Why You SHOULD Support The Writers' Strike

Yes, there's something alluring, if anachronistic (hearkening back to Hollywood's red days and the pre-HUAC thirties) and perhaps ridiculous about the photographs of America Ferrera and, in Grey's Anatomy scrubs, Sandra Oh and Ellen Pompeo walking the WGA picket lines in solidarity with the strikers, and press has tended to focus on the disruptions the strike causes (no more Daily Show, so much for Steven Colbert's presidential aspirations, etc, how will we ever get to see Jack Bauer valorize torture?) rather than what's at stake in the demands and dispute which have brought us to this moment.

I want to argue that you should support the strike, not ironically, and not only because it's the right thing to do to support strikes that aren't hate strikes and aren't out to disenfranchise one group of workers at another's expense, but instead because what's at stake here winds up being rather important.

Sure, the Jane Espensons of the world aren't exactly an immiserated proletariat. They make lots of money. They don't work in mines. They're mostly white, mostly male. Why should you give a fuck?

Because what's at stake here winds up being the relationship between the labor that generates "intellectual property" and the ownership and distribution rights of said "property, a key question" for those of interested in questions of what Andrew Ross has called "the Mental Labor problem," or what the Italian autonomist marxists - notably Lazzarato, call immaterial labor - the labor that generates the informational and cultural content of the commodity. What control intellectual workers should have over what they produce winds up being relevant to a far broader swathe of workers than well-paid TV writers. Think of international graduate student researchers in biology labs at universities all over the country, helping to produce pharmaceutical and other medical patents in which they will have no ownership rights. The two cases are not quite the same - the writers are simply asking for a stake in one particular arena, that of digital reproduction of the tv show - but still they seem to be to be calling the question of who owns and profits from intellectual work.

We may, ultimately, want to throw out the entire concept of intellectual property as extremely deleterious for much of the world, or as now stifling the very innovation it was supposed to encourage and protect. That's fine. I don't think such a goal and supporting the strikers demands are mutually exclusive though. As long as profit is the extraction of the unpaid (excess) labor that goes into the production of a commodity, attempts to recognize that labor, to bring it to the fore, are important and worth fighting for.

That said, we can't ignore the role that other forms of labor play in the creation of the tv show as a commodity and as a unit of intellectual property. We can't fetishize the writers and their celebrated creative work as the only labor that makes possible the creation, or even the writing of a television show. I'm thinking not only of camerapeople, editors, set designers, but also parking productions assistants, janitors, food service workers, the workers who actually work in the factories that produce the dvds and tivos and home theater systems that have precipitated the so-called revolution in viewing which has led the writers to make the demands that the studios are refusing to meet, as well as, perhaps, the people who clean the writers' apartments, take care of their children, cook the food they eat. So while we should support the writer's strike, we should also insist that it be augmented, broadened to address the often invisible forms of labor that we don't often think about in conversations about creative labor and intellectual property.

Now back to my exam.