The cost of living crisis has hit millions of people hard, with latest reports indicating that 8 million in the UK are struggling to pay their bills, and food prices reaching the highest they’ve been in 40 years. Amid this dire economic climate, the experiences of sex workers have been largely overlooked – but a new campaign aims to change that.
The Hookers Against Hardship campaign comes from a coalition of sex worker collectives across the UK, demanding government action and public support to tackle poverty among sex workers during the current cost of living crisis. Made up of Britain’s major sex worker-led organisations – including SWARM, the English Collective of Prostitutes, Scot-pep, United Sex Workers, Bristol Sex Workers’ Collective and Decrim Now – the campaign draws attention to the ways sex workers are being affected by the crisis, and situates their demands…
Despite inspiring millions of youth to resist galloping Planet Destruction, Greta Thunberg is one of the most reviled and ridiculed people on the internet. One line of hate speech by rabid rightwing boys accuses her of supporting the Orwellian ‘Great Reset’. But now she has condemned the Cop27 Egypt farce and returned to her activist anarcha/ feminist roots
Swedish eco-activist Greta Thunberg has turned her attention to the political arena, calling for the downfall of capitalism, which she claimed, backed with thousands of peer reviewed research studies, is responsible for climate change.
The 19-year-old climate campaigner launched her book – ‘The Climate Book’ – in London on Sunday night, telling the audience that the world is “never going back to normal again.”
She argued that global warming can only be solved by a “system-wide transformation,” according to a write-up of the event by the Telegraph.
The capitalist system, Thunberg continued, is “defined by colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the so-called global North to accumulate wealth that still shapes our current world order.”
“If economic growth is our only priority, then what we are experiencing now should be exactly what we should be expecting,” she added, before calling the extraction of fossil fuels “racist.”
As some of Thunberg’s critics pointed out online, global living standards have broadly risen under capitalism. Also that carbon emissions have fallen slightly from their incredible peak in the capitalist USA since the turn of the millennium, due largely to farming out dirty industries..
Greta replied to these critics on Wednesday, stating that she is not advocating for a return to “socialism, liberalism, communism, conservatism, centrism, you name it,” which she said “have all failed.”
Thunberg, who has previously been criticized for failing to offer solutions to the problems she outlines, quite rightly did not say what kind of system she would replace capitalism with. It’s not up to her to lay out a power grabbing alternative like the Great Reset globalists
The Fridays For Future, 350.org, Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion and many other Climate protection movements are advocating and creating horizontally organised economic projects which many see as seeds of Post Capitalist society, when Capitalism collapses. Greta Thunberg rightly refuses to which is ‘correct’.
Shooting to fame after she organized a series of school walk-outs in her native Sweden in 2018, Thunberg has since delivered her dramatic predictions of ecological armageddon to lawmakers across the Western world, to UN summits, and to the World Economic Forum’s yearly gatherings at Davos, Switzerland.
WEF founder Klaus Schwab is also an advocate of radically restructuring the global order under total elite control, a vision he calls “the Great Reset.”
Despite spending several years on the globalist circuit, Thunberg will skip the UN COP27 climate conference in Egypt next week, telling her audience that she now views the summit as a “scam” and an example of “greenwashing” – an attempt by politicians to falsely portray themselves as environmentally friendly.
On October 25, BBC News published an absolutely shocking exclusive report revealing that residents of the southern Ukrainian city of Nikolaev (which current officials in Kiev insist should be spelt as “Mykolaiv,” in English) had been without clean drinking water for six months, due to attacks on a pipeline supplying the city.
“Evidence collected” by the British state broadcaster pointed to this being “a deliberate act by Russian forces” intended to cause mass dehydration and death among the local population.
Strangely though, despite all the sound and fury and finger-pointing, the BBC stopped short of condemning the alleged action as an outright war crime, simply noting that “destroying resources vital for civilian life is widely regarded as a violation of international humanitarian law.”
This reluctance seems rather strange, given that the Beeb appears to offer an open-and-shut case, including “satellite imagery and data” showing the pipeline “was deliberately destroyed while under Russian control,” and bold declarations from esteemed military experts that it was a calculated act by Moscow.
The reasons for the BBC’s hesitancy soon become very clear, though. A key part of its case against Russia is that “two separate points on the same pipeline” were “damaged in ways that are consistent with sabotage.” Photos of this damage are provided in the article, at least one being an “exclusive” that was “given” to BBC journalists by unidentified people while in Nikolaev.
How tumult over a draft EPA report on fracking-related water contamination has given Wyoming a pass on fixing groundwater polluted by traditional gas drilling.
Note: This story originally appeared in the Living with Oil and Gas project which features “stories of people whose lives are impacted by oil and gas development.” The situation has yet to be resolved, leaving several Pavillion, Wyoming, families without drinking water. Currently, another freshwater pollution disaster looms as the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has moved to exempt the freshwater Madison Aquifer from protected status in order to allow Aethon Energy to inject millions of gallons of untreated wastewater from the Moneta Divide oil and gas field into it.
