ACORN Bristol have rallied in support of one of their members who was left without heating and hot water by her landlord over Christmas.
Fadumo, who lives in St Werburghs with her seven children and mother, said that she has suffered problems with her landlord for three years.
Her situation reached a crisis point in December when she was left for three weeks over Christmas with a broken boiler, on top of which her stove didn’t work, windows were broken and the house was affected by damp.
Fadumo said that she was encouraged to contact ACORN by a friend who told her that the community union would be able to help her.
On Monday, a small number of ACORN members spoke with the landlord and demanded that he fix the boiler, windows and stove within 24 hours. He did mend the boiler but the stove and windows remained broken.
In the 21st century, the prevailing social order is only maintained by ever-escalating exertions of brute force.
Following up our coverage of last week’s uprising in Kazakhstan, we have translated an array of perspectives on the situation from various Russian anarchist sources and interviewed two anarchists from Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan and the place where the fighting became most intense.
This text also includes previously unpublished photographs taken by our contacts in Almaty.
January 5 in Almaty; a photograph taken by Zhanabergen Talgat.
The following sources should serve to debunk any facile misrepresentations of the uprising from the authorities in Kazakhstan, Russia, or the United States—or their misguided supporters.
To those who spread conspiracy theories about the United States attempting to stage-manage a “color revolution” in Kazakhstan, we must point out that the protests began in response to the government canceling its subsidy on gas, which is produced under a profitable state monopoly in Kazakhstan.
Those who defend the governments of Kazakhstan and Russia are defending repressive forces that are imposing neoliberal austerity measures upon exploited workers in an extraction-based economy.
January 6: A view of Almaty. The photographer: “A grim fog hangs from the fires; now everything looks like nuclear winter.”
The honorable place for all who genuinely oppose capitalism is at the side of ordinary workers and other rebels who stand up to the ruling class, not supporting the governments who claim to represent protesters while gunning them down and imprisoning them.
This is not to say that the clashes in Kazakhstan represent a unified anti-capitalist struggle, or for that matter a labor movement. The most credible accounts of the composition of the protests acknowledge that there have been a wide range of different participants utilizing different tactics to pursue different agendas.
Of course, if we are sympathetic to workers who protest against the rising cost of living, we can also understand why the unemployed and marginalized might engage in looting.
A crisis like the uprising in Kazakhstan opens up all the fault lines within a society. Every preexisting conflict is pushed to a breaking point: ethnic and religious tensions, rivalries among the ruling elite, geopolitical contests for influence and power. We saw this to a lesser degree in France during the Yellow Vest movement and in the United States during the George Floyd Uprising and its aftermath, though those crises did not proceed as far as the uprising in Kazakhstan, where, owing to the entrenched authoritarian power structure, any struggle is immediately an all-or-nothing venture.
If it is true, as we have argued, that the protesters in Kazakhstan were opposing the same forces that rest of us face all around the world, then the violent suppression of those protests by the soldiers of six armies poses questions that we all must confront. It seems that such moments of truth are becoming practically inevitable as economic, political, and ecological catastrophes hit one after the other all around the world.
How do we prepare in advance, in order to maximize the likelihood that these ruptures will turn out well despite all the forces that are arrayed against us? In such moments of revolutionary potential, how can we propose transformative questions to the others who make up this society with us, focusing the lines of conflict along the most generative and liberating axes even as we compete with a variety of factions that aim to centralize their own ideologies and interests? How do we avoid both conspiracy theories and manipulation, both defeatism and defeat?
In the following overview, composed in collaboration with Russian anarchists, we present the analysis of the uprising in Kazakhstan that has come out of the ex-Soviet region, then share an interview we conducted with anarchists in Almaty as soon as internet access was reestablished following the crackdown.
The Prison of Nations
Starting on January 1, what began as a single protest against the rising cost of living escalated to a full-scale nationwide uprising, which for now has been brutally suppressed by a combination of domestic and foreign military force.
At first, the protesters sought the resignation of government, a reduction in the price of gas, and the removal of the ex-president—Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Grey Cardinal of Kazakhstan—from the head of the National Security Council. The slogan of the whole country for these days became “Shal ket!”—”Grandpa, go away!” As the protests gained momentum, people quickly came to the point of not wishing to agree to anything less than a complete change in the government, including the ouster of current president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.
