As we write, the world is on fire. Trump threatens Greenland and Venezuela, Iranians are being killed for protesting against their regime and the Gaza genocide continues. Climate breakdown is quickly entering a critical period. There is a desperate need to shift towards peace and reconstruction, and ideas for how to do so without relying on the state, government, or political parties are becoming increasingly popular. But those ideas are not equally accessible for all. As deaf people who use British Sign Language (BSL) as our first language, we face barriers that prevent us from participating in these discourses of resistance.

On the evening of 15 December 2025, just before 9:40 PM, a large group of people dressed as Santa Claus and his elves went into a supermarket in Montreal. They moved calmly through the supermarket aisles, filling their sacks with food. Within minutes they left taking thousands of dollars' worth of groceries, none of which was paid for. Santa and his masked elves then went to the Christmas tree in the central square. Underneath the twinkling lights, they laid out the stolen food and attached signs that read ‘Christmas is expensive, free food’. The remaining groceries were distributed to community fridges across Montreal.

Class is a touchy subject. It’s a lens we use to judge others and ourselves. Over the last 50 years, categories of class have become increasingly blurred by neoliberalism, despite Victorian-era poverty making a comeback. We are forever sold the dream of social mobility, but these days, most of the ‘socially mobile’ are hurtling downwards. Austerity has played a part in this. Families and friendship networks have been financially and energetically trying to care for those around us after years of health and social services being defunded, a burden that left many of us unable to accumulate our own personal safety nets. Many of us have had to move to big cities for work, and the precarity of the housing crisis has been another boot on our necks. At the same time, we watch through black mirrors those with more money than we have ‘living their best life’ on social media, taunting us with pleasures we will never be able to afford.

Traditional capitalist businesses are dictatorships. Small groups of managers and shareholders make all decisions, and reap most of the profits. In contrast, a workers’ cooperative is a business where the employees own and control everything. Workers are members, which means they have an equal say in decision-making and decide how profits are invested.

The movement of people is as old as humanity. Countries are fundamentally invented shared myths; borders, immigration controls and passports are just a blip in history. For most of human existence, movement was free if you could afford it - although money to move was another problem. People flee war, starvation, and seek better economic prospects in other countries. This is especially true of people coming to the UK, where its rulers have historically looted the world's wealth, resulting in improved living conditions relative to the rest of the world. And these same elites continue to sponsor global war, genocide and invasion, increasing the need for people to flee their homes.

In January 1997, Friends of the Earth called a rally at the construction site of the Newbury Bypass. The plan was for a candlelit vigil, followed by speeches, and then a march to the building site to tie ribbons and messages to the fence. The event was billed as a one-year anniversary reunion for all the activists and campaigners who had spent the previous winter occupying tree houses, dodging vast armies of security guards, attaching themselves to barrels full of concrete and using many other inventive tactics in an attempt to slow or stop the felling of more than 10,000 trees to make way for the construction of the road. The eviction of over 30 different treehouse camps along the route of the planned bypass from January to March of 1996 had become a national cause celebre, attracting thousands of activists in freezing conditions to try and stop the clearances.

Inequality is harmful. People who are discriminated against experience physical, emotional and social effects, which worsen their long-term health and well-being. These are collective traumas. Suffering is experienced in similar ways across communities and social groups living with historical oppression or the injustice of capitalism. One-to-one therapy cannot treat these collective wounds. It is inaccessible for many due to cost, but crucially, individual treatment makes healing a personal responsibility without tackling the social and political sources. 

The Woodcraft Folk is a cooperative youth movement. It was originally established in the 1920s by young people who wanted to create an organisation that facilitated a relationship between children and nature whilst rejecting much of the hierarchy and nationalism of other youth movements at the time. In opposition to the authoritarian tendencies of the Scouts, the Woodcraft Folk aims at more horizontal structures. When the Woodcraft Folk started, children were generally expected to refer to their teachers and guardians by the titles 'Sir' and 'Miss'. However, at Woodcraft, these formalities were avoided. New names and titles were given to both young people and adult volunteers, linguistically signalling an aspiration, if not always a reality, of engaging with one another on more equal terms.

