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Why won't people who read Jacobin realise this man is not a fascist? (Photo by DAVE CHAN/AFP via Getty Images)
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.
The naive among us could be forgiven for thinking that this protest signalled something auspicious about “late capitalist” society. For decades, the common folk wisdom for both the Left and the Right was that the West’s working classes had been completely neutralised as a political force, and that class conflict itself was a relic of the past.
This idea took hold in the Sixties, when Herbert Marcuse theorised that Western workers had been subjected to a “socially engineered arrest of consciousness”. Their vested interest in the existing capitalist order made them impossible to radicalise. Ever since, finding new theoretical models to explain the unreliability (and stodgy conservatism) of workers has been a recurring activity on parts of the Left. Marxists had made a horrific discovery: the working class were not their foot soldiers. As Joan Didion once put it: “The have-nots, it turned out, mainly aspired to having.”
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”.
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SubscribeI am a care worker. Poorly paid and overworked. I am also highly educated. My friends and family are mystified why I’m not doing “something better.” Most of my co-workers are poorly educated, some are smart cookies some are profoundly stupid. Very nearly all lack the intellectual infrastructure to understand the nuances of Brexit, vaccine mandates, or east European security politics.
Why should they? We do a difficult, complicated, often dangerous job. We don’t get paid enough to afford rent and food and a car and one cheap holiday per year. So we work ridiculous hours. And we are angry.
It’s really, really simple. Just pay us enough to cover the basic costs of living, without having run up silly amounts of debt or work so many hours that our health suffers. We don’t see our kids, no wonder they are neurotic basket cases.
We don’t need complicated social theory to make sense of it. Social justice, u-huh. A fair days’ pay for a fair days’ work, is the original social justice. The original and the best. Wat Tyler would be proud. It’s not complicated, it doesn’t require any level of intellectual hinterland. Even thick people know when they are being urinated on.
This anger has to go somewhere, prepare for fireworks.
Thanks for that contribution, and for the job you do.
Well stated. And thank you for your thoughts.
They way to do this is to make prosperity for the whole of society. A high tide does float all boats. How do you make prosperity? You provide the ground work for people to find their own opportunity.
Which generally means you need smaller government.
This is complete BS. How is smaller government going to help underpaid care staff? How do you make prosperity? First step is for working people to take back control from the neoliberal elites.
Society runs on services and commodities. Free people working fir themselves are more productive at supplying such. Big government is like radiation sickness to a productive society. I’ll let you fill in the rest.
How do you explain poor real wage growth and productivity then?
So everyone should just become self-employed? Nope, you need collective action and workers’ cooperatives. We also need more government investment in housing, infrastructure and R&D.
“Which generally means you need smaller government.”
IMO, poor government leadership – and that’s what the world’s woes are all about, are just symptoms of rarely spoken about causes. The causes, being the systems that install governments and set the standards of accountability, competence and moral ethics. Of course I’m talking about a country’s electoral system and Constitution. These are the things that determine the quality of a country’s governments – and ultimately the quality of the country itself.
I think if we should be turning our focus to the ‘machine’ that produces the faulty product, rather than wasting time trying to fix the broken product (governments).
Western ‘democracies’ over time, have ridden the waves in the ‘tug-of-war’ between the people and the elites, but in recent times, up until the taking-on-board of Thatcher and Reagan’s modern neoliberalism, the citizens mostly fared okay. Unfortunately, over the past forty plus years, the playing field has become progressively lopsided – heavily in favour of the big end of town. And again, IMO, the causes are electoral systems and Constitutions, which have allowed this imbalance to occur.
Just one simple change to the system that completely bans all forms of donations to individuals and political parties would be a huge step in restoring democracy; shifting the fulcrum back in favour of the citizens. Campaign funding can easily be paid for via federal budgets – thus eliminating the ‘bribery’ element. This, of course would just be the first step in fixing the world’s growing leadership issues.
These current primitive political systems simply cannot produce the quality of government leadership required to deal with 21st century issues and beyond. And the key ingredient to bringing about the changes, is ‘people power’ and unity – and it can be done. Iceland’s ‘Pots and Pans’ revolution came within a whisker of rewriting their Constitution, following the 2008 GFC. The people did however, replace the government and do what no other country had the guts to do – jail their corrupt bankers.
Care workers and health workers more generally definitely need to be paid more. Are you part of a union?
The modern political Left likes to go on and on about how they are for the poor, the workers, and lower middle class. Then, when they have to interact with these people go “Eww.. peasants! Who let them talk?” and then go dine out with corporate oligarchs. Right after this happens, another article gets written in the mainstream press wondering where all their support amongst the lower classes went. Whenever someone on the old Left points this hypocrisy out, they are labeled as Alt-Right Neo-Na**s and every one else on the Right but the Neocons have already been labeled as such. For some reason they have yet to figure out, this does not improve their popularity.
The Left love the poor because they are dependent clients of the state. They are kept poor and addicted to Government handouts – all they have to do is vote the right way in exchange.
