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."