There’s little charm in the current US administration’s version of the American Dream. Look at the original model. Not even its populariser, the financier-cum-historian James Truslow Adams, tied it exclusively to wealth-creation and the accumulation of power. In his version, while the Dream included the promise of cars and high wages, it was underpinned by a Protestant ethic of hard work and a notion of individual flourishing. Adams pictured a people unrestrained by the old world’s fusty ways and class biases, pursuing their happiness by the exploitation of the country’s seemingly inexhaustible natural resources. Enrichment, born of industrialisation, was the Dream’s driver. Liberty and equality were its end. 

Just in the last 24 hours of writing this article storms have smashed both New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, while in Jamaica, government officials warned that as Hurricane Melissa intensified into a Category 5 storm, many impacted communities ‘will not survive the flooding’, and that no community in the Jamaican capital Kingston is safe.

The speed with which the hurricane intensified is no longer shocking. Scarcely a day goes by without multiple news stories covering the increasingly catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin is an American writer, activist and black anarchist. He is a former member of SNCC, the Black Panther Party and Concerned Citizens for Justice. Following an attempt to frame him on weapons charges and for threatening the life of a Ku Klux Klan leader, Ervin hijacked a plane to Cuba in February 1969. While in Cuba, and later Czechoslovakia, Ervin grew disillusioned with the authoritarianism of state socialism. Captured by the CIA in Eastern Europe, he was extradited to the US, put on trial and sentenced to life in prison in 1970. He was introduced to anarchism whilst in prison, inspiring him to write Anarchism and the Black Revolution in 1979. Released after 15 years, Ervin remains politically active.

In the cockpit of the Hawk Jet lay a number of unusual objects: a VHS tape, an A4 pamphlet, and a calling card with the names of four women - Andrea Needham, Joanna Wilson, Lotta Kronlid, and Angie Zelter - under "Seeds of Hope: East Timor Ploughshares" and the words "Women Disarming for Life and Justice”. The control panel of the jet had been smashed by a single blow from a hammer.

For the past two years, the UK has been in the midst of an invisible health crisis caused by nitazenes, a group of powerful synthetic opioids which can be up to 500 times stronger than heroin and ten times stronger than fentanyl.

When Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old state assemblyman and self-described democratic socialist, decisively won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City in June 2025, the entire liberal establishment lost their shit. The authorities reached for their fainting hankies, and the insinuation (if not the exact words) of the rulers and their enablers was unmistakable: 'Bolsheviks take over NYC!'

As I write, Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militants have stormed the Zamzam refugee camp, home to over 400,000 displaced people, setting fire to shelters and systematically dismantling one of Sudan’s largest camps. It marks yet another atrocity in a civil war where the RSF and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have carved up the country. As is so often the case, those without guns are the ones to suffer most. According to the UN, in 2025, over 30 million people, approximately two-thirds of the population, will require humanitarian aid. Of this, 16 million are children. Around 12 million women and girls (and a growing number of men/boys) are at risk of sexual violence. Since the start of the major escalation in April 2023, more than 12 million people have begun a grim life fleeing war.

T

he downstairs two floors of the global bank UBS's 13-storey headquarters lie empty. In the City of London, this space – dubbed a 'double-height reception' – is barren of activity. Except for the morning, lunch and evening rush hours, this space's predominant captives are bored-looking security guards and receptionists. These voids mainly function as walk-through areas between outside and lifts or escalators. The architect's blurb says UBS resembles a machine, a well-oiled money-making machine. Yet many elephants could roam this bottom room, with space priced at £75/foot. 30% of the building's total floor space (1 million square foot) is not offices. These non-office spaces cost tenants over £22 million/year in rent. Sure, buildings need hallways. But why not put the stairs near the doors? Why let space lie idle?

In an era marked by using social media and instant messaging to talk to each other, there is something quite beautiful about sitting with a group of people writing letters. What makes it even more beautiful and important is that we are writing to prisoners.