A squatter, who goes by the name of Leaf, 28, relaxes in an empty former youth centre that is now occupied by squatter activist group Reclaim Croydon, in Croydon, South London. [Hannah McKay/Reuters]
A new leap in already Extortionate Rents has pushed million of Britons to the edge of Homelessness.
In the shopping streets and housing estates of the South London town of Croydon, some once-derelict buildings are slowly coming back to life.
People walk past a homeless man on a high street in Croydon. London Councils, an umbrella group representing the capital’s local authorities, said the number of people presenting as homeless increased by 14.5 percent in the year to September 2023, with more than 175,000 homeless and living in temporary accommodation. The cost of providing temporary housing in hotels, hostels or house shares rose by almost 40 percent last year to 90 million pounds ($113.54m) a month, London Councils said. [Hannah McKay/Reuters]
At a former school, peeling walls are getting a new coat of paint, and laundry hangs on a line to dry. Over at a disused youth centre, there is laughter in the gymnasium-turned-dormitory, and a vase of purple flowers decorates a scrubbed kitchen counter.
A child watches TV from his highchair in the space where he lives. The Reclaim Croydon collective has taken over disused commercial premises to provide beds for the homeless, saying it is providing a community-based solution to a broken housing market. [Hannah McKay/Reuters]
The Reclaim Croydon collective, a squatters group, has taken over disused commercial premises to provide beds for the homeless, saying it is providing a community-based solution to a broken housing market.
“The government is failing homeless people,” one of the youth centre’s new occupants, who goes by the name Leaf, told Reuters.
Zin, 47, paints a wall in an area used as a common room of the place he lives, which was once a school and is now occupied by Reclaim Croydon. [Hannah McKay/Reuters]
Britain has long lacked enough housing, but a 22 percent jump in private rents in England over the last five years has left growing numbers of people struggling to find anywhere to live. Housing routinely appears in the top five issues that pollsters report as the most important for voters ahead of Thursday’s general election.
The high rents and unaffordable house prices have meant people in their 20s or 30s are still living at home with parents or in house shares. At the most acute end, growing numbers are sleeping on the streets and in empty buildings, official figures show.
Squatters eat an evening meal together in a room used as a common room in the place where they live. [Hannah McKay/Reuters]
Studies have found that ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected, with a 2022 report published by the Centre for Homelessness Impact charity showing that Black people were more than three times as likely to become homeless as white people in England.
Both Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives and the main opposition Labour Party have pledged to tackle the housing crisis by building more homes.
Housing campaigners have long argued that local councils should also utilise some of the roughly 700,000 vacant homes in England as a cheaper and faster solution.
An external view of a former solicitors’ office, an empty building which Reclaim Croydon formerly occupied before they were evicted, is seen on a high street in Croydon. [Hannah McKay/Reuters]
“We’re seeing more and more councils saying that temporary accommodation budgets for people that they theoretically have a legal duty to house are literally bankrupting them,” Chris Bailey, campaign manager for the Action on Empty Homes charity, told Reuters.
KFARHAMAM, LEBANON – MAY 08: A view of damage after Israeli air strike hits Kafr Hamam town in Hasbaya district in southern Lebanon on May 08, 2024.(Photo by Ramiz Dallah/
The Israeli army wants to impose a buffer zone on the border with Lebanon approximately 100 kilometers long. It is doing so by devastating the forests and vegetation cover with phosphorus bombardment, as an even hotter summner begins..
Amnesty International has confirmed that Israel is using white phosphorus, an unconventional weapon, in its bombardment of southern Lebanon.
Tel Aviv justifies itself by saying that it is destroying shelters used by Hezbollah for its military operations against its residents.
In December last year, Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati raised his voice. “Large areas of Lebanon are subject to a regression of environmental conditions due to continuous Israeli attacks,” he warned.
