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.
average salary for a doctor in iraq - ~65k usd per year after tax
1/3 of the estimated income from the deprogram patreon - ~59k usd per year before conversion fees and tax
literally not petit bourgeoisie
make the majority of your income through wage labour - you’re working class
plus he does good work anyway
Does he own his own office? I would accept calling him petit bourgeoisie if he does, but he’s obviously a comrade either way and if he’s bourgeois he’s a very good class traitor.
from the episodes i’ve caught, he works in a hospital
a public one too, pretty sure he works for the health service/department
deleted by creator
Then he’s a worker plain and simple.
yep, as i pointed out in my previous comment
for real, there are lots of ways to have a relatively large salary, but not have a petit bourgeois relationship to the means of production. it has absolutely nothing to do with “salary number above certain threshold” and everything to do with using capital to extract surplus value from the proletariat. Hakim is using the artisan mode of commodity production. this sounds like a “maoist” pseudointellectual who’s going to be duped into blowing up a swingset for the feds if they ever do anything at all.
Holy shit Iraqi doctors are killing it Jesus
Insane to think about how Hakim makes literally over 10 times the average Iraqi salary yet he had his house blown up by an American missile
it’s why i’m a lot softer with privilege (compared to average in their country) when it comes to people from the global south
it doesn’t mean dick when the evil empire comes knocking
I’ve never understood this western ultra perspective of “if you make $1 more than X amount, you’re petite bourgeois.” if someone is a socialist, it doesn’t matter if they are relatively well off under capitalism, because they still see the issues with the system itself. Are these people going to decry Engels because he was a factory owner?
there are some arguments to be made about low revolutionary potential and out-of-touch-ness that comes from being comfortable, but broadly i agree, mostly
Oh for sure, I don’t mean someone can’t be suspect for being a member of the petite bourgeoisie, but class traitors do exist, and as they have access to the resources most of us lack under capitalism, they can be quite valuable in organizing.
This gets into why I think wage versus capital is such a limited model for a class dichotomy. Pick any arbitrarily high wage, and the worker will have more in common with old money, and also have the ability to easily pivot into capital. Some workers are paid arbitrarily high wages, and that’s balanced out largely by underpaid workers. Someone who earns almost as much in capital gains (note: patreon is not capital gains) as they do in wages, and has zero rents extracted, is still a “worker”.
What really stratifies people economically is not how “proximal” they are to capital, but the objective rules of how that capital operates: interest, credit, and debt. If across your lifetime you pay more debt and rents than capital gains, others are impoverishing you by financial means. If across your lifetime you have more capital gains than debt and rents paid, you are impoverishing others. A star athlete or actor who makes millions of dollars a year is closer to the ruling class than a business owner being squeezed into bankruptcy by banks, or a pensioner. If a business executive was paid the same money in salary rather than stock options, they wouldn’t stop being part of the ruling class.
In an age when the plurality of people were factory workers and only a small minority took out loans, “access to MoP” made sense. These days, with a financialized economy, it’s all credit and debt.