God does not play dice with the universe
Albert Einstein
He responds with this sentence to Niels Bohr whose scientific theory tended to completely deny the principle of scientific determinism in the face of the limits of understanding of new phenomena in the world of physics according to the canons of traditional mechanical physics.
English translation of the original italian text published on February 18th 2022.
It is not the purpose of this paper to reaffirm the reasons why this blog is decidedly against the mass capitalist vaccination campaign, which essentially is for reasons unrelated to the scientific debate and about vaccines that animate Western televisions and squares in recent months. Just as it is not the purpose of the writing to reiterate why this blog considers part of the need of the exploited to oppose all the measures of health security made by governments.
Security, healthy economy and public health.
Human society, as historically determined in its relationship with itself and with nature, has not yet emerged from its prehistory. Any general crisis and any health crisis, which is caused by the way of production relations and society themselves, has always confronted historical societies with the same contradictions that emerge from the general terrain of economic, social and political relations. These same basic contradictions, in the distant past, as 104 years ago (at the time of the Spanish flu) and currently in the time of the coronavirus, concern how to combine “security” in a functional way to the reproduction of its relationships (how to strengthen the state challenge on the world capitalist market through the army, protect borders from epidemics and migrations), the “healthy economy” (how to prevent a health crisis from interrupting the capitalist chain of value reproduction) and “public health” attacked by an apparently only sanitary phenomenon.
Any society based on private property, on the market, on the production of goods and for exchange value, and therefore for profit, is confronted with its ability to achieve a functional synthesis of these contradictions, because “public health” is rarely compatible with the need for “security” and a “healthy economy”. This difficult compatibility is more undermined when the determined dominant relationship is that of the capitalist accumulation of the socially produced surplus value inside its general global chain, where social groups are reproduced by the general movement of the mode of production itself that involves them into the anarchic vortex of competition, where individual private interests conflict with the general interests of the very reproduction of the capital relationship as a general system and which its state, as opposed to society, seeks to achieve.
The twenties of the last century, as a consequence of a war destruction and the crumbling of the old empires of central Europe, of the Ottoman one, of the tsarist one and the opening of large market prairies for a greater and powerful expansion of capitalist accumulation and of affirmation of the economic, industrial and financial power of the United States of America, are still remembered today as the roaring twenties, capable of reabsorbing the various crisis phases (also through the second imperialist world slaughter), definitely unloading the greatest part of the human and social cost to the world plundered through finance and aircraft carriers.
The current pandemic is inserted as a product and precipitator in a phase of general crisis of capitalist accumulation. Within the new capitalist era of the coronavirus, that mediation between the three horns of the problem, whose inherent contradiction risks being an unprecedented subversive factor, is increasingly ungovernable, putting the capitalist governance of the pandemic to the test, the results of which are often blatantly unsuccessful in terms of public community and human being health.
Within this wedge and possible gap that opens between “public health” versus “security” and “healthy economy”, we are witnessing growing moments of social fracture that are finally appearing with all their crudeness even to the main Western world, while in the powerful Asian and Chinese capitalist world has clear initial signs that even there the capitalist order begins to appear as a house of cards ready to falter under the blows of any health emergency, that becomes pandemic first of all for macroeconomic reasons than for reasons of force of the pathogenic element. Each capitalist state faces this crisis in the maelstrom of world capitalist competition, it does it starting from its own historical legacy of determined capitalist relations, on the basis of its own capacity about financial, industrial and domestic market resilience, carrying out those possible actions depending on the compaction of its social fabric in the name of the supreme economic good. Those who do not make it, see decades of capitalist national autonomy fade on the world market on which it depends and from which it cannot escape.
The time of the coronavirus manifests itself as a sudden precipitated subversive factor of all capitalist relations that up to now had made it possible to control the emergence of the long historical course of the general crisis. All class relations in their specific relationship and with the world of value production come out of it upset, creating panic, fear in large sections of capitalist society, crossing all the so-called social classes that react to them according to their specific relationship that they have with the production chain of accumulated surplus value. The same dominant economic powers are also driven by the uncertainty that this new, unexpected – but historically determined – phase brings with it. The decision-making of some leaders is the other side of the fragility of the structure that supports them.
How to protect the value chain in the face of the demand for protection from below, how not to damage the logistics chain of the world market and at the same time close the borders to the spread of a virus? How to strengthen border control without slowing down the circulation of just in time and production according to the Toyotist model? How can we not block the global chain of value and international trade while blocking borders or slowing down the chain of the world market for goods? How to necessarily cut the dead ends of the economy maintained through financial debt policies without compromising mass consumption and therefore the transformation of accumulated surplus value into profit? How to functionalize the productive work of the middle classes in the new global industry and within the global market (of services, tourism, retail distribution)? How to bend under these necessities growing masses of proletariat and racialized people who can no longer even live in the west metropolis as before? How to maintain and strengthen the real capital subsumption of all human activities and the general reproduction of life, while a virus, regardless of whether its pathogenic aggression in itself is severe or mild, becomes a factor that dramatically precipitates resilience in the face of human death for all causes if not through a continuous doping of the human immune system through traditional pharmacology and the close continuous jabbing with the new anti covid-19 vaccines? On closer inspection, the coronavirus accelerates a path that has already been underway for some time as a product of the contradictions that the general system of accumulation produces but which it is unable to resolve through its chaotic plan.
