• RuthlessCriticism [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I’m not sure what you mean by labor is recycled for profit. I see no difference between a worker paving a road that people drive over for 20 years and an actor making a movie which is rerun for 20 years. In Marx’s terminology there is living labor and dead labor. Living labor is the work done by workers. Dead labor is the product of work done in the past by workers, for example a sowing machine. Capital is dead labor. The actor makes the movie performing living labor and should be compensated for it. Then there exists the movie itself a form of dead labor and they should no longer be compensated for it (under socialism).

    • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      My point is that the movie is being recycled for profit specifically. As long as thats abolished, I agree with you I think. But if the corporation is still profiting off a living person’s labor like that, residuals seem like the way to compensate for that.

      I do agree there’s kind of a disconnect between how this is done in the entertainment industry vs other industries, but I think as long as profit is being made by “recycling labor” then ideally yes compensation should occur for that. I realize this would lead to complicated situations like, say, a private person using a sewing machine to do a craft and then selling it on etsy, do they owe the worker who made that sewing machine residuals? Its a weird road to go down. But I don’t think movies, music, and TV on streaming services are complicated in any way because thats a situation where a corporation is making money off people’s recycled labor in perpetuality, and currently those people make nothing off of that and the bosses do.

      • RuthlessCriticism [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Those royalties were at rates controlled by the government and as I understand it were fairly limited. No doubt there were significant shortcomings in the USSR though, this among them. Sort of in line with the general problem of different wage rates. I believe the highest paid workers had wages about 5 times those of the lowest paid. As the Soviet Union decayed more liberalism entered its copyright system, the rate controls were lifted by Gorbachev and even before that copyright was made more restrictive with respect to translations and foreign work.