This guy’s dad is the former VP of a multibillion dollar Turkish conglomerate, as well as the secretary of a government department. Mom and Dad were able to fly to their other home in NJ to give birth so he’d get US citizenship. His uncle is the founder and owner of TYT Media and gave him his media career. He went to Rutgers. He lives in a multimillion dollar mansion in the Hollywood Hills. This is by definition not the kind of person who can be a voice of the People. Saying “I recognize my privilege” over and over, while living his lifestyle, doesn’t negate his privilege and complete lack of real-life experience outside of the curated garden of the wealthy. He gets paid obscene amounts of cash to sit in his bedroom and word-vomit for 9 hours a day. Why are his unending opinions taken so seriously? He gives me strong controlled opposition vibes.
Edit: Thank you all for this discussion. I learned a lot.
I can give you my two cents. Currently, there aren’t many left leaning pundits, and I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. His privilege means nothing if he’s actually being a good progressive advocate. Also, he’s actually talking about the things the left populace actually care about. Controlled opposition wouldn’t look like him to me. They’d be more like the Democrat party, trying to copitulate with the right. He’s been fairly consistent with his messaging of workers rights, lgbtq rights, womens rights, and the atrocities happening in Gaza. His income from streaming is incidental, and isn’t a problem in and of itself. In fact, it lets him be independent and not beholden to corporate media. It’s hard enough to afford bills working a regular job. The vast majority of regular jobs take all your time, leaving none for anything else, much less being a left leaning advocate online. I’m assuming you’d rather a full-time employee take his place, but how would someone like that be able to be effective in their advocacy?
Maybe I’m just an old fart annoyed by the loudmouthed sarcastic child of immense privilege preaching about things he’ll never understand. As long as he’s saying what the people want to hear, I guess. A new leftist Rush Limbaugh for 2024, great. I’m on the left and I’m just exhausted. IDK.
I get the sentiment. But I don’t need to be lgbtq to be an advocate for their rights. I just want people to be able to be who/what they want and thrive. Compared to them I’m privileged (white cishet male), but I doubt they’d complain about me being an ally.
I just want people to be able to be who/what they want and thrive.
End the war on drugs cause I want to be high as hell.
Who is forcing you to be LGBTQ?
No one? Not sure where you got that from.
Also, class is not defined by wealth, but by relation to labor. He is doing the work he is getting paid for, regardless of whether someone thinks its too much. He’s not exploiting others to make that money as far as I know.
Exactly!
Moving to LA to buy a multi-million dollar house and be close to your other rich content creator friends is the same as setting yourself on fire for the proles.
Got it.
Fwiw, the picture doesn’t show someone setting themselves on fire, it shows someone having lit a Molotov cocktail.
Damn you’re right, that’s drawn by someone who’s never seen a molotov in real life lmao.
I think you have an extremely online view of “leftist political spaces” because I have never even heard this guy’s name mentioned in any real life context, and I’ve been a very politically active communist since I was a teenager.
Yeah the problem with living in capitalist hellworld at the heart of the empire is that you have two separated insular communities of leftists that are knife fighting rings. One in meetings and one on message boards, and they frequently know nothing about each other.
While the meetings communists sometimes eke out wins like Kshama Sawant, they often struggle to connect to the message board communists who really should be their base. Meanwhile both struggle to connect to society at large.
What’s really funny is that most meetings communists I know locally essentially think of him in essentially the same way message board communists think of AOC. Most meetings communists cannot stand his level of yadda yadda when pressed on any specifics he often just goes more general and says things like ‘I just want everyone to have healthcare bro’.
The thing is, also, from the lefts perspective, the right seems united, meanwhile the left is constantly arguing about the right type of left or not being left enough or whatever. Someone had a go at me once cause I said I learned something off AOC.
As a political force in the United States there is no left. The left is structurally shut out of power.
If you don’t think the right has message board arguments about what flavor of right wing is better, calling eachother RINO, saying that SS style Nazi guys should be Deus Vult style Nazi guys, or how frens and groypers are cringe or how parroting Mitch McConnell makes someone dumb you just haven’t talked to or seen right wingers talk to each other.
