I support the writer’s guild strike because they are not part of the bourgeoisie. The same can’t be said of a lot of these rich actors who own a ton of capital themselves. So on the one hand, it kind of seems like the bourgeoisie is fighting the bourgeoisie on this one. On the other hand, not every actor in the guild is as successful as Tom Cruise, so some of those striking actors are working class.
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Actors are not part of the bourgeoisie. They control no methods of production or productive capital. 5% of them are labour aristocracy at best while the other 95% are living paycheck to paycheck trying to survive.
Bourgeoisie does not mean “rich”, the class structure is built around your position in relation to productive capital. If you do not control the capital, no matter how rich you are, you cannot be part of the bourgeoisie.
If you do not control the capital, no matter how rich you are, you cannot be part of the bourgeoisie.
This presumes that the richer ones won’t still carry the bougie’s water like they do control capital, though. Richie fucks don’t often step down off the gilded plinth, in my experience.
Most of the rich actors that I’ve seen seem to be pretty supportive of this strike luckily, not sure how long that will hold though
Especially notably the women, the majority of whose value as an actor starts to plummet as soon as the first wrinkle or grey hair appears.
And also worth remembering that despite the fact that 90% of the spotlight is taken up by celebrity actors, the vast majority of actors are far from rich.
They’re all working class (investments, property ownership etc notwithstanding), most of them are not rich, and many of them don’t even have steady employment.
It’s a win for capitalists when working class people treat actors, their fellow workers, like they’re all Gwyneth Paltrow. Just like we shouldn’t treat all musicians like they’re Rhianna.
An actor is nothing without a writer. It’s like a soldier without a gun, basically pointless and unable to function.
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A valid point to raise; I’d always figured extras, and small-timers were doing that kind of thing as a ‘between jobs’ endeavor, rather than that actually being a job for them-- and holy fuck, my heart. I can’t imagine trying to scrape it as a small-time actor without other avenues of work lined up.
Extras get paid 100 dollars a day (an extremely paltry sum) for 12 hour workdays IF they’re lucky and manage to find a shoot within 200km of themselves every 3 months or so.
It’s not like most actors have the luxury of having a well paying survival job between getting booked for acting work. The career demands a lot of personal investment and flexibility that the typical 9-5 doesn’t allow. For most it’s a pretty harsh life.
That’s true, the rich like to delude themselves that they are capitalists.
This reflection is truly accurate, if you’re not owner of methods of production, you’re working class.
Good points, but I thought that capital could be just having large sums of money and not necessarily equipment that workers use to produce goods? Would the amount of money the 5% own not be considered capital then?
Not really, because methods of production essentially create that money. For example what is more worthwhile? A machine that creates products worth 1 million dollars a year, or a million dollars cash? Obviously the machine as it allows a capitalist to essentially endlessly fill their pockets.
Capital trumps money every single time (money can also be used to purchase capital but itself is not capital). It can be used as investment as well, which acts as capital because it accumulates interest and return, turning it into productive capital. But money itself is not capital.
only 2% of actors even make enough money from the profession to sustain themselves. The most prominent actors may get to become bourgeois themselves, eventually owning studios or becoming producers, but in reality the vast majority of the actors are proles and those are the ones who need this strike the most. Just look at the full credits of any movie you like and you’ll see at least ten times more “Unknown Actors”, than “Tom Cruises”.
Even if actors as a profession are more prominent in the public mind than UPS drivers or script writers, it doesn’t make their class bourgeois and this is still an organised labour class issue and any demand for better conditions with direct action such as strikes should be supported. Besides that there’s also the pragmatic aspect of showing proletarians worldwide what can be achieved through organised labour.
One point I haven’t seen yet is how high-profile strikes like this get media attention, and how people we’d like to bring around to communism perceive that and communists’ reactions to it.
We want labor actions to be popular. We want to be positively associated with labor action, and known as the ones who will go to the mat for workers. We don’t want to be libs who may cheer at first but quickly hem and haw and undermine.
As far as the rich actors go, sure. But plenty of labor orgs have wealthier people at the top running them. Something like less than 5% of SAG-AFTRA members make a living acting. The studios are also trying to make it so that even the lowest paid actors (one-liners) are giving away rights to their “likeness” so they can be replaced by AI. That’s predatory af.
