On a serious note his ultracomm ideology, nihilism, and the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever heard him speak positively about another leftist made me doubletake what I was reading.
His saying he was going to help the USA prosecute Hakim for communism when he’s nowhere close to communist makes me want to keep a healthy distance. Like I can appreciate some takes but no way I want to engage.
Do you mean Hasan? Hakim isn’t Statesian.
Yes I do, sorry!
Who is the third “he”referring to here?
Hakim
Hakim isn’t a Marxist-Leninist?
I haven’t seen his content in a while, what makes him not communist?
Is BadEmpanada the one true leftist or does he just need to grow the fuck up? Find out next time on Breadtube Slop Z.
He just made an hour long video about FD’s latest video and now he’s running victory laps…
Even if i agreed with some of the stuff he said about FD, the guy acknowledged fault and said some valid opinions, no idea why BE is trying to stir up more drama.
Because drama drives clicks and clicks means profit. Simple material analysis.
Most of these online people were never communist to begin with. Don’t know much about Samsen, but last I checked he is a generic lib making videos about some reactionary gamer. For most of the breadtube/nebula posse, being the “left” was just marketing and sub-culture appeal akin to being a skater or hipster rather than questions of fundamental political economic importance such as critical support for flawed but nonetheless anti-hegemonic forces.
Secondly, it isn’t true that bad is a nihilist. He is against entryism as it is tactic that hasn’t once achieved anything of note. I really wish Americans would stop falling for the idea that if they just vote for the DSA entryist candidate, then socialism will happen. Mamdani, AOC, Sanders, and a number of other supposedly “left” Democrat electoral options were either all imperialists from the start or got coopted. You will not change the system from within, it’ll change you. This isn’t nihilism, it’s just facts.
Edit: not that I’m big on the guy personally. I think supporting the US-aligned Zelensky puppet regime, palling around with the lausan collective, being a transphobe, and doing anti-Maduro propaganda amid imperial aggression against Venezuela are all quite damning reasons for why he shouldn’t be considered a comrade. He is good at bullying lib entryist advocates and being an opportunist, that is all.
The contradiction is that once they start making serious money from this (to the point that they can start considering this can be their job) then it’s in their interest to keep that not only going, but growing as well. More viewers = more payers = more money.
This places them squarely in the petite-bourgeoisie, objectively speaking. But because of parasocial identification whenever I talk about this phenomenon there’s always someone that says “but not my guy though! He’s good!”
I’m being a bit mean above and I don’t want to antagonize anyone on lemmygrad but it’s just objectively true. It’s in their interest to make more money and thus they engage in the same process as any other capitalist venture: if you don’t grow, you get eaten by someone else. I’m not saying it’s good or bad inherently, it’s just how it is.
And likewise it’s in their interest to keep doing this since it’s a livelihood, and a pretty cozy one at that: you just make videos and streams. There’s worse jobs out there.
When Lenin said “the capitalist will sell us the rope we will hang him with” he was saying many, many things - and none of them literal. But one of the things this phrase means is also that capitalism has its upsides, much like these content creators can have some upsides. They can make a good video once in a while. They can start bringing some people over to new ideas. There were, in the Bolsheviks, actual infiltrators who were also very good organizers - they needed to be, if they wanted to be good infiltrators (otherwise you’d just give them the mind-numbing paper-pushing job far from anyone and they would never get a chance to actually infiltrate you).
But they also won’t stop selling ropes.
I’m aware that people who make a living from the internet have an incentive to clickbait and appeal to the lowest common denominator to maximise views and thus earning potential. Nonetheless, I maintain that the posse who made being super into analysing disney movies and meaningless internet drama into a career were never left to begin with and always did their anti-reactionary stuff from a liberal democratic framework of there being nothing wrong with the current system.
When Lenin said “the capitalist will sell us the rope we will hang him with”
Hate to be that guy… but, actually there is no proof Lenin ever said that.
lol I imagined as much, it felt too edgy to be something he would have said. But like all anti-communist propaganda it ends up sounding cool as fuck, and it does have many ways to read it.
I’ve heard the same quote attributed to Lenin, Marx and even Mao, which is what made me wonder if it were real at all.
some guys apparently looked into it https://checkyourfact.com/2019/11/29/fact-check-karl-marx-capitalist-hang-sold-rope-quote/. i skimmed but apparently it was made up in many different ways, including one attributed to solzenitzin lol (can never spell that name right). but it’s older than his 1975 elocution.
It’s weird to see all of them double down so much on the “US has no national interest in supporting Israel” thing, as if countries don’t act in ruling class interest, and the US workers haven’t made a deal with their ruling class for a (formerly smoother) ramp up into their asset market
Just totally freezing your understanding of unequal exchange and excluding the works that show the depth of dependency beyond stolen labor time (denial & theft of productive capacity). I wonder if it has anything to do with what they want to say about China
At least it’s a little bit more interesting than the old “lenin said investment was imperialism”
What’s with the Bosnian flag?
He wants us to win the world cup, obviously
See his latest main channel video, it investigates the Bosnian war.
The weird thing about internet fame and validation is it can (when ignoring the noise related to botnets and such things) be a sign of how popular your particular messaging is. But that’s about it. It doesn’t inherently mean anything about the correctness of what you say.
However, whether it’s this guy or other “content creators”, no one is immune to letting the validation go to their head and taking agreement as scientific corroboration. But if we want to be scientific socialists, we have to learn to check ourselves and each other on such matters. I think it’s easy enough to avoid it most of the time when you’re the one in the room whose messaging is unpopular and you’re clawing uphill to be heard at all. But as soon as you start getting the “fans”, there’s a danger you start taking their liking of what you say as intrinsic validity of it. And this can contribute to more and more egoistical and poorly thought out “hot takes”. I think this is (one of) the causes of people like him becoming lost in a cycle of sus takes land instead of developing more politically. The mechanism of their sustenance becomes enmeshed with being attention-grabbing rather than being scientific.
I cling to being a pedantic nerd about these things not because I want to bore people, but because it’s a habit that needs to be sustained if we are to navigate the minefield of bougie thought land and come out the other side into building something better. But if your livelihood gets tied up in keeping the spotlight on you, being boring can get you into more trouble than being sloppy.
I cling to being a pedantic nerd about these things not because I want to bore people, but because it’s a habit that needs to be sustained if we are to navigate the minefield of bougie thought land and come out the other side into building something better. But if your livelihood gets tied up in keeping the spotlight on you, being boring can get you into more trouble than being sloppy.
❤️
He was positively talking about Greta thunberg and Maureen galindo more recently,
imo I think we need someone like BE as an avant-garde to bully the rest of the imperial-core pseudo-left about their bs and push the discussion more and more left,
I don’t think every communist should be like that but somone has to yell at the libs in disguise
BE was repeating imperial core propaganda about the “Uyghur genocide” in his “balanced” video about the topic. From start to finish it was basically “well if everybody says it, then it must be true”. Then, because a “famous” “communist” said it, we have to go around and do more work to undo the damage his video did. And I’m supposed to think he’s on my side.
He repeats the same contradictions inherent to any content creator: taking money to say what his audience wants to hear from him. But he seems to think that being terminally irony-poisoned and declaring war against the world somehow extirpates him from that contradiction. He’s no better than any other of those content creators who made “teaching marxism” into their livelihood.
Idk if he called it a genocide, and a fourth of the video was looking into chinese sources i think
