No Trespassing

No Trespassing: Squatting, Rent Strikes and Land Struggles Worldwide By Anders Corr South End Press, 1999 Review by Heather Steele June 20 (AGR)" If gathering a working knowledge of peoples' movements around the world is something best done an angle at a time, Anders Corr's No Trespassing: Squatting, Rent Strikes and Land Struggles Worldwide is an angle fit for the task. If acts of occupying abandoned land or buildings ever seemed like futile, remote or isolated endeavors, this book will let you know that they're more widespread, interrelated and relevant than you might have realized. Corr's intent with No Trespassing is to convey land and housing struggles' history of direct action and its effects and outcomes. He does a good job of this–it is almost encyclopedic, but isn't organized as a reference. Neither chronologically nor geographically organized, Corr instead went for context, which can make for difficulty in digesting all the facts presented, but brings home the ideas he wants to convey: why it is and should be done, what effect it does or doesn't have and how it's done. Some of the mass organization successes outlined are the world's largest and longest standing land occupation in Brazil, the 30-year-old squats of Copenhagen, the New York City rent strike of 1963-1964, the Sanrizuka land occupation against airport expansion in Japan, the Tacamiches in Honduras fighting Chiquita, the Zapatista uprising of 1994, as well as the squatting movements in Berlin, London and Amsterdam. Many more are profiled, including some less successful but more known (ie: the AIM occupations) from at least 45 countries, mainly in the 20th century, with a concentration on the 60s and 70s. Corr's premise is that there is an unbalanced distribution of land throughout the world and that it is not "hard work by the rich but wars, conquest, theft and fraud" that have created it. He says that renters, landless and homeless people face overwhelming odds in making change by legal means alone. "Repression falls heaviest on the poor, people of color, women and the landless" and because they have less to lose, are more likely to utilize such tactics. "The risk of violence and eviction loom for anyone that occupies land, squats a house or goes on rent strike. But communities worldwide continually take these risks to create affordable housing or to survive in the face of widespread hunger and unemployment. They risk so much in the hope that persistence, mass organizing and creativity will give them a fighting chance to win." That said, he deconstructs the arguments against squatting land–even deconstructing the notion of property–and uses classical philosophy to justify squatting. Private property is robbery, squatting improves land/GNP, utilization of vacant buildings houses the homeless. He also uses a basic social justice argument that although land and housing struggles may seem self-serving,, they actually serve the larger society by keeping the increasing tendency toward "skewed distribution of wealth" from getting out of hand and also by keeping the tradition of peoples' struggle alive for future movements to learn from. It's assumed that the reader is already familiar with the terms related to these kinds of direct action, and definitions are brought in mainly to bolster philosophical arguments. The book is geared toward educated activists and social researchers, judging by its academic tone. Most of the people that might actually utilize the tactics described, however, might not find the book accessible, which is unfortunate. Corr is a former squatter with a history of being a bit of a border renegade–at one point renouncing his US citizenship while in Africa as a statement against apartheid. He helped found the Santa Cruz Union of the Homeless, and at the time No Trespassing was published in 1999 he was at Yale for political science. The book may have started out as a thesis, such is the tone. The first part of the book, however, details Corr's involvement with squatting organizations in California and really pulls you in with lively dialog and midnight bust-ins. He also outlines an inherently double-edged relationship to the media. Most land and housing movements that get into the media are the violent ones, but Corr contends that in reality most aren't actually violent. The undertaking of such risky actions does require a certain militant or empowered consciousness. Corr doesn't make an effort to distinguish between militancy and violence but he should because it could strengthen his argument. He says that militancy is necessary for mass movements, that non-violent approaches are most effective, but that violent approaches have also had some success. None of these statements contradicts one another if it is understood that militancy means an aggressive and combative stance which doesn't necessarily include violence, but can. Corr also says that non-violent demonstration in liberal democracies rarely brings violent repression. Certainly we don't see the level of execution, rape and beatings in the US currently that have been seen outside the West. But I would consider Kent State, the civil rights sit-ins in the 60s, the suffragette marches in the 20s, repression of labor and the Black Panthers and even the more recent gay-bashings by cops here in Asheville all to be examples of violent repression, although not on the scale of which is seen, say, in the face of demonstrations in our sister republics south of our border. Latin America gets a large treatment, deservedly, because it has the largest number of land occupations per capita in the world. In part, it is ripe for this kind of activity because many of its countries already have provisions for land reform which aren't enforced, and so the logic goes that occupations help these governments enforce their own laws. But as Corr says, a common theme in Latin America is the ouster of pro-land reform governments by landowners allied with international interests. His prime references to international interests are in unraveling and exposing the IMF and WTO's entanglements with agrarian policies. Much has happened with regard to these organizations–and the FTAA–since 1999 when the book was published, most notably the advent of the global justice or anti-globalization movements. Among others: Seattle 1999, the Cochabamba water uprising in 2000, the Immokalee Workers triumph against Taco Bell in 2005 and the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement in Canada in 2006. These events are considered victories in the global peoples' struggle–they might not all fit within the tactics and scope in the vein of No Trespassing and that would be fine, because that would be a different book. I wonder what a book today about land and housing would look like, and whether Corr would choose to keep to that format. In any event, he's given us an avenue to understanding a fundamental aspect of the world's scramble for resources: the struggle for equitable distribution of home and land.