Knowledge is power. And it is produced by collective endeavour

April 2, 2026

By Simon Pirani

We need a collective discussion about “what the hell can we do to get out of the catastrophe that is growing all around us?”, my friend and comrade Bob Myers wrote on this blog (27 March), in a book review. Of course, I agree.

But I think that, to set the terms of such a discussion, we need to do better than what Bob proposes.

A Zapatista meeting in 1996. Photo by Julian Stallabrass / wikimedia commons

Specifically, first, I think that our generation, which set out to try to challenge capital and resist hierarchy half a century or more ago, can convey our experience less one-sidedly.

Second, we can offer a more accurate characterisation of the crisis between humanity and our natural surroundings.

Third, and perhaps most important, in developing our understanding of the gathering catastrophe, we can not only learn from the experience of social movements but also assimilate what science has learned about the world.

On the first point, Bob writes of our attempts to find ways to challenge capitalism:

All around the world, “anti-capitalist” activists are busy trying to galvanise the masses into action. But after more than a century of such activity, the goal seems further away than ever. 

The genocide in Gaza shocked millions of people worldwide and certainly has further undermined the authority of all those who uphold the present “civilisation”, but no-one was able to turn this popular horror into anything that practically made any difference to the plight of the Palestinians. We marched, we protested, got arrested and the slaughter went on – and still goes on – relentlessly. 

Yes, the slaughter goes on. And yes, the horror expressed on the streets of rich countries makes little difference to the killings in Gaza and the West Bank. But surely people who have been trying to change things for as long as Bob and I have (I dislike the word “activist”) can come up with a more convincing retrospective.

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Desperately seeking the pioneers of post-hierarchical, ecological production

March 27, 2026

A review by BOB MYERS of Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future!), by Roy Ratcliffe

This book made me confront my own prejudices and dogma right from the sub-title, which is “From a Revolutionary-Humanist & Gaia-centric Perspective”. Ironic, since I met the author, Roy Ratcliffe, on-line last year, when we exchanged letters about the sectarianism and dogmatism found in many left-wing groups.  

The word “Gaia”, to me, immediately conjured up images of people building straw bale houses and trying to grow vegetables, sometimes accompanied by an outlook that seemed to see human society’s survival having little importance. But Roy’s book is very definitely written by someone considering how humanity can survive in a world where our present activity is making life unbearable and unsustainable. 

Protest against the Gaza genocide in August 2024. Photo by Cary Bass-Deschênes / Creative Commons

I had to quickly overcome my prejudice against his “Revolutionary-Humanist and Gaia-centric Perspective”, which obviously stems from not having read more widely on this subject. And I am quite happy to be corrected on any shortcomings in this review.

Roy is not an academic. Like me, he started his working life in an aircraft factory and, like me, as a young man read Marx and joined a “revolutionary party” – not such an unusual thing in the radical 1960s.  Over the years he became critical of the prevailing ideologies of “revolutionary” groups, and has done a massive amount of reading and research to write this book.

It is the critical re-evaluation of historical data that makes this book so thought provoking. I read it with the growing excitement that I remember experiencing when I first started to read Marx, feeling all kinds of random, disjointed experiences and ideas fall into place, creating a new outlook on the world. 

I can not completely do justice to the book in this review, there is too much there. I just want to encourage people to read it and for it to become part of the collective discussion of  “what the hell can we do to get out of the catastrophe that is growing all around us?”

And isn’t that discussion badly needed? All around the world, “anti-capitalist” activists are busy trying to galvanise the masses into action. But after more than a century of such activity, the goal seems further away than ever. 

The genocide in Gaza shocked millions of people worldwide and certainly has further undermined the authority of all those who uphold the present “civilisation”, but no-one was able to turn this popular horror into anything that practically made any difference to the plight of the Palestinians. We marched, we protested, got arrested and the slaughter went on – and still goes on – relentlessly. The horrors of Gaza now fade before the new war on Iran. 

I welcome anything that makes us reconsider where we are.

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Russia: prison authorities punish anti-war protester Igor Paskar

March 19, 2026

Igor Paskar, who is serving eight-and-a-half years’ imprisonment for protesting against Russia’s war on Ukraine, is being victimised by prison authorities in Tomsk province, in Siberia.

Paskar is one of at least 2000 people people jailed for actions against the war, or even for writing a few words about it on social media.