The social rift in North America and the end of the Canadian national resurgence.
Within the contradiction that capitalism is trying to reabsorb between “public health” versus “security” and “healthy economy” during these two latest years, we are witnessing a polarizing social fracture that is finally affecting North America and Europe with all its dramatic content. It is a precipitate that places all social classes no longer being able to live as before and where private interests no longer find satisfaction within the general chain of production of accumulated capitalist value. But in which directions do these social fault lines go, produced by a structure that is shaking itself?
It is clear that what revolves around Canada’s Freedom Convoy struggle moves towards the polarizing need of “security” and for “healthy economy”, rather than widening the contradiction in favor of the “public health” of the human community. Some layers of the productive middle classes already penalized in the crisis are trying to restore the previous conditions with the struggle, while the national interest of the Canadian big capital defends its autonomy from its powerful competitor on the southern border, a competitor it cannot do without. A competitor whose general economic and market strength attracts the centrifugal forces that are released in the crumbling of the Canadian nation.
A great USA that is increasingly centered on America First (whose project is also embodied by Biden), which to reassert its global leadership must absorb Canada as part of that Greater North America under the aegis of the United States, whose decades of development and peaceful competition with the finance of the former British and French empire hindered its realization, creating precisely the Canadian national identity. What is happening in Canada in recent weeks is nothing more than an attachment to the historic dispute between the ascendant North American capitalism of the United States and the old imperialist and ex-colonial control of North America in the midst, however, of a polarizing social vertical rift to the entire north American continent faced with the greatest general crisis in the history of capitalism.
While Trump and Musk politically support and finance the Freedom Convoy (which also sees militant support on the ground from part of the social party that conforms the Trumpism 2.0), Biden pressures the Canadian government to use maximum of the force to crack down on the border blockade which penalizes the general economic chain.
Canada obviously finds itself in debt of autonomy and struggles to contain a social ground that was crumbling even before these last events. Its national capitalist union and autonomy is at risk, while the convoy represents the movement of social masses which in the name of freedom claim the freedom to return to an impossible normality in the context of Canadian economic development and they attempt it in the only way determined by the general capitalist relationship: through the magnetic power of US economic forces and at the service of its “security” and “healthy economy”. It is no coincidence that the mobilization of the Freedom Convoy focuses precisely on those sectors of productive labor that serve the economy and profit by crossing the North American borders, supplying the value chain of the United States. It is a movement that, in order to be realized, cannot but reinforce the characteristic traits that created the “Canadian Resurgence” based on capitalist aggression against the Amerindian populations, BIPOC and the profound white proletariat, traits also necessary to reaffirm the great leadership of a Great North America worldwide.
In the eyes of the Amerindians and the peoples of the First Nations, the situation is dramatic. Because if the great George Floyd rebellion of 2020 is in a low tide status, however, even the racialized and proletarian people even more than the productive middle classes cannot live as before and risk ending up between the anvil and hammer. The great rebellion of 2020 in the United States was the greatest reaffirmation of the “public health” of human communities, of blacks, of BIPOCs, of young white proletarians and of the gendered – essentially of the human being as a community – that has been able to break into a momentum the sacredness of “security” and “healthy economy”, breaking all the health measures set up by the state, because they hinder the very struggle of blacks. It has crossed borders like a virus and mainly in those countries where the trademark of capitalism based on colonialism, slavery and racism is evident in the architecture of the cities. But the low tide puts the exploited masses in a condition of extreme difficulty in the face of the social fractures caused by an entire general system that is crumbling and there are no avant-gardes or abstract programs that can keep it cohesive. This is the new horizon of the general struggle that is determined and cannot be exorcised.
The exploited Amerindians, who in recent months had already been boycotting the flow of goods at the borders functional to the expansion of oil pipelines and the exploitation of their reserve lands, into the low tide they may feel that they have to take a step back in their struggle fearing to favor the struggle of the White Convoy. Also, they could consider possible an alliance of all the “people” where the substance of their battle will be certainly expropriated and exploited for a different purpose which in fact strengthens internal colonialism. An attempt this which, moreover, was also unsuccessfully attempted by some Anglo-Saxon supporters of the Convoy, bringing a few of them to Ottawa even the colors of the Amerindian First Nations and of people of colors.
