The Political Economic Roots of Hollywood Strikes, 1950-2023

This paper investigates the timing of labour strikes in Hollywood. The occurrence of strikes, such as the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023, can make sense when we have the hindsight to piece together the historical details of what created rifts between labour and management. But was 2023 a particularly fragile year for contract negotiations to break down with two of Hollywood’s creative labour unions? If labour demands were reasonable, why did studios refuse to agree with them? And if Hollywood studios are profitable, what makes management see the demands of labour as something “unreasonable”? This paper uses multiple sources of empirical data to analyse the historical trends of strikes in Hollywood between 1950 and 2023. Strikes in Hollywood — particularly by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA — have common political economic roots. They tend to occur when the profits of major Hollywood studios are in a type of danger zone: when the differential profits of Hollywood are stagnating or declining. Differential profit is a relative measure of performance. Differential profit can be found in any situation where a firm or set of firms holds a better stream of income than what others hold. For example, differential gains still occur when a firm loses profit at a slower rate than others. In the case of the Hollywood studios, differential profit is measured against the largest firms in other business sectors. The paper argues that relationships between management and labour in Hollywood are strained by the appearance of these danger zones of differential profit. When the differential profit of Hollywood’s major studios falls, the studios are pressured to increase their profits through aggressive methods such as cost-cutting. Data from 2006 to 2022 demonstrate that acts of cost-cutting hurt creative labour significantly more than studio management. As employment in arts, design, and entertainment occupations stagnated, management occupations increased in size around the 2008 WGA strike, as well as during the years before the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Management occupations also had higher wage and salary increases than arts, design, and entertainment occupations. The paper also argues that alternatives to the aggressive approaches of increasing profits are unlikely to appear in the current business conditions of Hollywood film distribution, even with the growth of streaming media. With few exceptions, Hollywood studios since the 1980s have built a delicate system of risk reduction, which is disrupted by injections of green-field spending and investment. In other words, the major studios currently prefer stagflation over growth, a preference that creates managerial aversions to new employment, significant increases in compensation and other financial benefits in the next collective agreement

A Tour of the Jevons Paradox: How Energy Efficiency Backfires

When it comes to our sustainability problems, striving for greater resource efficiency seems like an obvious solution. For example, if you buy a new car that’s twice as efficient as your old one, it should cut your gasoline use in half. And if your new computer is four times more efficient than your last one, it should cut your computer’s electric bill fourfold. In short, boosting efficiency seems like a straightforward way to reduce your use of natural resources. And for you personally, efficiency gains may do exactly that. But collectively, efficiency seems to have the opposite effect As technology gets more efficient, we tend to consume more resources. This backfire effect is known as the ‘Jevons paradox’, and it occurs for a simple reason. At a social level, efficiency is not a tool for conservation; it’s a catalyst for technological sprawl.1 Here’s how it works. As technology gets more efficient, it cheapens the service that it provides. And when services get cheaper, we tend to use more of them. Hence, efficiency ends up catalyzing greater consumption. Take the evolution of computers as an example. The first computers were room-sized machines that gulped power while doing snail-paced calculations. In contrast, modern computers deliver about a trillion times more computation for the same energy input. Now, in principle, we could have taken this trillion-fold efficiency improvement and reduced our computational energy budget by the same amount. But we didn’t. Instead, we took these efficiency gains and invested them in technological sprawl. We took more efficient computer chips and put them in everything — phones, TVs, cars, fridges, light bulbs, toasters … not to mention data centers. So rather than spur conservation, more efficient computers catalyzed the consumption of more energy. In this regard, computers are not alone. As you’ll see, efficiency backfire seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Far from delivering a cure for our sustainability woes, efficiency gains appear to be a root driver of the over-consumption disease

Power (Re)distribution: How Dominant Capital Regained Control of the Energiewende

