General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Did Occupy Oakland Believe Their Move-In Day Would Succeed? [View all]Capitalocracy
(4,307 posts)people have successfully taken over similar spaces (factories, in many cases) and gotten them operating, even earning a decent living for all the people involved, in many nations around the world. While resistance was certainly not a surprise, people taking over abandoned spaces and making use of them is also nothing new.
And then come the legal battles as the former owners who abandoned the space, in these international cases, oftentimes after failing to pay wages to their workers for extended periods of time, suddenly want to get their hands on the profit the workers have produced by working together and putting the former management to shame.
Also, a common way of dealing with the occupation of abandoned space is to deal with it in the court system, attempt to get them out peacefully, and removing them by force only as a last resort and with minimal necessary force. These guys are practically Pinkertons.