Like on principle, I know that the writer’s and actor’s guild and union shit is all good. I don’t think all the success from a movie or show should go 100% to the company, but it still feels weird saying that a Hollywood actor is working class.

What do y’all think? Am I just being a dumbass?

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[–] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

Depends on how they use their money.

For the sake of simplicity I'm going to restrict this analysis to "famous actors".

The job of acting is working class, however it pays so highly that the actor has enough money to invest into things making them bourgeoisie or petty-bourgeoisie.

If they work doing acting and only use their acting money for life, without investing it into finance etc, they are working class.

Most of them do not restrict themselves to this, meaning they are not.

Determining who falls into which category can not be determined, therefore you have to go on a generalisation, are the majority investing their money into other things as business owners or stocks? I think they are, and therefore I say they are not proletarian. The ones that do not do this are proletarian however, but I can not determine who those are with any measure of certainty.

I would also go so far as to say that they themselves become a business if famous enough. Their public face, their voice, they are a brand. This too is not the proletarian experience.

Non-famous actors neither get paid enough nor have the same circumstances as the famous actors. They are all proletarian, until they're not, at worst they're petty-bourgeoisie who recognise themselves as a brand but have not built it into a true business yet.

I will go a further step and say that people truly invested in advancing the arts trend towards a disdain for the interference of money in their pursuit of furthering the arts. This tends to lean a lot of those people towards marxist sympathies.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

    they themselves become a business if famous enough. Their public face, their voice, they are a brand. This too is not the proletarian experience.

    Yes thank you, this is absolutely essential and no one else brought it up. A famous actor does not figure in the market as a seller of labor-power but as a seller of their special commodity that is their brand and image. Hence they are bourgeois, maybe petite-bourgeois at best. The mere fact that they occasionally must labor does not at all make them proletarian.

    A commodity is not only produced but reproduced, and in a market it could be reproduced by anyone with sufficient means of production — this is the foundation of the law of value! It is competition which makes the law of value possible, because it causes price to tend toward value, statistically, in the average. The law of value does not and cannot apply to a monopoly. When an actor is famous enough, they have created their own unique commodity which stands apart from the common labor-power.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Assuming they don't have employees or a team or invested capital I think they can kinda be like artisans but really really really rich ones. The artisan's fame and personal brand can have a similar effect. We don't really talk much about that class in the modern day but it's definitely still around.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Yeah I suppose artisan is the closest thing. Though I think of artisanry as an aspirational tendency inherent to competition itself, which spans all classes, even if historically it may have once formed a class.

    A commodity owner who is new to the market is happy if their commodity is validated (through sale) as identical and exemplary of that type of commodity. For example, if a baker manages to sell a cake at the market rate, their labor validated not only as abstract labor, but as the particular labor of baking. Their labor is assimilated both with abstract universal labor of all industries, and also with the abstract particular labor of their particular industry. But competition from other bakers puts a downward pressure on their own labor. Thus it eventually becomes important to emphasize not similarity, but difference from the competition. That this happens not only with artisans, but also with the largest corporations in the world such as Apple who sell their Different Computers™, is obvious to everyone alive today, but the connection to basic Marxian categories is still often missed.

    Purchasers of commodities (mainly capitalists), for their part, always have the opposite tendency of artisans. The interest of the buyer is to deny the artisan’s difference and to emphasize their interchangeability by any other in their industry.

    This leads directly to the capitalist tendency to proliferate brands, e.g. 100 types of essentially identical peanut butter in the grocery aisle, which becomes so commonplace that people accustomed to this struggle to understand a socialist society that doesn’t demonstrate this excess.

    Anyway in theory it might be possible that an actor works as a pure artisan, but in practice it never happens that way. The reason an actor builds a brand is for upward social mobility so that they can become bourgeois, just the same aspiration as any petty bourgeois.

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