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I’m glad leftist podcasts make money
Seems like about once every month or so someone will go to the Chapo Trap House Patreon, then multiply the number of patrons times $5 and post about how much they’re making. The “dirtbag left” comedy podcast has been consistently one of the top earners on the site for years now — their subscription revenue totals out to well over $1.5 million annually. Left Twitter then proceeds to have the same tiresome struggle session in which the Chapo hosts are denounced as bourgeois charlatans and shameless Brooklyn grifters.
I can’t stress this enough: How much podcasts make — even socialist ones — is not a political question. It’s not a matter that demands any serious discussion much less the endless amount of discourse that’s devoted to it online. The crux of the socialist critique of inequality isn’t simply that some people have more money than others. It’s that one class owns the means of production and it extracts profit by exploiting the labor of the working class.
Chapo Trap House earns its money from Patreon subscribers who pay them for content that they produce. In Marxist terms, they’d be referred to as “petit bourgeoisie,” like a shopkeeper who owns and operates a little grocery store…
