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.

IF THE GOVERNMENT REALLY HAD THE COURAGE TO “RECONNECT EMOTIONALLY” WITH THE BRITISH VOTER, IT WOULD BE BLASTED BY SHAME AND HORROR ~ Tabitha Troughton ~ What is this, slithering in your direction, smears of red and shards of bone in its wake, smirking ingratiatingly, waving gory tentacles, and muttering platitudes through its 27,000 teeth? Is it a giant slug? No! It’s the UK’s government, which has just been told, by Starmer’s toxic chief of staff, that it needs “to reconnect emotionally with voters”. Given the government’s documented track record of carnage, cowardice and corruption, voters may well flee, but the Guardian is made of sterner stuff. “In a presentation”, that paper explained seriously on its 6 January front page, “ministers were told the government needed to gain back voters’ trust with three Es”. The jokes are writing themselves. Who would not, at this point, risk an MDMA-induced stroke for a brief, delusional high, in which one forgets the government’s ongoing policies, and also the near indescribable awfulness of a recent Keir Starmer promo video, in which workers were invited to Downing Street for Christmas lunch. This showcased the prime minister prodding limply at cold roast potatoes,and pretending to chat to a prole, while completely ignoring their replies. It was the best they could do, or a post-realist joke. The “three E’s” with which the government were told to woo the country turn out to be “emotion, empathy and evidence”. Presumably the same emotion driving continued diplomatic and military support for our ally, the Israeli government, whose continuing genocide in Gaza has seen children freeze to death in inundated tents. Perhaps the empathy to match that of our ally, the Israeli government, who backs settlers ravaging in the West Bank and escalates the torture and rape of Palestinian prisoners with relish and impunity. Or maybe the kind of evidence yet to be heard against un-convicted prisoners of conscience starving to death in UK prisons for opposing weapons supply to our ally, the Israeli government—deliberately held on remand way beyond the legal limit, while the government contemptuously dismisses them. The UK’s prime minister, eyes glassy, refuses to support international law. It is not, he says, in the “national interest”, as though it is ever in the national interest to be a humiliated ally to demented, brutal, sociopathic regimes. The economy of Spain, whose government has stood openly against Trump, is out-performing those of Germany, France and Italy. Meanwhile the UK, staggering and flailing, pays vassal tribute: billions more to US pharmaceuticals, billions upon billions more on “defence”. There is a vast, shapeshifting horror in the shape of civil war, posing on the horizon behind the UK’s giant slug of shame. It is being invited into the country by obedient acolytes Nigel Farage and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. And this government’s attempt to ditch jury trials, for example, is the latest in a series of gifts to this unholiest of gods. It is now absurdly easy to picture the UK state in five years time as a low-budget version of America, even without Reform. Looking to Gaza, we might be tempted to think we deserve this. But of course, no-one deserves this. If the government did have the courage to “reconnect emotionally” with the British voter, it would be blasted by shame and horror. Hannah Arendt observed, in ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, that modern terror is not merely used by dictators against opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people, who are perfectly obedient. So, to the barricades, UK citoyens! Keep up your pens and paintbrushes, your guitars and cameras, your research tools; keep raising your flags and voices; sport your frivolous costumes against the coming shadow. Create plans for neighbourhood support. Save the slug from itself. Being “perfectly obedient” is not an escape, or an answer. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Number10 on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 The post Gifts to the unholiest of gods 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.