Comparing apples and oranges is the most common thing that happens when this kind of shit pops off because it helps diffuse the actual conversations we could have. You see it all in this thread about how for some people Hasan is a large portion of “the left” simply because he’s popular and that’s all they know. These people don’t have real world experience, they get their ideas from online. They’re no different than Kamala Redditors who thought that everyone was going to vote for Kamala because they were too online and instead there was a red wave.
The reality of these types of conversations is that most online leftists don’t have the theoretical backing to grapple with these types of questions and when the accusations are levied against a popular leftist that makes money off of their popularity it’s in their self interest to shut that shit down in any way possible and that’s what you end up seeing.
I was speaking generally, I’m not American so things are different to me.
If you’re from the UK the situation is the same. The entire system came down on Corbyn, but there are very few places in the world right now where there are real leftist politics happening.
Oh, ok. Thank you. Putting it like that makes it easier to picture.
Bang on.
Same. I thought it was cause I was British though.
Hasan occupies a niche within the broad “leftist” umbrella niche within the West. Unlike many breadtubers, he actually doesn’t serve as much of a barrier for further leftist movement (see: Vaush, Destiny, etc.). He is privledged, but so was Engels. Hasan certainly is no Engels, but he does serve a useful role in radicalizing liberals towards the Left, like how he vocally combats the nonsense usage of the word “tankie” trendy among liberals these days.
Hasan is a pundit at the end of the day, and isn’t bringing about the revolution, and he is definitely more of a USophile than he should be, but he is better than most leftist commentators and helps serve as a conveyor to the left of himself.
Thank you for a nuanced reply. When you put it this way, I can see why many listeners find value in his content. I worked another shift today with him constantly droning in the background and I think my opinion is largely being colored by his presentation style, and my own distaste for “streamers” and “react culture” in general, with his aforementioned privilege issues now coming in third.
His comments about people working “real” jobs having an easier time of it than he does certainly rubbed me the wrong way, though, and his response when called out on it was more of the exact same “BROOO WHAT ARE YOU STUPID? THATS NOT WHAT I MEANT! OK!?” that his streams are full of.
I understand where you’re coming from, honestly. But I think this is a sort of trauma response on our end (myself included) at this point. I’m not trying to pin mental illnesses on you, I’m nowhere near a licensed head doctor of any kind, I’m saying that we’ve been kicked and abused so much by the rich, that it’s only natural for those of us who broke free of the brainwashing to be on high alert, at least for a while. The continued unfolding of things surely can’t help this situation, either.
That being said, as long as he acts in good faith and is sincere and logical in his approach, which so far seems to be true, I’d say we should embrace his participation! As I see it, we need all the voices we can get. We’re already arguing semantics amongst ourselves all day long, I think it’d be a shame to let mistrust shatter “our side” without concrete proof of malicious intent.
At the end of the day, the greatest weapon the Right has is the fact that they yell united at everyone else. Let our chorus rival theirs!
Thank you for being one of the only commenters to understand my question.
Believe me, I’m keeping an eye on every piece of Leftist media I find, and not just for the purpose of learning. I know Capitalism is very good at repackaging our complaints and critiques and selling them back as dopamine hits, but… there’s not much of a choice otherwise. Even the "underground networks’ " infrastructure* is owned by someone at this point…
A person’s class is defined by their relation to labor, not their wealth. He’s not exploiting labor. I’m not sure the people claiming he’s a hypocrite for having money understand anything about communist/socialist theory. Engels was famously in a very similar situation.
A person’s class is defined by their relation to labor, not their wealth.
This is literally not true. Like quite literally, even in socialist history this is not a true statement. Leninism particularly had some very funny hijinks about linking wealth to class.
He’s not exploiting labor.
I don’t want to really get into it, but Hasan like every other content creator indirectly exploits the labor that provides the platform that he makes money off of.
Twitch.TV is a stage that is built and maintained by workers working for a Twitch. Those workers are exploited. The stage is a means of production. The artists that use the stage also exploit those workers, because they procure use of the stage. The cool thing about Hasans typical response to this which is the thought terminating cliche of “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is that it by definition has a corollary. If there can be no ethical consumption, there can be no ethical production.
