it still feels weird saying that a Hollywood actor is working class.

The vast majority of actors are nameless extras that no one would recognize.

Yes, actors are working class so long as they’re being paid a wage in exchange for their labor. If they’re making a lot of money, then they’re labor aristocrats. If they own stock in the company that’s producing their films, then they’re bourgeois.

I've seen an endless amount of confused "Are x proles?" questions. It's really a simple distinction - the whole point is simply to work out where peoples' common material interests lie.

Do they rely on their work to live and not a stockpile of private capital? Then yes. 99.9% of the time this is the same answer as "Is it in their material interest that workers have more control over their workplaces and the wealth they produce is more equitably distributed?"

Not everyone will work in their material interest. Some subsections are more propagandised/pro-status quo etc. than others, that's fine. It's a simple classification system.

So most actors - Yes. Tom Cruise, no. Bam.

So long as they don't own capital and they sell their labor for a wage they are workers. Even wealthy workers are workers, they are just paid enough to ignore their class interests in favor of their individual interests.

Actors and professional athletes are in a very similar situation.

At the end of the day they make their money from their labour/bodies. They make a lot of money, but if they are seriously injured or otherwise unable to work they don't make money anymore. This eats at the back of the mind of every worker - what happens if I'm unable to work tomorrow? Athletes with sponsorships are still the same, if they can't play they lose their celebrity and lose these endorsements.

Once someone starts making money from passive sources (investments, ownership in a team or studio) that is when their worker status changes. Now their income is secured whether they can or can't work, and can grow to a place where they no longer have to work. That is the divide.

This is usually a pretty simple question, because if you can map their relation to the means of production onto the normal Marxist categories, then that itself is your answer. Acting is labor, and most actors get paid peanuts for quite a lot of labor, usually while doing another job or two.

Of the ~50 or so working top dollar names in Hollywood, there are thousands of actors who don't get to set their own price. And the ones that are big now may not be next year. While they can certainly invest in companies or start their own, making them bourgeois, if you ignore that they only own their own likeness. Hence the push for genAI by production companies. The high earners are at least petite bourgeois, certainly, but otherwise I would absolutely call them working class.

A-listers are absolutely bourgeois through-and-through and I’m baffled that anyone would consider them proletarian, even labor-aristocrat.

You are a proletarian if your labor-power is assimilated with the mass of the labor power of the proletariat; ie your labor-power is indistinguishable, of the same quality, as any other worker’s labor power. Do you think this applies to Sandra Bullock or Matt Damon?

A-listers have effectively created a new commodity over which they have a total monopoly: their brand, their visage and likeness. It is furthermore backed by laws in the US which prevent unlicensed use of another person’s likeness for profit.

Sandra Bullock made over $70 million from Gravity. It was not earned as a wage paid for labor power. Much of her paycheck came as, effectively, royalties, for the use of her unique brand as Sandra Bullock. She was able to leverage her unique commodity to carve a fraction of the surplus value, not as a proletarian but as a capitalist, in the same way that money capital carves out part of the surplus value as interest.

Furthermore, these very well known actors make a ton of money outside of acting; from endorsements, from real estate, from co-ownership of movie production firms, etc. They are bourgeois!

As some have correctly pointed out, class is about your relation to production. Whether or not someone labors at all does not determine class. Do not the petite bourgeois “labor” to produce their commodity for sale on the market? Does that make them proles? The majority of actors do work for a wage, but this is absolutely not the case for the highly paid ones.

It's important first to disentangle the modern vernacular term of 'working class' from class definitions described in the 19th century. A proletarian is defined by their relation to the means of production, i.e. that they sell their labor for a wage and that is the primary source of their wealth. the term 'working class', on the other hand, is colloquial and not strictly defined (although I would remind everyone that all categories are fake.)

But beyond this, it's also important to consider that in the intervening couple centuries ownership of the means of production has had some innovations to manage the contradictions of capitalist production. For instance, there are a great many people who labor for a wage, but who have a significant amount of wealth invested in the stock market in the form of a 401(k) or an IRA. This blurs the lines somewhat, because while they have an interest in their wage and conditions etc. as a laborer, they now have an interest in the broad growth of the economy as well, which has a different relation to production.

