A few years ago, David Harvey brought the Left’s attention to capital’s massive dependence on supply chains. He speculated that if New York City delivery drivers went on strike, the city would starve in about a week. Last week, their Brazilian counterparts proved Harvey right. In the span of a few days, striking truck drivers brought São Paulo — which counts around four million more inhabitants than NYC — and many more cities in Brazil to a grinding halt.

The sudden rise of usually invisible workers pushed Brazil’s right-wing president Michel Temer into a corner over the price of diesel. Since the 1950s, the Brazilian state has prioritized road transportation over rail; today, the country features only twenty-nine thousand kilometers of railroad but 1.6 million kilometers of roads. As a result, commercial activity is highly dependent on road transportation, making the truck drivers’ roadblocks enormously effective. Many localities ran out of fuel, the middle class had to abandon their cars and ride public transit, and businesses, schools, and other entities closed their doors.

The strike shocked the Left, whose mobilizations, despite the April 2017 general strike, haven’t achieved nearly the same impact as the truck drivers’ strike. Leftist labor unions, like the Petrobras Workers Union, are now attempting to push truckers’ demands for lower diesel prices into a political protest against Temer’s economic policies. But they haven’t been able to replicate the truck drivers’ momentum.