From discussions online and articles from communist or “leftist” publications, I’ve seen an increase of anti-vax/mandate thinking, either being framed as
- Pro-vaccine means you’re pro-big pharma
- Pro-vaccine is inherently racist
- Pro-mandate is bourgeois authority meant to dissuade organizing
- Pro-COVID “hysteria” is a way to further oppress the working class
Other than a psyop meant to discredit the left, what about those that are genuine? I’ve seen online communists with seemingly good politics fall to this line of thinking, and even sources like Greyzone and MintPress have pushed out similar drivel. And of course I’ve only seen this from Western “leftists”, mostly from the US but not limited to them.
The pandemic has been a serious issue since the beginning, and now that rates of infection and hospitalizations are spiking well past the highs during the “peak” of the pandemic in the US, these voices have grown. The irresponsibility of these supposed comrades spouting out their hurtful rhetoric despite AES countries like China taking the necessary steps to continue to contain the pandemic speaks volumes to those privileged enough to be anti-health of the working class.
Don’t forget Marxists like Richard Wolff too. And you fail to see things in a national context. The reason you see this amongst communists in the west is because the situation is completely different. There are different vaccines with different consequences, and the people are responding differently. China is a democracy, and the people their have faith in their government to fight coronavirus and agree with the measures taken. In the US, this is not the case. Even in left leaning places like New York, workers are striking against mandates. So will you impose your pie in the sky dreams of zero covid onto these workers based on pure reason? This is not how Marxists are supposed to think.
We cannot blindly trust what Pfizer, Moderna, Bill Gates have to say about the vaccine or Liberal Science at all, we have to be critical. Liberal Science is based on the interests of the ruling class. In the case of big pharma it is to sell as many vaccines possible at the highest price. They will use the government to mandate several vaccines and foot the bill. Potential adverse side effects like myocarditis must be buried by the media so as not to encourage “vaccine hesitancy.” Already we are discussing a 4th shot only a year into the vaccines.
So what is the point of a mandate in stopping the spread of covid? Each booster shot is outdated for this purpose upon arrival. The first vaccine was made useless by delta, the booster made useless by omicron. They are not effective at stopping the spread. They admit as such! And something we know for certain: Covid is not ever, ever going away, no matter how many vaccines people take. Like the Spanish Flu, it will become gradually less deadly over time. Case numbers already diverged from hospitilizations with Delta, and with the Omicron surge, you do not see the same increase in deaths from covid.
You are also spreading misinformation. Cases are spiking past the old peaks true, but hospitilizations from covid are not even close to last years peak despite the surge in cases. And look, I got the booster too, and I would recommend people get the vaccine for their own safety. I am not anti-vax. The issue is whether we allow big pharma to use the government for their own profits or side with workers. Even if you don’t agree, why do you find it so important to propagandize on behalf of the vaccine, what the media and pharma are capable of doing themselves? Is the voice of communists really what people are waiting for to change their minds when they already disagree with the mainstream media? Instead, you are not convincing anyone, you are just losing credibility in the face of people’s real concerns.
Not doxxing myself but where I live in the US, both cases and hospitalizations are spiking past their peak last summer. Omicron may not be as deadly right now as with the first two strains that hit big here, but it’s still an issue.
Quoting how the workers in New York are against mandates should not affect our thinking. As Marxists-Leninists, we don’t take current working class sentiment/opinions/rhetoric as law. The majority in this country believe socialism to be evil at worst or “good on paper” at best; does this mean we drop the idea of a working-class revolution because the majority of the working class is seemingly against it? It’s an exaggerated example but the logic still fits.
There is also zero “blind trust” for pharmaceutical companies. I have comrades in the medical field who face centrist excuses of “vaccine hesitancy” hidden under the guise of “levelheadedness” on a constant basis, and it’s absolutely infuriating. So what, should we just ignore doctors as science can become politicized and form our own opinion? No, serious health officials in this country AND in general in AES countries know that pandemic protocols must be in place to deter this. Going with “it’s never going away, might as well get used to it” is defeatist and explicitly anti-Marxist, while the thinking is “this is potentially never going away, protocols need to be in place to prevent more outbreaks.”
