• Pezevenk [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Hasan is not an employee of Twitch lol he just basically "rents" a platform. It's kinda like someone renting a building for their convenience store, or a doctor renting the apartment they use as their office, except the price a streamer pays is smaller.

    A worker who owns their own means of production is just someone who makes shit.

    Yes, he does "make shit", he makes streams, that's why people give him money, to make shit. They give money to him, he doesn't get a wage from Twitch, Twitch just gets a small cut. Something similar happens with advertisers. Twitch's employees are not the streamers (who could just migrate to some other platform anyways somewhat easily), they are the ~6000 actual employees of the company. The streamers are basically just collaborators of the platform. And it's by definition petite bourgeois.

      • Pezevenk [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        ...by the marxist definition of petite bourgeois? Can people read anything? It was a category originally made to describe semi autonomous peasants, artisans crafting products and selling them, small scale merchants and owners who may employ someone but also work alongside their workers. The important distinction is that these people are not doing wage labour, and they're not employed by anyone, unlike the working class, but also they are small scale enough that they aren't removed from the process of production like the bourgeois who are capable of employing a large number of people. For some reason people here seem to think employing someone is a condition. It is not a condition, in fact the more people they employ the closer they are to regular bourgeois. I don't understand how so many people here complaining about this. Does your favorite streamer have a boss? No. Do they receive a wage? No. Are they employed by someone in general? No, they are self employed. Who is primarily responsible for the content they put out? Them. How do they get paid? Profit from the content they produce. They're not workers. They are petite bourgeois. Of course this is taken as a slur here and not an actual social category so it makes some people upset but it is what it is.

          • Pezevenk [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie. In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society.

            -Communist manifesto

            No one had fought more fanatically in the June days for the salvation of property and the restoration of credit than the Parisian petty bourgeois – keepers of cafes and restaurants, marchands de vins [wine merchants], small traders, shopkeepers, handicraftsman, etc. [...] Salvation of property! But the house they lived in was not their property; the shop they kept was not their property; the commodities they dealt in were not their property. Neither their business, nor the plate they ate from, nor the bed they slept on belonged to them any longer. It was precisely from them that this property had to be saved – for the house-owner who let the house, for the banker who discounted the promissory note, for the capitalist who made the advances in cash, for the manufacturer who entrusted the sale of his commodities to these retailers, for the wholesale dealer who had credited the raw materials to these handicraftsman. Restoration of credit! But credit, having regained strength, proved itself a vigorous and jealous god; it turned the debtor who could not pay out of his four walls, together with wife and child, surrendered his sham property to capital, and threw the man himself into the debtors’ prison, which had once more reared its head threateningly over the corpses of the June insurgents.

            The petty bourgeois saw with horror that by striking down the workers they had delivered themselves without resistance into the hands of their creditors

            -The Class Struggles in France

            There's not many places where he just has a dictionary type definition, there's many things like that however in many places in his writings.