Also: The whisper-quiet declaration of severe drought across a swathe of southern England, and the unsurprising news that far-right terror is on the rise. The post French student revolt reaches Argentina appeared first on Freedom Press.

Last week, I told my boss I was going on strike. ‘It’s good that you’re supporting the students’, he said, before telling me how he runs past a school each morning and sees peaceful, friendly students blockading it on the way out, and riot cops attacking them on the way back. I moved to France for work almost three years ago. Shortly after arriving, President Macron made his ill-fated decision to call a snap election. In the weeks that followed, I joined a union and received a crash course in French politics. I happened to be in Paris on the night of the election, and had to choose between an authorised viewing party in Place de Stalingrad, or a wild one in Place de la République. I chose the latter, and descended into the Métro in a sombre mood, expecting miserable results. When I emerged and regained phone signal, I saw that the exit polls favoured the hastily-assembled leftist coalition. What I had expected to be a riot became a riotous celebration, complete with fireworks, beers and whooping cheers every time a constituency declared for the New Popular Front. I’ve become more politically engaged through the years that followed and so, when the Freedom crew were recently bemoaning a lack of direct links between the UK and the French scenes, I thought I ought to do my bit to provide a bit of cross-Channel cross-pollination. The whole of France effectively runs on the academic calendar, and we have just entered the return-to-school period (la rentrée). Every year so far, this has been the peak time for protests: in 2024 it was a huge antifascist march in the run-up to the elections; last year it was the decentralised social media-organised Bloquons Tout movement (though an attempted follow-up flopped); and this year, it’s the lycéen·ne·s (i.e., college students and Sixth Formers). These are just the major events that reliably bring out 7,000–11,000 people; there are other, smaller marches just about every weekend. When I first arrived I went on a tour of the city centre, but lost the group amidst a huge protest in front of the Préfecture. I circled the building to try and find my group, and found another, unrelated farmers’ protest on the other side. It was a Saturday, so I’m not even sure anyone was in. The French are well aware that it only takes a small number of people, strategically placed, to cause outsized disruption. Famously, Haussmann widened the streets of Paris in part to make them harder to blockade; in Montpellier, only one street was so designed before the designers ran out of money, leaving the old centre of Écusson a tangled mess of narrow, winding streets. Protests rarely enter there (it’s usually declared off-limits by the Préfecture), but if they ever did it would prove remarkably unfavourable terrain for the forces of order. Instead, marches usually circumambulate the centre, around which all of the tramways are centralised. However, as long as these protest movements remain somewhat siloed into ‘left’ or ‘right’ or ‘pro-Palestine’ or whatever, the state can generally keep things under control. Over the last couple years they’ve sacrificed a few prime ministers to appease the crowd (although, bizarrely, last year Macron just reappointed the same guy, who remains in post to this day), but so far waiting for the momentum to die out and crushing particularly obstinate holdouts with riot police seems to have worked out. What the French state really fears, though, is a confluence of struggle. This is what happened in the Gilets Jaunes protests, where anger over cost of living united people across normal political divides and (crucially) social class. The result was the greatest threat posed to the Fifth Republic since May ‘68; there was one point where helicopters were being prepared to evacuate Macron from the Elysée palace. That confluence seems to be what is happening again today. When we talk of the French police as ‘militarised’, it conjures US-centric images of a police force given access to all sorts of military tools and gradually becoming a holding pen for people too violent for airsoft, yet too incompetent for the military. But in France, a major component of their riot control force is the Gendarmerie mobile, part of the Armed Forces; in the French case, then, it’s perhaps more accurate to call them policified soldiers. Whether civilian or soldier, what all French cops have in common is a predilection towards violence that exceeds their peers in neighbouring countries. In recent days, National Police armed with assault rifles have been dispatched to schools, and the Municipal Police (roughly equivalent to traffic wardens) have been co-opted into riot control duties for which they are untrained and from which they are normally prohibited. In the past few weeks, teenagers have lost teeth, eyes and hands facing off against the CRS, leading to condemnation from Amnesty International and