What is obvious is that the reactionary terrain will not vanish by itself making it possible to continue the struggle against domestic colonialism, because this will not happen, just as the reconquest of Capitol Hill to the sanctity of democracy after January 6th 2021 has only strengthened the general terrain of oppression, and so it will also be for the Canadian affair which is only the second stage of that social polarization that has accelerated in the United States of America since the spring of 2020.
The pandemic crisis also represents for Canada the acceleration of the historical failure of the Quiet Revolution which, from the end of the war and in the 1960s, managed to achieve national independence from the old French colonialism first and then from British imperialism, which could only be a precarious national autonomy, heavily dependent on the rising dollar economy and on the historical link with imperialist and ex-colonial finance (so many of the all major Canadian financial institutions are mainly linked to the British finance and secondarily to that French). A definition of one’s own national identity which, in order to free itself from the previous regent, could only follow in the wake of the industrial and financial power of the more powerful North American neighbor in bursting growth. The characteristics of the fragility of Canadian independence, whose national identity pride was forged in the participation in the two world wars, were immediately evident from the conquered formal national independence, when the new state found itself facing the separatist pressures of nationalism (also armed) of French-speaking Canada in Quebec and Ontario between the late 1960s and 1970s. A separatism that claimed for the productive classes and French Canadian workers the equal opportunities in the social elevator that were guaranteed to their fellow citizens of Anglo-Saxon origin in Nova Scotia and British Columbia. The ability of Canada to reabsorb that fracture was possible by wriggling in the difficult balance between the historical and financial link with the previous imperialist and colonialist domination and US capitalism by strengthening industrial development in Quebec and in Ontario functional to the great North American auto industry that was ruling the world. But above all, it granted the Canadian middle classes and working classes with the white privilege inside the social division of labor, strengthening the historical oppression of the colonized Amerindian populations.
Those were the years in which the peoples of the First Nations, left to live in marginal reserve areas where they were continuing their centuries-old productive and self-sufficient relationship based on breeding, pastoralism and nomadism, were expropriated of their children, who were kidnapped and conscripts in the white Christian schools, educated here for generations in the discipline and in the market and as a waged labor force forced into the production of commodities. Through psychological torture and also physical torture (against those children who did not want to renounce their tradition) the colonialist and racist school made it a docile mass of marginalized salaried workers. Tens of thousands of those young Amerindians, now adults, still carry on their bodies the psychological devastation of the white school discipline which in large numbers leads them to suicide. Hundreds died in schools as a result of the torture. Even today adjacent to those places, between the schools and Christian churches of Canada, there are the cemetery grounds (real mass graves) where the remains of those poor children lie. And now those churches are set on fire by the rage in red skin. Canada, like the United States of America, has risen to a modern bourgeois nation by marking with the blood the black and red skin and thus determining the white privilege with that keeps the working classes on a leash.
The Convoy of Freedom, which rises to the news all over the world, before being a movement to fight against the anti-pandemic and vaccine mandates of the Canadian government, it is the product of the collapse of the Canadian national resurgence with all its historical consequences.
The grip on the bridge in the beating heart of world capitalism.
In essence, the compass needle of the convoy struggle is pointed towards the powerful magnet of the MAGA project which attracts the centrifugal forces that emerge from the underground of the Canadian nation at the end of a historical cycle. A laceration of the unitary national fabric that had already been underway for some time and that in recent years has seen the development of vast and new independence movements in British Columbia, Alberta and Nova Scotia.
The same action made by the Biden’s Federal Government undermines the integrity of the Canadian national fabric on a par with the interference of external economic forces represented by Trump. The Federal Government of the United States of America calls for the suppression of the protest of the Convoy, which by blocking the connections on the border between Ontario and Quebec with Michigan and Detroit represents a blow to the supply of the North American industry and its attempt to restart in competition on the world market. The blockades of Canadian truckers at the borders and at the Ambassador Bridge on Lake Superior connecting Windsor to Detroit (through which 25% of all goods trade between Canada and the United States passes) resulted in a loss of 50 million dollars per day, while for the delay in the supply of semi-conductors and components of the automotive and high tech industry, Ford, Tesla, GM and Stellantis have found themselves forced to slow down certain phases of the production cycle due to the lack of just-in-time supplies.
It will also be possible that a stalemate in the situation could make the forces of US capital express themselves through Trump and Musk (which respond to specific interests of financial corporations connected to the hydrocarbon, oil and gas industries interests whose new expansion projects are extending pipelines from Canada and North America to the far south of Chile and Argentina) can remove their active support. Nonetheless, like the events of January 6th 2021 in Washington D.C. have shown, the social mass of transnational and Canadian trumpism does not necessarily need a commander in the field to continue their march even in the event of the leader’s desertion from the conflict line, and can maintain their course by consistently responding to the request to “be there, be wild” (Trump was tweeting on social media), as in fact happened during the most dramatic moments of Capitol Hill assault.
