Support the Writers' Strike

Viacom sued Google's Youtube for $1 billion for distributing Viacom's copyrighted material online. Now, Viacom and other billion-dollar media conglomerates are trying to stiff the writers of that material out of their share of revenues from online and DVD distribution, provoking the first writers' strike in two decades.

Even though it means missing their favorite shows, polls show that 2/3 of the public is behind the writers and against the corporations. The strike has produced a split among the highly-paid Hollywood elite as well. Jay Leno has brought donuts to the picket line even though his show has been shut down, saying "there aren't many unions left - we have to stick together." (If you watch Leno's show, it's clear that he has pretty good class politics aside from the immigration issue.) Ellen Degeneres, on the other hand, has embraced "the show MUST go on" scab mantra and filled in for her writers at the behest of her production company, Telepictures Productions. Now late-show host Carson Daly is joining the scab bandwagon - he'll be back on the air next week.

Poverty is no excuse for scabbing, and when a rich celebrity who could easily find another gig elsewhere does it, it's even more disgusting.

The writers have also begun harnessing the youtube phenomenon for their cause. Check out these videos:








The strike is important for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, it shows that the "new economy" - information technology, the internet, etc - is not some kind of Brave New World free of class conflict, where everyone is middle class except for the filthy rich venture capitalists. Marxist ideas are just as relevant today as they were at highpoints in struggle in the past - the 1960s, 1930s, and 1890s - although the nature of the American (and world) working class is changing.

Secondly, it says something about how the nature of those changes is having an impact on the class struggle. The United Auto Workers, a union founded by revolutionary socialists in the 1930s in a titanic struggle with the auto companies, has experienced uninterrupted decline over the last 30 years, along with the Teamsters and other industrial unions. And it's not because they lost big fights. By and large, they've been surrendering away the gains they made from the 30s to the 60s piece by piece, contract by contract, and factory by factory. For example, the UAW leadership agreed to the creation of a two-tier pay scale and allowed G.M. out of its obligation to pay for the health care of its retirees and passed it off as some kind of big victory after a short, meaningless strike.

The so-called "Big Battalions" of labor have allowed themselves to become lethargic and weak after decades of downsizing, layoffs, pay cuts, and attacks on benefits. Recently, it has been service workers - at UPS, janitors (many of whom are undocumented immigrants) in SEIU, MTA workers in NYC, and now the writers - who have fought more militantly than their industrial brethren. As the head of the Teamster's motion-picture division put it: "Wow. You are acting like a militant union."

Show your support. Sign the online petition, check out their blog, visit their picket lines (with donuts), or make a donation to their union, the Writers Guild of America.