On the Freedom Convoy: Has the Left Abandoned the Working Class?
As a life-long left wing writer and activist, I have watched the Left’s response to the truckers’ Freedom Convoy with a mixture of fascination and horror.
Truckers in Canada and their supporters have sparked a national and global movement against the government’s Covid policies, in particular vaccine mandates. Proof of vaccination is required in various forms across Canada for people to retain their jobs, board flights, eat at restaurants and attend various events such as a loved ones’ wedding, their five-year-old’s first dance class, their child’s high school graduation.
While the central demand of the convoy is for the government to drop all Covid mandates, the sentiment of the movement runs much deeper. Discontent runs deep over the government’s poor management of Covid from the beginning of the pandemic. While major corporations like Amazon and Walmart continued their operations with little regulation beyond mask mandates, millions of working people lost their jobs and small businesses in many sectors were forced to shut their doors. The past two years have represented the single greatest transfer of wealth from working folks to corporations and the ultra-rich elite. Coupled with this are many other grievances: Canada’s woefully underfunded and bureaucratic health care system, which was on the brink of failure long before Covid; rapidly-growing censorship in the online space, with big tech companies functioning almost as another arm of the state; stagnant wages and an out-of-control housing market which has allowed and encouraged investment in the housing market by wealthy foreign buyers and has put even a suburban townhouse out of the reach of many families, to name just a few. Meanwhile, the government of Canada is increasingly divorced from working people and representative of a class of the wealthy liberal elite. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau symbolizes this, born the son of earlier Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and coming from a family of the old money elite.
The truckers in Ottawa may not have put it in sophisticated language, but there is a lot more than simplistic hate of an individual behind those ‘Fuck Trudeau’ flags.
How has the Left responded?
Uniting the working class against the powerful elites of the state has long been the domain of the Left, so one would think that supporting the convoy with its demands for an end to authoritarian mandates which have hurt working people would be a natural cause – but not so, apparently.
Left organizations and individuals of all stripes – communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal – have come out in strong condemnation of the convoy. They have echoed Trudeau’s sentiments of the convoy supposedly being filled with science deniers, racists, misogynists and Nazis despite the overwhelming evidence on the ground being to the contrary. They wield the talking points of the legacy media against the convoy: they are funded by Trump, neo Nazis, even Russia. The Left, which once stood in opposition to the capitalist state, is now backing its narrative. Leftists on social media platforms have been calling for violence against the convoy, and indeed five were arrested for violence and vandalism during a counter-protest to the convoy in Vancouver. Ottawa gelato shop Stella Luna was forced to close after receiving threats of violence following the name of the owner being leaked in the GiveSendGo hack. Many on the Left have taken to this form of vigilantism, in a way which finds its chilling historical parallel in Mussolini’s Blackshirts.
The Left, whose rallying cry was once, “Workers of the world, unite!” is now condemning workers of the world for doing just that.
How did we land here?
While maintaining the illusion of acting against the state with cries of ‘fuck the police’, those on the Left have fallen directly in line with exactly what the state wants them to do: divide the working class into ever-smaller and more specific identity groups rather than uniting the working class as a whole.
This is not about justice, it is about power.
Of course, the traditional left was about power as well: dictatorship of the proletariat, as Marx famously termed it. In modern terms, that would mean something like control over the state, financial institutions, and the means of production by the 99% rather than the 1%.
This new Left is interested in power as well, but not in the same way as the old left. The focus of the new Left is on a transition of power from the old, more conservative state order to a new one of neoliberalism. While the old left was composed mostly of blue-collar workers, this new left is guided and dominated mostly by upper middle class university elite. This has fundamentally changed the character of what the Left represents. Rather than focussing on economic inequality, this new Left is focussed on the minutiae of politically correct language and achieving perfect equity for those in the intellectual and managerial classes.
This is not to minimize existing inequalities that need redress. But the identity politics approach does little to correct them. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training, government funding to BIPOC-owned businesses, etcetera looks like action but is focussed on redressing the minute inequalities faced by BIPOC in already privileged positions of upper middle-class jobs, while doing little to address the daily challenges of keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table faced by working-class BIPOC and LGBT folks.
Following the struggles and gains of the great women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights movements of the twentieth century, the capitalist states in Canada and around the world ultimately conceded on granting hard fought for rights to various oppressed groups, because while racism, sexism, and homophobia are important tools of division, they do not ultimately pose a threat to the economic underpinnings of capitalism and the power of the elites. (An exception worth noting are Indigenous land defenders, whose defense of their lands against resource extraction does, in fact, pose a direct challenge to the interests of corporations and capitalism.) Enter neoliberalism, which has embraced these identity groups as consumers (evidenced in the plethora of Pride Month and Black History Month corporate advertising), while pitting them against the new enemy: the white working class.
