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Would you consider actors to be working class? (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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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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[–] 0 points 1 week ago (1 child)

So if a person owns a car but doesn't use it for any small-business purposes, do you think that still makes that person bourgeois? I also think that in a settler-colony, skin color matters a lot. There are homeless white people out there who are not revolutionary, let's just say (for various reasons). But yeah, not owning a car, not owning a house, not having any kind of leadership role at work, that definitely makes a person more open to revolutionary thinking. I knew a guy just like this at my last job—a "skilled" blue collar technician who seemingly had nothing but a work van. I guess he had some land in the woods (bourgeois) and he told me he was supposedly building a house there (he's white, his dad's a carpenter who owns his own business), but he also said that he had slept in his work van on cold winter nights with the engine on. He was also super racist. One of the first things he ever said to me was "nobody wants to work anymore." And this was two years ago, long after that phrase had gotten pretty stale.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    I think there is - not a scale, but a sort of spectrum - of class relations that every individual falls somewhere on. And there are pure expressions of those class relations, but also imperfect ones, and it's senseless to draw hard lines within the spectrum when the dialectical position is accepting the spectrum exists as it does (this is a bit of a non-sequitor, but I believe a very similar thing could be said of other dialectic contradictions, such as gender).

    I often think of my father - I was not born into a wealthy family nor did I live a wealthy life growing up. My dad was self-employed as an auto-mechanic and was what I would call a "failed businessman". We lived in a modest (maybe around 300-400 sqft plus a basement and attic?) single-family home in a Midwestern city suburb. He was a co-founder of a natural gas automobile conversion company. He lost tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars on that and just bad stock market investments. Our family home (and only property) has a leaky roof, rusty pipes and constantly backs up with sewage, and we can't afford to get any of it fixed because the family is thousands of dollars in debt and behind on property taxes.

    I say this just to say that he is not wealthy, but he is also not Working Class nor Proletarian. He is Petty-Bourgeois, in some ways maybe even Big-Bourgeois. This isn't reflected in our standard of living (and certainly won't be reflected in my inheritance when he kicks the bucket, which will be nothing or close to it), but it does inform his politics. He's not openly racist or homophobic or a conspiracy theorist or anything like that, he's not a QANON or MAGA guy, but he still won't shut the fuck up about Ross Perot, he likes all the Libertarian grifters, he wants fewer regulations and more subsidies and simpler taxes for business owners. He's afraid of "thugs" and their music, their culture, their neighborhoods; he simultaneously hates cops when they inconvenience him but is almost gleeful when they police others.

    It's not about virtue or oppression but about studying how a person's relationship to Capital informs their politics.

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