A SINGLE SUPREMACIST AGENDA CONNECTS VENEZUELA AND MINNEAPOLIS—AND IT IS STARTING TO OVER-REACH ~ Louis Further ~ “We live in a world in which, you can talk about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time…” That’s the ghoulish Goebbels clone, Stephen Miller — influential White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, and Homeland Security ‘Advisor’ since 2025 when interviewed hours after Trump/MAGA’s attack on Venezuela, which is illegal under Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter [pdf]. He says you all you need to know about the priorities and impetus behind Trump/MAGA foreign ‘policy’: Might makes right. Here‘s fascist House representative Andy Ogles (Tennessee) last week “[the United States is…] the dominant predator, quite frankly, force in the Western hemisphere”; and Trump interviewed in the ‘New York Times’: “[I do…]not need international law… [my]… power is limited only by […my…] own morality”. Jaws dropped at the news from Venezuela; TV programmes were interrupted; a few public figures told everyone how they should be ‘outraged’; pundits reminded audiences that there is nothing ‘new’ in US war with South American countries and speculated on how likely was similar aggression on Colombia, Cuba, Mexico then even Greenland and Canada. Yet (substantive) consequences for Trump and his cult members are unlikely because bombing Venezuela and kidnapping its leader was an ‘official act’, from prosecution for which the US Supreme Court ruled in July 2024 Trump is immune. MAGA cult members voiced support… “It’s about time!”. “Good, now we can get ‘our’ oil back!”. “Here’s hoping there can be a peaceful transition of power”. Minnesota Republican Tom Emmer on Fox ‘News’ was typical: “God bless this president of peace, Donald J Trump”. Representative Randy Fine (Florida) was sure that invading Venezuela was OK because it… “put America first”. Would supporters have to lie about the lives which the takeover will save by curtailing the ‘import’ of drugs? Yes: most fentanyl goes anywhere but north to the US. Oil, then? Crude in Venezuela’s main oil-producing area (the so-called Orinoco Belt in the east of Venezuela) is amongst the ‘dirtiest’ and most damaging in the world. Anyway, it soon became clear that major petrochemical executives weren’t really keen on the idea – even though they were rumoured to have been given advanced notice of the attack. Explaining that, of course, did for one major oil company as punishment. Impulsivity? Could be: Trump is known to have a short attention span and be influenced by his latest encounter with a sycophant or some snippet on far right TV. Secretary of State Rubio is known to have had régime change in Central America on his list for decades. Such scattershot actions seem also to lie behind Trump’s cryptically-inspired indiscriminate bombing of villages in Nigeria. Although possibly more than 100 were killed during the attack, Democrats in Congress were more concerned at not having been given the chance to weigh in on the plans for Venezuela (which they might well have endorsed: “Maduro is one of the bad guys”) than they were about the dangers of such unprovoked aggression: internecine rivalry and violence have already begun; widespread and/or regional instability must follow. Nor has the US gained a viable ‘bargaining chip’ with and for NATO, Putin, China. Remember, Democrats did nothing in response to Trump’s many acts of piracy killing over 100 sailing in the Caribbean and Pacific. You could sympathise with Democrat congresspeople angry at Trump’s continual illegal bypassing of Congress… only the US legislature can sanction invasions (War Powers Resolution), impose tariffs, demolish and de-fund government institutions and so on. Rather, the Democrat line is fast becoming that the best the party can do now is hang on and set their hopes on ‘change’ in the Midterms in November this year, and/or the next presidential election two years later – assuming that they happen. It seems as though Trump/MAGA is testing limits – how far can he go to implement Project 2025 before something breaks. For instance, more agents are to be sent into Minneapolis after events there. RESISTANCE  On the fifth anniversary (6th January) of Trump’s attempted insurrection in 2021, the official Whitehouse website published a trough of lies and rubbish in an attempt to rewrite the narrative of those same events which surely half the nation saw for themselves as it happened. Similarly, within hours of the murder of Renee Good by an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent, the Department of Homeland Security took the unusual and unorthodox step of excluding local agencies in Minnesota from any ‘investigation’ into Good’s murder. Yet again widely viewed videos used in evidence already reveal – at the least – that an ICE agent stood in front of a vehicle preparing to exit a situation dangerous for its occupant (Good), and discharged his weapon (apparently in anger and retribution) at a moving vehicle – something which ICE training specifically prohibits [pdf]. Also within hours, resistance began, both spontaneous and hastily planned. From the unequivocally ‘forceful’ (with a capital ‘F’) imprecations of Minneapolis Mayor, Jacob Frey and others in the city, to peaceful vigils and marches in Minneapolis to the planned thousand “ICE out for Good” events in all 50 states and at least 500 cities last weekend. Remarkable was the speed with which participants voiced – and were able to express – alarm and revulsion at the whole idea of scapegoating, kidnapping and violently trafficking (non white) guest-workers, and – not for the first time –  murdering them. Also significant was the network of neighbourhood resistance: observers; notification (“Alert: ICE nearby”, whistles) techniques; blocking and protecting tactics. There is also vehement resistance in Portland, Oregon, where two passengers in a vehicle were shot by ICE agents, on 8 January. And refusal, despite these events, to be intimidated. And courage. And solidarity: recent reporting suggests that ICE mobs are specifically recruiting ‘gun enthusiasts’ and ‘military fans’ in a $US100 (£75) million drive. There is anecdotal evidence that many of those already working for ICE are welcomed as members of far right militias like the Proud Boys. Accounts on social media like these in this Reddit thread suggest that the situation in Minnesota has rapidly deteriorated even further in the past week, with ICE gangs now behaving much as the Gestapo did in the 1930s and ‘40s. This returns us to where we began: the supremacist strategy underlying it all. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security now plans to deport almost a third of the country’s residents: ‘The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world’ – meaning: “we’ll be getting rid of as many non-whites as we can”. According to an official government post, ‘2026 will be the year of American Supremacy’. Congresspeople have a constitutional right to visit ICE detention centres; but last week were again prevented from properly visiting one in Minnesota. Nevertheless, neither Democrat leader listened to calls to try and curb ICE through spending cuts. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Images: Radical Graffiti in Minneapolis, MN and Paris, France The post Notes from the US: Might makes right appeared first on Freedom News.