THE RECENTLY PUBLISHED BROCHURE ANARCHISTISCH RECHT EXPLORES ‘ANARCHIST LAW’ AS A COLLECTIVE TERM FOR FURTHERING CRITIQUES OF THE SOCIAL AND LEGAL ORDER ~ Thom Holterman ~ Anarchism can offer an excellent framework for fundamental legal criticism. Since anarchists critique capitalist society, which relies on oppressive laws to maintain its existence, the addition of legal perspectives can allow for decisive criticisms of the present social order. The two approaches do not exclude each other; instead, anarchists can advance legal criticism without compromise. This aligns with what is known as ‘positive anarchy’, a term borrowed from Proudhon. Fundamentally, it encompasses a view of society without oppressive power and refers to order, dynamism, and rationality, in addition to mutualism and federalism. Such views and ideas can also be found in Kropotkin and Bakunin. Here, I would like to emphasise Clara Meijer-Wichmann (1885-1922) in particular, as she was one of the first female jurists, challenging existing criminal law and the entire penitentiary system over a century ago. What I call ‘anarchist law’ here should be understood as a collective term with plural meanings. ‘Anarchist’ refers both ideologically to ‘anti-capitalist’ and sociologically/politically to ‘without coercion’. Referring to ‘law’ as anarchist law thus places the term into a forward-looking perspective towards a libertarian society. This future-oriented focus does not imply that it is new, or without a past. Forms of anarchist law have always existed, but have remained largely unknown. As is evident in my first contribution in the recently-published brochure Anarchistisch Recht, entitled ‘Law and Power in a Libertarian Perspective’, one of the sources of law is human co-operation. This is further elaborated in my second contribution, ‘George Gurvitch (1894-1965) and Social Law’, where his ideas of ‘social law’ and political pluralism are discussed. The third contribution, entitled ‘State, Law, and Legitimacy’, addresses the foundations of that ‘other’, libertarian society, by French libertarian activist, anarcho-syndicalist, and historian René Berthier. The fourth contribution comes from French libertarian jurist Anne-Sophie Chambost, a university lecturer in legal history specializing in Proudhon. She demonstrates that anarchist law already has a history. Her text is titled ‘Anarchist Thoughts on Law in the 19th and 20th Centuries’. In these first four contributions, anarchism and law are seen as converging. As already noted, this doesn’t preclude viewing the two phenomena in a divergent, mutually-opposed sense. Law that is used to maintain the existing capitalist society, which is precisely what anarchists are fighting against, is a main aspect of this opposition. The Armenian physician, activist anarchist, and author Alexander Atabekyan (1868-1933) makes clear to us that this has been the case for a long time. His contribution, the fifth, was sent to me in a German translation from Russian, published here under the title ‘Law and Supremacy’. The apparent divergence between anarchism and law can be put into practice or worked around in various ways. In the sixth contribution, I listed some of these anarchists’ ways: ‘Apart from the Law – On Illegalists, Direct Action, Take and Eat movement’. Finally, the seventh contribution is by French libertarian jurist and anarcho-syndicalist Pierre Bance, who once again comprehensively examines the ‘question of law in anarchy’ and encourages recognising ‘anarchist law’ as a key issue.   The post Anarchism and Law 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.

WE’RE CAUGHT IN A LOSE-LOSE SITUATION IN THE MODERN MEDIA WORLD: REFUSAL LESSENS OUR REACH, ENGAGING SETS US UP AS TARGETS ~ Rob Ray ~ A couple of friends of mine, hailing from an end of the anarchist scene where skipping and shoplifting are more common, were telling me about their experiences from this venerable part of the rebel lifestyle recently. It’s a time-honoured part of hunting dinner in the bowels of big supermarkets that the greatest flaw in even the best security systems has always been bored minimum-wage night staff whose class consciousness extends, at the very least, to not giving a single solitary wossit about some snacks and a tinny galloping out the door. The theatrically rolled eye, or a muttered “at least wait until my back’s turned” has been the saviour of many a struggling person. As with so much of our daily lives now, however, the rollout of not just CCTV but facial recognition technology is making itself known. Usually using the excuse of a “devastating wave of shoplifting” that’s “driving supermarkets out of the area.” This unpitying, inhuman eye does not roll, it simply reports directly up the chain, to someone whose actual class (worker) is blurred by their designation (manager). An unpaid, ever-vigilant quisling following the poor round the store. We’re filmed through almost every aspect of our public lives now, with both the State and private business rapidly converting the results into databases which, as the recent unpopular move towards a centralised ID system suggests, are only a stone’s throw from being amalgamated. For law and order purposes, naturally. As a result of this techno-stool pigeon’s spread, my friends were finding, a ban from one major store had become more easily enforced across all related properties. They were automatically flagged. Another few pounds saved for the bottom-line profit of the billionaire class. Later, away in another wing of the movement, I was reminded of this observation while listening to a talk by reps of Campaign Against Police Surveillance (COPS) and Police Spies Out of Lives. They were explaining their experiences dealing with spycops who had infiltrated so many of the left’s political movements throughout the 20th and