Capitalism: A Love Story

[cyu]

Should be interesting - I saw Sicko a long while back and it was much better than I expected, from my well here in the US, that was pretty much my first glimpse into the health care systems in other parts of the world.

Excerpts from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/09/michael-moore-documentary-capitalism

When I first met Michael Moore more than 20 years ago, he was showing a half-finished documentary to a few dozen people... He had taken a second mortgage on his house... and raised some money from like-minded locals for a long-shot venture. We all loved what he showed us but thought he would be lucky if a few thousand people got to see it.

Twenty years later, he has produced his most radical work, which was greeted with rave enthusiasm when I saw it

Moore has bigger targets in his sights: he is questioning whether the whole incentive structure, moral values and political economy of American capitalism is fit for human beings... it's pretty much unprecedented for something that can reach a mass audience in the US.

there are victories, too – as when workers occupy their factory in Chicago to win the pay that they are owed.

As an economist who operates in the think-tank world, I have to appreciate this work. He gets the economic story right. How is it that Michael Moore's father could buy a house and raise a family on the income of one auto worker, and still have a pension for his retirement? And yet this is not possible in the vastly more productive economy of today?

Moore also explains the structural changes, such as Ronald Reagan's rollback of union and labour relations to the 19th century, that helped bring about the most massive upward redistribution of income in US history.

the only thing missing was a look at the stock market and housing bubbles of the last decade. The current recession, like the last one, was primarily caused by the collapse of a huge asset bubble... Asset bubbles are as old as capitalism, and since this is a movie about capitalism and the current Great Recession, it would have been nice to see some of this in the movie.

Moore's last documentary, Sicko – which was quite careful with the facts – drew attacks from CNN and a smear campaign from the insurance industry. Both attempted – unsuccessfully - to impugn its accuracy. One former vice president of corporate communications for a health insurance company, and the author of several memos attempting to discredit Sicko, recently admitted to Bill Moyers on camera that Moore "hit the nail on the head with his movie."

we see Jonas Salk, the man who discovered the vaccine for polio in 1955, saving millions from the crippling and often fatal disease and refusing to get rich off his work by claiming patent rights.

the Catholic Bishop of Detroit, when asked what Jesus would think of capitalism, replies that Jesus would not want to participate in such a system.

[KarlMarx1989]

I look forward to seeing this film. I liked Fahrenheit 9 11 and Bowling For Columbine was an eye-opener for me to see when I was 13. Sicko, I thought, was a little incomplete. Moore could've done a lot more with that and left a lot out. I hope this is a movie with some very valid points and is a complete, factual, non-biased film.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Despite all the right-wing rants about Moore's obviously capitalist background, I wonder if a rebuttal can be made in the form of "This is the Conditions of the Working Class in England applied to American conditions" in reference to the work by a petty capitalist by the name of Frederick Engels.

[chegitz guevara]

The Condition of the American Working Class in 2009

[The Something]

Michael Moore is a limousine liberal fucktard who will do anything for a buck.
Case in point: he jumped the hate on Ralph Nader bandwagon after publicly endorsing him and then very publicly rejecting him and mocking him. The facts in his "documentaries" if they can even be called that are questionable at best.

Or how about the scene in bowling for Columbine where he goes up to the clerk of the store and trys to make him answer for why the students have bullets in them...... yeah that's the way to go blame the working class schmuck. He's an entertainer nothing more.

Good ole' Michael.

[Bloody Armalite]

He seems to me a john lennon type, talking about leftist issues, while in a upper class lifestyle, i could be wrong though

[chegitz guevara]

We need more friends like this, actually.

[Revy]

It blows my mind that Michael Moore is releasing a film criticizing capitalism. I didn't expect that.

I don't expect the content of the film to be particularly revolutionary, perhaps it might be social democratic in nature, but I think the changing perspectives will be an added benefit. That, for once, capitalism can become a dirty word instead of socialism.

[Robocommie]

I don't care if Michael Moore lives in a mansion and does coke off of strippers. (he doesn't) If he releases a film that mocks and questions capitalism, I guarantee it can only benefit our movement because it will get people questioning things.

Even more social democrats is an inherently good thing. I used to be a social democrat myself until I decided that my government will never vote socialism into practice. And so it will be if more people wake up to the realities of this system.

[KurtFF8]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/michael-moore-new-t114905/index.html

[RedHal]

The rabid rightwing's worst nightmare or the elitist left's worst nightmare?

http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitpic/photos/large/28656386.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=0ZRYP5X5F6FSMBCCSE82&Expires=1252701347&Signature=VOOtDLGSjL5kW0oOeq61EQlkS3w%3D

[jake williams]

I think it's great news. If it were a perfect documentary it probably wouldn't be popular.

[Jimmie Higgins]

With all reformers it's important to recognize that their politics ultimately fall short, however, look at the big picture comrades!

Even though Moore did fall back into the Democratic party in 2004 and 2008 (which he is clearly to the left of) this is in the context of a time when practically the entire broad left retreated! Let's not blame individuals for broad trends in consciousness.

Secondly, Michael Moore's very existence as a public figure and film/tv maker counter-programs a huge chunk of right-wing propaganda about the US working class.

His movies which are (to varying degrees) critical of Democrats and well to the left of any national Democratic party proposals PLAY IN FRIGGIN' MULTIPLEXES next to inane shit like "Bratz: The Movie". His films pretty much created a market for documentaries in the US and are the highest-grossing documentaries in the US - followed only by totally apolitical things like the Spelling Bee or the Penguin documentaries.

Any radical who could flatly poo-poo a movie CRITICAL OF CAPITALISM (even it it's very title) and raises these issues to working-class audiences across the country must be living in a fantasy world where the local Drive-in shows "Das Capital: the Movie" an adaptation of Marx's theories of Capitalism directed by Steven Speilberg.

[Jimmie Higgins]

In short: I'll be seeing this movie while drinking an overpriced soda and then I'll be standing outside the exit handing out fliers to the next protest or meeting I'm organizing.

[the last donut of the night]

It doesn't matter if Michael Moore isn't our dear idea of a revolutionary (I mean, I would love him if he were, but c'mon). I know, as a young Communist, that what brings in people to our movement isn't free copies of Lenin's work on the street. Or just high-brow leftist theoreticians on RevLeft screaming at anything that doesn't necessarily fit the ideological base. What made me into a communist was the works of liberal capitalists; for example, Sicko. That is because these works usually reach a higher base and have some criticism in them, unlike most crap Americans hear every day. If you're smart and free-thinking enough to go ahead with the train of thought behind Moore's latest work, you can eventually reach Marx's ideas. That's how it worked out with me. So I support this movie (which I hope is pretty good).

[redasheville]

Michael Moore is a limousine liberal fucktard who will do anything for a buck.
Case in point: he jumped the hate on Ralph Nader bandwagon after publicly endorsing him and then very publicly rejecting him and mocking him. The facts in his "documentaries" if they can even be called that are questionable at best.

Or how about the scene in bowling for Columbine where he goes up to the clerk of the story and trys to make him answer for why the students have bullets in them...... yeah that's the way to go blame the working class schmuck. He's an entertainer nothing more.

Good ole' Michael.

Geez.

While some of his tactics are a little annoying and misguided, let me tell you a little store. I was riding my bike through my neighborhood yesterday and I saw some pasted advertisements that said things like "Make Love Not Capitalism"...obviously viral marketing for this movie. During the worst economic crisis since the 30s, I think it is highly significant that a high profile movie is explicitly criticizing capitalism, as Gravedigger excellently explained.

It is also a little repugnant that you used the term "fucktard" ...

[mumba miss]

Micheal moore is a disease amongst leftists, not progressive enough to be communist, too confused to be bourgesie, he is a total idiot who only wants one thing.
MONEY MONEY MONEY

[Crux]

Well, I don't think anyone here has professed that Micheal Moore is some kind of revolutionary, but this is an intersting turn of events. If nothing else, this shows that the discussion has opened enough for people, Americans specifically, to be openly critical of capitalism. This clearly gives us new possibilites. Sure be critical of Moore, point out his limitations, but don't do it in knee-jerk fashion. After all, people agreeing with Michael Moore are (some of) the people we wish to win over.

And yeah I must admit I liked Moore's other movies and I am looking forward to this one.

[mumba miss]

The present system means joyless drudgery, semi-starvation, rags and premature death; and they vote for it and uphold it. Let them have what they vote for! Let them drudge and let them starve!

I dont want to have to win people over, they will either be with us or join the capitalists.
I am sick of our feeble notion that we should love all the working class, what?, even the ones who uphold the notion of loyalty to the system, no, they are morally bankrupt and have no place in the revolution

[Crux]

The present system means joyless drudgery, semi-starvation, rags and premature death; and they vote for it and uphold it. Let them have what they vote for! Let them drudge and let them starve!

I dont want to have to win people over, they will either be with us or join the capitalists.
I am sick of our feeble notion that we should love all the working class, what?, even the ones who uphold the notion of loyalty to the system, no, they are morally bankrupt and have no place in the revolution
It's not about morals.

[mumba miss]

how can a capitalist have morals, he supports a system of greed over one that esposes equality.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I am sick of our feeble notion that we should love all the working class, what?, even the ones who uphold the notion of loyalty to the system, no, they are morally bankrupt and have no place in the revolution

Comrade, were you hatched from an egg with a full formed radical consciousness? Radicalization is a process for individuals as well as the working class in general.

As Marx said, the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class. As radicals our job should be to engage workers and win them to radical ideas. In the US, having the Democrats and Republicans define the boundaries of political thought creates a very narrow range of general political discussion - people like Michael Moore, while not revolutionaries, help expand the range of mainstream political debate and that creates a space for us to intervene.

I don't agree with Naomi Klein or Michael Moore, but when books like the "Shock Doctrine" (while not revolutionary) reach a broad audience, it opens the debate up more and exposes things the ruling class would just assume sweep under the rug. "The Shock Doctrine" was actually printed in excepts in some newspapers followed by a column by a neo-liberal economist trying to refute here claims about neoliberal capitalism. The establishment would rather not talk about the bigger picture of economics they want people to believe that, as Margret Thatcher said, "there is no alternative" to free market capitalism.

[mumba miss]

I am working class, as soon as i turned seven i understood what capitalism was, infact i always used to get in trouble at dinner for saying gangster were just the new euntrepuneurs in this capitalist society, it did not bode well in primary school:).

[Crux]

''I think it's difficult to call anything a democracy when the economy, the thing that really drives people's lives, is anything but democratic,'' [Michael Moore] told a press conference at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday. ''We should have democracy throughout our society and every day of our lives, not just every two to four years in the voting booth.''

I am impressed, even if he finished the interview by saying

''But one man cannot make happen everything that needs to happen,'' [Moore] said. ''Obama will rise or fall based not so much on what he does as what we do to support him. Democracy is not a spectator sport.''

And even so this I still from an activist view point. If Obama does not deliver, and he won't, than working people will have to build movment that will.

