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We lost. In Part I the archaeology of our defeat was made clear: Remain killed us. But to fully realise how this happened we need to look at the deeper political substrate on which the rot of left Remainism has grown: the ongoing collapse of the political centre, writes GEORGE WEST

In Part I ALEX BIRCH charts our defeat and how we could have won. See Part II for an examination of the politics that engineered our failure, and how to fight them.

Millions of people are on the streets, from India to Chile. Democracy is both their promise and it is what has betrayed them. They aspire to the democratic spirit but find that democratic institutions–saturated by money and power–are inadequate. They are on the streets for more democracy, deeper democracy, a different kind of democracy.

Spending time with the union members of Chapare, who run society in a collective fashion, offers special insights into the resistance to the coup. They succeeded in expelling the police, but now fear a bloodbath in retaliation.

In the face of climate crisis megafires and an air quality health crisis, 40,000 people rallied and marched in Sydney to demand action on Wednesday night. The city is choking, and New South Wales is on fire. In Randwick on Tuesday, the air pollution was 11 times higher than “hazardous”.

Conservative leader Boris Johnson swept to power in the UK’s December 12 elections, winning 365 of a possible 650 seats. Labour’s socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn announced his resignation, after a bitterly disappointing night for his party.

The climate crisis isn’t a future we must fight to avoid. It’s an already unfolding reality. It’s the intensification of extreme weather–cyclones, storms and floods, droughts and deadly heat waves.

Real-time scenes evidenced once again how the Chilean state acts with rampant and absurd violence.

In the middle of the year, we Venezuelans received a visit from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michel Bachelet, on the occasion of meeting with the different political actors in the country to “evaluate” the complex economic and social environment brought about by the White House’s decision.

“In the richest country in the history of the world, we have an obligation to turn this around and make sure our kids live healthier and better lives than we do.”

“Is that a big deal?”, some may ask. It is to those who have pushed for achieving the far-reaching liberalisation of trade in an unequal global order, first under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and then under the auspices of the agreements that established the WTO and defined and expanded its remit.

However, this is by no means the most embarrassing thing.

Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to use a definition of antisemitism that conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism when investigating civil rights complaints alleging antisemitism on campus.

Jeanine Áñez, the ‘president’ of Bolivia, walked into the Burned Palace (Palacio Quemado) with an enormous Bible in her hand. ‘The Bible has returned to the Palace’, she said as she seized power.

There aren’t many ways ordinary Americans have a say in what happens to the surplus that determines their fate.

In 2015, United Nations member states adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which include an imperative to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” Yet, in the last four years, matters have deteriorated significantly.

This chapter of “In Commune” explores the Pancha Vásquez Commune in Apure state, where communards are working hand in hand with local farmers to fight smuggling and speculation with autonomous barter systems and communal markets.

There are many reasons for those at the top of the U.S. income distribution to celebrate the performance of the U.S. economy and tout the superiority of current U.S. economic and political institutions and policies.  Unfortunately, there is a strong connection between the continuing gains for those at the top and the steadily deteriorating employment conditions experienced by growing numbers of workers.

After deposing Evo Morales in a U.S.-backed coup November 11, Bolivia’s military selected Jeanine Añez as president. Añez immediately signed a decree pre-exonerating security forces of all crimes during their “re-establishment of order,” understood by all sides as a license to kill. Those same forces have now conducted massacres of Morales supporters near the cities of Cochabamba and La Paz.

The effort to revive and recover critical theory and its intellectual precedents has become more difficult at a time in which ‘critique’ is regularly denounced as negative, skeptical and anthropocentric. Bruno Latour, for instance, imagines that when we speak about what is ‘critical’, we have in mind a fully negative project, a practice of debunking and dismantling hegemonic presumptions about the world, and that critical theory only intensifies skepticism and lacks transformative power and commitment to emancipatory ideals.