Disney Corporation through the Eyes of a Marxist

Introduction

The Walt Disney Company is an example of a global media conglomerate focused on the provision of intangible entertainment and tangible products including souvenirs and merchandise (Disney, 2018). The following figure reviews the latest financial figures reported by Disney.

Figure 1: The Financial Performance of Disney

Source: Disney (2018, p.12)

In 2018, the company was able to earn a total of $59.4 billion, meaning that the firm has developed a strong capacity for generating value and earning revenue (Disney, 2018). This was further illustrated by the significance of its inorganic growth such as the acquisition of the Fox film studio (Disney, 2018). One question that could emerge from the firm’s activities was whether Disney could be considered a stereotypical capitalist as was originally defined by Karl Marx (Evans, 1975). The goal of this essay is to review the structure and business operations of Disney from the Marxist point of view.

Evaluating Disney from the Marxist Point of View

This part of the essay relies on 3 criteria proposed in classical Marxism, namely appropriating the means of production, the class struggle and the balance of profits.

Disney and the Appropriation of the Means of Production

According to classical Marxism, capitalism is characterised by its dominance in capturing the means of production with human labour being the primary resource for all economic activities (Evans, 1975; Elster, 1986). This means that capitalism necessitated establishing a distance between the worker and the product of their labour with capitalists controlling both inputs and outputs (Elster, 1986; Keith and Charalambous, 2016). From this point of view, the Disney corporation presents an unambiguous example of a capitalist organisation. Its merchandise and souvenirs could be considered as an example of business outputs. By possessing the exclusive rights to produce merchandise based on its intellectual property, Disney demonstrated its acquisition of the means of production (Wei, 2018). In other words, the creative outputs of the workers of Disney did not belong to the employees but the company itself. This was further illustrated by Disney being able to continuously expand its portfolio of intellectual properties such as the Star Wars brand. One critique of such a perspective was that Disney was arguably reliant on its employees to maintain its competitiveness.

It was the creativity of the workers that determined the success of the different enterprises established by Disney such as its expansion into Broadway (Thomas, 2019). However, other scholars argued that maintaining such a relationship between a capitalist and their subordinates did not necessarily avert the main principles of capitalism (Koch et al., 2019). In their review of this issue, Koch et al. (2019) noted that persistent self-employment produced high rates of income and high average job satisfaction. This meant that at least partially controlling the means of production was ultimately beneficial for the workers themselves. Another argument in favour of the traditional Marxist perspective was that the employees were reliant on Disney to transform their efforts into profit (Wei, 2018; Disney, 2018). This meant that the means of production and the capabilities possessed by Disney (such as its ability to access large developing markets) provided the firm with a high degree of power over its workers.

One question was whether the tenets of Marxism were applicable to highly creative industries such as the film sector and the video game setting; Disney had a strong presence in both of these areas of business (Disney, 2018). On the one hand, controlling the means of production was a universal feature of capitalism (Evans, 1975; Elster, 1986). On the other hand, the uniqueness and the intangibility of the output of the workers arguably provided a contradiction to classical Marxism. This raised the question of how exactly Disney exerted its control in creative industries. The essay argues that creativity did not necessarily mean an escape from capitalism. According to Lampel and Germain (2016), creative industries were the hubs of business and managerial innovation such as increased work flexibility. Nonetheless, workers in creative industries still produced a labour surplus that allowed their employers to earn profits (Lampel and Germain, 2016). As an illustration, the share awards for employees of Disney were only equal to $0.03 per diluted share in 2017 (Disney, 2018). This meant that the corporation was able to control wages, thus presenting a major example of exploiting its workers.