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“Capitalism:
A Love Story” is Michael Moore’s most ambitious but not most successful
film. He wants to show how capitalism in America today does not work as well
as it did in the past due to mismanagement, corporate greed, and the
failure of government oversight. He hopes for “a kinder, gentler”
capitalism. Unfortunately, Moore is not radical enough; he
does not grasp the root cause of economic oppression.
Still,
there is much to applaud here. In this film Moore puts a human face on the
victims of the system. He shows people losing their homes, fired from
their jobs, jailed without cause, and swindled by the despicable
schemes of employers and insurance companies. He shows the devastation
left behind on cities and towns when companies collapse or move away in
search of higher profit.
Perhaps
even more important, Moore shows people banding
together and fighting back, preventing housing foreclosures and, in the
case of Republic Windows and Doors, preventing companies from throwing
workers out like trash. The old slogan, “An injury to one is an injury
to all,” comes to life in this film.
Moore continues his unique style
of confrontational comedy, where simple common sense runs afoul of corporate
greed. His effort to retrieve misused bailout money and return it to
the federal treasury, for instance, is flat-out hilarious. So too with
his failed attempts to seek interviews with people in power so that he
may speak truth to them. Their arrogant silence conveys an essential
lesson: power means never having to say anything to anybody. From these
humorous situations Moore draws out his essential
theme, that America needs more democracy.
Though
Moore excels in portraying the symptoms of
oppression—no small achievement—he does not grasp the nature of
exploitation within capitalism. It’s as if everything went wrong with
federal deregulation and the election of Ronald Reagan, while
capitalist oppression will end if Obama adopts the crusading spirit of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and implements a steeply progressive tax
code. Moore fails to distinguish
between bad policies and a bad system. He does not recognize the
fundamental and irresolvable social antagonism between capital and wage
labor.
Workers
must produce more value than they earn. The extra value which they
produce goes into the hands of capitalists. Without profit founded on
inequality, a form of theft perpetrated every day on millions of
people, capitalism could not exist.
Since
exploitation is built into capitalism, the system cannot be altered
fundamentally by reforms, no matter how thoroughgoing, no matter how
necessary and just. To survive, capitalism must expropriate profit from
workers. Real democracy means that “the expropriators must still be
expropriated.”
Few
other films put social oppression on the screen and ask whether the
economic system that creates and thrives on human alienation and
suffering should continue to exist. Credit Moore for raising the essential
questions, ones that will linger in a viewer’s mind long after the
closing credits.
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