While I will post the link to the tweet be aware that there a like 100 blue check bootlickers defending Netflix here https://twitter.com/SaeedDiCaprio/status/1699136050331799627
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
200 points (100.0% liked)
Movies & TV
22891 readers
160 users here now
Rules for Movies & TV Discussion
-
Any discussion of Disney properties should contain a (cw: imperialism) tag. If your post isn't tagged appropriately it will be removed.
-
Anti-Bong Joon-ho trolling will result in an immediate ban from c/movies and submitted to the site administrators for review.
-
On Star Trek Sunday only posts discussing how we might achieve space communism are permitted. Non-Star Trek related content will be removed and you will be temporarily banned until the following Sunday.
Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Residuals would not exist under socialism. I have nothing against any labor action and if actors and writers can extract concessions then good for them, but I feel like it should be said.
Not sure I agree with this? Unless we're talking about a moneyless phase of socialism. Residuals for everyone who worked on the project (not just the actors and writers) would seem like fair compensation for labor if the piece of media is being reused. Only argument I can see for this is that media would be freely available but as much as I want that to be the case under socialism, so far no AES country has done this to my knowledge.
I kinda feel like its missing the point and a distraction so I dont agree with this either.
Residuals are not fair compensation for labor because they are not proportionate to work done. Also media would of course be freely available, as was the case in the Soviet Union. There was a charge but only to cover distribution not for intellectual property.
To elaborate, there is no reason one actor should get paid 10 times as much as another because she happened to work on a popular production. I'm not opposed to some small bonus paid to the workers on 'successful' movies but it shouldn't be more than nice-to-have.
Also, only socialists are reading this anyways so I doubt that I am doing any damage to the strike.
I really dont think this concept can be fairly applied to something like media that gets reused by third parties though? Thats the persons labor being reused again and again with no compensation for them. This would be especially true for actors who's actual literal faces and voices are being reused, but I think it applies to everyone who works on the product. Thats certainly why its fair compensation under capitalism.
Under socialism it would depend on a lot of things, like how available media is, whether money is used, and whether profit has actually been completely abolished.
I didnt know this about the USSR but when you look at Cuba, Vietnam, and especially China this is not the case. (DPRK idk). Pretty sure those countries still all have markets for media. And as long as someone is continuing to profit off someone's work after the fact I would think residuals would be fair compensation for movies, music, and games. Which is the point of them as they exist now.
Did you forget about federation?
Does not exist.
Under socialism people will be compensated for the amount of work they do, indeed we should probably replace money with labor vouchers, but that is another topic. This is the abolition of the extraction of surplus value, no one gets unearned income (note that support for the old, young, and disabled would still exist, subject to democratic consent). For an actor to be paid residuals (under socialism) they must necessarily be taken (unjustly) from another worker, or more precisely the whole mass of the working class which do not have the privileged of getting such payments.
China today is of course a different question since they have a market economy. I don't know about Cuba but I would be surprised if they had a significantly different system from the USSR.
*relatively fair, more fair than what is currently happening, ect. Sorry I wasn't precise.
I think you're being overly orthodox over things that did not or barely existed in Marx or Lenin's times here. Basically I think you're continuing to artfully dodge the fact that these people's labor is being reused for profit under a system like China's. (I'll drop the Cuba and Vietnam point because I don't actually know for sure either, though I think both still incorporate markets to an extent? Like Cuba has tourism for profit. And I do know for sure that neither has abolished intellectual property.). With things like reruns, theater plays, radio plays, and now streaming services, the labor of workers is being recycled for profit. That doesn't go away until profit and markets for media are completely abolished. As long as they do then all the workers involved should be getting residuals to compensate for that recycling of their labor.
Did they have radio plays in Marx time? I wonder if he ever wrote about those
Radio dramas didn't exist until the 1920s. Marx died in 1883 when electromagnetic waves themselves were just a hypothesis. The first experimental radio signals were done by Heinrich Hertz in 1886. The first radio broadcast with audio didn't happen until 1906.
Marx was an avid Shakespeare fan if that counts. I think he mentioned Christopher Marlowe a few times too.
I'm curious as well.
I think u/Thomasmuentzer is pretty knowledgeable about Marx, though the last time I saw him talk of Marx and artists it was about them being part of a third "artisan" class. It had something to do with ai...
I'll ask in the mega and tag you if I get anything
I'm not sure what you mean by labor is recycled for profit. I see no difference between a worker paving a road that people drive over for 20 years and an actor making a movie which is rerun for 20 years. In Marx's terminology there is living labor and dead labor. Living labor is the work done by workers. Dead labor is the product of work done in the past by workers, for example a sowing machine. Capital is dead labor. The actor makes the movie performing living labor and should be compensated for it. Then there exists the movie itself a form of dead labor and they should no longer be compensated for it (under socialism).
My point is that the movie is being recycled for profit specifically. As long as thats abolished, I agree with you I think. But if the corporation is still profiting off a living person's labor like that, residuals seem like the way to compensate for that.
I do agree there's kind of a disconnect between how this is done in the entertainment industry vs other industries, but I think as long as profit is being made by "recycling labor" then ideally yes compensation should occur for that. I realize this would lead to complicated situations like, say, a private person using a sewing machine to do a craft and then selling it on etsy, do they owe the worker who made that sewing machine residuals? Its a weird road to go down. But I don't think movies, music, and TV on streaming services are complicated in any way because thats a situation where a corporation is making money off people's recycled labor in perpetuality, and currently those people make nothing off of that and the bosses do.
So apparently Yuri Antonov was paid royalities in the USSR for when his songs were played in restaurants so thats a thing. ( @Egon@hexbear.net )
Those royalties were at rates controlled by the government and as I understand it were fairly limited. No doubt there were significant shortcomings in the USSR though, this among them. Sort of in line with the general problem of different wage rates. I believe the highest paid workers had wages about 5 times those of the lowest paid. As the Soviet Union decayed more liberalism entered its copyright system, the rate controls were lifted by Gorbachev and even before that copyright was made more restrictive with respect to translations and foreign work.
Yeah I'm going to go ahead and keep disagreeing with you that compensating people for the recycling of their labor is a flaw in the system but whatever.
huh, that's pretty neat. Seems fair tbh
If we think of Residuals as a form of profit-sharing, then I think basically a similar system would work in a system where media production was worker-owned. But they do kind of demonstrate the unfairness of market based rewards, as it can be sort of a lottery for the workers (with some people getting rich as hell for little work, while many others just have to continue drudging along creating content).
Residuals are definitely an incoherent concept in a fully communist system, especially where all created media is free culture.
In the context of the system we actually live in, I think residuals are good actually; they're one of the few examples of workers clawing back a proportion of the profits.
Yeah, I absolutely agree that workers should take everything they can.