So for an actor, we have to first establish exactly what the question we're asking is, and then evaluate what their primary relation to production is and how this affects their interests and how we might identify them as part of this or that class. I would argue that merely using the tools of yestercentury is insufficient to this task. I would also remind that class as described such is an analytic tool and not a direct means of determining whether someone is on this or that side of a divide or if they're 'good'.

They produce value with their labor, so yes.

If I'm talking to a normal person, yes. If I'm talking with an actor then no. Fuck them overgrowth theatre kids

I think most actors aspire to be working class but never get beyond lumpen stature. But because people love celebrities some actors get access to the elite and manage to leverage their fame to join their ranks.

any actor who has a lot of wealth isn't a worker anymore. so many of them(esp the successful actors) are also nepo babies who came from wealth. they are definitely in a unique situation but at some point when you have enough wealth and/or generational wealth, you're not really working class anymore. but that is an elite few actors who command that much wealth. Many do well but they aren't getting millions of dollars per film/episode.

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.

If you don't own the means by which you work you're working class but that doesn't mean some workers aren't paid extravagantly at the expense of others

• freelancers (like on youtube) are petite bourgeoisie.
• actors employed for a wage are workers (most actors are in the background literally being employed as a faceless set prop.)
• actors who own their own firm are bourgeoisie, they often pivot to like Politics as a source of revenue it's a transferrable skillset.

No youtube/twitch etc. doesn't employ creatives for a wage, it's a freelancing platform that lets you compete for a performance bounty.

In my mind, if you need to sell your labor to survive, then you're a worker. If you don't you're a capitalist. There's small business owners that have a foot in both worlds, that get a little messy but thinking of it this way makes sense to me 🤷

So if an A-lister has enough money to not have to work I'd say they're a capitalist now even if they still choose to work.

In my eyes, they are workers, but in today’s environment they are vastly overvalued. For the ones with overly inflated salaries, they should have that money distributed amongst the others involved in the works they’re involved in.

I can see how one can see them as Bourgeoisie. In the end, for them to make their overly inflated salaries, they are exploiting all of the folks behind the scenes to make such sums of money. Not much different from a factory owner if you think about it.

I could be way off on this. I’m just giving my unadulterated thoughts on the matter.

yes... believe it or not actors dont get paid that much. the movies/show they act in then gives them some exposure and opportunities and then they tend to become greedy/capitalist but actors are working class because they wont eat if they dont have work.

furthermore, acting is often very brutal as a profession.

Actors are a hyper-complex subclass (speaking of the US, probably also true elsewhere). You've got the usual layers of complexity that most workers in the US have, like imperialism, racialization, etc, and the relationship between higher income and having marginal access to pre-defined systems of capital.

But also, their labor is wholly superstructual, both in the sense of what it produces (which is usually a mistake to put too much weight into) and its relation to the superstructural reproduction of the dominant ideology. This local worker-owner dynamic has a unique relationship with the larger worker-owner dynamic of the nation/world. This might be a contributing factor for its level of unionization compared to other sectors.

There are also the gradients between being in the reserve army of labor or otherwise employed*, versus selling their labor (dominant variable for the majority of working actors), versus selling their image (dominant variable for highly successful actors). The nature and duration of those experiences are going to color someone's outlook, in addition to whatever immediate material interests they give them.

And there's all sorts of selection happening regarding who gets to enter the actor subclass and where on the above scale they land, from lookism and the usual social classes, to basic resources like fucking rent in LA, to networking access, and even explicit political ones like McCarthyism.

As a whole, the section of working actors as well as reserve army of actors can probably be grouped with rest of the US proletariat for general purposes. Every sector is going to have its particularities, though.

*And the class character here can have a strong influence, like how a lot of struggling or formerly struggling actors have experienced the service industry, which may leave them with an echo of radical class politics even if their immediate interests change.