Israel was defeated by Hezbollah in 2006 in Southern Lebanon and ever since the military have been screaming for revenge. In recent months, the strong Lebanese resistance has systematically destroyed dozens of radar stations, night vision cameras, infrared sensors, long-range communications towers, telescopes antennas inside Israel. This makes all Israel a target if war breaks out, including Jerusalem and the main Haifa port.
Hezbollah’s policy has left many Israeli bases unprotected, and forced a mass evacuation of up to half a million Israeli colonizers. Frustrated by failure to eliminate Hamas or complete the Genocide in Gaza the now unhinged extreme rightwing military/ regime is crying out for blood, threatening to “bomb Lebanon back to the stone age” and ‘devastate Beirut like Gaza‘.
It remains to be seen whether the Israeli dominated neocon US regime, which has bankrolled the ongoing Gaza genocide, will provide the billions of dollars necessary and risk a wider world war, spreading to Russian backed Iran, and even China.
“Constant Israeli attacks, including the use of banned white phosphorus weapons are killing civilians and causing irreversible damage to more than 5 million square meters of forests and agricultural land, in addition to having damaged thousands of olive trees,” the Lebanese prime minister claimed.
The situation is deteriorating as the days go by. The NGO Save the Children even fears a humanitarian crisis affecting tens of thousands of families in southern Lebanon, who were left without livelihoods after Israeli army fire destroyed more than 47,000 olive trees as well as other crops during their harvest.
Israel white phosphorous attacks on Lebanon are harming people and ecosystem… More than 92,600 people have been displaced from their villages in south Lebanon by the attacks, according to the IOM.
Four-year-old Merve has serious burns on her body due to phosphorus used by Israel on Gaza, according to doctors, shown here being treated at El Arish Hospital in El Arish, Egypt on November 15, 2023 [Burcu Calik Gocumlu/Anadolu via Getty Images]
With eight hundred hectares of land completely devastated, 340,000 head of livestock dead and about 75 percent of farmers destitute, Prime Minister Mikati warns that southern Lebanon risks becoming an “agricultural disaster zone.”
This part of Lebanon is famous for the production of citrus fruits, olives and tobacco in particular.
It is an area more than 100 kilometers long, stretching from Naqura to Mount Hermon and the hills of Kfar Shuba, and at a depth that exceeds an average of 6 to 7 kilometers.
More than eight months of war have left at least 458 people dead in Lebanon, including some 90 civilians and nearly 300 Hezbollah fighters.
Since the beginning of the Gaza war, in solidarity with the Palestinian people, Hezbollah has periodically exchanged fire with the Israeli army.
Israel believes that the Lebanese resistance movement uses the vegetation cover adjacent to the Lebanese border to conceal its military operations.
In addition, Israeli shelling targeted several southern regions, killing two people, including a Hezbollah fighter, and sparking large fires on Saturday.
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Since October 7, all eyes have been on Hezbollah. The Zionists know that if it makes a false move in Gaza, the various factions of the Axis of Resistance, and first and foremost Hezbollah, will be confronted.
Hamas spokesman Abu Obaida says in a statement posted on social media that his organization had captured several Israeli army soldiers during an ambush in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. Members of the Palestinian organization lured an Israeli unit into a tunnel in Jabaliya refugee camp and ambushed it.…05.06.2024
Hezbollah attacked 15 sites in Metulla yesterday with anti-tank missiles and Shlomi Eldar, Israeli correspondent for Channel 13, confesses that the protectiles are a significant threat because Israeli warning systems are unable to detect them. Israeli media acknowledge that Hezbollah’s missiles, which are aimed beyond Israel’s border, have intensified and…14.12.2023
The recovery of a species that was on the brink of extinction is very good news, but these measures and efforts should have been applied to other species, such as the wolf, and this was not done. This is why it became extinct only a decade ago in Andalucia. In other parts of Spain wolves are making a comeback and soon they may return to the south.
Ecologistas en Acción publicly shows its satisfaction with the increase in lynx populations that has led to their transition from endangered to vulnerable, although trhis should not lead to triumphalism that coukld relax protection measures.