The Patronage system of Rome was an excellent example of how it works. A Important Roman, say a Senator had taken as clients of his Patronage as many important underlings as possible – owner of metal working shops, haulage firm owner, cloth merchants, Wealthy farm owners…..and every morning they would assemble at his house and stand outside wile the ‘Patron’ had his breakfast. Then the Patron comes out and sees who is there and who is not – and may pass out some cakes, and the clients go home, or have a word if they need something.
Waiting at their houses are Their clients – the local small business owners, their managers of business they own – important customers that he is a sub-patron of. He sees who is there and who is not, maybe gives them a bit of food, and off they go…..
And under these sub, sub, patrons are all the people of the district, workers, cleaners, and so on that they can recruit – naturally that depends on what they can have done for them – the top Patron, sub Patrons… they control all jobs, contracts, and so on – you Had to be a client of some Patron or you got nothing, you were helpless. This was how Rome worked – the clients and Patron inter dependent as it was a democracy, and votes were needed, and were rewarded when asked for service, and were a mutual aid society. The top Patron also called on them to fight is a riot was needed.
It was a pyramid of Patrionism – actually this was how Louis the XIV, and Henry the VIII, and all of them worked – you Must be seen daily in Court as the Monarch Always tallied up who was present, and who absent, and this showed loyalty.
This is how the Democrat Party Functions, not so much in the Republican Party – as they do not own all the ones who rely on Gov handouts as their clients like the Dems do. But ‘Patronage’ is the way Government works in every society, just the Democrat make it so open, how they buy votes by making poverty, and then using that to make clients of them.
This means the Workers who make a good wage are independent of the Politcos. Truckers make $70,000 a year here, they get no Gov money – they serve no Patron. Like the Middle class they are doing fine, and so are the natural enemy of the Left, as the Left holds no power over them. They may vote their conscience, and for their Nations betterment.
I think that there has been a trend, going way back even to Thatcher era, but slowly boiling and not going away, where, rather than working class voters showing their discontent by abstaining, such was their disenchantment that they started and continue voting for right wing parties, in the UK that being the Conservative Party (and even UKIP for a while).
Such behaviour indicates that many working-class people have increasingly become tired of the left leaning parties they traditionally voted for. For them the time has come to look for a new political home. These political shifts are quite simply the dawning among working-class people that Parties like the Labour Party in the UK and the Democrats in the US no longer understand their lives or ambitions, even worse that the Lefties were not bothered to try and understand.
To me it seems todays working-class right-wingers are defined by a determination to improve things for their families and their way of life. They do not want or need to be stunted and kept under the thumb by the ideas of welfarism or the sickening paternalism of the intellectual Left.
That has been a difficult judgement in social policy for years. The balance between a safety net beyond which no one should fall and a poverty trap which stops aspiration in its tracks. Equality of outcome or equality of opportunity etc. For me, our adversarial system with strong government and a strong opposition has worked well in the past but our present system which I first noticed when John Major was in power, to oppose without offering an alternative as they were the opposition so were not obliged to. Also the moral outrage which seems somewhat forced. I didn’t vote for Boris in the last election but Ms Rayner suggesting that events in Parliament led to the heckling of a politician, when she has labeled the governing party as sc*m a little opportunistic?
I came from a mining family..so long ago that I need the help of the hubble telescope to look back to it.. but the working class always had a different attitude to conservatism than the idealogical left..ie they supported small ‘c’ Conservative values.
You are 100% right to track the start of schism between working class ordinary people and their self appointed spokesmen and women to Thatcher.
I think the hysteria with which Thatcher was demonised was really a reflection of the fear felt that *Mondeo Man* or whoever it was (and Mondeo woman would have been more accurate) had voted for her and not Michel Foot or Neil Kinnock.
Really Wilson’s government was the last wing one before Blair that could connect with Britain.
It’s been said many times..but it is a good quip, now more than ever, what Owen Jones, Polly Tonybee, Emily Maitlis and their Canadian and US equivalents need , are new workers who appreciate their pontificating.
How about the destitute, the sick, the very old. What option do they have but to seek patronage? Die in a ditch perhaps?
That’s not what I understand today’s corrupt system of patronage to be
And many of those at the lower end feel so far away from being heard that they don’t vote because the many, many levels of patron above them make it seems very unworthwhile.
Brexit, here in the UK, was most probably caused by the unheard rebelling in something they thought they would never win and, by mistake, did!
This is a really intelligent post. It explains why institutions are falling for woke leftism and how much of their funding depends on how ideologically pure they are.
Bliar was all about patronage. The (cough, ahem) “reform” of the House of Lords. The “Third Way” and the(cough, ahem) “reform” of the Charity sector. The massive increase in public sector jobs. And once it’s there, it’s hard to root out. I’ve often said to my kids (and anyone else I can get to listen) it’s like we’re back in the land of the Mediaeval monarchs. Then we had to lop Charlie It’s head off. Now we need to Do Something about the patronage power our PMs have accreted to themselves.
