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.
What’s your cut off? At what financial point is someone allowed to take part in trying to fix a broken system?
If it’s only people who don’t benefit from the system who are allowed to fight against it, should white people not try to fight the system? Cis? Straight? Able bodied? Able minded? Are only poor trans lesbians with two types of disabilities allowed to try to fight the system?
I don’t know the guy from Adam and I’m not gonna say he’s not well off, and I get that it seems sketch, but he’s at least doing something with his money other than sitting on it trying to get richer.
I have no idea who this guy is but Fidel was the child of a plantation owner.
He’s more conventionally attractive, confident, charismatic, muscular, well dressed, and less of a drama king/queen than most other leftist influencers his age, and he speaks in more Gen Z lingo/vocabulary than other left wing influencers (who are often older) with similar knowledge levels and political stances.
Oh, and he is already popular, on a platform where people love to exist in one-sided, parasocial relationships.
… Sorry if this bursts your bubble, but even most self described leftists basically operate by the same fundamental popularity / favorability dynamics that middle or high schoolers do, whether concsiously or subconsciously.
Imagine actually drawing the line at Hasan Piker’s net worth…
- Average U.S. net worth: $1,000,000
- Hasan Piker net worth: $2,600,000
Here are your real enemies:
- Elon Musk net worth: $336,800,000,000
- Jeff Bezos net worth: $225,900,000,000
Lol this is a misuse of statistics to make it look like Hasan isn’t rich. The median US net worth is roughly $200,000. That means 50% of people have less than $200k of net worth, and remember it’s not real money. It means liquidating all of your assets.
Hasan makes the median net worth of an American in one month on Twitch subs alone (from the Twitch leaks where he was the 13th most paid on the site at ~$200k and that’s just one of his income streams). Which means he makes the average US net worth in 5. Using just his house price as his “net worth” is laughable.
Using the Twitch leaks numbers, Hasan bought his house in 2021. Twitch leaks were about 2019-2022. If he makes $200k since 2019 (which is a low estimate because his line go up), he’s made $12,000,000 off of Twitch alone. He can arguably buy 4 of that same house cash and carry.
I get it, he’s a cool guy, but are we really gonna pretend here that he’s living some life comparable to normal people when he’s made $12 million in 5 years? He’s certainly better than most of his peers (other rich people) since you could argue there’s minimal direct exploitation (indirect exploitation is a whole other argument, and given that people hate nuance I’m not gonna bother to make it), but let’s not pretend he’s living the same type of life.
Do you believe everything they tell you without applying mind ?
Obsessing over “privilege” smells like jealousy
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.
you need to be part of an org to be a socialist
Saying shit like this makes you feel special because you can call yourself a “Real Socialist”, while gatekeeping political self-identification from anyone you feel isn’t as pure as you.
Telling me that I’m not a Socialist because I’m not a registered member of a Socialist organization doesn’t encourage me to join any organization. It encourages me to dump you and find an actual mutual ally.
Stop saying stupid exclusionary things about your left-wing allies if you want to actually have a movement capable of change. I’ll happily accept anyone who believes in Socialism as a Socialist.
Let’s start with asking the question: how exactly are you an ally? what are the actual parameters of ally ship here? Do you do mutual aid? Do you voulunteer consistently in your community? Do you do organizing? Do you read theory?
Or do you just nod your head when someone says medicare for all or living wage? If so, why do you think you deserve any kind of accolades for simply vaguely agreeing with (and possibly also parroting) sloganeering?
Or do you post on vaguely leftist sites? If so why do you think you deserve any kind of accolades simply for posting, a recreational activity?
What is it that you’ve done besides call yourself a socialist that practically means something? And why is that worthy of praise?
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.
So what? A class traitor is a class traitor, and we only have to win with this. What’s next, you gonna say Engels wasn’t a communist because he was a part of the bourgeoisie?
You do not need some sort of vow of poverty to be a true leftist.
This is pretty much why the left will always lose. They will purity test their movements until only the most dogmatic ideologues remain, and those dozen or so purists will get steamrolled by the right-wingers that remained united over a single issue.
When I was young, and generally much poorer, leftist groups basics tried to court me. My young mind, not yet sure how to attain wealth and establish my place in the world, was quite valuable to their movements because it was easy to convince me that my dreams were being gatekept by elites. To this day, this rings true to me. I see the lack of meritocracy and fairness every day with my own eyes.
But after I graduated college and started building a career, my political leanings didn’t really change, but I noticed that my political allies’ attitude toward me certainly did.