early 21st century. For anarchists, particularly those active in the environmental movement of the 1990s and 2000s, the officers who infiltrated their communities were a particular horror. They started relationships with women and even had kids with them purely as cover for forms of petty snooping which, as the inquiry has revealed, amounted to little more than coppers pathetically cosplaying the spy game. Infamously, while the inquiry ground on over the years, legislation was brought in not to restrain, but to enable, similar behaviour in future. After seven years of slowly leaking revelations and a mountain of evidence that it couldn’t be trusted to follow even the most basic ethical standards, the Met was gifted the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021. It allows any police force, security service branch and every other major agency up to and including the Food Standards Authority to break laws if it brings in “intelligence.” What this should tell any reasonably-minded person is that the State is not a responsible body. It does not care about the safety of the public, but instead is quite happy to endanger it for the sake of knowing what non-violent dissenters are up to. And the irony? They may not even need it, for the most part. Because similar to skipping and shoplifting, it is technology, rather than sex-offending liars, which now provides their primary method of surveillance. Handing spycops total impunity to exploit the families of the bereaved, like Stephen Lawrence, is a bastard’s bonanza enacted just on the off-chance, in case they ever feel the need to rape their way to some extra data. In-person spying is in many ways less powerful and a lot more expensive than getting yourself added to a messaging group and just feeding the whole thing into a database for later sorting. You can discover networks of support for a given organisation simply by filtering through their social media followers. Cameras and mics no longer need to be laboriously installed in likely places, they’re everywhere, being sorted and catalogued by increasingly clever large language models (marketed as AI). Which isn’t to say it won’t happen, especially if dealing with a savvy group, but technology has made watching us, every step and finger swipe, every day, in many ways trivial. What’s remarkable is how weak opposition to it really is. NGOs do the usual liberal thing, lefties have been quite slow on the uptake outside of the everyday grind of protest, and of course, no parliamentary party has shown any interest in making the law less onerous. In fact the grouping which has been most vocal about civil liberties in the media is probably the far-right, which, for all its huffing and puffing about free speech, has little to no quarrel with the core functionality of government intrusion. What victory is it to secure Graham Linehan’s right to be an obsessive, self-destructive bully without let or hindrance when the State is busily drawing to itself all the apparatus of a surveillance state in the sort of granular detail Orwell could never have foreseen? They have had nothing to say about – or have been joyously in favour of – the extension of repressive legislation and policy against left-wing targets. Most notable is Palestine Action, but prior laws and policing priorities aiming to take out the non-violent climate actionists of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil met with a similar shrug/jeer response. It’s only when their own are threatened, or in service of a rhetorical bete noir (universities), that they suddenly discover their freedom-loving backbone. The truth of where Reform and its fellow travellers are going with this can be seen in the US, where it has taken a matter of months for the far-right to utilise all that power to purge the public sector, academia, and media of perceived enemies. The social media presences of everyone from judges to teachers to generals has been pored over for years by the MAGA grassroots, more efficiently by the likes of the Heritage Foundation and its allies, and in bulk by tech barons such as Zuckerberg, Musk and Thiel, as they sucked in endless data across various platforms. And now, with Trump at the helm, these once relatively latent forces, easily augmented by the powerful tools of the State, have been used as, effectively, a giant shopping list of people to be hounded out of key roles and replaced with loyalists to the cause. Visitors and students who show solidarity with Palestine are not just censured, but jailed and deported. Migrants are tracked and deported. Where supermarkets and activist surveillance go today in Britain, so broad civil society goes tomorrow via the landslide-in-the-making of Reform UK, or perhaps slightly more slowly through the grinding decay of technocrats. We have several difficulties dealing with this situation, especially in the event that the far-right gain power and feel emboldened enough to volte face completely on their “principles.” To start, much of the damage is already done. Few of us are entirely without footprint giving our opinions on social media – and indeed if we were we’d be caught the other way. Because despite all their carping, the far-right have very few real barriers to saying exactly what they want any more – egregious racists are actively welcomed in serious positions in the major parties – and we already have problems countering their reach. A wholesale abandonment of social media would be an abandonment of its hostage public to algorithmic pipelines leading straight to Andrew Tate or, worse, Robert Jenrick. But in presenting our own cases in the era of Tiktok and Instagram, we are expected to show faces, in public. To record our voices. To not do so by wearing masks or Anon-styled faceless screens usually restricts the audience, largely, to fellow-travellers