Police officer suporting Canadian Truckers and Freedom Convoy
This Canadian immigrant became a police officer to protect the freedom of Canadians and not take away their freedoms.
https://youtu.be/nd-NXYR2He8
She moved to Canada to escape her country and gain the right to be free. Many Canadians take for granted how hard it is to build a nation that promotes the rights of its citizens and how little it takes to take those rights away. If anything, it is immigrants from countries that lack rights or abuse those rights who know how important those rights are.
Thanks. Excellent video. Point made!
The “laptop caste” has completely lost the plot. Their sense of superiority, their divine right, is beyond disgusting and they need to be taken down. Corrupt, ultra-woke Trudeau and the mayor of Ottawa have been goaded into showing their true colors: they are against peaceful protests and yearn to be dictators instead. How Canadian! Their comments on this revolt are truly vile.
I don’t agree with much this black academic marxist from Sweden says–and his academic writing is atrocious–but here he has a point.
Bon Courage, Canada!
Who exactly? Got any names? These lefties sound horrible, give me names and I’ll help you cancel them
What the Hell do you want me to do? Start listing off the names of CNN and MSNBC anchors? Continue with prominent writers from the New York Times, New Yorker, and Atlantic? List off some of the regular social justice grifters in the Democrat Party who constantly accuse working class Americans of being racist hicks and constantly make clear how much they hate them? Bring up Justin Trudeau’s name for the millionth time? As for you Clegg, you can cancel them yourself. Me, I am just going to watch them implode. Every group I listed is either in political trouble or watching their revenue dry up.
The most likely person to replace Justin Trudeau – Mark Carney – is a former Goldman Sachs executive. However I am sure he will talk about social justice, environmental equity, etc, just like his trust fund predecessor.
Read Carney’s op-ed on truckers in the Globe & Mail. Canada has a despot waiting in the wings
It was a real eye opener to see so much Twitter sneering at the voters of Hartlepool for electing a Tory in last years by-election, with left wingers consoling themselves that losses in the North East would be compensated for by gains in Surrey and the like. The notion that there is no point in a Labour Party which doesn’t try to appeal to the working class seemed to escape them.
The vast majority of lefties I know grew up in modest circumstances but are now solidly middle-class, property owning and mostly have private insurance. They love to spout about how awful Tories and other conservatives are – while sipping Prosecco and talking about property prices and private schools for their kids.
I think they have become moderate conservatives but don’t want to admit it because it would scratch this carefully constructed image of the great and the good that they believe being a “left liberal” carries. So they cling onto this identity and the traditional parties of the left cater to their middle-class urban tastes and mores – while forgetting the needs of the people those parties were originally created to represent (i.e. the gammon…what an awful word!) – thus weakening the cause overall.
It is quite bizarre to watch the people like Sahra Wagenknecht who highlight this trend (glaringly obvious to anyone who bothers to apply their minds for 5 minutes) getting so thoroughly trashed. What we are witnessing is a big reality bubble bursting.
I have the same experience. The old phrase “you forgot where you came from,” springs to mind.
The majority of the leftists I know are not properly middle class. They just deny their working class roots and becoming desperate they can’t keep up with their false middle class identity want their zoom jobs guaranteed by a form of socialism that will freeze their momentary good situation.
The radical Lefties of the late 60’s were protesting the Establishment and wanted to “screw it to the Man”. By the 90’s they had become the Establishment and were less interested.
Perfect summing up , they have more in common with tories than they would ever admit
Another excellent insight, Katharine! I did not know who Sahra Wagenknetch was, but she is worth watching. Interesting how some of her views–on immigration, for example, are quite reasonable and therefore denounced by the left, though her anti-capitalism/communism is not defensible….
She’s very intelligent. Sometimes I agree with her and sometimes I think she’s out of her tree, but she’s always out there with her arguments, taking a stand, and well done her, I say. The woman has more cojones than many a man out there.
I’m a huge fan of women with cojones, except of course for JB!
So true! The “progressives” that I know mostly came from humble beginnings, now own large homes, drive very expensive cars, definitely sip prosecco at endless house parties and are absolutely disgusted by, and recoil when confronted by the average person on the street.
I am in Denmark, where the longtime labor party the “Social Democrats” is now leading the government after becoming strict about limiting immigration, which is what most Danish people want and which helps support good wage levels for working men and women.
We have also had no COVID vaccine mandates at all here, and in particular no mandates applied to any class of workers.
Labor parties can retain their power if they adapt to what the population wants.
”Gone are the halcyon days of dreaming about halcyon days – where serious working class militancy was just a myth.”
I’m old enough to remember a not dissimilar case of working class militancy which caused consternation among those who adore the working class (but only from a safe distance). This was the reaction to Enoch Powell’s electrifying “Rivers of Blood” speech ( although he never actually used those words) in 1968 and his subsequent dismissal by Edward Heath.
Perhaps the Brexit vote can be seen as another another case of working class militancy – certainly the reaction of our great and good was very similar.
As a tradesman, (Carpenter, but also electrician) I know other skilled tradesmen and their helpers – almost none of then took the vax.
