The Truckers' Anti-Mandate Protests Are About the Most Basic Freedom of Them All

And How Leftists Have Been Suckered by the Establishment Media

Photo courtesy of CNN

The coverage of the truckers’ protests against Covid mandates has completely missed the point of the whole thing, and is obvious to anyone who has actually paid attention to what these working class people are protesting. Their demand is the most basic one of all: The freedom for an individual to decide what goes into his own body or what she should wear.

The truckers themselves say that vaccine and mask mandates should be abolished. That’s it. They aren’t asking for anything else, and medical science is on their side.

The whole point of vaccine mandates was to stop the spread of, and to speed the elimination of, the Covid-19 virus. Now we know, and the authorities knew then(but that’s another story) that vaccines do not stop its spread because it is a respiratory virus. No vaccine ever invented stopped the spread of another respiratory virus, influenza, and Covid is no different. Like influenza, it’s here to stay. If you haven’t been infected by Covid yet, you will, vaccinated or not. That is the reality, whether you like it or not.

Influenza vaccines have never been mandatory. They are encouraged for at-risk populations, as they should be, but they aren’t mandated for everyone like Covid vaccines have been in different places. One doesn’t have to have an influenza vax passport to get into a restaurant in San Francisco, but one better have a Covid one and wear a mask or one is outcast unclean.

The truckers, most of whom are vaccinated BTW, don’t think the government should have the authority, and the power, to require them to inject a vaccine made by pharmaceutical companies with profit motives into their bodies, or to wear masks which have been proven to be ineffective, to stop the spread of a virus which Dr. Fauci his own self now says will infect every single human being on the planet no matter what is done.

I imagine they also don’t like delays at border checkpoints because they cost them money, which makes logical sense to me.

The corporate and government media, like there’s a difference, in both the United States and Canada have portrayed the truckers as a bunch of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, right-wing assholes who are hellbent on inciting an insurrection against a democracy that does not exist. Many leftists, including the World Socialist Web Site and many members of Socialist Revolution, have been suckered into emotionally endorsing the establishment narrative.

All it takes, apparently, is for one fool(or maybe undercover cop) waving a Confederate flag and, hey presto!, all of the truckers are frigging Nazis. The truckers say they are protesting for freedom and liberty; many leftists hear those terms and immediately think Right-Wing Republican or Tory. And that’s sad.

Freedom to decide what to do with own’s own body is about as basic as it gets. Isn’t that what the women’s rights movement is all about? If a woman has the right to decide whether to get pregnant or to carry a pregnancy to term, should a working class person not have the right to refuse an employer’s demand to take a questionable vaccine or drug test? Or to have a subdermal tracking chip implanted in their forearm, for that matter?

That’s what the truckers are really saying, and that’s all they are saying. Everything else has been manufactured by the same media Noam Chomsky used to know manufactured consent. Whether one is a Marxist, a Social Democrat, a liberal, a conservative, or a right-wing Libertarian, we should all be united behind the truckers on this one basic, common sense demand of our government.

Now I’m going to digress a little bit into how many socialists have been saying the truckers shouldn’t be supported because they are “petit-bourgeois,” with the implication that they are just like the petit-bourgeois Germans who supported Hitler.

To be any kind of bourgeois at all, one must have employees. Sure, the owner of a small trucking company is petit-bourgeois. My father, a podiatrist who had two employees, was petit-bourgeois in a way. But most of these truckers are “independent operators.” They “own,” usually meaning they are making payments for, their own trucks. They work by contract.

But do they decide what to transport and where to take it? Do they set the rates at which they are paid? No, they do not. They don’t have that kind of power. And they are doing actual productive work, so by any reasonable Marxian definition they are most definitely working class. They certainly consider themselves working class, for good reason. So let’s stop making false and divisive descriptions of them.

To their credit, the truckers are staging a very effective protest. They have shut down both Ford and GM in Detroit by closing off supplies from Canada. I call that effective. They are causing pain for capitalists, and government, by disrupting supply lines in two countries. Naturally, the oligarchic media is going to obey its capitalist masters and smear them every chance they get.

All of us, left or right, who do not believe in authoritarian government should know better than to take the word of a corporate media that has consistently lied to us for at least a generation. All of us should pay attention to what the truckers are actually protesting and to what they really want, not to what some overpaid talking head says they do.

It’s way past time that more common people listen to what other common people have to say, and to find common ground. The truckers have provided the left an opportunity. Those of us on the left should support them, not denigrate them, for when we do that all we are doing is serving the interests of the oligarchy that exploits us all.

Thank you for reading. Good day and good luck.