Being a communist isn’t about being contrarian to anything that happens under a bourgeois capitalist society, it’s about looking at the situation critically and dialectically.
I have a friend that’s a nurse, and she’s also infuriated with having to deal with people all day long who went to google medical school. Its that kind of systemic ignorance that’s causing even “leftists” to have this selfish individualism with respect to the pandemic, even while the global north is doing their best to prevent everyone else in the world from getting access to vaccines.
I don’t know where you are getting your numbers, because covid cases and deaths didn’t peak last summer, they peaked winter 2020. And deaths in the US have not even surpassed the delta wave. On the global scale, you don’t even see an increase in deaths since omicron. This is how the pandemic ends. Each variant becomes more transmissible, less deadly, because being severe and deadly hurts the transmission of a virus obviously.
But that’s the truth! What everyone is saying! If you think that covid can be completely eliminated like small pox, you do not have any friend in academia who will agree with you, not even Fauci. The approach has always been how to best deal with the virus, not how to eliminate it. So it’s not defeatist or anti-marxist, it’s just the truth.
No, but you have to at the very least listen to what they are saying, understand their arguments. I get the impression that some of Marxists just want to dismiss the opinions of these people altogether instead of understanding the dialectic and learning from their concerns. They still arrive at their positions through pure reason and not through a dialectic relationship with the people. It is the job of Marxists to articulate the real concerns of the people, not to dictate.
Which is what we are doing. We are not blindly antithetical to liberal ideology. I don’t just assume there are creatures with tentacles in the vaccine or that the vaccine is a genocide plot or other conspiracy theories. On the other hand, I wasn’t always skeptical either. My starting position was to trust what the news was saying about the vaccine and distrust other opinions.
‘Everyone is saying it so it must be true’ that is not good reasoning and is anti-marxist and defeatist no matter how you spin it, because it is unscientific. You can’t just declare ‘it’s never gonna get cured’ because how do you know for sure it can’t be cured? We’ve said the same things about diseases such as polio for example. There should be absolutely no absolutism with declaring diseases ‘uncurable’.
That’s not my reasoning. But for those people who disagree with me, they’re point is always “trust the science, don’t think critically and do your own research.” So if these people want to trust liberal science, of course it should be pointed out when that science even contradicts the points they are making.
And yes, with the vaccine technology we have today, it is impossible to completely eradicate covid. All means of preventing covid are based on increasing the correct antibodies to identify spike proteins on covid. The reason this doesn’t work for certain diseases is because these spike proteins are always changing through mutation. With covid, it is changing VERY quickly. With waves every 3 months, it suggests your immunity only lasts for 3 months. And in the case of Omicron, people seem to be getting reinfected after only 2 months. This is why we don’t vaccinate against the common cold either. Because it mutates too quickly.
If you have a plan to eradicate covid worldwide, let’s hear it! Because our epidemiologists have nothing. Until you come up with something, you can stop being rude to me and stop calling me a defeatist and anti-marxist when the entire world is already working on this and has come to the same conclusion that I have. I’m just a realist. The sooner you see reality as it is, not as it should be, you will be best equipped to handle its challenges. But if you can’t, then you are the anti-marxist.
Thanks for completely missing my point. The point was that you shouldn’t rush to conclusions in the field of science, whether it be vaccines or any other field of endeavor in the sciences, because it is unscientific and therefore anti-marxist to do so. You also pretty much undermined your (apparent) point with ‘with the vaccine technology we have today’. Solidifying one of my own points, which is that science is never set in stone. You never know what science is truly capable of. I have never claimed to have a solution to covid, that is for the great scientists of the world who have actual training to figure out, so you are appearing to poison the well on that front.