[Orange Juche]

Micheal moore is a disease amongst leftists, not progressive enough to be communist, too confused to be bourgesie, he is a total idiot who only wants one thing.
MONEY MONEY MONEY

That's why he is encouraging people to pirate the new movie?

[Saorsa]

Michael Moore, along with George Orwell, was the guy who first pushed me left. I read Stupid White Men because I'd been told it was funny when I was about 14, and something just clicked. I read left wing books every chance I could, kept searching until I stumbled upon books by or about Lenin, Marx, and Che. Reading about the Cuban Revolution turned me into a convinced revolutionary.

The point is, while Moore is no revolutionary and has some fucking awful politics, his writings introduce layers of people who might never think about leftist politics at all to the idea that something is wrong in our world, and it's possible to fix it.

[Vanguard1917]

It blows my mind that Michael Moore is releasing a film criticizing capitalism.

But is that what he'll be doing? From the trailers and clips that i've seen, it appears that he will not be questioning the capitalist system at all.

From what i've seen, what he will likely be doing is following the mainstream consensus and blaming the problems of the system on a few handfuls of evil 'greedy bankers', scapegoating a few individuals for the underlying problems of capitalism. If that's radical, Tory politicians and Murdoch press editorialists should be numbered among the leaders of radicalism today.

Moreover, there's a definite tendency within the liberal intellengentsia to go further and blame, often implicitly but sometimes openly, supposedly greedy and credit-hungry 'consumers' -- i.e. the masses -- for the recession. It remains to be seen whether this will be a theme in Moore's film, but it is an outright reactionary position for which those on the left should have no sympathy whatsoever.

[manic expression]

Michael Moore, along with George Orwell, was the guy who first pushed me left.

Michael Moore's work also first pushed me left when I was younger. I remember sitting in the theater watching "Bowling for Columbine", and that scene that summarizes American imperialism since 1950 just hit me like a stack of bricks. All those lies about America being a force of good and justice in the world was forever shattered in those 2 1/2 minutes. From there, it was only a matter of time until I learned about the Cuban Revolution and finally Marxism.

[Orange Juche]

But is that what he'll be doing? From the trailers and clips that i've seen, it appears that he will not be questioning the capitalist system at all.

That's what I initially thought, as well. But here's some quotes:

"Where's the say that you and I have in this. It's not a real democracy until the economy is also democratic. I think out of this will come something very good." - http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikeinthenews/index.php?id=14399

“Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil,” he lectures in the final voiceover. “You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that’s good for all people, and that something is called democracy.” - http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikeinthenews/index.php?id=14385

"Moore's conclusion? That capitalism is both un-Christian and un-American, an evil that deserves not regulation but elimination." - http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikeinthenews/index.php?id=14382


Sounds to me like he is promoting a wholly anti-capitalist view, advocating Democratic Socialism (and not social democracy) as it's replacement.

[cyu]

Michael Moore, along with George Orwell, was the guy who first pushed me left.



Michael Moore's work also first pushed me left when I was younger.


You know how some people claim marijuana is a gateway drug to harder drugs? I don't know if that's true or not, but if Moore (and other somewhat left comedians / other figures) are a gateway to the rest of the left, then I'd rather build more of those bridges than burn those bridges down.

[Orange Juche]

Also this:

"[Capitalism is] like a beast and you have to stop the beast... You can't regulate the beast, you really have to put a stake in its heart otherwise it will just find a new path." – Michael Moore

[Saorsa]

You know how some people claim marijuana is a gateway drug to harder drugs? I don't know if that's true or not,

Oh it's true :rolleyes:

[What Would Durruti Do?]

About time we get a bourgeois talking head to rally the troops for our side for once.

[PRC-UTE]

But is that what he'll be doing? From the trailers and clips that i've seen, it appears that he will not be questioning the capitalist system at all.

From what i've seen, what he will likely be doing is following the mainstream consensus and blaming the problems of the system on a few handfuls of evil 'greedy bankers', scapegoating a few individuals for the underlying problems of capitalism. If that's radical, Tory politicians and Murdoch press editorialists should be numbered among the leaders of radicalism today.

Moreover, there's a definite tendency within the liberal intellengentsia to go further and blame, often implicitly but sometimes openly, supposedly greedy and credit-hungry 'consumers' -- i.e. the masses -- for the recession. It remains to be seen whether this will be a theme in Moore's film, but it is an outright reactionary position for which those on the left should have no sympathy whatsoever.

A strength of Moore is that I've never seen him take up those kinds of positions on consumerism. More like he'd take the position criticising the fact that workers can't afford to buy what they need and want. He even was criticised by some lifestylists for eating at McDonalds and using the same products any normal person would use, IIRC

[Bankotsu]

Anything that gets the general public, the non politicised population to think and to wake up from their slumber is a good thing in my opinion.

It gets them to question the current system that they are living in and how to change it.

[Segmund]

For those amongst us that would call Moore a money grubbing capitalist, he has a rather good track record of giving his movies away. His last film, "Slacker Uprising," he offered completely for free on his website.

[chegitz guevara]

Michael Moore’s Movie “Capitalism, a Love Story” a Must See

Stewart A. Alexander
StewartAlexanderCares.com

September 17, 2009

Last night, my wife Vicki Alexander and I attended the screening of Michael Moore’s movie “Capitalism, a Love Story” at the Mann Bruin Theater in Los Angeles, and my gut impression of the movie is that it reveals many truths about capitalism and how the system only benefits the super rich.

“Capitalism, a Love Story” also reveals how Wall Street has engaged in the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world; a scheme that has been systematically developed over many decades. Michael Moore’s movie will reveal to America and the world that Washington is under the complete control of powerful Wall Street bankers.

In his movie, Michael Moore attempts to explore the root cause of the nation’s foreclosure crisis, why corporate profits are leading to high unemployment, why the majority of Americans are losing their home due to health care cost, why factories are shutting down across America, and how Wall Street has devised schemes to increase profits on human life from the cradle to the grave.

Michael Moore reveals how Wall Street ushered in a new line of U.S. presidents that were beholding to the nation’s richest elite from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. However, in the movie Michael Moore makes the suggestion that President Barack Obama may eventually prove to be a bad investment for Wall Street and may be the savior of America’s working class.

Socialist across America will not agree with Mr. Moore’s portrayal of President Obama as a savior of working people; to the contrary, the people with Socialist Party USA, a nationwide socialist party, believe President Obama is the single best investment Wall Street has made in 75 years and is now the chief functionary of the nation’s richest banking elite.

Michael Moore engaged the audience in a Q&A at the end of the movie and most of his answers related to his movie. The movie will be a shocking revelation to the millions of Americans who believe in capitalism; however, socialists will understand that “Capitalism, a Love Story” does not reveal the ultimate danger and damage that capitalism is wreaking on the working class and world economies on a global scale.

For more information search the Web for: Stewart A. Alexander
http://www.stewartalexandercares.com/

Alexander Applauds Michael Moore’s Movie “Sicko”
http://banderasnews.com/0706/edop-sicko.htm

“Capitalism, A Love Story”
http://banderasnews.com/0909/edop-stewartalexander18.htm


Washington and Capitalism in Shambles; Socialistwebzign
http://socialistwebzine.blogspot.com/2009/05/washington-and-capitalism-in-shambles.html

Peace and Freedom Party Home Page
http://www.peaceandfreedom.org/home/

Socialist Party USA
http://socialistparty-usa.org/

[Lolshevik]

Just a side note, Mr. Moore is not going to be doing all of our work for us. He is not a revolutionary. But instead of pouring scorn on him for his opportunism (and I admit, it is a really ridiculous opportunism), we should seize this great opportunity to engage with the public on what socialism really is. After all, he has piqued their interest, we just have to do the follow-up.

Which is why Socialist Alternative is holding a series of "What is socialism?" public forums after the movie comes out.

[KC]

This movie is great ammunition for us. I think it is going to open up a much larger debate about the state of capitalism, much like how Sicko opened up a debate about the state of the American health care system. The point is that while Moore is going to probably offer up some very good criticisms of capitalism, he has already stated that his solution is a very vague form of "democratization" and not capitalism or socialism.

Our role then is to point out where he is right, point out where he is wrong, and put forward our views on the situation.

We all know that Moore is an idiot, but that is completely beside the point, and anybody that writes this off because of that is not taking into consideration what this film will actually offer the revolutionary left or what effects in general it will have in opening up discussion about capitalism itself. That has very profound consequences and we can really benefit from it if we actually put effort into utilizing it for the spread of our position.

EDIT: And I think this film is coming out at the absolutely most opportune time for us. It is coming out right after the first wave of this economic crisis and right before the second wave that is just starting right now. People are starting to question the validity of the system already due to the first wave of this crisis, and if we can utilize this to spread our views as far and wide as possible, by the time this second wave really hits we will have made enormous progress. I think that this really gives us a chance to rebound from the impotence that has plagued the left throughout the last couple months of this crisis.

[cyu]

he has already stated that his solution is a very vague form of "democratization" and not capitalism or socialism.

It's the same strategy I would use, at least in the US. In capitalist "democracies" the people are basically brainwashed to believe that socialism is the opposite of democracy and the opposite of human rights. They are also brainwashed to believe that they should support their own government because it is democratic and because capitalism simply "comes with" democracy.

The best strategy to use in this scenario, in my view, is to seize upon the democracy aspect of what the ruling class uses to justify the system, and use that to point out contradictions in their system and use it to undermine capitalism.

So when someone says "communism is dictatorship" you bring up democracy in the workplace.

When someone says "communism is atheism" you bring up liberation theology.

For different nations with different cultures and systems, you may have to use different angles to attack the same problems of capitalism - if the old angles of attack aren't working, then all the more reason to study what they currently use to justify themselves, and then use those arguments against them.

[Black Cross]

Moore was on Democracy Now! the other day promoting the movie and talkin bad about capitalism. With 10 seconds left he was asked if he considered himself a socialist and he hesitated, tried to change the subject and didn't answer. Think that means he does consider himself a socialist but doesn't want people thinking this movie is 'red propaganda'?

[Orange Juche]

Moore was on Democracy Now! the other day promoting the movie and talkin bad about capitalism. With 10 seconds left he was asked if he considered himself a socialist and he hesitated, tried to change the subject and didn't answer. Think that means he does consider himself a socialist but doesn't want people thinking this movie is 'red propaganda'?

I definitely believe, considering what he's said about "replacing capitalism with democracy," that he considers himself a socialist. It's just that the s-word is so dirty in America that it'll drive people away for him to use it.

I think it's clever of him not to. If you can introduce socialism to people without letting them know thats what his good idea actually is, it'll draw in that many more people.

[Jimmie Higgins]

If there were a strong socialist movement, maybe he'd join. Without it, I think he's still searching and grasping and whatever he can to make sense of things from his perspective.