The regime attempted to suppress the protests. Yet the protesters managed to seize weapons from the police and fight back, looting shops and burning down or occupying municipal buildings. President Tokaev declared a state of emergency and sent military against the protesters with orders to shoot on sight anyone who dared to resist. At the same time, Tokaev officially asked the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO, consisting of Russia and several neighboring countries) for support in regaining the control over the country.
What do they REALLY mean by “living with Covid” Why are media dialling back on the Covid hysteria? Is it because the “pandemic” is really over? Or is it just a Pause in the Control process?
Kit Knightly
The past few days, even weeks, have seen a definite alteration in the media’s attitude to the Covid “pandemic”.
There have been numerous examples of what, if the media were not so tightly controlled, might be referred to as “dissent”. But, since the media is tightly controlled, we must call it an apparent change in the message.
Famously, Dr Steve James, a consultant anaesthetist, confronted UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid over the weakness of the science supporting vaccine mandates. Note this was actually aired on Sky News:
“The science isn’t strong enough”.
Watch the moment an unvaccinated hospital consultant challenges…
Josep C. Verges Report 12.1.22 State terrorist: ‘Scare Catalans’/ TERRORISTA D’ESTAT: ‘SUSTO ALS CATALANS’ ‘I’ve kept working for the Spanish Secret Service trying to fix the mess of the infamous terror attack by the Ripoll imam, a serious error that miscalculated the consequences of giving a small scare to Catalonia’ (Photo: One of the 16 […]
theanarchistlibrary.org is (despite its name) an archive focusing on anarchism and anarchist texts.
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The library provides a high quality online web browser version of the text along with various other formats, like PDFs, plain text, HTML, EPUB, and XeLaTeX. We actively encourage the DIY
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Latest analysis from Mark Jacobson’s energy group at Stanford shows what we’ve come to understand, that a renewable grid is possible, that could actually be more reliable than current service.
One new wrinkle is the understanding of battery storage. We know that a plethora of new battery technologies for energy storage are in development, with prices now dropping as rapidly as solar PV dropped in the past decade. Jacobson’s team produced their results without assuming more than 4 hour battery storage, through a process of linking batteries in sequence, or “concatenating” end-to-end to create more long term storage when necessary. Given that longer term batteries seem inevitable, it gives more confidence that engineers in different systems will have multiple options for maintaining service.
A study led by Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson has demonstrated that the US energy system running on wind, water and solar, coupled with storage…
What do they REALLY mean by “living with Covid” Why are media dialling back on the Covid hysteria? Is it because the “pandemic” is really over? Or is it just a Pause in the Control process?
Kit Knightly
The past few days, even weeks, have seen a definite alteration in the media’s attitude to the Covid “pandemic”.
There have been numerous examples of what, if the media were not so tightly controlled, might be referred to as “dissent”. But, since the media is tightly controlled, we must call it an apparent change in the message.
Famously, Dr Steve James, a consultant anaesthetist, confronted UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid over the weakness of the science supporting vaccine mandates. Note this was actually aired on Sky News:
“The science isn’t strong enough”.
Watch the moment an unvaccinated hospital consultant challenges Health Secretary Sajid Javid over the government’s policy of compulsory COVID jabs for NHS staff.https://t.co/IvbdwQbF0N
A few days ago Dr Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC, went on Good Morning America to discuss the “Omicron” wave, and ended up pointing out that most “omicron deaths” have multiple co-morbidities.
In another interview, with Fox News, Dr Walenksy said the CDC was going to publish data on how many people had died of Covid, and how many died with it.
This begs a series of important questions.
Why is the director of the CDC (seemingly) engaging with these Covid skeptic arguments after two years of pretending they don’t exist?
Why would Sky News air, and then tweet out, the video clip of a doctor challenging the health secretary?
Why Endemic Covid-19 Will Be Cause For Celebration
An article which argued, among other things, that “Endemic Covid-19 will be no worse than seasonal flu”. This sentiment has been repeated ad nauseum across multiple outlets.
The messaging isn’t just media-based, either. Reports are coming out that “living with Covid” is going to be the UK government’s strategy moving into 2022, with an official publication on this topic expected “within weeks”.
The Free 