You don’t seem to have a consistent point of your own, it seems: “trust the science, don’t think critically and do your own research.” and then you followed it up with why we shouldn’t trust ‘liberal science’? So which is it? I also love the presupposition that people who follow science are basically sheep. If that were the case, we couldn’t do literally anything without ‘being a sheep’. That just reeks of Alex Jones-level craziness.
I’m not rushing to conclusions! These are the conclusions that have been reached after a hundred years!
True, science is not set in stone, but it also takes years to develop new technologies, and these have to be in the realm of imagination first before they put billions into development. So where is even the hypothetical or proposed path to eradicate covid? You believe in magic! You are a magical thinker!
Reading comprehension bro. Why don’t you reread the context of where I put that quote carefully.
So would you trust the eugenicists of the early 20th century? If “science” told you that certain races are worse would you believe them uncritically? I’m not anti-science, you are, because you wouldn’t know what science is if it hit you in the face. Every real Marxist understands historiography, the history of philosophy and the history of science, and knows that the study of these things serves the interests of the ruling class. If science could reveal something disadvantageous to the ruling class, it would never be funded in the first place. REAL science, relies on criticism, and not just an appeal to authority FALLACY which you are invoking. It’s you who doesn’t believe in science.
‘Reading comprehension bro. Why don’t you reread the context of where I put that quote carefully.’
The ‘context’ is that you uttered two incoherent points. The entirety of what you said in that bit is all the context you need. ‘Context’ seems to be a word you like to throw around when losing an argument.
‘So would you trust the eugenicists of the early 20th century? If “science” told you that certain races are worse would you believe them uncritically? I’m not anti-science, you are, because you wouldn’t know what science is if it hit you in the face. Every real Marxist understands historiography, the history of philosophy and the history of science, and knows that the study of these things serves the interests of the ruling class. If science could reveal something disadvantageous to the ruling class, it would never be funded in the first place. REAL science, relies on criticism, and not just an appeal to authority FALLACY which you are invoking. It’s you who doesn’t believe in science.’
So many things to unravel from this trainwreck of a paragraph. Who is arguing ANY of this? This is a straight-up strawman. I have never argued for eugenics, science is not just limited to criticism, and Marxists can study all of the sciences you listed without being ‘anti-marxist’. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are philosophers, I guess they served the ruling class then, guess that means we have to ignore everything they said, which means I guess everything we’ve ever accomplished is history, and you continue to superimpose the western situation onto science as a whole, which includes Chinese science, so I don’t know what else to infer from this other than you are an arrogant western ‘leftist’ who believes in the superiority of the western world over nations like China.
OK. Let’s break down what I said so we can all see what a fool you are.
The first statement in question:
But for those people who disagree with me, their point is always “trust the science, don’t think critically and do your own research.”
So clearly, what this means is that I am QUOTING someone, because it is in QUOTES. I didn’t say that myself and clearly disagree with this, because I said exactly that. So the meaning of this statement is that I think “trusting the science” is an oxymoron. If you trust something uncritically, you are not thinking scientifically.
The second thing in question, which you paraphrased:
“and then you followed it up with why we shouldn’t trust ‘liberal science’”
Yes, so my second statement could be summed up as “don’t trust liberal science”
So explain to me how the statements
contradict each other? When they have identical meaning?
I bet you feel embarrassed now, you can still delete your comment.
I never said you did! You are the one strawmanning me! My point was that it follows from your way of thinking. If you believe in “trusting the science” uncritically, this is where that thinking would have led you in the early 20th century.
“I know that a million of you are dead already, but its not a big deal, I swear. Sure, they were mostly poor people, but eh. I mean, can we trust Liberal medicine? I don’t have anything that shows significant harm done by the vaccines, but hey, the profit motive is super scary. Now, go back to work and die. I’m a communist by the way.”