Engels was famously in a very similar situation.
Engels’ factories were all unionized.
Hasan has literally in 2019 after all the “podcasters don’t pay guests drama” that he very well knows of given his friends, had exploited people that did free work for him. There’s controversy about whether Hasan actually pays his mods. Most online personalities are not very forthcoming about how they get help with their content/community management and whether that is properly compensated, Hasan included. For a venture that’s made $12m over 5 years Hasan 100% should be paying every single person that touches anything related to his work without them having to ask, whether it’s hourly, piece work, or full time employment.
Hasan is nowhere near Engels in his understanding and treatment of labor.
I’m not sure the people claiming he’s a hypocrite for having money understand anything about communist/socialist theory.
Most of Hasan’s fans and Hasan himself don’t have understand anything about communist / socialist theory or history. This thread at large is a perfect encapsulation of this where the history and theory is bent entirely in the defense of one online entertainer in 2024. I say this as a person who occasionally watches (e.g. election night since I dind’t want to watch broadcast cable and nobody else good had election live streams).
The real problem here is the deification of Hasan and the comparison of him to Marx or Engels that’s done up and down this thread is indicative of the seriousness of the commenters in their understanding of socialism. A lot of these arguments are vibes + socialist bromides, they don’t actually do anything beyond surface level reflexive defense. Nobody actually wants to open the Pandora’s box here because as the famous tweet said “some of our faves might be implicated”.
This is literally not true. Like quite literally, even in socialist history this is not a true statement. Leninism particularly had some very funny hijinks about linking wealth to class.
That’s weird, because the class = relation to labor stuff is literally in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels
I’m not deifying Hasan, I don’t really care about Hasan. I was just correcting an incorrect sentiment in this post that having wealth means you can’t be on the side of the working class.
Everything else you said is weird too online gossip so I’ll just move on.
That’s weird, because the class = relation to labor stuff is literally in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels
I would challenge you to actually find such a quote, because such a claim doesn’t make a lot of sense in the language of Marxism. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is effectively a literary review of “how we got here” and such a definition of class excludes classes of feudalism which are covered in that work. Not only that but a peasant’s relation to labor is vastly different within the peasant class. Some peasants have a relation to labor in the same way as the bourgeoisie, some the same as the petite bourgeoisie, and some without any real relation to labor at all. And yet peasants are a distinct class according to all modern Marxists.
Kulaks were literally a class according to the Bolsheviks, which was at its clearest defined as a class based more-so on wealth than relation to labor. It wasn’t really until Maoism that a more complete understanding of socialist class was developed especially in relation to peasants since communism was mostly developed as a collaboration between educated urban intelligentsia and urban workers.
The difference between the proletarian class and the lumpen proletarian class is generally accepted in modern times not as their relation to labor but their relation to communism(or more specifically class consciousness) itself. Like the problems around the peasants most communism between 1840 ~ 1970 had trouble working through the entirety of the urban landscape, so “normal people” that were difficult to qualify or deemed morally degenerate by various authors were just put into the lumpen space. It wasn’t until the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords took a look around and said the normal people around us don’t fit into pure “proletarian” definitions. That begged the question of “does this mean that communism is doomed?”. As a natural consequence of this these groups that lead the way in the theory and practical organizing spaces to start speaking about working with and activating the lumpen proletariat in earnest rather than casting them off as dregs that could only be useful to counter revolutionary forces.
The last reason this doesn’t make sense is that wealth is capital which under a capitalist system is the means of production in and of itself. Marx himself even goes further to say that accumulation of wealth is systemic and has an equilibrium with the accumulation of misery.
"The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus- population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital (Marx’s Capital, p. 661)
Hasan has accumulated much capital, therefore according to Marx has also accumulated much misery because he is not exempt from the systemic nature of capitalism. Hasan very often in response to house gate says “There’s no ethical consumption”. The corollary here is that there’s no ethical production, and there is no ethical accumulation.
