CLASS DYNAMICS

MORE THOUGHTS ON THE TRUCKERS

I want to follow up last week’s post with some further thoughts on the trucker protest in Ottawa – and indeed elsewhere in the country (and maybe around the world?). This is not meant as a hard alternative to what I wrote last week. Some combination of the analyses (for example, see the footnote below) could be true. But it is possible that today’s thoughts will wind up providing a better insight into what’s happening.  

As a sidebar: My daughter is coming to visit in a few days and we’re taking a trip along the coast. (Ah, but which coast, you wonder.) So, I’m posting this quick hit today and I’ll plan to post the long piece on power next week. I may not be able to get anything done for the week after that. We’ll see. Something like that is the plan. Of course that could all change.

In different posts on this substack I’ve brought up the question of class, but I haven’t really done a deep dive on it. If you’re interested in better understanding my take on this topic, check out my book, The Managerial Class on Trial. As I explained there, it’s not unfair to think of me as a right-wing Marxist. If that seems odd to you, you might want to check out that discussion as well, in the same book. In fact, if there’s interest, I may excerpt and expand the relevant section of the book in a post to this substack to elaborate the idea. (Maybe let me know in the comments if you’d be interested in that.) The short of it, here, though, is that I do take class analysis seriously and I do think the relation to the means of production, as an analytical tool, provides valuable insight.

For those who are interested, a while back I used this analysis, explored in The Managerial Class on Trial, to produce a video called, “Why the Ruling Class Hates Donald Trump.” The gist of the argument was that the managerial class, to consolidate power, must suppress the bourgeoisie and control the proletariat – the working class. And the managerial class has usually achieved the former objective by using their ventriloquist powers of conceptual sophistication and verbal dexterity to mobilize the working class against the bourgeoise, as though the latter was their main obstacle to achieving a better life, not only early in the process – e.g., during Marx’s lifetime – but even (maybe especially) well after the managerial class had displaced the bourgeoise as the dominant class in our society. (Again, see the book for the underpinning arguments and evidence for these claims.)

So, what I argued in the video was that Trump’s presidency constituted an existential threat to the managerial class (embodied in what is more commonly known as the deep state, the corporate media, academia, and in some quarters, also the Cathedral). Populist unrest is an ongoing fact of life for any ruling class. A genuinely threatening populist insurgency, though, is rare and requires very specific conditions – including leadership. As I’ve discussed elsewhere (here, here and here), such leadership can usually be expected to come from a surplus elite, which rebels against the ruling faction of the ruling class. While this is a threat to that ruling faction, it isn’t a threat to the class. In this case, the managerial class is still going to be the ruling class, just a different faction will gain control. This is a serious business, which can lead to bloodshed, but it isn’t an existential threat to the rule of the class. The unique threat of the Trump phenomenon, as I argued in the video, is that while Trump may have a degree at a good university, and despite his obvious verbal gift for trolling and framing, it’s hardly clear he can be considered a legitimate member of the managerial class.

He has many of the skills and experience of the managerial class, but he has always identified as a capitalist, entrepreneur, bourgeois. It’s no coincidence that so many derisive criticisms of him by managerial class types were along the lines that he was unintelligent, inarticulate, lacked intellectual curiosity, and, my favourite, he never read any books – the most damning criticism from the managerial class. So, while I will concede, objectively, the water is a little muddy when it comes to placing Trump’s class, the key point is that insofar as he might be legitimately considered a member of the bourgeoisie, his effective nomination as leader of the populist insurgency in America posed a terrifying prospect for the managerial class.

The most frightening prospect for that class would be an effective alliance between the bourgeoisie and the working class. As long as they were divided, the managerial class could control each of them. The bourgeoisie has resources and leadership qualities, but not raw numbers in people power. The working class has the raw manpower, but generally lacks the resources and leadership qualities and experience. (Look into how many union leaders have been lawyers or otherwise members of the managerial class.) Separately, the managerial class can handily contain each class, but an effective alliance between them would combine their capacities in such a way that could constitute a genuine, existential threat to the continued rule of the managerial class. That’s why Trump had to be destroyed, and why they were willing to reveal the naked power of their media and administrative state apparatus. Keeping those sources of control and manipulation concealed, while preferable, was less important than destroying any chance of establishing a beachhead in such a bourgeois-proletariat alliance.