THE TRUMP REGIME’S SHOWY BID FOR VENEZUELAN OIL IS NOT SIMPLY REHASHING THE MONROE DOCTRINE—IT IS AN OPENLY FASCIST ASSERTION OF FLAGRANT POWER ~ Daniel Adediran ~ Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez has been sworn in as the country’s new leader, sounding a conciliatory tone towards the United States after it abducted her predecessor Nicolas Maduro and his wife under “Narco-terrorism” and weapons charges. US President Donald Trump has publicly said that the operation was intended to increase access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, stating that his regime will “run” the country. This new phase of American global power games is not simply a warmed-up corpse of the Monroe Doctrine which rejected European involvement in Latin America and designated it as the United States’ backyard. Trump’s monstrous realpolitik of open disregard for the law is blatantly a fascist geopolitical doctrine, fully complementing the authoritarian creep at home. The US has been using violence to promote its interests as a ‘continental superpower’ for much of its history, whether it’s Panama, Chile, the Bay of Pigs, Haiti, or extra-judicial killings all over the Caribbean going back to the 19th Century. As was made plain in a statement by the Latin American Anarchist Coordination (CALA) and its sister organisations, even its meddling recently in Argentina’s sovereign affairs is part of this pattern. Neither is it surprising that the USA’s media class was in lock-step with the administration, seeing tried and true headlines and catchphrases from the last 30 years come back into vogue in political punditry. What is different today is that only the flimsiest vestiges, if any, of international or even domestic legality are being provided for the invasion. Trump’s cynical use of the language of the “War on Drugs” and “The War on Terror” was bound to ring hollow, after the failure of both adventures by the ‘World’s Policeman’. Only those entirely hypnotised by the powerful will cling on to such rhetoric after the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. However, this flimsiness of legitimating rhetoric is actually what it’s all about: to a fascist regime, none of it matters any more. Trump is making a point of sidestepping even his own official legal parameters to uphold a twisted vision of flagrant, unlimited US power. This is an openly fascist policy—the brazen use of violence to further national interests, linked to a drummed-up external threat to unify the in-group and boost the regime’s woeful unpopularity at home. Nor is this the first time that America invasions to instigate regime change has been met with crickets by other Western states. The weak-willed calls from European nations to respect and uphold international law are thus predictable; they never recognised Maduro’s administration, and thus practically approve of the US operation. What remains astonishing is Prime Minister Keir Starmer ability to outdo even the most milquetoast responses of conservatives like Germany’s chancellor Merz or EU Commissioner von der Leyen—as he refused to even acknowledge that international law has been violated. As anarchists, we know that the rule of law—whether on the international or domestic level—is a complete farce meant to protect the powerful and their cronies. If anything, the genocide in Gaza has put its laughable hypocrisy on full display. With Israel facing hardly any official consequences for its murderous actions, the ground has been prepared for the American abduction of Maduro to appear ‘surgical’ in comparison.  The attacks on Caracas and the abduction of Maduro will do nothing to bring freedom to the Venezuelan people. But nor will they crush the people’s own resolve to achieve it. Venezuelans are more resilient now than they were in 2014, despite the switch of those in power from the wallet to the gun. Outstanding grassroots initiatives like CECOSESOLA have withstood over four decades of shocks, from government crackdowns and environmental strain to crippling economic sanctions, hyperinflation, countrywide mass exodus and food shortages. It has inspired literally thousands of other co-operative projects in Venezuela, which even with the blockade have been meeting the needs of over 100,000 families in seven different Venezuelan states. Whatever happens to the regime and its oil, horizontal self-organisation in the country will continue to be the people’s only hope for liberation. It will never roll over for a fascist. The post Surgical coup in the fascist backyard appeared first on Freedom News.

BOTH THE “CENTRE” AND THE COBWEB LEFT WALLOWED IN FAILURE, WHILE THE FAR RIGHT EASILY HAD ITS BEST YEAR ~ Rob Ray ~ Reform UK has consistently topped national polls in 2025 as the “anything but LabCon” choice, with its predictable and often ridiculous incompetence in local government barely making a dent on numbers. Barring a minor miracle, it will win big in May’s local elections. Meanwhile its street wing, in the form of Tommy Robinson’s mob, managed to pull out a record crowd for Unite The Kingdom and litter every lamp-post from Kent to Yorkshire with the butcher’s apron. KEIR? HARDLY Much of the blame for this must be laid at the feet of former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer, whose journey from McLibel activism to implacable opponent of left dissent went supernova when his government proscribed a non-violent direct action group, Palestine Action, as a terror organisation. A monumentally stupid decision on all counts, not least for his own political future, as for many, it stripped away their last illusions of Labour as a progressive force. The impact of Labour’s attitude to the left, its abandonment of promised policies, and its seething hatred for protest can’t be overestimated in terms of where it finds itself entering 2026. Starmer’s wing of the party, its eminence thoroughly greased by Morgan McSweeney, never did understand that over the long term, if you have no tame corporate media you need grassroots activity. Not for the election-time door knocking, but for the shield it provides online. When no-one wants to defend you, because you make it clear you despise them, all that gets heard is the negative voice. The impact of this choice, to deliberately insult and alienate its own base, can be seen in the wake of the Autumn Budget, which did have a few vaguely centre-left ideas in it, and the Employment Rights Act, which (even watered down) genuinely does introduce a handful of protections for working people. Nobody cared. No-one has been jumping in on socials to pat Labour on the back, not even the old guard of (lower case r) reformists who previously would have been saying “see, this is better than the Tories”. And as a result, it all goes one way. As many predicted when Starmer first started purging Labour’s ranks of anti-Zionist Jews and rolling back on his leadership promises before the general election, a total reliance on public exhaustion with the Tories was never going to hold up, and so it has proven. With a grassroots shattered by its own hubris, an implacably hostile corporate media, and a public refusing to trust a word said by party or government, how Labour might pull out of the nosedive is anyone’s guess. All of which, in tandem with the Tories’ own self-immolation, has opened the void through which Nigel Farage sauntered. YOU’RE KIDDING ME … To his left, meanwhile, all has been chaos embodied by the extraordinary saga of Your Party. What were they thinking? Freedom has never made many bones about its position on Corbyn and the ultimate uselessness of the cobweb left, but even we weren’t predicting such an immediate and comprehensive proof. It’s hard to think of a critique, sneer, or bald-faced insult that could do justice to the absolute fucking shambles of it all. Amidst perhaps the most dangerous political situation of the postwar era, we watched a handful of inflated egos take all the potential energy created by Labour’s desertion and explode it into little pieces. The people I feel most sorry for are those who genuinely, for just a little while, believed it could go somewhere. Not in a patronising way, but in the comradely sense of knowing how it feels to have hope in a project and see it dashed. That is what the likes of good ol’ Corbs, Zara Sultana, and the various “revolutionary” parties should feel ashamed of: they took the energy and hope of hundreds of thousands of people and stamped it into the mud, unnoticed amidst the squabbling and scrabbling for position. There can be no better example of why we don’t need parties, but to turn outwards and organise the working class directly — place the horse firmly in front of the cart. Leave that pack of blithering idiots behind and give up on their decades of abject, piteous failure. SAVED BY THE (GREEN) BELL? The beneficiaries on the left from these twin towers of dung were, of course, the Greens under their affable, well-meaning and occasionally analytically shallow new leader Zack Polanski. No word of a lie, it’s been nice hearing someone be direct and relatively uncompromising in his language while taking on the press this year. His absolute refusal to play the “how many rights can we take away from trans people this week” game, in particular, is the sort of confidence many on the left could stand to learn from. But, even setting aside obvious anarchist critiques of the inchoate core and systemic shortfalls of the Green Party project, there are plenty of limitations on its surge, which already seems to have peaked. The Greens have no friendly media. Not the Independent, not the Guardian, not even the Morning Star, which (in the absence of a functional Communist Party offering) has broadly plumped for Your Party as the home of a more Proper socialist politic. And the Star is probably correct there — pathetic though Corbs and co. may be, their platform is at heart red economics, while the Greens are, well, green, with social democracy largely tacked on as an often uncomfortable coalition-building exercise. Much like the Lib Dems, green parties are notorious for opportunism, most notably in Germany where they frequently enter coalitions with the conservatives. So it remains to be seen how deep its commitments will run when placed under pressure. WHAT ABOUT US? Perhaps I’m being Mr Bias of Cheerleader City, but I think the direct action movement, particularly that wing of it which refused to simply roll over on Palestine and proscription, deserves a great deal of praise this year. It’s been a hard one, in which it became clear long sentences for non-violent dissent are here to stay, surveillance and repression are on the rise, and money has poured in to fuel our opponents. But thousands of people stood up to be counted, knowing they could face prison terms, knowing they would be mocked and mistreated. There has been a great deal of bravery on display throughout the year, and everyone involved should be proud of themselves. Always under the cosh, always few and underfunded, facing up to a State that increasingly has done away with even the slightest respect for privacy and human rights — the fact you keep going is frankly incredible. If 2025 has shown one thing, though, it’s that we’re right. The “practical” cobweb left and their electoral obsessions won’t save us; they can’t even save themselves. They’ve been given chance after chance, and shown that even if they could win power they probably shouldn’t. We need grassroots strength. We need the force of unified working class communities who can disrupt business as usual and make those in power sit up. It was direct action this year which, time and again, rattled the government where the conferences of electoral leftists produced only a distant gale of laughter. As we head towards the spectre of a far-right government which will show us no more mercy than this one, I can only say: keep going. Because they sneer at you. Because they seek to silence you. There is no greater proof of a government’s fear than a law designed to stop you from doing what you’re doing. You’re right. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Images: Radical Graffiti The post 2025: A gilded year for the right, hubris fulfilled on the left appeared first on Freedom News.

GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATE CONTROL HAVE HOLLOWED OUT RURAL LIFE IN GREECE AND INTERNATIONALLY—BUT AN ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN, COMMONS-BASED ALTERNATIVE IS POSSIBLE ~ from Babylonia ~ The myth that the state serves the public interest is collapsing from every direction. It collapses in transport, where “safety” was measured in deaths at Tempi. It collapses in healthcare, which operates in a permanent state of crisis. It collapses in energy, surrendered to monopolies. It collapses in housing, which has been transformed from a social right into an investment product. And today it collapses in the most brutal way in agricultural production. The image of farmers on the roads is the visible outcome of a system in which political party, state, and capitalist elites manage public resources as their own property, transferring the cost of crises onto those who have no institutional power whatsoever. The scandal at OPEKEPE and the intervention of the European Public Prosecutor did not merely expose corrupt practices. They revealed the way agricultural policy has been transformed into a field of clientelist networks, political cover, and economic plunder. At the very moment when intermediaries, “insiders,” and business circles were siphoning off EU funds, thousands of real producers became fully dependent on a flow of money controlled by mechanisms to which they have no access. When this system stalls, production freezes—not because farmers are not producing. The payment crisis is a structural feature of a state that functions as an intermediary between European funds and domestic power networks. Controls, necessary for the most basic restoration of legality, are turned into weapons of mass punishment against the weakest. Corruption remains systemic, while “clean-up” is applied horizontally at the expense of those with the least power. Within this framework, the farmer is presented either as an “entrepreneur” who must adapt or as a “subsidized” actor whose legitimacy exists only through dependence on the system. In reality, however, the farmer functions as a bearer of risk. They assume the climatic, economic, and social cost of production, while the critical decisions regarding prices, inputs—water, energy, fertilizers, seeds—the value of land and products are made by multinationals, banks, concentrated trade and distribution networks, and the state mechanisms that serve them. When this regime is shaken, the state stands against society. As the climate crisis and resource scarcity erode the stability of the capitalist model, the state becomes more authoritarian, more disciplinary, more aggressive toward society. It does not protect production; it protects its institutional architecture, redistributes losses, and thus reveals the real political dead end. The question that therefore arises is who controls agricultural production, for whom, and under what terms—and whether, at this point, that control can remain in the hands of state and capitalist elites in a world of ecological collapse and social disintegration. THE HISTORICAL TRAJECTORY OF THE CAP The crisis of the agricultural sector in Greece is neither temporary nor the result of “poor implementation.” It is the outcome of a long historical trajectory of political choices implemented with the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as their central axis. To understand today’s suffocation of the agricultural sector—economic, environmental, and social—we must view the CAP not as a technical tool for regulating production, but as a mechanism of political management and social consensus on a European scale. Historically, it was constructed to absorb crises, yet it ends up reproducing them in new forms. The climate crisis does not create this dead end; it multiplies it and makes it visible. The CAP was established in the early 1960s, within the framework of the Treaty of Rome, as a response to food security as a post-war European imperative. The stakes were clear and deeply state-centric. Agriculture was treated as a strategic security sector, on par with energy and industry. The goal was to increase production, stabilise markets, and secure farmers’ incomes through guaranteed prices and common market organisation mechanisms. In this context, the farmer was conceived more as a link in a system of mass production, while power was concentrated in planning and regulation. Already in the 1970s, with the Mansholt Plan, it became clear that the CAP did not merely aim to support existing agricultural structures, but to deeply restructure them. The pursuit of larger holdings, production concentration, and increased productivity marked the first systematic attempt to transform agriculture into a high-efficiency agro-industrial system. The emerging crisis was no longer one of scarcity, but of mismatch between traditional rural societies and a model of intensified production that required capital, technology, and scale. In the 1980s, a fundamental contradiction of the early CAP became visible. The very system designed to increase agricultural production began producing more than could be consumed or absorbed. Overproduction was not a sign of success, but a problem. Massive surpluses—known as “butter mountains” and “wine lakes”—turned agricultural policy into an issue of public cost and social legitimacy. Instead of changing the model, production continued to be centrally and hierarchically regulated through new control mechanisms such as quotas and product withdrawals. In 1992, the CAP entered a new phase with the so-called McSharry reform. This was not merely a technical adjustment, but a response to a deeper political crisis. Intensive agriculture had already caused serious environmental impacts, the cost of the policy was being socially contested, and international trade pressures made the previous model difficult to defend. To preserve it, the CAP changed its discourse. Support for farmers was no longer directly linked to product prices, but to income, and agriculture was redefined as “multifunctional.” It was now expected not only to produce food, but also to maintain landscapes, ecosystems, and social cohesion in rural areas. This expansion, however, was largely rhetorical. Power remained concentrated in European institutions, states, and technocratic mechanisms interacting with markets, input companies, and commercial networks, excluding producers from any substantive participation in decision-making. Policy increasingly took the form of technocratic management. Every social or environmental demand was translated into indicators, measures, controls, and eligibility regimes, turning consensus into a matter of compliance rather than democratic choice. With Agenda 2000, the CAP attempted to show that it concerned not only production quantity, but rural development as a whole. The so-called second pillar was introduced, ostensibly addressing local development, social cohesion, and rural infrastructure. Nevertheless, the architecture of the policy remained largely unchanged. The main flows of resources and power continued to be centrally determined, while local communities were called upon to “adapt” within predefined frameworks of administrative compliance rather than democratic planning. The period from the early 2000s to 2020 marked a deeper shift in the CAP—what can be described as the CAP of discipline. Subsidies were decoupled from production and presented as tools of modernization and competitiveness. This choice aimed to limit overproduction without changing the dominant model and to align the CAP with international trade and market rules. In practice, economic and climatic risk was transferred almost entirely to the producer. Prices were left to the market, losses were not collectively offset, and support was granted only under conditions of compliance. Income no longer depended on what and how one produces, but on whether the farmer complies with an increasingly complex web of rules, controls, and administrative requirements. Political conflict over production, prices, and markets was depoliticized and replaced by bureaucratic surveillance. Within this framework, the farmer was treated as administratively eligible or not. Production primarily served to keep them within the system, accepting individual risk and collectively accepting the depoliticization of agricultural production. The most recent phase of the CAP, for the period 2021–2027, explicitly incorporates the climate crisis into its discourse and tools. Eco-schemes, environmental commitments, and national strategic plans are presented as evidence of a new, “green” CAP. Yet environmental requirements increase without any substantive change in control over critical resources—water, land, energy, market access, and risk insurance. The climate crisis thus acts as a multiplier of all previous crises—of production, income, legitimacy, and resilience—revealing the limits of a system that reforms endlessly without redistributing power. The climate crisis, moreover, does not arrive in a neutral field. It enters an already unequal rural landscape. In Greece, extreme weather events, droughts, floods, and heatwaves disproportionately affect small and medium producers. As climatic risk increases, control over inputs remains concentrated, insurance is inadequate or expensive, compensation is delayed, and “adaptation” translates into new investments that producers must finance on their own. Thus, instead of becoming an opportunity for democratic redesign of production and common resources, the climate crisis tends to become a tool for accelerating concentration. Those who can bear the risk survive; the rest exit. WHY DOMINANT SOLUTIONS ARE INSUFFICIENT Dominant responses to the agricultural crisis appear under various names—technological modernisation, innovation, digitalisation, green transition, financial instruments—but share a common feature: they do not challenge the power structure within which agricultural production operates. Technology, for example, is presented as a neutral solution. In practice, however, the digitalisation of agriculture without data control turns the farmer into a passive information provider for third parties. Data on soil, crops, water, and climate are collected, analysed, and exploited by platforms, input companies, or financial actors, without producers having any meaningful say in their use. Knowledge is extracted from the field and reintroduced as a paid service. Similarly, innovation is promoted as a driver of transition without addressing ownership and control. When innovation is introduced as a package of technologies, certifications, and consulting services without collective ownership and management structures, producers are asked to “modernise” without co-shaping the tools that determine their production. Even cooperatives, often presented as an answer to individual weakness, are not guarantees of change. When they reproduce the same hierarchies they claim to oppose, they become subsidy management mechanisms or market intermediaries rather than tools of collective bargaining and political autonomy. The common limit of all these “solutions” is that they treat the agricultural crisis as a technical problem of efficiency, adaptation, or innovation. Yet, as the historical trajectory of the CAP shows, the crisis is primarily political. It concerns who controls resources, knowledge, value chains, and risk. As long as these questions remain off the table, every new solution—no matter how “green” or “smart”—will simply add another layer to a system that has already reached its limits. AN ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN AGRICULTURAL PERSPECTIVE The discussion of an anti-authoritarian perspective in agriculture and rural life is a political necessity. The climate crisis demands shifts in power. As long as fundamental control relations remain unchanged, every adaptation effort will translate into further burdens on the same subjects—small and medium producers and rural communities. Any planning must begin with the decentralisation of power and the return of control to producers themselves and local societies. At the core of this perspective lies collective control over critical means of production—seeds, storage, processing, and basic infrastructure. When these nodes remain fully privatised or controlled by a few powerful actors, producers are deprived of real bargaining power and trapped in relations of dependency. At the same time, rebuilding local and regional value chains is required as a political project to reduce dependence on concentrated and impersonal networks. Reconnecting production with processing and consumption at a regional scale strengthens producers’ negotiating position and creates conditions of collective resilience against increasingly unstable markets. Central to this vision are the commons. Water, land, knowledge, and data cannot be treated exclusively as commodities or investment assets, especially under conditions of climatic destabilisation. They are necessary commons, without which neither sustainable production nor social justice in rural areas is possible. Their management is not a technical issue, but a deeply political one, concerning who decides, for whom, and under what conditions. These are necessary conditions for moving forward to the questions of what crops we want to grow, by what criteria we decide, and what agricultural products we actually need. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine translation. Image: World Riots on Facebook The post Agriculture beyond the state and market appeared first on Freedom News.

EVOLVING OUR RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CRISIS, MILITARISATION, AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ~ Salvo Vaccaro, Umanità Nova ~ Not possessing prophetic visions, it will be difficult to predict what forms anarchism will take in the 21st century, as this depends on the geographical, cultural, political, social, and temporal context. Undoubtedly, struggles for the expansion of spaces of freedom, equality in differences, and solidarity—individual and collective—(including and especially among strangers) will always constitute the axes around which the specifically appropriate forms and modes of conflict will revolve, depending on the context of anarchism, or rather anarchisms. I will briefly focus on three global scenarios, not alternatives, but rather intersecting yet not hierarchically descending, within which twenty-first-century anarchists will strive to identify the best forms of action. There is clearly a fourth, linked to gender issues, but other contributions will provide us with general and specific features and contextual objectives of struggle. Of course, these scenarios do not exclude or downplay the more common, more everyday, and perhaps more local spheres of struggle, whose importance is crucial to our rooting in the territories where we live. However, in my opinion, global scenarios will also “over-determine” local or traditional conflicts, changing their forms and modalities and imparting, in my view, significant twists. The first is climate change, which alters the planet’s living conditions, jeopardising the survival of its ecosystems, with the risk of demographic conflicts, migratory movements, and the violent exploitation of resources (fertile land, water), etc. The nomadism typical (and even original) of the human species cannot be stopped by state or “natural” borders, such will be the pressure of migration in search of better living conditions. If the pace of exploitation of humanity’s resources (land and water, first and foremost) is not reversed, increasingly bloody conflicts will erupt, considering that half the world’s population is of working age, and a quarter of them live in rural areas, where 80% of global poverty exists. This is without considering the informal, obscure, and invisible work that escapes ILO or World Bank statistics. In these conditions, which it would be unworthy to call “emergency”—so endemic and reiterated are they by the dynamics of power and inequality on a global scale—the approach to problems can only hinge on bottom-up self-organisation, to mitigate the destructive effects of current climate policies pursued by unscrupulous state and business elites. It is from this practice of solidarity and self-organisation that an anarchist ethos is forged: a training ground for creativity in horizontal problem-solving that will gradually extend to the complete reorganisation of social life according to libertarian practices and attitudes. It is therefore time for the livability of and on our planet to enter the political agenda of social anarchism with determination, since we cannot count on being among the elite who will migrate to the Moon or Mars following Elon Musk & Co. The second global scenario is the recourse to war as a challenge to global hegemony in the 21st century, with the risks of nuclear annihilation and mass extermination. Already at the close of the last millennium, many American scholars were questioning which would be the hegemonic power in the second half of the 21st century, seeing China and its allies (including Russia) as the most likely competitor against which to pursue policies of containment and aggressive counterbalancing. It’s not difficult to imagine the same in China, only that analyses and studies are not easily accessible, let alone legible. After all, history has never seen smooth and peaceful successions of global hegemony—quite the opposite. It is no coincidence, then, and not just today, that we are witnessing a growing militarisation of societies, which already directly results in the disintegration of hard-won “rights,” even without losing the pretence of (pseudo)democratic representation, with the reduction of constitutional states to electoral-parliamentary autocracies. Freedom of action, speech, expression, the ability to shape one’s life as one sees fit, and the ability to adopt non-conformist customs and traditions are all practices wrested with difficulty from previous generations and, in some cases, from the living. Whether they are constitutionalised or translated into legal norms is of little importance: positive law grants and takes away based on more or less strengthened parliamentary majorities. The path will make the difference. By militarisation, we must not and cannot merely evoke the visible presence of signs of armed power (army, police forces, armaments, war industries, etc.). We must address the internalisation of a warmongering and bellicose culture, which arms consciences from a very young age, pressuring them with violent models for solving everyday problems and overcoming the obstacles that life throws at us at every step. Cultural models in which violence is exalted because it is simulated—game over, and we begin again—life as a video game in which you kill and are killed, but then you rise again in a limitless and infinite fight. It is no coincidence that entertainment video games fuel and are in turn fueled by military simulations, by autonomous and automatic weaponry that transform war in its forms, anaesthetising its wounds and physical traumas and transferring them to a psychic sphere. This is at least for those who attack from a position of technological supremacy, not for those who suffer its effects, as every victim of war knows. We must not underestimate or minimise the hybrid militarisation that insinuates itself from cyberspace into our pockets via digital devices. These devices are not only the source of capitalist surveillance for commercial marketing purposes, but also, and above all, the control exerted by governments and private companies, which now possess an infinite amount of knowledge related to our tastes, our actions, our physical and virtual experiences, which are transformed into numerical data easily processed by algorithms, resulting in a unique mass profiling —and this may not sound contradictory—that is useful for predicting and even guiding our future behaviour. Which brings us to the third global scenario: the advent of digital technologies, and AI specifically, which is literally revolutionising the way of life in our societies, not only in the areas of living labour, which can be replaced by robots and various machines, nor only in the ways in which “political” opinions are channelled during elections. The split between the corporeal, “real” sphere and the “virtual” dimension, whose effects are just as real, intertwine, delineating the formation of a subjectivity very different from the one we have become accustomed to on the material terrain of social classes and the balance of power. In an era of extreme individualism, advocated and encouraged by the neoliberal policies of recent decades, the collective sphere has shattered to be “resurrected” in the relationship between the self and the screen of my digital device; Physical sociality has in some ways evaporated in favour of a virtual “sociality,” managed by proprietary platforms, within which a fiction of communication and dialogue is enacted with just as many other selves, each connected via their own screen. The fiction of having a following of followers, of having tons of friends: in effect, we are unknowingly immersed in a bubble, within which my opinions resonate, becoming convictions as soon as I see them confirmed by others who think exactly like me. The end of the pluralism of ideas, excluded from echo chambers, the end of the emergence of dissent, the end of dialectical confrontation between different people. And when these virtual expulsions resurface in the space-time of corporeal existence, being unaccustomed of relating to different others turns into gratuitous, senseless, unexpected violence, except as a “defensive” form of a psychology devoid of real sociality, precisely because it is imbued with “social” surrogates. Neoliberal individualism, further translocated into the digital universe, produces conformist individuals, diversified replicas of a machine matrix whose limits and technological advances we have likely become prostheses, experimentally testing. We think we are the ones using the devices, but perhaps it’s precisely the opposite. Outside of any community of reference, disoriented and tossed from one platform to another, what kind of subjectivity will ultimately consolidate? What community could give rise to the communism of goods and services? What critical and diverse subject could emerge in the increasingly pressing relationship between the human and the machine? The new ways in which we feel we are subjects of ourselves, aware and critical of reality, push us to deepen and diversify our analytical tools, to seize new opportunities for “social(i)” connections from which we can reconstitute a strong destituent community capable of imagining and therefore experimenting with collective utopias organized around the pivot of the absence of power. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine translation. Summary of a presentation at the Carrara Conference (11-12 October 2025) on occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Italian Anarchist Federation. The post 21st-century anarchism appeared first on Freedom News.

