Russian empire, social dynamics and where Marxism goes from here

By Simon Pirani What, really, have socialists learned from the Russian war on Ukraine? Has it changed our understanding of the way that imperialism works? Tell us we were right all along? Reflectin…

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Judicial review challenge to extortionate heat network charges

By Simon Pirani. Republished from the Ecologist, with thanks Skyrocketing charges for heating and hot water from council heat networks in Lambeth, south London, are to be challenged at a judicial r…

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The butcher of Srebrenica: a UN officer had drinks, ‘lefts’ had clean slogans

A guest post by JOHN DAVIES The Serbian general and war criminal Ratko Mladić, the butcher of Srebrenica and too many other places to mention, died last week. It’s an opportunity for reflection, an…

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Political prisoner Andrei Trofimov has appeared in court, but is not out of danger

The Russian political prisoner Andrei Trofimov has appeared on a video link to a court hearing on Thursday, after four months’ loss of contact. His supporters, who fear he was being mistreated in t…

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Jail sentence for Ukrainian Trotskyist is an assault on free speech

By Simon Pirani A Ukrainian court this month found Bohdan Syrotiuk, a Trotskyist, guilty of high treason and jailed him for 15 years – solely for words he wrote about the war. This assault on free …

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Free buses open doors for Scotland’s under-22s – but privatisation undermines scheme

This summer’s heat waves have hammered home the reality of climate change, and highlighted, again, the gulf between the government’s timid efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and what scientist…

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Effective taxes on wealth could fund abolition of bus fares

Reposted from the Fare Free London web site The government could make all bus journeys in the UK free, at a cost of about £5.6 billion per year, a report by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) shows…

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The Local Power Plan risks blocking community energy potential

The government’s Local Power Plan will fail to boost community renewable energy projects  if regulatory and market obstructions are not swept away, campaigners say. An obsessively centralised …

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Decarbonising homes: the government’s plan is heading for failure

By Simon Pirani. Republished with thanks from the Ecologist The UK government’s plan to shift to electrified, low-carbon heating of homes could be heading for ruinous failure without public sector …

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Hong Kong protesters: “Oppose Russian hegemonic aggression! No Peace without Justice!”

This statement by HK Anti-War Mobilisation was published on facebook on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, in February. It deserves to be shared widely – please copy an…

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In Mexico, people fear one imperialist aggressor. In Estonia, it’s a different one

At a Green Left zoom discussion on 23 June about “the Green party and NATO”, I argued that we can support resistance to Russian imperialism while opposing NATO. I was on a panel along with Paul Ing…

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Russian socialists: “Solidarity means accepting Ukrainians’ pain and suffering as our own”

Russian-Speaking Leftists, a group based in Germany, on 19 May published this interview with a socialist activist living in Russia who, they write, “stands for revolutionary defeatism”.[1] I transl…

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Organising action on climate and social justice: what next

This post is based on a talk I gave at the Ecosocialism conference in London on Saturday 30 May, about the Fare Free London campaign, in which I participate, and the wider movements of which it is …

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Tackling extreme heat in India: aiming at a moving target

By Nagraj Adve Seeking to cushion the impacts of global warming is like aiming at a moving target. What’s worse, the target is now moving faster. Over the last decade or so, there has been a signif…

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Russia’s anti-war prisoners: Outcasts in their own country

By Simon Pirani Russia’s political prisoners are “outcasts in their own land,” Sergei Dudchenko, a biker tortured and framed by the security services, told his trial judges this month before being …

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Russia’s Antiwar Prisoners Are Outcasts in Their Own Land

Over four years into Russia’s war in Ukraine, some of the Russians imprisoned in its early days are still in jail. Even people with no previous political activism have been landed with long prison sen...

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Political prisoner Aleksandr Nesterenko: they fabricate cases, just as they did in Soviet times

This is the final statement by Aleksandr Nesterenko, one of thousands of political prisoners in Russia, to an appeal court on 31 March. He appeared at the appeal via a video link from prison, and s…

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Try Me For Treason, the film

TRY ME FOR TREASON is a 50-minute film, in English, featuring speeches made by anti-war protesters in Russian courts. It has been made by a group of actors to draw English-speaking audiences’ atten…

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Knowledge is power. And it is produced by collective endeavour

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 …

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Desperately seeking the pioneers of post-hierarchical, ecological production

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-…

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Russia: prison authorities punish anti-war protester Igor Paskar

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 o…

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London’s car-centred transport policies turbocharge climate danger

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. I…

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European socialism, imperial militarism and defence of Ukraine

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 I…

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Russia’s war: stop trying to delegitimise resistance

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 fo…

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Carbon capture project greenwashes waste incinerator expansion

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, …

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

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…

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

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…

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

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 …

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