WSWS arts editor speaks in Los Angeles on implications of screen writers' strike

Walsh did not limit his talk to the strike and its aftermath. Instead he placed it within the context of the history of the struggle between writers and the studios and the current crisis of capitalism.

Calling the strike a “major social episode,” Walsh said that, from the outset, the WSWS’s coverage placed the strike in the broadest social and political context. “We argued, first of all, that the writers’ strike was an expression of a growing international resistance of workers to the relentless assault on their jobs and living standards and democratic rights.” As examples of this resistance, he cited the struggles of autoworkers in the US, postal workers in Great Britain, French railway workers and the German train drivers. All of these struggles were betrayed by their union bureaucracies, as—the writers will find out—was the WGA strike.