Housing ourselves and others: 50 years of the Advisory Service for Squatters Last October, the Advisory Service for Squatters celebrated its 50th anniversary, though squatting has been around much longer. In October 2024, we published the 15th edition of the famous Squatters Handbook, which had to be more detailed and complex than earlier editions. Squatting used to be a mass movement; a way for almost anyone in need to house themselves or make space for social use, against the domination of buildings by money and power. But after decades of attacks, sacred property values have been gradually restored, patrolled by the law and the increasingly bloated security industry. In 2012, a law was passed to criminalise squatting in empty residential buildings in England and Wales.
https://libcom.org/article/housing-ourselves-and-others-50-years-advisory-service-squatters Indian communist parties suffer historic defeat: how did we get here? The April-May state elections were an historic turning point in Indian politics. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP conquered West Bengal, while the Left Democratic Front (LDF) lost control of Kerala. For the first time since 1977, not a single Indian state will be led by a communist party. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) – the largest and, in words, the most radical of the two main communist parties – described the results in Kerala as a “serious setback.” This is something of an understatement. The Indian National Congress – the main party of Indian capitalism – won 63 seats. Its allies in the United Democratic Front (UDF) won another 39, giving the UDF 102 of the 140 seats in Kerala’s state assembly. Meanwhile, the vote share for the CPI(M)-led coalition of four parties, including the Communist Party of India (CPI), fell by 12 percent. These results are nothing short of a catastrophe. However, this did not come out of the blue. It is the culmination of decades of decline for India’s communist parties, which have abandoned the ideas and methods of Marx and Lenin in favour of criminal class collaborationism. Let us look at the lessons for the working class and youth today.
https://marxist.com/indian-communist-parties-suffer-historic-defeat-how-did-we-get-here.htmPierre Proudhon: Interest and Principal: The Origin of Ground Rent I said before that in ancient times the landed proprietor, when neither he nor his family farmed his land, as was the case among the Romans in the early days of the Republic, cultivated it through his slaves: such was the general practice of patrician families. Then slavery and the soil were chained together; the farmer was called adscrpitus gleboe, joined to the land; property in men and things was undivided. The price of a farm depended (1) upon its area and quality of its soil, (2) upon the quantity of stock, and (3) upon the number of slaves. When the emancipation of the slave was proclaimed, the proprietor lost the man and kept the land; just as today, in freeing the blacks, we leave the master his property in land and stock. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of ancient law as well as of natural and Christian right, man, born to labor, cannot dispense with the implements of labor; the principles of emancipation involved an agrarian law which guarantees them to him and protects him in their use: otherwise, this pretended emancipation was only an act of hateful cruelty, an infamous deception, and if, as Moses said, interest, or the yearly income from capital, reimburses capital, might it not be said that servitude reimburses property? The theologians and the law-givers of the time did not understand this, and by an irreconcilable contradiction, which still exists, they continued to rail at usury, but gave absolution to rent. The result was that the emancipated slave, and, a few centuries later, the enfranchised serf, without means of existence, was obliged to become a tenant and pay tribute. The master grew still richer. I will furnish you, he says, with land; you shall furnish the labor; and we will divide the products. It was a reproduction on the farm of the ways and customs of business. I will lend you ten talents, said the moneyed man to the workingman; you shall use them; and then either we will divide the profits, or else, as long as you keep my money, you shall pay me a twentieth; or, if you prefer, at the expiration of the loan, you shall return double the amount originally received. From this sprang ground-rent, unknown to the Russians and the Arabs. The exploitation of man by man, thanks to this transformation, passed into the form of law: Usury, condemned in the form of lending at interest, tolerated in the contrat a la grosse, was extolled in the form of farm-rent. From that moment commercial and industrial progress served to make it only more and more customary. This was necessary in order to exhibit all the varieties of slavery and robbery, and to establish the true law of human liberty.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudhon/1849/origin-of-ground-rent.html