The film industry is much more than A-list bourgeois actors. The acting industry is mostly composed of overworked wage earners who also are working at Starbucks, restaurants, temping, teaching, etc. just to get by. Under capitalism and in the Hollywood system it’s mostly a petite-bourgeois trade (hence being a guild, not a union), but the strike still has the ability to raise some class consciousness.
Plus a major arm of the US propaganda machine being shut down for the foreseeable future is an objectively good thing.
Plenty of labor org’s have wealthier people running them
This part merits plenty of discussion more broadly imo.
This doesn’t change the fact that this labor action is good, striking now is a great move for sag aftra. Creating a class divide between union leadership and union rank and file is one of the most effective capitalist tools to undermine union solidarity. Cohesion is the only thing keeping any union standing; leftists should get and remain vigilant about this in the coming months and years as labor action becomes more and more prominent in America.
Big ups to the UAW for unseating incumbent leadership earlier this year, for example
The rich actors aren’t bourgeoisie because they get paid millions, most of them are bourgeoisie because they take those millions and reinvest in capital. The rich actors aren’t the ones who make billions in profit like the companies, they’re just compensated much better than other actors because they more bargaining power individually
Also, all the reporting I’ve heard has described SAG as union?
Yep. It’s an issue within SAG too because some of the wealthier actors end up becoming producers as well. Like every org it’s got a ton of things about it that the working-class members take issue with, but it’s good that there’s unity here in this moment.
SAG stands for Screen Actor’s Guild. It’s a trade guild. People and journalists calling it a labor union are incorrect and conflating the two terms. (Or maybe I’m incorrect? Guild is is the name but they call themselves a labor union? Idk what the government considers them.)
Now “spiritually” they may aspire to operate as a union, but because of the nature of the career, a national org representing actors can’t really be considered a labor union. Not legally anyway.
What is the difference? SAG-AFTRA themselves on their website says they’re a union, I’m not finding anything in the first page that calls them a guild, do you have any reading?
My mistake. Sorry about that. They call themselves a union on their website. But… it’s confusing because of their name and the nature of the career. I’m having trouble finding any official federal classification other than just taking their word for it.
In America, the legal difference is that labor unions are founded under one employer (e.g. Starbucks employees). Trade unions represent a trade of laborers (e.g. Boilermakers). Guilds are similar to trade unions but they represent independent contractors.
Because actors don’t just work for one employer but work by the gig, if SAG is classified as a union and not a guild, I would speculate they’d be classified as a trade union not a labor union. But I don’t know.
I’ve been trying to parse through these definitions lately since I’ve been trying to organize my workplace. One huge barrier to laborers organizing is this new trend of blatantly misclassifying employees as independent contractors like where I work. Because of that, the government doesn’t recognize us as a labor union even if we had the minimum votes for forming one. We’d have to become a guild.
These official categories really just feel like arbitrary barriers that are intended to nerf collective bargaining.
All good, just wasn’t sure if I was searching right or needed to switch search engines
Is it “some” of those striking actors or “almost all” of those striking actors that aren’t tom cruise level wealthy?
Just one (highly publicized) front in a larger battle from my standpoint. Nevermind that they’re also in solidarity with the writers, which both is great for the writers (who are usually paid like shit) but also more than that because the idea of multiple strikes in solidarity is completely alien to modern American political imagination
crosses fingers UPS strikes
It’s like a tiktok I saw recently about delivery drivers that were on strike for a company. The comments were saying “you make X (maybe like $40+)amount per hour, that’s really good and you get raises consistently, why go on strike? Is nothing good enough for you?” To which the delivery driver replied “I personally make enough and am satisfied with MY working conditions, but the new people are making x (I think it was $16.50) per hour and that’s unacceptable. Solidarity is what matters above all” that’s how I view this. I’ve been to a few standup shows and talked to comedians after shows, they say pretty consistently that a writing job for TV isn’t as much of a draw as it was back in the day, pay is awful to start and most writers barely get credit for their writing, it’s just associated with the success of the show, it’s tough to prove yourself as a consistently good writer because you’re always in someone’s shadow who will inevitably take credit for the success of whatever program it is. If it’s a failure, the writers sucked. It’s a Catch 22. Even on a comedy podcast, one of the hosts said that he’s been an extra in movies and Tv and ads so many times but there’s usually no credit for them being there. They get a few bucks that day and hope for more work
Part of me wonders if people will use this exact sort of thinking to discredit the strike, without even knowing that most of them barely make money to survive.
