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Another rockstar used to perpuate the myth of meritocracy while most musicians have to work two jobs and cant raise a family on there incomes.
Exactly. They find the very occassional artist or musician or writer (usually from within the ranks of the rich already) and showcase them off as a “success”
The billion she has made is a tiny fraction of the billions she has generated for others. And all her concerts, albums, posters, everything, have all been made by exploited workers, some of them probably just as talented and hardworking as she is, but they don’t get to win the creative lottery and so toil away as a roady working 12 hours a day and making minimum wage despite having a decade of technical skills under their belt.
There’s no such thing as a self-made billionaire; she gets the redistribution machine just like the rest of them
Wouldn’t that apply more to the record labels and individuals that use her image for profit? While of course there’s no such thing as a “self-made billionaire”, she’s probably at worst a complicit figurehead. She’s not really the one running Ticketmaster, or abusing the venue staff, or the factory workers who make her records. Plus she’s not really extracting surplus value from the workers that are needed to support her, since the worker is not directly inputting into the final product (in the example of concerts for example), it’s labels squeezing the maximum amount of profit that people will willingly give up to see a pop star. The abuse of those workers only acts to sweeten the pot and extend those margins.
She’s also not directly profiting off of her work and the exploited works of others, only what her labels will graciously give her through contracts.
Would it not make more sense to simply move artists over to a more equal framework but let them continue on as they are? Essentially just take away the private jet, the tickets get cheaper, and the return of value of those supporting workers is increased.
It’s best not to think of these celebrities as people, but as corporate entities with PR teams, legal advisors, sales and advertising departments, teams of ppl dedicated to obscuring their revenue in offshore untaxable accounts, etc.
Plus she’s not really extracting surplus value from the workers that are needed to support her
She gains the equivalent of lifetimes of human labor in a single concert. Even if we avoid the question of whether entertainment workers are involved in ‘production’, at most they should only be remunerated for their labor time; anything more is theft from the finite pool of labor.
I completely agree with you for that first point.
But the second point is where the problems begin. If a person creates a product that is ethical in its own right, meaning they aren’t selling something like water rights, where is the limit drawn for what they can receive for their work? For example, in the case of a concert, if the venue staff, support network, and community are properly compensated for their own labour and input, but the artist still makes millions off of that one appearance, why should they not be allowed to keep what they have made? Essentially, if an artist is able to make several lifetimes of labour value in a single concert (which itself is rare), then so what?
Further, how do you define the artist’s, singer’s, painter’s, comedian’s, etc’s labour time? Wouldn’t that be extremely contradictory to the entire purpose of the subjective value of art? Of course no artist should starve, but if one becomes wildly successful, is it their fault?
If people are willing to give up the amount asked for the art, is it really theft or unethical? It is not a human necessity to go to a specific artist’s concert, and no one is forcing you at gunpoint to pay up. It’s not like water rights being held hostage by a corporation, which people will die without.
Essentially, if an artist is able to make several lifetimes of labour value in a single concert (which itself is rare), then so what? Further, how do you define the artist’s, singer’s, painter’s, comedian’s, etc’s labour time?
The same way we define all workers hours in the labor theory of value, by hours worked. You work 5 hours? You get paid 5 hours, and can exchange it for 5 hours worth of goods / services from the pool. This becomes much simpler when you use labor time, and not other abstractions, as the primary unit of account, and as this pool of labor being conserved and finite, unlike value theories that allow you to create and destroy value out of thin air.
Why should the .000001% of entertainers gain 50k hours of labor value for every one of ours worked? That is nothing more than theft from the finite pool of labor. Even if you don’t believe in labor time equality, then at the most you should put a cap on the multiplier to something like <10x.
If people are willing to give up the amount asked for the art, is it really theft or unethical?
Absolutely it is. Most musicians, artists, etc can’t make enough to survive, so there is no reason that we should be justifying all the value going towards that tiny percentile of entertainers who capitalist media has dubbed worthy to promote and funnel all the value towards.
You work 5 hours? You get paid 5 hours, and can exchange it for 5 hours worth of goods / services from the pool.
Has any AES to date considered all labor hours to be of equivalent value, or even made it an aspirational goal? If you personally think that should be the ultimate goal, you’re welcome to propose it after the revolution has fully succeeded.
she’s destroying the climate more than any prole could ever imagine. she gets the guillotine.
How?
She takes private jets everywhere. Arguably more than anyone else
Of all the types of billionaire, celebrities have the most potential to be decent people. They’re the ones that get put on pedestals to propagate the ‘this could be you too!’ delusion.
Swift is celebrated as a feminist, but she’s not a feminist. She exploits feminism. Every time she’s spoken up about patriarchy, it’s been about her. Every time she champions feminism, it’s been about her, and every time it’s ultimately made her a shitton of money. She’s somehow got an image of being politically outspoken without ever speaking out about anything of wider import than her girlboss ambitions.
