A movement with a distorted sense of individual rights that would seek to hamper vaccination in the midst of a global health crisis is reactionary to the core and hostile to human life itself. The dangerous rise of the anti-vax far-right is a symptom of a sickness in this society that we will still be confronting well after the last wave of the pandemic has finally receded.
I don’t understand the class interests that fuel these pseudoscientific movements. Both the working and the owning classes benefit from the proliferation of vaccine acceptance. The former avoids dying and the latter retains a workforce. So why do these bs movements exist in the west?
This pandemic has resulted in one of the biggest wealth transfers to the top that we’ve ever seen. The thing to realize is that there is a difference between petty bourgeoisie such as mom and pop shops and the real bourgeoisie who have serious capital.
The pandemic is a disaster for anyone who needs recurring revenue or income. However, people who have significant amounts of capital can easily weather it out. As smaller bourgeoisie go out of business the real bourgeoisie are able to buy up their assets for pennies on the dollar.
So, what we’re actually seeing is massive concentration of capital with the few owners at the top. These people are very happy with the current state of things and any measures to stop the pandemic would directly cut into their profits and ability to consolidate capital.
That, unfoetunately, makes a lot of sense.
The other thing I’ll add, is that the bourgeoisie doesn’t have much need for their domestic workforces anymore. Surplus value extraction has mostly moved to the global south, and aging first world workers become a burden in health costs. Its cheaper to let these unnecessary workers die than it is to vaccinate them. Right wing anti vaxx conspiracy theories play right into that.
Even the vaccines themselves become a product, whose sale to other countries must be profitable and treated as intellectual property. Not very far sighted, but those are the standard short term incentives.
Marx said that capitalism tends to destroy its 2 sources of wealth: nature, and human beings. We’ve reached that late stage now.
I want to joke like “hE tRiEd tO wArN uS” but it’s not a joke at all, he really did >_<
Yeah, that’s an important point as well. The system is starting to eat itself from the inside out now.
What Yog said is true, but it should also be mentioned that the far-right has used crazed conspiracies to convert followers for generations, and anti-vax is one of many.
If they can prey on a person’s mental illness (in this case paranoia), then they can convince this person that only the far-right has the answers that can solve this problem, that they made up. This is why Infowars and Breitbart were popularized in the early 2000s, and are still massive far-right entities today. All of the wild conspiracies of this nature, the Illuminati, reptilians, aliens at A52, Op Jade Helm being a training op for enacting modern enslavement of Americans, FEMA mass-producing coffins (they were actually just helicopter basket liners) being evidence that the government intended to lead a genocide of Americans, etc. are all intended to bring people on the fringe into the far-right. And this propaganda absolutely works, in fact, it worked on teenage me.
Yeah. Feels like anti-science thought is bound to emerge and propagate from bourgois ideology.
You’re making several false assumptions. The working class, who are largely young and healthy, aren’t dying in any meaningful way from not taking the vaccine. They’re more likely to die in a car crash or from heart disease, than from Covid.