Now it is the turn of the wolf, the great predator of the Mediterranean forest that became extinct in Andalusia just a decade ago
The Iberian lynx has gone from less than 100 individuals at the beginning of the century to more than 2,000 this year. The success of the species conservation program is good news, the result of cooperation between public administrations, research centers and environmental associations.
Citizens have become more aware of the importance of conserving our biodiversity and the lynx has been a symbol.
But not all is rosy in the recovery of lynx populations.
There are shadows that should not be ignored if we want greater success and for the lynx to once again be present throughout Andalusia, fulfilling its important ecological function: balancing ecosystems, keeping other generalist predators such as the fox at bay, and controlling the number of rabbits where they can pose a problem due to overabundance.
One of the weaknesses of the lynx recovery program is its excessive dependence on captive breeding to compensate for deaths from unnatural causes, such as run-overs on trails and roads which is the main cause of death, and deaths from gunshots.
Another weakness is the lack of rabbits in the spaces where the habitat is most conducive to the conservation of the species. The rabbits are still decimated by involuntarily introduced diseases, which is why supplementary feeding is required to conserve lynx populations.
Paradoxically, the Andalusian Government continues to approve hunting emergency orders due to the abundance of rabbits in many agricultural regions, allowing rabbit hunting during the closed season due to alleged damage to agriculture.
The future of the lynx will not be guaranteed until its dependence on these policies is broken. To do this, it is necessary to expand the habitats in which the species can thrive, including agroforestry spaces such as riverbanks and livestock trails in agricultural environments, where lynxes have guaranteed food.
To do this, these public domain spaces must be renaturalized in their entirety, and thus provide refuge and reproduction areas for the species.
The recovery of a species that was on the brink of extinction is very good news, but these measures and efforts should have been applied to other species, such as the wolf, and this was not done, which is why it became extinct only a decade ago in Andalucia.
The recovery of predators in the Mediterranean forest must be a priority objective in Andalusia, as it will allow the ecosystems to be rebalanced, control the populations of wild boars and feral pigs, reduce the expansion of epizootics and even carry out positive selection of their prey, as opposed to the selection by hunting activity.
The Iberian wolf population has increased in Spain by 26% since 2014, although made extinct in Andalucia.
The Pyrenean bear population is consolidated with 83 specimens… Apr 4, 2024
The Pyrenean bear population continues to consolidate with a total of 83 specimens detected in the mountain range in 2023, four more than the previous year.
According to provisional figures, 16 cubs have been born to a minimum of 11 bears, the highest number of litters since the reinforcement began..
Some ‘Farmers’ oppose protection of fauna despite compensations
“La recuperación de una especie que estuvo al borde de la extinción es una muy buena noticia, pero estas medidas y esfuerzos se deberían haber aplicado a otras especies, como el lobo, y no se hizo, por lo que hace tan sólo una década se extinguió en Andalucía.
Ecologistas en Acción muestra públicamente su satisfacción por el aumento de las poblaciones de linces que ha motivado su paso de peligro de extinción a vulnerable, lo que no debe llevar a triunfalismos que relajen las medidas de protección.
Ahora le toca el turno al lobo, el gran depredador del bosque mediterráneo que se extinguió en Andalucía hace tan sólo una década.
El lince ibérico ha pasado de menos de 100 ejemplares a principios de siglo a superar los 2.000 este año. El éxito del programa de conservación de la especie es una buena noticia, fruto de la cooperación entre las administraciones públicas, centros de investigación y asociaciones ecologistas. La ciudadanía ha tomado conciencia de la importancia de la conservación de nuestra biodiversidad y el lince ha sido un símbolo.
Pero no todos son luces en la recuperación de las poblaciones de linces. Perviven sombras que no se deberían obviar si se quiere que el éxito sea mayor y que el lince vuelva a estar presente en toda Andalucía, cumpliendo su importante función ecológica: equilibrar los ecosistemas, manteniendo a raya a otros depredadores generalistas como el zorro, y controlando el número de conejos donde puedan suponer un problema por sobreabundancia.