Please do the bare minimum of research, the SAG is huge, vast vast majority of the actors in it are not famous superstars making millions (and even they are still deserving of being in a union). One of the major contention points is the studio’s proposal for AI for background actors is they will get scanned once, get paid like 1k dollars and the studio will own their image and voice for like forever
Please do the bare minimum of research
What do you think they’re doing by posting in communism 101?
Asking for other people to do the research for them, you can learn this info by reading or listening to like 1 news article
Ok great yeah please go listen to the mainstream media to get your understanding of labor action 😵💫
This is a question that a lot of less politically conscious people have, the answer is obvious if you know it, this place should be for sharing that information with people who are seeking it. Introductory info, 101, no??
Get your opinion? No, but mainstream media will present most of the basic facts if you actually read the article, they tend to just deceptively edit headlines and shit with stuff that’s harder to lie about like this, it’s not ike this is news about the war or anything
Edit: like this is 6 paragraphs down in the nbc article, it should lead you not to make assumptions like the guild is just rich actors or something:
SAG-AFTRA was formed in 2012 after the merger of the Screen Actors Guild (founded in 1933) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The combined guild represents roughly 160,000 performers, from Oscar-winning A-list stars, such as Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, to radio personalities and television presenters.
The whole point of a 101 community is to propagandize to people who are interested in leftist politics.
If you are sending people to the sixth paragraph of an NBC news article instead of just answering the question with leftist spin (i.e. extra truth that nbc leaves out), you have totally missed the point.
Especially when you have a big issue that’s hot in the news that has generates more interest than normal.
It’s not that asking “is supporting [x] union the right move?” is bad, it’s that the framing of the question implied that famous actors make up a significant amount of the union. I don’t see how you come to that conclusion if you’ve done any sort of cursory reading or listening into the topic. This isnt even communsim101, it’s like media literacy 101 to just look into a situation for like at least 5 minutes to get extremely basic facts. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask people to do that before posting
edit: further, what truth is nbc leaving out with regards to this question? If they were asking if the 100k+ poorer actors were just throwing a temper tantrum and turning down a good deal, I would get it, they have uncritically been repeating studio exec lies, but essentially they asked a question that the lib media themselves is not even trying to lie about
The giant lib media companies are literally intermingled with the exact same capitalists that run the studios and streaming services that the actors are striking against. I cannot understand why anyone would think it’s a good idea to send obviously newbie people to go read what they have to say about it, even if one article you have found doesn’t exhibit obvious lies.
Maybe it’s because I’m a big sports person too, and often see how people react whenever those unions act? The average American has no concept of this. People literally see this and think ‘oh wow tom cruise thinks he should make even more money, screw him give me back my shows’. That’s a real thing lots of people think in America! That’s the kind of thought pattern you get after uncritically living within the mainstream media ecosystem in America. It’s not the person deceptively framing the question, it’s the person relating the question through the lens they have been made to have by living in that ecosystem.
When I say ‘mainstream’ I don’t mean it in the qannon conspiracy way, I mean these companies are literally owned and operated by the capitalists you are fighting against. They are absolutely not apolitical actors. Why would you expect them to report on this fairly? Is it even fair to put that info in the sixth paragraph instead of the second?
It’s an own goal to send people there instead of explaining to them why the common perception of these ‘rich people unions’ is complete bunk.
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Lib news is fine if you know what you are looking for. If you are asking “is the actor strike good” you don’t know what to look for.
You’re gonna get “both sides make good points” from lib news on that. So why tell newbies they should go read that instead of us? It’s pointlessly hostile, spiting ourselves for no reason
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“Hey there fledgling leftist who is asking to be propagandized, unfortunately I do not deem your question worthy of my time, please go read CNN instead”
Is the painfully dumb to me sorry. Simply saying nothing would be a significant improvement. In a normal discussion, sure. This is not a normal discussion, it’s 101 for a reason I feel like I am taking crazy pills here it’s like some people are actively hostile to the idea of growing leftism, which has always been true, but also they decide to hang out in a place called ‘communism 101’ for some fking reason
The people who own these companies ARE THE BOSSES that the actors are striking against!