the UN. Yet the students continue to march, and increasingly their signs (and those of their parents) reference these shocking acts. The students have also clearly been paying attention in history class: last week I saw a sign that read ‘we’ve killed kings for less than this’; and I’ve been seeing more and more references to May ‘68. History weighs heavy on the French everyday imaginary. It’s almost like the experience of both the Nazi occupation, and the preceding Vichy collaboration, have left a traumatic impression on the very language itself: one is not a ‘traitor’ in French, but a ‘collabo’; the police are routinely compared to the Vichy-era Milice; and the word ‘rafle’ (roughly ‘police roundup’) is laden with Holocaustic baggage. But equally, you can trace the history of pretty much anything here, from a contemporary newspaper to the French equivalent of HMV, and eventually hit on a connection to the French Resistance (or, the other side). This sense of movement history is also expressed in the remarkably intergenerational membership of many of the marches I’ve been on and groups I’ve participated in. Grandmas here do not retire quiescently; they stand facing our march flipping the double bird and shouting ‘ANTIFA’ at the top of their lungs (true story). It is hard to overstate how much of a strategic misstep the state’s decision to violently suppress the early student protests has been. Spend any time in the outdoors and one of the first things you learn is that most animals are safe enough, except when they are protecting their young—the sense of ‘mama bear’ energy behind French society’s protective enveloping of their youth is also hard to exaggerate. Teachers have connected their own struggles with that of their students; university students—older brothers and sisters to the lycéen·ne·s both figuratively and, often, literally—shut down 100% of mainland institutions last Tuesday in solidarity; apolitical parents are out in the street en masse to protest the mutilation of their children; farmers in tractors joined school blockades; and the youth uprising has not been limited to only metropolitan France. This all coincides with rolling waves of pre-planned strike action, ranging from public servants to exhausted firefighters (following an unprecedented summer of wildfires).It’s hard to say what will happen next. There were rumblings, even before the lycéen·ne·s seized control of the headlines, that this coming Saturday would mark a new Gilets Jaunes movement, but this seemed to be mostly limited to unsourced AI slop posters shared on social media. But former GJ organisers have urged their supporters to support the students, and so it’s possible that even an originally inorganic movement may provide a point around which these various struggles can converge. Ultimately it’s hard to see an off-ramp for the state: they have nothing plausible to promise the youth except the excitement of being conscripted to go die in the Balkans. The political centre has thoroughly discredited itself, and next year’s elections are set to be a literal choice between socialism or barbarism. But whilst the left-wing LFI stands to gain the most electorally from this mass mobilisation of young people (many of whom will be voting age come April), and the LFI certainly has a prominent flag-waving presence on these marches, I don’t think the students are content to wait until next year, nor overly convinced that electoral politics are the way to best achieve their demands. I’ve just come back from my third march in two weeks, as ‘Act V’ of the student protests begins. All I can say for now is that the marches have been larger than I’ve seen before, that they remain so, and that I see little sign that the momentum is slowing. The post Postcard from Montpellier appeared first on Freedom Press.

France is at the forefront of a European wave of school and university-led insurrection with protests now spreading to Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Germany and Austria. Demands vary from country to country, but the shared grievances are the cost of living, access to decent housing and deteriorating school infrastructure, all of which deepen the chasm between privileged minorities and excluded majorities. State administrations are therefore no longer facing isolated protests over education, but a groundswell of youth-led unrest that brings students in generalised direct conflict with police forces—events that could once again gain momentum and set the agenda for political and social transformation. In France, the youth uprising, now in its third week, began in Paris-suburb high schools and spread nationwide despite heavy police repression. The high school union says about two-thirds of public high schools were blockaded on 6 October, and nearly all mainland universities shut down. Meanwhile the mainstream political system tries to rise to the occasion, condemning or co-opting the movement depending on which side of the spectrum it sits, right or left respectively. The problem officials face is that this movement is on the offensive, going for victory. It