Throughout the history of literature the Skilled Tradesman has been seen as sturdy, intelligent, honest, independent to the point of being like a mule; he will not do what he does not wish to, or thinks is not a good thing. They are usually Conservative in USA, they are old fashioned in their beliefs because they work hard, and with hard won skills, and usually get paid pretty well, enough to live on, so believe in the value of hard work for fair pay – so do not have to do as told by the Politicians.
1 Timothy 5:18 is a thing i always lived by. A worker must be paid the going rate, it is in the Bible. And to underpay because a man is in a bind is a sin. There is honor in physical work, and these Truckers are great as they protest what is wrong, they show they are honorable by the way they protest – and they show how vital the tradesman is – they are the ones who actually DO things to make society work, and we see that.
“1 Timothy 5:18, KJV: For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, The labourer is worthy of his reward.”
“1 Timothy 5:18, ESV: For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,” and, “The laborer deserves his wages.””
I agree. My husband is a carpenter. He can build a house from scratch with no written plans because he is a skilled, experienced problem solver who’s being doing it for years. He told me once he never had encountered a problem that he wasn’t able to (eventually) solve. Many of these tradesmen in New Zealand are self-employed and it seems the government hates them as they are not one of the pet ‘victim’ classes which can be kept quiet by grants and welfare. We live in the capital and he has nothing but contempt for the public servants and chatting classes who make policy and plans that continually screw things up for people like him. Today there’s a convoy inspired protest in the grounds of our parliament. They are receiving no support from the left wing identity focussed types even though the police have become very heavy handed. Unions are useless by the way and part of the problem.
Exactly.
The left in general hates small businesses and self-employed.
(As I remember very well from my leftie days)
The rhetoric is always against Big Business, cos that gets the populist upticks, but the effect always comes down hardest on small business.
Great article; I was wondering what was going-on, as, up-until-now, we’d mostly heard from ‘old blackface’ himself, Trudeau.
In U.K., the abandonment of the actual working class, as distinct from the theoretical, Left-approved, variant is decades old. Council House And Violent (CHAV) is a New Labour sneer, as is ‘bog-standard comprehensive school’; sentiment, loyalty and the dedication of many local Labour Party activists – often essentially fulfilling a social worker function – kept people loyal. That is now broken and ‘The Left’ has nowhere to go except for the inanities of identity politics, where the majority of their former voters are denounced as irredeemable racists, and state authoritarianism.
Simon Diggins, How dare you insult the stunning and brave leader of Canada ! he is the equal of any toxic male that stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-day. He is heroically fighting on the frontline against fascism, Canadian flag in hand and boot polish on face ,from the position of his covid isolation bunker miles from the front, but what matters is that Trudeau identifies as being at the frontline. Actually the Allies that stormed those beaches had no trans representation among the Allied Generals and they excluded women from being massacred on the beach by not letting them fight, so Trudeau is actually morally superior to those bigots that fought against the nazis. What did those bigoted allies even achieve anyway they didn’t even defeat fascism – it just moved from Germans to Truckers. Trudeau is literally saving the world with his valiant tweeting in the face of lethal honking.
Your slanders wont convince anyone that Justin “i’ve blacked up so often I lost count” Trudeau is a virtue signalling, cowardly hypocrite.
Justin ‘Pause for dramatic effect’ Trudeau…
Agree with your sentiments but you’re wrong about the term CHAV and the phrase ‘bog-standard comprehensive school’ being invented by lefties, I’m afraid. All the many lefties I know deprecate both, so credit where it’s due Even the reviled (by me) Owen Jones wrote an eponymous book castigating those who called people Chavs. .
that was before the Chav’s voted for Brexit now Onan Jones calls the very same people Gammons.
Jagmeet Singh, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, is a wealthy doctor. When he appears in public, his shoes alone are worth more than a working man earns in a week. The so-called Left has utterly betrayed working people. They are absolute sellouts.
I get the sentiment but my shoes are also worth about the same as I earn in a week…’a month’ might have been better.
On a side note, I learned a few years ago the value of investing in good shoes. It makes such a difference to posture, foot hygiene – not to mention the superior aesthetic.
Yep, and a good pair of shoes will last far longer than many pairs of cheap shoes. I’ve got some Churches that are 25 years old and still look good (you have to take care of them of course).
Either in bed or in your shoes, as the saying goes. Made the same decision myself some years ago and never looked back.
If you’re patient, TK Maxx can often furnish you with remarkable footwear at a very agreeable price.
They’re already there. This is why the left has so fervently embraced racism as the thing to be doing something about, instead of workers rights, or working conditions, or surveillance capitalism or any number of things that formerly used to animate them. Another thing which covid did was expose the American Left’s preoccupation with racism and Black Lives as another sham.
Anthony Fauci performed medical experiments on orphaned Black and Hispanic children at the Incarnation Children’s Center in NYC. Whether you subscribe to the new theory of racism, where only outcomes matter, or the old theory, which meant ‘I took a look at what race you were so I could determine how badly I was going to abuse you’, you have pretty strong evidence that what Fauci did was racist.
