Councilor Shemano writes: > We were just discussing that capitalism is theft, > appropriation of value, etc.
I wasn't in on that. >Now, how did this play out at > the concert? There were about 18,000 tickets sold. Let's > conservatively say at an average price of $150, so there was > a gross of $2,700,000 for one night's work. The Hollywood > Bowl got a leasing fee. The crew was paid. Simon and > Garfunkel either received a very hefty fee or a piece of the > gate shared with the promoter. Now, from a Marxist > perspective, what were the class relations at play? Whose > labor created what value? Who exploited who? How would it > work in PEN-Ltopia? The hired folks (the crew, etc.) probably produced more value than they received in wages, so Marxian exploitation was going on: surplus-value was likely produced (though I don't know the details of the case). S&G are super-star members of the working class, so they probably got a chunk of the surplus-value on top of their wages. TicketMaster and the concert impresarios got the rest, I'd guess. I don't know who owns the Hollywood Bowl. If it's the city, then some of the surplus-value went to the (local part of the) state. The class relations part of the concert (exploitation, production of surplus-value) reflects the class relations of US capitalism as a whole. There was also some distribution of that s-v to S&G, TicketMaster, the impresarios, and perhaps the city. In the ideal socialism, the concert would have been organized democratically, by a pact between a democratically-run city and a workers' cooperative running the Bowl. S&G's company would also be a workers' cooperative (though I imagine that the performers would have more say than most in decisions). They wouldn't e earning super-star salaries. I wrote: > >> Now why anyone would want to listen to Simon & Garfunkel > is beyond me. David: > C'mon, you live in LA. Listening to anything at the > Hollywood Bowl is worth it. Pack the basket, drink wine and > stare at the stars --pure bliss. it's true that with chemical help, anything sounds good. Even John Ashcroft's singing? (the last is a reference to "Fahrenheit 911." I can't say much about that flick that hasn't been said, except (as far as I was concerned) that it was preaching to the converted. I'd read too many reviews, so a lot of it wasn't surprising at all. The best part was the aforementioned singing and seeing Paul Wolfowitz comb his hair.) jd
