Celebrities

[Ocean Seal]

Celebrities what class do they belong to exactly. Professional sports players, popular artists, movie stars. This is a serious question more for learning purposes than anything else. I know that the product of their labor is often stolen from them by recording companies and the like, but at the end of the day they still earn millions. Also what do talk show hosts qualify as. Is Glenn Beck part of the proletariat? Are they just an extremely well payed portion of the proletariat or are they something else. Should we ever defend them from being fired for anything other than ideological purposes?
I find it hard to see them as workers because in fact oftentimes they are out earning the majority of the bourgeoisie. Is there any way that they make money other than what they do? Under socialism how are celebrities dealt with?

[LewisQ]

I suspect Glenn Beck owns at least one production company and probably several other enterprises besides, most talk-show hosts do.

It's more complicated when it comes to actors, sportspeople etc because (while many of them also employ and control labour outside the game) they often belong to the same unions as vastly worse-off members of the same profession. This is often used by management to undermine strikes by acting or sports unions. Of course, it goes against the grain for socialists to be compelled to defend mega-rich celebrities, but workers' rights are workers' rights.

Let's not forget that Reagan's decimation of American labour began with an attack on air-trafffic controllers, who weren't exactly breadline workers.

Something we also overlook (because, frankly, we have better things to worry about) is the mentally/emotionally/physically corrosive effect of celebrity and wealth, particularly on people who aren't capitalists to the manor born.

[thesadmafioso]

I don't think you can rationally classify them as being anything but bourgeois, given their excessive access to capital and their tremendous capacity to exploit their societal status for the purpose of individual profit.

[Welshy]

I suspect Glenn Beck owns at least one production company and probably several other enterprises besides, most talk-show hosts do.



Yeah he does. He's claimed he is a small business owner because of it, despite the fact I know no small business owner who makes 20 some million dollars in profits from their business. He uses the whole small business thing to show that he understand the little guy because he's one of them. I wonder where he gets the idea that the majority of Americans are petty bourgeois.

[Old Mole]

Many celebrities doesnt produce anything, many just live a parasitic existence as images, examples of a possible way of life offered by capital ("You are aloud to dream about this"). Being a celebrity (as in an embodiment of a lifestyle, I am thinking about the role they are given in Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord) requires access to Capital that no worker can attain from working. Most of them are capitalist, living on their image that they use to create markets, to accumulate capital etc., etc.

[Ned Kelly]

those that are 'famous for being famous' are parasitic scum...