A decade of dissent: enemies of progress

In the first part of a retrospective essay on ten years of The Acorn, which I edit on the Winter Oak site, I look back on its content in 2015, the year in which it was launched. The online document covering the entire decade can be found here.

Our very first Acorn, which came out on February 6, 2015, was very much concerned with the fight against industrial “growth” and “development”, focusing on struggles against road-building plans in West Sussex, East Sussex and Bristol.

The theme continued in the subsequent 18 issues published that year (we’ve slowed down a bit since!).

In March, for instance, we wrote about the announcement of a big roadbuilding programme by Highways England, whose list of “strategic outcomes” included “supporting economic growth” and “opening up new areas for development”.

Our article declared: “All the smooth talk about making roads safer and reducing congestion is a barely disguised cover for its real mission of expanding capitalist infrastructure and thus increasing private profit at the expense of the public and the environment”.

We also covered anti-road protests in Turkey and in Australia, where authorities were clearing the way for a motorway to be driven across an Aboriginal heritage site “older than the pyramids”.

There was a lot of coverage of the battle against fracking that had been ongoing in England for several years.

Indeed the threat was starting to be seen off – for the time being, anyway! – and we reported that a June decision by Lancashire County Council was a significant victory for frack-free campaigners and had been described as “a Waterloo for the fracking industry”.

We placed fracking in a broader context, insisting that our real enemy was “infrastructure” and “the death-cult industrial capitalist system itself“.

And we wrote: “There are some ‘enemies of progress’ out there who strangely don’t welcome the prospect of contaminated water, soil and air, of devastated countryside, of lorry-congested roads, of a night sky constantly lit up by flares and of the occasional frack-induced earthquake”.

The label “enemies of progress” – a badge I am still proud to wear – came from a leader writer in The Daily Telegraph, who in 2013 also described anti-fracking protesters in Balcombe, West Sussex, as a “shrieking chorus of environmental zealots”, a “travelling circus of protest”, “eco-loonies” and “new Luddites”.

I’m happy with that last one, as well!

On the environmental front we also expressed our support for Plane Stupid and its battle against a threatened expansion of Heathrow Airport, Earth First!, Reclaim the Fields, and Via Campesina, an international movement that was declaring “No to the false solutions of green capitalism! Sustainable family farming now!”

We reported on protests against lignite mining in Germany, against the “phoney COP21 climate summit” in Paris, on the resistance of the Nasa people in Colombia to private ownership of their ancestral homeland, on indigenous resistance to logging in Canada and on massive and bloody demonstrations against a $10 billion copper-mining project in Peru.

We also cited a Mexican anti-industrial group called the Pagan Sect of the Mountain which said it was “continuing the fiercest conflict inherited from our ancestors against progress and artificiality”.

There were regular mentions for the Anarchist Action Network, which adopted The Acorn as its unofficial mouthpiece and for a long time reposted each issue on its own website.

We also included plugs for various anarchist bookfairs, for the Anti-Fascist Network in its actions against Tommy Robinson’s (Zionist-funded) EDL, notably in Brighton, for Class War in its campaigning against gentrification in London, for Occupy Democracy, the Open Spaces Society and the Love Activists in Liverpool.

We wrote about protests against the DSEI arms fair in London’s Docklands, against the G7 in Germany, against the Bilderberg summit in Austria and against NATO war games in several southern European countries as well as the November 5 “Million Mask March” in London.

We also ran a piece about the “full-on resistance movement against capitalism and its infrastructure” that had emerged in France, with notice of a forthcoming talk by Le Comité Invisible, famed authors of The Coming Insurrection, in Brighton.

We subsequently reported on a massive demonstration, of some 20,000 people, against the opening party of the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt and a Mayday protest in Milan “focused on the opening day of Expo 2015, an extravagant six-month ‘world fair’ celebrating the corporate wealth built on the exploitation of workers and the destruction of the environment”.

We also published reports on two rooftop occupations that shut down the Kent factory of Israeli arms company Elbit Systems.

The Acorn expressed a certain ambiguity regarding the “left”.

In September we commented on the British Establishment’s reaction to Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour Party.

We stressed that we didn’t see his politics as “particularly radical or interesting” – “he is happy to work within the putrid parliamentary system and to acknowledge its legitimacy, along with that of the ‘law’ and the monarchy”.

And yet, we added, Corbyn had suffered “relentless attacks” and prime minister David Cameron had just described him as “a threat to our national security”, using a phrase that observers regarded as evoking “the language of Hitler and Stalin”.

