AnneVolin

Fun fact I watched Hasan's election day stream so keep that in mind as you read my reply!

There’s no alternative to Hasan right now in the left online space.

The beginning of this argument reeks of "there is no alternative to capitalism". We do not have to accept things simply because there is no "better" popular alternative. This is the argument that Democrats use to bully and denigrate voters.

Organizing 20 people in your local communist book club doesn’t matter if your movement is constantly demonized in the media and never grows. I don’t think some in the left seem to understand how important propaganda is, and yes, even online. Even Lenin worked on newspapers.

Firstly, Lenin and Hasan are worlds apart. Lenin's propaganda was hard theory. Hasan is vague "I want things to be better". Lenin never shied away from putting his chips down on the table in tough intra-left questions. Hasan doesn't even address any tough intra-left questions, he's not even at that level. Lenin literally lead the 1905 Revolution after being out of prison for 5 years. Hasan has been posting for more than 5 years and hasn't really moved the political needle in this country appreciably.

Hasan is the Jon Stewart of anyone that's left of "progressives". The same non-ideological criticisms of Stewart apply directly to Hasan. Jon Stewart hasn't done very much to move that needle either. Popular entertainment is important to have people be open to ideas, but it does not equal political activity. Hasan is actually worse than Jon Stewart in this regard because Hasan hasn't even made his own brand of political rally unlike the lib Jon Stewart.

Organizing history in the US shows you don't even need propaganda, you just need to meet people where their at and talk to them about what their problems are. "Winning Gen Z" is such a Democrat beltway insider tactic that's consistently a loser. Charging those with the least experience in the world to change it is quite literally the best way to fail, it's not a surprise that "youngism" has been the call of the Democratic party on the ground despite having a gerontocracy that controls the party. There is simply no real durable through line from Hasan to making socialism. He's just a guy people watch.

. Other people can’t afford to be kicked out of the DNC for talking to Palestine protestors like he was.

There is no theory of change or path to power here. You have literally foreclosed that yourself by pointing this out. Hasan is an entertainer, and he softens views but it literally does not translate into power because in our system the left is structurally disenfranchised.

Hasan does not address this. It's simply hand waved away.

To put this another way, we don't have a democracy. There has been consistent popular overwhelming majority grass root support for many social welfare programs in the US over the last 30 years, M4A, rescheduling marijuana, etc.

This doesn't translate into change, because of the structures of our system. Hasan could make 66% of the country believe n socialism overnight and nothing would change because the theory of change that underpins that assumption is wrong about the structures of the US government.

It's the same problem that Bernie had. His theory of change did not account for the reality of the political structure. Which is why both of his campaigns failed. There was no answer to that, it was simply hoping for the best and ignoring the possibility of the worst rather than having a contingency for it.

For all the hate that you get for people like Jon Stewart or Voldomir Zelenskyy they are literally the logical ends that Hasan can rise to. That's pretty much it, and in reality anyone who actually knows Ukranian politics knows that Zelenskyy's personal political views have almost nothing to do with Zelenskyy's decisions anymore because he's so structurally compromised by the Ukranian political arrangement and the geopolitcal arrangement that you could replace him with a random off the street and more or less the same outcomes would occur. So President Hasan would be as libbed up as possible.

Hasan is a great entertainer and but he trafficks in the most basic understandings of shit, that's what makes him a great entertainer. There's nothing happening outside of the basics. The idea that "if only people knew" is not powerful in reality, because people know, people feel it, that's the whole argument of Marxism the sociological philosophy. In this day and age everyone has the tools and materials to educate themselves for this stuff. It's not the 20th century where you have to figure out how to get your hands on printed materials of Marx or whoever. This shit is freely available at marxists.org, libcom.org, Wikipedia, etc. The amount of people that go through that is minuscule compared to the amount that watch a Hasan stream.

Hasan is the perfect example of Wittigenstien's Ladder, because the type of person who becomes a "big boy socialist" through Hasan effectively would agree with criticisms of Hasan despite liking him. Once you start to do actual organizing and actual mutual aid you see how fake the online shit is. The majority of his audience are more involved with his beef with H3 than they are involved with actually doing good works.

It's great that people's personal journey to leftist organizing might have started with Hasan, but that's a small percentage of the people in his orbit. Hasan himself would be leery of claiming to be some great leftist guy, his party line is the same as ChapoTrapHouse, this isn't news, this isn't organizing, this isn't leftism, this isn't real, this is entertainment.

A lot of the defensiveness in this thread is literally based on the personal and not the systemic, it's incredibly parasocial and incredibly toxic to the growth of the people who are putting themselves in that position. For many Hasan's worth is a mirror of their own worth, that's what parasocial relationships are.

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".

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

This doesn't change anything. Since AMLO the Mexico itself has acted as the US southern border and worked to prevent caravans from making it to the US.

This is just Sheinbaum mystifying the position of Mexico

Hasan literally told Business Insider that he wanted to move to LA because of fucking Entourage.

Likewise yeah people in their 20s-30s move to cities to chill, but not everyone moves to LA or NY.

Remember how libs were rehabbing GWB but then GWB never endorsed, and they got really mad?

We all know why!!!! It's because GWB is a Russian asset, why else would he invite Putin to a high school in Crawford Texas unless Putin had compromat dizinformatsiya on him in 2001. DO NOT LOOK UP WHEN PUTIN BECAME PRESIDENT THAT IS NOT RELEVANT!!! COMPOMAT! DISINFORMATSIYA!

Yeah TBH I was with him until that point.