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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Ehh, complicated. Technically most celebrities are much more aligned with the working class than the bourgeois because they are entertainers. They actually do a thing instead of playing make believe with numbers all day. The WGA strike really exposed a lot of the antagonisms between talent and management. But what actually matters here is that normal people, the people we want on our side, listen to celebrities. Obviously Cardi B isn't going to lead the People's Liberation Army of America to victory, but the more people who start to understand exactly how they're being squeezed, the better.
Jiang Qing was an actress tho. I am just saying the Cardi B Cultural Revolution is possible
I know it probably won't happen, but if we go by the heuristic that only the funniest thing possible can happen, the Cardi B Cultural Revolution is one of the highest probability outcomes of the ever intensifying contradictions.
People's Liberation Cardi
Maybe that's the proper marxian analysis, but in practice, the fact that they're selling their public image means that they're much more susceptible to the pressures of conformism than almost any other worker. They have the same anxious mindset of the petty bourgeoisie, but (sometimes) without the capital.
Entertainers are businesses and the business they run is their brand image. It's attached to them personally, but it's still a business.
This is easier to see in "influencers" like Twitch or Youtube than it is for people to notice in television I think.
They still don't create their own work though. Their brand gets them a wage job acting. The bosses are still the ones that dictate what work is to be done.
Twitch streamers directly sell their creative works outside of the wage system. I think that puts them more in line with the artisan class than are movie stars
Only the small ones. Every single streamer of any consequential size for us to be talking about living off it also employs video editors, doesn't pay a team of volunteer moderators, and the larger you go the more people are in their teams as actual employed staff. Their name is the brand and name of a business employing a whole bunch of people that do work for them.
Remember that alignment doesn't just have to do with the type of income you have, especially when you are more directly a cog a larger machine as entertainers typically are. Celebrities are mostly labor aristocrats invested in the status quo.