I think it is possible that something similar is happening with the truckers in Ottawa, which explains both why we’ve seen such a naked classist response¹, but also why the Canadian division of the managerial class has seemed so confused about how exactly to deal with the protest. The complication here is suggested by how frequently people have characterized this as a workers’ revolt. Some observers have laughed about how ironic it is that the left, rather than rejoicing in the workers of the world uniting, have taken aggressive postures against the trucker protest.

The complication is that while the truckers often present the conventional aesthetic of the working class, for instance in dress and diction, they do physically demanding work, and indeed some of them are formally proletariat, in fact a very great number of them – I’ve heard claims that a considerable majority of them – are owner-operators. They own their own trucks (how else could they park them in Ottawa for weeks at a time). Such people may look and sound like some cliché of the working class, but they are members of the bourgeoisie. And being part of the bourgeoisie involves not only having different interests and perspectives, but it involves different experiences, skills, and aptitudes.

This no doubt goes some way in explaining the difficulty the managerial class and their official (politician) representatives are having undermining the protest. If the truckers had been overwhelmingly proletariats, with experience largely limited to being managed by others, might they have been more easily manipulated into playing into the traps that the managerial class has tried to set for them: characterizing them as social deviants; creating confrontation that invited aggressive responses; threating their access to essential supplies like diesel and food? It’s hard to say that with any certainty, but it is possible that so many of them having entrepreneurial experience, forced to deal with the business-end of unpredictable conditions, may have put them in a better position to anticipate the provocations and have response strategies and tactics in place.

What I am confident about though is that, in its own way, the trucker protest presents the same threat to managerial class interests as did the Trump presidency. That does not mean the truckers are secret Trumpists, as a Quebec newspaper headline recently asserted. For my point, here, the truckers’ opinion of Trump is entirely immaterial. Everyone of those truckers could hold Donald Trump in complete and utter contempt and it would have no bearing upon the point I’m making. That point is that, however different the circumstances and contingencies involved may be, there is an objective analogy between the Trump presidency and the truckers’ protest. Each pose to the managerial class the prospect of a beachhead for developments which are terrifying to that class and could indeed provide an existential threat to their rule: an alliance between the bourgeoise and the working class.       

This objective danger explains why the managerial class has become so unhinged in its response to the protest, again, as happened with Trump, willing to leave exposed the machinations of its “reality” crafting media and the bald resort to what Carl Schmitt called super-legality: the weaponization of the legal system against the enemies of the state. Though the managerial class has largely ruled for the better part of the last century, through their control of media, Hollywood, academia and the other cultural and intellectual instruments, they have been able to use their ventriloquist skills to maintain the illusion that we all still live in the 19th century and the real great class conflict is between the bourgeoisie and the working class. In truth, the real threat to our societies is the unrelenting technocracy and social engineering of the managerial class, reducing everyone outside of the sacred circle of our rulers to being cogs in their dreams of the perfect social machine. And anyone who gets in the way and won’t dutifully take up their cog position is disposable human refuse.

It's possible still for a surplus elite to provide an alternative ruling faction of the managerial class, which would provide some relief to the extent they’re committed, at least in the short term, to a different ruling agenda. Nothing though is more threatening to most of the ruling managerial class than the danger of a bourgeois-proletariat alliance. So, it will be fascinating (and perhaps telling) to see how events unfold for the trucker protest.²     

1. This has been most painfully evident in all the bureaucrats complaining about the truckers disrupting “their” city. The apparatchiks of the administrative state are not very happy to see the unwashed and their big, noisy work machines cluttering up their tony streets. Their willful blindness to the fact that nearly everyone living in Ottawa either directly or indirectly gets their income from Canadian taxpayers — that without such taxpayers, in fact, the city probably wouldn’t be much more than a sleepy hamlet — may well be considered the typical classism of the a ruling class’ attitude toward “its” capital city.

2. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, while Trump may have been himself a member of the bourgeoisie, there’s no doubting that there was also a cadre of surplus elite members of the managerial class who attached themselves to his presidency and the related populist movement. It isn’t impossible that a bourgeois-proletariat alliance could be co-opted by a faction of the managerial class, still maintaining that class’s hold on power.