WHILE ACT UP’S POLITICAL WORK BECOMES INSTITUTIONALISED AND MEMORIALISED, THE MYTH PERSISTS THAT HIV NO LONGER KILLS ~ Chrys Papaioannou ~ As the campaigns, slogans and direct actions of the legendary activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), originally formed in New York in 1987, enter history books, exhibition rooms and cinema screens, our fight to save the lives being lost to AIDS has never been more urgent. While ACT UP’s political work becomes institutionalised and memorialised, today the persistent myth that HIV no longer kills is only made worse by deadly political decisions that decimate disability welfare, fund militarist expansion and genocide, and remove aid and access to HIV- prevention and HIV-treatment medication from those most at risk. This year, for the first time since 1988, the US Government did not commemorate World AIDS Day, with State Department employees being told not to promote World AIDS Day through any communication channels (whether via social media, media engagements or public speeches). It is difficult not to view this vile disregard for all those who have lost their children, friends, and lovers in light of a longer history of eugenicist policies and remarks made by fascist politicians, such as Nigel Farage who, in 2014, called for people who are living with HIV to be banned from migrating to the UK and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France who, in 1987, publicly stated that AIDS is a form of leprosy, proposing that people with AIDS be forcibly isolated. It was on World AIDS Day this year, 1 December 2025, a grey and gloomy Monday morning, that I and dozens of others from the wider ACT UP London network left our homes early, put on our waterproofs, and headed to Trafalgar Square to remember the dead and fight for the living. ACT UP London is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the HIV pandemic. I had seen pictures of die-ins before but no pictures and no video footage of any die-in could capture what it felt like to participate in this poignant act of solidarity. As we surrounded the Equestrian Statue of King Charles I in the small traffic island opposite Nelson’s column, the Big Ben within sight, the thirty minutes spent lying on the cold pavement with our eyes closed felt like a lifetime. Light drizzle gave way to heavy rain and the wind kept blowing our makeshift cardboard gravestones away. The cardboard gravestones themselves told the story of consecutive governments failing us – Tory cuts, Labour cuts, decades and decades of misinformation, stigma and violence inflicted through corporate greed and state neglect. Just this November, the UK government announced a 15% reduction in the country’s contribution to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. According to the Terrence Higgins Trust, “in November 2024, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) stated that it is unlikely that we will meet the 2025 targets, but the 2030 target of zero new HIV transmissions is within our reach.” And yet, not only has the 2025 goal not been met, but it looks even more unlikely that the goal of “no new HIV transmissions by 2030” will be met either. In a carceral neoliberal context where class, race and citizenship status cruelly determine who is likely to live a long healthy life with HIV and who is not, there are thousands and thousands of people who cannot access daily oral PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) and the twice-yearly injectable drug Lenacapavir. Widespread stigma associated with being HIV-positive is further exacerbated by the societal stigma experienced by sex workers and people who inject drugs (PWID), with scarce needle and syringe programmes (NSP) allowing people to access free and sterile equipment, and whorephobia and the criminalisation of sex work – whether through the Nordic or other models – preventing sex workers from accessing healthcare: “Punitive environments have been shown to limit the availability, access and uptake of HIV prevention, treatment, care and support for sex workers and their clients”, report UNAIDS. It might seem that all we demand is for Warfare Britain to turn into Welfare Britain. But fighting to end AIDS – zero new transmissions, zero new deaths, zero stigma – means fighting to end the very crux where state violence, racial capitalism and ethno-nationalism intersect. The hard-earned victories of our queer elders mean that ‘gay cancer’ can no longer be the homophobic stick with which they beat us. But turn your gaze not so far from here, to a busy pedestrian street in central Athens, and you find the lingering ghost of queer activist Zak Kostopoulos (open about his HIV-positive status and known for his gay rights activism) who in 2018 was brutally beaten to death by civilians and the police. Still lying on the cold wet pavement, I open my eyes to gaze at the sky. A nothingness almost, an ever-expanding grey with no variation. I hear the name of Zak Kostopoulos, of Derek Jarman, of Natalie Caroline Wells and her son Judd Conrad Morgan Wells, both of whom passed away in London the other week, days apart. My sight catches a glimpse of the Union Jacks hanging from the nearby buildings and then of a small flock of birds dispersing and reorienting. Silence still equals death. And until Britain’s war machine is dismantled and healthcare is free for all, we know that we will not be choosing silence. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photos by Holly Buckle @stickypicnic, video by Joseph Wilson   The post In AIDS activism, silence (still) equals death appeared first on Freedom News.