[#FF0000]

I saw it the other night. There was maybe a 10 minute bit about how Obama is baller as shit or something followed immediately by how the Democrats were bought off after turning down the original bailout bill.

All in all, pretty good I would say. Dude straight up says "We have to eliminate capitalism" at the end of the movie. Tbh I can overlook the 10 minutes of Obama-felating in light of the fact that it is the most left-wing perspective you're going to get on big-screens across the U.S.

[What Would Durruti Do?]

I wish the Democrats were more like Michael Moore and there was actually a left wing in this country. Obviously a radical left wing would be best, but even that would be pretty nice.

The unfortunate thing is the corporate media is going to trash this movie so badly that anyone who actually likes it and agrees with Moore's analysis of capitalism is going to be equated with that of a domestic terrorist/soviet spy/whatever

Even liberals think Michael Moore is "kinda nutty" or "just somebody that stirs stuff up for no reason" and isn't to be taken seriously. This is how he is always portrayed and spoken of at least in my experiences.

But still, something is better than nothing and I appreciate Michael Moore for doing what he can.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I wish the Democrats were more like Michael Moore and there was actually a left wing in this country. Obviously a radical left wing would be best, but even that would be pretty nice.

The unfortunate thing is the corporate media is going to trash this movie so badly that anyone who actually likes it and agrees with Moore's analysis of capitalism is going to be equated with that of a domestic terrorist/soviet spy/whatever

Even liberals think Michael Moore is "kinda nutty" or "just somebody that stirs stuff up for no reason" and isn't to be taken seriously. This is how he is always portrayed and spoken of at least in my experiences.

But still, something is better than nothing and I appreciate Michael Moore for doing what he can.

I agree although it's fun to see the mainstream idiots try and react to this film in particular. Just read the MTV review for a laugh... oh the voice of the youth:rolleyes:

The fact that there will be lines around the block in some areas (4 screens in NYC made a quarter of a million dollars and out performed "Cloudy with a chance of Bacon" on a per screen basis) will be an automatic negation of the "oh I'm a liberal reviewer, but why'd he hafta criticize the entire system, he's so shrill" arguments.

[BIG BROTHER]

The film is not perfect but just watched and love it :)

Like I said is not perfect but except for the Obama part, it critical of the Democrats, shows the destructive nature of Capitalism and how living conditions have been deteriorated. But the most important thing is that in a reactionary country like the U.S. is one of the FEW anti(or at least critical of) capitalist messeges that reaches out the Masses!:thumbup1:

[KurtFF8]

I think that the revolutionary left in the US would do a disservice to itself by completely writing off this film and not trying to take this opportunity to explain why we also don't like capitalism.

[Q]

Interesting interactions after an interview with the audience (http://fora.tv/2009/09/17/Filmmaker_Michael_Moore_on_Capitalism_A_Love_Story #chapter_15)
That was a very interesting view, thank you for posting that here.

[RedSonRising]

I think that the inevitably negative mainstream reaction from the right, and possibly left, might actually help draw lines on the issue of class struggle where there weren't any. I think many who like the movie or who are on the fence might look at those who despised it in the media, and say "I identify with the values in that movie moreso than the guy yelling about the movie and calling people who liked it terrorists." Once the socialist word comes out, it almost can't be used as a dirty word anymore. If someone comes right out and says "You know what Hannity, I am a socialist" it loses it's thunder. Not that something like that has to happen as described, just saying. Those who are against capitalism by the end of the movie or at least question it will find a passive, non-involved, non-marginalized group they can identify with: people who liked the movie. Those who oppose capitalism more openly will be able to come out and state their beliefs a bit more openly, and that will open doors for our ideology to become more legitimate in the eyes of the citizens of the United States and elsewhere.

[Salyut]

The Merle Haggard song at the end was pretty awesome. :thumbup1: Seriously though, I don't think I've ever seen a more subdued crowd at the end of a movie. The Canadian parties need to tap this ASAP.

[hugsandmarxism]

I found this critical review from the FIRE Collective interesting:


“Capitalism: A Love Story,” A Critique of American Capitalism Stuck in American Capitalism (http://thefirecollective.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=132:capitalism-a-love-story-a-critique-of-american-capitalism-stuck-in-american-capitalism&catid=25:blog&Itemid=115) Written by Eric Ribellarsi Friday, 02 October 2009 23:25
The following is a critical review written in response to Michael Moore's new film, "Capitalism: A Love Story."
by Eric Ribellarsi

Let me start by saying there was much in this movie that was quite rare, and that I think ought to be united with. It is not very often that a popular movie in the U.S. says that the problem in society is capitalism, and opens up a conversation around that in the way that I think this movie likely will. Certainly it is also rare to see a popular movie in the U.S. that shows some of the awful and ugly workings of capitalism, like the housing crisis and the way capitalism grinds people up and leaves them to die. And certainly the movie is fun, and quite hilarious at times in ways that are provocative and that make the movie really accessible to people.

http://thefirecollective.org/images/stories/capitalism_love_story-500x334.jpg

However, if we go through Moore’s entire critique of capitalism, nowhere in the entire movie is there EVER a discussion of the exploitation of labor in the “third world,” and what America’s wealth is actually based on. Moore begins the movie by juxtaposing the eviction of a family in the U.S. from their home, while showing the U.S. is one of the richest countries on the planet and that it ought to take better care of its people. Surely it is true that people in this country shouldn’t be ripped from their homes and thrown out on the streets to die; there is no question about that. But how can we talk about any re-distributing of wealth without ever even acknowledging where all of this wealth came from in the first place? I have to say… the positive aspects of this movie are ultimately ruined by American chauvinism in ways that are deeply disappointing.

Moore talks about how wonderful things used to be in the U.S., pointing to the New Deal and Jimmy Carter, the U.S. Constitution, and so on. He calls for a new “New Deal,” and then argues that capitalism is not part of the United States constitution, even going so far as to insinuate that the U.S. constitution is more socialist because of its repeated use of words like “we,” “people,” and “union.” I remember feeling like I wanted to shake him and say “Michael! This document says that slaves are 3/5’s of human beings, and that private property is a fundamental right, how can you miss the capitalism here?!”

Let’s be clear, this is a parasitic imperialist empire. None of its wealth can be understood in abstraction from both its historic legacy of slavery, genocide, and colonialism, combined with its modern day parasitic relationship to the rest of the world. None of that wealth would be possible without the children of India and Mexico who have produced all it. Should our goal really be to have a new “New Deal” in the context of an empire waging a war on the world? What kind of an effect would this have on the already existing complete lack of internationalism among people in the U.S.? What good would a new "New Deal" have for the millions of undocumented workers in the U.S. who are super exploited and locked out of these "deals?"

There were many opportunities for Moore to discuss the super-exploitation that people of oppressed nationalities face, both inside and outside the U.S. In one scene, Moore discusses NAFTA, and how it ruined the economy of a U.S. city by sending jobs to Mexico without ever mentioning that NAFTA raped Mexico! Or as one fellow activist pointed out, at the end of the movie, he mentions Katrina and how people were abandoned by the U.S. government, but doesn’t even mention the particular racist oppression Black people faced. There is a real appeal here to an ugly white American chauvinism that is really difficult to stomach.

And of course, there was Moore’s usual “stir shit up, and bring people back to the Democrats,” that makes us sigh and say "here we go again with the Democrats." Moore tries to claim the resistance people had waged against factory shut downs and forced evictions was because they had been inspired by Obama. Frankly, this is bullshit, and it insulting to oppressed people. It is to claim as if oppressed people are fragile and incapable of waging struggle without some sort of legitimacy from the head of the very system that exploits them.

One thing that I think is worth discussing here is also a certain controversy to this question of economic struggles promoted in Moore's film. People like Michael Moore have framed resistance struggles in ways that are completely devoid of any internationalism, and in ways that are objectively American chauvinist (for example, raising demands against war because we want that money to go to ourselves, not because the war is murderous and immoral).

While at the same time, groups like the RCP have dismissed things like economic struggles, insinuating that they are inherently economist and inherently American chauvinist. Are these housing struggles not important ways that people are brought into initial political life and living lessons as to what this system is all about? Surely if we concentrated the attention of people in an imperialist country on themselves that would be wrong, but can we really imagine a revolution where oppressed people do not fight against their own oppression as a part of a larger revolutionary process? Is there really never a place for communists to jump into economic struggles, especially as they begin to spill over into political struggles? There is much more to be said regarding this.

But going back to Moore’s critique… I think there is deeper more fundamental assumptions of Moore’s which need to be uncovered and understood. In one particularly funny scene, Moore shows up at a bank with a money bag and says something along the lines of “hey, I’m here to get the money back for the American people, don’t worry, I’m going to take it back to the U.S. treasury, I’ll make sure it gets there, just put the billions of dollars in these bags.” Setting aside the assumption that this money belongs to “the American people” and not the people of the world for a moment, there is another problematic assumption here. The U.S. treasury belongs to the American people? Is this really “our government,” as Moore calls it throughout the movie, or does it serve the capitalist and imperialist ruling class?

Another example: Moore discusses a theme throughout the movie that sounds like revolution. Toward the beginning of the movie, he poses: “what if the peasants revolted, and stopped taking this?” Well, later he says “the peasants had revolted” and then shows the Democratic Party’s refusal to sign the first initial bailout, spreading the cruel lie that the Democratic Party is the ‘party of the people.’ How many times have we been told this, only to face bitter lessons of betrayal, again and again?

Certainly there are positive aspects to this movie, and much to be united with and learned from. But I think if we really want to break free from capitalism… we’re going to need a much deeper analysis than this. We’re going to need internationalism, actually taking a stand on the side of the people of the world, and saying “hell no!” to ugly American chauvinism and this whole society. Our liberation won’t come wrapped in an American flag, it’s going to have to reject that flag.

[RadioRaheem84]

The movie was amazing! I loved every minute of it EXCEPT when Moore starts salivating over Obama. Jeez, Moore forgot to include the FACT that Obama supported the second half of the stimulus package. Heck, he should've included clips of him supporting the first half too.

There was a Democratic congresswoman who was totally awesome in it too. I mean she really nailed the Dems and the Repugs to the floor with her speeches.

I swear if this film doesn't motivate people in the slightest then there is NO HOPE for this country. NONE.

[Red Icepick]

Michael Moore is about as anti-Capitalist as PT Barnum. I'm sure the Chinese think all Americans look like Moore: fat, hairy, baseball cap-wearing slobs. He should have lost weight before making Sicko. A socialized health care system can't work if the populace is a bunch of fat, cheeseburger chomping morons. Now he's taking on Capitalism itself? The very look of the man is counter-revolutionary.

[KurtFF8]

Wow what an amazing criticism of the film and the filmmaker: He's fat and thus counter-revolutionary?

Really?

[Red Icepick]

Wow what an amazing criticism of the film and the filmmaker: He's fat and thus counter-revolutionary?

Really?

