Shallow Marxist Trashing of Truckers

There’s a talking point being passed around by certain self-identified marxists and socialists, dismissing the truckers who are resisting vaccine mandates because they are not “workers” but “owner-operators” who, since they “own” their own trucks are actually small capitalists and therefore not worthy of class solidarity. Indeed, they can be treated as class enemies.

It’s hard to conjure up a shallower, more self-defeating use of marxist language.

These truckers “own their own trucks” the way most struggling families own their own homes—they own a debt, which makes them more economically insecure, and places a further burden on them to work harder for the banks and finance companies that are always one step away from depriving them of their livelihood. What kind of self-sabotaging “socialist” political paradigm would dismiss all homeowners as petit-bourgeois class enemies rather than approach them with solidarity, working hard to ally with their concrete struggles and persuade them to ally with the more general socialist project—since they are in fact indispensable to it?

“Owner-operator,” “contractor,” “self-employed”—all these ambiguous class locations are the constructs of neo-liberalism, which has reveled in confusing class relations by hiding the power of big capital behind a sea of socially-weakened, infinitely-at-risk, “entrepreneurs.” The project of neo-liberal capitalism has been to destroy jobs themselves, to dispense with any smattering of job security, and to abolish all concepts of capital’s relation to, let alone responsibility to, labor. It’s precisely neo-liberalism’s wet dream to turn the working-class into a mass of incipient "entrepreneurs," every one dreaming to hit the Shark Tank jackpot in a social economy that dooms most of them to failure. For a non-shallow marxism, it’s should be seen as a reversion to a modern version of piece-work. You know, like the nineteenth-century women sent home to work on their sewing machines. Owner-operators.

So, when a diverse and united group of workers actually stands up in solidarity and collective action to resist an injustice for the whole of society—which is what they (and I) consider these mandates to be (argue that if you want, without the faux-marxist diversions)—it is utterly foolish, and destructive of any chance of developing a class-based revolutionary politics, for judgemental “leftists,” using the shallowest of marxist rhetoric, to reject and shit on them for occupying the social position neo-liberal capitalism has forced them into, for not being the abstract “worker” they are supposed to be.

It is a complete abandonment of marxism/communism 101: A mass, left, working-class movement, which we lack, has to be built with the working-class we have, not the one we wish for.

Syriza’s Final Charade

In my February post on The SYRIZA Moment (and in a revision of that piece, forthcoming in Canadian Dimension), I expressed great skepticism about the Syriza leadership’s commitment to the radical change the party promised to enact.

I pointed out that the leadership, as represented by Alex Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis, refuses on principle to have a strategy for “replacing European capitalism with a different, more rational, system.” In Varoufakis’s own words, they are “tirelessly striv[ing] in favour of schemas the purpose of which is to save” the current “indefensible …anti-democratic, irreversibly neoliberal, highly irrational,” European socio-economic system. All this, because, as he understands it, “it is the Left’s historical duty…to save European capitalism from itself.” Varoufakis’s whole negotiating strategy, I suggested, was centered on persuading the masters and mistresses of the Eurozone, through his brilliant “immanent critique” of their own capitalist economic theories, that it would be in their own, and capitalism’s, best interest to help Greece restore some semblance of social democracy.

Certainly, the left factions of the party sincerely wanted it to be an “anticapitalist,” “class-struggle” formation that would be unlike “any European social democratic party today,” and that would have “an agenda of really breaking with neoliberalism and austerity,” and the capitalist TINA (There Is No Alternative) consensus. These currents defined Syriza’s 40-Point Program and its Thessaloniki Program, upon which it ran for election, and which promised a “National Reconstruction Plan that will replace the [Troika] Memorandum as early as our first days in power, before and regardless of the negotiation outcome.”

But even the hopeful left militants recognized that the party leadership, under Tsipras, was increasingly prone to ignore the base, and cultivated a “creative ambiguity” about crucial issues. Tsipras’s message to the base was a rejection of illegitimate and unpayable debt, and a radical break with austerity; his message to the Eurozone ruling class was a firm commitment to staying in the Euro and playing by the rules of capitalist finance. The message to the electorate was: We can do both of those things. And if we can’t… Well, yes we can!

This was a deeply dishonest deception and self-deception. It was the worst kind of electoral evasion, promoting false hopes that so many wanted to hear, and burying the need to prepare for the inevitable fight that was coming—thus virtually guaranteeing that the fight would be lost.

Socialism Demands Stewardship

For Marx at least, don't you know.

h/t Solidarity