Una de las debilidades del programa de recuperación del lince es su excesiva dependencia de la cría en cautividad para compensar las muertes por causas no naturales, como los atropellos en pistas y carreteras, su principal causa de muerte, y las muertes por disparos.
Otra debilidad es la falta de conejos en los espacios en los que el hábitat es más propicio para la conservación de la especie, diezmados por las enfermedades introducidas de manera involuntaria, por lo que se precisa alimentación suplementaria para conservar las poblaciones de linces. Paradójicamente, la Junta de Andalucía sigue aprobando órdenes de emergencia cinegética por abundancia de conejos en muchas comarcas agrícolas, permitiendo la caza de conejos en periodo de veda por supuestos daños a la agricultura.
El futuro del lince no estará garantizado hasta que no se rompa su dependencia de estos artificios. Para ello se precisa ampliar los hábitats en los que la especie puede prosperar, entre ellos los espacios agroforestales como son las riberas y las vías pecuarias en entornos agrícolas, en los que los linces tienen comida garantizada. Para ello hay que renaturalizar estos espacios de dominio público en su integridad, y así facilitar zonas de refugio y reproducción a la especie.
La recuperación de una especie que estuvo al borde de la extinción es una muy buena noticia, pero estas medidas y esfuerzos se deberían haber aplicado a otras especies, como el lobo, y no se hizo, por lo que hace tan sólo una década se extinguió en Andalucía.
La recuperación de los depredadores del bosque mediterráneo debe ser un objetivo prioritario en Andalucía, pues permitirá volver a equilibrar los ecosistemas, controlar las poblaciones de jabalíes y cerdos asilvestrados, reducir la expansión de epizootias e, incluso, realizar una selección positiva de sus presas en contra de la negativa que realiza la actividad cinegética.
Apr 4, 2024 La población deosos del Pirineo sigue consolidándose con un total de 83 ejemplares detectados en la cordillera en 2023, cuatro más que el año anterior. Según las cifras provisionales, han nacido 16 crías de un mínimo de 11 osas, el mayor número de camadas desde que comenzó el refuerzo
Anarchists in Southern Brazil on the Floods of May 2024
In the first days of May 2024, the territory known as Rio Grande do Sul in so-called Brazil suffered the biggest climate catastrophe in its history.
More than a week of intense rain caused several rivers to overflow, wrecking dozens of cities and destroying everything in their path, before flowing into the Guaíba River, causing the biggest flood ever recorded in the Greater Porto Alegre region.
By June, 171 deaths had been confirmed. Thousands of people lost everything; 614,000 were rendered homeless; over two million were impacted. The force of the waters erased entire cities from the map. More than 90% of the industry of the state of Rio Grande do Sul was flooded.
This is the greatest economic and structural damage a climate event has ever caused in Brazil. Reckoning by the number of people affected and the material damage, the tragedy already surpasses the destruction that Hurricane Katrina inflicted on New Orleans in 2005.
The state and the capitalist mode of production are directly responsible for the devastation of the planet. They have cut down forests to make way for cattle, monoculture, and mining, degrading the soil with urban expansion. They are producing more and more catastrophes like the one that struck Rio Grande do Sul. Amid all the horror, we see the complete failure of the ruling class to care for our lives and our environment.
The Municipality of Lajeado after the waters of the flood receded.
At the center of this tragedy, anarchists, Indigenous communities, quilombos, and social movements have been organizing solidarity efforts as they try to rebuild their lives and their territories—soliciting and distributing donations, calling for joint efforts for cleaning and reoccupying affected properties, and organizing new occupations of empty buildings to house those who lost their homes.
Here, we explore how capitalists and the state have taken advantage of the catastrophe and how grassroots movements have responded to it, and present an interview with anarchists impacted by the flooding.
If you are dismayed or inspired by what you read here, please considering supporting anarchists in southern Brazil here as they address the ongoing impact of the floods.
