently broken down by external pressures. In the world of squatter’s settlements, this holds true. The worsening of conditions in squats, the impoverishment of their residents, the violence that sets in as a reaction to all this- these are products of the state. The state is desperate to keep marginalised people in its clutches through controlling their access to land and community, enmeshing them in the legalistic, exploitative structures that prop up global capitalism. Squatting provides many things- a radical solution to economic crisis, an anti-authority protest, a space where subaltern voices are not muted by an unhappy marriage to systems of private property that will never work for them- but it is not sufficient for these settlements to exist in a vacuum. Radicals must support solidarity with squatter’s settlements, build networks for sharing technical and practical know-how, emphasise the rights and needs of subaltern communities as of primary importance. We on the left need to drastically reassess our relationship with property, to do away with the myth that it provides ‘upwards mobility’, and to oppose measures that perpetuate these ideas. We need to keep asking why subaltern communities are not allowed to control their own lives, to exist outside of the system that profits off of their pain. No Pasaran should not be heard as a plea but as a mandate. When the subaltern speaks, we need to shut up and listen.