has its own agenda—it did not simply erupt “against a reform” or “in reaction” to political events but is reportedly in revenge, echoing the Nahel uprising. Working-class crews (bandes) are also reported to be the driving force, without demands or representatives, indifferent to the codes of the Left and to bourgeois politeness. High school actions are diverse and go beyond blockades to sabotage, barricades, wildcat strikes and the mockery of authority. The mainstream unions want to defuse the renewed call for 17 October, which recalls the Yellow Vests, while the left puts forward demands that help separate “good” protesters with demands from “bad” rioters. In Belgium, the mobilisations have led to repeated clashes with the police and hundreds of arrests. The tension was such that local authorities banned public gatherings of more than three people until 16 October, citing the risk of further incidents. Hundreds of school and university students kept gathering regardless, protesting the cost of education, overcrowded classrooms and scarce resources, and showing that the state’s response is not enough to halt the momentum. Madrid (Radical Graffiti) In Italy, the first school occupations in Turin and Rome took place under the slogan “Let’s do as they do in France”, over chronic underfunding, dilapidated school buildings and rising living costs, and a student delegation travelled to Paris in solidarity. Students in Ireland are demonstrating against high fees, higher education funding and the lack of affordable student housing. In Germany they are joined by teachers and parents, and in Austria university students have announced new mobilisations. In Spain, housing protests sparked by the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal have spread to dozens of cities, prompting a snap election and a general strike call. The Gen Z movements in Europe follow those across the globe: widely leaderless, centreless insurrections led by tech-savvy youth who use social media to spread instantly and create real political shifts in their home countries. In Nepal, a mobilisation born online and on the streets toppled the government and led to a Discord-based nomination of an interim administration. In Madagascar, university students forced the president to flee the country. In Morocco, Discord-based organising extracted government promises of more spending on employment, health and education.  In Peru, two presidents were removed within four months and new coalitions of youth collectives took shape. Protests in Indonesia, India and Timor-Leste forced reversals of unpopular policies. In Albania, decentralised Gen Z-style protests that began against a destructive luxury resort widened into demands for government resignation, and cost-of-living protests returned in Kenya and the Philippines. These movements largely form outside existing structures, have in some cases resisted co-optation by opposition parties, and build cross-border solidarity through symbolism and social media. The horizontal, anti-hierarchical structures and the thoroughly anti-authoritarian ethos of this uprising of kids against police authority recall the youth insurrections of the late 2000s and early 2010s around the world. The current waves feel like they pick up the baton from those years, and from the break with vanguardist politics signalled in the mountains of Chiapas in the 1990s. The excluded rise up, loudly, in search of a response to the root problem of hegemony at the level of everyday life, while raising existential questions about humanity’s future on a declining planet. States, capitalists and all political forces, anarchists included!, have been scrambling ever since to catch up or respond. Governments of the left and of the authoritarian right alike, formed in the echo of those revolts, have proved at ease with a capital-backed far-right surge that the neoliberal centre props up to contain the cyclical waves of insurrection across the globe. As illustrated in more detail in Gen Z Makes History, the youth-led uprisings have occurred in international resonance with each other, in places toppling governments and shaking others into changing in ways unimaginable only days before. It is not elections but militant street actions that strike fear into regimes and compel reforms in governments on three continents. The cost in lives and injuries is high (at least 76 dead in Nepal alone), but those once dismissed as “narcissistic babies of the Internet Age” and a “lost generation” are, through their sacrifices, changing the conversation globally and inspiring people to look to the future with new hope. The post Gen Z on the barricades appeared first on Freedom Press.

We also consider the increasingly desperate measures the US government is taking to try and shore up its position ahead of the mid-terms, especially on diesel reserves; the likely capture of Brazil by Trumpish far-right candidate Flavio Bolsonaro; Royal Mail’s upcoming jobs cull; and the rise of attacks by the far-right against HMOs. The post La Revolte! Panic in the French State appeared first on Freedom Press.