The BBC did an exposé on this. See https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/guinea-pig-kids-aids-fauci-experiments/
The upshot of all of this, is that vaccine uptake among Blacks and Hispanics in New York City is low. Or, as a friend of mine put it — if Fauci recommended that we drink water when we were thirsty we would all start stocking up on soda pop and beer.
So here is a historic opportunity for the NYT-lead left. Are you going to talk to your white subscribers about the racism inherent in demanding that the Black people get vaccinated when their ‘lived experience’ says that this is a bad idea? Are you going to talk about vaccine hesitancy among Black people at all, or are you going to ignore them and double down on ‘it’s all about those racist white Trump supporters’? Are you going to use the expertise you have cultivated in talking to Black people about racism to seriously talk with them about their concerns?
Or are you going to demand vaccine mandates, because those ignorant clucks just don’t know what’s good for them? And suddenly start arresting BLM protestors because they are protesting such mandates?
At the top, the leftists have never cared about other people. It’s just a way to hold onto power.
Yes, but this is nothing new. The left was always like this. If I recall correctly when the Soviets assembled their first post-revolutionary committee there was only one actual member of the working class on it, and he turned out to have been a police spy.
Leftism has always been about putting intellectuals in power in non-democratic ways, so they can lead in an “enlightened” fashion even if the masses are too dumb to understand why it’s good. That’s it, that’s all leftism has ever been. It was never about the working classes, despite how much Marx seemed to write about them. They were merely a tool to be used to implement the goals of revolution and then install a superior class of leader. The fact that the working classes have often staunchly supported the Left despite this is largely down to not realizing the nature of what the left truly is. From time to time it gets revealed in very visible ways and, really, not much changes.
The Left invented the idea of “false consciousness” to describe the condition of people who don’t know what’s good for them (i.e. what the Left have decided is good for them). The reality is that most people in poor or modest circumstances are not interested in overthrowing the state. They just want to get on with their lives..
There are too many people seeking too few ‘elite’ jobs so they have to compete by displaying their virtue by arguing about pronouns for people who identify as cats (yes, really). Usually ignoring the ordinary members of their union, their constituency, their charity.
And so with the ‘powers that be’ off and playing for status in their own walled enclave, ordinary people have to shift for themselves. And nowadays they often do a better job, more relevant to their concerns.
The funny thing the elite laptop class has not realized is that if they can do their jobs remotely from their little lake cabin, then some clever person can do it remotely from Manila or Bangalore or Cape Town for a much lower fee.
Outsourcing over the next decade will be vicious. I encourage my children to take hands-on jobs that will be difficult to outsource, such as builders, dentists, hairdressers, etc.
I hadn’t thought of that, Jesper. Why are large companies spending millions to develop remote working infrastructure? Despite their public professions, it’s not for their workers’ safety or lifestyle at all. It’s to replace those very workers. Makes total sense.
In technical jobs (IT anyway) my experience is that outsourcing is probably decreasing rather than increasing. Companies are learning that it is cheaper to employ 1 in the UK than 4 overseas, especially as you also need the 1 in the UK to check that the 4 are actually doing what they’re supposed to be doing and all your IP goes straight out the door!
My observation is that they are still outsourcing “non-software” services, but bringing them back “on-shore”.
Either way, that work will probably move away from the higher-paid and comfortable folk.
It’s already true that those in trades where hands on work is vital and irreplaceable are safer financially than remote computer workers who can be employed from anywhere in the world more cheaply. To have your own business is also more satisfying than to be controlled by remote employers.
The concept of left and right has become redundant in recent times. We are entering a new era.
Pharaoh’s versus Proles?
The late Antony C Sutton studied the similarities between Wall Street and the Bolsheviks* to determine that, although we think of (far) left and (far) right as a straight line with opposing sides, it is in fact horseshoe-shaped. They were therefore far closer to each other, more dangerous in fact.
Thinking in that way does suggest that the landscape is different and needs re-classifying.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd9B3cilgHY
“although we think of (far) left and (far) right as a straight line with opposing sides, it is in fact horseshoe-shaped.”
Karl Hess (speech-writer for Barry Goldwater when he ran for president) said something similar in his Playboy Interview (July 1976), that it’s actually a circle, with the extreme right joining the extreme left, to explain his own remarkable political transition.
Noel
interesting! thanks Noel
The left betrays everything it touches. It has to, when you think about who founded it — Judas. Whether you’re religious or not, religion is old wisdom. Judas called Jesus “rabbi”, not “master”, presumably because he could not conceive of anything greater than himself. When Jesus did not turn out to be the kind of Messiah Judas wanted, he betrayed Him. The idea of adjusting HIMSELF in the service of the One to whom he was nominally loyal did not occur. Does that sound at all familiar? The Christian crowd funder, GiveSendGo has stepped up to cover GoFundMe’s withdrawal. They have so far raised 6 million dollars for the truckers. Give what you can.
Watching a debate in the Canadian Parliament was an eye opener. The Conservative leader was feeble in support of the truckers, and the Liberal representative fulminated against them as haters and insurrectionists.
