What did the Canadian trucker convoy achieve?

I’ve been working on a longer piece on this general topic, but as usual gotten bogged down in the research, and meanwhile this article popped up which I think is a useful jumping-off point into the discussion, so I am sharing it with a few comments.

You may like to listen to the article read by Tom Woods on his podcast, where he adds his own comments.

I would like to add a few comments on my side, which are self-standing even without reading the article, assuming of course that you followed the developments (and not just in the mainstream media).

Obviously, the question of what the convoy achieved is only one instance of the general question of what all of the anti-Covidist protests and movement have (and will) achieve, since most of them seem in hindsight to have been ephemeral and to have fizzled out. Arguably they have simply faded from the spotlight whilst other things are in gestation, but participants in those movements have also often had the same impression of failure and been left disappointed and disillusioned. The article I have linked to is largely an example of this.

This is an ahistorical understanding. One of the most striking features of the Convoy protest and its self-understanding has been the low level of awareness of historical precedents. This is because the socio-political background of the protesters was novel this time round. These were largely not people who engaged in protests before and had formed their views of those earlier protests from the media. They were naive. They largely would have identified themselves as socially conservative. Thus, they probably mostly believe themselves to be entirely different. The convoy protest developed organically, however, in a very similar manner to the self-consciously leftist movement Occupy, and even its themes had many points of contact. Its violent extinction followed the same pattern as well. This is also true of the gilets jaunes. The idea of ephemeral protests springing up to evade the structures of spectacle whilst effecting a switch of gestalt on its memetic vocabulary goes back to the Situationists in the 1950s and 60s (who called this tactic detournement), via Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone, the Global Justice movement and the flashmob.

Compared to this, the tactical failures of the trucker convoy are of relatively little interest. The limitations of its organizational model were also its strength. There is by now a reasonable literature on these emergent movements of social protest, even if mainstream academics still struggle with or discount them. Unknowingly, the convoyists re-explored anarchist pathways, and the result was glorious. Perhaps not perfect, but extraordinary nevertheless. This resurgence of non-leftist anarchism, by whatever name or none, clearly left Canadian conservative politicians struggling for a new vocabulary, and I think the sentiments behind it are changing the character of the traditional as well as alternative right to a greater or lesser degree everywhere in the West into something with a greater ear for the concerns of ordinary people, a process already evident (though perhaps abortive and misappropriated) in the Trump campaign. We probably are witnessing an historic shift in which the left ultimately gives up this mantle completely. In the US, we could see a reversal of the (supposed) switch in positions of the main two parties which took place (according to a contestable reading of history, in my opinion) in 1929-1932.

Popular movements such as the convoy, on the face of it, certainly do not always succeed, and some may well have led to an enduring doubling-down of authoritarianism. The Iranian “Green Movement” is an obvious example, as is Tiananmen, the Hong Kong umbrella protests, and the 2020 protests in Belarus. Those that have achieved system-level changes have also had ambiguous outcomes in some cases, since they are fairly easily appropriated or subverted. The ways in which the establishment has responded to these protests has seemed disturbingly identical regardless of the nature of the state, democratic or otherwise. This is most certainly a very salient fact, but should not lead to thoughtless assimilation.

The analysis of Occupy carries over, I think, more or less in its entirety to the Convoy. In this article in Time, James A. Anderson similarly observes the prevailingly negative self-assessment and contests it. “Occupy’s messaging just won’t go away,” he writes. “It permeates political discourse about the global economy. It has cemented notions of economic inequality squarely in D.C. policy debates. Ideas that were thought to be too socialist since the demise of the Eastern Bloc—class struggle, wealth distribution across social strata, or even flaws in the capitalist system—were suddenly aired loudly and frequently for the first time since the Great Depression.” Occupy energized Bernie Sanders’ campaign, created AOC and the Squad, and probably made the difference in tipping the 2020 election for Joe Biden. You are welcome, of course, to consider all that a failure and certainly it is far from a proven success. But inconsequential it certainly was not. Political change in democracies, including very flawed democracies, comes only through influencing public perceptions and bringing new themes and demands to the fore.

There are many other examples too. The Global Justice movement clearly had an effect on global trade policies and the rise of ESG investment policies. And protest movements I am neglecting because I don’t particularly like them - like Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion - similarly have effected clear and substantial shifts in the public discourse.

“One of the most remarkable things about such insurrectionary upheavals is how they can seem to burst out of nowhere - and then, often, dissolve away just as quickly,” wrote David Graeber, well before the Convoy events, which, sadly, he did not live to see. Yet “if we are to have any chance of grasping the new, emerging conception of revolution, we need to begin by thinking again about the quality of these insurrectionary moments.” He suggests that “they will most likely be one element in a far more complex and multifaceted revolutionary process whose outlines [can] hardly, at this point, be fully anticipated.”¹

If Occupy brought to light flaws in global financial capitalism, the Convoy and other similar protests have revealed another ugly and arguably deeper face of the state regimes that govern us. The loss of innocence on the part of some of the organizers is paralleled by a large growth in awareness on the part of large sections of the general public that these systems only purport to serve us and, in the final instances, are often captive (for the reason of your choice) to the interests of political elites and transnational third parties instead. You are free to be optimistic or pessimistic regarding where all this will ultimately end up, but this seems to me largely to be a revealing of what was already there, not a new layer of armoring of the state apparatus, which political and legal traditions for the moment still allow us to contest. Knowing ones enemy is a precondition to engaging effectively (as is a refusal to be disheartened).