Solidarity Zone, which gives practical support to Igor and other political prisoners, reported this week:

Igor Paskar in court in 2023. Photo: Mediazona

Igor has been transferred to the federal penitentiary service’s prison colony no. 2 in Asino, Tomsk province.

Since arriving at the colony in December 2025, Igor has been confined in a punishment cell several times and declared a “malicious offender”.

He was first punished while still in quarantine, immediately after arrival – for failing to do the required physical exercises. That resulted in seven days in a punishment cell.

On the seventh day, a further punishment was announced: another seven days, for lying down on a bench while in quarantine.

After he had done that sentence, he was given another five days in the punishment cell – this time, for lying down on a bench in the punishment cell.

These three breaches of the rules were enough for Igor to be declared a “malicious offender” and transferred for six months to a solitary confinement unit (in Russian PKT or pomeshchenie kamernogo tipa, literally “cell-type building”) for six months – the maximum possible period.

PKTs are a separate part of a prison colony, with a much stricter regime. They were previously named BUR (barak usilennogo rezhima, or barracks with a stricter confinement regime), and in many prison colonies that old name is still used, informally.

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London’s car-centred transport policies turbocharge climate danger 

March 19, 2026

London is missing its own targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions from road transport by ever-greater margins, Simon Pirani writes.

The relentless rise in the volume of traffic is the cause. It has increased in each of the four years since the Mayor, Sadiq Khan, announced the aim of cutting the total amount of traffic by 27% by 2030.

Far from heading for “net zero”, the city’s road transport is still pumping around 7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air each year.

Traffic on the M25 near London. Photo: N. Chadwick / Creative Commons

And Labour’s transport policy, focused on sinking billions into building roads and airports, makes matters worse.

It’s not only that the targets are being missed. They were set at far too modest levels in the first place – far short of what climate scientists say needs to be done, for London to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the necessary pace.

Campaign groups are fighting for much more ambitious plans to cut road traffic, and expand public transport, walking and cycling in London, which are not only socially just and healthier, but are also essential to tackling the climate emergency.

The undermining of decarbonisation targets is not confined to London or its roads. It is part of the dangerous political trend, at national and international level, to mask continued fossil-fuelled economic expansion with “green” rhetoric.

How London politicians undermined climate action

Sadiq Khan set the target, of reducing vehicle-kilometres driven in London by 27% by 2030, in January 2022. It was a centre-piece of his declaration that the city would aim to be “carbon neutral” at the end of this decade, rather than 2050.

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European socialism, imperial militarism and defence of Ukraine

March 12, 2026

Russian bombing of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and blocks of flats has continued uninterrupted this month, while attention has been diverted by the criminal US-Israeli military adventure in Iran. Ukrainian cities are emerging from their hardest winter yet, during which Russia tried its best to freeze them into submission.

How, or whether, socialists in Europe get their heads around the political and practical challenges posed by Russia’s war is surely very, very far down the list of things that most Ukrainian people care about right now.

Demonstration in London on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion, February 2025. Photo by Steve Eason

I am going to write about it here nonetheless, because if “socialism” is to mean anything, then how European socialists are responding to the bloodiest war on this continent for eighty years matters a great deal.

I will argue that, whatever small steps we have taken, to support Ukrainian resistance in the spirit of internationalism, are overshadowed by our collective failure to understand and discuss the profound changes caused by the Russian war and to work out effective responses.

By “we”, I mean socialists who from the start supported Ukrainian resistance to imperialist attack. In this first article I offer a view of what we have done and not done. In a second article, I comment on the enduring influence of those who oppose Ukrainian resistance, in practice, words or both.

The small steps we have taken can be summed up as follows. First, sections of the organised labour movement have given direct, material support to their Ukrainian counterparts in the form of medical and other supplies. While this is probably a relatively small component of the overall flow of support from civil society and from Ukrainians living in Europe, up to and including military equipment and volunteer soldiers, it is significant.

Second, we have sought to unite support for Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism, and indeed for the tiny, fiercely suppressed anti-war movement in Russia, with the massive anti-war movement that opposed western governments’ support for Israeli genocide in Gaza. We raised our voices against the hypocrisy of governments who sought forcibly to silence pro-Palestinian voices while permitting Ukrainian ones.

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Russia’s war: stop trying to delegitimise resistance

March 12, 2026

The second of two linked articles. The first is here: European socialism, imperial militarism and the defence of Ukraine

In the labour movement and civil society organisations in the UK, support for Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism is countered by those who argued that Ukraine is only a proxy of western powers.