and topics where masking up is considered logical. Which rather defeats the purpose of outreach, except as a recruitment tool for the already-interested – one that is in the hands of the very people we’re supposed to be resisting. So we’re caught in a lose-lose situation in the modern media world. Refusal lessens our reach, engaging sets us up as targets. What is to be done? What strategies can we work with? If engagement is necessary, how do we protect ourselves? Present ourselves? There is AI which can very effectively throw a realistic virtual mask over recorded videos – providing the expected friendly face. Deepfaking behind a VPN on a throwaway account? Grim, but plausible. And then the task of building our own media is always there, more important than ever as a means of locking identities away from the snoopers. Freedom is just one of several online media projects which are all understaffed and constantly in need of help – not just the odd bit here or there, but joining up with an understanding that the project is going to be long and difficult, and will be fighting to get heard over the noise. Finally there is the offline. Away from facial recognition cameras. The communities we live in. The analogue way may be the most important of all, the only one they won’t have access to, the hardest to infiltrate. The future of resistance, using the oldest methods. Much of the resilience we need to build has to happen in short order. If Trump’s ascension is any sort of guide to the ambitions of Reform, we will not simply be needing a better, more joined-up form of prisoner support but mechanisms to fight purges of progressive voices from every walk of life, or at least to help such Official Cancellations with support, and an entryway into effective resistance. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was originally published in the Winter 2025-26 issue of Freedom anarchist journal. Public domain image by VideoGirl The post A wall of electronic eyes replacing human feeling appeared first on Freedom News.

ONE DAY THERE WILL BE A RECKONING — BUT IT WON’T BE A WHITE BOY WITH A WAND AND A SCAR ~ Kell w Farshéa ~ This is a government of death. A cabinet of death-eaters who put the needs of capital and state above our humanity, and reactionary ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and disability above our shared solidarity. Death eaters who even now would rather prop up the genocidal state of Israel than attend to 8 activists on hunger strike who are being denied medical treatment or a judgement of their peers. People who have not even had a trial for crimes invented to suit the needs of Western geopolitical imperialism. People who saw the complicity of this British state and capital and fought back at source to intervene on behalf of humanity. The death-eaters manufacture consent through media as diverse as the BBC and GB News, the Guardian or the Express. Rationing social media and parliamentary questions for silence. So whilst basic access to medicine or a fair trial is denied — there is a mighty absence of the inquiring investigative journalism that the British press pretends to care about. There they are — the death eaters: Starmer, Lammy, Reeves, Mahmood, Streeting, Cooper — presiding over a cabinet of death. They take life-saving medical care from trans children and young people whilst praying to their gods in the name of love. They deport asylum seekers whilst claiming the mantle of liberalism. They pander to fascism and flag shagging, dangling the possibilities of mass deportations in the name of British fairness and British decency. A very British form of fairness built on the backs of colonial and imperial asset-stripping of half the world, of the third passage, the enslavement of millions, the cotton and sugar plantations, the indentured labourers, the gerrymandering of tribes, polities, countries and whole regions — all for the benefit of British capital and British power. The death eaters in Parliament — Farage, Badenoch, Starmer etc, — sidle up to the kleptomaniac fascist in the White House. They flatter him with baubles, monarchal fantasies of the divine right of kings, back when dictators dressed up their crimes with God (but don’t mention Charles I). Meanwhile they cut benefits for the dis/abled, play cheap tricks to push more gig economy working class people into tax brackets they cant afford. They promise whole new towns but do nothing about 700,000 empty buildings in the UK. They promise to bulldoze nuclear power stations through planning committees but still keep the oil and gas flowing from the North Sea. They demonise people who survive the prison system whilst doing nothing to address why so many veterans, ex-criminals, and people with mental health conditions will be the ones freezing on our streets this Christmas And still they cannot speak of Gaza. Gaza flooded. Gaza freezing. Gaza starving. The fake ceasefire and the Gaza land grab. Children shot for walking over invisible lines. Instead, the death eaters make political capital out of antisemitic hate crimes and mass shootings to avoid talking about Gaza. They’re all so pleased with themselves. And then there’s us. Spending our wages and benefits to keep people alive in Gaza in a global act of international solidarity. Brave comrades: arrested, harassed, punched in the face, laying down in the streets, slandered, occupying buildings, smashing the windows of the ECHR and Elbit. Same tactics, same struggles. One day there will be a reckoning. It won’t be a white boy with a wand and a scar though. It will be the whole damn world, and we will want justice. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photo: House of Commons on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 The post Governed by Death-eaters 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.