Yes, obesity is the product of capitalism. He couldn't put on a worse image unless he was wearing a top hat with a cigarette holder.

[Comrade B]

Yes, obesity is the product of capitalism. He couldn't put on a worse image unless he was wearing a top hat with a cigarette holder.
Because in communism... we dont have food?
A lot of people are over weight because when you work all day, you don't want to make your meals, so you get the 1$ crap McDonalds sells. Being fat is not a character flaw in someone...

[What Would Durruti Do?]

Yes, obesity is the product of capitalism. He couldn't put on a worse image unless he was wearing a top hat with a cigarette holder.

Being a successful movie director is also a pretty bad image for someone championing the workers and the exploited.

How about you critique the man's politics/art rather than his "image"? When did RevLeft turn into Perez Hilton?

I just got back from the movie. It seemed to focus entirely on the antithetical relationship between Capitalism and the American notions of justice and equality. I know some people are upset that it had such a narrow view by only concerning itself with American affairs, but Moore was keeping his audience in mind. He knew who he was speaking to and the best way to get through to them. Talking about Africa to a bunch of Americans about African problems, as sad as it is, isn't going to work.

As much as I would have liked to see a connection made to the crimes of the state against others for economic profit, the state was never really brought into the equation. This doesn't mean it isn't important to Moore though, he just couldn't include it.

I think the route he did take was effective and painted a good picture of how true liberty and democracy can't be achieved in a capitalist system.

Of course it wasn't perfect. Still better than I expected though.

[gorillafuck]

Michael Moore is about as anti-Capitalist as PT Barnum. I'm sure the Chinese think all Americans look like Moore: fat, hairy, baseball cap-wearing slobs. He should have lost weight before making Sicko. A socialized health care system can't work if the populace is a bunch of fat, cheeseburger chomping morons. Now he's taking on Capitalism itself? The very look of the man is counter-revolutionary.
That was one of the stupidest criticisms I ever read.

[RedSonRising]

I have a newfound respect for Michael Moore; I thought he was a fat alarmist Democrat. The film exposes the nature of the relationship between the ruling class and the gov't through evidence, demonstrates the undemocratic framework of the free market, deconstructs Democrats as saviors (he simply states Obama is a signifying of a shift in values in the country, which is true, though I'd have liked to see more criticism), and champions alternative workplace models and struggles; all vital concepts to socialism and key points to illustrate to previously un-interested viewers. The way he did it makes it relevant to life in the US. He didn't use Marxist terminology, but he brought class struggle to life on the big screen.

[cyu]

Seriously though, I don't think I've ever seen a more subdued crowd at the end of a movie.


Where I saw it (in the Seattle area, midafternoon Saturday), people were applauding at the end.

[the last donut of the night]

Michael Moore is about as anti-Capitalist as PT Barnum. I'm sure the Chinese think all Americans look like Moore: fat, hairy, baseball cap-wearing slobs. He should have lost weight before making Sicko. A socialized health care system can't work if the populace is a bunch of fat, cheeseburger chomping morons. Now he's taking on Capitalism itself? The very look of the man is counter-revolutionary.

This just may be why workers in the US may feel alienated by the Left.:thumbup1:

[chegitz guevara]

It actually wasn't a great film. It was scattered and all over the place. But it made me so happy, so I don't care. Yeah, he slobbered over Obama, but then he said we have KILL CAPITALISM. And at the very end, he played The Internationale. If I hadn't been out passing out fliers to the people leaving, I would have been floating on cloud 9.

:wub:

[Decommissioner]

Where I saw it (in the Seattle area, midafternoon Saturday), people were applauding at the end.

I just got back from the movie, and people applauded as well. I was pleasantly surprised, I expected there to be a lot of people walking out or speaking out at the movie, but people were really into what he was saying. I got a good feeling from it overall.

[Spawn of Stalin]

And at the very end, he played The Internationale.
In Russian I hope?!

[KurtFF8]

No, it was actually very "Broadway-ish"

That was another thing that excited my about the film: it did indeed end with the Internationale playing :)

[What Would Durruti Do?]

Also, for some reason I came out of the theater wanting to become catholic.

[bcbm]

In Russian I hope?!

why would a film for american audiences have the internationale in russian?:rolleyes:

[cyu]

why would a film for american audiences have the internationale in russian?


No kidding - some of the worst propaganda is propaganda that nobody understands. What if the entire movie were in Russian, Latin, or Aramaic? :laugh:

[chegitz guevara]

He did play the Soviet anthem when talking about how the GOP pounced on Obama after the Joe the Plumber "incident."

[Manifesto]

why would a film for american audiences have the internationale in russian?:rolleyes:
I think its a lot better in Russian.

[punisa]

He did play the Soviet anthem when talking about how the GOP pounced on Obama after the Joe the Plumber "incident."

Always good to hear the old USSR anthem :)
As for Joe the Plumber incident - that one I have never understood. I watched many news channels report on this Joe guy before elections.
What in the world was that all about?
Who the hell is Joe the Plumber?? I just didn't get it then and I don't get it now.

[chegitz guevara]

Obama was asked a question by JtP and Obama replied, using the words, "spread the wealth around," which the GOP seized on to attempt to discredit Obama. Instead, they've rehabilitated socialism. :D

[punisa]

That was another thing that excited my about the film: it did indeed end with the Internationale playing :)

Aaahhh, Moore .. the old cunning fox :lol:
He knows damn well that you gotta hide the big S word as much as possible, but also work on sneaking it through the back door.
We should learn from that.

Now is the time to get people angry and willing to fight, but if you start a conversation with "look, Socialism is the only way to go" - you won't go far.

P.S. Any Google video links or similar? :)

[punisa]

Obama was asked a question by JtP and Obama replied, using the words, "spread the wealth around," which the GOP seized on to attempt to discredit Obama. Instead, they've rehabilitated socialism. :D

Oh, so that's were it all started, thanks for clarification :)
Still, there was no point making a hype around this JtP guy. He was like on all station, guy was confused about everything :lol:

[RedHal]

wasn't there a shot of Moore staring at the bust of Marx in Sicko? I wouldn't be surprised if Moore was a secret member of cpusa, afterall he did have them linked on his old site (along with spusa) lol

[cyu]

As for Joe the Plumber incident - that one I have never understood. I watched many news channels report on this Joe guy before elections.
What in the world was that all about?
Who the hell is Joe the Plumber?? I just didn't get it then and I don't get it now.
Just a tool used by capitalists to further their own agenda. Capitalists and their hired propagandists are basically always on the lookout for anybody they can co-opt into arguing for capitalism - especially if it's "the little guy" or "common folk" that can be made to look like they support capitalism, then capitalists will keep throwing money in that direction to make it as big of an issue as possible. Once they can no longer be co-opted to further the capitalist ideology, then they are quietly ignored.

[the last donut of the night]

What American parties should be doing is using this movie as a platform on which to spread our message. People are in a raised state about class struggle, and various workshops on socialism (I think the SPUSA is doing them) would capitulate on this energy. People will start seeing the truth more.

[chegitz guevara]

wasn't there a shot of Moore staring at the bust of Marx in Sicko? I wouldn't be surprised if Moore was a secret member of cpusa, afterall he did have them linked on his old site (along with spusa) lol

No, Moore didn't go to London in that movie.

BTW, love your avatar.

[brigadista]

No, Moore didn't go to London in that movie.

BTW, love your avatar.


i think he was in highgate cemetary at marx grave...

[chegitz guevara]

I guess I was wrong.

[Q]

A good review by Socialist Alternative (http://socialistalternative.org/news/article10.php?id=1169):


Michael Moore Takes on Capitalism: What Is the Alternative?

Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, opened in over 1,000 theaters across the U.S. on Friday, October 2 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, skyrocketing tuition, 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.” In his previous films, he focused on specific industries like health insurance (Sicko) or corporations like General Motors (Roger & Me). But in Capitalism, Moore shows how the problems we face are systemic in nature, rather than the product of a few bad apples or a handful of evil corporations.

As he explained in a brilliant interview on Democracy Now (9/24/09): “I am tired of having to dance around this or deal with this symptom of the problem or that calamity caused by capitalism. I mean, I could keep doing this ’til the end of my life, and I don’t think anything is really going to change that much. And I’d like to see change in my lifetime… I guess I can keep making movies for another twenty years about the next General Motors or the next healthcare issue or whatever, 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.”

Capitalism: A Love Story will educate millions about the realities of a system which has only one goal: the short-term maximization of profit. 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.

Victims of the 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.

He interviews families facing foreclosures and layoffs, giving voice to working class anger at the bosses, bankers, and politicians responsible. Moore 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 in between anymore.”

Perhaps most disgusting, Moore exposes the “Dead Peasant” insurance policy, through which giant corporations like Wal-Mart and Bank of America take out life insurance policies on their employees, usually unbeknownst to the workers or their families. If a worker dies, these companies collect tens of thousands – or even millions! – of dollars, while the family is left to foot the bills for medical and funeral expenses. This gives these companies an incentive for their employees to die young, when they can collect the most money.

Similarly, Wall Street investment banks, seeking a new arena to profit after the collapse in housing prices, are hatching a plan to buy up millions of life insurance policies from elderly Americans at less than half their value, then bundle them together to be sold to big investors as bonds. The investors will then collect the payouts when the people die (with the biggest profits coming from earlier deaths). Predictions are that this market could reach up to $500 billion (NY Times, 9/6/09).

This is the sick logic of the capitalist system, in which human life itself is reduced to a mere commodity. If there’s profit to be made off of something, the capitalists will find a way to do it, leading to the ever-growing commercialization and commodification of our society. Moore exposes Wall Street for what it is – an “insane casino” – and fittingly, covers it in crime scene tape.

The film does not even get into the crimes of capitalism on a global scale. This is a system that condemns 30,000 kids under the age of 5 to die every single day because of poverty (State of the World’s Children, 2008, UNICEF). This year, for the first time in world history, 1 billion people will go hungry, despite record harvests, because they are too poor to afford food. Meanwhile, the wealth of the world’s 200 richest individuals is greater than the combined wealth of the poorest 2.6 billion who struggle for survival on $2/day or less. Not to mention the record $1.47 trillion in military spending in 2009 (48% by the U.S.), or the environmental catastrophe being wrought by the endless quest for profits, no matter the long-term damage to the planet.

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. He says we need to replace capitalism with “democracy,” though what exactly he means by this is unclear.

Moore counterposes his call for real “democracy” to 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 percent combined. When you have a situation like that, where the 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? I know we get to vote every two or four years. Is that it? Just because we get to vote every now and then, we can call this a democracy, when the economy is anything but? You and I have no say in it. The people watching this, listening to us today have no say in how this economy is run. 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.” (Democracy Now, 9/24/09)

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. It is to be hoped that this film will help spur similar struggles across the country.

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 by Amy Goodman 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 (9/24/09).

