Is avoiding the vaccine anti-establishment and anti-capitalist now? I don't understand
Contrarianism without materialism leads to being a crank. You can point to flaws of the system and reject a flawed system but you're not replacing it with a more solid logical framework for ordering things. They turn into utopian thinkers, conspiracy theorists, libertarians, and prophets because those are the things that let them idealistically reject the system in some coherent way.
Some big words there but I think I follow. You're saying because the vaccine was delivered by capitalism, it doesn't inherently make it something to reject?
Most socialists are materialists. The way knowledge is gathered and ordered is like how science does it. You observe things and then link the observations. You trust in things like statistics and well-founded information that correlates with other information you already know. The vaccine makes sense to me as a Marxist because I know how vaccines work, how public health works, and how pandemic responses need to work in order for us to hit the right numbers. If I observe any component of that in the context of the others, either it proves or disproves itself based on how it holds up. If I knew how vaccines work and this one had a low efficacy rate or major side effects, I wouldn't support it. If I knew pandemics could be contained without measures that open up shock doctrine opportunities for capitalism and the state, I wouldn't support those things. But it all contextually makes sense.
Bernie had his whole socdem and apolitical base that was attracted to a handful of policies. I knew Trump-supporting libertarians who voted for him in the primary because they wanted healthcare and legal weed. That wing of his support is based in wonkier logical frameworks and they're not building on knowledge from the same places. There's nothing binding them to socialism as a process of understanding the world, just a few places where they personally benefit from a policy that we're the only ones offering. As soon as there's no more Medicare for All drawing them in with the branding, they're just the same right-wingers and apolitical people drawing from whatever the algorithms feed them. They're still dealing with the alienation and sense of contradictions but narratives like that are what's on offer if you're not a systems and statistics kind of person.
Insightful comment! Your last sentence is interesting. People do not have the tools available to reach Marxist conclusions (could be because in the US it is hardly mentioned until like grad school...) so they grasp onto random bullshit to try and bring order/explanation to the cruel backwardness and inefficiency that is clearly visible all around us.
Some of them draw from the much more widely available technocratic ways of thinking, liberals who understand science even if they don't apply it to ideology. Being adjacent to them doesn't make my vaccine support liberal any more than it does capitalist because a big pharma company produced it. Philips made my toothbrush and I don't keep from brushing my teeth. Anticapitalist opposition to the vaccine would be along the lines of vaccine apartheid, job conditions not allowing for recovery times, and attacking power structures that exploit the working class during the pandemic. We see all of that here on a daily basis. If they're not tuned into that kind of dissection method and especially the media streams that understand it, everything else is filtered through the lens of the people wealthy enough to own media companies. It's all judas goat shit leading them to slaughter for the real priorities behind the information they're given.
Not really, outside the mainstream, the media people who are pro-Ivercmectin and anti-lockdown have their politics defined by being "populist" and anti-establishment more than a commitment to anti-capitalism, and many of them have the classic American individualism that clashes with COVID policies.
It's easier to come at it from that angle because how do you make anti-vaccination the socialist position? It's a decision that puts you ahead of your community, COVID is mostly a plight on working class, the vaccine is free, the alternative solutions are also big pharma, etc.
when I post marxist stuff they upvote it but I think the remaining subreddit is mostly lonely old people
wow, that's new or at least I didn't check it often enough in the past to ever see that
The sub is now mostly a confused mixture of social democracy and libertarianism. A lot of Glenn Greenwald, Kim Iverson, Matt Taibbi, Michael Tracy, Thomas Frank, Jimmy Dore, and Whitney Webb. Many of them can be generally anti-imperialist and will correctly call out the Russiagate shit, but then fall for neo-Cold War anti-China propaganda like the right-wing lab leak conspiracy theory. They seem to all take the naïve libertarian position on pandemic control policy that advocates essentially having the government doing nothing and hoping individuals will all be responsible enough. A lot of free speech absolutism.
Its moderation is very weak and it gets brigaded frequently. Head moderator is a weird Ivermectin fanatic. You’ll see socialist content regularly getting upvotes, but then there’s also an influx of right-wing/right-libertarian articles on the pandemic getting upvotes as well.