From the National Post:
Lightbound’s speech pointed to a number of COVID policies that he saw as being increasingly politicized and divorced from scientific necessity. “In Quebec in 2022 we locked up kids aged six to 10 for up to 10 days in windowless rooms. Let that sink in,” he said in reference to ongoing quarantine requirements at youth group homes.
The protest is about mandates, restriction, virus mismanagement and the overreach of our governments. It is also about a whole lot more.
The ‘elite cupcake’ claims that by refusing the jab I am a racist, misogynist minority that does not belong in Canada. His heir apparent, Mark Carney, who needs no introduction in the UK, says that I am an extremist and should be charged to the full extent of the law for contributing financially to the protesters.
Scratch a liberal and you will find a fascist. Maybe that is why the swastika bothers them so much.
The Left never truly supported the working masses; they just used them as a tool to gain absolute power and after that suppress the entire population. Look at all those failed socialist states starting with the USSR. In the Thirties the Left realized that the masses were not going to start the revolution they wanted and they have since moved to become the sycophants of BigGov and BigCorp, both of which love the central planning/corporatist ideals of Fascism. So any threat to the Left’s more recent patron saints will be met with extreme prejudice. It’s not a betrayal at all, this clamp-down on the truckers, it’s a natural consequence of the Left’s alliance with BigGov and BigCorp.
All animals are equal but some are more equal than others. Orwell experienced directly during the SpanishCivil War.
This article perfectly describes the situation in Australia too … the problem is, if there isn’t a mainstream centre-left party to vote for, the right, in government, are left unchecked, and it leaves a lot of people looking for somewhere to put their vote (compulsory in Oz) – perhaps small parties with extremist tendencies. Otherwise people become just plain disillusioned with democracy.
The “right” in Australia and elsewhere, have moved so far to the left, throwing money around willy-nilly, that there is nowhere for the established left to go but further left.
The left in Australia don’t even know which direction left is in. I agree that the right, nationally, are hopeless big spenders. I don’t mind spending on infrastructure (both hard and soft) which will increase productive potential e.g. a proper broadband system, but giving away, say, $40 billion a year in superannuation tax concessions, is just plain stupid.
I agree to some extent but broadband is a bad example.
UK private firms are laying good fibre infrastructure around the UK at lightning speed compared to Australia’s expensive gold-plated mess. Government and local councils had input with enabling legislation etc but didn’t try to fund and run the whole effing thing.
This has happened before, notably the fuel tax protests in the UK but most comparably, the Australian “convoy of no confidence” which descended on Canberra in 2011, animated by issues such as the carbon tax and the ban on live cattle exports (which devastated a whole industry sector) .
If you Google it you’ll find nothing but derision in mainstream media of the time.. “convoy of no consequence” was the jibe that most got the lefties chortling.
Yet within months, PM Gillard was replaced within the ruling Labor party, and then her replacement PM Rudd was swept away by the “unelectable” Tony Abbott. And that was just the start of an even more frenzied anti Abbott media campaign of the like not seen until Trump 2016.
And yet today, Australia increasingly looks like an authoritarian state. Perhaps the 2011 truckers weren’t very successful after all.
Well, it was over ten years ago. There’s no permanent solution to authoritarianism, it has to be resisted again and again.
It is not the case that the left has abandoned the working class. They could never stand them in the first place.
By infiltrating and hijacking the union movement they did for a time thing of the working class as storm trooper who could be used to bring down the establishment and replace it with their juvenile fantasy of a socialist paradise in which they of course give the orders while being cheer on the grateful workers.
As we are now witnessing with our own left wing ruling elite is that the ultimate aim is to keep us all poor and dependant while of course none of the rule that apply to us can possibly apply to them.
Being a Marxist intellectual does not separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to worker solidarity. Being anti-authoritarian does. The problem is that 99% of Western tenured Marxists are authoritarian to the bone.
Absolutely. It might be human nature for some people. I see it in corporations when someone gets a promotion and suddenly becomes a spying dictator.
I think you are all being a bit mean to lefties. We the British, in our glorious isolation, pretty much invented socialism. The Diggers, The Levelers, The Chartists, The modern Labour Party up until Neil Kinnock (a coal miners son for god’s sake.) These were all grass roots organisations borne of genuine class grievances.
The reason why the left has lost touch with the masses is not because they were always a shifty eyed bunch looking hoodwink the masses. It’s because we all got rich. Socialism became irrelevant. As my old politics professor used to say “what’s the point of socialism when we all have fitted carpets, central heating and holidays in Spain.” None of my lefty friends had an answer, much more interested in the right kind of hat and liking Billy Bragg. And so it goes with the left ever since, a legacy institution looking for cause. And all still obsessing about the “correct” identity.
What confuses me is that the working class has been repeatedly kicked in the face since 2008 and the left has repeatedly failed to connect with this pain.
No matter, if the professional left is unable to articulate the needs of the workers, they will find a grass roots route to political power on their own. Its just that it probably won’t be called socialism. It’s just a label after all. All that really matters is that social justice happens.
