Ruling-Class Artists on Strike

During the Hollywood strikes I certainly regarded the actors and writer taking that action with sympathy--the more in as the conditions of their work have deteriorated so badly, in part because of the extreme imbalance of power between themselves and the executives who call the shots, which said executives have exploited to the full. Gush as the business press does about the streaming business, the artists who created what it has become fashionable to call the "content" without which it would not exist have derived very little benefit from it, precisely because of how their employers had got the better of them in so many prior battles, all as the advent of generative artificial intelligence threatens them with the virtual annihilation of their professions within the space of a few short years, the more quickly insofar as they fail to secure some claim to profiting from their contributions to it.

Still, watching their world fall apart around them, sympathetic as I was, I also found myself thinking that there was the very real extent to which they helped bring it all down upon themselves. After all, as Daniel Bessner's brilliant piece in Harper's about the situation in Hollywood circa the 2023 strike made clear, the developments in Hollywood in recent decades were the same as what was happening all over the world in the neoliberal age. The destruction of those regulations that protected workers and small operators, including those regulations that legally safeguarded their right to bargain collectively. Aided by that deregulation, and the loose monetary policy that was to characterize the era, the consolidation of business in fewer and fewer hands, as these in turn came to be dominated by shareholder value-minded short-termist idiots who want their money now, Now, NOW! even if that meant wrecking the company irreparably as the price of a fat payout this quarter of the kind for whom Jack Welch was such a hero. The ascent of global labor arbitrage that hollowed out the old industrial center as it sent production to wherever costs were lowest and subsidies most irrationally generous (because for all the libertarian claptrap they speak the neoliberals' objection was to welfare for humans, not welfare for corporations, for which they are ever holding out their greasy hands). And ultimately the great widening of the gulf between those who, as "investors" were in a position to profit from the rising profits and asset values that resulted, and the people who actually had to work for money who did not.

Just how did Hollywood's artists address that in the works they created? By worshipping what is dishonestly and meanly called "success" and all that goes with it as they validated and glorified the elite in its assorted forms, and showed contempt for working people, one category of human that these singers of "representation" had no interest in "representing" on the screen. (I think again and again of what Peter Biskind wrote in Seeing is Believing, that self-made millionaires are as common in the films of the radical right as the masses in the films of the radical left. And you know full well who made it seem as if self-made billionaires, above all self-made tech billionaires, are a dime a dozen in such "elitist porn" as Silicon Valley, and all of them magnificent superhumans--even as many of these professional enshittifiers of everything they touch personally did their bit for making life hell for those who work in Hollywood as they got in on the production game with their brain-dead "move fast and break things" swagger.)

Of course, the artists do not run Hollywood, the executives do, and therefore cannot bear the full responsibility for Hollywood's having so much been a giant factory for (save on those few issues of lifestyle-identity liberalism to which coastal elite types such as themselves are so committed) right-wing propaganda. It is even the case that some of them have produced works that did not line up with such propaganda, opposing it, sometimes with intelligence and force--and at risk to their careers. Compared with the era before McCarthyism, compared with the era of the "New Hollywood" that led to another, quieter, round of purging in the name of putting auteurs in their place, what one could in Upton Sinclair's terms call "hero artists" are few in Hollywood, but they are not wholly nonexistent. (At their best such figures as an Oliver Stone, or an Andrew Niccol, or the Gilroy brothers Dan and Tony, for example, seem to me to be just a few of those who have earned respect as such.)

Still, it is the "ruling-class artists" who have prevailed, with these rarely producing what they do out of pure careerism, serving willingly, as they make clear at every opportunity, while persecuting those of their fellows who do not do the same--making life that much more hazardous for those who do follow their consciences when it is not the safe thing to do, and a disgusting hypocrisy of their presumed respect for the "free speech" that seems to me a duty of everyone who would call themselves an artist. And I do not think that it slights life's complexities to acknowledge that as a group they have been complicit in making that neoliberal situation that has them learning the hard way what empty claptrap the privileged lot of the "knowledge worker" was all along.