THE CONFLICTS IN UKRAINE AND GAZA HAVE BEEN HIGHLY TECHNOLOGICAL, PUSHING SURVEILLANCE TO NEW HEIGHTS. ~ Nikita Ivansky ~ As the first bullets fly and shells explode, we begin to learn the names of the war machines and the companies that manufacture them. We learn which weapons are the most lethal and cause the most harm. However, during this learning process, the other side of the war often slips from our sight. The smaller companies, which work with information, are overlooked. From processing your personal data to AI that assists with bomb strikes, invasive technologies have a hard time passing through civil society in times of peace. However, when violence erupts, and we all look to the sky, hoping for no more drone strikes in our neighbourhood, we are happy about the eyes looking in all directions, trying to find an enemy. The conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza have been among the most technologically advanced on this planet. But outside the traditional scope of war – where tanks and firearms kill and destroy – these technological wars push surveillance to new heights. Four months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp personally visited the country to offer his services to the Zelensky government. For free. Most activists following the surveillance sector are familiar with Palantir, a data-mining giant that law enforcement in many countries dream about. In Ukraine, the company has found a zone outside of regulations where it can test its software on the live data of millions of people. According to Time magazine, “Palantir’s software uses AI to analyse satellite imagery, open-source data, drone footage, and reports from the ground to present commanders with military options. It is responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine.” And not only targeting. Time also noted that Palantir was working with half a dozen ministries in the country, including the ministry of finance and education. Palantir itself doesn’t produce the data. It doesn’t manage surveillance satellites or street-level CCTV cameras – those are handled by different companies. Palantir accumulates and processes data, assisting humans in decision-making. In a country like Ukraine, Palantir can operate with little oversight. While Ukrainian society struggles against the Russian invasion, help is accepted from any direction. The Palantir CEO understands this, as does most of the Western military-industrial complex. Another role in processing data for the war was given to controversial American face-recognition technology (FRT) company Clearview AI. Officially its software is used to identify the bodies of combatants, and possible spies crossing into Ukraine. Police forces also use it to identify war criminals and those responsible for kidnapping Ukrainian children – a very wide scope of operations. A Ukrainian digital security laboratory commented on Clearview AI’s usage in the country: “Initially developed for law enforcement purposes, Clearview’s technology matches the images against the database of publicly stored images scraped from websites, including social media platforms. Notably, despite not having unified legislation on the usage of such data, Ukraine still resorts to digital measures without legal framework and safeguards … arbitrary usage of FRTs by authorities may negatively influence citizen’s privacy, by continuing to be applied even when the emergency ceases to exist.” While Clearview AI faces legal challenges in the US and EU, Ukraine provides space for its work without any serious challenges. From personal conversations, only some Ukrainian anti-authoritarian activist circles were aware of the facial recognition systems in their cities. This is mostly due to the fact that groups which would usually fight against a surveillance state are currently occupied with resisting the Russian invasion, while State repression is still very low compared to the rest of the region. Both Palantir and Clearview AI are companies built around the extreme-right tech movement mobilised by billionaire fascist Peter Thiel. It is hard to imagine the role of these companies, as well as many smaller ones trying to enforce strong government control, fading away in the event of a ceasefire or peace agreement. The infrastructure is in place, and the State’s security forces have seen its effectiveness. It is more likely that Thiel’s allies will continue to assist certain government branches. In a country with a growing far-right movement, this could pose a serious threat not only to anarchists but also to moderate leftists and liberals. While we know little about surveillance processes in Russia, even before the invasion, Putin’s regime tried to create a network to control any opposition activity. It was used in 2022 to detain or force into exile many political opponents. In recent days, control, especially in occupied territories, has reached a new level, fuelled by a fear of saboteurs. With the global ecological crisis only getting worse and the possibility of a full-scale war across Europe, we are looking at a very dire future of rapid surveillance expansion and automated data processing. Algorithms will make decisions about repressions against certain parts of society. This will certainly be a challenging future, but we must fight to stop fascism today, as tomorrow will be too late. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article first appeared in the Winter 2025/26 issue of Freedom Journal Image: Funeral of David Chichkan in August, by @polidavydenko.   The post Ukraine: Big Brother in a warzone appeared first on Freedom News.

