How the Left betrayed the Truckers
The convoy is despised by those who should support it
Kyeyune, Malcolm
http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2022/02/10/how-the-left-betrayed-the-truckers/
Date Written: 2022-02-09
Year Published: 2022
Resource Type: Article
Cx Number: CX24498
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.
Abstract:
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Exerpt:
Many on the left have come to believe that without their leadership, the working class could not organize and act. 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?
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