The State
Whenever a “natural” disaster strikes, we see once again that the priority of the state has never been to protect our lives. For decades, the Brazilian government ignored warnings about the dangers of environmental destruction and climate change and failed to take effective measures to prevent catastrophes like this. On the contrary, it played an active role in the destruction—sometimes at a slower pace, sometimes devouring the land voraciously.
This contempt for life and hatred of nature was blatant in Bolsonaro’s neo-fascist government. But even social democratic regimes, including progressive governments involving parties like the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party, or PT), contributed heavily to global warming, relying on the automotive industry, oil extraction, and other energy sources with a high environmental impact to boost economic growth.
In 2015, during the tenure of the PT’s Dilma Rousseff, scientific reports warning that climate change would cause floods were shelved as “too alarmist.”
At the state and municipal levels, the government’s continuous negligence has an immediate impact on our lives. Despite threats from one weather system after another, the governor and mayor did not develop adequate evacuation plans or warnings.
They did not even invest in the most minimal steps to protect the population. The current governor, Eduardo Leite (from the right-wing Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, Brazilian Social Democracy Party, or PSDB), shredded the state’s environmental legislation in order to favor businesspeople and reduced investments in Civil Defense during his government.
Confronted by journalists, Leite tried to justify this by claiming that “There are these studies that, in some way, warn, but the government also has other agendas.”
In Porto Alegre, the dam floodgates that protect the city failed due to lack of maintenance and closing errors. This became even more serious because the last administrations of Porto Alegre city hall had scrapped the DEP (Department of Storm Sewage), the body responsible for the system of dikes, floodgates and pumping stations that protect the capital of Rio Grande do Sul against floods, which imposed further demands on the DMAE (Municipal Department of Water and Sewage). According to experts, the city would not have flooded if the system had been properly maintained and managed.
Making matters worse, the mayor of Porto Alegre, Sebastião Melo, only decreed water rationing after 85% of the city was already without access to drinking water.
The populations of some neighborhoods were only notified that the pumps that prevented the flooding of their homes had been turned off after the fact, giving them no time to evacuate.
The Impact of Capitalism
The capitalist mode of production is the cause of climate shifts that threaten all life on earth. At the same time, the corporations and executives that profit from it are doing very little to mitigate the suffering of the population. In this case, if anything, they have made the situation even worse.
The capitalists failed to keep the supermarkets that were still operating stocked. Since they were interested in making a quick profit on people’s despair, they allowed those with money to buy up all the available water and supplies.
At the same time, dozens of stores were flooded while they were still filled with food, water bottles, and other essential items for the population, which had been locked inside under the protection of police and security guards armed with rifles—who had formed paramilitary groups to prevent hungry people from accessing food or other resources destined to rot in water.
The corporations and the state were more interested in protecting these goods than saving the lives of those who needed them, even if the items were bound to be discarded and compensated for by insurance companies.
flooded prison… Imagem do Complexo Penal de Charqueadas inundado em 4 de maio de 2024 | Foto: Divulgação/Susepe
A civil police officer shoots in the direction of a person suspected of looting a supermarket in Porto Alegre.
By Gilberto López y Riva | La Jornada In Mexico, a democratic transition does not take place with the collapse of the state party regime, upon the arrival of Vicente Fox to the Presidency of the Republic. There is a rotation of State parties, in which there is systemic continuity, a mere replacement of political […]
Zoe Baker’s book and videos Means and Ends are a comprehensive look at the revolutionary class-struggle anarchist movement as it existed and developed in the period from the International Workingmen’s Association of 1864-78 to the defeat of the anarchist and syndicalist-inspired revolution in Spain in 1939.
Although the book is not about the writings of famous anarchist authors, she often uses quotes from people like Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta to illustrate points. The author concedes that she only knows English and thus could not consult writings that have not yet been translated into English.
The book does not talk about all the various political tendencies that have used the “anarchist” label but mostly focuses on the main class-struggle oriented tendency which she calls “mass anarchism.”
