POPULIST LESSONS OF POLAND’S SOLIDARNOŚĆ, PART 4

TRUCKING, AGAIN

In addition to being, simultaneously, a history of Solidarność and a meditation upon the cooptation of populist movements by the managerial class, Goodwyn’s towering work is also a foray into the epistemology and methodology of populist historiography itself.¹ He challenges the very assumptions that inform most history, and sociology, of populism. A key matter that he emphasizes on multiple occasions is the tendency for scholars to treat populist insurgencies as spontaneous uprisings. He specifically takes to task Hannah Arendt, in her otherwise excellent book, On Revolution, for this misguided emphasis upon such movements or insurgencies as spontaneous.² Somehow, it is the magic of the people in common motivation that continually stumbles upon these populist forms of protest and counter-power.³

This fetish for spontaneity, for Goodwyn, is like the tendency among the managerial class dissidents, mentioned in the last post, to invoke the role of the intellectual in raising the consciousness of the workers.⁴ In both cases, what is being suppressed is precisely what made Solidarność possible: the hands-on learning of what I’ve called elsewhere analog workers – call them blue collar if you’d like – to generate renewed iterations of the organizational and strategic populist ideas and practices that eventually allowed them to discern and consolidate winning institutions and culture. Both characterizations dismissed the potential for collaborative, popular agency. And for Goodwyn, to have missed this was to have missed the whole story when trying to study Solidarność. In effect, such ostensible friends of the insurgency wind up undermining the movement no less than a Neema Parvini, who simply dismisses populist agency as a delusion.

This last lesson from Goodwyn then is obviously going to be important for seeing what lessons might be applied from the Solidarność experience to contemporary populism. And, while these lessons can be applied in a wide range of contexts, I’m going to specifically apply them to our old friends the Canadian truckers.⁵ Right off the top, from reading the earlier posts, memory should draw our attention to some similar dimensions of the two populist moments.

The governments and their propaganda arms engaged in shaming and demonizing techniques to try and socially isolate the populists. As the Canadian government condemned the truckers as all manner of bigots and science deniers, with the icing on the cake being Trudeau’s now infamous characterization of them as “a fringe minority with unacceptable views,” the Polish government likewise denigrated its workers as counterrevolutionaries, malcontents, hooligans, and social scum. Both governments attempted to cancel the leadership of the populist opposition, particularly through the imposition of economic hardship: job blacklisting in Poland, bank account freezing in Canada. And of course, both governments proved willing to use levels of violence to resolve their populist problem that shocked many across the nation, and the world.

Now, clearly, the violence used by the Polish government was far more egregious than that used by Justin Trudeau’s government. But of course, we’re also talking about reaching different bars. As Canadian government has less of a history in using violence against its own population, the violence used beginning on February 17, 2022, was much more shocking to Canadians than it might have seemed to Poles of 1970. And the other interesting dimension of this use of violence is that the Commission Inquiry into the Canadian government’s invoking of the Emergency Act, just approaching its conclusion as I’m writing these posts, has revealed that, like the Polish communist government, the Canadian government’s action was understood by itself to increase the likelihood of provoking violence among the truckers.⁶

Given these similarities, then, it is interesting to ponder parallels and disjunctions between the two populist movements. In a few areas, the parallels are striking. As in Poland, the truckers effectively drew upon their national symbols. The Canadian national anthem and flag held a prominent place in the movement, long before the convoy reached Ottawa, as supporters lined highways and overpasses, waving Canadian flags. For American readers, the full implications of this might not be sufficiently appreciated. Canadians traditionally have not been nearly so gung-ho in their nationalism as Americans. To some extent, many Canadians even find expressions of nationalism cringe or cheesy. So, this demonstration of national pride and unity, which as far I can tell was entirely organic, is quite striking. Furthermore, it was remarkably successful in galvanizing the movement, as revealed in the knee-jerk psyop by members of the Canadian culture industry: fretting over the Canadian flag becoming a “hate symbol.”

Also, the impressive improvisation and adaptation exhibited by the Polish workers, discussed in part 2, was often mirrored by the Canadian truckers and their supporters. Such improvisation, by definition, cannot be precisely planned, but it is indicative of an openness to unexpected circumstances, with a broadly shared understanding of the goals and spirit of the movement. In the case of the truckers, acts of care, compassion, and generosity were common: from shoveling and salting public sidewalks to feeding the homeless.

