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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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I would say no; it's only indirect exploitation, and everyone living in a capitalist country does this more or less willingly to survive. It'd be different if the creator had an ownership stake in the video platform, had employees, etc.
In that case, did JKR become a billionaire by being a worker?
JK Rowling? Did she make that money from sales of the books she wrote, with no stake (e.g. a significant percentage of stocks) in the various organizations that sold HP merchandise, movies, games, etc.?
She owns the media rights, so the answer would be both.
JKR is not a valid example of a worker as their money comes mainly not from the fruits of their labour, but the amalgamation of entire industries that help her reap billions.
But why does that line of reasoning not apply to rich YouTubers and Twitch streamers?
If influencers stopped working, their revenue would go down drastically, which can't be said of Rowling. So in a sense they have to work for a living, but they're also so rich that they could stop working if they wanted to. It just seems like they're similar situations.
If you can call an athlete or a movie star labour aristocrats, it seems like that label would also apply to successful authors and influencers. They're all propped up by the industries built around them.
Good point. A rough estimate would be she gets 10% of each of the 600,000,000 $15 Harry Potter books that have been sold worldwide. That comes out to $900,000,000.
A lot of that value came from the many workers involved in the publishing, marketing, translating, printing, shipping, etc. of the books. Did she get the surplus value of their labour? Does intellectual property count as means of production? How is that different from Youtubers and Twitch streamers benefitting from the labour put into their respective platforms?
If intellectual property is valid in at least some sense and she deserves monetary compensation for the sale of Italian translations, why does that not transfer to the licensing for movies and theme parks?
Btw I'm neither defending Rowling nor am I being antagonistic / trying to pull a gotcha or anything. I just think it's interesting.
(This is just my interpretation of the proletariat as a class and intellectual property, so take it with a grain of salt.) It's worth noting that in the post title's case, the labour embodied in YouTube as a platform and the advertisements shown by YouTube would have existed without the video creator in question. In Rowling's case, the vast majority of her wealth comes from her ownership of the IP, which is then "leased" by the corporations that produce the content in question (books, movies, plays, games, theme parks, merchandise, etc.), meaning that the source of her money is effectively rent. Since the IP isn't something tangible like a housing complex, I'm not sure if people like her are clearly bourgeois like landlords, but she's certainly not surviving by selling her labour power (so she's not proletarian) and she's not surviving by selling goods she created (so she's not an artisan)
YouTubers profit of US, the viewers. We buy their overpriced merchandise, we religiously watch their ads and their sponsorships. Heck some people even go further and crowdfund them through patreon!
They're not bourgeoisie (tho their lifestyles are as opulent), they're merely jesters of our time, they have huge incomes because WE crowdfund them in exchange for entertainment.
The platform, the ad companies, patreon shareholders are the capitalists. They take a cut from every content creator income.