The Workers’ Revolution Is Here, and the Left Hates It

W hen you look up at Canada and see truckers — most of them independent owner-operators of their rigs — suddenly coalescing into a powerful protest movement, making the government afraid, complaining of inflation, and getting condemned by the Teamsters, you have to realize it’s all happened before.

Truckers have done this before. Throughout the 1970s, trucker strikes in the U.S. led to snarled traffic for days and weeks in the American Midwest. Truck driver J. W. Edwards felt squeezed by the ongoing energy wars, which were raising gas prices, forcing truckers to stop constantly to only half-refuel, and cutting into what was a modest, but steady, living. Edwards stopped in the middle of I-80 in Pennsylvania, got on his CB radio, and started explaining to other truckers listening in that he’d had it. Within an hour, hundreds of other big-rig drivers joined him, idling their vehicles and putting Pennsylvania’s main interstate into paralysis.

Over the next few days, truckers shut down traffic across ten states, trying to flex their muscle and let the federal government hear their anger on the policies of fuel rationing and reduced speed limits that were costing them their way of life. Along the way, there were confrontations with police and the National Guard. Soon independent truckers began forming political groups, such as the Unity Committee, that could be present at negotiations with the Department of Transportation, or the Fraternal Association of Steel Haulers, which directly challenged the Teamsters, which at the time had over two million members. Deals with the government were cut to get the trucks moving again, but further strikes of independent truckers took off in 1979, again over speed limits and on the Carter administration’s preference to allocate diesel to farmers over long-haul truckers.

And now it’s happening again. Yet again, inflation is a major factor. But this time, it’s the vaccine mandates and the continued strictures holding back economic activity that drive the anger. But CB radio has been replaced by the modern social networks. The truckers have been assisted by crowdfunding sites.

The largest, loudest, and most politically disruptive action of workers in most of our lives is taking place right now. Like traditional labor movements, it is getting assists from others in the same working class. In this case, the towing companies don’t want to tow away the big rigs. They have turned down offers to do so. The movement is also growing, leading not just to the shutdown of Ottawa, but of the bridge on which much of the trade between Canada and the United States is conducted, with run-on effects such as the work slowing down at U.S. car manufacturers. The stakes of this protest keep rising, and its apparent momentum has attracted what looks like a decidedly radical component in the encampment at RCGT Park in Ottawa.

Not only is the Left disgusted by it, but it refuses to recognize it is happening. In the same way that a nonfeminist woman is degraded to the status of not a woman, or a racial minority with the wrong politics is accused of multiracial whiteness, workers taking political action that isn’t controlled by the Left are deemed not workers at all. Returning to their orthodox Marxist categories, they sniff that the majority of these workers own their rigs and are thus more like the middle class.

But this doesn’t capture the way truckers often slide from being company workers to owner-operators and back again. It doesn’t capture that truckers are obviously united by the very nature of their work and the unique culture of trucking itself, more than they are divided by their notional economic relationship to the means of production.

In this case, the traditional class categories matter. Truckers earn their living through their skills. That separates them from members of the laptop class, who earn it by their knowledge and formation in higher education. The Covid-19 pandemic has only highlighted and heightened the differences between “essential workers” such as the truckers and the people who hid in Zoom life. People who make deliveries by driving 40-ton trailers on asphalt don’t see a need for the kind of leadership on offer from people who talk about “deliverables” on digital slide decks. It’s notable too that this is a movement almost entirely of men. Remember that the truckers in the 1970s wanted faster roads, and the freedom to earn more. Perhaps the Left is now only suited to lead women workers, whose demands in the workplace are for conformity and social rules that tame the environment, who want safety.

The government of Justin Trudeau is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with this protest. It has hoped in vain to fob off the responsibility of breaking it up to the mayor of Ottawa. It faces potential backlash from western Canada, which feels misunderstood in the corridors of power. And as it tries to simply cast the normal left-wing culture spells on the truckers — hoping to dismiss them by intoning the words “racists” and “transphobic” — it is radicalizing them, rather than mollifying them. Emmanuel Macron was not so stupid when dealing with the Yellow Vests.

But through plain mismanagement of this crisis, to a stubborn insistence on the politics of the left-wing overclass, Trudeau’s government has maneuvered itself into a class conflict that can rapidly get out of control. Bonne chance!