The most notorious of these improvised moments though was certainly the jerrycan brigades. After police had seized stores of fuel – essential for the truckers who slept in their cabs (sometimes with their children) to maintain warmth during the frigid Ottawa winter nights – people began carrying around jerrycans, some empty, some full, in great numbers, making it impossible for the police on the ground to control. This latter could be depicted as falling into the category of spontaneity, which Goodwyn warned us about. There’s a difference though between treating an entire movement as magically spontaneous and recognizing that a common preparedness or movement spirit can allow for effective improvisation.

Also, I think the Canadian truckers and their supporters must be congratulated for not allowing themselves to be goaded into the kind of widespread violence that the government seems to have been intent on provoking. Many of the lessons learned by the Polish workers in the early days of their populist movement involved how to reduce such violence, with its corrosive impacts upon the pursuit of their goals.  

There are though still lessons that today’s populists can learn from those of 20th century Poland. One is the value of what Goodwyn calls commemoration politics (discussed here and here). These are the means by which the Polish workers kept their struggles alive, in the face of adversity, even when a major mobilization or confrontation was not taking place. The trucker populists have received a shot in the arm in this regard, with the Commission Inquiry into the Emergency Act.⁷ It has provided an occasion for convoy organizers to tell their stories – including some who have been otherwise prevented from speaking publicly due to the imposition of repressive, punitive bail conditions.

What happens in the future in Canada, as indeed it did in Poland, will depend much upon how the government acts going forward. (There’s currently talk in some provinces about re-imposing masks, and maybe other, mandates.) I am curious to see if any kind of public event is organized, in Ottawa or elsewhere, for February 14 or 17, 2023 – commemorating the government’s imposition of the Emergency Act and the use of state violence to end a peaceful and legal protest. Certainly, such a commemoration is an opportunity that the Polish workers would not have passed up.

Another important concern, which needs to be worked out by today’s populists – trucker or otherwise – is the response to official (and unofficial) cancelation. In part 2 of this series, I discussed the party’s effort to cancel Lech Walesa. As noted there, the debilitating economic hardship which the party expected him to experience never occurred. There doesn’t seem to be a definitive conclusion about who was (nor how they were) funneling the necessary funds to Walesa to allow him to feed his family while he ramped up his anti-party activism. But clearly, somebody was.

For today’s populist movements, in their struggle to push back on managerial regimes, with their social engineering and bureaucratic paternalism, finding ways to subvert such cancellation, and indeed potentially turning it into an advantage, as the Polish workers movement did, seems essential. While today’s populists probably couldn’t afford to support in such a manner everyone who is financially cancelled (nor could the Poles), such enabling of demonstrably effective activist leaders to continue their efforts remains a valuable way to subvert regime compliant cancelations.       

Maybe, with our more cyber-tech surveillance and financial controls, slipping money to today’s Walesas may be trickier than it was in the 70s. However, it is also true that today’s populists have cyber-tech means at their disposal that vastly outstrip anything the Polish workers’ movement of the 70s could have imagined. This point of course gets to a larger question of maintaining financial independence from ubiquitous government control.

So, I’ll conclude with one last lesson. For those who may have felt a little dejected by the harsh, sometimes brutal, conclusion of the Canadian truckers’ populist protest, maybe the most valuable lesson to be learned from the Polish workers of Solidarność is to take the long view. Many in today’s populist movement see themselves as part of a struggle that goes well beyond unconstitutional mandates, or even what they’d characterize as medical tyranny. To them, that struggle is just part of a larger one to resist globalist efforts to erode national sovereignty, intermediary organic community institutions, and financial independence. That’s a long term struggle. And the Polish workers demonstrated not only the tenacity that was necessary for such a struggle, but the opportunities that were provided by taking such a long view.

Freedom Convoy 2022 was not Canada’s first protest convoy. Indeed, some of those involved in the internationally feted January-February protest had already participated in earlier convoy protests. Indeed, there is a long history of truckers and farmers engaging in these types of actions, in Canada and elsewhere. And, it isn’t hard to imagine, should the Canadian government engage in action widely perceived as again, or further, infringing on Canadians’ national sovereignty, Charter rights, local communities, or financial independence (e.g., another wave of biopolitical regulation, or government controlled digital currency) that other such convoys may be mounted.

Seen through that lens, then, the most valuable lesson that today’s populists can learn from those of the Polish workers’ movement would be, indeed, to learn from their own experience. As Goodwyn emphasizes throughout his book, the remarkable achievement of the Poles was to keep learning – from their mistakes, failures, and blind spots. It was the increasing recognition of the organizational and strategic practices available to them, and their determination to continually refine those practices through the iterations of their struggle, regardless of the short-term outcomes, which allowed them to finally act so effectively in the historic cauldron of August, 1980.