AGAINST A STATE THAT WILL NEVER RESOLVE CLIMATE CHAOS, AND ITS VIOLENCE WHICH FORCE CANNOT OVERTHROW TODAY, WHAT REMAINS FOR ENVIRONMENTALISTS? ~ Vincent Lucchese, Reporterre ~ The myth that the state serves the public interest is crumbling on all sides. Seeing the state stubbornly defend projects as economically and environmentally disastrous as the A69 motorway, and witnessing its police unleash violence against opponents of ecocidal private mega-reservoir projects, more and more environmental activists are becoming disillusioned. For citizens who are abruptly learning to “mourn the state,” a series of essays and books in recent months have contributed to dusting off this hypothesis: what if it were possible. At the heart of anarchist thinking for two centuries, this idea is making a strong comeback today, given the obvious impasse of other possible paths. On one hand, the reformist path, that is to say the social-democratic project of reforming capitalism from within to make it socially and environmentally viable, is ‘doubly dead, doubly zombie-like’, as Alessandro Pignocchi sums up in his fascinating Perspectives terrestres (Seuil, 2025). The author continues, the ecological crisis ‘sweeps away the philanthropic belief at the heart of the social democratic project’ of possible infinite economic growth which promised the elevation of all social classes within the capitalist regime. The realisation that this crisis is precisely caused by the economic structures that ensure the ruling class’s dominance is radicalising other social classes. The capitalist elite is tightening the screws to protect its faltering model, rendering any prospect of social-democratic compromise obsolete. On the other hand, the revolutionary perspective is hardly any better. Past experiences have revealed its two symmetrical pitfalls: overthrowing the ruling power requires comparable armed force, which if inadequate, risks being swept away as brutally as the Paris Commune was in 1871. When this proves sufficient, it threatens to lead to a ‘capture phenomenon’, meaning that the new power itself serves only its own particular interests, as was the case in the USSR, Maoist China, and after the Arab Spring. A STATE THAT CANNOT BE REFORMED OR OVERTHROWN The observation of this double impasse, of a state that can neither be reformed or overthrown, is shared by Irish philosopher John Holloway, whose latest book has just been translated into French: Penser l’espoir en des temps désespérés (Thinking Hope in Desperate Times, Libertalia, 2025). He adds this definitive analysis: the state is, by its very nature, at the service of capitalism, and trying to make it an ally is a complete waste of time. The modern state, he explains, survives only through the taxes it levies on capital accumulation. Its mission and survival are, therefore, intrinsically linked to capitalists’ insatiable quest for accumulation. John Holloway develops an argument that follows in the long tradition of analyses by thinkers of the “capitalist state”, which was already clearly summarised by the American sociologist Erik Olin Wright (Anti-Capitalist Strategies for the 21st Century, La Découverte, 2020). Historically, he explains, the state can be described as the institutional form that has been deployed to ensure the reproduction of capital: the “rule of law” guarantees the inviolability of private property — largely derived from the appropriation of commons, colonisation, and the exploitation of workers and nature — and its capitalist development within the market framework. The Paris Commune ended in the large-scale massacre of the Communards by the Versailles army. After Félix Philippoteaux (1815-1884), Public domain Furthermore, the mechanisms for recruiting state elites create a privileged caste and a convergence of interests between them and the capitalist elites, to the detriment of the general interest. It is an understatement to say that the political dynamics of recent years have provided fertile ground for this type of analysis. We are witnessing a rise in “illiberalism” in France and many other so-called democratic states, fuelled by media propaganda from far-right billionaires. Across the Atlantic, the capitalist barons of American tech are openly allying themselves with the proto-fascist power of Donald Trump. All of this supports the thesis that capitalist states are becoming more authoritarian as the scarcity of natural resources and crises caused by climate change make governing populations more uncertain. RETURN TO THE LOCAL So what can be done? These authors suggest competing with the state by building on local roots and local struggles. From a strategic perspective, this is first and foremost a quest for autonomy: developing local subsistence agriculture and reclaiming technical know-how to reduce dependence on the state is a prerequisite for resisting it. ‘Material autonomy and political autonomy reinforce each other,’ summarises Pignocchi. For him, ‘liberating territories is therefore the first condition’ for moving towards what he calls ‘terrestrial perspectives’. Namely, a political project based on local autonomy and the renewal of ties with non-human living beings. The virtues of this approach are its broad potential to mobilise people in a unifying struggle based on love for the land, the rediscovery of powerful and joyful emotions in connection with living things, and values of respect, care and coexistence between species and between humans. It places the dynamic at the opposite end of the spectrum from reactionary localism. In practice, this strategy works and is even becoming increasingly widespread. This is what journalist Juliette Duquesne recounts in her comprehensive investigation, Autonomes et solidaires pour le vivant, S’organiser sans l’autorité de l’État (Le Bord de l’eau, 2025). From the French ZADs (Zone à Défendre) of Notre-Dame-des-Landes (Loire-Atlantique) and Les Lentillères (Dijon) to the long-term experience of Longo Maï, the Zapatistas of Chiapas in Mexico and the Kurds of Rojava, among others, she has documented and examined numerous experiences of struggle. Her proposition: the conditions for victory are complex and constantly need to be reinvented, but it is possible to organise without the state. Historically, anarchism has already proven its organisational viability on a large scale, she points out, recalling the little-known Spanish experiment of 1936, ‘often forgotten in history books because it was denigrated by capitalists and communists’. From July 1936 to spring 1937, Juliette Duquesne summarises, 3 million people in Catalonia and Aragon reinvented collective life without a state: collectivised economic activities, self-managed education and health systems, communities with local currencies, and others abolishing money altogether. A cultural, social, anarcho-syndicalist and political context unique to Spain at that time allowed for this profusion of experimentation, before the civil war and then Francoism brought this adventure to a tragic end. Among the lesser-known achievements, the Makhnovshchina, the anarchist Ukraine between 1917 and 1921, is also worth mentioning. The victories of the ‘Black Army’, a peasant and worker guerrilla force, against reactionary forces enabled the establishment of agricultural communes throughout the country. A lack of military resources and Soviet repression brought this large-scale libertarian and egalitarian experiment to an end. Anita Garbín Alonso, anti-fascist and anarchist militiawoman in Barcelona in 1936. Antoni Campañà i Bandranas, Public domain Ecological and social emancipation may work locally, but can it be generalised? ‘Imagining that we can stop the ravages of accumulation by multiplying the number of ZADs is probably no more serious than thinking we can stop global warming by accumulating small gestures,’ noted The Earth Uprisings (Les Soulèvements de la Terre) in their strategic work Premières secousses (First Shocks, La Fabrique, 2024). ” ‘Unless, perhaps,‘ they continue, ’we connect the dots.‘ This is the idea towards which all the authors mentioned converge: the “territories liberated” from the state, even partially, if they multiply and unite, could reach a critical mass sufficient to compete with, or at least undermine, the sovereign authority of the state. KAIROS For Alessandro Pignocchi, it is a question of ‘piercing’ the state with autonomous territories, of ‘gradually building something parallel to capitalism’, united within a ‘terrestrial internationalism’. Juliette Duquesne writes that ‘contagion must spread through capillary action’ so that ‘the state and capitalism become increasingly marginalised’ until they reach a ‘threshold’ that allows for a turning point. In other words: the exit from capitalism and the entry into a true democracy. Obviously, the state will not allow itself to be attacked without reacting: the fierce repression of the ZADs at Notre-Dame-des-Landes is a prime example. But, paradoxically, it is also proof that victory is possible if anarchist activists know how to seize the kairos, that is, take advantage of favourable circumstances. This is the other essential strategic lever. Pignocchi, Duquesne and Wright agree with the conclusion reached by the Earth Uprisings: achieving autonomy outside the state requires allies within the state. It is necessary to hybridise the state, rely on civil servants or elected officials who sympathise with the cause, and take advantage of the electoral victories of the least hostile political forces to gain the advantage in the conquest of territories. The task, however, seems monumental. It may well inspire scepticism given that the eco-anarchist and sustainable overthrow of a capitalist state has never historically taken place. To avoid the pitfall of discouragement, John Holloway emphasises that this capitalist state is a colossus with feet of clay. Throughout the lengthy and sometimes complex development of his work, the philosopher reinterprets Marxist theory on the internal contradictions of capitalism. Capitalism’s insatiable need for accumulation drives it to transform everything into commodities and, ultimately, into money. However, this need to exploit humans and nature ever more intensely is now coming up against physical limits, as evidenced by the ecological crisis. The fall of the Vendôme Column, bearing the statue of Napoleon I , during the Paris Commune, Lithograph from 1871, Public domain In recent decades the need for constant accumulation, vital to prevent the system from collapsing, has been partly met with empty promises. Unable to find sufficient human and natural ‘resources’ to exploit, explains the author, the elites have accumulated ‘fictitious capital’ through the massive issuance of money derived from the creation of debt. Capitalism today is in the same situation as the cartoon coyote, which has long since passed the edge of the cliff, is running over the void, and must keep running to avoid falling. The dismantling of social gains, police violence, open conflicts: everything is being done in a desperate attempt to coerce workers and increase profit margins. But our hope lies here, writes John Holloway: in the realisation that it is our refusal to accept absolute commodification, our desires overflowing with vitality, that is what holds back and frightens capitalism. Global finance, subject to increasingly intense “heart attacks”, such as the financial crisis of 2008, could well succumb definitively to the next one. He concludes: ‘We are not victims of the crisis but its protagonists: our resistance and rebellion, our insubordination and non-subordination, our refusal to be robots. This is what constantly upsets capital. In these desperate times, this is our hope.’ He calls for daring to embrace radical ambition: to think and act for a world without capital, and therefore without money. To those who see these projects as unrealistic or overly distant utopias, these contemporary anarchist authors concede that the path they are charting is far from clear and that their horizon is taking shape as they go. But their struggles, they argue, have the advantage of being very concrete, since each person must begin by taking action in their own territory to defend their forest, their dignity at work, or their drinking water, here and now. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine translation. Top photo: A pirate sheep as a shepherd’s mark, in a Longo Maï flock. Sébastien Thébault / Wikimedia Commons     The post Anarchism: Last hope for the Environment appeared first on Freedom News.

