Michael Moore ’s Capitalism: A Love Story

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Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story
By Joanne Laurier and David Walsh
6 October 2009

Veteran documentary filmmaker Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story
sets out to examine the recent financial collapse. His aim, he
suggests, is a critique of the existing economic set-up.

“This time the culprit is much bigger than General Motors, and the
crime scene is wider than Flint, Michigan,” observe the film’s
production notes, a reference to Moore’s first documentary, Roger &
Me, made twenty years ago.

The new film is Moore’s fifth major documentary, three of which,
Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko, are among the
largest-grossing non-fiction films. Moore has developed a following as
a result of the concern he demonstrates for working people and their
difficulties. There will no doubt be a popular response to Capitalism.

That a film offering a criticism of the profit system opens in nearly
one thousand movie theaters in the United States is obviously an
unusual and noteworthy occurrence. There is certainly a connection
between this and a growing popular radicalization under conditions of
economic devastation. But what is the precise connection? Moore and
his greatest admirers see him as the vanguard of some oppositional
movement (whose character, however, is left remarkably vague). Is this
the reality?

The filmmaker maintains a certain independence from the mass media
where lies and misinformation dominate. He has shown backbone on a
number of occasions. Capitalism is concerned with nothing less than
“the disastrous impact of corporate dominance on the everyday lives of
Americans (and by default, the rest of the world),” according to the
film’s press notes. In other words, Moore comes before his audience as
a political individual with something to say, and we will judge him
and his film primarily in that light.

A number of elements in the film are to his credit. First, as noted
above, genuine sympathy for a suffering population.

The documentary, for instance, counters the claims of the media
pundits and the Obama administration that the victims of predatory
lending by the banks are in part to blame for the economic collapse.
Instead, Moore demonstrates how the wages, pensions and healthcare of
the working class have been decimated in the last quarter century as a
huge transfer of wealth to the financial elite has taken place.

Capitalism begins by facetiously comparing ancient Rome to present-day
America—vast social inequality, slave labor, and a regime that employs
torture (an image of former Vice President Dick Cheney appears
onscreen). The film’s overall format is familiar, perhaps too
familiar. Moore does the narrating, as well as the interviewing and
provoking. Through the sometimes clever use of television and movie
clips he makes his points and those of his talking heads.

He focuses on some of the crimes of the system. Early on in film, a
family in Lexington, North Carolina, is shown videoing their own
eviction by a police force that descends upon them in excessive
numbers. The next scene takes place in Detroit. A carpenter is
boarding up the residence of an angry and distraught family—their home
of 41 years. “This is capitalism—a system of giving and taking—mostly
taking,” says Moore in a voice-over.

“In a country run like a corporation,” other incidents are highlighted
in the film:

*A disabled railway worker’s family in Peoria, Illinois, lose their
home of 20 years. In a further humiliation, the bank hires the family
to empty and clean the foreclosed property for $1,000.

*In December 2008, workers occupy Republic Windows and Doors in
Chicago over monies owed them by a company shuttering its doors. They
eventually win an average of $6,000 per person, although the plant closes.

*Airline pilots for regional and commuter airlines make so little that
they have to be warned by employers not to apply for food stamps while
in uniform. The co-pilot on Continental Connection Flight 3407, which
crashed in February 2009, earned a little over $16,000 the previous year.

*Banks and corporations take out so-called “dead peasant” life
insurance policies on rank-and-file employees, whose payoffs are to
the companies, not the employees’ surviving family members.

*Thousands of young people were unjustly incarcerated in a privatized
juvenile detention center in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on the order
of two judges who were receiving millions in kickbacks from the
facility’s owners.

The footage of these events and the moving comments of those involved
are by far the Capitalism’s strongest features. Moore makes the
legitimate point that much of the country now resembles the wretched
conditions in Flint, Michigan, he documented in Roger & Me.

Without being unduly harsh to Moore, one must say that his films stand
out in large measure by default: because the fairly elementary truths
he points out are systematically and disgracefully concealed by the
news media—and Hollywood, for that matter.

