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.
I have no idea who this guy is but Fidel was the child of a plantation owner.
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.
Obsessing over “privilege” smells like jealousy
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
The revolution will not have a channel on youtube.
I was going to comment the same ö
‘This person’s not allowed to do the right thing, because he was born wrong.’
Uh huh.
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’.
Oh screw off with this bullshit. So pathetic.
Thanks for your contribution to the discussion, very insightful.
These are bot account folks. There’s been a surge of attacks against Hasan by the right and russian propaganda machine. They are opening the flood gates to undermine all the remaining progressive influencers.
Evil Russia is botting on lemmy dot ml to reach a smidgen of the 60K MAU who are mostly already deluded nerds into not supporting Hasan on twitch dot tv a site of 240M MAU for geopolitical reasons of 20 dimensional chess.
That’s a new one, I’ve never been accused of being a bot for having an unpopular viewpoint before! You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?
I’ve never been accused of being a bot for having an unpopular viewpoint before!
Ah, you get used to it pretty quickly.
His class shouldn’t matter ultimately.
However, his superficial and putrid understanding of anything regarding politics or the world in infuriating. At one point he was simping hard for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine repeating verbatim rt talking points.
I loathe this man more than I hate Joe Rogan. Joe is an imbecile, through and through. Hasan, on the other hand, supposedly has a poli Sci degree. He knows what he’s doing and it’s disgusting
Edit : I don’t have time to go into every fact check of the mountain of lies he spews. The guy has never opened a book in his life and spends all day reading Twitter. Some great intellectual.
Willymac does a good breakdown on yt:
Ukrainians react to Hasan (yt) :
He’s such a joke
Can you elaborate?
I don’t have time to break down al his lies. Willymac does a decent job:
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.
