SHAKSPER 2000: Re: Exploitation of Actors

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 07/12/00 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.1385  Wednesday, 12 July 2000.

[1]     From:   Edmund M. Taft <taft@marshall.edu>
        Date:   Tuesday, 11 Jul 2000 22:25:22 +0000
        Subj:   Exploitation of Actors

[2]     From:   Andrew W. White <awhite@wam.umd.edu>
        Date:   Tuesday, 11 Jul 2000 21:15:55 -0400
        Subj:   Exploitation of Actors

[3]     From:   Werner Broennimann <Werner.Broennimann@unibas.ch>
        Date:   Wed, 12 Jul 2000 10:28:36 +0100
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.1369 Re: Exploitation of Actors

[4]     From:   Mike Jensen <mjensen@mayfieldpub.com>
        Date:   Tuesday, 11 Jul 2000 09:50:56 -0700
        Subj:   SHK 11.1378 Re: Exploitation, Marx, and Shakespeare

[5]     From:   David Siar <david.siar@worldnet.att.net>
        Date:   Tuesday, 11 Jul 2000 11:58:52 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.1378 Re: Exploitation, Marx, and Shakespeare

[6]     From:   Gabriel Egan <ge@totus.org>
        Date:   Tuesday, 11 Jul 2000 18:41:36 +0100
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.1378 Re: Exploitation, Marx, and Shakespeare

[7]     From:   Geralyn Horton <ghorton@tiac.net>
        Date:   Tuesday, 11 Jul 2000 21:40:45 -0400
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.1378 Re: Exploitation, Marx, and Shakespeare


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Edmund M. Taft <taft@marshall.edu>
Date:           Tuesday, 11 Jul 2000 22:25:22 +0000
Subject:        Exploitation of Actors

As the president of the faculty/staff union at Marshall University
(Huntington, WV), I have found this discussion of exploitation and the
demise of Communism both fascinating and deeply disturbing.  We are in
reactionary times -- those who still support Marxism and those who
oppose it argue extreme positions full of invective for the "other
side."

Sam Small writes that "people freely paying money for the goods or
services they find of value is the basis of real democracy."  He may be
right, but by NO means is the evidence in on this large claim.  China,
Singapore, Malaysia, and others are all betting the house on the
opposite assumption: that a market economy can be blended with basically
authoritarian rule.  And they may be right.  Think about it
historically, Sam: for at least 200 years a market economy existed in
both America and England, and the former was run by the landed
aristocracy and then industrial giants, while the latter was run much
the same, with the nobility's power thrown in to boot. Nor is it by ANY
means clear that today power is less concentrated than it was, say, 50
or 100 years ago.

With all due respect to Sam, I think that he and others have a bad case
of "triumphalism," defined as the euphoria generated by the fall of the
Soviet Union and a consequent belief that the end of history is at hand:
"You cannot have a designer economy. It is impossible."  Really?  So
there will be no new economic systems in the future? Ever?  Give me a
break.

I have the greatest respect for my friend Sophie Masson's intelligence,
wit, and artistry, but I must disagree with her statement that Marx "got
just about everything wrong."  Marx thought that the state could set
prices. Historical experience suggests that he was wrong.  Without a
proper price mechanism, Marxism cannot work, or so it seems.  But as a
critic of capitalism, Marx has no peer.  Not even Dickens approaches
Marx's ability to see the ways in which capitalism itself often works as
a tool of oppression and exploitation, especially in the short run.  In
the long run, free-market theory says that things will work out.  But it
should be noted that economics has an entire subset of scholars who
devote their lives to studying why markets do not work the way they are
supposed to.

As just one example, consider the phenomenal growth of the American and
English economies from about 1825 to the early 1900s.  This growth
should not have happened because trade and tariff barriers in both
countries were both numerous and high in an attempt to protect basic
industries.  Well, the evidence suggests that these attempts worked!
Both economies grew and basic industries were not only saved but
flourished.  How to explain this?  We don't know how. But our inability
to do so should give all of us pause before we rush into the final
goodnight of global capitalism, unrestrained by unions (or by states,
for that matter).

Cliff Stetner is right.  It may be that Shakespeare's "theories" have
been "proven wrong" by history.  But that doesn't mean that he no longer
has anything worthwhile to say. Ditto Marx.

Discussions such as this can get highly emotional, so, for the record,
let me state that I am not a Marxist or a Communist or a socialist.  I
am a Truman-Humphrey Democrat who is dismayed to see that his own party
has become a pale imitation of what it once was: a force for social
change and a believer that government has an important role to play,
especially in a capitalist economy where power is concentrated in the
hands of the few.

Are actors exploited? Of course they are!

--Ed Taft

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Andrew W. White <awhite@wam.umd.edu>
Date:           Tuesday, 11 Jul 2000 21:15:55 -0400
Subject:        Exploitation of Actors

Many thanks to Dr. Egan for daring to inject actual relevant data into
this discussion.  I should hope we could base our future discussions on
pieces like his, which reveal how easily exploited these actors were,
and why.

The notion of profit and loss-sharing continues to this day; I vividly
recall being paid next to dirt in my own early days, when "profit share"
was the rule, and when the shows were, well, shall we say hastily
produced and it showed?  In my salad days, Washington, D.C. theatres
operated out of abandoned garages and were always one step ahead of
creditors.

FWIW, we actors put up with it because we were a) young, b) living
cheaply, and c) incredibly desperate for work that would get our names
in the local papers.  (Mine was easy to spell, although there were times
when I wish it hadn't been ...)

I would be especially curious if Dr. Egan could point to a version of
this lawsuit in print -- it would be interesting to see how the
defendants accounted for themselves, if at all.