But what does Moore make of these basic facts of American (and global)
life? Here his severe limitations as a thinker, and an artist, present
themselves. The confusion and eclecticism, of course, are not simply
his, but one must say what is—that it is impossible to see one’s way
out of the present crisis on the basis of his analysis.

Little is added to an understanding of the present situation by more
of the usual Moore antics: putting crime scene tape around AIG’s
headquarters; driving a truck up to Citibank demanding the return of
public money disbursed under the federal government’s TARP plan;
trying to gain entrance to the GM headquarters in Detroit—once again.
The gimmick of attempting a “citizen’s arrest” of a corporate looter
has worn very thin.

A few of the gags, his or other people’s, are still amusing. A mock
musical appeal to tourists to visit Cleveland makes its point: “See
our river that catches on fire…. It’s so polluted that all our fish
have AIDS…. See the sun almost three times a year…. Buy a house for
the price of a VCR.... Our main export is crippling depression.... But
at least we’re not Detroit!”

The film is disjointed and jumbled. Moore has great difficulty
separating the essential from the inessential. There is no shortage of
social atrocities in America. The filmmaker indignantly introduces us
to the “condo vultures” and “bottom feeders” who for 25 cents on the
dollar grab up foreclosed properties. What does the filmmaker expect?

Too much moralizing, sentimentality, and even manipulation go on.
Moore has an unpleasant tendency of letting his camera linger on the
distressed faces of his social victims.

The most serious weaknesses, however, involve his continued support
for the Democratic Party, and Obama, and his inability to advance any
serious alternative to the capitalism system.

His film is dominated by an internal contradiction: between the harsh
social facts he presents and the paltriness of his political solution.
Capitalism: A Love Story absurdly advocates the “elimination” of the
profit system at the same time as it praises one of the parties, and
that party’s leading figure, who preside over that system.

While he excoriates the obviously corrupt individual Democrat
(Christopher Dodd, Richard Holbrooke), he gives a platform to other of
its spokespeople, especially those who posture as “populists.” For
example, Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio is given wide coverage in the film.
Kaptur, like a Dennis Kucinich, is capable of any amount of demagogy
about Wall Street and Goldman Sachs, but she is staunchly
pro-military, a protectionist, a ferocious anti-communist, and an
opponent of abortion.

As for Obama, Moore is obliged to mention in passing that Goldman
Sachs was the largest private contributor to his 2008 presidential
campaign. Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, the
brain trust of Obama’s “Government Goldman,” come under fire—but
without any mention of the president himself. Capitalism refers to
events that occurred in the spring of 2009, by which time the
right-wing character of the Obama administration had shown itself,
both on the domestic and foreign fronts, and Moore is entirely silent
on that.

He is one of those who invariably invoke Franklin D. Roosevelt as the
ultimate reformer. Roosevelt, a canny representative of the American
bourgeoisie, lived in another era. What remains of the Democratic
Party’s legacy of social reform, particularly in the form of
healthcare “reform,” is under attack today by a president whom Moore
refers to as—potentially—the 21st Century Roosevelt!

The filmmaker presents himself as a kind of “Christian socialist.” He
offers a forum to various bishops and priests in ravaged areas like
Detroit and Chicago, where the Church plays on the misery and
illusions of the some of the poorest of the poor, to pontificate about
social ills. The bishop of Chicago is filmed sermonizing and giving
communion to the Republic workers during their occupation.

His argument, repeated a number of times, that capitalism is “evil,”
is false. It is a socio-economic system that arose under certain
objective conditions and was thoroughly revolutionary and progressive
in its day. The parasitic character of contemporary capitalism is
bound with its historical decay, and not, in the first place, the
moral depravity of its leading figures.

At the film’s climactic moment, Moore calls for the replacement of
capitalism…by “democracy.” What does that mean? It means more than
anything else that he hasn’t the political courage to mention socialism.

To the extent that Moore believes the ahistorical, eclectic views he
espouses in Capitalism: A Love Story, he is deluding himself. To the
extent that he attempts to sell them to a broad audience, he is
deluding others.

Copyright © 1998-2009 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/capi-o06.shtml

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