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.
I think “Hasan exposes people to leftist ideas” is great and all, but your argument has the following lynch pin:
This has a couple of parts we need to inspect:
The Right has it easy. It’s why they can be boring, lazy, stupid and evil. They have it easy because not only are they the status-quo, but their arguments have big salacious things they can point to. Capitalism exists, the US Empire exists, and people’s suffering exist. The right doesn’t actually need people to continue it’s project in the same way the left needs people. The Right can sustain itself on morons running into walls until the whole system collapses under its own weight. There is a pinprick of sunlight between your average neocon and your average fascist. Hell there’s only a 4ft window of sunlight between a liberal and a fascist. The last 2 libs that ran were hard to distinguish from fascists if you understand fascism (most people only understand the aesthetics of fascism and only in particular contexts). Fascism is easy because it’s the logical ends of an already existing system of capitalism. All you have to do is give the morons something to do and let the system run, that’s why culture war is great for the right. Fascism more or less exists as a real and in-power political force in most of the Western World.
The Left needs people to build an alternative, something that doesn’t exist, something that works for everyone, something intelligent and intelligible. The only way to do this is to be armed with the knowledge of the past, cognizant enough to understand the landscape of the present, have enough foresight to visualize the future, planing capacity to deal with the logistics, and the resources to put it into motion.
“Roganism” will never deliver these things. In fact “Roganism” will simply get you a bunch of consumers. The only way that “Roganism” will prevail for the left is if we are already at war and we simply need bodies to take orders and to pull triggers.
Now Hasan isn’t really responsible for any of this, he’s an entertainer. He’s a good entertainer, he has okay politics. But that’s it, there’s no there there beyond that.
Hasan makes $1.4 million a year about probably more now. If we pretend that everyone paying for that is “the left”, we’re doing the same type of spending as we criticize the DNC for. Hasan is our Beyonce concert, our Oprah interview, it’s just spread out over the whole year. That didn’t work for the Democrats. Meanwhile the Democrats also have it easy. 90% of what they want literally just exists as is. They can be losers forever if they wanted to, and they do.
The Democrats might be missing a “message” or “policy” or any desire to help people in any realistic way that isn’t a spreadsheet, and it’s stupid that they paid for Beyonce thinking it will get them over the line. Leftists don’t have a unified platform and don’t even have a machine, but it’s smart that we “pay” for Hasan? That’s really the argument that I’m reading from all this:
It’s the same argument:
I think one thing a lot of Westerners don’t want to understand is that socialism necessitates the death of American media culture. That includes the Hasan path, because what is Hasan under socialism? The US overproduces media culture to the point where it’s gig work, because of the same exact reason that “Roganism” works. Hasan’s path under socialism is to either go back to an organization where he will be subjected to the same if not worse circumscription he had at TYT, pick another career or at best be the last of a dying breed. No socialist economy is actually going to be able to support the ecology of streamers needed to generate Hasans. Hasan likes what he does, when push comes to shove is he going to give it up for socialism? It’s really easy to say that, it’s another thing to actually do it. Given his personal consumption and what he talks about, I have my doubts that Hasan is going to tighten the Gucci belt for us.
A lot of Western socialists assume that the desired individualized labor mix of the population is a realistic goal. The idea that everyone does what they want to do is not real. Yes people will still want to do certain necessary jobs, but that doesn’t mean enough people will want to do them to ensure social reproduction. We can talk about robots and magical maguffins till the cows come home, but in practice until those maguffins are created and function good enough humans will still have to do those jobs.