FAR-RIGHT GLEE TELLS YOU ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT’S ASYLUM PLANS ~ punkacademic ~ Plans announced by the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to “shake up the asylum system” have finally achieved what Labour appears to have hoped for: the support of far-right extremists, if not their voters. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (a.k.a. Tommy Robinson)  has been quick to claim that Labour’s moves have shown that ‘the Overton window has been obliterated’, meaning that far-right politics are now mainstream. Given Yaxley-Lennon epitomises Labour’s own fantasy caricature of the imaginary ‘white working class’, this probably means Labour are getting what they wanted from this with his quasi-endorsement. That and the gushing headlines in the right-wing press. That support though should tell you all you need to know about what these policies mean. This is fascism, which needs to be described unequivocally as what it is. The fact that it is a transnational phenomenon or that electoral politics has not merely failed to stop it but actively enabled it should not stop us calling it out. The plans—which include attacks on those provisions in the European Convention of Human Rights which aim to ensure the right to a family life and to protect individuals from torture—are, put simply, heinous. They aim to reduce refugee status to a temporary affair, with continued uncertainty hanging over refugees for decades, unable to achieve permanent status until they have been in the country for twenty years. And of course, being a policy from Starmer’s Labour, there’s the customary genuflection to AI, which will supposedly be used to verify refugees’ ages, something mooted earlier this year. Labour has rolled out the full fash playlist. Jewellery can be confiscated from refugees to pay for processing them, as one minister gleefully told the press—seemingly blissfully unaware of the horrific echoes such a despicable policy conjures up. Indeed, those with living memory of the Holocaust or with a family connection to it have been amongst the quickest to call out Labour’s plans for what they are. Alf Dubs, who fled Nazi persecution in 1939, was clear that Labour’s plans sought to “use children as a weapon”. It has been a long road to here, and though the rise of the far-right is international, the variant in Britain gives the lie to myths the British state has long fostered about Britain’s status as a ‘welcoming nation’. Indeed, despite much rewriting of history, in the 1930s and 1940s Jewish refugees were often met with prejudice and legalised discrimination if they even made it to England. Claus Moser, ultimately a leading statistician and Establishment figure at LSE and Oxford in the post-war period, was placed in an internment camp despite his family fleeing persecution at the hands of the Nazis four years’ earlier. But history isn’t relevant to technocratic centrist politicians, for whom every political question is merely a cost-benefit analysis of fiscal implications or polling data. As far as elites are concerned, the BBC’s much-vaunted TV series The Nazis: A Warning from History, broadcast the same year Blair came to power, seems to only have reinforced the view that the experience has no relevance for now. Instead, centrists not actively convinced by fascism and far-right politics have resorted to the 1990s playbook of contrarianism and triangulation. But you cannot ‘triangulate’ fascism. As scholars have noted, with a force that wishes to destroy freedom and whole communities, there can be no middle ground. The non-fash press continues to persevere with weasel-words such as “populism” and ‘both sides’ perspectives, as if those doomed advocates of greater social spending and council housing in Parliament were of the same ilk as those wishing to open concentration camps. Otherwise, it seeks to report in the depoliticised language of the ‘game’, the hyper-personalised style that makes a big deal of who’s up and who’s down in Westminster rather than making any attempt to consider why people across the country have embraced far-right politics. This tells us something else, a truth we anarchists know too well: that no salvation is coming from centrist parliamentary politicians or their media outriders. Societies are only so receptive to hate on this scale thanks to their complicity in the destruction of what passed for political choice in favour of an oligarchic dystopia, where the donors pay well and news moguls own Downing Street Those who have fuelled a fire won’t douse it. That task falls to us, and those many outside our movement who also know that the answer to fascist politics—in parliament as in the streets—is a total lack of compromise and a total emphasis on human dignity and solidarity. Institutions cannot do that for us. As one of our predecessors reminds us, we must always and everywhere act for ourselves in practices of mutual aid that know no boundary of border or nationality to combat a fascist menace that is itself international, and which cannot be appeased but which must be destroyed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: UK Home Office on Flickr CC BY 4.0 The post Labour rolls out the full fash playlist appeared first on Freedom News.