The Energiewende (energy transition) is the dynamic and contested project of energy transition in Germany. It encompasses both the sociotechnical transformation of the German electricity system and the reorganization of the sector’s ownership structure. In this paper, we present a Capital-as-Power (CasP) based analysis, investigating industrial path-dependency and innovation as part of the dialectics of power and sociotechnical change in capitalism. According to CasP, dominant capital seeks to increase its differential accumulation, i.e., accumulation relative to a benchmark. Energiewende policies initially decreased the differential accumulation of dominant electricity firms in Germany. However, we find that by concentrating their control over the shrinking conventional generation capacity, while variable generation expanded, dominant firms gained the leverage needed to increase differential prices and profits, thus managing to regain sectoral control by increasing their threat to reliable power supply. We find that these processes coincide with spatial centralization, ownership concentration, and decreasing penetration rates of renewable energy resources in Germany. By presenting new conceptual tools and empirical findings, we trace the ways in which the recovery of dominant capital in the German electricity sector shapes and restricts energy transition processes

Key points on Bichler/Nitzan’s text “Capital as Power”

FROM THE ARTICLE: At first glance, it would appear that Deleuze’s concept of structure involves a complex form of so-called creorder, a term that appears at the forefront of the methodological findings of the economists Bichler/Nitzan. If the structure is actualized in each of its moments in processes, then Bichler/Nitzan describe this process with the term “creorder”. They consider this to be a highly artificial term, which is intended to indicate that a structure/order must constantly construct and reconstruct itself in (historical) time, just as a form must constantly transform itself. According to Bichler/Nitzan, in the context of creorder, the meaning of the relationship between Heraclitean becoming and Parmenidean being lies precisely in the fact that the fusion of verb and noun results in the term “creorder”: “To have a history is to create order – a verb and a noun whose fusion yields the verb-noun creorder.” On the one hand, the so-called creorder may be completely vertically or hierarchically ordered, as is the case in ultra-bureaucratic systems, for example; on the other hand, it may also be horizontal, as could be the case in radical democracies, or it may be in between order and disorder

Consolidation and Crisis in the US Banking Sector 1980-2022

Much of the economic analysis of banking crises focuses on the interplay between concentration and stability. A common theory is that concentration is associated with greater stability, whereas competition is associated with instability. In this view, there is a trade-off between, on the one hand, the higher prices and higher profits associated with a banking cartel, and on the other, frequent banking crises and lower prices caused by a fragmented sector. However, this theory is not entirely convincing. Principally, it tends to treat competition and concentration as independent variables, whereas in reality, causality works both ways: banks actively work to transform the structure of the system and transcend apparent constraints – whether through coordinating interest rates, influencing policy, or by transforming the business landscape through corporate amalgamation. In addition, the last two major banking crises in the US occurred in dramatically different conditions of concentration from one other, complicating any obvious empirical connection between concentration and stability. In this paper, I try to move beyond this hypothesis by investigating the relationship between corporate concentration and banking stability through the lens of organized power. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, I make two claims. First, since the 1980s, the differential profitability of large banks has been driven by corporate amalgamation. Second, crises tend to be followed by an increase in the pace of amalgamation. As a result, since the 1980s, banking crises have preceded a dramatic redistribution of resources and control to a handful of large banks. While it is not clear that concentration makes a banking crisis less likely, the evidence suggests that crisis makes concentration more likely. Though the research presented here is only tentative and exploratory, it indicates that since the 1980s, large banks have remade the business and regulatory landscape in ways that defy the logic of a simple binary relationship between concentration and stability, and that this needs to be taken into account when analysing the dynamics of banking crises

The Notions of the Valuable: How Symbolic and Economic Value Discuss the Fragile Nature of Ecology in Frank Herbert’s Dune

What determines value? Value-theory is a complex field of study, but in Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel ‘Dune,’ there are especially two categories of value that come to light: economic and symbolic value. In the novel, economic and symbolic value are demonstrated by the natural resources of the spice mélange – a strange substance which allows interstellar travel within the fictional Empire but only found the desert planet Arrakis – and water, the building block of life which is almost non-existent on the planet. In this dissertation, these ideas are explored by using real-world theories of value and the different social groups within the novel to determine the value of water and the spice in ‘Dune.

Is Bitcoin More Energy Intensive Than Mainstream Finance?

