Front Static

Communities at the front-line of coal extraction

“Mining is going on a hundred meters away. When they started blasting, all the dust was brought to our vegetable gardens. Vegetables got covered with the coal dust which is impossible to wash out. Now I don‘t want to harm myself by eating anything from this garden,” a resident of Kazas, Siberia, Russia, describes the impact of coal mining.

A collection of notes, written by a waitress, regarding the mouvement sociale contre le loi du travail (the social movement against François Hollande's labour law) in 2016 in France. La Serveuse chronicles events from the movement’s beginnings in March onward.

Five notes towards averting the most ideologically polarised reactions to Syriza’s victory in Greece (mostly for those not from Greece)

1) Syriza did not win because of Tsipras’ ‘charisma’ or thanks to their winning populist political discourse. They also did not win as part of a surge in social struggles.

Tsipras is not a particularly rousing speaker, nor are most of the leading members of Syriza. Syriza is also not a ‘mass party’ akin to what PASOK had been in the 1980s.

If anyone were to undertake a protest without official permission in or around Parliament Square – the putative heart of democracy in the UK – they should be aware that there was a high probability that they would be arrested. When Cuban artist, Tania Bruguera, announced, in December 2014, that she was intending to make a performance–protest in Havana’s best-known public square, despite having being denied official permission, her arrest was met with inevitable cries of censorship.