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.
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.