A comment: What will be the impact of the writers' strike on the writers themselves?

The film and television business is presided over by a layer of corporate parasites, whose role it is to decide what the US and global population should see and hear and to make certain that massive profits pour in uninterrupted to a handful of conglomerates. For fulfilling this regressive and philistine function, they receive enormous sums and live like royalty.

As Brecht once noted about some ruling stratum or other, ‘Perhaps they have to be the way they are, but they do not have to be.’

A rational and socially progressive program for the writers strike would begin from the premise that the means of producing and distributing film, television and other media need to be removed from the viselike grip of GE, Time Warner, Disney, News Corp., Viacom and the rest and become publicly-owned and -operated facilities. Realizing such a goal is no easy matter. It requires a political break with the Democratic Party, a conscious identification with the struggles of the international working class and the building up of a socialist movement.

For their part, the studios and networks hope to defeat the writers and, once having decisively suppressed what they perceive as a threat to their omnipotence, see a return to normal. But how could that be? Things will never return to ‘normal.’ Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again.

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