Moore’s reticence to refer to himself a socialist may have something to do with the long anti-Communist history in the U.S., and the words association with the crimes of Stalinism. The film does highlight the growing interest in socialism among Americans, and points out the recent Rasmussen poll showing that among people under thirty, only 37% say they “prefer” capitalism to socialism, while 33% prefer socialism and 30% are unsure. This is thanks in part to the right-wing’s efforts to tar any efforts at reform as “socialism,” as well as the impact the crisis of capitalism is having on the legitimacy of the system.

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. Neither is socialism is some conspiracy to be organized by a tiny minority acting in the interests of the “masses.”

Rather, as the socialist pioneers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in The Communist Manifesto, socialism is “the movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.” They explained that “the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.”

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 got 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 few super-rich people.

For workers to control what is produced, that means the economy must be run on an entirely different basis than the current system of private ownership. Socialists call for taking the top 500 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 ordinary working people.

In this way, socialism would mean a massive expansion of democracy. In fact, direct democracy will be vital for socialism to succeed. 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. They would control wage scales and methods of production, and have a say in what was produced.

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 should they betray their promises (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).

By taking the biggest corporations under public ownership, they would no longer be able to buy votes and lobby to exert what amounts to a corporate dictatorship over the political system. Just look at the current healthcare “reform” debate if you need convincing of this, where the head of the Senate Finance Committee, Democrat Max Baucus, receives 1 of every 4 dollars of his campaign contributions from for-profit health companies anxious to stymie real reform. A reduction in the workweek to 30 hours or less, which is entirely possible given the vast increases in productivity that Moore shows in the film, would also give people more time to engage in discussions and debate about the direction of society.

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.

A socialist United States would guarantee the right to a living wage job, a home, adequate medical care, social security, and a good education. 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.

Many object that socialism is impossible, because people are too lazy and would cease to work without a boss. But Moore shows how such a society might be possible in the film, when he highlights several companies being run democratically by their workers. There are numerous examples throughout history that show that when workers have been able to democratically control their workplaces, productivity has actually increased, contrary to capitalist mythology.

However, while these co-ops and democratically run workplaces show workers’ ability to run their own factories – and society as a whole – alone and isolated they cannot form a viable alternative to capitalism, given their small scale. Real social change will require the most powerful sections of the economy to be brought under democratic control and public ownership, and the drawing up of a democratic plan of production.

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 1% at the expense of ordinary 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. This would include running independent, pro-worker, anti-war candidates in the 2010 Congressional elections and preparing for a national challenge in 2012.

Unfortunately, Moore himself stops short of calling for this critical step, and at times, the film serves to mask the true role of the Democratic Party, both in the current crisis and historically. Recently, Moore has said he’s too old to help start a new party, and to him, reforming the Democratic Party from within is more realistic. But this is a complete misreading of recent history.

Moore does show a powerful clip of Democratic Rep. 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 U.S. Congress or the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs?”

But figures like Kucinich are marginalized within the Democratic Party, often functioning, despite 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 health care reform does not even include a public option. The real party leaders make policy within the strict limits imposed by the Democrats’ corporate donors.

For example, as Kaptur explains, after the $700 billion bank bailout was initially voted down by the House of Representatives in September 2008, there was massive pressure exerted on anyone who wanted to advance in Congress to vote yes. Party leaders promised Senate seats, committee chairmanships, and more. The bailout sailed through shortly thereafter, with both major presidential candidates, McCain and Obama, playing a key role in lobbying their parties for its passage.

All efforts at reforming or “capturing” the Democratic Party by the left have only resulted in the left being captured by the Democrats, pushing movements to water down their programs and methods of struggle to what is acceptable to the big business leaders of the party. Instead of relying on the Democrats or holding out false illusions that the party can be transformed (even as it drifts further to the right), we need a party of, by, and for working people. Such a party would refuse all corporate contributions, and would provide a vehicle to unite our social movements into a common struggle against big business.

The Myth of Roosevelt
Another weakness is Moore’s presentation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at times comes across as the hero of the film. FDR appears 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, history would have been different, with the enactment of a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing the right to living wage jobs, health care, 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’s film that, as labor historian Art Preis writes, under FDR “more company unions had been organized, more workers killed, wounded and jailed, more troops called out against strikers … than under any president in memory” (Labor’s Giant Step, 47). 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.

These struggles were most often led by anti-capitalists – including socialists, communists, and anarchists – who refused to accept the logic of capitalism during the Great Depression and instead based on themselves on the needs of the working class. This powerful labor movement was key in securing the gains of the postwar period as well, with the biggest strike wave in U.S. history coming in the years immediately following World War II.

Moore also shows how after World War II the Japanese, Germans, and Italians, to name a few, achieved social provisions in their constitutions such as were outlined in FDR’s Second Bill of Rights speech. According to Moore, the U.S. should know this since we helped them write their constitutions. But contrary to Moore’s portrayal, these social provisions were only granted following massive struggles by workers in these countries, and the fear that workers would move to the left and challenge capitalism itself. The film neglects to mention that U.S. occupying forces actually banned workers’ strikes and demonstrations in Japan and Germany after the war.

Social democratic reforms were granted in Europe in particular because mass workers’ parties rose to power to challenge the establishment parties and this, combined with the threat of the Soviet Union and Easter Europe, threatened the very foundations of European capitalism.

Obama’s Role
Moore also treats Obama with kid gloves, despite criticisms of his economic team and some of his policies. In the film, he presents Obama as if he were initially a threat to Wall Street and Corporate America, who they sought to rein in by throwing tons of money at him – with Goldman Sachs his top contributor. Yet Obama never would have been able to make his meteoric rise to power had he not, from the start, been thoroughly vetted by key power brokers among the U.S. corporate elite, who he impressed with his ability to employ a soaring message of “hope” and “change” at the same time as faithfully serving the same interests who have run the show for many years.

Further, despite the impression that he created of his campaign’s reliance on an army of small donors, nearly half his campaign money came from donors who gave $1,000 or more – in other words, the wealthy. Obama himself was more than willing to play by these rules.

Moore supported Obama’s campaign in 2008 and even helped create false illusions in his policies. This was despite Obama’s support for the bank bailouts, opposition to single-payer, and call to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan. Moore justified his support by saying: “I'm hoping that Senator Obama is like all politicians: they don't always keep their campaign promises, right? Somehow I've told myself that those campaign promises that he will not keep are expanding the war in Afghanistan [and] pushing a healthcare plan that leaves the profit-making health insurance companies in charge of the plan” (Democracy Now!, 10/31/08).

Of course, these are exactly the promises that Obama has kept, sending over 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan this year (and now debating whether to send tens of thousands more), and allowing the for-profit health insurance industry to dictate the terms of the healthcare debate.

Today, as millions grow increasingly frustrated with Obama and the Congressional Democrats’ policies, Moore continues to create illusions in them. 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 town halls] on his own. Who's got his back?" (Washington Post, 9/16/09)

Clearly the racist attacks on Obama put forward by the right-wing should be sharply opposed by all. But Obama’s sell-out on health care reform, his bailouts for the banks, and his refusal to create the kinds of jobs programs needed to reverse rising unemployment, are rapidly 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.

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 health care plan in which the government insures everyone, cutting out the insurance companies, and allowing free choice of doctor and hospital)? Or if the unions had spent the $450 million they spent electing Democrats in 2008 on building a new party that stood unabashedly for a moratorium on foreclosures, a mass jobs program, and single-payer healthcare?

Unfortunately, the right-wing has mobilized its base and dominated the debate, despite the massive public support that exists for a single-payer system (as well as the public option). The left, meanwhile, not wanting to embarrass its “friend” in the White House, has remained largely silent. This is why Moore’s position is so problematic.

In the film, Moore includes clips of quotes from former president George W. Bush defending capitalism during the financial crisis last year. Bush intones, “Capitalism is the best system ever devised.” Yet Bush is not alone in this position. Despite the right wing’s claims that Obama is a socialist, he wrote in his autobiography, “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. Far from being a socialist, his policies thus far 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. Thus, it is no coincidence that his top economic advisers have ties to Goldman Sachs and other big Wall Street firms. Instead of providing relief to homeowners or guaranteeing jobs to workers, he has prioritized the interests of the banks, and the profit system.

Ultimately, as Moore shows, we need to build movements from below – for jobs, homes, health care, education, 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.

Moore himself was once a proud champion of the need to break from the Democrats and build a political alternative that represents working people. He was a supporter of the Labor Party in the 1990s, founded by a number of the country’s most progressive unions, and also a major backer of Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign. For those who want to see real change, it’s necessary to return to this spirit.

End of the American Dream
Capitalism: A Love Story provides striking proof that U.S. capitalism cannot guarantee a decent living for working people in the 21st century.

Moore charts the changes in the U.S. economy in recent years, and what he terms the end of the U.S. “love affair” with capitalism following the end of the post-World War II economic boom in the early 1970s. This boom allowed U.S. capitalism the space to grant millions of workers a decent living, though this was only in order to secure class peace to more securely make profits, following the massive postwar strike wave and growth in the power of the labor movement.

Millions of working class families were able to survive on one income, and those with a good union job often secured 4 weeks paid vacation, free dental and health care for their entire family, and guaranteed pensions. Many Americans came to take these living standards for granted, along with the idea that their children would be better off than they were (although at the same time, millions were left out, in particular African-Americans and Latinos).

All of these gains are under sharp attack today, just like the advances made by workers around the world, as the capitalists attempt to restore and maintain their profits in the wake of growing competition. This shows how the reforms won under capitalism will never be secure or permanent, because they will be undermined by the relentless competition to maximize profits unless the fundamental structure of society is changed.

In reality, the conditions that existed during the postwar boom were an exception to the rule, not a normal part of capitalism. As Moore briefly shows, this boom in large part owed to the decimation of any competition during the carnage of World War II, when the industrial bases of Western Europe and Japan were reduced to rubble. In addition, there was the U.S. corporate and military domination of the formerly colonized countries, ensured by U.S.-backed coups (Iran 1954, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, etc.) and violent military interventions (Vietnam, etc.).

The post-war boom came to an end in the early 1970s, with the oil price shocks and the restoration of German and Japanese competition. In order to restore profits, big business around the world resorted to attacks on workers and the welfare state. The more recent period has seen a return to some of the more “normal” features of capitalism, with a global race-to-the-bottom, massive attacks on unions, corporate globalization, financial deregulation, and more. Despite huge increases in productivity, workers have seen their wages stagnate, and their pensions, health care coverage, and job security under attack.

These trends have only deepened recently. According to one measure, 3.5 million good jobs, defined as “one with health insurance, a pension plan and earnings of at least $17 per hour” were lost in the U.S. between 2000 and 2006 – before the current recession even began (McClatchy, 3/23/08). Inequality in the U.S. today has reached its highest point in 80 years. To give one example, in just two weeks in 2004, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott earned as much as the average American Wal-Mart worker would earn in a lifetime.