Sue Spencer, a hydrogeologist based in Laramie, Wyoming, looks down from a sandy bluff on a two-football-field-sized swath of cleared land that designates a capped natural gas well. Two men in unmarked blue coveralls and…
“No no you don’t understand, this US war is completely different from all the other US wars. See, the US is intervening in Ukraine for humanitarian reasons.
We’re fighting a bad guy who is an evil dictator that loves war crimes and genocide. Not like all those other interventions.”
If the US proxy war in Ukraine was meaningfully different from other US wars they would be justifying it using different arguments, not the exact same ones.
Western punditry is rife with op-eds arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US, like its own actions would have nothing to do with it.
If World War 3 does indeed occur, it will be because the drivers of the US-centralized empire continued accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to their inability to relinquish their goal of unipolar planetary domination.
WWIII has begun and the West has two options if we continue down our warmongering path:
1. Lose 2. Lose while dragging everyone else down with us
Pointing out the various flaws in historical attempts at communism does not address the problem that if we don’t move from competition-based models to collaboration-based ones we’re going to destroy all life on this planet in short order. We’ve still got to find a way to change.
Have issues with Stalin and Mao? Okay. Cool. Our competition-based models are still destroying our biosphere and shoving us toward nuclear war. Our survival still depends on moving toward collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem toward the thriving of all beings.
Babbling about Stalin and Mao doesn’t magically change the fact that we can’t keep doing this thing where human behavior is driven by profit and competition.
Activists have broken into the five-story Amsterdam home of sanctioned Russian technology tycoon Arkady Volozh and say they plan to use it as a temporary shelter for students and other young individuals.
Two new squats in Amsterdam in a week and a half: Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal 302 and Vossiusstraat 16.
Twee nieuwe kraakpanden in Amsterdam in anderhalve week: Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal 302 en Vossiusstraat 16. pic.twitter.com/RrmziJSGXK
Since October 2021 anarchist Toby Shone has been held in prison, often in conditions reserved for terrorists.Toby is due for release in December, but his troubles will be far from over..
On Sunday evening, a group gathered in the city centre to show solidarity with Toby and to raise awareness of his story with a march through the streets dressed in Halloween costumes.
The Monster March was organised by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a union organising across all industries, students, the unemployed and prisoners.
Bristol branch secretary, Seb, said: ‘When the state comes and tries to persecute prisoners like Toby Shone, or when the government puts down attacks on the union movement…when they come after any of the members of the working class we do what we can in solidarity with them, and to build strong community sand connections and to make their struggle our struggle.’
He continued: ‘The scariest thing for the state is when people come together, they show solidarity. They show solidarity across differences. When people stand together. When people fight for each other’s rights, fight for something better, and we begin to collectivise our struggles.
‘That’s why tonight is a Monster March. Because that’s what we’re here to do, to scare the system.’
In November 2020 Toby was arrested from his home in the Forest of Dean as part of international policing effort Operation Adream. Accused of running 325.nostate.net, a website publishing details of direct actions, Toby was charged under the Terrorism Act and the website was taken down.
At trial in October 2021 the prosecution offered no evidence to the terrorism charge and a not guilty verdict was subsequently recorded. Toby was however sentenced for three years and nine months on drug offences, spending time at HMP Horfield in Bristol before being moved to HMP Parc in Bridgend.
Notwithstanding the not guilty verdict, counter-terrorism police applied for a serious crime prevention order (SCPO), a measure usually reserved for those convicted of trafficking or firearms offences, or serious fraud.
During his prison time, supporters say Toby has been held in solitary confinement, treatment again usually reserved for those convicted of far more serious crimes.
Upon release he will have to attend mandatory psychiatric treatment, which supporters say is a consequence of his refusal to give up his anarchist beliefs. His probation team allegedly contains members of counter-terrorism police.
Toby’s supporters see his treatment as the thin end of a wedge being pushed by the government to shut down any criticism of present systems, especially capitalism, and to repress alternative lifestyles.
In an interview Toby gave to The Canary last May, he said: ‘The implications of this case do not only concern anarchists, who have been under the microscope for some time, but anyone who is living in alternative way with their ideas or their actions, collective or not.
‘Anyone who essentially wants to see actual social, political or environmental change will at some point put that into practice. And the state has prepared prisons for you.’
Supporters can write to Toby at the following address: Toby Shone A7645EP, HM Prison Parc, Heol Hobcyn John, Coity, Bridgend CF35 6AP.
Feature image: Kamui Oshino.
Did you go this protest? What did you think? Let us know in the comments or at thebristolactivist@protonmail.com.
Juno Mac 