CAPITALISTS ARE MUCH, MUCH BETTER AT LYING THAN AT SOLVING PROBLEMS RELATED TO THEIR OWN GREED ~ Rob Ray ~ A couple of years ago I attended a talk by Peter Gelderloos at the London Action Resource Center (Larc) on his then-new book, The Solutions Are Already Here. He wasn’t in the best of shape — as is now common knowledge, he had been diagnosed with a brain tumour and was on his way back to the US to, among other things, try and get some help with it. Larc being a small venue, and Gelderloos being among the radical scene’s larger names, the place was packed with people, a little claustrophobic as he stood at the front to give his talk on the impossibility of stopping, or even slowing, climate change without a significant social revolution. In the dim orange light preferred by the Larc crew, a little wired and clearly exhausted from the combination of illness and travel, there was a half-wild and somewhat messianic aspect to his presentation, a shadowed, shaggy-haired and shiny-eyed character grasping and gesticulating as he outlined two futures. A likely one of catastrophic climate change driven by capitalism’s inherent inability to control its own, cancer-like growth, or the almost imperceptible hope of a genuine ecological revolution driven by society’s realisation that survival and business as usual are not compatible. You can find a (better-rested and longer-form) version of it here, in a talk he gave a year prior to the Marxist Education Project: I was impressed by his zeal (and frankly by the fact he was there and standing at all), but doubted his message would find many converts outside the sort of people who already frequent Earth First! events. The trouble being that telling folk the only solution is to destroy capitalism is a hard sell at the best of times, and in April 2023 capitalists could point to any number of initiatives to show how they were “making progress.” Unconvincing to someone who is disinclined to look past 50 years of excuses, lies, vacillating and half-hearted compromises, perhaps, but enough for your average liberal who really wants to believe someone else can sort it all out while retaining, roughly, the status quo. Just two years later, though, Gelderloos’s predictions that capitalism would be unable even to maintain its existing lacklustre efforts towards reducing carbon emissions, let alone deepen them, are worth returning to. Because that feverish anarchist, ranting about capitalism’s follies in a stuffy former Methodist Hall, was pretty much spot on. THE 2030-NEVER OF ELECTRIFICATION The promises of capitalism to magically technologise the world to reduce emissions hinged, in the 2010s to early 2020s, on a few key ideas. First, reduce the direct emission of carbon dioxide by electrifying everything. Cars, trucks, buses, boilers, even steel foundries. Second, clean up electricity generation by switching to a combination of renewables, and maybe something like nuclear or cold fusion or grid-scale battery for base load (tbd). Third, discourage companies from polluting by introducing a complex system of carbon trading credits. Fourth, lean in to improving efficiency at “consumer” level — better insulation, less waste etc. With a gradual tightening of such policies, it was thought, the system could switch over to a non-damaging model, and capitalism could continue doing its thing. Now there is, as has been pointed out with increasing volume for the entirety of living memory, already a fundamental problem there which simply cannot be fixed. Growth. Capitalism demands it, and in fact, faces crisis without it. Efficiency on a GDP balance looks very much like recession — lower production, less economic activity. So if you’re going to be both more efficient with what you’re already making and placate the religion of growth you in fact need to accelerate exploitation of resources. Make more, sell more to keep the line going up. The green revolution must be economically justified as an opportunity for growth and the opening of new markets. It must be fully exploited for increased profitability. Thus we find, in the late 2010s, the enthusiastic initial take-up of electric vehicles as a panacea. Growth with falling emissions. Perfect. First Tesla, then every other company, started to experiment and found, to their delight, that the electric car did present possibilities. You could sell it like a luxury item and get a big State subsidy. You could stuff it full of modern technologies, from big screens to 360-degree cameras permanently connected to central servers. You could make repairs impossible without sending it to your own workshop. Enshittification theory and panopticon surveillance applied beyond the internet, in an industry where much of the population is entirely hostage, unable to function without the range afforded by a vehicle and unsupported by mass transit. We also find the massive new wave of solar and wind farms, thunking megaprojects bypassing the old community ideals of transition towns becoming independent of Big Energy. We see the flogging of replacement green tech for boilers, the promise that (whichever country) will be a Green Energy Superpower. Spool forward to 2025, and it’s all falling apart. The megaprojects have problems moving energy to where it’s needed. Spain apparently produces too much solar, Scotland too much wind, at the wrong times. To no industry watcher’s surprise, European and US car manufacturers are flubbing the electric market to the point that subsidies were removed by Trump, Tesla has started making sci-fi promises about mass self-driving vehicles to hide its woeful sales figures, and the EU is preparing to ditch its 2035 target to abolish internal combustion engines, with the UK likely to follow. Both the “UK” (internationally owned) oil