While in rhetoric much of the Left continues to oppose the state and capitalism, in practice their actions serve a different agenda. Perhaps unconsciously, the Left’s focus on identity politics and demonizing, attacking, or cancelling anyone who speaks incorrectly only serves the interest of the state and powerful elites.
This is perhaps best evidenced in the Left’s response to the convoy. The very same individuals and organizations who were calling for ‘defund the police’ during the Black Lives Matter protests are now calling for police action, state violence, and criminal charges against participants in the convoy. In other words: they don’t really want the police defunded, they want the power of the police and the state to be wielded against those with whom they disagree.
What is the convoy really about?
The central demand of the convoy is an end to Covid mandates – but it represents so much more.
The Left has criticized the convoy on two main points:
The first – that there are far-right people involved in organizing.
This is true, although not nearly to the degree that the Left makes it out to be. One of the central organizers is Tamara Lich, former member of Alberta’s separatist Maverick Party. Her party holds right-wing views certainly, but they are not the fascists they are made out to be by the Left. The other central organizer in the crosshairs is Pat King, a truck driver and social media influencer who has reportedly expressed white supremacist views. Certainly, there are members of right-wing parties and racists involved. However, this is certainly not representative of the movement. Right-wing political groups will fund and intervene in movements to recruit people to their cause, just as the left does. Put simply, that’s politics. (In fact, a notable case in point would be the fact that the Left is willing to unite with the Liberal government against the convoy, even while the Liberal government has sent Canadian Forces to train actual Swastika-waving, SS-styled fascist militias in Ukraine.) But this movement is not centrally organized and funded – it is fundamentally grassroots, organized and funded in the majority by ordinary folks of all walks of life. Footage from Ottawa is in stark contrast with what both the Left and the media portray: rather than hordes of confederate and Nazi flag-waving rednecks, there is an array of people very representative of Canada: Indigenous folks who see these mandates as yet another government overreach. Truckers from the Sikh Freedom Alliance. Christians. Muslims. Jews. Refugees and immigrants who do not want to see Canada turn into the tyranny they fled from. Young. Elderly. Disabled folks. People of every colour and ethnic background – yes, including those supposedly racist white working class folks. There are drum circles and snowball fights, bouncy castles and little kids bringing flowers to truckers and police alike. Perhaps much of the success of the convoy is in the fact that these folks aren’t the Left, engaging in performative outrage against the state and police. They have been remarkably peaceful. They are ordinary folks who simply want an end to mandates, an accountable government, and a better world for their children.
The other Left criticism of the convoy is something along the lines of “where were these people when we were fighting for Indigenous land rights or (insert other struggle here)”. This criticism is possibly the most ridiculous. History shows us time and again that the majority of ordinary folks don’t get involved in struggle until they directly feel their own rights and lives at stake. In essence, the Left is whining that the working class is not already ‘woke’ to Left politics. And yet, on the convoy discussion pages and in my own friend group, I have time and again seen folks waking up to the realities of our current economic system, to Indigenous struggles, foreign wars, and other forms of injustice. Is this not the day the Left has been hoping for?
Yet rather than get involved in this mass movement and guide people towards a movement for fundamental political change and demands for a better health care system, more regulation of pharmaceutical and other corporations, they are condemning convoy participants for not already understanding Left politics. It seems the modern Left, rather than being a vanguard leading working people, wants to cast stones at working folks while supporting the interests of the state. For this new Left, it is the working class themselves who have become the enemy. And in so doing, they abandon the working class to the only leadership that is showing up: that of a right wing populist variety.
I fear greatly this new era of creeping authoritarianism. Benito Mussolini once said, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” It is difficult to deny we are in such a position now. It seems we have entered a dystopian era of a kind of ‘friendly fascism’ – and with the (perhaps unwitting) support of the Left.
On the other hand, the only political alternative to this corporate power seems to be growing right-wing populism. While it is not nearly as popular as an ideology in Canada as it in in the US, it should be viewed as a concern. Given this, the failure of the Left to take leadership against the mandates and corporate interests is dangerous and deplorable. I am hesitant to draw such extreme parallels, but it is a very similar political atmosphere that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany.
The Left has abandoned the working class to our peril.
What is to be done?
The Covid era has proven above all one thing: working folks and ordinary people of all backgrounds need a political alternative that goes beyond the left-right divide, because we will inevitably end up in the arms of corporate authoritarianism if we continue down either path.
The Freedom Convoy is the spark which has woken people up and brought them together like never before. We need to unite to demand an end to the mandates – and from there, we need to start a conversation about the kind of future we want for ourselves, our children, and our planet. We need an alliance of like-minded people to come together to build a better way forward out of this rotten system. This alliance must embrace open discussion and debate. It must embrace the values of veracity, integrity, courage, and community.
Forget the Great Reset. It’s time for a Great Awakening and a government of the people.