The values of the protesters did not spring from nowhere in either case. Occupy and the Convoy were both driven by cultural values already prevalent in the community and this gives them clear and enduring political relevance. In the case of the Convoy it is it far too early to draw conclusions, but the political situation is not worse, I believe, as a result of it, it is just more manifest. Political battle-lines are already staked out. The main problem of the Convoy was that it took on a shibboleth which elites were already trying to engineer a face-saving way out of and - largely because of the influence of ideas taken over from the canonical counter-narrative (the WEF, digital IDs, all that stuff) - it got sucked into a logic of confrontation and a zero-sum game. Though they were not nimble enough to avoid it and I highly doubt they pursued such a goal consciously - certainly I detected nothing in the prevailing discourse to suggest it - the consequence has been that the raw violence underlying the structures of the state has been glaringly, and disturbingly, unmasked, and is now a political locus of contention.

What may, however, change the picture entirely are potentially catastrophic events lurking, iceberg-like, under the surface. In this regard, we are currently in a phase of investing in new political ideas as well as organizational models, which may soon have wider ramifications as we seek to rescue ourselves from systemic crisis.

The Covid response in the strict sense does have potential to play forward politically depending on developments, but I currently anticipate the issues around health freedom will manifest more culturally than politically and over a longer time horizon. However, the response to protests as well as the massive fiscal easing we have seen in the last two years in order to pay people to do nothing very clearly play in to the already overdue systemic collapse of fiat currency banking which is an event the ramifications of which will leave no one untouched.

Since the banking crisis of 2008-9, states have engaged in policies of mortgaging the future to apply a sticking plaster in the present. This has no credibility whatsoever and this fact has been perfectly evident to anyone who did not choose to ignore it. As fiscal overhangs spiral out of control, tectonic forces have been building up under the surface. The apparent assertion by the Canadian government that it holds an unrestricted call option on the bank accounts of Canadian citizens, and more recently the repudiation by the US of its sovereign obligations to the Bank of Russia, are major developments in the international monetary order. It really doesn’t matter whether you consider any of this justifiable or not. Even if I considered both of these responses completely justified, I still would not trust sovereign assets underwritten by (these) central banks. Whether premeditated (cui bono?) or foolhardy in the extreme, the US action amounts to the end of the petrodollar era and signifies that we are clearly moving into a new international monetary order the shape of which will be radically different. The weaponization of finance is a nuclear option. Russian sanctions could only be effective because of our success in integrating Russia into the international financial order in the first place. This game cannot be played twice. At least not to the same rules.

If you have read, again, David Graeber, you will know that fiat money has always rested on the state’s claim to monopolize violence². But it needed to do so at least in some degree in the interests of its citizens in order to achieve ascendancy and widespread acceptance. In the 19th century, astonishing as it may seem, the vast majority of exchanges still involved some form of informal barter (this is, in fact, still true today, we simply do not recognize these exchanges because they leave no accounting trace; but 150 years ago they concerned everyday commodities like bread, not just things like household labor).

The economic benefits of monetization require hard money. Otherwise alternatives will be found. Today, a parallel monetary system - with its roots in reflections on 2008-9 - is already waiting in the wings in the form of cryptocurrency. In order to mitigate its appeal, governments would need to increase trust in their own currencies. Instead, they are doing the opposite: they seek to constrain crypto, whilst also being largely aware that they have no chance of succeeding because they will just drive investment and innovation offshore and descend into impoverished autarchy. Shotgun money is not hard money and will not be accepted and used as if it is. The writing is on the wall as regards an imminent functional collapse of state fiat currencies and there is every chance that maximalist implementations of CBDCs make this problem even worse as the credit risk of commercial banks is undermined and conditional money is of limited appeal (it does not meet the economic definition of money at all). At the very least it is wise to maintain a viable Plan B in reserve. Gresham’s law is a bitch.

The fundamental crisis faced by the modern state is that the bureaucratic logic of its very operation locks it into a trajectory of self-impoverishment and collapse. The more apparent this becomes, the more desperate we will be for novel ideas and the more grateful for the work which has already been done to prepare the ground. The new world order is certain. But its beneficiaries are not, because the conditions of wealth creation and financial hegemony are still what they always were - freedom, innovation and well functioning markets. They will have to be stewarded in a way which resembles something far more grown up than the current racket. Those who succeed may not be those we expect or are used to: but they will have this in common. Contrary to Huxley’s Island, it would suffice that just one country conserves these values for all talent and capital to flow there, and every other country - or at least its elites - will be too dependent on that country (think Switzerland) to undermine it.

The Convoy experience now needs to morph into new forms, and the links to it surely will be undocumented. This most evidently does not mean it has failed. Acquiescence in more and more brutal forms of surveillance capitalism would have been far worse. The Convoy, it seems to me, is a breaking open and a potentiation, of sociopolitical forces that were previously taken for granted by political elites. That story, organically driven by the objective failure of contemporary capitalism to continue generating social welfare, even at the minimal rate needed to forestall social unrest, is only getting started.

1. Graeber D. (2015), The Utopia of Rules: Melville House, p. 97.

2. Graeber D. (2011), Debt - The First Five Thousand Years