Because the retreat from class is a common feature in the writing of various anarchists since World War 2 — from George Woodcock to Murray Bookchin and contemporary post-modernist anarchists — I have chosen to use “class-struggle anarchism” to refer to the political tendency this book is about.
People in that movement did not use the term mass anarchism which was first coined by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt in Black Flame. This term makes a certain sense, though, because of the orientation of that movement to mass struggle and building and participating in formally organized, democratic mass organizations such as worker unions, tenant unions, and independent women’s groups.
Origin
Zoe Baker starts out by honing in on the very specific anarchist tendency that her book is about. This political tendency first emerged as an organized political force within the framework of the International Workingmen’s Association (“First International”).
At a congress of the International in 1869, the majority of the delegates voted in favor of ownership of land by the whole society. This viewpoint was called “collectivism.” Among this collectivist majority, a tendency emerged who opposed a strategy oriented to the politics of parliamentary elections and parties and opposed the goal of gaining state power. This tendency often referred to itself by labels such as “federalist” and “revolutionary socialist.” The word libertarian was first used as another name for anarchism by Joseph Dejacque in 1857.
Thus “libertarian socialist” or “libertarian communist” were also labels used by this tendency.(p. 24) Many did not call themselves “anarchists” initially because anarchism was identified with Proudhon at that time. This emerging federalist, libertarian socialist tendency had significant disagreements with Proudhon.
From the 1840s on, Proudhon had advocated a strategy called mutualism. This was a gradualist strategy of social change through the building of worker cooperatives, with the aid of loans from a “people’s bank.” Proudhon thought the cooperatives could grow to eventually take over more social functions.
Proudhon opposed social ownership of the land, advocating private ownership by those who work the land, such as a peasant farmer. The federalist libertarian socialists did not support Proudhon’s mutualism but “advocated revolutionary…unionism and the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state through an armed insurrection, which would forcefully expropriate the capitalist class.” (p. 24)
As Baker points out, the opposition to Proudhon is an example of why the emergent class struggle-oriented federalist socialist or anarchist tendency cannot be defined simply by their proposal for abolition of the state as other socialists also advocated this.
Baker uses the term collectivist in two different ways. She initially defines it as proposing social ownership of the land. Later she talks about an internal disagreement among the class-struggle oriented anarchists between “anarchist collectivists” and “anarchist communists.” Here she is using a distinction explained by Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread. In Kropotkin’s terminology, “collectivists” were people such as James Quillaume. Nestor Makhno or Ricardo Mella who advocated remuneration for work effort in a libertarian socialist society (p. 90).
Workers would be given certificates based on hours worked which they could use to obtain consumer goods. This is similar to Marx’s proposal in A Critique of the Gotha Program. Kropotkin, on the other hand, advocated a proposal of free-to-user provision for all needs — in keeping with the principle, “From each according to ability, to each according to need.”
Kropotkin explicitly opposed remuneration for work effort. People advocating Kropotkin’s view were called “communists.” But according to the original definition of “collectivist,” “communists” would also be “collectivists” since they advocated social ownership of the land. In reality, the principle of remuneration for work effort and the principle of free-to-user pubic goods and services are compatible. Indeed, the Spanish CNT “libertarian communist” program of 1936 advocated both.
UNICEF’s deputy executive director underscores the severe toll on Palestinian children amid widespread death and destruction due to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Chaiban mentioned that over 23,000 cases of children being killed or injured in 2023 remain unverified due to insecurity, movement restrictions, and significant risks faced by humanitarian personnel working in Gaza.
🚨With their bare hands, civil defense rescuers save a woman from the rubble of a house bombed by Israeli forces in eastern #Gaza amid their brutal attack and massacres in Shujaiya neighborhood. pic.twitter.com/1rWpYqihjX
“The bodies of thousands of missing children remain buried under rubble, and none of this includes the thousands of violations reported so far in 2024,” he stressed.
The Free 