environment

Anti-nuclear activists blockade Hinkley Point power station

Over 1,000 protestors blockade the entrance to Hinkley Point power station in response to a proposed new nuclear reactor.

Valsusa in every city: NO TAV updates (Italy)

The last 10 days or so have seen a massive shift in the NO TAV struggle, with the state now trying to repress the movement more openly than ever: evictions, police beatings, and the government’s terror propaganda. Here’s a look at recent events:

No Tav Luca Abbà severely injured while resisting to an expropriation

Luca Abbà NoTav

No Tav activists were not expecting the police to expropriate until the following night, but they came in the morning, after an urgent order by the Prefect. On Monday 27th February they started to build the fences to enlarge the construction site, in spite of the 75.000 people demonstration that took place just two days before.

75,000 say no, but government goes straight on

Susa march

Update (27 february 2012, 11:00 am italian time):
While we write, police forces are expanding the off-limit area, trying to clear the baita in order to demolish it. Fifteen protesters are resisting in it. One notav protester, chased by police, climbed on an electric pylon, and then fell down (from 10 meters high) after taking a shock. He’s now under surgery in Turin, ambulance transportation has been delayed by police for almost an hour. Roadblocks and rails occupations by notav protesters have started in Valsusa and solidarity actions are being planned in all Italy. More updates later on.
(type #forzaluca on Twitter).

Ongoing solidarity with the NO TAV arrestees in Italy

Update on the NO TAV arrestees and how to support them. Includes updated address list to write to activists still in prison.

Catastrophism, disaster management and sustainable submission - Rene Riesel and Jaime Semprun

In this book first published in 2008, Jaime Semprun and René Riesel examine the attempt by predominantly First World governments and NGOs to utilize the specter of an environmental apocalypse as an alibi to save “industrial civilization” by imposing a rationed form of “survival”, justified by a terroristic propaganda campaign based on fear, enforced by an expansion of the state’s coercive powers, and facilitated by the mass conformism and resignation that “industrial society” has induced in the population by creating an “anxiogenic environment” of “insecurity and generalized instability”; “[f]or the fears proclaimed by the experts … are in reality nothing but orders”.

You can’t arrest the whole Valley – support the NO TAV arrestees

How to support the NO TAV activists arrested on January 26. Support the campaign or, even better, write to them!

Post-Scarcity Anarchism - Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin's collection of essays envisioning an anarchist society without scarce resources, if we rely on technology.

Climate change and capitalist growth

Does the failure to reach an agreement to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees celsius prove that capitalism has no answer to man-made climate change?

The end of politics: theses on the crisis of the regulatory system of the commodity form - Robert Kurz

In this essay first published in 1994, Robert Kurz examines the history of “politics” as the “regulatory system” of “the modern commodity production system”, from the inception of capitalism to its high point immediately after WW2—when “the last residues … of the pre-modern constitution” were eliminated and when “politics” was finally totally absorbed by “economics”—and its current crisis, heralding “the historical collapse of the system”, manifested as “the environmental crisis, the crisis of the society of labor, the crisis of the nation-state and the crisis of gender relations” in an era when democracy “is nothing but the completed subjection to the subjectless logic of money”.