The underlying idea, that the only “real” imperialism is western – and that resistance to Russian or Chinese imperialism, or their puppets in e.g. Syria or Iran, is therefore illegitimate – has its roots in twentieth-century Stalinism. But it retains its hold, in part, because the western empire’s crimes are so horrific. It is Gaza, and climate change, that angers young people in the UK above all.

Ukrainian troops during a break in the second battle of Donetsk Airport, October 2014. Photo: Creative commons/ Gennadiy Dubovoy

This “campism” (division of the world into a US-centred “camp” and other, not-so-bad camps) transmits itself, in part, through activists who seek simple principles on which to build social movements.

It has reared its ugly head again during the US-Israeli war on Iran this month, treating the theocratic, authoritarian regime as the victim rather than the Iranian people caught between that regime and the murderous US-Israeli onslaught.

This article is a plea to avoid such simplicity. It has grown out of an email, written last year to one such activist, who told me I was wrong to support the provision of arms to Ukrainians resisting Russian aggression. I asked him these five questions, and I still hope he will reply.

1. What is the character of Russian imperialism, and what is its relationship to Ukraine?

We often hear, or read, on the “left” that the war in Ukraine is an “inter-imperialist war”. I don’t agree. There’s certainly an inter-imperialist conflict that forms the context, but the actual war is between Russia (an essentially imperialist country) and Ukraine (clearly not an imperialist country). I’ll come back to the character of the war below (question 2). But I think we agree that Russia is essentially imperialist. What sort of imperialism?

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Carbon capture project greenwashes waste incinerator expansion

March 2, 2026

A carbon capture project is being used to greenwash the expansion of one of the UK’s largest waste incinerators, at Belvedere, Kent.

Cory Topco, which owns one incinerator and is building another, says it will capture greenhouse gases from burning waste, liquefy them, and send them by ship to Yorkshire, to be piped under the North Sea and stored.

□ Cory promises to capture more than 90% of its incinerators’ greenhouse gas emissions – but no carbon capture plant on earth ever got close to that.

□ Cory has an agreement with Viking CCS to to offtake its captured carbon in Yorkshire and bury it under the North Sea – but there are doubts about how, and whether, that could work. Competition authority officials, who say non-pipeline schemes should not get government funding, could cause problems.

Crossness Nature Reserve, Belvedere, with the Cory incinerator in the background. Photo: Dudley Miles / Creative Commons

□ Cory claims it will generate electricity to power 371,000 homes – but is more likely to put less than half of that into the grid. The CCS plant would have a devastating impact, though – doing irreparable damage to the Crossness nature reserve.

□ The incinerator expansion will encourage local authorities to send waste for burning that could be avoided or recycled, reinforcing fossil-heavy economic throughput and putting the impact-light “circular economy” ever further out of reach.

□ Cory hopes the project will be funded by the government’s multi-billion-pound carbon capture subsidy schemes – money that could be spent more effectively on genuine decarbonisation measures.

Doubts about Cory’s claims it can capture 90% of greenhouse gas emissions at Belvedere arise from carbon capture and storage (CCS)’s 40-year global history of failure. 

Cory would use post-combustion carbon capture technology, that pulls carbon dioxide out of the flue gases (i.e. gases coming out of chimneys) with amine solvents.

Only one company in the world – SaskPower, which operates the Boundary Dam coal-fired power station in Saskatchewan, Canada – uses this method. In more than ten years of operation it has not once hit its target of capturing 90% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Boundary Dam’s average capture rate was about 50%, not 90%, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found. Less than 65%, said separate analysis by Carbon Tracker.

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‘Bread, peace, democracy.’ The Turkish miners’ strike of 1991

January 16, 2026

Thirty-five years ago, Turkey was shaken by strikes. An eight-week stoppage by mineworkers, between November 1990 and January 1991, won support from other workers, and took up political demands. It was a turning point for the workers’ movement. At that time I was working for the North East Area of the National Union of Mineworkers here in the UK, editing their newspaper. With their support, I travelled to Turkey, and then published a pamphlet about the workers’ movement. Here’s a PDF version: please download, share and copy it.

And here is the introduction and chronology with which the pamphlet began. Simon Pirani, January 2026.

==

The Turkish miners’ strike of November 1990-January 1991 was far, far more than just a strike.