I had a bet with a friend of mine that the progressives wouldn’t like it if the workers rose up. I have been waiting for this for some time – but I didn’t dream it would happen in Canada. For the record they don’t like it. The leader of Canada’s socialist party – the NDP – a lawyer who wears natty suits – is horrified. All those university professors who love it when the black block smash up downtown Vancouver are horrified. Vancouverites who cheer on forestry blockades, critical mass bike protests, churches getting burned down and Extinction Rebellion protests are horrified. The dirty little proles – how dare they! Know your place peasant.
Progressives? Ahh, you mean regressives.
The current left, at least in Canada, controlled by the government union agenda, is made up of people voting for their high government pay jobs.
During the pandemic they have been “forced” to work from home and get full pay. In their nice homes with yards in big cities they can order anything they want and it shows up on their door step. And of course they have the money to do that.
It not so rosy for the people without an employer with an unlimited check book and a 20 mile trip to town for groceries while paying carbon taxes which the majoritarian government uses to make life in the cities affordable.
Thus the “trucker revolt”, and yes the regressive parties hate them. Currently on the chief propaganda arm of the federal government, the CBC, they are lamenting that these people brought their families to the rally. They have advertised pictures of squads of machine gun toting police preparing to remove the truckers. If only they didnt have to shoot the children too, it would be so much easier.
a primordial sense of dread in the hearts of the urban classes
Ha! The self-appointed leaders, community organizers, ‘activists’. They never met a working stiff they didn’t despise.
All it took was universal Internet communications, and the ‘inessential’ folks who actually do the work have self-organized to c**k a snook at the oh-so-essential politicos whom the media anoint as leaders of the Left – the choosers of Causes for the next progressive wave. And joy to the world – them truckists have forged a goodly momentum against their urban political betters, without a single burned building, ambushed cop or looted business.
Maybe there’s a hope for civilization after all.
The class struggle was, is and always will be the real struggle that working class people in the world need to fight. Everything else is just noise in comparison.
The class struggle was killed off by the Great War (1914-18). Since then it is an invention of the left who need it to retain their snobbery and control over people who work for a living.
The left have left the lower classes far behind, ever since Clinton and the basket of Deplorables, or the “gammons” in the UK.
I bet your just waiting ready to lead them
Fix your spelling, and just be better in general.
Pray how am I supposed to be better in general
And consider who is using the left. In Globe and Mail Mark Carney, openly calling for crushing political protest with force as a rebellion against “lawful authority”. You recognize the playbook, it is the same that Democrats are using in the States to use the idiotic, useless riot on Jan 6 as a pretext to treat 47% of their population as “domestic terrorists”. Then I realized it was a sign of desperation. Carney is representing WEF, Blackrock, and Klaus Schwab. He cannot be denied.
But suddenly in less than a month it becomes clear that Democrats rule in the US is going down the drain, and the WEF golden boy of censorship, Zuckerberg, just lost 40% of his wealth. Their only card now is the clueless and corrupt PM of Canada. His mandates for truckers, travel restrictions to..close the borders to Omicron become incredibly important to Carney. At this point opposing Trudeau is akin to opposing the new world order, the reset.
The Left thinking that they will be controlling society through government. They are useful idiots, that’s all they are.
I love the scatter shot of ideas and references.
But I hope he is correct!
The workers whether truckdrivers, supermarket shelf stackers, welders, oil rig workers, miners, etc etc are the heavy lifters who hold civil society together and without whom society could not function. They are the most important people in society and deserve the greatest respect. Governments and elites forget and ignore this at their peril.
“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.”
Now let us hope that more Black people will also see the light and unchain themselves from their white, elitist, self-appointed “leaders”.
Why dis you capitalise the word black and not the word white?
I would think a trucker is a trucker and if a trucker is black he or she will feel exactly the same outrage as a trucker who is white. Some feelings are so important that skin colour just doesn’t come into it, and I think your comment is pointless and misplaced.
I don’t think that Warren was referring to black truckers, but rather blacks in general. That is, will they cease to support parties of the Left – i.e., the Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK, etc. – and come over to parties that will treat the working class with respect? Whether there are such parties with a legitimate chance at attaining power is, to be sure, a valid question.
The left’s failure to keep to its values of collectivism and social democracy in the west means its just one of many fringe would be oligarchies. It is unlikely to be able to get and hold real political power within a democratic electoral system. Whilst this is a powerful incentive for them to cheat and steal eg Biden 2020 this just reduces them to one of the many fringe outfits that would damage any society that elected them. This august group includes the BNP, UKIP, SWP and whatever the Galloway outfit is called. I think the public are waking up to what they are up to. The link between Covid oppression and student style politics is clear for all to see. Leftism is a scar on humanity to match that of Christianity and this maybe its end game. Its been obvious for 40+ years in the UK that the public simply won’t elect these people. Deprived of he ballot box leftists are really only left with the gun or other physical means of obtaining power. This in turn makes power harder to achieve and to hold onto.