majors of Shell and BP, after a desultory few years pretending to give a single solitary damn about renewables, have dumped their interest in wind to reinvest in fossil fuels. The big rock candy mountain of cold fusion is as far away as ever, and nuclear baseload remains low, with much-touted “mini” reactors already, as the Financial Times quips, “losing their glow.” Carbon offsetting, meanwhile, simply doesn’t, and has never, worked. END OF THE PRETENCE? Some of this is simply the end of the road for a cycle of demonstrative reactions to political fashions that began in the 2000s, when climate activism was at its height and had forced its way into the global conversation. A combination of the rise of the far-right, the impact of powerful lobbying interests and the collapse of astroturfing, both because it had become less effective and because companies no longer felt the need to virtue signal. At no point had the rich ceased to consume exactly what they wanted, nobody had cut back on private jets or superyachts. If solar and wind had grown, it was largely to service expanded consumption, rather than decarbonising. Most notable in this farce was that fossil fuels never actually stopped being produced and used. In fact, apart from the pandemic, every year to date has seen a new record for global oil consumption. The same is true for coal. In terms of cutting back on CO2 emissions, capitalism has failed year after year in absolute terms. Every single watt of solar energy was additional to fossil fuel use. China is often blamed for this, but it is the workshop of the world, not just domestic markets. Global consumption of its goods within unaccountable neoliberal models drove the opening of all those Chinese coal plants, exactly as the 2000s anti-globalisation movement predicted it would, outsourcing air pollution to nations where poverty and autocracy ensured few complaints could be raised. Renewables capacity wouldn’t magically have appeared if these factories had moved to Europe instead. And we know this in part because where a sudden spurt of building new industry has happened, it’s been dirtier than a Texan rigger. Tesla, infamously, ended up fuelling its “superchargers” with diesel. So too the vast server “farms” which have been built to power the extraordinarily wasteful AI bubble. Most of those slop videos and images people generate  for social media are burning dead dinosaurs by the tonne. In fact, between the ultra-capitalist dream of crypto markets and this dystopian sci-fi hellscape of tech bros’ imagined Nazi artificial superintelligences, you can pretty much write off the entire benefit from solar and wind as having been sucked up into an exercise filling the internet with a more convincing type of garbage. That’s what capitalism, in the post-pandemic world, has actually done regarding the one big ecological issue that it said it was going to fix. That was its supposed best effort. Gelderloos, in his own critique (which I should note comes before a much more optimistic and constructive offering of what to do about it), notes: “Even though they’re they’re reducing it just to climate and they’ve been aware of the danger of climate change – like the US government recognised it as a national security problem already back in the 1960s – their responses have been militarising borders and increasing the deployment of militaries for, you know, so-called disasters, natural disasters, and things of that nature. And then also making big agreements that have done exactly nothing to slow down greenhouse gas emissions. “So even within their reductionism, they don’t do a good job of dealing with the one part of the problem … The larger part of it they have to ignore, and then of the part that they look at, half of it they don’t get right, and the other half they deal with in a way that that actively harms us.” This is what we’re now being asked to look past, to “just trust us bro.” We are about to run headlong into any number of issues related to unsustainable exploitation of resources – most notably food and water – in a situation where capital made not the slightest dent in solving the runaway climate change it said it was the only solution to. In fact it made more headway simply persuading the easily-led there was no problem. Capitalists are much, much better at lying than they are at solving problems related to their own greed. I’ll finish with a quote, culled from Octopus founder and green energy enthusiast Greg Jackson in a December 10th interview with RS. In it, he describes an encounter with one of his opposite numbers in the fossil fuel gig: “I was sat literally next to a very senior executive from a very big, very well-known oil company. And a person asked him about climate change. And he said ‘look, we’re planning on 2.75 degrees. And the guy said ‘well, what does that mean?’ And he said ‘six metres of sea level rise’.” And the rest. When bosses talk to other bosses, you finally get to a version of the truth. What our lords and masters really have in mind for us is death. Mass, irrevocable, on an unimaginable scale. That’s “priced in” to their calculations. That’s what we’re up against. The death cult of Big Oil, fuelling the death cult of Big Tech, paying for the nihilistic, careless lifestyles of Earth’s few thousand  early 21st-century ultra-rich, until the clock strikes midnight. They have to be deposed. The dimly-lit hopes of Gelderloos’ gesticulations and all our decades of struggle towards better alternatives must prevail. The alternative is catastrophe. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: odg.cat CC BY-NC 4.0 The post Capitalism’s ‘green transition’ is dead—was it ever truly alive? appeared first on Freedom News.

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.