In the glamorous world of Hollywood, the Jerusalem to which every aspiring artist must make their pilgrimage to pursue their dreams, a ferocious battle is unfolding between the workers’ Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the bosses’ Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Behind the velvet curtains, a relentless class war is raging between the influential Hollywood producers and the struggling writers. Armed with deep pockets and a vast web of industry connections, the producers have had the upper hand in negotiations, perpetuating a system of grossly unfair contracts that favors their financial interests over the bare minimum of a stable, secure, and dignified quality of life for the workers who create their wealth. This clash of interests has ground the U.S. film industry to a halt, and threatens to tear apart its very fabric. The producers would rather doom the world to darkness than relinquish their “precious,” their gratuitous wealth which they are hopelessly addicted to accumulating.
Two particularly powerful forces are shaping the landscape of the negotiations: streaming technology and artificial intelligence (AI). In recent years, streaming services have grown to dominate the entertainment industry, and the new model for intellectual property monetization no longer conforms to the terms of the writer’s contracts. The WGA says that the changing landscape has effectively transformed the industry into a gig economy, leaving its members to fend for themselves between contracts.
After weeks of negotiations, the AMPTP ultimately refused to budge, causing the writers’ contracts to expire and leaving them with no choice but to go on strike. Recently, the writers have been joined on strike by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), motivated both by solidarity and by similar grievances with the studios.
The Cutting Edge in Strikebreaking: Artificial Scabs
Just as a torturer must skillfully select the right implement to extract a confession from his victim, so too do the Hollywood producers have at their disposal brutal strikebreaking tools — the classic, of course, being the infamous “scab.” Sure enough, the AMPTP has already attempted to replace the striking workers with scabs. Alongside this tool, the producers are employing a fundamental tactic of siege warfare: cut off the enemy’s supply lines, and slowly but surely starve them out. Because the bosses can withhold the workers’ means of subsistence, that is, in the form of wages, and because they have a greater horde of wealth, the producers are betting that they can outlast the workers. One anonymous producer infamously stated as much with unusual honesty: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” In a now-deleted instagram reel, actor Ron Perlman said that he knows which “motherfucker” (sic.) producer said this, “and where he fucking lives,” suggestively adding, “There’s a lot of ways to lose your house. You wish that on people? You wish that families starve while you’re making $27 million a year for creating nothing? Be careful motherfucker. Be really careful.”
Mr. Perlman is right to call out the producers for living in extravagant luxury while the workers who actually create the value, who pay for the producers’ lifestyles, struggle to keep a roof over their head and food on their table. Perhaps most insidiously, these ungrateful parasites are attempting to entirely replace these very same workers, not just with scabs, but with machines. One need not cross the picket line to get a fill of their dystopian cyberpunk fantasies: artificial intelligence is already here! Only, the kind of “intelligence” in demand by the market is a very limited and mundane sort of intelligence: intelligent scabbing.
The final counter offers turned down by WGA and SAG included two critical “compromises.” In the first case, AMPTP maintained the right to replace writers with AI text generation. If you doubt the efficacy of existing AI technology, its capacity to replace writers, and whether this is an idle bluff by the studios, then I encourage you to re-read the first two paragraphs of this article, which have been co-authored by Chat GPT.
The studios also insist that they have the right to digitally scan background actors; the actors would be paid for a single day of labor, and the studio would walk away with full ownership of that actor’s likeness, to use as they please, forever, without even a single cent of compensation. This grotesque move has spurred the SAG to join their fellow workers in the WGA in protest.
Perhaps the AMPTP is bluffing. We can surmise that their plot to replace writers and background actors with AI was an empty threat, never intended to leave the negotiating table. Of course the studios knew this would be unreasonable and offensive to the workers before they proposed it — but that’s exactly the point! In both cases, the studios are challenging the power of labor by threatening to automate and thereby replace it with an unlimited supply of robotic “scabs.” They’re saying: “if you don’t step back in line, we will eliminate you, and you will starve.” The entertainment industry bosses have clearly signaled their unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. They’re confident that, one way or another, they will win — the workers be damned.
Indeed, it’s as the old saying goes: not all that glitters is gold. Nowhere is this truer than the entertainment business. As the bourgeois propagandists in the capitalist news media rally behind the corrupt studio executives and attempt to sow division between the workers, it is paramount that we not get beguiled or misled. Unconditional solidarity to the writers and actors in their fight against the producers is the only policy for the class-conscious proletariat. All power to the workers! Down with the producers and the executives! Down with the bosses! Down with all the parasites who feast upon labor!