For Canadian national unity, the situation animates the white and democratic popular nationalist component with dismay in the face of the waving of the right-wing flags of the Make America Great Again and of the historic separatist flags of both Anglo-Saxon and French-speaking origin in the occupation of the Convoy. Faced with national unity endangered by a combined internal action and external forces, other sectors of the liberal middle class and sectors of the most guaranteed working classes also take to the streets, opposing the protest of the truck drivers basically in defense of the lost National Resurgence, where the vaccination contest and the reaction to the disorder brought by the people of the rights to quiet Ottawa citizen is only the superficial zest of what is shaking society. These liberal and democratic sectors call for state intervention to remove the capital truck drivers’ occupy and above all wonder “how and why the convoy was not stopped before reaching Ottawa and was freely allowed to occupy the city by surrounding the area of the Parliament still today and for so long“?
The reality of the situation is very present in the Trudeau government. The state of emergency is a delicate matter to be implemented by addressing the anger of truckers, because it is not a simple contrast to a productive category that involves less than 4% of the Canadian workforce (including hired drivers, small owners, and large freight transport companies).
Several reasons make the affair dramatically complicated and to be managed by the Canadian government. Not only and not so much because the Canadian police among its ranks have many feelings that unite them to truck drivers, first of all the material factor of the whiteness privilege and the terror about immigrants. Not only because there is a fear of bloodshed on both fronts, knowing full well that some convoys also carry weapons and modern hunting rifles. This is nothing new, all the social conflict that has crossed the United States of America from 2020 onwards has seen the presence and also the use of weapons (their own and improper) in the squares and in the streets and above all by the social right to counter attack the George Floyd rebellion.
Between prelude to a new American civil war and crumbling.
The real difficulty lies in the fact that the course of the crisis is eroding the foundations of the white privilege that has allowed the national compacting of these mass sectors now pressed into the vortex of global competition, radicalizing diffuse layers of the productive middle class that can hardly be reabsorbed.
Just as yesterday at Capitol Hill, today on the Ambassador Bridge middle and productive classes are willing to fight against their state to regain it for a service of greater aggression against everything that hinders the freedom of the market and the exercise of one’s own private entrepreneurial business. Trudeau cannot capitulate either to the pressure of the convoy or to Biden’s urging, because both solutions would represent the fastest and most subordinate slide into the orbit of US capitalism. On the other hand, what is taking place is the mighty American revenge against Canada, in a history of military and commercial strife that has continued to the present day. Let’s not forget that during the wars between the United States and Great Britain in the early nineteenth century to redesign the borders of North America and the market spaces, it was the Canadian troops under British command who in 1814 stormed Washinton D.C. and burned down the White House.
The initiative of the North American and Canadian truck drivers against the vaccination mandate necessary to cross the border can only move within this historical terrain that has determined the struggle itself. At the same time, it has very little in common with the previous mobilizations in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal against lockdowns, an expression of a real intolerance of reducing the time of the life to just the time of production and work. But here, capitalism finds its apparent solution, restoring freedom to the life through the vaccination campaign, the green pass as an tool of freedom to exercise one’s own existence again and freely inside the capitalist relationship that still guarantee non-existent residues insignificant of white privilege for the middle classes layers of the society. Much of that mobilization has returned to the tail position behind the general needs of the state and the market, of the “security” and the “healthy economy” by passively adhering to the vaccination campaign.
Why do truckers protest? Between historical bourgeois corporatism and impulses towards the mestizo proletariat of the United States.
Truck drivers in Canada and in the United States, whose number of employees are well below the demand for work, have enjoyed the grant for vaccination exemption and of the green pass required to cross the North American borders in both directions. An instrumental that should have relaunched the chains of the global market in security allowing the international traffic of general business (within the European Community, in the market relationship with Great Britain, in the Atlantic and Pacific routes between east and west, on the extended line of the Russian Chinese border), but that in a short time – as underlined by the gray eminence of historical capitalism The Economist – this tool has shown more weaknesses than the acquisition of greater immune resilience, slowing the recovery of business as usual much more than expected. For this reason, the truck drivers of both North American countries were granted with the vaccination exemption for crossing borders until the end of January, a corporative bonus given to this category of workers for their service to the Toyotist production and in the circulation of goods for the rapid realization of surplus value in profit.