MAOIST ASSAULT ON ATHENS ANARCHISTS EXPOSED A HIERARCHICAL POLITICAL CULTURE SHAPED BY PATRIARCHAL COMMAND HABITS ~ Blade Runner ~ Thousands took the streets across Greece on 17 November, in memory of those killed during the Polytechnic uprising of 1973, when students were gunned down as they rose against the colonial dictatorship. In Athens, more than 6,000 riot police were deployed for the demonstration and rally outside the US Embassy, with armoured vehicles cordoning off the march’s route in an attempt to deter mass participation. Forty-three people were arrested in police operations prior to the demonstration. Earlier, on the morning of 15 November, around 150 members of the Maoist group ARAS descended on the Polytechnic campus in Exarcheia during preparations for the annual commemorations of the 1973 revolt. They surrounded a small group of anarchist and anti-authoritarian students, launched a coordinated and sustained assault, and left more than a dozen hospitalised with concussions, broken bones, and severe head injuries—including people beaten while unconscious. The attackers operated behind a tight cordon, the campus gates were locked, and hundreds of other left organisations present were unable to intervene. The event was publicly condemned by the majority of the leftist and anarchist organisations in Greece. Far from being just another intra-left skirmish, the attack was a strategic attempt to stake out territory. Whoever holds the physical space of the Polytechnic does not just manage a campus; they lay claim to the meaning of its history, and with it to the future horizon of social struggle. ARAS has spent years imposing its dominance inside sections of the university student movement, reproducing an authoritarian posture analogous to the Greek Communist Party’s (KKE) hegemonic stance in the wider social-political field: the insistence on organisational control, the policing of dissent, and the decades-old line—embraced by both KKE and liberals—that rioters are ‘unity wreckers’ or undercover police agents. The assault belongs to a longer cycle of disillusionment, repression, and political decay. A generation came of age after the 2008 youth revolt—a moment that terrified the political class—only to watch the long disillusionment of the SYRIZA years unfold: hope evaporating, movement energy betrayed, and ‘left government’ shrinking into technocratic management. What followed was the right’s triumphant return, armed with a violently enforced TINA (‘there is no alternative’) and a counter-insurgency posture aimed squarely at the movements that shook the country in 2008 and during the memorandum years. In recent years, police authorities have increasingly attacked political squats—including inside university campuses with the cooperation of academic administrations. In this climate, authoritarian and patriarchal patterns have reasserted themselves not only from above but also inside the political field, with remnants of the left acting as buffers and internal counter-insurgency, absorbing anger and blocking the emergence of genuinely autonomous social alternatives. ARAS’s attack was a re-enactment of this broader tendency: the internalisation of state logic by a leftist formation desperate for recognition and power. The attempt to secure relevance and organisational survival in a landscape reshaped by the slow asphyxiation of the movements culminated in a grotesque rupture with the spirit of the Polytechnic—an authoritarian spectacle that mimicked the very forces the anniversary is meant to defy. Movements have a lot to fear when actors legitimise these formations in the name of ‘unity’ and thereby help them secure moral cover. Moreover, the attack’s brutality revealed more than a sectarian and authoritarian ambush; it exposed a hierarchical political culture shaped by patriarchal command habits—festering across parts of the Greek left (and the political spectrum more broadly)—and now emboldened under a government that fetishises discipline, punishment, and obedience. For decades, the Polytechnic has been held open by those who reject these narratives of order and inevitability. Very few of the political currents present have ever been ‘non-violent’ in the moralistic sense pushed by governments and liberals. They have defended occupations, confronted police, blocked mines, and built care infrastructures under fire. Their militancy is collective and grounded in mutual protection. ARAS’s violence was the opposite: authoritarian domination masquerading as discipline, a patriarchally inflected theatre of control posing as social struggle. This distinction is essential. Political formations that reproduce hierarchical and patriarchal command structures do not simply echo the state’s violence—they legitimise it. When a male-led sect storms the Polytechnic like a private riot squad, it functions as an unofficial extension of the repression the government has been escalating for years by suffocating movement spaces and expanding police powers under the banner of inevitability. In this context, ARAS’s attack reads less like sectarian madness and more like a grotesque amateur version of the state’s own narrative: ‘order must be restored; alternatives must be crushed.’ A violent echo of the TINA they claim to oppose. If movements want to survive this authoritarian phase—the criminalisation of dissent, the ‘good protester/bad protester’ theatre, the policing of youth politics—they must confront what enabled this attack. Not through vendetta or purges, which only recycle the same authoritarian circuitry, but by refusing to tolerate inside our own spaces the hierarchies, masculinities, and command habits that make such violence possible. Transformative justice is not a soft alternative to militancy; it is the only way militancy stays rooted in liberation rather than sliding into the logic of domination. The Polytechnic revolt remains powerful because it rejected hierarchy, patriarchal command, and the logic of inevitability. It was messy, plural, and contradictory—and therefore genuinely insurgent. What happened this year was a desecration of that memory by people faithfully reproducing the logic of the state more than its police. Our task now is not only to defend our spaces from external repression, but to defend our political cultures from internal rot. No movement that fails to uproot authoritarianism—whether carried by the state or by its imitators—can build the world it says it is fighting for. The post A left that carries the state inside it appeared first on Freedom News.

THE CLOSE SUPERVISION CENTRE (CSC) IS PART OF A SYSTEM THAT REQUIRES ENDLESSLY GREATER PUNISHMENT AND RESOURCES TO DISCIPLINE PRISONERS FACING DEGRADING CONDITIONS ~ Kevan Thakrar ~ On 26 March 2010, I was condemned to the Close Supervision Centre (CSC) system following the false and malicious allegations from the corrupt employees of HMP Frankland, who claimed I had committed an unprovoked attack upon multiple prison officers there on the 13 March 2010. As was later proven in Newcastle Crown Court, I had actually unsuccessfully attempted to defend myself using lawful force against a brutal gang of racist prison officers. The CSC system is purportedly designed to detain only the most dangerous and disruptive prisoners, utilising Prison Rule 46 of the Prison Rules 1999 to effectively impose indefinite solitary confinement upon those of us allocated to it. The United Nations (UN) defines solitary confinement as an individual being kept locked inside a cell in isolation for at least 22-hours per day. The UN Nelson Mandela Rules prohibits this occurring in excess of 15-consecutive days, classifying any longer as inhumane which is precisely what the CSC is. Since its creation in 1998 following the Spurr Report by low-ranking prison official Michael Spurr, it has been misused as an unofficial punishment and plagued by endemic discrimination easily amounting to institutional racism and Islamophobia, as well as institutional corruption. This was exposed by the state itself when, during the rare occasion its prison inspection body (HMIP) conducted a ‘full inspection’ of CSC 2015, it was unable to ignore the fact that around half of the CSC population were Muslim. If not through discrimination, how else could a minority group possibly become the majority within the most oppressive conditions available within English prisons? Dare to resist the state or come from a minority background, and prison is where they send you; but resist within prison, especially as a minority, and the CSC is the state’s further retaliation. Moreover, many CSC victims suffer from extreme mental health conditions amounting to disabilities, often developed within the CSC itself, making us even more vulnerable. This failing system costs the taxpayer more than £200,000 per prisoner per year, which is over 4-times the amount spent to detain those within the mainstream prison population. Despite these exorbitant costs, the CSC continues to expand like a cancer. This has become supercharged from the moment since Spurr himself somehow managed to slime his way into becoming Director of HMPPS, the most senior role within the prison and probation service. Since March 2010, although the overall prison population has remained relatively stable, the CSC has almost tripled in capacity going from around 20 men (women have never been deemed dangerous enough to warrant detention within the CSC it seems) to almost 60. Although Spurr himself was unceremoniously dismissed for the chaos in prisons under his leadership, he had already appointed minions who share his sadistic views to senior positions. The CSC experiment forms part of a much wider structural drive for control and oppression by those in power within British society not limited to the vision of its lead architect. Richard Vince, a former CSC prison officer and who was appointed to Executive Director of High Security Prisons by Spurr, is currently pressing ahead on the Spurr agenda by creating another costly CSC unit. Their plan is to close part of G-wing in HMP Frankland, which is where I suffered the racist events leading to my CSC detention, and a large part of it re-designated as a CSC unit. As each CSC unit only operates with the consent of the Prison Officers Association (POA), they have ensured a wildly disproportionate ratio of them to prisoners. This enables them to feel safe to abuse the prisoners knowing back-up is ready should any resistance occur. Currently, HMP Frankland is due to be plunged into a staffing crisis impacting the entire prison. This will lead to lockdowns, and these lockdowns in turn will build frustration, leading to behaviour that will result in CSC referrals. This process of degrading standards leading to the need for even more CSC facilities is central to endless need for more resources in our prisons, despite the fact that prisoners themselves are living off as little as a £2 food budget per day. It should come as no surprise when the direction of prisons emulates society, which at this time includes increasing police numbers and powers, creating new oppressive anti-resistance laws, and greater exploitation of the poor and disadvantaged who are directed to fight each other for scarce affordable handouts. As the system expands, those referred to the CSC who would otherwise be returned to main population due to a lack of space become more likely to be condemned to the system, and the chances of those within the CSC progressing out of it diminish further. This same principle applies with the expansion of all forms of prisons regardless of name or their target, it is the ‘Field of Dreams’ concept, “If you build it, they will come”. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kevan Thakrar is one of the UK prisoners under ongoing solitary confinement under the Close Supervision Centre (CSC) system. He can be written to at: Kevan Thakrar A4907AE, HMP Whitemoor, Longhill Road, March PE15 0PR —- or via emailaprisoner.com The post Field of Nightmares: The never-ending expansion of torture units in England appeared first on Freedom News.