When leftists the world over are calling working class folks fascists we in Sri Lanka ought to be proud that there is no such happening in this country.
There are protests in this country by the working classes that push the envelope, but nobody calls the regular strikers fascists. The strikers are coddled and generally tolerated by the masses, and pampered by the Government.
This, in stark contrast to Canada where the striking and blockading truckers are being called fascists and worst these days.
Why are working classes being branded as fascists by left of centre politicians or others from the left per se? Apparently that’s because they are disrupting society and the system, we are told.
Since when has the left become establishment? Since the time apparently the left indeed became the establishment. The leftists have become coterminous with the liberal political cohort and now we have the spectacle of the left demonising the working classes.
We don’t have this abomination here because our working classes are not in direct confrontation yet with the global order. They want salary increases and are striking for trifling benefits.
In Canada this is not the case. The truckers are taking on the establishment that comes in the form of the Covid police and so on.
Accredit
Now, the truckers may be right, they may be wrong — but does it matter? Since when did the truckers of the world, blue collar workers if ever there were any, become demonised for the fact that they may be ignorant or wrong?
There is no judgment being passed in this article either way. The truckers may be misguided or be well-informed in blocking highways and taking over city squares, in protest against Covid mandates and Covid vaccine mandates.
They have elevated the power of ordinary protest into a cultish art form. But there is no price that’s normally extracted from the working class even if they are misguided, assuming that they are.
Yet, the Canadian establishment is not bothered about niceties and in that respect it is a little grating that in Ottawa these days they have taken the high ground and castigated the Sri Lankan Government for trying to accredit a former army officer as the High Commissioner. But that’s all in the by and by.
Why are the Canadians insisting or demonising the working classes in this way. It’s because the working class is becoming uppity and challenging issues that are ‘not within their purview’ such as Covid mandates and Covid vaccine mandates.
These issues are to be strictly considered and settled between the liberal Governments of the West and the establishment that control the international health protocols as they are in operation.
That’s exclusive, that loose association of members of a close knit group — club if you will — of international actors.
The Canadian Prime Minister went in high dudgeon and basically considered the truckers upstarts who dared question the global establishment in that manner.
It seems that Canadians are free to trifle with the Government but the moment they step out of line and challenge the global establishment, they are considered outcasts by the Canadian Trudeau-led regime and its establishment associates.
In the case of the Sri Lankan left and the Sri Lankan establishment, in the first place they are not coterminous but in the second place it’s a fact that our working classes have more immediate issues to worry about which does not include mask-wearing and getting jabs for Covid.
This may be just as well as they may have been demonised globally too if they stepped out of the familiar regimen of protesting against domestic working conditions. They may have been called human rights violators if they chose to protest against Covid vaccine mandates.
These days working classes are considered too big for their boots if they think about Covid, and protest on the basis of keeping Covid related economic restrictions at bay.
It seems that the liberal left then has been co-opted by the global establishment — which is generally right-wing and operated by the owning classes which is distinct from the leftists.
The Canadian truckers are being lampooned meanwhile by the sections of the global media that are in lockstep with the leftist regimes of the West.
The strategy of the media is to lampoon, and not demonise. Their modus operandi has been to portray the protesting blue collar truckers as a hick, and unsophisticated boors.
That the working class is characterised by the fellow working class in this way, is a sign that the global order is now stratified into those who are comfortable with the global establishment and those who are pushing back against it. The media in the main has been cozy with the Covid police.
Even if they are right about all the Covid restrictions going on in various countries — and that’s a big assumption — isn’t it curious that the media seeks to portray fellow working class folk as being boors and hicks that are beyond the pale and are deserving of their scorn?
Or is it that the global media does not consider it working class anymore because they are media, and are a separate class by virtue of being the fourth estate?
This confederacy between the media and the global power elite is not any of our business except that when the relationship becomes so involved as to target the ordinary blue collar workforce, one wonders whether there is a fundamental tectonic shift in the global balance of power?
Trench
How is it that the media not only automatically closes ranks with the powerful forces of global capital but also so easily scorns those that are fundamentally their own — the working classes?
What also is the morality of a media that looks down its collective nose at truckers and calls them hicks, ignorant yokels and worse?
Its one thing for the media to abandon their class comradeship with the working truckers, but quite another for them to be so supercilious as to brand these workers as outcasts and treat them as buffoons that deserve to be the butt of their jokes.
At least in passing it could be said that in this country the working classes are not looked at with such disdain in any quarter, leave alone the media.
If the workers are called fascists here, there would be hell to pay. The strikes and protests of the labour classes have been legitimised here, even though successive May Day celebrations were banned due to the Easter Sunday attack, and Covid.
Could banning May Day be a sign of oppression to come in the future? If the Sri Lankan working class crosses the line and challenges global capital perhaps there would be strict censure, and the May Day ban would then begin to look like early warning they got from ‘liberal international’ with that term being used generically.
However, society here has not become so subtly prejudiced against the working class as to institutionalise name-calling and the usage of terminology such as ‘fascists’ and boors.
It is unlikely that the fundamentals of working class rights would be disturbed to such an extent in this country, not the least because we are a nation with a long tradition of genuine trench warfare on behalf of the working classes.
Through these struggles many rights such as labour tribunal recourse and so on have been won, and it is unlikely that these victories could be challenged — unless of course global capital is challenged by our working classes too.
Then, things could turn ugly and there may be epithets such as ‘fascist’ and worse coming their way. Our working classes are generally detached, however.
They are supine and do not want to push the envelope.
They have always been happy winning a few worker rights here and there but in the big picture, have by and large been accepting of their lot.