Compare this to someone like Jane Fonda, who is far from perfect but threw her career under the bus by loudly opposing the Vietnam war, during peak American jingoism and when American patriarchy was stronger than ever. She shows full well that celebrities can speak up about shit without even giving up their wealth privilege.
But the sickest thing for me is how far people will go to defend her. Swift could gleefully murder animals on stage if she wanted to and her fans would find some cope explanation to make it a ‘good thing actually’ or ‘she’s got no choice’ or ‘the Patriarchy made her do it.’ Like with the amount of private jet travel she does.
Parasocialism is a fuck.
Climate collapse (Taylor’s version)
Does anyone have a link to that tiktok where swift is laughing at a TV showing climate-change-caused disasters. I can’t find it.
Not really one of my biggest issues but still concerning. Swift is obviously no Elon or Jeffy but no one on this earth deserves to be that rich
Genuinely as a question, but what is it is through something that the person wholly created themselves through their sweat, blood, and effort.
For example with game devs (and yes they are bad people for other reasons), but Notch or Scott Cawthorn (before commercialization and merchandizing of their franchises). Wouldn’t the ten’s, if not hundreds of millions they made from their initial products be theirs and theirs alone (after reasonable tax)? They didn’t extract surplus value, their customers came willingly, and the product isn’t some unavoidable monopoly, such as water rights, they printed money off of.
Where would the territory of Marx’s “Sweat of his brow” end?
I do not believe it is physically possible to become as rich as somebody like Notch or Taylor Swift simply on your own. Notch’s wealth primarily comes from his $2.5 billion deal with Microsoft to acquire Minecraft, at that point Minecraft was essentially a symbol of consumerism with a fuck ton of merchandise that was (obviously) being created by other people. Notch would have been making money from licensing fees simply because he owned the IP. He may have made the game but he was still essentially profiting off of the work of other people.
An example of a game developer who works entirely alone and does not sell the rights to the IP of his game to others is RobTop Games, creator of Geometry Dash which is one of (if not the) most popular games on the app store and Steam. He’s living comfortably sure but I doubt he’s worth much more than $5 million. He’s estimated to have grossed $21 million from the game and this is over a 10 year period.
Genuinely as a question, but what is it is through something that the person wholly created themselves through their sweat, blood, and effort.
I don’t think anyone has ever become a literal billionaire purely through their own effort. That amount of money is something I think most people cannot even begin to comprehend.
To use your game dev examples, I am sure some game devs that have stayed truly independent like Eric Barone (stardew valley creator in case anyone doesn’t know) live very comfortable lives. He worked very hard for years on that project and deserves his compensation, but he’s still not remotely close to a billionaire. Notch, like Jennie said, made his money primarily through the MS acquistion. Cawthorn is also absurdly wealthy, but according to some light internet searching is valued around $60 million. Well shy of a literal billion dollars. These are all already outlier success stories that don’t even come close to a billion.
There is no world where a single billionaire should ever exist. I cannot think of a legitimate exception to that statement.
I think that, in general, having a lot of money because you made music a lot of people enjoy is fine
But here we have someone who was raised by a filthy exploitative star system grounded on the monopoly of culture, actively participating in uniformization of said culture, and getting amounts of money that don’t simply make her comfortable but makes her part of a class that causes most structural problems on earth
The thing is almost no celebrity artist that has reached this level of wealth has done so exclusively through their art. Once you have amassed even a moderately large sum of money through being an artist you almost always end up paying someone to manage your money and to multiply it through investments. Invariably when you have become this wealthy you end up becoming a capitalist even if it’s done by someone else or by some investment firm in your name. And more often than not these artists also launch their own brands and various companies selling this or that knowing that they can use their fame for marketing their products. The top 1% of the 1% of artists are no longer just workers, their class interests clearly lie elsewhere.
This applies to all professions where those at the very top make enormous amounts of money compared with the vast majority of the rest in that field. Other examples of this include athletes - if you’re European you will know how absurdly wealthy some soccer players can get (and US comrades can probably give examples from the sports that are popular over there) - and yes even streamers/youtubers exhibit this phenomenon where the small number who make it to the very top of the industry inevitably start to develop bourgeois class interests and never just sit on their money but begin to use it to found companies, buy investment assets, and put it into various stock market funds that are designed to deliver guaranteed returns.
And this happens regardless of your ideological convictions when you first start out. It is unavoidable, else you will not stay wealthy for very long.
The thing is almost no celebrity artist that has reached this level of wealth has done so exclusively through their art.
Maybe not the the level of billionaire, but this is why MF DOOM is still an incredible artist. He was a poor nobody in it for the game, not money. Any money he had just sweetened the deal, but the focus was always the music. Better then the vast majority of “celebrity” artists.
Who?
Billionaires should not exist, there is no exemption to this.
Yeah, I seriously don’t get why Elizabeth Holmes get what she deserved but not Elon Musk. They are both tech scammers btw.
Well if that’s the case, she can go fuck herself
IDC
Women having fat stacks of money isn’t girl power.
Can you explain what exactly do you think is up to be “thought” about it?
