as I always liked to say - "do you sign the front or the back of your paychecks?"
I like it, gonna redistribute that one to myself
I think its referring to the owner's name being on the front of the pay checks that go out to the workers.
With direct deposits and stuff it might not be much of a thing these days, if you work in a larger company.
you sign the check on the back when you give it to the teller to get your deposit. i only did this a couple of times, now everyone pays through electronic payroll software.
When you write a check to someone you sign the front of it, when you go to deposit/cash a check you sign the back of it
I prefer something like "everybody's salary just went up 10%, are you better or worse off?"
You are spot-on! The right-wing reactionaries are tripping over themselves to "dunk" on "rich actors crying over not getting more," which is easy to get their base of "hard workers" foaming. Always got to keep making and enforcing cultural norms of work that is and isn't "real" or "hard." Which is easy to do when you only ever play lip-service to "supporting" blue-collar workers, but never actually push for those same workers to stop being screwed over in any meaningful way. Just a grift from those singing false praise in order to do the same shit that libs do when running for office. Which is unhelpful shit where they "hear and see us" while doing everything the oppressors demand. It is like how stuff like free-speech is so quickly brought up to attack China or other socialist nations. Just because we are allowed to talk shit all day doesn't mean anything was changed to help any of us.
But these "fake workers" (also labeled "entitled") in fields of entertainment and sports often only have a very short window of time to get gigs that pay much while still being in whatever "valuable" state that is wanted at the time. Like how female actors have the stereotype of "aging out" of being attractive for leading roles. If the system does work this way, then it means they have X amount of years to get maybe a lifetime's worth of pay. In addition to being more or less 24/7 in applying to jobs.
Are there lots of super obvious libs in entertainment that do act like assholes and perfect examples of what the conservative puppets are talking about in their "dunk" sessions? Do those examples look down on the rest of us "untouchables" and even go on to become the business version of landlords via buying franchises that then treat their workers poorly? Oh fuck yes they do. But what the right-wing/conservative folks always fully and knowingly ignore is that the vast majority of the folks on strike are not making anywhere near the amounts of money or have the same lives of luxury. It is all just more fake barriors being placed in order to keep all workers fighting each other instead of the ones fucking us all over.
These products make billions of dollars. These people, whether they are athletes or movie stars, should be paid billions of dollars for their work. No one watches sports for the owners or movies for the studio execs. Thinking that sports and movies make too much money is ab entirely different argument from whether or not athletes or movie stars get their fair share of the money that is made.
Hot take: the problem isn't that some workers earn too much, it's that every other worker is compensated too little. Relations to the means of production, folks!
For sports/entertainment in particular, bear in mind that the vast, vast majority of workers in these jobs have - maybe - an actual 5-15 year career at most, and then then then they're no longer considered of value to capital.
Ok, but there's a massive class distinction between an uber driver and Chris fucking Pratt or any other rich hollywood mf. It's not "nazbol" to recognize that there's 2 different realities for poor and rich people.
Who cares??? Not relevant in this situation unless you're looking for excuses not to support the union
Marx and Engels were both class traitors. Rich people can be socialists. Understanding that we live in a capitalist society where money=power and using that power to further systemic change is still praxis regardless of your income.
I think it’s also strategically important to have left-leaning (at the very least) people in positions of influence in entertainment media. This is why HUAC and the Hollywood blacklist were made into such a big deal in the first place. Hollywood was once filled with communists and we can only hope that will be true again some day.
these are categories we spin up to help us understand and analyze a complex world. i don't care for them as moral markers or whatever, which seems to be the subtext of this sort of discourse. i care for the categories' utility in helping us make observations and predictions about the world.
do a person's material interests align with revolutionary/progressive interests, or reactionary interests? relationship to the means of production is a great shorthand for assuming a person's material interests, but it's not the end-all-be-all determinant of how a person will act. A doctor making $500,000 a year working for a larger corporation is technically alienated from the means of production, but still has different material interests than the nurses and janitorial staff working for the same company. A CEO may technically not own the means of production (assuming they aren't paid in stock options) but obviously has interests mostly aligned with the owners. The material interests of blue collar versus white collar versus service workers are somewhat different.
All that to say, relationship to the means of production is more of an indicator for material interests and revolutionary potential than a determinant. Relative comfort and income are other indicators. Social class or demographic are other indicators. We can make assumptions about a person or group of people based on how their experience intersects with these various influences, but even then there's variation from person to person and potentially variables we didn't take into account.
We might assume that a hypothetical group of blue collar workers has revolutionary potential because they're being materially exploited, but then in actuality they support reactionary politics because maybe their social class is a stronger influence than their economic one, or maybe their international economic class is a stronger influence than their domestic economic class, or maybe their underlying psychological mechanisms leave them vulnerable to false consciousnesses (or maybe a little of all of the above, a tension between the multitude of reactionary/revolutionary influences and impulses).
class traitors and false consciousnesses exist, otherwise we'd have no reason to educate and agitate.
All very good points!
On a related note, I see a lot of leftists equating class (and class subdivision) with personal morality. There are massively underpaid blue collar workers that subscribe to every reactionary thing there is and actively do harm and there are petty bourgeois people massively funding your local commie orgs. Oh, and highly-paid working class people all over the spectrum.
I see this most often used to start petty fights rather than to do analysis or debate strategy.
You have a sound analysis, but...even though the strikes are atomised, the contagion is spreading to the extent that the isolated nature is just a fig leaf to get around the sympathy strike ban. There's an outside chance we get a widespread anti-AI movement. Which as Communists we are well placed to provide political direction to.
No! No! I want all the people on my social media feeds promoting the SAG strike to be "Bathroom Goer #4"