Ah, I love day old accounts on my case. Whose alt are you? Too scared to show your real identity huh? Or maybe you are a fed?
This is total projection. Because when workers go on strike against mandates from their bosses, I have solidarity with them. It is you who want them to go back to work. You have solidarity with the bosses.
And you think being wary of the profit motive is an insult. What kind of communist are you? Profit is the essence of capitalism and all of its ills. How can you be a communist without being wary of the profit motive?
Would you have supported labor organizers in the thirties trying to excise minorities from their shops?
No. I am in favor of building a movement of the working class. That kind of behavior divides the working class so it is not in anyone’s interest but the ruling class. It’s objectively counterproductive.
Great.
So you agree that just because a group of workers wants something, doesn’t mean it’s good and deserving of support, right? That a class of workers have interests that they, at the very least feel, align closer with the Bourgeois due to their position in the liberal meritocracy?
Yes I agree. But this is not the case with the vaccine mandate protests. Richard Wolff explains it best https://twitter.com/profwolff/status/1454266810400972801?lang=en
The tried and proven form of a workers movement is the harmony of the workers following the leadership of the communist party. The party learns from the people, the people follow the leadership of the party. If there is a misalignment, this process has failed somewhere and you do not have a successful workers movement.
In the national context of the US, there are multiple communist parties, which is already a problem. And none of them have significance in politics. They are completely out of wack.
And you take this error of factionalism further by individualizing it. I don’t care if you as an individual support or oppose mandates. Are you in a party and that is there position? If so, how successful are they at leading the workers? Not very, would be my guess. So what is the point of preaching pro-mandate if no one is listening to you or your party?
Even if you think mandates are good, are your own fee-fees more important than what you would lose by alienating striking workers? You could be helping these people organize. Educating about the importance of unions. This is an opportunity! It’s also an opportunity for the ruling class if no one acts. It’s an opportunity to leverage the division in society to pass legislation against strikes on the basis of public health. It’s an opportunity to give employers more power over their workers. How can you not see this?
I don’t give a single, solitary fuck about your dogmatism, or idealism.
I also don’t particularly care what Wolff had to say here either, given it’s three months old and predates the return to a 9-11 every other day, and his conclusion seems spurious at best. If you want to cite something more relevant temporally, that would be fine.
There is no organized, strong communist presence in the US. You wanna know why? Because we’re still in decay. There won’t be an actual leftist reckoning until the final stages of the sublimation of the national Bourgeois into the international, and near complete proletarianization of my people.
So, no. I don’t particularly care for delusional counterfactuals about enticing the labor aristocracy.
And also, I’m not engaging with you. I don’t care what you think. I care about innoculating anyone here against blatant misinformation that’s killing people.
Then explain how I am those things. You don’t get to invoke those insults out of thin air.
Ok. You really think he changed his mind?
https://twitter.com/profwolff/status/1484580551340089347
Why? The entire US media is doing that for you. You think there are really people who are against mandates are just waiting to hear the same points from a communist to change their minds?
And it’s not misinformation that’s killing people, you haven’t demonstrated that in any capacity despite the information I have provided in this thread.
You are theoretically bankrupt and a defeatist. You are shifting responsibility to the third world instead of taking responsibility in the first world. The labor aristocracy is not a class, it is a tendency of the working class. And even in the early 20th century, when this tendency was observed in the west, the communist movement was at its peak in the USA. Sure, it is possible that the ruling class does what Lenin said. They bribe labor leaders and striking workers with super profits. But they are not doing this as much, because unions are dead in the USA. So the labor aristocracy, as it was understood by Lenin, is not a prevailing tendency in American politics when the real working class is living at the bare minimum wages needed for survival.
In a time when the entire country is anxious about the economy, are rioting en masse and rebelling through various channels, and are looking for a new system, I think the people are not at fault for the reason why we see no communist movement. The blame is solely on the failures of the American left.