Under the pressure of productivity, the freight industry market has been causing an increase in labor demand in recent years, but for years it has suffered from a constant supply of labor that is far below the industry’s need for both north American countries (as well as Brexit rules exposed Great Britain to this same Achilles heel). Along with this suffering, there has been a decrease in profit margins in the goods transport industry for some years, despite an exponential increase in the volume of turnover and tons of goods transported. For every dollar of revenue, the freight industry makes a profit of 4 cents, while 96 cents is the fixed cost that capital advances for restarting its process. Apparently the inadequacy of the labor supply is part of the decrease in the profit margin itself that afflicts the large companies in this sector. This scarcity of supply of work has historical roots in the long capitalist period, where the position as a truck driver Owner Operator (i.e. the truck driver who owns his own tractor and his business) represents less and less for various sectors of the American middle class the horizon of rise within to realize their dream of small entrepreneurship. Today in the USA only 9% of truck drivers are independent owners, while in Canada the share is more conspicuous (the small owner of the tractor is about 35% of the total workforce of truck drivers). Moreover, it is a market with a high turnover, because about 55% of the Owner Operators of the heavy transport industry go in bankruptcy within the first 18 months from the start of the private business. Many are former veterans over fifty who try their luck in freight after voluntary leave from the army. The decrease in profit margins forces the logistics and transport industry to deregulate the tariff regime towards an ever more flexible determination of the pay, less and less agreed on an hourly basis (in Canada it is still maintained only for short-haul engagement), while it is increasingly based on the criterion per mileage, or on the percentage basis in relation to the volume of transport, sometimes with a participation coupon of the small owner truck driver in the profit of the company when he works exclusively for it. It is a market where the wage labor force of heavy transport drivers begins to characterize itself with the employment of a growing number of immigrant workforce, especially in the West Pacific of the United States (for example 44% of the workforce in California are Indian immigrants of Sikh origin). In this market dominated by flexible wages, it is long-haul and cross-border transport that ensures a better rate, although the quarantine obligation for those without vaccination penalizes productivity especially for truck drivers and their ability to resist against the debt agreed to start their own business as a small business owner. On January 15th for Canada and then on January 22th for the United States, the term of the vaccination exemption for crossing the border in freight transport expired. In view of the expiry of the vaccination exemption, the freight industry (whose productivity and marginality suffers from a job offer below economic needs) has tried to reconstitute the corporative pact with Canadian truckers, proposing to those not vaccinated the relocation of transport activities within the national territory (where the vaccination mandate is not in force), perhaps revising upwards those tariffs that the market had already lowered. The proposal could not be adequate to the small entrepreneur’s need to keep his business competitive, so he was forced to fight to restore that corporative pact looking towards the largest capitalist corporation, the Great North America which is expressed by the transnational trumpism.
The expiry of the de facto exemption represents a severe blow to those 35% of small owners of their own tractor (including some of these who have also created associated small businesses or by purchasing 3 or 4 tractor units and hiring a few units of salaried workers), who it is made up of approximately 160,000 owner operators and a total fleet of 180,000 trucks (thus twenty thousand more than the number of small owners). But it is also the same for that wage workers who, through relocation to the internal market, sees their wages gnawed, while the productivity required and to be chased is very high for everyone.
For the truck small owners, the debt burden agreed to start the business is putting this sector of the Canadian middle class to the brink and does not give a way out. The consequence of the expiration of the vaccination exemption can only accelerate the decline of the American dream, which has long been downsized in the nearby United States market, while placing the entire transport workforce (salaried and self-employed workers) at a lower income and at a pace of backbreaking productivity.
In the United States (whose transport industry employs more than three million mainly salaried truck drivers and a total of nine million people) the widespread sentiment of the small owner of his own engine, of this historically important production sector, is of general discouragement. In 2020, truckers plagued by problems related to the productivity and increasing costs of their operations built a small protest convoy in Washington D.C. under the White House and in protest against Trump, whose de facto his policy had defied the promises he made to his people. Today a part of this production sector laborers organizes support groups called Convoy Save America with the aim of organizing solidarity caravans crossing the border on the West Pacific. The entire labor category, originally and historically with corporative traits, is exposed to ever greater risks for the safety of the worker engaged in exhausting transport and to an increase in maintenance costs for small owners. A few weeks ago another Convoy blocked the entire freight traffic towards the State of Colorado in a spontaneous action of solidarity with a young immigrant worker of Cuban origin (Roger Lazaro Aguilera Medero) sentenced to 110 years in prison for a road accident caused on the hairpin bends of Colorado itself on December 21th, 2019.
From the outburst of multiracial solidarity and protest against the freight industry companies to putting dangerous unmanaged killer trucks in the hands of wage drivers, today part of this labor category reacts by renewing their patriotic sentiment for a great, white, capitalist and fierce America.
Donald Trump in 2017 tried to coax his popular base by also looking at this sector of the productive world, staging the leadership of a large truck near the White House. Then he was unable to carry out that defense of the productive middle class which were suffering from the effects of the so-called globalization.
