Are YouTubers Bourgeois? Well...

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Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
3:41 Class Analysis: The Basics
4:12 The Proletariat
4:41 The Petty-Bourgeoisie
5:22 The Bourgeoisie
5:56 Mixed Class Relations & the Primary Source of Income
6:41 Material Class Vs Ideology & (False) Consciousness
7:46 Still Struggling? Recommendations
8:24 Categorizing YouTubers
8:41 1. No-Income YouTubers
9:11 2. YouTubers with Jobs
10:29 3. Petty-Bourgeois YouTubers
11:27 4. Bourgeois YouTubers
12:24 What is to be Done? (with this information)
13:32 Class Traitors & Accountability
15:33 Towards Collectivism
16:42 Further Suggestions
18:03 Acknowledgement
18:29 Special Thanks

[nervoussuffermaker]

Trying to categorizing my own class is always fascinating.
I'm a freelance illustrator and might be proletariat and petite bourgeoisie almost depending on the day. On one hand I do own the means of production and sometimes I earn money not from my labor specifically, but from people buying an already made product (like a print). I could start creating something and people would buy it or subscribe to patreon or such for me to continue doing so, at which point I would consider it not selling my labor, but the product I made, making me essentially a one man factory (?). The fact that many things can be "manufactured" from start to finish on a home pc with a very respectable quality by one person, makes some of the categorizing pretty weird.
But on the other hand the main bulk of my income currently is selling labor to contribute or fully create products for other people and companies, which makes me a regular worker with the only difference of me being able to work from home, because the hardware tools are relatively cheap (and software tools can easily be pirated) and the work lends itself very nicely for working from home.

Probably doesn't matter too much since ideologically I'm aligned with the interesets of the working class anyway, and improvmenet in their material conditions will probably impact me positively as well.

[WhySoSquid]

One of a few things I really look forward to after about three *ridiculous* weeks in a row is getting caught up with Paul uploads...it's like a warm hug 😇

Many thanks, as always, comrade! o7

[thguy]

You sir deserve WAY more attention than you are currently getting.

[TheJayman]

That was about as sober a breakdown as one could ask for.

[marting]

Your videos are always uplifting to me, thanks for giving me a bit of hope for the future.

[mcnt]

Love the "NO NO IM NOT BOURGEOIS, PLEASE DONATE YOUR MONEY TO THE PEOPLE'S CHARITY TRUST ME BRO" self awareness of how the video might come across as

[SashaClaudeee]

Very informative, for understanding both class and how weird stock footage is

[ChipsNsalsita]

Nice break down. I relate the parts of your video where you explain "a class material reality doesn't always align with the ideology a person from a particular class holds" to political organizing. The people you organize around a particular issue with can surprise you with the ideologies they hold. Sometimes good surprises, and sometimes not! 😅

[mihirjain]

My dad is a petty bourgeois and a conservative he and me had fights before because of it. Oh well it is what it is. I just like your videos so much, I look forward to them. Your voice is very soft too so that's even better. Keep it up comrad, we will if not this generation then next if not that one then the next one to it but we will. Solidarity from India, Long Live The Global proletariat, Long Live The Global Recolution.

[KingOfShenanigan]

After the 15:00 minutes mark describes Humanist Report & Secular Talk perfectly.🎯

[socialistsolidarity]

This is a great explanation of what petty bourgeoisie is. When I speak with those who consider themselves "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", I always ask if they can survive and meet all their essential needs without working and wage labour, and then things get really interesting. 🤣

[tymanung]

There are more intermediate classes
1) Lower + middle management
2) Self employed artists, artisans, etc.
3) Professionals
A) Purely self employed
B) Purely employed by others
C) Combination of both ( doctors who
have own practice but also work in
private or gov. hospital, etc.)

[BolshevikBurgeoning]

This shit bangs. Totally applies to most of leftube. Thanks for making the crit - self-crit!

[whythelongface]

The revolutionary path is difficult, and disincentivised at every point. Thanks for your work.

All conflict is decided by the people, not the technology or equipment, is a common saying by commies, but now, technology itself has been used to disperse ideology in tailor-made fashion; we have great hurdles to overcome and make good use of all available outlets to uphold proletarian consciousness. To break free of escapism, despondency, and see clearly our problems, our livelihood, and then set ourselves upon the task of liberation.

[axlgzrdmattick]

always excited for a marxist paul video

[antoniovaccaro]

You mentioned in passing the possibility of worker's cooperatives running YouTube channels. What would be their class position in the current framework. A collective of petty-bourgeois?

[djohpbobdobbersonesquire]

Your analysis of youtubers, regardless of how much they earn from their labor, is that they do not own the means of production. They do not control or manage the platform that may or may not censor their labor. Obviously, if the videos are produced by a production company, there's a different dynamic, but the person doing the presenting and whatnot is still doing labor, and YouTube and others still profit off of their labor.

[alpacario]

Loved that bit at the end about Socialist YouTubers who become neolibs after gaining money. There are... quite a few too many that come to mind there.

[tasfa]

I think it's a bit more complicated than what you presented here. Youtube has almost an informal employer-employee relation to the content creators. You're not technically forced to produce content, they don't tell you how much you must produce and if you decide to produce nothing there's no contract being breached. At the same time, youtube decides whether you can monetize your content, how much you get from it, they take their share, they decide whether and how it's distributed and if they wish to put you out of a job, they can. In some ways, the relationship between youtube and youtubers is a bit like the relationship between Uber and Uber drivers. They're not technically Uber's employees, they can technically decide how much and when they work and what work they take up, but in the end they're completely reliant on the company to get work, to get paid, they end up having to work anyway out of necessity and they're done if Uber decides not to give work, which is dependent on reviews by costumers, which is also kind of like how youtube operates. The analogy breaks down when you consider bigger channels which employ other people, which work as enterprises of their own that exist outside of youtube and use youtube only as a means of distribution but could potentially survive without it. I'm thinking of InfoWars, for example. They're more like a take-away restaurant that relies on UberEats to make the distribution, I guess. Or perhaps at that point it's useless to insist on the analogy. Anyway, I don't disagree with your perspective entirely, I just think it's a bit more complex because it isn't really clear what are the informal but implicit employer-employee relationships, what constitutes the means of production and who owns them (for example, can you really claim you even own your channel?? I think you clearly don't) and maybe, altho there are general tendencies and you can divide channels up theoretically, you'd have to analyze case by case to determine these things. Is your channel and your relationship to youtube anything like, say, the Daily Wire's relationship to youtube? What can be said about even huge content creators' exclusivity being bought by platforms, like what happened with Joe Rogan and Spotify? Does that in some way make JR Spotify's employee? I think these are perhaps new manifestations of class relations and we don't yet have the theory to properly explain them. (Or maybe we do and I'm ignorant)

[TheMilli]

This might be a dumb question, but since you mentioned worker coops it made me wonder what the class position of workers in a coop is. They absolutely aren't bourgeois, since they don't employ and exploit labour (although some coops do employ contract labour in order to keep the number of owners down - but that still wouldn't be the primary way they earn their living). However, since they do own means of production and working that means of production is their main source of income, doesn't that make them not proletarian? But then again, calling them petty bourgeois just feels wrong, since their class interests still seem to me to be closer to the working class than the bourgeoisie. So, are they a class of their own? Or am I missing something?