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.
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.
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.