The more stable, self-sufficient, and financially solvent I became, the more I found myself ostracized by the left. Working in tech became disqualifying - I was a “tech bro” just for getting the job. Wearing decent clothes would get me side-eyed by those who insist on black bloc. Enjoying any luxury or pleasure in the world without suffering would have me cast aside as too privileged to understand the world.
So any material assistance I could ever provide the left is nullified by the fact that other leftists won’t give the time of day to anyone with a positive net worth, and any desire I have to work with the left is nullified by the fact that all of my so-called allies expect me to either live in poverty and misery to be a real leftist, or self-flagellate about my privilege because I have an education and career.
The left convinced me to establish myself as a progressive, socialist participant in our democracy, and then chased me away over a matter of class membership, rather than substantive disagreement. No matter what class I fight for, the left brands anyone who attains middle-class status a class traitor by default.
If I chose to align with the right, they would accept me with open arms. They would pat me on the back for my career. They would tell me I deserve more. It’s no mystery why so many men like me drift towards validation like that. The only thing stopping me is my moral core would never let me align myself with the socially regressive goals of the right, and my education keeps me from falling for the incredibly stupid policy positions of the Republican Party.
As for Hasan, he’s a great example of what I am talking about. He’s worth $2.6 million, and he stands up against the interests of people worth more than $300 billion, yet the left is eager to group him together with the people he opposes.
I have a net worth 1/8 of Hasan Piker’s. Elon Musk has a net worth 130,000x that of Hasan Piker’s. If you’re drawing the line between me and Hasan, congratulations, your movement is dead in the water. Unfortunately, the line is usually drawn so low that even I don’t make the cut.
I totally get your frustration. Any leftist person, group or organization that ostracize people for being a little bit better materially than other people is completely wrong and shouldn’t be taken seriously. The tech field is full of techbro ancaps, having a leftists there is already a step forward. We can’t just confine ourselves to a few spaces and gatekeep who can and who cannot be a part of it.
It’s like you said, you’re orders of magnitude closer to the homeless than to the rich. You are not the enemy, and even if you were, you’re still a leftist and any help is welcomed.
That all being said, I don’t think it’s right to say that this is the reason the left will always lose. First because the left is not an unified mass that thinks the same. There’s a lot of different leftist ideologies and they all clash in some way of another, be it for a disagreement in how to organize or in how to achieve communism. And second, because this type of thing tends to be something you would see more on the imperial core where actual leftist thinking have been thwarted and made into a boogeyman, I don’t know where you’re from, but I honestly suggest you try looking for Marxist-Leninist groups and organizations.
The more stable, self-sufficient, and financially solvent I became, the more I found myself ostracized by the left
I’m also in the tech sector and I’ve been part of local leftist organization. From direct mutual aid to anarchist crust punks to soup kitchens to PSL, I’ve literally never had a problem. Not to turn this into Blind dot com, but my net worth is ~3x the US median.
The difference between Hasan and I, is that Hasan is a poster boy for the left that is making money off of being a poster boy for the left. Nobody is “pocket watching” you as a rando online or in person. Nobody is putting you on trial for your success. That argument is literally the same argument that Elon Musk and other Billionaires make about being punished for their success.
If you’re attempting to show your class traitor bona fides and defending Hasan as one at the same time, but it’s sounding a lot more like solidarity with the moneyed class. Your resentment is showing.
Wearing decent clothes would get me side-eyed by those who insist on black bloc.
Also wtf does this even mean? People don’t dress black bloc for every day dude.
If you want to be lauded for your material success in a capitalist system perhaps you should just be a capitalist?
You do not need some sort of vow of poverty to be a true leftist.
helps though
Semi off-topic but genuinely curious: did going to Rutgers become something that is fancy/seen akin to Ivy league? Or was mention of the school just a mention that he went to college?
Rutgers and Princeton have an intertwined history, but that’s pretty much it. Rutgers is seen as a good state school and to many it’s mostly because it sounds like a private school.
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.
Plus as far as I know socialists have always been fine with class traitors who join them.
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.
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.
Net worth isn’t a thing except for the aristocratic right. There, privilege implies belonging; and when coupled with egocentric decisions is basically their entire theme.
‘This person’s not allowed to do the right thing, because he was born wrong.’
Uh huh.
The revolution will not have a channel on youtube.
I was going to comment the same ö
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.
Same. I thought it was cause I was British though.
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.
I’ve never listened to him for more than a few seconds. He gives me shyster vibes and I don’t need a pundit to tell me everything is shit.