When it comes to Bitcoin, there’s one thing that almost everyone agrees on: the network sucks up a tremendous amount of energy. But from there, disagreement is the rule. For critics, Bitcoin’s thirst for energy is self-evidently bad — the equivalent of pouring gasoline in a hole and setting it on fire. But for Bitcoin advocates, the network’s energy gluttony is the necessary price of having a secure digital currency. When judging Bitcoin’s energy demands, the advocates continue, keep in mind that mainstream finance is itself no model of efficiency. Here, I think the advocates have a point. If you want to argue that Bitcoin is an energy hog, you’ve got to do more than just point at its energy budget and say ‘bad’. You’ve got to show that this budget is worse than mainstream finance. On this comparison front, there seems to be a vacuum of good information. For their part, crypto promoters are happy to show that Bitcoin uses less energy than the global banking system. But this result is as unsurprising as it is meaningless. Compared to Bitcoin, global finance operates on a vastly larger scale. So of course it uses more energy. To be meaningful, any comparison between Bitcoin and mainstream finance must account for the different scales of the two systems. So instead of looking at energy alone, we need to look at energy intensity — the energy per unit of circulating currency. That’s what I’ll do here. In this post, I compare the energy intensity of Bitcoin to the energy intensity of mainstream US finance. Which system comes out on top? The results may surprise you

Who Controls the Public Debt? A Critical Review of Sandy Brian Hager’s Public Debt, Inequality, and Power

Hager’s project examines the historical development of US public debt ownership and its political implications. His main innovation is to approach the topic from the perspective of disaggregated social class and frame questions of public debt ownership in terms of social inequality and power. He tackles four questions: who are the owners of the public debt; what are the distributional effects on income and wealth; what are the implications of increasingly foreign public debt ownership; and what is the relationship between debt-ownership concentration and political influence. He argues that the increasingly unequal power of bondholders undermines the ability of the US government to pursue a more equitable and democratic fiscal policy, which is essential to tackling a range of social issues (including inequality itself). The project is illuminating and has important political implications, though due to the narrow scope of the project, Hager gives light treatment of some key aspects of the relationship between debt and power

The Road to Gaza

You can read, quote, reference and link this working paper, but you cannot reproduce or post it in any form unless permitted in writing by the authors ***** The war that started in 2023 between Hamas and Israel is driven by various long-lasting processes, but it also brings to the fore a new cause that hitherto seemed marginal: the armed militias of the Rabbinate and Islamic churches. The Rabbinate militias, embodied in Jewish settler organizations, have taken over not only Palestinian lands, but, gradually, also Israeli society. The Islamic militias, represented by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, rose to prominence after the traditional resistance groups of the Palestinians – primarily the PLO and the PFLP and, by extension, also the Palestinian Authority – weakened and proved unable to reverse, let alone stop, the Israeli occupation. The rise of these militias, though, is hardly unique to Israel/Palestine, or even the Middle East. It is part of a broader, global process, in which ‘private’ military organizations, financed by states, church-related NGOs and/or organized crime, fight for and against states as well as each other. The ascent of such groups is closely related to the decline of the nation-state and its popular armies, a model that developed in the wake of the French Revolution but no longer resonates with the increasingly globalized nature of capital accumulation. Our previous studies of Middle East wars emphasized the ‘state of capital’ – our notion that the capitalist mode of power fuses state and capital into a single logic in which dominant capital groups are driven by the power quest for differential accumulation. We showed that, in the Middle East, this logic was imposed by a Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition of large oil and armament corporations, OPEC, financial institutions and construction firms, whose differential incomes and profits were tightly correlated with – and helped predict – the cyclical eruption of ‘energy conflicts’. But this mode of power comprises not two elements, but three. In addition to state and capital, it also includes the supreme-God churches, and in this paper we outline the role of these churches and their militias in capitalism generally and in Middle East wars specifically

The Road to Gaza, Part II: The Capitalization of Everything

Our recent article on ‘The Road to Gaza’ examined the history of the three supreme-God churches and the growing role of their militias in armed conflicts and wars around the world. The present paper situates these militia wars in the broader vista of the capitalist mode of power. Focusing specifically on the Middle East, we show the impact these militia wars have on relative oil prices and differential oil profits and explain how the wars themselves, those who stir them and the subjects that fight them all get discounted into capitalized power