Accurate information is difficult to obtain on the conditions on the ground in Ukraine. Many times we are required to rely upon biased media outlets. It is with that important caveat that the blog relays a promising development among the Russian armed forces.

In the Okhtyrka district in the north-east of Ukraine, where it said 300 Russian servicemen are refusing to carry out attacks. The troops have now left the field of operations.

The more mutiny the merrier. Let the Russians put into practice the words of the International.

No more deluded by reaction

On tyrants only we’ll make war

The soldiers too will take strike action

They’ll break ranks and fight no more

And if those cannibals keep trying

To sacrifice us to their pride

They soon shall hear the bullets flying

We’ll shoot the generals on our own side.

 As long as capitalism lasts there will be a conflict of interests; in other words, war is caused by capitalism and cannot be avoided under that social system. We have had two global wars and countless regional and local conflicts over the struggle for raw materials, trade routes and spheres of influence. Capitalism is a competitive society and the logical outcome of the resultant conflict is military violence. Capitalism by its very nature breeds competition between nations and this produces threats and counter-threats which leads to ultimatums, eventually, military action. The awful truth is that it is members of the working class who own no part of these resources who take part in the resultant conflicts and suffer the resultant tragedies of war.

The tragedy of war is that our fellow workers have no reason to go to war; their interests are not involved. Yet we are the ones who do the fighting and the dying. For almost 120 years, this organisation has been consistent in its opposition to nationalism, in the belief that nationalism is a killer epidemic, creating conflict from which those with the least to gain have the most to lose. Whatever cause and victory the misinformed defenders of nationhood believe they are fighting for, it pales into insignificance when compared to the real war that needs to be waged on the battlefield of ideas and against an elite who perpetuate the myth of nationhood for their own ends and always to our detriment.

Socialism will abolish war because it will bring a community of interests; it will be a society without frontiers, without nations, without classes, without conflict. Socialists can therefore say without any hesitation that there can be only one way to achieve lasting peace across this planet and that means an organised retreat from nationalism in all its forms and an escalation of the struggle for global working-class emancipation. War is an ever-present menace so long as capitalism survives. The sordid squabbles over markets, trade routes and other considerations, give way eventually to armed conflict, but no working-class interest is involved, and no social problem is solved by fighting. When each war is over, all that can be said is that countless workers have died to preserve the conditions for another holocaust later on. Someone once said that the next war really begins where the last one ends. We could not agree more. So it will continue until those who do the work of the world understand that only when class ownership of the means of living, has been abolished will it be possible for the people of the world to live in harmony. When this is achieved exploitation and the hunger for profit will disappear and there will no longer be tragedies like Yemen or Ukraine. We ask that workers set aside nationalism and join together to root out the real problem itself—capitalism.

The real needs of people the world over can only ever be fulfilled in a world devoid of borders or frontiers.

PEACE AMONG THE peoples, no peace BETWEEN THE CLASSES

 The Russian anarchist website https://aitrus.info/node/5934 has posted an interview with an anarchist in Gorlovka, which is a town in the Donetsk People’s Republic. As it’s unusual to get news from such a vantage point, here is a translation of some of what he said:

‘Before Putin recognized the “independence” of the DPR the situation in my town was quiet enough. After recognition many residents hoped that Russia would send “peacekeeping forces” to the DPR and the war would stop. Instead, a considerable part of the town’s male population was mobilized into the “People’s Militia of the DPR.” At municipal service facilities at least 50% of men were mobilized, at some 100%. As a result there was no one left to repair many objects of the infrastructure. A city sewerage worker I know said on March 13: “We still have water for a few days. After that we’ll be in the shit.” There is a much stronger feeling of fear in the town than in 2014. But there are still enough food and other products on the shelves of stores.

As for the military situation in the area, the front line has not shifted and I don’t expect it to in the foreseeable future. But artillery fire has become more intensive.

My father and I stay home almost all the time, so that we don’t get handed mobilization notices on the street. We live in the central district, which throughout the war has been relatively little affected by artillery fire. Things have always been much worse for people living on the outskirts. So we are lucky.

There have been instances of whole groups of people being forced into motor vehicles and driven off to the military recruitment office. Even people with a “white ticket” have been mobilized. Although it is possible to avoid service legally. If you end up in the recruitment office, demand a full medical examination. That will take several days. If serious problems with your health are found they will let you go. My neighbor was excused because he used to have cancer. Even if there are no serious problems with your health, you can use the delay to find a reliable hiding place.

As for those who are mobilized, some are sent to the front, others serve in the rear. I know of instances when men were sent to serve in Kharkov or Kherson Province or at a “sorting station.” Trucks are loaded with the corpses of Russian soldiers and they are taken to Crimea. One told me: “I’d sooner go to prison for five years than see all this horror.” Many of the mobilized men have already been killed or wounded. Others have been taken prisoner. Those who refuse to go to the front are threatened with criminal charges.

