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    <title>EconStor Collection:</title>
    <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/157765</link>
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    <pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:37:52 GMT</pubDate>
    <dc:date>2026-04-29T08:37:52Z</dc:date>
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      <title>The Political Economic Roots of Hollywood Strikes, 1950-2023</title>
      <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/312264</link>
      <description>Title: The Political Economic Roots of Hollywood Strikes, 1950-2023
Authors: McMahon, James
Abstract: 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.</description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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      <dc:date>2024-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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      <title>30 Years to the AIC. A Speech at Beit Sahur</title>
      <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/305188</link>
      <description>Title: 30 Years to the AIC. A Speech at Beit Sahur
Authors: Bichler, Shimshon
Abstract: The following is the text of a presentation delivered by Dr. Shimshon Bichler at the 30-year celebration of the Alternative Information Center (AIC), on October 5, 2013. Dr. Bichler is a political economist and veteran member of the AIC Board of Directors.</description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://hdl.handle.net/10419/305188</guid>
      <dc:date>2013-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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      <title>The Asymptotes of Power</title>
      <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/157998</link>
      <description>Title: The Asymptotes of Power
Authors: Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan
Abstract: FROM THE CLOSING COMMENTS BY JONATHAN NITZAN: Today’s talk has, like the one I gave at last year's conference on Capital as Power, presented my joint work with Bichler on the present crisis. Last year, I argued that this crisis is a systemic one, and that capitalists were struck by systemic fear – a primordial consternation for the very existence of their system. My purpose today has been to explain why. In order to do so, I have set aside the liberal-democratic façade that economists label 'the economy' and instead concentrated on the nested hierarchies of organized power. The nominal quantity of capital, I’ve argued, represents not material consumption and production, but commodified power. In modern capitalism, the quantities of capitalist power are expressed distributionally, as differential ratios of nominal dollar magnitudes. And the key to understanding capital as power is to decipher the connection between the qualitative processes of power on the one hand, and the nominal distributional quantities that these processes engender on the other. I have dissected, step by step, the national income accounts of the United States, from the most general categories down to the net profits of the country’s largest corporations. I have shown that, from the viewpoint of the leading corporations, most of the redistributional processes – from the aggregate to the disaggregate – are close to being exhausted. By the end of the twentieth century, the largest U.S. corporations, approximated by the top 0.01%, have reached an unprecedented situation: their net profit share of national income hovers around record highs, and it seems that this share cannot be increased much further under the current political-economic regime. This asymptotic situation, Bichler and I believe, explains why leading capitalists have been struck by systemic fear. Peering into the future, they realize that the only way to further increase their distributional power is to apply an even greater dose of violence. Yet, given the high level of force already being exerted, and given that the exertion of even greater force may bring about heightened resistance, capitalists are increasingly fearful of the backlash they are about to unleash. The closer they get to the asymptote, the bleaker the future they see. It is of course true that no one knows exactly where the asymptote lies, at least not before the ramifications of approaching it become apparent. But the fact that, over the past decade, capitalists have been pricing down their assets while their profit share of income hovers around record highs suggests that, in their minds, the asymptote is nigh.</description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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      <dc:date>2012-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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      <title>No Way Out: Crime, Punishment and the Limits to Power (Transcript and Video)</title>
      <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/157999</link>
      <description>Title: No Way Out: Crime, Punishment and the Limits to Power (Transcript and Video)
Authors: Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan
Abstract: The United States is often hailed as the world's largest 'free market'. But this 'free market' is also the world's largest penal colony. It holds over seven million adults – roughly five per cent of the labour force – in jail, in prison, on parole and on probation. Is this an anomaly, or does the 'free market' require massive state punishment? Why did the correctional population start to rise in the 1980s, together with the onset of neoliberalism? How is this increase related to the upward redistribution of income and the capitalization of power? Can soaring incarceration sustain the unprecedented power of dominant capital, or is there a reversal in the offing?</description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://hdl.handle.net/10419/157999</guid>
      <dc:date>2012-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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