Michael Moore’s assault on capitalism
Capitalism: A Love Story
A Michael Moore film
Reviewed by
Dan DiMaggio,
MICHAEL MOORE’S new film
opened in nearly 1,000 theaters across the US in early October with a
simple message: capitalism is evil, and must be replaced with a system
that puts the interests of ordinary people over profit.
The film puts the suffering
of ordinary, hard-working Americans facing job losses, home
foreclosures, and declining wages and benefits on full display.
Capitalism is exposed as a system that is rotten to the core,
subordinating every social concern to the limitless quest for profit.
Moore calls this movie "the
culmination of all the films I’ve ever made". As he explained in an
interview on Democracy Now: "I am tired of having to dance around this
or deal with this symptom of the problem or that calamity caused by
capitalism… I guess I can keep making movies for another twenty years
about the next General Motors or the next healthcare issue, but I
thought I’d just kind of cut to the chase and propose that we deal with
this economic system and try to restructure it in a way that benefits
people and not the richest one percent". (24 September 2009).
The significance of this
phenomenon – a major filmmaker denouncing capitalism in front of an
audience of millions in the most powerful capitalist nation in the
history of the world – should not be lost. While Moore does not provide
a clear alternative, he is forcing open a popular debate on the need to
transform the entire social system.
The film relies on intimate
portrayals of the human costs of capitalism. In one example, Moore shows
a privatized juvenile detention facility in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
The owners of this facility made tens of millions of dollars by bribing
judges to unjustly convict over 6,500 kids and lock them up for months
for offenses ranging from throwing a piece of steak at their parents to
making a MySpace page about their assistant principal.
Moore interviews families
facing foreclosures and layoffs, giving voice to working class anger at
the bosses, bankers, and politicians responsible. He traces the
devastation of Randy and Donna Hacker, as police force them from the
home they built on their family farm. As Randy Hacker says, "There’s
gotta be some kind of rebellion between the people that’s got nothing
and the people who have it all… There’s no inbetween anymore".
Capitalism vs democracy
AT THE end of the film, Moore
concludes: "capitalism is an evil, and you can’t regulate evil. You have
to eliminate it, and replace it with something that is good for all
people". Yet while Moore is clear on the problems of capitalism, he
avoids putting forward a coherent alternative. His alternative to
capitalism is ‘democracy’, though exactly what this means is left
unclear.
Moore clearly exposes the
anti-democratic character of capitalism, decimating the claims of the
corporate media and political elite that the free market goes
hand-in-hand with democracy. As he told Democracy Now, "The wealthiest
one percent [of Americans] have more financial wealth than the bottom
95% combined. When you have a situation like that, where one percent
essentially not only own all the wealth, but own Congress, call the
shots, are we really telling the truth when we call this a democracy?…
Just because we get to vote every now and then, we can call this a
democracy, when the economy is anything but?... There’s not democracy in
the workplace. I mean, through most of our daily lives, the idea of
democracy is fairly nonexistent. And I think things work better when the
people who have to work with whatever it is we’re working with have a
say in how it’s working".
Moore’s call for ‘democracy’
means in part the building of social movements of workers and oppressed.
The film cites some important examples, including community struggles to
prevent evictions and, most notably, the successful factory occupation
by workers at Republic Windows & Doors in Chicago last December where
workers forced their employers to give them the back pay and severance
owed them. Moore also shows several factories that are owned and
democratically operated by workers themselves, rather than corporate
bosses.
Yet while highlighting the
need for struggle from below, and calling for an alternative to
capitalism, Moore avoids calling himself a socialist. For example, when
asked on Democracy Now if he was a socialist, he evaded the question,
answering, "Uhh, I’m a heterosexual! Uhh, uhh, I’m overweight!" before
they ran out of time.
Yet many of Moore’s
descriptions of ‘democracy’ could accurately describe genuine socialism!
Democratic socialism does not mean the dictatorships that existed in the
Soviet Union and elsewhere, or the sort of top-down system in which the
government controls every aspect of life, as the right-wing likes to
caricature it. Nor does it have anything to do with bailing out the
biggest banks and corporations with trillions of taxpayer dollars.
A socialist alternative
A SOCIALIST society would put
the economy and political system under the democratic control of working
people, whose labor actually creates all the wealth. If we all had a
democratic say in what got produced, the methods of production, and how
products were distributed, the world would be a fundamentally different
place. The resources of society could be used to benefit all of humanity
and the environment, rather than just a tiny minority of super-rich
people.
For workers to control what
is produced the economy would need to be run on an entirely different
basis than the current system of private ownership. Socialists call for
taking the top 500 US corporations, including the big banks, auto and
oil industries, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, and more, out of
the hands of their wealthy shareholders and placing them under public
ownership and democratic working class control.
This doesn’t mean putting the
resources of these corporations into the hands of government bureaucrats
appointed by big money politicians, like the recent nationalization of
General Motors. Instead, the current government, controlled by a
two-party system thoroughly awash in corporate cash, must be replaced by
a government made up of direct representatives of working people.
In this way, socialism would
mean a massive expansion of democracy. Instead of simply voting for
representatives every few years, while the real decisions are made
behind the scenes in corporate boardrooms, socialist democracy would
bring collective decision making into the day-to-day functioning of
every workplace, every neighborhood, and every school and university.
Elected workplace committees would replace existing bosses.
Neighborhood and workplace
councils, holding regular meetings open to all, would send
representatives to expanded city and regional councils. In turn, such
regional councils would elect national representatives. Elected
representatives would be paid no more than the wage of the average
worker, and be subject to immediate recall (imagine if voters had been
able to recall all the politicians in congress who voted for the Iraq
war, the Patriot Act, or the bank bailouts!).
