'Convoy for Freedom' protesters in Ottawa (Image: EPA/Andre Pichette)

This week Canada and the world were shocked to see something interesting happening in Canada, when the capital, Ottawa, was besieged by seemingly well-organised protests of truckers angry at the imposition of a vaccine mandate.

That it was organised by truckers gave it a heft other protests had lacked. That it was not just about the vaccine mandate became clear — if it were ever in doubt — when the objectors began noise protests aimed at the capital’s inner-city residents, disproportionately well-heeled bureaucrats and corporate types.

The whistles and horns wailed until 5am, driving people crazy, prompting fights in the street and, allegedly, the attempted arson of an apartment building. Hard-right and other exotic elements were soon drawn to the protests, and a GoFundMe account quickly raised $2 million, mainly from the US.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared a state of emergency, but stopped short of more forthright action. (His father had not been so mild; during Quebec’s separatism years, then prime minister Pierre Trudeau suspended habeas corpus and locked up hundreds of separatists, violent or otherwise.)

Perhaps Trudeau Jr feared that repression might generate a wave of support for the protest. Maybe he even had an ear to Facebook chatter that police and military elements were sympathetic to the protests…

Days, perhaps hours, after the Ottawa protests started, similar unrest bubbled up in Wellington around “the Beehive”, New Zealand’s ghastly Parliament building. At one point Prime Minister Jacinda Arden’s official van (yes, van) was forced off the road. Now it’s all on in Canberra, although our capital’s layout, as a sort of Erinsborough from hell, appears to be defeating protesters’ attempts to blockade anything. 

So how far is this going to go? Is this just a Commonwealth thing, or will it catch fire across the world? There is every possibility. Truckies occupy a similar space to construction workers — a mix of labour aristocracy and petit bourgeois subcontractors, their politics a mixture of leftist militancy and right-wing anti-statism.

They probably have the same justified claim against the manner in which vaccine mandates have been imposed — i.e. treating them like cattle — and wish to reemphasise their status in the production process.

The fact that social democratic parties have handled the extension of mandatory vaccination to manual workers so badly is a measure of how separated they have become from actual labour, and the cause of its human dignity; they only have themselves to blame for the crossover that many have made. 

But who knows… By next week this may all be filed away as a “something interesting happened in Canada” story. Or is it the start of something bigger, where a movement will coalesce across the globe simply because it has recruited people who have the means to bring whole cities to a standstill?

If so, that will serve as a guerilla focus, for such movements do have a way of gaining territory, even temporarily. In that case, it will count as a mirror to the Occupy movement at the beginning of the decade. It will also announce that progressive and left mobilisations will at best have to share power with these new movements — or at worst be displaced by them.

Thin end of a wedge

To a degree, this has already occurred. The post-Occupy rise of “progressivism”, which focused overwhelmingly on cultural-political goals, has seen a gradual fusion between such politics and the state — for the enforcement of progressive values across the whole society. By the time COVID hit in 2020, this had been all but completed. The “iron-hand” lockdowns by Victorian Premier Dan Andrews and others completed the process.

The “I stand with Dan” movement didn’t start with the lockdown. It was a smooth passage to being the authorised power, and it continued long after it was clear that much of this display was a calculated political performance. This was demonstrated when Omicron hit and, faced with a variant that could not be controlled, the Andrews government deserted the stage from the beginning of summer onwards — no strategy, no public leadership — to keep itself fresh for the November election. 

This new assault on the capitals represents the right’s best chance to turn these inchoate movements into a movement that can articulate a baseline resistance to the fusion of government, social control and delegated technocratic rule that the pandemic has wrought. One would be very surprised if there is not active international coordination going on by a global movement of traditionalist ethno-nationalists — and even more surprised if Sarah Ferguson’s bestie Steve “Two Shirts” Bannon were not around the edges somewhere. 

Notably, left and progressives have not mobilised in any number to challenge the anti-vax/freedom marches, even when it was clear the movement is a toxic stew of anti-Semitism, deranged conspiracies and nativist sentiment.

Given that Melbourne used to mobilise “you will never win in Melbourne” mass protests against the hard right’s pathetic manifestations, this is a curious omission. Has that been because stray elements of the anarchist left, and some Indigenous activists gone to the right, were involved? Or is it because the great shift has happened?

The brief Western socialist surge post-Occupy is over, the transformation to a knowledge/culture economy has clicked on apace and the progressive base of what was once resistant progressivism is now absolutely integrated with the state — such that its members, from their pleasant apartments, can now watch the cops corralling the hi-vis rabble before breaking off to ride the police float in the Midsumma Pride march.

In a world where major Marxist activist group Socialist Alternative advocates lockdowns long after the state has (a triple backflip of dialectical genius worthy of the great Tony Cliff himself), what resists the state but the right? 

Well, we shall see.

Our saving grace remains, as ever, that no one has emerged with the charismatic force and depth to weld the right and overcome the mismatch of its fragmented projective fantasies.

With these protests, though, it feels like that is being done in increments, like death on an instalment plan. So perhaps if not now, soon.

But I mean, Canada?