CONTRAFLOW WINTER 93/94

"Buy this L reg car and get a free gas mask!'The MII, Motorways and 1990s
Capitalism and Cultureblah blah blah 

As CF goes to print the M11 link motorway from Redbridge to Hackney in East
London is 4 months into 4 years of construction. Yet another Motorway, this one
is costing 1 billion pounds, 350 homes and parts of 2 parks - and all just to
end up spewing into Hackney's streets. Already it has met stiff opposition from
local residents, squatters and nomadic green activists. A peak of this
resistance was on the 7th of December 93 when 200 cops and 150 bailiffs and
security guards evicted 7 residents from their tree house on George Green,
Wanstead. Taking ten hours, 3 were hospitalised [a demonstrator and a guard by a
crane slipping backwards in the mud] and 18 arrests made. 

Other activities include the storming of the green by school kids and a local
'lollipop' [roadcrossing] worker, guerilla gardening, sabotage of construction
equipment, and the reclaiming of vandalised houses left empty in the route of
the M11. The campaign has shown a tendency to advance from a position of
nonviolence to one of active resistance - from hugging the coppers to an active
minority being ready and willing to have a ruck - particularly for those who
were not originally local residents. Eg. actions on the 20/1 saw mass
occupations of building sites by up to 200 activists as well as a strong push
towards autonomous organisation. By late January, the entire population of the
autonomous region of Wanstonia faced with invasion by the freeway were preparing
for physical resistance to their eviction. This invoved digging anti vehicle
trenches [vs bulldozers and cherry pickers], blockading doors with old cars, and
building another tree house. 

Reasons for fighting the motorway aren't hard to find - from saving homes and
green spaces to spending the money on something more useful like buses. That's
apart from new studies which suggest that 15 million people living in Britain
are suffering from additional headaches, runny noses, red eyes and ear
infections - because of auto Capitalism. 

But the M11 isn't just an example of car Capitalism gone mad - nor just an
indication of the social strength of the auto industry and the petrol companies
- ie. the 'road lobby'. Rather, the Motorway boom across Britain is a reflection
of the specific needs of Capital trying to stabilise itself in the 80s and 90s.
Capitals' strategy rested on boosting car ownership, homeownership and
suburbanisation to both buy off and atomise part of the working class. The
motorways are but the physical infrastructure necessary for this. 

Car ownership rose in the 80's in from about 30% of households to about 60% -
the policy framework that encouraged this [eg. cheap petrol, homeownership,
superstores, shit public transport] was no accident. Cars disorganise working
class communities - from making streets too dangerous for kids to play in,
reducing kids' Capital free space but to the more profitable sega games - to
lessening non boss controlled spaces where workers mix [eg. chatting on the
bus]. 

[And while resistance is also sometimes organised with cars - eg. Ram raiding or
the use of cars during the LA uprising of May 1992 which added fluidity to their
resistance - the possible saving grace of cars in interlinking families or
friendship networks doesn't seem to have saved too many old folk from dying in
the cold this winter.] 

On the other hand, cars assist in organising Capital, ideologically and
structurally. Not only do they increase the mobility of some workers, they also
tend to support the ideologies of individualism, imperialism and patriarchy.
From providing each car owner with [at least psychic] stakes in the Gulf War
[petrol price panics], to each male driver with a space to to live out macho
fantasies of power, speed and control [Well OK - maybe not in a traffic jam!].
And while cars provide each nuclear family with privatised transport - they also
in het, 1 car couples tend to disempower the non commuter [read woman] and shore
up male power within the relationship in some instances. At least in the media
cyber space of car advertisements: cars, patriarchal power and capitalism work
hand in glove while still reflecting some of the space won by women [eg. the
Nissan advert]. And while in the real world, connections are more tenuous, the
overall argument retains force. 

While for British Capitalism, physically organising such a car culture is
obviously more difficult than in settler states in the US, Australia etc - the
common language and TV culture in many ways merely reinforces the need for
Capital to construct such a culture here - bulldozing through East London [to
Ramsey St?] as they go. 

In this context the resistance against the M11 is fine, but the expressed
ideology of the resistance - evironmentalism, a critique of the road lobby and
the defence of Wanstead's 'village like feel' in East London is no match for
Capitals' hopes for Essex man motoring into town. It remains to be seen if the
support for the Motorway building from its projected working class users can be
turned into opposition to the whole project of auto Capitalism. 

[Certainly, the slow but steady level of security guard desertion from the
project suggets that for these men/workers, they see little in the roadway for
them - but then security guards aren't high on the list of workers to be
co-opted.] 

contact direct action against the M11 ph. 081 530 5709 

And while we're talking about transport Below are two more articles about anti
freeway actions in Wales Cymru and also anti car actions in Holland. 

We'd suggest that the action in North Wales, aimed at companies and part of an
overall milieu of defence of the welsh speaking part of north Wales which has a
tradition of militant defence of its community [see previous CF articles on Goch
Cymru activists framed up on firebombing holiday homes] is more soundly based
than the Dutch activists' attacks on cars 

To say: "the individual car owner is responsible for their choice of destroying
our nature" is intensely problematical! Let's face it - a fuck of a lot of
people need to use their cars to live ... we can only hope the smashed up motors
were owned by rich bastards. 

Why all these actions are important is because of the new [from 1992] by the
Euro states in developing TERrors [trans European routes] from Moscow to the UK.
Roads are now the premier environmental issue in the UK - but they are
fundamentally being resolved on a class basis. While a few OBE types in
Buckinghamshire can finally succeed in ending their threatened motorway - making
this not only the the last Tory controlled county council but also the only
success so far of the anti motorway movement - meanwhile in East London the
story is much different. NIMBYism's success as a political strategy clearly
depends on how big your backyard is 

NO Snowdonia Motorway! 

When over 100 "saving the Environment" protestors met at the ARC Northern quarry
at Penmaenmawr, Gwynedd, recently [25/10/93], they were happily patronised by
the attendant police, quarry security and press with a nice picture in the next
day's Daily Post saying how peaceful the protest had been. There was no mention
of how this quarry was to benefit from supplying all the rock for the new A5
highway through Snowdonia. However the next day, the Post carried a small
outraged report about how the ARC office had been trashed, computers and drawing
equipment smashed - all up costing œ40,000. 

2 days later the North Wales MEP told the press that all plans for the Snowdonia
motorway had been scrapped. The green gremlins, not content with this [as the
motorway was now being re-routed through the north coast of Wales] re-entered
the offices in January 94, turned on the computers, hacked away at the
headoffice mainframes and caused œ10,000 monetary damage as well as wiping out
months of work. Police remained puzzled - "nothing was stolen." 