In order to stay afloat, workers have been forced into record levels of debt. Meanwhile, the prison population has skyrocketed, with 2.3 million people now locked up, disproportionately people of color. The U.S., which capitalist ideologues love to refer to as “the freest country in world history”, now has by far the highest incarceration rate of any country in the history of the world.

Even when there is a recovery from the current recession, it will not mean a return to the living standards of the past. As radical journalist Naomi Klein writes, “Without huge popular pressure for structural reform, the crisis will prove to have been nothing more than a very wrenching adjustment. The result will be even greater inequality than before the crisis. Because the millions of people losing their jobs and their homes aren't all going to be getting them back, not by a long shot.” (The Progressive, 8/09). Achieving any gains will require massive movements from below.

Movement Against Capitalism Needed
Moore ends the film with an appeal for people to get active in building movements against the corporate domination of our society. It is an appeal that could certainly catch on, given the anger bubbling up beneath the surface in U.S. society.

We cannot sit around and wait for capitalism to fall on its own accord. No matter how deep the economic crisis goes, capitalism will always recover at the cost of much pain to working people, unless we build a movement powerful enough to change the system.

The need to struggle to fundamentally transform this system is posed more urgently now than ever before. If this system is allowed to continue, in addition to the usual exploitation, wars, and general rottenness, the question of the very future of the planet itself is posed.

Building such a movement will clearly be a difficult task. We are faced with reorganizing the socialist movement from humble foundations, given the throwback in socialist consciousness and all types of struggle in the last two decades. But imagine if just a tiny fraction of the 33% of young people ages 18 to 30 who said told a Rasmussen poll they preferred socialism over capitalism got active in the socialist movement?

Every single worker and young person who gets active can make a massive contribution to fighting for a just world. Let Capitalism: A Love Story be a wake-up call for a new generation of activists to rebuild our build movements and link these to the struggle to fundamentally transform the system.

To anyone interested in building a fight back against capitalism, we urge you to consider getting involved in Socialist Alternative. Join us in the fight for a world free of poverty, exploitation, war, and the tyranny of the super-rich. Join us in the struggle for a democratic socialist future.

[GPDP]

Here's an excellent article by Paul Street, author of Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (a damn fine book; it skewers Obama from a socialist point of view). This is partially a review of Moore's film, but it mostly deals with his strange love affair with Obama, and why the newly self-professed anti-capitalist Moore has no business cozying up to the neo-liberal, right-of-center capitalist and imperialist president Obama:

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22823


Michael Moore and Barack Obama: A Love Story

October 09, 2009 By Paul Street

If you liked Michael Moore's latest movie, "Capitalism: a Love Story" (I did) and are long past being fed up with Barack Obama's deep allegiance and service to his corporate paymasters (I am), then this essay might be for you. I start with some happy reflections on Moore 's apparent ideological evolution. The mood darkens, however, as I raise unpleasant questions about the extent of Moore 's break with existing American power relations. I discuss two critical and related matters that exist in curious tension with Moore 's newly proclaimed rejection of the capitalist system (portrayed as a sin in his new flick): the President of the United States ' love affair with capitalism and Moore's continuing love affair with the President.


"CAPITALISM'S GOT TO GO"

Moore's film career began with a brilliant satirical, neo-Dickensian documentary (titled "Roger and Me" [1989]) on the bad behavior of General Motors' (GM) CEO (Roger Smith) and other top GM managers towards autoworkers and ex-autoworkers in Moore's corporate-de-industrialized hometown Flint, Michigan. Subsequent targets of Moore's dazzling Dickens-like eye have included the managers and owners of: the gun and "defense" industries ("Bowling for Columbine" [2002] and "Fahreneheit 9/11" [2004]), Wal Mart ("Bowling for Columbine" and "The Big One"), the athletic shoe industry ("The Big One" [1997]), the mass retail book chains ("The Big One"), and the leading drug and insurance corporations ("Sicko" [2007]).

By the end of the Bush-Cheney administration, itself a leading Moore target, however, Moore seemed to have lost patience with skewering specific sectors of the capitalist and political elite. He had decided that the underlying profits system was the issue. As Moore announced last September, explaining why he "may stop doing documentaries" (he said he might take up fictional movie-making) to the audience at an early Toronto showing of his 2009 movie "Capitalism: A Love Story":

"I've done this for 20 years. I started out by warning people about General Motors, and my whole career has been trying to say the emperor has no clothes here, and we better do something about it .I've been having to sort of knock my head against the wall here for 20 years saying these things."

"Two years ago, I tried to get the health-care debate going, and it did eventually, and now where are we? We may not even have it. What am I supposed to do at a certain point?"

"I started this film before the crash. The crash happens, I'm thinking, oh, somebody's going to start talking about what I'm talking about in this movie...I've yet to see a talk show or read an op-ed where somebody has just named it, just come out and said, ‘Folks, what has to happen here is capitalism's got to go.' Because we can't have a system where the richest 1 percent own as much as the bottom 95 percent. That just isn't democracy. That's not America ."

"I'm tired of feeling like I'm doing this alone. All through the eight years of Bush, you Google `Bush' and `nemesis' and I'm the first name up. And there aren't a whole lot of other names," Moore said. "It doesn't work with Michael Moore and Sean Penn and Ted Kennedy and a few others. The people have got to get involved in their democracy." [1]
Near the end of his new must-see movie, Moore declares that "capitalism is evil" and that "you can't regulate evil."

I turned to the person sitting next to me and said, "Damn. Right on"

Moore had come to the conclusion that the profits system doesn't work for any for the privileged Few - a judgment that the historical Left has held (with good reasons) going back though Marx and back at least as far as the great 17th century British "Digger" Gerrard Winstanley. Moore is announcing something of a mid-life shift from Charles Dickens (for whom the crucial issue was indecent behavior on the part of specific Victorian capitalist and other authorities)[2] to Karl Marx [3] (for whom the key issue was the underlying capitalist system of class oppression), consistent with the conclusion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who decided by at least the middle 1960s that: "only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in men or faulty operations;" [4] "radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced;" and "something is wrong with...with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America should move toward a Democratic Socialism." According to one of his aides, King would commonly demand that his assistants "turn off the tape recorder" while he held forth on the virtues of "what he called democratic socialism" and on his belief that the needs of the poor could not be met under capitalism. "If we are going to achieve equality," Kingtold ayoungCivil Rightsworker (Charles Fager) in a Selma , Alabama jail in the winter of 1965, "the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.'" [5]

Welcome aboard, Michael Moore. I am an anti-capitalist too.


ANTI-CAPITALISM AS SHRUGGING RESIGNATION

There are two critical qualifications to Moore's conversion, however, from my perspective at least. First, I found it hard not to notice (with consternation) Moore 's sense of resignation as he accompanied the rolling out of "Capitalism: A Love Story" with a statement to the effect that he might "quit" documentaries. What ought to be a fresh beginning - a shift into hard-hitting investigative film work on and against the profits system as a power structure to boldly name, break down and resist - comes across instead as something of an ending linked to a sense of futility in trying to reach the public with fact-based narratives. Moore's move from Dickens to Marx (at least metaphorically speaking) was problematically connected to a statement of exhaustion with explicitly political left-documentary film activism. It sounded to me like Mike was saying that discovering "the real problem is capitalism" amounted to shrugging one's shoulders and giving up.

In his new movie, Moore's seeming resignation is captured by his comic exasperation at his final effort to speak directly with the CEO of General Motors and as he engages in the lonely and futile act of streaming yellow "Crime Scene" tape around the headquarters of a leading Wall Street firm. "I can't keep doing this," Moore says.

"Actually Mike," I thought to myself, "you might want to think about how you've just started on a welcome new path of explicitly criticizing the class dictatorship of capital. This is new and exciting to see, isn't it?. I'd like to think you're beginning anew."


MICHAEL MOORE AND BARACK OBAMA: A LOVE STORY, PART 1: "THIS EXCEPTIONAL MAN"

Second, consistent with his apparent confusion (at the end of his Toronto statement quoted above) between being anti-capitalist and being (along with Sean Penn and the late Ted Kennedy), anti-Bush, Moore's unveiling of "Capitalism: A Love Story" was strangely accompanied by statements of attachment to the distinctly un-left president Barack Obama, whose first nine months in office have been marked by militant surrender to Wall Street and to, well, ummm......capitalism.

As the New York Times reported on the first page of its Sunday "Arts & Leisure" section last September 20th, "After the screening in Toronto, Mr. Moore took questions from audience members eager to know exactly what they should do. He offered some broad suggestions, stressing that he was worried that Democrats in the United States would begin to abandon Mr. Obama (whom he enthusiastically supports) now that the election is won." [6]

This account was consistent with Moore 's ringing spring 2008 endorsement of the future president, which mixed up the corporatist Senator from Illinois (see the next section below) with a vast social justice movement and called for a "nation of millions to stand behind" Obama's supposed effort to seize control of "our government" from "corporate America ." Here's what Moore wrote on his Web site in the April of 2008:

"There are those who say Obama isn't ready, or he's voted wrong on this or that. But that's looking at the trees and not the forest. What we are witnessing is not just a candidate but a profound, massive public movement for change. My endorsement is more for Obama The Movement than it is for Obama the candidate."

"That is not to take anything away from this exceptional man. But what's going on is bigger than him at this point, and that's a good thing for the country. Because, when he wins in November, that Obama Movement is going to have to stay alert and active. Corporate America is not going to give up their hold on our government just because we say so. President Obama is going to need a nation of millions to stand behind him." [7]


BARACK OBAMA AND CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY

"Our Greatest Asset:" Capitalism

Perhaps the now fully anti-capitalist Moore would like to look back both on the pro-Wall Street policy record of the Obama administration and on Obama's recurrent campaign statements of "love" for the so-called "free market" (code language for the profits system) and at an interesting passage from the candidate's 2006 book The Audacity of Hope. One key question addressed in Audacity came straight out of the neoconservative world view: what makes the United States so exceptionally wonderful? To a remarkable extent, Obama found the answer to this nationally narcissistic question in the wise and benevolent leadership of the nation's great white Founders and subsequent honored policymakers like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman and JFK. But Obama also grounded the United States ' distinctive greatness in its "free market" capitalist system and "business culture." The American over-class should have been gratified by Obama's paean to the United States ' "free-market" system of (state- and corporate-) capitalism:

"Calvin Coolidge once said that "the chief business of the American people is business," and indeed, it would be hard to find a country on earth that's been more consistently hospitable to the logic of the marketplace. Our Constitution places the ownership of private property at the very heart of our system of liberty. Our religious traditions celebrate the value of hard work and express the conviction that a virtuous life will result in material rewards. Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as role models...As Ted Turner famously said, in America money is how we keep score."