It was difficult yesterday and it is even more difficult today to homogeneously strengthen the material foundations of the national compacting of the middle classes and the productive classes of the United States of America. This objective difficulty will certainly not push the productive middle class attacked by the effects of the crisis towards an anti-capitalist struggle, especially since they are already radicalizing themselves in the wake of a market that they want to be freer and more aggressive. The Freedom Convoy story is a demonstration of this.
The middle class and the petty bourgeoisie of Marxian memory found themselves caught between two fires, between an old world where the feudal order of the guilds of the trades guaranteed their existence and the new world of the capitalist development of society which necessarily moved in the direction of its demolition. Today the relationship is qualitatively different, the middle classes are no longer the residues of the order of the feudal guilds of the cities, they are the product of the expanded accumulation, of the commodification and profitability of all the man’s productive activities, born from the pores of capitalist circulation of which it is functional to it. This relationship is constantly being revolutionized to reaffirm it in an even more functional and efficient dimension to the general system of capitalist accumulation.
It is the small owner truck driver himself who is part of his problem, from the exact moment that he started his business by subscribing his debt easily granted by the bank he turned to and whose interest rate will make him fails.
Today, in order to pay the coupon cut to the bank, the Canadian truck driver is forced to mobilize to keep in balance those market and capitalist relations that attracted him, just as every small trader, small restaurateur, craftsman or tourist entrepreneur who does not he wants to end up being a mere salaried official of the big capitalist industry still linked in a privileged status towards the proletarian and racialized mass. But if you think about it, it is a difficult balance that the banks and financial policies of the states try to achieve without success in order to ensure that mass commodities consumption necessary to transform the enormous mass of socially extorted surplus value into profit.
This blog is not surprised that the Freedom Convoy struggle fills with suggestion a large part of the European protests of recent days against the anti-covid-19 policies of the governments due to its indisputable effectiveness in putting big capital in difficulty in a renegotiation, however, precisely as a productive middle class that intends to survive whatever the cost. But the rebellion of the former slaves of the French colonial Antilles against Macron’s green pass does not arouse as much charm and sympathy in most of these squares, while they look with suspicion at those social brute figure of the metropolitan banlieues who in Holland, in Amsterdam and Eindhoven, had turned several days of peaceful protests against the lockdown of the Dutch government into looting of supermarkets. And it is for the same low tide of the struggle of black Americans, that even the North American proletarians who have suffered more than all the costs and consequences of the aggravation of the crisis will be able to transiently and confusedly share the nationalist streets of all the people who no longer exist.
Empathy.
Beyond the dynamics and outcome of the Freedom Convoy struggle, the material factors of the social and economic crack of the entire capitalist system are represented with the extension to Canada of the crisis and social polarization of the United States of America. And these shocks can only spread to the whole world with enhanced consequences. The last two years have been fraught with close social explosions of all the contradictions that capitalism is unable to govern as it was possible only 20 years ago. North American society is breaking down by splitting in half and crosswise. Feeling satisfaction in the face of the faltering of the capitalist order creates enthusiasm for the revolutionary and for the communist who waited the outbreak of the crisis for an entire historical cycle. But it is a reaction that risks appearing detached indifference and in some respects very similar to the indignation of the liberal bourgeois, intellectuals and liberal capital with a human face who feel in the face of the monstrosities and grotesque that the crisis of a general system produces. The superficial satisfaction risks being the other side of feeling distant and comfortably reclined in the reformist room, also privileged in white from what are the material turning points of the general human suffering crushed by capitalism. It is necessary to feel empathy in the face of the drama and suffering that this wavering is causing, even towards some layers of the Freedom Convoy that are agitated in the wake of the market and capitalist competition. Jarrod Shanahan, on January 7th, 2021, in commenting on the Capitol Hill events of the previous day wrote:
“…Forget how risible or horrific it may seem to professional pundits or social media celebrities who shed tears for the sanctity of the “hallowed halls” where imperialist wars and austerity programs are hatched. The sight of gatecrashers angrily storming the Senate demanding Mike Pence reveal himself, a man in proletarian dress with his feet up on a desk in the office of the multi-millionaire powerbroker Nancy Pelosi, and the perverse fun most of them seemed to be having doing it, furnish powerful political images that speak to the widespread disgust with US life that’s just about the only thing everyone agrees on”.
Empathy means that first of all we must reject the painting that sectors of capitalist society want to make the participants of the Freedom Convoy look like grotesque thugs, waving their Nazi flags (imagine that appeared really in a few between the thousands of photo shoots) or their religious symbols animated by the strength of their bigotry and unscientific ignorance. This caricatured view must be rejected for what it is: the other side of capitalism (and even racist towards all the lower classes) and its liberal and democratic factions, for which every social crisis is due to the lack of culture or enlightening bourgeois education.
