Stars and Strikes

On the missteps of celebrities during the SAG-AFTRA walkout.

From a certain perspective, there can be no such thing as a millionaire on a picket line. In the terms of labor’s fight against capital, in which the most pointed weapon is solidarity, picket lines can be composed only of workers (and, sure, their allies), regardless of how much they make. This is because strikes are as much about principles as they are about paydays, even when their demands include more wage parity between different tiers of workers. In the recent UAW strike, for instance, Tier 1 workers fought alongside their lower paid comrades for the elimination of tiers altogether precisely because those tiers divide workers while dimming their power. The point is equality on every front.

But what happens when workers who make millions do choose to act as such while on strike? The recent SAG-AFTRA walkout provided a glimpse. First, we had De Niros, Clooneys, Afflecks, and Streeps swooping in to try and end the strike with their deep-pocketed benevolence. Their suggestion, apparently offered out of frustration with the pace of bargaining, was that wealthier stars could pay more in membership dues to help cover things like health care. Not only did their discussions of the idea seemingly threaten the unified front represented by the bargaining committee, they also risked weakening the union’s position by implying that it was reasonable for basic benefits to be covered by fellow actors—critic Andy Greenwald called it a “GoFundMe for medical expenses”—and not an exploitative employer worth billions. In the end, it was a subtly patronizing and anti-solidaristic move, with rich celebs positioning themselves as white knights of wealth, saving the day with the band-aid of impatient philanthropy, not as fellow workers standing against greed in principle.

The faux pas continued. Shortly after the tentative deal was reached by the union, Alec Baldwin took to Instagram to applaud the work done by the bargaining committee and a few of his wealthy friends, but not so much that of the exhausted rank and file, which managed to maintain picket lines for 100+ days. The nods they did get were cursory. “I’m so happy that the rank and file of this business can get back to work as well,” he says at the very end, almost as an afterthought. Thanks for the scraps, Jack Doneghy.

There is so much in Baldwin’s four-minute video that is telling, but nothing more so than the fact that he hardly utters the word “we” once. What this suggests, of course, is that he in no way identifies as a worker, insulated by his millions from the ramifications of the fight. But there is also a jarring lack of acknowledgement of any kind of collective agency in general. What he acknowledges instead are individuals, and mostly famous ones, which, from the self-important celebrity’s perspective, makes sense: the job of the actor-individual is to convince people of things, and famous actors, rarefied beings that they are, are people who do this particularly well. Why wouldn’t this game of persuasion extend to the bargaining table? In this worldview, a picket line becomes the merest community theater in which the actor hoi polloi convinces itself it is convincing others while the real work is done by the real talent on the bargaining stage. Success is a matter of shrewd individual acumen. Solidarity, mutuality, and collective power have little place in this narrative.

We have to assume that, on some level, celebrities realize that their wealth and worth derive as much from that very hoi polloi as it does from their own labor; without the extras and other smaller parts on the call sheets, there would be no one to play against, set their supposed greatness into relief, give them their singular power. But instances like these raise doubts. Just as people fetishize celebrities, celebrities surely also fetishize themselves, convincing themselves that their value is entirely inherent and self-produced. The Marxist philosopher György Lukács called this reified consciousness. And what better to misunderstand the solidaristic spirit of a strike, premised on the idea that value and victory alike can only be collectively produced, than that?

It is possible, though, to get carried away with this mockery of celebrity cluelessness. While it is true that fame and fortune are inherently deradicalizing, isolating stars from the masses like Citizen Kane at Xanadu; and while it is also true that they insulate from the need to be literate in types of power that do not involve caché or dollar signs, we also have to contend with the limited availability of those notions of power in our impoverished political discourse. What does not even occur to well-meaning progressives as an option cannot be advocated for as a strategy. That goes for all of us. This is not to apologize for the celebrity class so much as to remain committed to targeting the real villain. The language of solidarity, of the social, of the “we,” of labor militancy and the power that flows therefrom—there is perhaps no greater conceptual casualty of capitalism and its neoliberal turn in the political imaginary than these things.

What is critical to realize, however, is that what once helped as much as anything to propagate that leftist language was—what else?—labor strikes. During the heyday of unions, labor militancy provided important mirrors in which everyday people could see and understand themselves as collective and collectively powerful beings, not just impotently atomized individuals who could do little more to change the world than recycle and vote. With the disciplining of labor and decline of unions over the past forty years, those mirrors have cracked, and the empowering imago they offered has as well.

But luckily, these mirrors show signs of repair. What the recent resurgence in labor actions and victories offer, insofar as we talk and teach each other about them, is precisely new ways to rediscover the “we” and its place in winning things—even for the clueless glitterati. After all, the celebrity millionaire-as-worker can benefit from political education just like the rest of us.

What that education should make clear is simple: what won the SAG-AFTRA deal, just as it has won landmark deals of various sorts for writers, UAW workers, UPS drivers, and others of late, was not the benevolence of millionaires, nor their convincing A-list performances in bargaining rooms; it was not caché nor cash; it was workers organizing to shut down production of a capitalist enterprise to get what they deserved. That organized money will never be a match for organized people is the lesson for high society and hoi polloi alike.