"The result of this business culture has been a prosperity that's unmatched in human history. It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services - electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, and household appliances - that are still unattainable for most of the world. America may have been blessed with some of the planet's best real estate, but clearly it's not just our natural resources that account for our economic success. 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."[8]

The Audacity of Hope left it to more radically inclined left progressives - characterized by Obama and many of his elite supporters as insufficiently "realistic" and excessively "moral absolutist" carpers, "cranks," "zealots," and "gadflies" (Obama's insulting description of the revered populist U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone [9]) - to observe some of the undesirable and less-than-"efficient" outcomes of America's heavily state-protected "free market system" and "business culture." Those results include the climate-warming contributions of a nation that constitutes 5 percent of the world's population but contributes more than a quarter of the planet's carbon emissions. Other notable effects include the generation of poverty for tens of millions of U.S. children while executives atop "defense" firms like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Raytheon rake in billions of taxpayer dollars for helping the United States maintain the deadly and controversial occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan . [10]

It was left to insufficiently "pragmatic" Left thinkers and activists to note the American System's arguably wasteful and destructive allocation of more than a third of the nation's wealth to the top 1 percent of the U.S. population and its systematic subordination of the common good to private profit.

"Unreasonable" "radicals" were left to observe that business-ruled workplaces and labor markets steal "individual initiative" from millions of American workers subjected to the monotonous repetition of often imbecilic and soul-crushing operations conducted for such increasingly unbearable stretches of time - at stagnating levels of material reward and security - that working people are increasingly unable to participate meaningfully in the great "democracy" Obama trumpets as the Founders' great legacy.[11] They were left also to "complain" about the fact that U.S. social mobility rates are actually quite low in comparison to other leading industrialized states, indicating a relatively fixed class structure in "magical" (Obama's description) America.[12]


"What's the Dollar Value of a Starry-Eyed Idealist?"

Moore might also have consulted Ken Silverstein's important article "Obama, Inc.," published in the November 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine. Silverstein told the story of Obama's early vetting by the money and politics class in 2003 and 2004, showing that Obama was found to be an eminently safe candidate for concentrated wealth early at the beginning of his national political career. "On condition of anonymity," Silverstesin reported, "one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a ‘player.' The lobbyist added: ‘What's the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?'" [13]

The filmmaker might also have examined an important in-depth take on his special candidate in the May 7, 2007 issue of The New Yorker. In a carefully researched portrait of Obama based on extensive interviews, MacFarquhar found that Obama was about as far from being a radical reformer as one could imagine. "In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama," MacFarquhar determined, "is deeply conservative...It's not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good. Take health care, for example," MacFarquhar noted, quoting Obama on how the United States ' for-profit health insurance companies were too deeply entrenched for us to evict them from their Mafia-like control of our health-care future. MacFarquhar's essay was titled "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?" [14]


"No One Has Asked You to Build a More Just America "

If he were to ever undertake a serious investigation of Obama, Moore would find that Obama falls short not just of the filmmaker's "radical agenda of scrapping capitalism" [15] but also of Moore 's earlier Dickensian take [16] on the elite business class. Another key expression of Obama's desire not to offend the nation's real power centers was his curious effort to appeal, ala Dickens, to their supposed underlying and far seeing benevolence. In the late summer of 2007, Obama made a revealing statement at the end of a speech that purported to lecture Wall Street's leaders on their "Common Stake in America 's Prosperity." Speaking at NASDAQ's headquarters, he told the nation's financial elite that "I believe all of you are as open and willing to listen as anyone else in America . I believe you care about this country and the future we are leaving to the next generation. I believe your work to be a part of building a stronger, more vibrant, and more just America . I think the problem is that no one has asked you to play a part in the project of American renewal."[17]

These were strange beliefs to (claim to) hold in light of the actual historical pattern of business behavior that naturally results from purpose and structure of the system of private profit. An endless army of nonprofit charities and social service-providers, citizens, environmental and community activists, trade union negotiators, and policymakers has spent decades asking (often enough begging) the "American" corporate and financial capitalist over-class to contribute to the domestic social good - to little or no avail. Moore 's pre-"Capitalism" films can be reasonably interpreted as efforts to shame the nation's corporate and political elite into better, more socially responsible and morally respectable behavior - to play the role of "good rich men" recommended in the novels of Charles Dickens. The positive results of all these institutional efforts and moral haranguing have been (as Moore accurately suggested in Toronto last month) marginal and fleeting as the "business community" works with structurally super-empowered effectiveness to distribute wealth and power ever more upward over and above any considerations of social and environmental health and the common good at home or abroad. Holding no special allegiance to the American people in an age of corporate globalization, the state capitalist elite is more than willing to abandon domestic U.S. society and its workers and communities to enhancing its bottom line.

As the founder of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute Jeff Faux noted in his 2006 book The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future and What It Will Take to win it Back, America's largely business-based and bipartisan "governing class" holds no particular attachment to the people, communities, health, or even competitiveness of the United States per se. "As early as the 1950s," Faux observed, "A Ford Motor executive corrected a U.S. senator who referred to the company as ‘an American firm. We're an American company when we are in America ,' he said, ‘and a British company when we are in Britain , and a Brazilian company when we are in Brazil ." Forty years later, Ford Motor Company chief Alex Trotman told Robert Reich that "Ford isn't even an American company, strictly speaking. We're global. We're investing all over the world. Forty percent of our employees already live and work outside the United States , and that's rising. Our managers are multinational. We teach them to think and act globally."[18] General Motors' and Chrysler's executives didn't and don't think any differently.


"I Love the Market"

During the presidential campaign, the supposed (so the Republican right wing noise machine ritually and religiously claimed) "radical leftist Obama"[19] repeatedly identified himself as a capitalism-enthusiast, saying things like, "Look, I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market." [20] His Inaugural Address proclaimed that "the question" of "whether the market is a force for good or ill" was not up for debate. "Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom," he proclaimed, "is unmatched."[21]

I and many other on the actual, officially invisible Left agree with Laurence Shoup, who observed in the summer of 2008 that Obama's campaign trail declarations of "love" for the market "fail to note that the market loves and rewards those who already have money and power, not those lacking these advantages. To say that you ‘love the market' is akin," Shoup noted, "to saying that you love the ruling class (the top 1 percent of the population that controls 20 percent of the country's income and nearly 40 percent of the country's wealth) and do not care about the great majority (the 60 percent of the population that controls only 25 percent of the income and 5 percent of the wealth). To say ‘I love the market' — at a time when the financial system is deflating because of decades of lies about how great unregulated markets are which fueled rampant speculation, phony valuations, and deceitful assurances — is to be deaf to the reality of how powerful interests are protected by the government while everyone gets a lecture on personal responsibility. ‘Change we could believe in,' would involve confronting the perversity of market-driven capitalism...." [22]

Growth Ideology

By connecting his "love" for "the market" to being "pro-growth," Obama sided with the corporate state's longstanding ecologically and socially disastrous notion that the solution to contemporary difficulties is material expansion not the radical redistribution of wealth and power. A "rising tide lifts all boats," the standard Western maxim maintains, making "angry" comparisons between the Few's yachts and the Many's rowboats obsolete. "Expanding the pie," the reigning corporate wisdom runs, abolishes the supposedly irrelevant question of socioeconomic redistribution - of how the pie is shared out. "To escape any reevaluation," the French ecological writer Herve Kempf notes, "the oligarchy keeps repeating the dominant ideology according to which the solution to the social crisis is production growth. This is supposedly the sole means of fighting poverty and unemployment."

Abundant data over the last three-and-a-half decades shows that economic growth does not in fact reliably undo those and other social evils. But the notion that material growth is the answer lives on because it induces societies plagued by structurally imposed poverty and idleness "to accept extreme inequalities without questioning them."

Besides being demonstrably false on its own terms, moreover, the reigning doctrine ignores growth's giant negative impact on an increasingly fragile environment. The toxic ecological costs of increasing total consumption far outpace whatever gains in per-unit ecological efficiency are achieved through "green" developments within and beyond "advanced" economies [23]



PRESIDENT OBAMAS "SURREAL" COMMITMENT TO CAPITAL OVER LABOR AND THE CASE OF MOORE 'S BELOVED AUTOWORKERS

Obama's love affair with American capitalism ("our free market system") and its big money elite has been on grotesque display in the first year of his plutocratic, plus ca "change" presidency. The president might briefly criticize excessive Wall Street salaries and visit hard hit job-loss towns like Pomona , California and Elkhart , Indiana to demonstrate his supposed concern for ordinary working people. But that's public relations, meant to provide fake-progressive cover for the president's deep service to capitalism's wealth masters. That service is evident in his continuation and expansion of Bush II's massive taxpayer bailout of Wall Street perpetrators, his increase of the deadly "defense" (empire) budget (a massive public subsidy to giant high-tech corporations and the source half the military spending on Earth) and his promotion of a blatantly corporatist health "reform" that leaves the leading for profit insurance companies in basic, parasitic, cost-driving and care-denying control of our health care future.


"A Doubling of the Vehicles it Will Import from Overseas"

Obama's commitment to capital over ordinary working people has been especially evident in his treatment of Michael Moore's beloved autoworkers. The administration's federal restructuring of the auto industry in the winter and spring of 2009 was more than consistent with his "financial reform." Reflecting the persistent victory of the "low-road" corporate-globalization agenda in national economic policy, it wiped out tens of thousands of livable wage union jobs and led to a wave of wage and pension cuts for current and retired auto workers. The administration's refusal to impose such draconian restructuring on the elite financial firms, who collapsed the economy and hence the auto industry, reflected those firms' remarkable political power and economic reach but it likely resulted also reflected the fact there were no great institutions of working class power like the United Auto Workers (UAW)to be undermined on Wall Street.

Consistent with the suspicion of a pro-capital and anti-labor agenda under the new corporate-Democratic White House, president Obama quickly betrayed his campaign pledges to: (i) advance an elementary and overdue labor law reform that would have fundamentally (the Employee Free Choice Act) boosted labor's chances of overcoming employer opposition to basic union organizing and collective bargaining rights; (ii) pursue the re-negotiation of NAFTA to include stronger labor and environmental protections.[24]

Ironically enough given the pro-labor sentiments he expressed during the campaign and the strong union support he got before and during the election, Obama's auto-bailout plan subsidizes the General Motors' efforts to move yet more jobs abroad. As William Greider explained last May:

"So this is how the auto bailout will work. American taxpayers pump tens of billions into rescuing General Motors from bankruptcy. Then GM pays us back by shipping more jobs overseas -- the equivalent of four assembly plants. The federal money will directly subsidize more imports from abroad, enabling GM to double its car production in Mexico , South Korea and China and selling the cars into the U.S. market".

"...GM's restructuring plan envisions a doubling of the vehicles it will import from overseas factories, from 372,000 to 737,000, in the next four years. GM's imported cars -- already 15.5 percent of its domestic sales -- will rise to 23.5 percent."

" ‘ The overall number of vehicles GM will be importing in 2014 represents the production of four assembly plants, the same number that GM plans to close in the United States,' UAW legislative director Alan Reuther noted. People already outraged by the bank bailouts should save some anger for the carmakers. "GM should not be taking taxpayers' money simply to finance the outsourcing of jobs to other countries,' the UAW insisted."