On the basis of bringing the
economy into public ownership and democratic control, and by replacing
the ‘insane casino’ of the market with democratic economic planning, we
could dramatically improve living standards for the majority, save the
environment, and abolish poverty and war.
Under capitalism people are
evicted from their homes and forced to live on the streets while
millions of houses lie vacant. Workers are thrown out of their jobs
despite the urgent need for more teachers, nurses, and public
transportation. A democratically planned economy would not allow this
cruel insanity, instead utilizing the resources of society to meet human
needs, rather than profits for shareholders.
Role of the Democratic Party
MOORE’S FILM exposes the role
of both the Democratic and Republican parties in implementing policies
that have benefited the top one percent at the expense of workers. This
film could have been a wake-up call, educating anyone interested in real
change of the need for a political alternative to the two-party system.
Unfortunately, Moore himself stops short of calling for this critical
step, and at times, the film masks the true role of the Democratic
Party, both in the current crisis and historically.
Moore shows a powerful clip
of Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, Ohio, calling from
the floor of congress for Americans to "squat in their own homes" and
refuse to leave. He also shows left-wing Democrat Dennis Kucinich, also
of Ohio, asking, "Is this the US congress or the Board of Directors of
Goldman Sachs?"
But figures like Kucinich are
marginalized within the Democratic Party, often functioning regardless
of their intentions to provide a left-wing face while the party
continues to carry out pro-corporate, pro-war policies. The important
positions go to people like Christopher Dodd and Max Baucus, who after
raking in health industry donations are now busy making sure that
healthcare reform does not even include a public option. The real party
leaders make policy within the strict limits imposed by the Democrats’
corporate donors.
Another weakness is Moore’s
presentation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR appears in the movie as
the champion of working people, supporting their struggles to unionize
and fight for a decent living in the 1930s. Moore claims that had FDR
lived a few more years he would have enacted a Second Bill of Rights
guaranteeing the right to living wage jobs, healthcare, housing,
education, and more, as FDR outlined in a 1944 speech.
Yet reality is far different
from the popular mythology of the New Deal and this ‘great man theory of
history’. It was not thanks to FDR’s leadership that workers achieved
all the gains they made in the 1930s, from stronger unions to Social
Security and unemployment relief. It was because they broke the law and
defied court injunctions, local police, ‘citizens’ militias’, and
National Guard troops with sit-down strikes, mass pickets, general
strikes, demonstrations of the unemployed for relief, and more.
One would never know from
Moore that, as labor historian Art Preis writes, under FDR "more workers
[were] killed, wounded and jailed, more troops called out against
strikers … than under any president in memory" (Labor’s Giant Step). It
was only under massive pressure from below, and the fear that workers
would go even farther and threaten the entire capitalist system, that
FDR and the political establishment made concessions.
The even greater reforms
achieved by workers in Western Europe and Japan, which Moore touches on,
such as universal healthcare and free higher education, were also the
product of massive struggles of the working class which threatened to
overthrow capitalism, often including the election of mass workers’
parties.
Obama: defender of capitalism
MOORE’S FILM stands out
because of its willingness to boldly tell the truth about the real
character of capitalism. But when it comes to Obama, Moore treats him
with kid gloves, despite criticisms of his economic team and some of his
policies.
Moore himself was once a
champion of the need to break from the Democrats and build a political
alternative that represents working people. In 2000 he was a leading
advocate of Ralph Nader’s left-wing presidential campaign, and in the
1990s he was a supporter of the Labor Party, which was founded by a
number of the country’s most progressive unions. Unfortunately, Moore
has retreated from this position under the pressure of the dominant
‘lesser evil’ mood among the left during the Bush years. In late
September, he told the AFL-CIO convention, "Instead of us piling on
[Obama], he needs our support… I see him out there [at the healthcare
‘town hall’ meetings] on his own. Who’s got his back?" (Washington Post,
16 September)
Clearly the racist attacks on
Obama put forward by the right-wing should be sharply opposed. But
Obama’s sell-out on healthcare reform, his bailouts for the banks, and
his refusal to create the kind of jobs programs needed to reverse rising
unemployment, are creating the conditions for a right populist movement
to develop.
The half-measures of Obama
and the Democrats have managed to antagonize the right while
demoralizing the millions of workers and youth who had hoped for real
change. That’s because Obama and the Democrats are fundamentally
representatives of big business. Instead of ‘having Obama’s back’, the
key is to mobilize, independently of the Democrats and Republicans,
around the needs of working people, rather than from the standpoint of
what is acceptable to the corporations and their two-party system.
Imagine if the AFL-CIO had
mobilized its millions of members to demand single-payer healthcare (a
guaranteed, universal healthcare plan in which the government insures
everyone, cutting out the insurance companies, and allowing free choice
of doctor and hospital)? Unfortunately, the right-wing has mobilized its
base and dominated the debate. The left, meanwhile, not wanting to
embarrass its ‘friend’ in the White House, has remained largely silent.
Far from being a socialist as
the right-wing tries to depict him, Obama is a full supporter of
capitalism. As Obama wrote in his autobiography, The Audacity of Hope,
"our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system
that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual
initiative and efficient allocation of resources... our free market
system".
So Obama defends the very
system that Moore is indicting with this film. Obama’s policies have
been aimed at saving the capitalist system from a devastating crash like
the Great Depression and, like FDR, preventing social upheaval that
could threaten corporate rule. It is no coincidence that his top
economic advisers have ties to Goldman Sachs and other big Wall Street
firms.
Ultimately, as Moore shows,
we need to build movements from below – for jobs, homes, healthcare,
against the wars, and more – to challenge the corporate stranglehold
over our political system. But that will also mean breaking from the
Democrats, and linking those movements together into a new political
party to represent ordinary workers and youth – a party of the millions,
not the millionaires.