It is necessary to show empathy towards the real suffering that capitalism causes in an increased way by shaking even the fat West, but not to support how legitimate fear is reacted in a specific way remaining inside into the capital relationship even more reactionary. Seeking a vain attempt at a “united front” aimed at orienting the objectives of the struggle, which in itself cannot be reoriented, is useless as the course of the post-insurrection on Capitol Hill is demonstrating. Just as any avant-garde attempt to orient and recompose the crumbling proletarian front under a program according to the forms of the past is destined to be wrecked. It is empathy that should maintain the revolutionary commitment against capitalism, whose crisis crumbles one by one the material force on which it is founded, a feeling that should also be expressed in relation to real fear and the reasons why the proletarians and the oppressed who try to protect their condition by passively undergoing the policies of governments, believing that defeating the pandemic is necessary for the healthy economy recovery that would be the illusory guarantee of proletarian living conditions and also of its possibility of bargaining through struggle.
The solution to the social drama that is rending North America does not find an easy solution. The course of the general catastrophic crisis of Capitalism will cause the still missing pieces of the puzzle to fall on the table, and in the face of the North American facts underlying the struggle of the Freedom Convoy this blog, maintaining its empathy, believes that “God does not play dice with the universe ”and certain paths are already determined. I know very well that this conclusion is unsatisfactory for those looking for an answer to the problems of what is to be done, I find Jarrod Shanahan’s conclusion absolutely pertinent to his reflection on the events of Capitol Hill of January 6, 2021 which highlighted the real terrain of the struggle that we have on the horizon:
What is our alternative?
The chronicle of the facts.
We thank the comrades of Crimethinc for recalling the relevant facts underlying the story. Other moments of the historical event have been pointed out by Noi non abbiamo patria.
2016 – 2021. Donald Trump wins the presidential elections in the United States, creating repercussions in Canada, encouraging the formation of various groups animated by the opposition “of mass immigration” and to Islam in particular in Quebec. On January 29, 2017, an armed action in a mosque in the suburbs of Quebec City kills five people.
2018. The yellow vests movement is born in France. The iconography of the struggle takes hold in Canada towards the end of January 2019, but here the concern that drives the crowds includes Islam, immigration, Trudeau’s tyranny, border security and the fate of the oil industry and of gas in western Canada (British Columbia and Vancouver). Many of the claims concern the expansion of pipeline projects also in Alberta to be carried out for exports to the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.
6 December 2018. Meng Wanzhou, number two of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawey, is arrested in Canada during a stopover on an international flight for a business trip from Hong Kong to Mexico. The arrest was carried out on an international arrest warrant issued by the FBI and the United States Department of National Security for alleged violation of the trade embargo on Iran and for unspecified cyber espionage activities. The affair will create a major diplomatic and commercial problem between Canada and China, also embarrassing the British financial giant HSBC whose center of global financial gravity is between London, Hong Kong and Toronto.
February 2019. The United We Roll truck convoy departs Red River, Alberta on February 14 and 200 trucks arrive in Ottawa on February 19.
October 2019. Trudeau wins the elections again, while in Alberta and Saskatchewan they are predominantly and uniformly represented by conservative MPs. The disappointing electoral outcome for some of the Anglo-Saxon people leads to the birth of the “Wexit Canada” party which aims at an independent state by birth or all of western Canada.
March 2020. Canada begins to implement some emergency measures with respect to the Covid-19 pandemic. A few months earlier, the trade truce reached between the United States and China had brought about the tightening of some tariffs on imports from European Community countries and also towards Canada following the unilateral renegotiation of NAFTA and the initiative to cancel the agreements of free trade of the Trans-Pacific by Trump towards Mexico and Canada and for a more equitable recognition for the USA.
May – end of October 2020. The George Floyd rebellion sees the mass participation of the black, Latino, and white youth proletariat. It is the largest and most extensive multiracial struggle movement in the history of the United States of America. In the first weeks of June the protest extends to the white world and of European origin, following the iconoclastic message of the demolition of the statues of slaveholders and colonialists (in Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland and Portugal).
August 2020. In the face of the Covid-19 wave, Canada tries to fight the virus by applying some border closures. The United States of America and Trump are threatening to tighten tariffs on imports of Canadian aluminum.
November 2020 – January 2021. In the low tide of the black and multiracial struggle, social Trumpism 2.0. of the people of Trump consequently overrides their own boss and attacks Capitol Hill on January 6 in a growing grassroots of social mobilization, which also saw it as a protagonist as a militant forces in defense of white supremacy and in armed action against the struggle of the black communities that sprang up in all the cities of the USA supported in an accomplice way by a variegated white youth proletariat.
January 20, 2021. In Washington D.C. Biden takes the White House office with National Guard 20,000 troops to preside over his coronation. Nothing good on the horizon.
