Gamestop, Reddit, and the Failure of the Bourgeois Left

Early this year, shares in the company GameStop (ticker symbol GME) shot up in value at a wild and unexpected rate, bringing enormous amounts of capital into the hands of a select few day traders and snatching billions of dollars from a group of hedge funds who had been betting on the continued decrease of the value of the shares.

The meteoric rise of GameStop shares did not take place by pure chance, however. On Reddit, a community of day traders who make up the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, whose members pride themselves on sinking money into high risk/high reward stocks, began to notice that several hedge funds had been shorting GameStop, leading to a continuous decline in the price of its shares, and, according to the users of r/WallStreetBets, the undervaluing of GameStop stock.

With mixed motivations – partly out of a desire to hurt the massive hedge funds to satisfy their moral resentment of them, and partly to enrich themselves – they hatched a plan that gained widespread support across the site: the users of r/WallStreetBets would buy GameStop stock en masse, thus driving up its price astronomically, costing the hedge funds billions and making a tidy profit themselves.

In January 2021, the plan truly took off, with GameStop hitting a record high of $347.51 per share, where the price had been below $3 less than a year previously. This sparked a flurry of attention in both the more traditional mass media and on other social media platforms, with some bemoaning the terrible consequences they alleged would occur, while many cheered on what they saw as ordinary people fighting back against the parasitic elites.

However, closer examination of the GameStop incident exposes the nonsense at the heart of this romanticised view of things. For one, massive investors have thrown millions of dollars into GameStop stock, including some of the hated hedge funds, and even Elon Musk, the poster-boy of capital himself, has publicly celebrated the actions of r/WallStreetBets. Furthermore, the true beneficiaries of this are not at all proletarian – aside from the handful of working-class individuals who will scrape meagre profits from the incident, the rewards will be reaped by those who had the capital necessary to purchase large numbers of shares, namely the petty bourgeois day traders who make up the core of r/WallStreetBets, and the bourgeois investors who hopped on the bandwagon after GameStop began soaring, not to mention the other hedge funds already circling their stricken brethren. The obviousness of this fact can hardly be overstated – the figurehead of the entire movement, who goes by the username “DeepFuckingValue”, has made millions, but only because he was capable of investing tens of thousands of dollars at the beginning of the scheme.

The foolishness of these “socialist” cheerleaders goes beyond the above observations. In their enthusiasm for this redistribution of capital among the owners of private property, they have gone so far as to encourage proletarians, even those on the edge of total ruin, to throw their money into what is undeniably a speculative bubble. In one particularly egregious example, someone whose father had died as an indirect result of the financial crash of 2008, and who understandably held great resentment for Wall Street, was applauded for sinking everything they had, which was very little to begin with, into the GameStop bubble. While a small number of bourgeois and petty bourgeois investors will profit enormously, and a handful of working-class people will get out with a little more money in their pockets, as is the case with any speculative bubble the vast majority of those who invested, a body largely proletarian in character following the massive media attention focused on the event, will lose their whole investment, and in many cases will be ruined. The thoughtless excitement of these “socialists,” perhaps fuelled by a frustrated streak of adventurism, has harmed many of the proletarians they claim to be advocates of, and shows that these so-called socialists are nothing more than petty bourgeois activists whose enmity is directed not at capital and class in general, but at the bloated titans of commerce and finance. The beneficiaries of the words and actions of these “socialists” are the petty bourgeoisie, whose fate in the development of capitalism is to be proletarianised and have their property subsumed by the massive concerns as they inexorably monopolise the market.

The entire GameStop debacle has exposed with a glaring light a sad failure of “the left” – they have internalised their own propaganda about “the 1%” and the “99%”, and now large segments of their movement view class struggle not in terms of the proletariat seizing power and abolishing class relations, but rather in the amorphous entity known as “the people” fighting against “the 1%”, the largest of the big bourgeoisie. This view of the world is absolutely incorrect – while the petty bourgeoisie and the smaller elements of the bourgeoisie proper do in fact have interests which often oppose those of the big bourgeoisie, that does not mean they align with those of the proletariat, whose interest demands the abolition of property. This is a proposal which even the boldest forms of petty bourgeois radicalism cannot abide – when they claim to, deeper analysis of what they call for gives lie to this assertion – for the ideology of the petty bourgeois does not seek the abolition of class itself, but the universalisation of petty bourgeois conditions. Any “socialists” whose programme involves the advancement of petty bourgeois causes have nothing to offer the proletariat but empty words and foolish activism, and they should be given all the respect which their behaviour accords to them.

The failure of leftist sloganeering has been laid bare by the GameStop incident. All the rhetoric which heaped fury upon “the 1%” never reflected the true reality of class relations as they exist under the capitalist mode of production (or under any other mode of production, for that matter), and the anti-worker consequences, which are the natural conclusion of this line of propaganda, should make it clear to anyone who pays attention that it should be abandoned immediately by those who still cling to this and other varieties of idealist nonsense. All this makes one thing clear – the rhetoric and propaganda of the workers’ movement must be based not upon what slogans can best rally a broad coalition, but rather upon those which reflect the social relations of production and the class dynamic as they really are. Anything else, regardless of how many signatures or new reading-circle members it may garner, will only lead to ruin and ignominy, as all opportunism inevitably must.