This Christmas has been a sombre and reflective one, cast in a new light by the profound sacrifice of the Palestine Action hunger strikers in the UK. These activists have undertaken prolonged hunger strikes, risking their health and lives to demand that the UK government and corporations end all complicity in Israel’s military actions in Gaza and the occupation of Palestinian territories. Their act of self-sacrifice is a direct appeal to pressure the UK to sever its military ties with Israel, aligning with their network’s central goal: disrupting the arms supply chain that sustains the conflict.
Families and supporters of hunger strikers linked to Palestine Action have urgently pleaded with Justice Secretary David Lammy to meet them, hoping to end a dangerous impasse in a protest that has left several participants severely unwell, a crisis underscored on Sunday when three strikers were simultaneously hospitalized, Qesser Zuhrah, 20, and Amu Gib, 30, on their 51st day without food, and Kamran Ahmed, 28, on his 43rd day, and followed on Monday by a legal letter from the strikers’ lawyers alleging that Lammy’s refusal to meet violates the Ministry of Justice’s own policy on handling hunger strikes.
“Unlike the British government, the hunger strikers cannot take a Christmas holiday, as they continue to be locked up in prison cells, suffering immensely away from their families.” (Francesca Nadin, 2025)
Of course, for millennia, the lives of countless people have been upended by those in power, sacrificed to greed and the thirst for dominance. History books are filled with the records of these victories and losses, each page a testament to generations of visible and invisible lives consumed by time.
So, these (supposedly) Christian days, when we celebrate the spirit of Christmas, are meant to be a “light in the darkness”. A concentrated reminder of our shared humanity and a brief but vital invitation to live by our highest ideals (Miller, 2021). As Charles Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol, it is a time when we open our “shut-up hearts” (Dickens, 1843, p. 5) to embrace a more loving, generous, and connected way of being, recognising it, in the words of Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, as “a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time” (Dickens, 1843, p. 5). Yet, as ever, the world’s bullies remind us how this light in the darkness is a temporary vale of denial, as they carry on killing and ruining lives.
This pretence that all is well, while the world burns, casts a suffocating shadow, an insidious and familiar ogre growing within our souls. We all feel it inside. It may indeed simmer away in different ways, shapes, and colours, but it’s there and will not go away. A knotty monster reflecting our own monstrous pact to bend the knee to power, to adapt to all the nastiness, hatred and corruption. Choosing where, consciously, you can stop bending the knee. This is where agency lies. It might be in small, defiant acts of integrity, kindness, or truth-telling in your immediate sphere. It might be in aligning your life more closely with your values, even fractionally. Finding others who see the ogre. Community is the antidote to the suffocating shadow. Shared recognition breaks the pretence and makes the burden bearable.
This brings me neatly to one of my favourite books, which I have been rereading over Christmas, Peter Linebaugh’s The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day, an essential and passionate work that argues that May Day is far more than a historical date. The book explores the holiday’s dual roots, framing them as the “Green” and “Red” sides of its history. The “Green” refers to the ancient, pre-capitalist celebrations of spring, fertility, and common access to nature—a time to cease work and celebrate life. The “Red” signifies its modern identity as International Workers’ Day, born of the struggle for the eight-hour workday and commemorating events such as the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago.
Linebaugh proposes that these two strands are fundamentally connected, forming a powerful, ongoing hallmark. He sees May Day as “the union of the two best things in the world, the love of nature, and the love of each other,” arguing that this “green union” can only be realised through “red struggle”. It is a living symbol of the fight for common rights, workers’ dignity, and a better world. The title of his book reflects this core thesis: May Day’s history is incomplete because its revolutionary promise of liberation from exploitation remains unfulfilled, and it is a living struggle rather than a finished story from the past.