April 2021. Quebec is the only Canadian state jurisdiction to enforce the lockdown. Spontaneous and mass violations begin curfew in Montreal. Despite the participation of right-wing nationalist groups, the days are also characterized by real street parties with a multiracial content.
June – July 2021. Christian churches are set on fire in several Canadian counties and cities, perpetrators of the capitalist kidnapping of the children of their native peoples.
September 2021. Trudeau wins the election again. But the Canadian People’s Party (PPC) quadruples its share of votes.
December 2021. Just as everyone believes the pandemic is coming to an end, North America experiences the new Omicron wave. Those who became activists in 2019 during the Canadian version of the yellow vests in the United We Roll struggle begin to form separatist social groups outside traditional conservative and newly formed parties under the motto Canada Unity.
January 15, 2022. The covid-19 vaccination exemption expires for trucks workers crossing the border from the United States to Canada. The freight industry, already in a shortage of labor, is trying to run for cover by relocating a large part of its salaried workforce to national freight transport. Many refuse, both among employees and small owners for whom the upward adjustment of the already reduced rates does not resolve the decided opposition to the mandate.
January 22, 2022. The convoy leaves from Prince George in British Columbia to the east of the country. There would be around 1200 trucks and other vehicles.
January 28, 2022. The first trucks arrive in Ottawa realizing a real occupation of the city, while another substantial part will arrive the next day. The liberal press criminalizes by portraying the protest with media over-exposure of facts such as desecration of monuments or Nazi flags waved by the convoy. Apart from the true fact that in the shitty situation, real poop bags were thrown by the demonstrators against the participants of the counter protests, the presence of Nazi flags in the convoy and among its supporters is reduced to few photos of sympathizers on the way out of Winnipeg or in other roads. The flags flying in the squares against squares of Ottawa are largely Canadian and transnational Trumpism, to which are added those of independence and nationalism of the provinces of West Canada and French Quebec.
End of January and beginning of February 2022. The Convoy receives the financial support of millions of dollars to resist the fight as long as possible. Most of the funding comes from the United States. The Convoy responds to the press campaign of denigration with photos of the peoples of the First Nations who bring solidarity to the truck drivers marching along the country and with the motto we are all the people. Many of these photos will turn out to be taken in completely different circumstances in 2019 and the news of the participation of important sectors of the tribes in support of the truckers’ protest is effectively a hoax on social media, while minor layers of people of colors joined the protest in Ottawa. Against the use of the colors of the First Nations, the leaders of the various tribes almost in unanimous chorus denounced the instrumentality and more decisively took sides against the purposes of the truck drivers’ protest defined as a struggle for “privilege” and not for “freedom. ”, but sliding in favor of the liberal state considered at that moment the least formidable danger.
February 5th. In Ottawa and on the side of the Convoy in the square in addition to the truck drivers there are several tens of thousands of people, many of whom are residents of the capital. Waving the MAGA and Canadian flags, there are also the flags of the historic nationalism of French Quebec (with the colonial coat of arms of France) and those of Nova Scotia nationalism. Against this show of strength the counter demonstrations of the liberal democratic people are overwhelmed in number. But the mobilization of the square against the convoy also extends to Vancouver.
February 7th. The Convoy is preparing to block the Ambassador Bridge linking Windsor to Detroit. On February 10, the border between Manitoba and North Dakota is also blocked by the Freedom Convoy.
February 11th. Biden urges Trudeau to end the border blockade promptly and determinedly. Trudeau shares his partner’s arguments but in fact shows more perplexity than certainty about what to do.
February 12. In Montreal and Halifax (Nova Scotia) the demonstrations of a few thousand people in solidarity with the Convoy and for the end of the anti covid-19 restrictions extend. Here, too, they are confronted with as many anti-demonstrations whose number of opposing forces are equal. Meanwhile, another border block is being built to the west on the Vancouver-Seattle junction.
February 13th. The slow evacuation of the Ambassador Bridge by the police begins, making a few dozen arrests and also seizing some rifles and pistols stored on board the trucks. The clearing is completed during the night.
February 14th. Trudeau calls for a state of emergency to permanently clear the occupation of Ottawa and the remaining blocks on the borders. Traffic resumes on the Ambassador Bridge in the stretch from Canada to Detroit, but the wound still remains open and bleeding, the crisis is only postponed and the crumbling is still ongoing.
Current days. Not present into the original Italian text when it has been written.
Some important capitalistic media of the liberal global wings (The Economist, Bloomberg) are defining horrifying the Trudeau repressive measures against the truckers. Biden, amid weakness to contend Russia and to reinforce USA global leadership, is threatened by a domestic truckers Convoy is expecting to block Washington D.C. in the coming week. 700 National Guard troops are already alerted and deployed but unarmed. A clear sign of a challenges that the crumbling is causing to the heart of the capitalist beast.