Bonus points for implying Parenti is one too.
Another one:
Summarises it better than I could. I used to watch him, along with other content creators, but it’s been a while so don’t remember exact examples. The above hits the nail on the head when it comes to the overarching issue.
The fact Hakim promotes Parenti, if I remember correctly, is one sign of his liberalism. The fact he runs a sub like r/TheDeprogram which is one in a long line of western petit bourgeois leftist meme subs (succeeding MoreTankieChapo and GenZedong) and the fact many of his podcast’s followers there are Dengists is another sign of his liberalism.
The fact he has a (fairly successful) YouTube channel where he makes relatively short, relatively shallow, “snappy” videos, as well as a podcast, is a clear sign of the petit bourgeois nature of the commodity production (“content creation”) he’s engaged in. And I think the fact he has a fairly successful Patreon from which he funds his own survival + the continuation of his petit bourgeois commodity production pretty much by definition makes him a fairly successful petit bourgeois. And the fact it is his political propaganda which directly affords him this class status is problematic to say the least.
E: Please keep in mind that me as well as many others are deriving this stuff from personal as well as collectively experiences and observations. I’m not just randomly thinking oh he’s petit bourgeois so fuck him. I personally spent years consuming leftist content on YouTube and the like and did not learn shit about the philosophy and theory of Marxism or the history of communism. I had a very superficial understanding of things despite spending years watching this stuff and it showed when I started engaging with the sub we’re on right now since people here actually have a more in depth understanding of Marxism. I’ve basically had to start over which is what I’m doing now, I’ve tried to put away all I think I know and started studying Marxist texts, starting from the basics, a few months ago. This is my own personal experience but if you talk to other people here you’ll find it’s not unique at all. Leftist content is legitimately not a good way to learn Marxism, at best if it somehow manages to be devoid of liberalism it’s just an entertaining thing to do in your free time, but even then there’s so little leftist content that is actually revolutionary, exactly for the reasons I described above, that leftist content creators work within the framework and by the rules of petit bourgeois production in the industry of content creation. They are by default driven to produce content that will appeal to western petit bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats since those are the people who consume things like YouTube and podcasts the most. If your concern is to just consume leftist whatever then okay, keep watching it. But if you want to become a Marxist and an actual communist, i.e. the vanguard of the global proletariat, you’ll have to do better than that.
Looking for some peoples’ opinions on here. On a purely practical/strategic level, and not a moral level, do we have to sort of slowly coddle the west into gradually not exploiting the rest of the world, so that they don’t just flip fascist and fucking glass the whole planet with nukes?
Been thinking about that. Are there enough labour hours and resources going to the rich to sorta divert that to all other westerners and make up for the lack of global resource extraction? Can we so dramatically improve lives in non-resource intensive ways, that people in the west feel fine about a lack of iPads or whatever?
20% of Americans are already salivating for a literal apocalypse. Obviously it’d be a lot funnier to just whip that rug out but I think their lack of treats would end carbon based life idk
there is definitely enough going to the super rich that if we cut them off there would be more than enough man hours and stuff to maintain average standard of living without exploitating the global south. Capitalists aren’t known for their reluctance to cut labour costs
I’m betting on the prospect that we can present a better deal than driving from work to big box store to mortgaged house… to maybe 90% of Americans. Peel a large chunk of them off, and the economy will stall out.
Shit, if the Indus River Valley civ had improved sanitation, and if the classical Mayans figured out water filtration, and if permaculture can support 4 people per acre, it really can’t be that hard to make it work.
We forget that so much of the product of exploited labor ends up as waste. This is why I find it really hard to take people seriously when they make the essentialistic claim that citizens of Western countries cannot have their quality of life without exploiting the global South. Maybe under the current structure, but we never wanted to keep that anyway. Or the claim that “Westerners benefit from imperialism so there’s no incentive to replace it”. China, more amd more with each passing year, is a shining counterexample. Their median quality of life has almost achieved parity with America’s, and who are they exploiting?