Whether your faves are implicated or not Marxism is a sociological system of the poorest, those among us who are wealthy communists should have much more personal sin to grapple with than those who are poor, that is our privilege.
Everything else you said is weird too online gossip so I’ll just move on.
This whole thread is weird too online gossip if you haven’t noticed.
I was just correcting an incorrect sentiment in this post that having wealth means you can’t be on the side of the working class.
This is true, however this is actually hard to prove, and denying Hasan’s implication in the capitalist system and his accumulation of wealth simply because Hasan is popular is a willful misunderstanding of Marxism. Having in-house conversations is literally how people advance their understandings of Marxism, what’s happening in much of this thread is denying those conversations via thought terminating cliches but from the left, because many see this as a “grand posting battle”. I’m not advocating that we have to game out a percentage of Hasan good or Hasan bad, I’m arguing that we have to understand Hasan as Marxists warts and all. That understanding is not happening because in this circumstance stan culture is at odds with Marxism.
Lastly it’s my view that if Hasan is indeed a “fellow traveler” and someone who people learn “the left”/Marxism/whatever from, he should be showing us this journey himself, instead of steeling himself because of his constant battles with H3 or Destiny or whoever. Otherwise this is just kayfabe.
You can advocate for hungry people after eating a meal. You can advocate fornsex worker rights even if you are a virgin.
You can’t tell people you are “working class” if you’re rich. You can’t advocate for punishing day people while pretending to be straight.
It is not complicated.
He sometimes tells his audience to log off and join an org, we get a handful of new recruits occasionally due to the guy.
So he actually is successfully moving people from being socialist sympathizers to actual socialists (you need to be part of an org to be a socialist)
That’s all I really know about him, besides some people being thirsty about him.
Crazy that Marx and Engels weren’t socialists.
Marx was part of the Young Hegelians. Marx and Engles were part of the Communist League (if not it’s literal sun around whom the League revolved), and Marx and Engels were also the founders of the German Workers’ Society.
The idea that Marx was a recluse internet style poster with no attachment to real society is a 21st century invention to make vaguely left people feel better about their alienation and a strawman for the right to attack.
Lol someone got to it before I could.
Crazy how history doesn’t agree with your gotcha.
What’s with the identity politics man? Does what he says makes sense or not? Don’t tell me you won’t listen to rich white people when they make sense because they’re rich and white.
I don’t know Piker from a hole in the ground. This sure sounds like a red flag, and I think The Young Turks are hacks. Nonetheless, bourgeois class traitors are a thing, Engels & Mao being a prime examples.
Not knowing Piker’s particulars, I can only speak at the 30,000 foot view: Western “leftist” spaces have largely been captured by US imperialism since the end of WWII.
Thank you for an intelligent response! I will read up on the links you shared.
The revolution will not have a channel on youtube.
I was going to comment the same ö
Because he’s cool to a certain type of person and those people are vaguely leftist (just like Hasan is vaguely leftist).
That cool factor and the parasocial relationships protect him a lot in places like this where some of the more knowledgeable users will actually dunk on his sources like Ettingermentum when they do/say stupid shit. It’s incredibly funny to see.
Honestly that’s pretty much it.
Embrace petty bourgeouis class traitors and don’t fetishize the working class.
Hes good at breaking down media. Gets involved on community organizing. Does good propaganda.
People are free to like who they like and make up their own minds. Why you hating? Who made you thought police?
I guess his ubiquity annoys me when he strikes me as hypocritical. Thought police? That’s just a weird thing to say. Why am I “hating?” Nobody hates the Left more than the Left.
I like that he’s focusing on the relationship between labor and the means of production and its not about being poor or rich per se.
Exactly why the infighting when we have bigger fish to fry.
Fair enough. Guess I’ll delete before the hive attacks in full.
No… Its a good discussion… Maybe add an edit or a caveat… I do feel there are a few people out there who don’t like him for the reasons you stated. But end of the day bigger fish to fry. As long as we keep that in mind it’s all good to me.
My partner watches him a lot and while personally dislike Hasans loud yelly bro style I’ve never heard an opinion from him that I disagreed with.
