How to Throw a Squatted Dance Party : A Step by Step Guide

discarded photocopy toner. They only knew it when the sun rose and they saw each others’ blue faces.”

-“Squatters of Rome”

Be Prepared Even if you’re just squatting the place for the duration of the dance, bring a first aid kit and a fire extinguisher and mark the fire exits if applicable. Invite your street medic friends; ideally, someone should have first responder training. If you’re creating a situation in which anything can happen, and you want it to be a good experience for the participants, make sure you really are prepared for anything to happen. This is part of being capable of maintaining truly autonomous spaces.

Lastly, and unfortunately, you should consider how to handle the authorities. Prepare a plan for dealing with the police if they come to your event. Go over this together with all the other organizers so everyone agrees on how to respond and feels prepared.

Rule number one: if the police show up, don’t let them in. They’ll pretend that they have a right to enter; they might say they “just want to check it out.” Don’t fall for it! Don’t let them in. Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. If you have to, play for time—you could give them the number for a voice mail or a burner phone with a friend on the other end of it representing the owner of the space. Generally speaking, you want to volunteer as little as possible, to avoid things getting more complicated.

Consider having your vegan straightedge friends work the door so if the cops show up, there are sober, assertive people prepared to keep them out. They still might manage to get inside somehow, so prepare an emergency plan in advance to deal with that scenario. If there is an impromptu bar or something like that functioning inside, make sure people are ready to disassemble it and rush everything out a back door at a given signal. If there are people in more vulnerable legal situations—undocumented, on probation, etc.—make sure that they are able to exit safely, too. You should also have a plan to get the speakers and other expensive gear out of there!

Things can get unruly if the police show up but that’s a subject for another article.

Social Ecology

Social Ecology, developed from green anarchism, is the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.

Quotes

Poetry and imagination must be integrated with science and technology, for we have evolved beyond an innocence that can be nourished exclusively by myths and dreams.

People want to treat ‘we’ll figure it out by working to get there’ as some sort of rhetorical evasion instead of being a fundamental expression of trust in the power of conscious collective effort.

~Anonymous, but quoted by Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

~Murray Bookchin, “A Politics for the Twenty-First Century”

There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.

In modern times humans have become a wolf not only to humans, but to all nature.

The ecological question is fundamentally solved as the system is repressed and a socialist social system develops. That does not mean you cannot do something for the environment right away. On the contrary, it is necessary to combine the fight for the environment with the struggle for a general social revolution…

~Abdullah Öcalan

Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution social and natural fully self-conscious.

~ Murray Bookchin