Firstly, it brought into action not just the strikers but the whole community: this it had in common with all movements that really challenge the established order of things. The most downtrodden people in Turkish society, the women, were on the front lines.

While in many strikes the majority of participants are only occasionally called to picket lines or demonstrations, in this case the daily marches involved most strikers, and their families too. The march to the president’s palace in Ankara, begun by this activated mass on no-one’s instructions – and ended only by heavy police and army intervention – was the spontaneous movement of the working class in a most spectacular form.

The second reason this was far more than a strike was that it began with a demand for more pay … but rapidly went on to demand “bread, peace and democracy”. Zonguldak [the mining town on Turkey’s north coast] saw its action as political – and this on the eve of the Gulf war in which Turkey was an essential part of the US-led alliance. At the end of December [1990], 150,000 metal workers joined the miners on strike; in mid-January textile workers came out. A general strike on 3 January was supported by 1.5 million.

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‘Your power is based on lies and violence’: three years for sharing Ukrainian songs

January 4, 2026

A Moscow court has sentenced university teacher Aleksandr Nesterenko to three years’ imprisonment, for sharing Ukrainian songs on a social media account. Here is a translation of Nesterenko’s final statement to the court, which was published by Mediazona.

Aleksandr Nesterenko in court

On 19 December, the Liublin district court sentenced Nesterenko, an associate professor in the faculty of philosophy at the Moscow state technical university, to three years, Mediazona stated in its introduction. The 62-year-old lecturer has been in custody since September 2024 because he saved on his page on VKontakte [a Russian language site similar to facebook] a clip of the songs “We are growing” by Voply Vidopliassov [Screams of Vidopliassov, a Ukrainian rock-and-roll band], “We were born at a great time” [a Ukrainian nationalist anthem] and “Bandera is our father, Ukraine our mother” [a Ukrainian song that Nesterenko denies having circulated]. Experts saw in these songs “evidence of incitement to violent actions against Russians, as a group defined by nationality” and “to the destruction of Russians as military opponents”.

To start with, Nesterenko was accused of “inciting hatred or antipathy” [Article 282:2 of the Russian criminal code] and “advocating extremism” [Article 280:2]. But in court the prosecutor said that the first charge was “unnecessary”, and asked that Nesterenko be sent to a prison colony for four years on the second charge. Before sentencing, Nesterenko made a final statement, which we reproduce here in full.

==

I hope that this statement is my last in this auditorium, but not my last all together. To start with, I wish everyone here a happy Christmas, with hopes of miracles and of changes for the better. About this, there’s [Iosif] Brodsky’s poetry: the stronger is Herod, the more certain the inevitable wonder.[1] We’re putting our hopes on that.

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Caution: high-voltage networks. Polemical cheap shots may cause damage

January 3, 2026

By Simon Pirani

Electricity networks matter. Humans depend on economic and technological systems through which they run. We will depend on electricity networks still more heavily if – despite, and against, capital and its power – we are to tackle climate change.

It is a shame, then, that Matthew Huber, in a long-delayed response to my comments on his work,[1] avoids the crux of the argument, about grids trending towards decentralisation and how that technological change relates to social change. Instead he presents me, falsely, as representative of a “left energy ideology” that I do not recognise, and bashes that ideology over the head.

Moray East Offshore Wind Farm in Scotland. In 2024, UK wind farms were switched off for 13% of the time they could have been supplying the grid, costing the grid operator billions in compensation payments

I suggest we clear this “ideology” out of the way, and return to issues that matter.

Huber’s imagined “ideology” sees the “struggle over energy” waged by “local ‘communities’ vs big, centralised state and corporate entities” and by “‘energy democracy’ in the form of local participation in the governance of electricity systems”. I simply don’t think in these terms. And that’s obvious in the articles to which Huber is responding.

“A socialist response to [pro-capitalist] narratives [on grid development] must be based not on rejection of renewables or of decentralisation”, I wrote in one of them, “but on rejection of corporate power and of the dictates of capitalist expansion and capitalist markets”, and on principles of decommodification and public ownership. Decentralised power supply is “no less welcome to socialists than the growth of the internet or mobile telephony: we don’t have to accept the form of ownership to acknowledge the technology’s potential.” I was, and remain, very cautious about the potential of co-ops and municipal projects, that, I argued, “operate, at best, as islands of common ownership in a sea dominated by corporations”.[2]

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