ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the legitimation strategies that political squatters use to justify their occupation of property they do not own and how those strategies often 'soften' what could otherwise have been a more radical anti-capitalist stance. The chapter contributes to the squatter literature and to the discussion of the legitimation strategies of peoples and groups challenging the prevailing property regimes. Political squatters who take an anti-capitalist and left-libertarian stance tend to justify squatting by expressing an idealistic appeal to the abolition of private property in all forms. The advantage of anti-capitalist discourse is that the occupation of urban emptiness unveils the processes of urban speculation in which most vacant properties and private owners are involved. Most of the literature has not paid attention to the contextual shift when examining squatters' challenges to private property or has not compared the two forms of political squatting.