FAR FROM BEING A TRAGEDY, THE DEMISE OF THE FILM INDUSTRY SHOULD BE CELEBRATED ~ Andrew J. Boyer ~ Netflix has proposed an $82.7bn (£62bn) deal to purchase Warner Bros, a movie studio with over 100 years of cinema history under its belt. Paramount+ has joined in on the bidding in hopes to gain further media assets, as the two streaming services fight over dominance. The proposed deals would dramatically reshape the Hollywood industry towards streaming and will likely have a detrimental effect on local cinemas. This has understandably induced anxiety amongst cinephiles and casual movie-goers alike as they fear the ‘death of cinema’ is upon us. But is it really so bad? First, let’s ascertain that Hollywood has faced many ‘threats’, from sexual abuse scandals to writers strikes, to CGI replacing practical effects etc.. All of these issues stem from the same cause: the capitalist system. While A.I. is certainly a new threat on the horizon, Hollywood’s grotesque commodification of filmmaking has been decades long. Preference for speedy overblown franchises, name recognition, and nostalgia-mongering have been issues since at least the late ‘70s when modern ‘blockbusters’ emerged. Most will recall news of Ian Mcellan’s tearful breakdown on the set of The Hobbit. After having to recite most of his lines to green screen, he lamented “This is not why I became an actor”. Art has taken a back seat to commercialism in tinsel town for a while now. A further point against cinema whilst it’s knocking on death’s door, is the sheer amount of financial and environmental waste that goes into major motion pictures. Benedict Cumberbatch commented on this in his interview with Ruth Rogers earlier in the year, stating: “It’s a grossly wasteful industry. Think about set builds that aren’t recycled, think about transport, think about food, think about housing, but also light and energy. The amount of wattage you need to create daylight and consistent light in a studio environment. It’s a lot of energy.” Plenty of energy indeed. In 2021 the Sustainable Production Alliance reported that the average feature film has a carbon footprint of 3,370 metric tons. Understandably, Hollywood actors are often the subject of scorn for their hypocrisy on preaching climate responsibility to working people. But the most damning nail in the coffin of all: most blockbuster films these days are boring. There’s a genuine sense of ennui with the film industry that has plagued it since the turn of the century. Let’s not kid ourselves that this can be fixed with unions, laws, contract negotiations or (god forbid) more franchise reboots. The movie industry has been more about stifling art than producing it, yet many people can’t imagine films without it. To this effect, Hollywood can be considered what Ivan Illich called a “radical monopoly”. In his 1973 book ‘Tools for Conviviality’ he wrote: “Above all, by depriving people of the ability to satisfy personal needs in a personal manner, radical monopoly creates radical scarcity of personal–as opposed to institutional-service.” Of course, one could argue that the institutional aspect of cinemas is its appeal. Being handed your ticket and walking into a dark room with a large screen and surround sound is what separates the experience from simply watching a film in your living room. This, however, would overlook a very grassroots solution which anarchists and cooperative communitarians have championed for years: independent community cinema. Independent grassroots cinemas are often smaller, cozier and the seating is typically sofas pulled together, or perhaps tables and chairs facing a projector screen. A stellar example of one would be Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Whilst being run by volunteers, the cinema also works as a community kitchen and concert space, but most importantly: it screens films. From classics, to modern, and even local indie productions, grassroots cinemas provide essentially the opposite, more social experience to streaming isolated at home. Furthermore, as A.I. begins to infest the entertainment industry by replacing both actors and set design in the upcoming decades, independent cinemas can champion authentic human films which grasp at the heart of what cinemagoers are longing for. These independent film scenes run far less risk of fostering sexual abuse in the way top-down hierarchical Hollywood production companies have in the past; namely Harvey Weinstein, whose abuse sparked much of the #MeToo movement. It’s tough not to become sentimental about cinemas and Hollywood. Stories of the ‘golden age’ and memories of our favourite films can enchant our senses away from remembering that it is, in fact, an industry; and a very cold and calculative one at that. With the rising costs of living combined with a loneliness epidemic plaguing the western world, perhaps our sights shouldn’t be set towards saving Hollywood, but instead towards each other. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photo: howzey on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 The post It’s the end of cinema as we know it… and I feel fine appeared first on Freedom News.