At the very start of mobilization people were promised that they would just spend a few days in barracks and then be sent home. That is why many turned up at the recruitment office. Also because they feared possible problems at work if they failed to show up. Fighting spirit was nowhere to be found. The DPR “patriots” whom I know have not the slightest wish to join the “People’s Militia” and take part in the war.

The people of the Donbas have always been passive and attracted to a “firm hand.” The miners’ strikes in the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s were the peak of class struggle, but once the Ukrainian economy stabilized and the miners began to get decent wages their activism faded.

There was a group of non-political volunteers in my town in the first years of the war, who helped residents who could not care for themselves. But for a long time now I have heard nothing of these volunteers. There is no sign of grassroots self-organization here.

Experts at the United Kingdom-based Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, in a  report, found that “immediate and deep cuts in the production of all fossil fuels” are needed worldwide to avert the worst of the ongoing climate emergency. The report was led by University of Manchester professor Kevin Anderson.

 Rich countries must end oil and gas production entirely by 2034 to give the world a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C by the close of the century—the Paris accord’s most ambitious climate target.

“There are no exceptions; all nations need to begin a rapid and just phaseout of existing production,” the analysis states. “There is no capacity in the carbon budget for opening up new production facilities of any kind, whether coal mines, oil wells, or gas terminals. A transition based on principles of equity requires wealthy, high-emitting nations to phase out all oil and gas production by 2034 while the poorest nations have until 2050 to end production.”

Despite the catastrophic consequences of inaction, the report warns, no government is currently considering—let alone moving with urgency to implement—the kind of rapid fossil fuel phaseout needed to prevent future climate chaos that could render huge swaths of the globe uninhabitable.

“For the wealthiest group of ‘producer nations,’ with the highest capacity to achieve a ‘just transition,’ output of oil and gas needs to be cut by 74% by 2030, with complete phaseout by 2034,” the report argues. “For the middle-income group with medium capacity for a just transition, the timeframe extends a little, with a 28% cut by 2030, and a zero-production year of 2043. For the poorest group with the lowest capacity, a 14% cut is required by 2030, with all production ended by 2050.”

Romain Ioualalen, global policy lead at Oil Change International (OCI), said in a statement that the Tyndall Centre’s new research “highlights the deep and profoundly unjust consequences of climate inaction by rich producing countries: their continued reliance on fossil fuels has depleted the carbon budget to such an extent that even the poorest countries would need to stop producing a mere 15 years after the richest ones.”

“This report is a stark indictment of the climate failure of rich countries,” Ioualalen argued. “Rich countries have twelve years to end their production of oil and gas, but none has any plans to do so.”

OCI estimates that rich countries are currently planning to produce five times as much oil and gas in 2030 as the new report says is compatible with keeping warming below 1.5°C.

“As the world grapples with Russia’s tragic invasion of Ukraine, Big Oil and Gas are attempting to harness the crisis to boost shareholder profits and lock in decades more pollution,” said Collin Rees, of OCI’s United States. “Oil and gas boosters claim more fossil fuels are the answer, but nothing could be further from the truth.”

“Rich nations like the United States must resist cynical calls to commit to a fossil-fueled future and instead act first and fastest to carefully phase out their own extraction while funding other countries to transition away from fossil fuel production,” Rees continued. “Global equity demands swift action to preserve a manageable transition—Joe Biden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and other U.S. leaders must heed this call while there’s still time.”

Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General says the rush to use fossil fuels because of the war in Ukraine is “madness” and threatens global climate targets. Guterres makes no bones about the fact that the limited progress achieved in Glasgow is insufficient to ward off dangerous climate change.

 “The problem was not solved in Glasgow,” Mr Guterres says, in a speech delivered at the Economist Sustainability Summit. “In fact, the problem is getting worse.”

To keep that 1.5C threshold alive, carbon output needs to be cut in half by the end of this decade. Instead, as  Guterres points out, emissions are set to rise by 14%.

The war in Ukraine threatens to make that situation even more problematic, he says. Europe and the UK and other countries are looking to cut their reliance on Russian oil and gas this year. Many are turning to coal or imports of liquefied natural gas as alternative sources. But Guterres warns this short-term approach heralds great danger for the climate. “Countries could become so consumed by the immediate fossil fuel supply gap that they neglect or knee-cap policies to cut fossil fuel use,”  Guterres said. “This is madness. Addiction to fossil fuels is mutually assured destruction.”

 For many in the Global South it would mean a death sentence or a mass exodus of people but the USA perserveres.

