Trudeau flees as first 1,000 Trucks Arrive in Ottawa

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I've come to something of an epiphany here. For some reason Australians are desperate for Americans to view BLM as a bogeyman. Why Australia of all places?

They call it “The Honkening”. Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, is currently being besieged by a novel kind of protest. Honkening is a fairly appropriate name for what’s going on. Thousands of truckers have driven to the capital, and barraged the city with the noise of truck horns creating a cacophony of sound. Elsewhere, on the border between the United States and Canada, truckers, farmers and cowboys have blockaded traffic.

As the protests enter another week, Ottawa’s mayor has declared a state of emergency. Jim Watson described the truckers — ostensibly protesting against Canada’s harsh Covid mandates — as “out of control”. Watson sees anarchy; the truckers fulminate against Covid authoritarianism. But this battle is really about working-class discontent.

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Many on the Left came to believe that without their corporatist union structures, and without their shop stewards and political organisers, the working classes were done for. They were little better, to paraphrase Marx, than a “sack of potatoes”.

Without proper leadership, the workers would be too inert and stupid to do anything about their plight. As such, the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union (and the defeat of the strike waves of the Eighties) saw many Leftists indulge a wistful nostalgia for a time when the workers stuck it to the powers that be. Celebration of the good old days of the Left, and of “working-class power” in general, was thus central to the aesthetics of the now completely defunct wave of Left populism in the 2010s.

With that backdrop in mind, the explosion of worker militancy over vaccine mandates — and, on a related note, high fuel taxes in Europe — ought to have been greeted by enthusiasm by the Leftist activist and organiser set. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The truckers in Canada have instead triggered a primordial sense of dread in the hearts of the urban classes, in the people who Canadian trucker Gord Magill has dubbed “the email job caste”.

This sense of fear and dread at the machinations of the proles is hardly something unique to Canada. Indeed, even the United States saw a large increase of worker militancy and wildcat strikes over oppressive vaccine mandates. Like their compatriots in Canada, America’s various professional friends of the working class responded with horror and scorn. The well-known Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, was mobbed on Twitter for suggesting that workers striking over mandates were actually part of something called “class struggle”, rather than merely an expression of “fascism”.

Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.

The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?

It’s easy to laugh at this sort of absurdity, but the lesson here is anything but a joke. The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. Nora Loreto may not be a person with calloused hands, and she may very well belong to Gord Magill’s “email jobs caste”. But for the longest time, the political rhetoric and worldview of the Left depended on the idea that the trucker and the activist were merely two sides of the same coin.

Without the activist and the “organiser”, the trucker would never be able to know how to organise himself and his fellows politically; without the trucker, the activist and the organiser would not have a cause for which to organise. Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders.

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Why should they negotiate with these occupier morons?

An excellent analysis.

I've come to something of an epiphany here. For some reason Australians are desperate for Americans to view BLM as a bogeyman. Why Australia of all places?

Why should they negotiate with these occupier morons?

Because we don't like our cities being burnt down.

Who would burn your cities down because of unrest an ocean away?

These guys?

Do they have a good reason for it?

Do they have a good reason for it?

It depends who you ask: If you ask academics and people (aboriginal or otherwise) in the "upper"\"upper middle" classes, they'd probably say yes, but the aboriginal people I have spoken with (working class and\or middle class) would say no (my mother-in-law's partner is Aboriginal, and I've spoken to him and a number of people from his tribe on the subject, as well as a number of others)...

Then maybe the fear is unreasonable?

Then maybe the fear is unreasonable?