At the same time we were exposing “fake ‘left-wingers’ who hate the alternative media” and expressing a growing frustration at the state of what was supposed to amount to an opposition movement.

We described a big but lifeless anti-austerity demo in London as “depressing” and watched with disbelief as sold-out trade unions got behind both the fracking industry and the proposed Heathrow expansion on the basis that these would provide “jobs”.

Declared The Acorn: “We need to break out of the reformist strait jacket that ‘left-wing’ thinking has put us in. We need to throw off the blinkers of its restrictions and inhibitions and look clearly and boldly into the eyes of the industrial-militarist-capitalist beast before thrusting a stake through its putrid heart”.

The so-called “left” was also serving the interests of Capital in France, and we reported on a general strike being staged against a new law drawn up by the ruling Socialist Party, which was all about encouraging “economic growth” – “working hours are to be increased, with Sunday working normalised in the way it already is in the UK, and bosses’ powers strengthened”.

The legislation in question was known as the Macron Law, with the minister responsible being Emmanuel Macron, the former Rothchild banker and future president who was to feature in many more Acorn bulletins and Winter Oak reports in the years to follow.

A glimpse into the murky activities of the global mafia came in a special Acorn investigation into so-called “sustainable transport” funding in southern England which was being diverted into a project that was blatantly nothing more than a make-over for an urban shopping centre.

Decision-making about the allocation of this state funding was, we discovered, in the hands of a company called WSP Global Inc whose previous projects had included The Shard in London, Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok and Trump Tower in New York, where it was also involved in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center.

Repression was a recurrent theme in the first year’s haul of Acorns and we drew our readers’ attention to “the increasing fascisisation of the UK and other ‘democratic’ Western states”.

Some of this repression was directed at fellow anarchists, such as those arrested by the Spanish state on suspicion of belonging to a “criminal organisation” in the form of a non-existent “network” invented by the police, or those in the UK who had been targeted by spy cops.

We quoted an anonymous anarchist leaflet in France explaining: “We hate the police. Because they are the armed wing of the thing that is slowly and surely killing us. Because the police will always be an obstacle between the life we have and the life we want”.

And we noted that the French high court had upheld the criminal conviction of 12 political activists for “inciting hate or discrimination” because they had handed out leaflets calling for a boycott against Israel as a means of ending the decades-long military occupation of Palestine.

In the UK, we reported, authorities had produced propaganda claiming that young people who questioned official state narratives might be “extremists”.

The leaflet, handed to parents in London, claimed danger signs of so-called radicalisation included “showing a mistrust of mainstream media reports and belief in conspiracy theories” and “appearing angry about government policies, especially foreign policy”.

We commented: “Numbed slack-jawed conformists gawping apathetically at the TV set are, presumably, the ideal non-extremist citizens of tomorrow”.

In another Acorn we wrote: “While the state is trying to win acceptance for its idea of ‘extremism’ by linking it in the public mind to ‘Islamic terrorism’, it clearly also applies to anyone who dares cock a snoop at the neoliberal corporate megamachine, as we can see from the remit of the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit, for instance.

“The technique is Orwellian and essentially simple. The system declares itself to be a democracy and therefore anyone who opposes the system is anti-democratic! This is much the same as declaring yourself to be God and that therefore anyone who challenges your absolute authority is working on behalf of Satan!”

We voiced concern about “the future being lined up for us by the industrial prison-system”.

And we sounded the alarm about “smart spies in our homes” as part of a so-called internet of things “where privacy, freedom and, indeed, humanity will be consigned to the past and we will all be reduced to the status of permanently monitored and controlled slaves to a techno-industrial global state that will make Orwell’s nightmare look like a whimsical daydream”.

With police-state repression increasingly being carried out in the name of “anti-terrorism”, we pointed out that this phenomenon was not at all what it claimed to be – “it is in fact the deliberately misleading label given to a global psychological war waged against most of humanity by a controlling elite”.

Indeed, we said, terrorism itself is often carried out by the state itself, as was the case in the 20th century with the Gladio network which, while exposed most fully in Italy, operated across Europe, including the UK, where the conflict in the north of Ireland was an ideal training ground.

We stated: “The worrying lack of knowledge and understanding, even in radical circles, of the extent to which terrorism was secretly deployed by the capitalist system from the 1940s to the 1980s sadly means that there is little to stop it using the same techniques again today”.

And we warned that we were up against “a cult of power for the sake of power, growth for the sake of growth, which will do anything – literally anything – to ensure its own preservation and expansion. Murder, lies and hypocrisy are part of its very essence and we would do well never to forget that”.

[Audio version]