It’s the Uni class against the working class.
my post ‘Awaiting for approval’
Canceled for quoting the Bible I suppose……But I find the mods end up letting things go after they look at it
It’s automated. Unherd uses wordpress for the comments section, so it is stuck with WordPress’ hyper sensitivity until an actual human, if such a thing still exists, can take a look.
They do get to it and they do look.
The workers are now “populists.”
Thankyou Malcom Kyeyune for an interesting and informative article. Brilliant analysis and beautifully written.
It has been clear for years the comfortable, old fashioned idealogical left have become detached from workers and the old Left-Right idea about politics just doesn’t describe what is happening.
I think Goodhart’s ‘Anywhere’s and Somewhere’s’ idea is miles ahead as the best one for understanding what’s going on and it is leading to a situation where it’s is carving lumps off traditional left wing, AND right wing , parties.
But it is funnier watching the chin scratching, uber woke, self cert progressives on the left slowly turning into 18th century French Aristos clutching nosegays as they look on at history happening while they pontificate about things, than right wingers similarly wrong footed.
Exactly. I think you have nailed it. Having lived in the USA for many years in California, many of the left are now in a state of PTSD after Trump years and anyone who even looks like they come from that cadre e.g. the truckers, have to be seen as crazed, right wing “fascists”. Covid has been the great “revealer” in showing the true political colours of many, including the left in most countries who now despise individual liberties in their thrall of the cult of scientism and vaccine fetish. But you are right, this is a classic class struggle. I wrote about this a bit just now in my enthusiasm for the trucker’s movement. http://talesfromtheroad.info/news. Go Truckers.
Maybe we should extend the diversity trend to respect and allow for, err, diversity. There is an awful mot more to it that skin colour and gender. I guess I’m talking about the libertarian centre, where left and right can, and do meet. Freedom of speech, decriminalising drug use, flexible tax regimes (not all income is equal), more planning rights given to individuals over corporations etc
Dream on!
From Revolutionaries to Reactionaries…Left has no agenda and that is why is clinging to any fashionable “narrative of the day”
Hey, Western leftism views these truck drivers as scum of the earth, replaceable with self driving vehicles so do as we say. But what these western leftist elitist refuse to see is that those “thugs” see them for who they are. Sure they may not be scared yet. Sure they overcooked Jan 6 BS. But fact remains people are on to them
The relationship of the two elements of the left had always been fragile and uneasy although I’d contest the stated simple polarisation pushed in this article.
I wonder however whether a large part of the break is not just due to the pandemic but also to that other great leftwing Zeitgeist of the moment, the Climate Crisis. When your jobs are being threatened by a revolution that demands less of everything (even while buying it all in a new green form is allowing the ’email class’ to worry about it and have it all anyway), you might rethink your alliance.
Just getting ready to go out to local highway overpass anti-mandate celebration here nearly 3000 miles from Ottawa! This is trucker-inspired and initiated but includes people of every class, income, age, job description, education, race, colour, religion, you name it. There are email-class and hands-on class and everyone else hugging. This is the most diverse, grassroots uprising/happening ever in Canada. It is barely organized at all. No wonder the pro-coercion class is alarmed.
Here is a popular interview channel interviewing Sikh truckers who claim to not be white supremacists! https://www.bitchute.com/video/nGdKy6FVire5/
Listen. The left has always been an educated class organizing people as the foot-soldiers in their political army. It has never been interested in what the lower orders actually think or want.
Problem is that the Commoner middle class, that used to be a minority, is now the majority.
So we are in the Autumn of the Over-under Political Age.
This thread is very very interesting to what might happen next – https://twitter.com/ezralevant/status/1491582230216548357?s=20&t=fyUc68dM6L1Lk6oCK3l7vg
What a great piece – spot on. Thanks Malcolm
Fringe elements:
Mounties Seize Major Weapons Cache, Arrest 11 In Truckers Blockade
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/canadian-mounties-weapons-anti-vaccine-truckers-cache-truckers-blockade-alberta-border_n_620adf62e4b04af87f41956e?
Majority of truckers are vaccinated, Trudeau says, as ‘freedom convoy’ heads to Ottawa – National | Globalnews.ca
https://globalnews.ca/news/8533779/truckers-convoy-canada-vaccine-mandate/
Nice theoretical analysis but no contact with the reality of the situation. Shame so many interesting facts were left out of the supposed left abandoning the worker thesis. For an alternative view that gives the whole picture of this astro-turfed, fringe right wing movement I recommend: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/08/ottawa-truckers-protest-anti-vaxx-canada?utm_term=6202e0e0ab0e13f9a099431524812213&utm_campaign=BestOfGuardianOpinionUS&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=opinionus_email
two quotes from the article:
“it’s an astroturfed movement – one that creates an impression of widespread grassroots support where little exists – funded by a global network of highly organized far-right groups and amplified by Facebook’s misinformation machine”
” The protesters don’t represent the vast majority of lorry drivers, nor are they representative of public sentiment towards vaccines in Canada – a country where 84% of the population, children included, have received at least one vaccine dose.”