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.
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.
You said ‘trusting the science’, not ‘trusting the liberal science’. If you had said the latter, you would have been right on that occasion. You did not. You saying the former implies you do not trust science at all, and is generally too vague of a statement.
EDIT: I was also well aware you were quoting somebody. You quoted him in a manner which suggested you did not agree with science. That still is a contradiction because you went on to say that liberal science is the issue. Herein lies the issue: is it science that is the problem or is it liberal science?
‘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.’
How does anything of what you claimed I said ‘follow from my way of thinking’ when you clearly cannot understand my way of thinking? Not that my way of thinking is bad, but you can’t infer it properly somehow. How do you arrive at that point where you know me that much?