The western United States will suffer “prolonged, persistent drought” for the second spring in a row, government scientists have said. The US National Weather Service (NWS) predicted continuing or worsening drought across a vast swathe of the country from California to Montana down to Texas.

It comes after the southwestern US experienced its most severe drought on record last year, exacerbated by historic high temperatures that a US government report blamed “significantly” on global warming.

Nearly 60 per cent of the continental US will experience minor to exceptional drought conditions. Severe to exceptional drought has persisted in some areas of the West since the summer of 2020 and drought has expanded to the southern Plains and Lower Mississippi Valley.  Dry conditions would increase the risk of wildfires in the Southwest and the central Great Plains region, following brutal fire seasons in California and Oregon. Southwest states such as California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah have been in drought for two years now, bringing crucial water reservoirs such as the Hoover Dam to all-time lows.

Russian rapper Oxxxymiron cancelled his upcoming tour in Russia and has instead organised charity concerts abroad – known as “Russians Against War” – to raise money for Ukrainian refugees.

Announcing the postponement of his Russian tour, Oxxxymiron explained that he could not “entertain people while Russian rockets fall on Ukraine, while residents of Kyiv are forced to hide in their basements and the metro, and while people are dying”.

 Despite all types of asbestos being banned in the UK since 1999, it still kills thousands of people every year.

One of the UK’s biggest manufacturers of asbestos and the industry bodies that it co-founded historically withheld information on risks posed by the carcinogenic material, playing down the dangers while lobbying the government for product warnings to be moderately tempered. 

Asbestos Research Council (ARC), of which Cape was a founding member, from 1966 successfully lobbied the government for regulation of asbestos products to be on a “maximum allowable concentration” basis rather than the “no dust policy” that had been proposed.

Documents also show Cape’s in-house sampling data threw up significantly higher dust counts than industry standards for accepted levels of exposure, but data unfavourable to Cape was withheld. Cape began to label its product in 1976 with a “take care with Asbestos” warning, it said “breathing asbestos dust can damage health”, but made no reference to the risk of mesothelioma. In a 1976 booklet by the Asbestos Information Committee, of which Cape was also a founding member, said: “The normal use of asbestos products should not be a cause for anxiety.”

Harminder Bains whose father died of mesothelioma said she felt “revulsion and anger” when going through the documents. 

“They clearly show that Cape knew of the high risk of fatal disease, yet deliberately withheld information and lobbied the government to protect their profits,” she said. “As a result of their greed, many men and women, including my father, have lost their lives.”

UK asbestos maker withheld information on material’s risks, court papers show | UK news | The Guardian

 In a recent speech, Putin very much parroted the propaganda tool of Herman Goering.

Putin declared, “… the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors, and simply spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths, spit them out on the pavement.” 

 Older people face the prospect of “pensioner poverty” due to the rising cost of living and the falling value of the stock market.

 Interactive Investor show its customers withdrew a quarter more from their private pensions in January as the cost of energy, food and petrol went up. The figures have prompted concern that pensioners will not have enough money to see them through retirement. In January, the average withdrawal from an Interactive Investor pension was £1,944, up 25% on the average for the same month in previous years. In February, the average was £1,910, up 7% on the same month in previous years.

Former pensions minister and campaigner Ros Altmann says these higher withdrawals are a “danger signal for the future”, particularly if they are taking their retirement savings early. “As the cost of basic essentials, such as food and heating have soared, people need higher incomes to cover their bills. Pay increases are far lower than current 30-year record high inflation rates, and people may be searching for other ways to make ends meet,” she says.

“For the over-55s, this could mean being tempted to take more money from their pension funds. This is worrying because private pensions are meant to support people after they finish work, rather than topping up pre-retirement earnings. Higher pension withdrawals now risks rising pensioner poverty in future and lower long-term growth.”

Becky O’Connor, head of pensions at Interactive Investor, says the average monthly withdrawal before the pandemic was £1,782. It then dropped to £1,534 as lockdowns were imposed and people were spending less. The combined pressure of a need for cash to cover higher living expenses, and the falling stock market, leads to a “double depletion” effect on savings, she says, and an anxiety for pensioners. 

“It’s the existential angst perennially faced by retirees on limited means, whose pensions have to last the rest of their lives. But it’s worse now than ever as a result of diminishing stock market returns and high inflation, which both erodes the value of the pot and puts pressure on people to withdraw more,” says O’Connor. “Withdrawing more from a diminishing pot means a higher risk of running out of money later on. You may take the view that you need it now, whereas you might not need it in 10 or 20 years when you reach your 80s. That might turn out to be true, but even when you are 80, there can be unexpected calls on your income that you could need to cover.”

‘Pensioner poverty’ alarm as older people raid pension pots | Money | The Guardian