I would never presume to predict any future regarding that trucker-inspired, populist uprising in the frigid winter of 2022. If though it is to be a sustained populist effort to resist the agenda of the globalist faction of the managerial class, and not merely a passing moment of unrest, learning from the experience of this last convoy, and any other (including other strategies or tactics), past or future, will be essential. How do you protect your leadership; how do you leverage your greatest strength; how do you win people over to your side; how do you communicate effectively, at an appropriate scale, to maintain discipline and strength?

If it is not just a passing moment of unrest, these are the kinds of questions that the trucker-inspired populist movement in Canada (or anywhere, today) has to answer honestly and creatively. No one can do it for them. But Goodwyn’s book is a fruitful exploration not only of such a prospect’s feasibility, but also an inspiring illustration of how, in one historic moment, it was done.

1. For a concentrated exploration of these themes, see his Telos article: Lawrence Goodwyn, “Rethinking ‘Populism’: Paradoxes of Historiography and Democracy,” Telos 1991, no. 88 (June 20, 1991): 37–56.

2. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006). For my take on her book, from back in the foggy mists of time, see: Mike McConkey, “On Arendt’s Vision of the European Council Phenomenon: Critique from an Historical Perspective,” Dialectical Anthropology 16, no. 1 (1991): 15–31. (Brief warning: this latter article was published in the final issue of Dialectical Anthropology edited by the great Stanley Diamond, and perhaps as a result the copy editing isn’t quite up to expected standards.)

3. As Goodwyn puts it: “It can be almost taken as a law of research that the word ‘spontaneity’ is employed by observers to characterize insurgent mobilizations that they have not researched.”

4. Goodwyn points out a key problem for historiography is the absence of enduring sources for the historian to rely upon. As historians are familiar, and comfortable, with written records they tend to privilege those – particularly when the alternatives are less obvious. Assuming either that the written record be taken at face value, when they claim to be generative, or simply appealing to mystical spontaneity when one is disinclined to take the written sources at face value, are easier to do when the physical actions (like occupation strikes or forming Interfactory Strike Committees) leave no immediate material artifact. This is why Goodwyn based his own history of Solidarność upon the recording of oral history, told in the words of the participants. Such a corrective to the abovementioned tendencies of course though is only an alternative for historians working on relatively recent history. Still, for those working on periods from which no survivors remain to tell their own story, the risk of this historian’s bias needs to be born in mind.

5. Recent readers of this substack may not be aware, as long time readers would be, that I devoted a large number of posts to trying to make sense out of the Canadian truckers protest, both in real time and subsequently. Anyone interested in following up on that work can look here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

6. Documents and testimony entered as evidence at the inquiry has revealed: 1) the government knew that the City of Ottawa and the trucker leadership had arrived at a deal which would remove trucks from residential streets but chose to undermine that deal with its invocation of the Emergency Act (EA). 2) CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) provided Cabinet a report that concluded the trucker protesters did not constitute a threat to the country nor of violent political action. 3) Further, the CSIS report warned the government that invoking the EA would not only lead to increased antigovernment sentiment but would increase the likelihood of violence. The government’s disregard of the warning from its own intelligence service about the EA seems to be reasonably interpreted as at least a cavalier attitude about the prospect of their own actions provoking violence, and maybe that they perceived such possible provocation as a net positive.

7. Somewhat amusingly, just today as I was putting on the finishing touches to this final post in the Solidarność series, Deputy Prime Minister Freeland was testifying before the Inquiry. She was being cross-examined on her position that the threat posed by the trucker protest constituted a legitimate danger to Canada through the risk posed to the future trade and investment atmosphere in the country. She was being pressed on what precisely she thought was the balance between freedom to protest and national economic consequences. A variety of hypothetical possible cases were cited, such as a general strike. Then the examining attorney, to my great amusement, brought up the example of Solidarność. Freeland responded by claiming the difference between the two situations was that Poland’s was an “illegitimate” government, while her government was legitimate. Well, maybe. Unfortunately she wasn’t asked to speculated on whether her governmental counterpart in the Polish government of 1980 would have, like her, testified his or her own government was legitimate. Nor did anyone raise the question of whether, like Solidarność, the trucker protesters may have had grounds to consider her government illegitimate.