'Freedom' Convoys: No Red/Black Alliance!

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Wrong Ideas of “Freedom”

It is true that the Canadian protesters are not uniformly white nor all committed to a Trumpian white nationalism; there are participants who have seen an opportunity, albeit catalyzed by a pathetic anti-mandate movement, to protest Trudeau’s government and its neoliberal policies.

One could squint and see the potential for anti-authoritarian affinities to be found. Squint that hard, though, and you might find your eyes are closed. We cannot ignore the white supremacist notion of autonomy that undergirds the movement, which is not an incidental aspect that could be exorcised to reveal a working-class movement based on solidarity.

Needless to say, there’s nothing salutary in the individualist rejection of masks and vaccines. The historian Taylor Dysart in the Washington Post rightly characterized these truckers’ notion of “freedom” — the ability to move freely and potentially spread disease across the occupied Indigenous lands of the U.S. and Canada — as the “freedom” of settler colonialists.

The settler colonialism was evident in the occupiers’ offensive misuse of Indigenous ceremony — which Indigenous groups have condemned — and the way the convoy protesters ignore Native communities’ calls for the end of this occupation on already occupied land.

The “Freedom Convoy” is also not a challenge to the U.S. and Canada’s violent border regimes, even though it began in protest of the border policy mandating that truck drivers be vaccinated to cross between the U.S. and Canada. A number of the movement’s leaders have openly expressed racist, anti-immigrant sentiments and been involved in far-right organizing.

The anti-mandate protesters are not in the struggle for the freedom of anyone’s movement but their own.

Yellow Vests Example

A useful comparison might be drawn with the Yellow Vest movement, which exploded onto the streets of France in late 2018. The protests were initially in response to the ur-neoliberal French President Emmanuel Macron’s increase on fuel taxes — a putatively ecological measure that in fact put an extraordinary financial burden on the working class while refusing to challenge major corporations. The protests erupted into a generalized uprising against the French status quo of austerity and economic injustice.

Under the Yellow Vest umbrella, fascist elements were also pushing for harsh immigration policies, while antifascist leftists were taking to the streets against the police and capitalist institutions. The movement contained deep internal conflicts, and left-wing participants were faced with the question of whether it was worth trying to fight the racist and fascist elements of the uprisings from within the movement. Many, though, deemed the alternative — to allow far-right forces to direct and control the revolutionary moment — unacceptable.

Could the same logic also speak to the anti-state protests in Canada and beyond today? Should the left refuse to cede the ground of anti-state dissent and circulation struggles to the right-wing conspiracy theorists?

The difference between the current blockades and the Yellow Vests is that the “Freedom Convoys” are not only incidentally rich in far-right elements; the notion of autonomy driving the movement is essentially a white supremacist, individualist one. Notably, too, American right-wing support of the blockades is only anti-state insofar as the state is not a Trumpian one. And it’s worth recalling that when Canada saw its own Yellow Vest movement emerge in response to France’s, it was explicitly right-wing and anti-immigrant in character; the current blockades are within this legacy.

If there is a Yellow Vests-related legacy to carry forward toward more liberatory aims than those of the Ottawa occupations, we might instead recall the Black Vests, or “Gilets Noirs” in French. This huge collective of undocumented immigrants in France carried out major protest actions in 2019, including occupying a terminal in Paris’s Charles De Gaulle Airport in direct resistance to Air France’s role as “the official deporter of the French state.” The movement understood, too, the importance of striking at major points of circulation: sites of the free flow of capital and brutal limits on the movement of peoples.

Like the Black Vests’ answer to the Yellow Vests, any worthwhile response to the “Freedom Convoy” occupations and blockades must take effect on wholly anti-racist, antifascist, and anti-capitalist terms. On this side of the Atlantic, the way has already been paved — and not by anti-mandate protesters. Indigenous land and water defenders from Standing Rock to the Wet’suwet’en territories have shown us what it looks like to take up the struggle against capitalist circulation in the service of collective, rather than individual, freedom.

@TI.

H/T Harry Feldman.