Cheers,
Andrew White
Arlington, VA

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Werner Broennimann <Werner.Broennimann@unibas.ch>
Date:           Wed, 12 Jul 2000 10:28:36 +0100
Subject: 11.1369 Re: Exploitation of Actors
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.1369 Re: Exploitation of Actors

The predicament of actors then and now can be compared to that of New
Economy permatemps.  In a 1999 article on the union organiser Amy Dean
("Mother Jones meets the microchip") The Economist paraphrases her as
saying: "temporary workers are often miserable workers. The worst-paid
live a hand-to-mouth existence without medical or other benefits. Even
many of the best-paid are fearful of the future and envious of those on
the permanent payroll, as Microsoft discovered last month when some
'permatemps' won a class-action suit against it. Microsoft is
appealing."  Blaming Marx for all the crimes committed in his name is a
legitimate response for all those who had to live under Communist
regimes, but reference to those crimes does not legitimate present-day
rampant social Darwinism.  Or as Hamlet says: "Use every man after his
desert, and who shall escape whipping?  Use them after your own honour
and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty."

Werner Brönnimann

[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Mike Jensen <mjensen@mayfieldpub.com>
Date:           Tuesday, 11 Jul 2000 09:50:56 -0700
Subject: Re: Exploitation, Marx, and Shakespeare
Comment:        SHK 11.1378 Re: Exploitation, Marx, and Shakespeare

> How can we take Marx seriously when he got just about everything wrong?
> Leaving aside the millions of corpses his ideas have left in their wake,

Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah, yawn, yawn, yawn.

If by their fruits we shall know them, then we must also consider the
millions of corpses left behind by Christians and Muslims - or perhaps
we should not blame Marx for the ways he has been appropriated?

Look, Marx and Engels got one central thing right.  They noticed that
economics had a profound impact on history not really appreciated
before.  Sure they talked a lot of swill, but that was a major
contribution and let's give them credit.  Let's also recognize they are
guilty of reductionism, learn what they have to teach, and not follow
their mistakes.  The kind of hyperbole quoted above, so oft' and
boringly repeated, tends to allow the writer to toss the baby with the
bath and pretend the issues are simpler than they are.  Let's be better
than that.

Standing for truth, justice, and who the hell cares,
Mike Jensen

[5]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           David Siar <david.siar@worldnet.att.net>
Date:           Tuesday, 11 Jul 2000 11:58:52 -0500
Subject: 11.1378 Re: Exploitation, Marx, and Shakespeare
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.1378 Re: Exploitation, Marx, and Shakespeare

Not one to sit idly by while red-baiters caricature a writer that
they've in all probability never read, except perhaps for snippets from
the _Communist Manifesto_, I'll offer the following quotation from David
Harvey's _Limits to Capital_ for this list's anti-Marxists to chew on --
and, of course, to *rationalize,* since that's how capitalists and their
supporters are able to cope with the economic and ideological
contradictions of daily life in the new world (dis)order:

"The rapidly increasing social inequalities (the 358 billionaires in the
world who, according to recent UN estimates, command assets equivalent
to 2.3 billion of the world's poorest population) obscenely demonstrate
the truth of Marx's contention that freedoms of the market inevitably
produce 'accumulation of wealth at one pole' and 'accumulation of
misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental
degradation, at the opposite pole' (_Capital_, vol. 1. p. 645)."

David Siar, co-editor
_Cultural Logic_ (http://eserver.org/clogic)
and
_Early Modern Culture_ (http://eserver.org/emc)

[6]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Gabriel Egan <ge@totus.org>
Date:           Tuesday, 11 Jul 2000 18:41:36 +0100
Subject: 11.1378 Re: Exploitation, Marx, and Shakespeare
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.1378 Re: Exploitation, Marx, and Shakespeare

Sam Small wrote

> Capitalism evolved out of the trading instincts
> of human beings over millennia.

Even its keenest fans generally accept that capitalism is distinguished
from slavery and feudalism by its market in labour. Do you think there
was a labour market in ancient Greece and Rome and in medieval Europe?
Or do you think the transitions from slavery to feudalism and from
feudalism to capitalism occurred by processes of gradual evolution?
Neither of these views is likely to gain wide acceptance, but I can see
no other way of understanding the above assertion.

Buying and selling human flesh requires a set of enforceable rules
regulating ownership of flesh. Buying and selling human muscle power
equally requires a set of enforceable rules regulating ownership of
labour. There is nothing 'given' about any of these rules, although
right up until to the emancipation of Africans kidnapped to America
supporters of slavery asserted that the practice derived from immutable
human nature.

Gabriel Egan

[7]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Geralyn Horton <ghorton@tiac.net>
Date:           Tuesday, 11 Jul 2000 21:40:45 -0400
Subject: 11.1378 Re: Exploitation, Marx, and Shakespeare
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.1378 Re: Exploitation, Marx, and Shakespeare

Michael Meyers writes: "This disparity in pay between men and women is
because women tend to prefer careers where there is an over supply of
labor."

Todd Lidh adds: to this that a recent meta-analysis of these
equal-pay-for-equal-work studies indicates that no differentiation had
been made between workers who have been on the job for six months, six
years or sixteen years.

What studies?  Cite your sources, gentlemen!

I refer you to: 70% of all film roles go to men, and only 9% of film and
TV roles go to women over 40.  Men show consistently higher earnings
under SAG contracts, a discrepancy that increases with age as women's
earnings drop in the 40's, 50's and 60's, while men's earnings peak in
these age groups.

Source: 1990 statistics report, Screen Actors Guild.

Geralyn Horton, Playwright
Newton, Mass. 02460
<http://www.tiac.net/users/ghorton>


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