The Seizure of Virtue

The trucker convoy and leftist re-alignment

The current political re-alignments we’ve seen since the arrival of COVID are maddening. It really feels like the world’s been turned upside down, with anarchists arguing for brutal repression of people who oppose vaccine mandates and right-wingers arguing against the state the way that anarchists once did.

The truck convoy and occupation of Ottawa in Canada is one particular place where things have flipped very severely. Yesterday, I checked in on several of the social media accounts of influential left activists, especially Antifa sorts, and found them all fully supporting Trudeau’s decision to claim emergency powers against the protesters. Many of them have compared it to the occupation of the US capitol on 6 January, and apparently see both events as manifestations of a growing “fascist” threat to democracy.

In particular, there were quite a few think-pieces used to explain how certain aspects of the convoy that don’t fit into this narrative actually do. One was an explainer on how, though it appears these are all working class people, none of them actually are: they’re ‘petite-bourgeois’ truck owners aligning with the rich, while the actual proletariat truck drivers are fully supportive of the Canadian government.

I didn’t think I’d ever live so long to hear a truck driver described as ‘petite-bourgeois.’

The argument there is that because some people own their trucks, they are therefore part of the capitalist class. The vast majority of truckers, on the other hand, drive trucks owned by the bosses and therefore are the true proletariat. And that latter group didn’t drive trucks to shut down the city, which is proof that they are do not support it.

This is a neat trick. See, because people who don’t own their own trucks didn’t drive their own trucks to the protest, they obviously don’t support it. And because the only people who drove the trucks they owned to the protest are people who own trucks, that’s proof only truck owners support it.

According to this framework, owning your own truck makes you part of the capitalist class. Of course, in such a reckoning, an Uber driver is therefore also petite-bourgeois, as is a pizza delivery person. They own their own vehicles, and therefore are capitalists.

Another think-piece was used to explain away the large presence of south-east Asian truckers who were part of the protest, especially Sikhs. They’re there because they’ve been duped, you see, because they don’t understand that they’ve been roped into a white supremacist protest. Those who fully believe in goals of the protests, on the other hand, are suffering from the same problem the many black, Asian, and Hispanic members of the Proud Boys or militias suffer from: “multi-racial whiteness.” They are white, even though they are not.

Several articles and essays defending government repression of the protest cited safety fears from non-binary and other gender-variant people living in Ottawa. That is, the trucker convoy represented a threat to their existence and government action was required to keep them safe. But it was never explained why they were endangered, only that they felt endangered. There have been no reports of any anti-LGBTQI+ violence by the truckers. In fact, there’s been no violence at all, but of course other articles point out that just because they aren’t using violence doesn’t mean they aren’t violent.

In addition, there was lots of support for the corporate fundraising platform Gofundme’s decision to freeze donations and force them to be redistributed to uninvolved charities, as well as a subsequent doxxing of donors to another platform that had been hacked by an “activist” group. Official reports on the hack stated the personal information of donors was only being supplied to journalists, but there were several links posted by Antifa activists purporting to be file transfers of the lists. I didn’t check these out to verify their contents, but it would hardly be surprising they would have access to it, since many Antifa organizers also work as journalists.

And of course, there are official police accounts of the truckers keeping stashes of guns, body armor, and weapons, which is cited as proof of the violent plans of the truckers. Any leftist over 30 years old should know better than to accept wholesale such accounts from the police, as police reports of such armaments circulated regarding Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and the anti-globalization protests in the early part of this century. The police always seem to find these stashes, which are always conveniently amassed in an easy-to-find place that is nevertheless never revealed.

This might be the most maddening part of all, because many of the same people citing these reports just a few years ago were arguing that police can never be trusted and all police departments should be de-funded. Of course, some of those people changed their mind after the occupation of the Capitol Building (suddenly all the police accounts of the event were 100% accurate and they needed more funding…), but now it seems this switch has solidified.

All these re-alignments of political belief, especially with anarchists and leftists becoming pro-state, pro-capitalist, and pro-police, make the theory in N.S. Lyons’ recent piece quite plausible. Lyons argues it can be explained as a divide between the “Physicals” and the “Virtuals.” The Physicals are the people who are involved in actual physical production (workers or owners) while the Virtuals are the intellectual classes who are involved in informational exchange. Each have different worldviews and values, and the latter has become politically dominant despite being the minority.

The only problem with this theory is that it’s really just a repackaging of Marx’s understanding of the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat with a slight shift in the axis. The bourgeoisie, remember, were not just an economic class, but a social and cultural phenomenon as well, whose values became the dominant ones in the cities. These values still map quite well to the Virtuals that Lyons proposes, especially the globalised connectivity and disdain for manual laborers.

The proletariat, on the other hand, hadn’t reached a sense of class consciousness and thus had no unifying values, only a common position. And here I think Marx’s analysis is more accurate, because the “Physicals” don’t really have any binding cultural forms either. A Cambodian textile worker, an African immigrant farm worker in Europe, and a machinist in a US factory have no shared cultural frameworks, only common material conditions and common relationships of exploitation by their bosses.

Regardless, “Virtual” is absolutely a great way to explain why these re-alignments are occurring, especially if we remember that Virtual and Virtue are two forms of the same root idea and that bourgeois values were all virtue-based. The problem with the proletariat was that they had no virtues; they were not polite, they were uncivilised, they were the unwashed and uncouth masses that needed to be changed in order to be brought into proper society. They were crude (that is, rude but also raw) resources for economic expansion, and therefore fit for a say in industrial society only after learning time-discipline and universal education.

Most of all, the bourgeoisie required the liberal-democratic state in order to flourish. Anything that threatens that state (in both senses of the word state) threatens them, and such threats must at all times be neutralized. Police repression is messy but an option they don’t mind using as long as it appears virtuous: Trudeau looking sad and tragic when he announced he would be suspending the rules of democracy for a little while was virtue-signaling in its best form.

What’s better than police repression, however, is winning the virtue war before it becomes necessary. To do this, you need to convince the intellectuals that it is virtuous to oppose threats to the bourgeois order.

That’s how it became virtuous to write think-pieces defending state repression of the truckers, as opposed to what virtue might otherwise suggest. That’s how doxxing and threatening donors and mocking participants became a sign of virtue. It’s virtuous to do all this to them, because they are enemies of virtue.

That’s also how North American anarchists and Antifa became apologists for the capitalist state. Repression of anything that looks fascist (i.e., without virtue) is virtuous, even if it means adopting the oppressive tactics of the fascists themselves. Once you are truly virtuous (Calvin’s elect, essentially), then everything you do is virtuous.

Again, I’m thinking on Adorno’s letters to Marcuse that I mentioned yesterday. “Dialectical thinking” was the topic of the lecture the students interrupted, the one in which he was harassed as a capitalist stooge. Dialectical thinking describes these shifts, the “flipping” to “left fascism” he identified then and what seems to happening now. Contradictions in a movement trigger these re-alignments, and the contradictions of the urban “left’” have already led them to argue for things only the authoritarians they claim to oppose would have supported decades before.

What’s left of the left now, I don’t know, but I know this has happened before, and many times. After such mass re-alignments, just like after mass hysteria, everyone looks around at each other a bit shocked, a bit embarrassed, and a bit horrified. Jung’s Wotan thesis also applies here, that something seizes us, something buried in our repressed unconscious, but then it eventually lets go.

After the seizure comes the reckoning, and maybe they’ll all look back in shame at the things they justified while seized by virtue.