“Everywhere people went a-Maying” by going into the woods and bringing back leaf, bough, and blossom to decorate their persons, homes, and loved ones with green garlands. Outside the theatre, performances were given with characters such as “Jack-in-the-Green” and the “Queen of the May.” Trees were planted. Maypoles were erected. Dances were danced. Music was played. Drinks were drunk, and love was made. Winter was over, spring had sprung.”
Furtherfield’s 2012 essay, “DIWO: Do It With Others – No Ecology without Social Ecology,” posits that meaningful environmental solutions are impossible without transforming the underlying social systems. Arguing that the exploitative logic of contemporary capitalism, amplified by commercial digital platforms, treats both people and nature as disposable resources, driving both social inequity and ecological collapse. We critique technological solutions that leave these core power dynamics intact, proposing instead that collaborative artistic practices can model alternative social ecologies. Their central project, DIWO (Do It With Others), uses networked collaboration to decentralise creative production, dissolve traditional hierarchies, and demonstrate a more equitable way of organising cultural and social life.
To enact this vision, the essay champions a unified social-ecological transformation. This is framed as a dual project: building new forms of community while respecting planetary limits. Furtherfield refers to the Media Art Ecologies programme (initiated in 2009) as a practical framework for this work, focusing on “the construction of alternative infrastructures and visions of prosperity”. The role of art and culture is foundational to this process; it is through collaborative and critical creative practices that new collective stories, values, and social imaginaries, essential for moving beyond an extractive status quo, can be forged. Therefore, intersectional environmentalism is not just a political stance but a creative methodology, where fighting for justice for people and the planet is the same artistic and social endeavour.
“There is no ecology without social ecology,” shares the same political and imaginative approach to grassroots radicalism as Peter Linebaugh’s idea of “Green and Red.” Both see the struggle for a world that reclaims nature and the struggle for class liberation as inseparable. Our community spirit and radical identity are being suffocated. A system of ingrained defaults has severed our once-strong connections to our history and our current potential. The powers that be have blurred our rightful legacies, burying our roots, beliefs, and self-knowledge under psychological and historical debris.
The green union (environmental justice) and the red struggle (economic and class justice) remind us that we must reclaim common ground. We need to look beyond and climb out of the systems and structures that sink us and blind us to ourselves, our peers, and our potential allies. It’s not just about rehacking our lives away from those who think they own our consciousness. But, from the technological tools and weapons they have used to control us by stealing our data for their grubby gains over billions of lives and nature.
In the year 2025, we are all looking over a cliff edge, balancing precariously between fascism and our hopeful choices of urgent forms of resistance. If we don’t do anything now, we are lost in a world of constant lies, distraction and violence inflicted on the planet and its people.
References:
[1] Families of Palestine Action hunger strikers seek urgent meeting with Lammy. Guardian. Haroon Siddique and Jessica Elgot, Mon 22 Dec 2025.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/dec/22/families-of-palestine-action-hunger-strikers-seek-urgent-meeting-with-lammy
[2] Ibid,
[3] Miller, J. A. (2021). Seasonal sentiments: Ritual and renewal in the modern age. Oxford University Press.
[4] Dickens, C. (1843). A Christmas carol. Chapman & Hall.
[5] Peter Linebaugh. The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day. PM Press/Spectre. 2016.
[6] Historian Peter Linebaugh on “The Incomplete, True, Authentic & Wonderful History of May Day”. Democracy Now. April 29, 2016. https://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/29/historian_peter_linebaugh_on_the_incomplete
[7] Peter Linebaugh. The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day. Anarchist Library, 2016.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fq96l0EXfIe7XB90K7Haq7FHmMxMRus-SuUz2B35_g8/edit?tab=t.0
[8] Garrett, Marc and Catlow, Ruth. DIWO: Do It With Others – No Ecology without Social Ecology. Furtherfield, 26/01/2013.
First published in Remediating the Social 2012. Editor: Simon Biggs, University of Edinburgh. Pages 69-74.
https://www.furtherfield.org/diwo-do-it-with-others-no-ecology-without-social-ecology/