"...The outlines of the auto deal suggest the president is sticking with Rubinomics. Will other Democrats be brave enough to stand in his way?" [25]

No relevant such bravery emerged.

"Ruining the Lives of the Workforce"

Obama's betrayal of American autoworkers reached levels that struck the renowned left U.S. intellectual Noam Chomsky as "surreal." In the summer of 2009, the business press reported that Obama's transportation secretary (a Republican hack) traveled abroad in pursuit of contracts with European manufacturers to construct high-speed rail projects with federal funds designated by Congress for U.S. economic stimulus. U.S. taxpayer funding for badly need domestic infrastructural development would perhaps go to Spanish and other European corporations. "At the same time," Chomsky noted, "Washington is busy dismantling leading sectors of U.S. industry, ruining the lives of the workforce, families and communities...Surely," Chomsky reflected, "the auto industry could be reconstructed, using its highly skilled workforce to produce what the country and the world needs - ad soon, if we are to have some hope of averting major catastrophe. It has been done before, after all...But all such matters are off the agenda."[26]


"Screw the Autoworkers"

Also in the category of the corporate-authoritarian "surreal" is big auto and the administration's assault on autoworker pensions. Under the terms of the bankruptcy that the Obama White House and its "Car Czar" Steven Rattner worked out with General Motors last May, the company was permitted to grab workers' pension funds to pay off Wall Street. As the progressive muckraker and expert corporate malfeasance-chronicler Greg Palast explained:

"Screw the autoworkers."

"They may be crying about General Motors' bankruptcy today. But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won't spoil Jamie Dimon's day."

"Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders - led by Morgan and Citibank - expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6 billion."

"The way these banks are getting their $6 billion bonanza is stone cold illegal."

"I smell a rat."

"Stevie the Rat, to be precise. Steven Rattner, Barack Obama's 'Car Czar' - the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning."

"When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit:fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name."

"But not this time. Stevie the Rat has a different plan for GM: grab the pension funds to pay off Morgan and Citi."

"Here's the scheme: Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance. Cash in the insurance fund would be replace by GM stock. The percentage may be 17% of GM's stock - or 25%. Whatever, 17% or 25% is worth, well ... just try paying for your dialysis with 50 shares of bankrupt auto stock."

"Yet Citibank and Morgan, says Rattner, should get their whole enchilada - $6 billion right now and in cash -from a company that can't pay for auto parts or worker eye exams."[27]


MOORE AND OBAMA, PART 2

Obama's Curious Escape from Serious Scrutiny in "Capitalism: A Love Story"

Like many lefties watching "Capitalism: A Love Story," I was curious to see how serious Moore was ready to be about acknowledging the president's deep allegiance and service to the profits system. Would Moore have the brains and/or courage to (as one friend of mine put it) "stick it to Obama?"

The answer is a resounding "No!" The "deeply conservative" corporatist sitting in the White House gets portrayed in Moore 's generally excellent movie as a decent fellow who would actually like to be the leader of a populist-progressive movement against corporate power. As far as one can tell from "Capitalism: A Love Story," the only problems that the big corporations are "throwing money at him" and that he's surrounded by conservative Wall Street functionaries like Lawrence Summers and Timother Geither. The viewer is assumed to be unaware: that the Obama Team has hotly pursued big Wall Street money from the beginning (2003 and on); that Obama (as Silverstein showed) was carefully vetted by the financial and political classes and found acceptable early on; that Obama actively chose Summers and Geithner and numerous other corporate-imperial members of his White House apparatus; and that Obama is himself a corporate centrist (and imperial militarist) who shares core ideological precepts with the people he has placed around him. Of course, Moore's movie makes no direct reference to the sickening role that his "exceptional man" - his supposed people's candidate - in defending and advancing the October 2008 Bush-Paulsen-Pelosi bailout that serves as the central crime drama in "Capitalism: A Love Story."

"Where His Heart is...Those Things That He Believes In"

To be sure, all is not lost for Moore when it comes to the President. According to the New York Times' account of Moore's unveiling of "Capitalism: A Love Story" in Toronto, Moore was "pushed" by audience members "on Mr. Obama, a gradualist seemingly out of step with Mr. Moore's radical agenda of scrapping capitalism." According to Times reporter Bruce Headlam, "Mr. Moore could only say that he hoped for the best, but feared the influence of Goldman Sachs on the administration. Finally, he just shrugged. ‘You know,' he said, ‘the next movie may have to be about him.'"[28]

I would be happy to help Moore in the research and writing for that movie

But he's not ready yet, that's for sure.

In a recent interview with the left Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein [29], Moore worried about the outsized influence of the "corporate agenda" on Obama. He fretted about the president's taste for "half-measures" that do not rally "the millions" to his cause.

Still, Moore argued that Obama has "shown us, I think, in his lifetime many things about where his heart is" - on the left progressive side of the spectrum in Moore 's opinion.

Moore 's evidence for his claim was (to put it charitably) less than impressive. Below I give the four different components of his argument inside and offer criticisms of each.

1. "He [Obama] slipped up during the campaign and told Joe the Plumber that he believed in spreading the wealth."

This was a very over-wishful take on Obama's campaign-trail statement in the fall of 2008 to the effect that American capitalism works best "when you we spread the wealth around a little" (not actually a call for the redistribution of wealth long sought, with good reason, by left progressives).

2. "He was raised by a single mother and grandparents and he did not grow up with money. And when he was fortunate enough to be able to go to Harvard and graduate from there, he didn't then go and do something where he could become rich; he decides to go work in the inner city of Chicago ."

Here Moore ignores the fact that Obama quickly came to dislike and reject community organizing, which struck him as a dead-end career path. Moore got his history wrong here, failing to understand that Obama did his main community organizing gig before, NOT after going to Harvard Law. After Law School , Obama went to work for a downtown Chicago law firm, taught at the conservative University of Chicago Law School, and moved in the Illinois Legislative Assembly, all consistent with his longstanding interests in attaining high political office - an objective he knew would be better served by avoiding the path of corporate law. Also outside Moore's understanding of Obama's personal history: his mother was well connected to neoliberal global foundations that were hooked in with U.S. imperial foreign and economic policy and his grandmother was a well-paid bank manager who paid for young Obama's education at a prestigious pre-school in Hawaii and at two elite private higher-educational institutions: Occidental College and Columbia University. There is nothing about being raised by a single parent and outside the upper classes that dictates a progressive mindset orprogressive policies as president. The career of the brazenly corporatist Democrat Bill Clinton (product of a working class single-family household in Hope , Arkansas ), should certainly remind us of that. Like Obama, a graduate of Columbia and Harvard, Clinton absorbed conventional ruling-class and imperial wisdom at elite educational institutions ( Oxford , Georgetown , and Yale in the earlier president's case).

3. "His ethnicity."

Here Moore presumably meant to say that Obama deserves credit for being black, which Moore identifies with being progressive. The filmmaker might have wanted to listen first to the comments of a more radical filmmaker named John Pilger, who offered the following wise words in San Francisco last spring: "The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist, partly because it is indeed exciting to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century, and race together with gender and even class can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters, I believe, above all, is the class one serves. George W. Bush's inner circle from the State Department to the Supreme Court was perhaps the most multiracial in presidential history. It was PC par excellence. Think Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. It was also the most reactionary."

4. "Oh, and he decides to change his name back to what it was on the birth certificate - Barack. Not exactly the move of somebody who's trying to become a politician."

Here Moore failed to grasp that Obama's ethno-cultural nomenclature was actually an electoral asset, not a liability, in the post-Civil Rights era and in the wake of the Bush-Cheney fiasco in the Middle East (something Obama and his handlers certainly knew despite pretenses to the contrary). (And for what it's worth, as anup-close observer Democratic Party and black politics in Chicago and Illinois between 1996 and 2005,I can tell Moore that if Obama thought his chances of becoming president would have been helped by changing his name he would have done it many years ago.)

"I think that those things that he believes in are still there," Moore told Naomi Klein. "Now, it's kind of up to him. If he's going to listen to the Rubins and the Geithners and the Summerses, you and I lose."

"What things that he believes in, exactly?" I asked, incredulously, after reading this comment. "Does Mike's category of ‘things he believe in' include the president's repeated explicit embrace of the profits system Mike now claims to reject? Does it include the belief that the U.S. is a great and unquestioned 'force for good in the world,' uniquely qualified to run the planet'saffairs and beyond serious scrutiny and apology when it comes to its imperial project, with its occasional ‘mistakes' like the crucifixion of Southeast Asia and the murder of Mesopotamia? And what in the name of God does Michael mean by ‘if he's going to listen to the Rubins and the Geithners and the Summerses?' If? Hello? Has Mike been actually paying attention to the economic and financial and health care policies of the Obama administration? Good grief."

Klein was much more polite than I am being here in her interview with Moore . Still, she reasonably pushed Moore to comment on the fact that Obama "is the person who appointed Summers and Geithner, who you're very appropriately hard on in the film. And one year later, he hasn't reined in Wall Street. He reappointed Bernanke. He's not just appointed Summers but has given him an unprecedented degree of power for a mere economic adviser... I often hear from people...that he's being duped by these guys. But these are his choices, and so why not judge him on his actions and really say, ‘This is on him, not on them'?"

A very good question, to which Moore could offer no response except to say something I've heard more than once from never-say-die Obamaphiles: "I don't think he is being duped by them; I think he's smarter than all of them."

Oh, okay.

Meanwhile, around the same time Klein interviewed Moore , Obama chuckled with CNN's John King over how foreign leaders from center-right governments tell the president that "you'd be considered a conservative in my county" [30].

This was consistent with Chomsky's observation that Obama has never really sought to hide the fact that he's a centrist. "With the rhetorical flourishes stripped away," Chomsky told San Francisco Examiner reporter John Kirch three weeks after Obama's election, "Obama presents himself as more or less as a familiar centrist Democrat, roughly on the Clinton model. His early appointments and advisers conform to that judgment." [31]

Chomsky's observation matches candidate Obama's warning (saying "you haven't been paying close enough attention to me," in essence) to his (supposed) "friends on the left" in July of 2008 [32], the president's reference to himself as a "New Democrat" in March of 2009, and, of course, with much else in his record.

At the same time, however, much of the Democratic Party's liberal and progressive base was targeted by Team Obama's potent effort to deceptively market Obama as a left progressive. Some left voters were capable of seeing through the façade and responding to the limited electoral choices of 2008 without falling prêy to the carefully crafted left illusion. Other voters, including - incredibly enough - Michael Moore, were not.

"PUMMELED" INTO FALSE HOPE: U.S. PROGRESSIVES' "PARADIGM OF LEARNED HELPLESSNESS" AND "WHAT THEY THOUGHT THEY HAD FOUND IN OBAMA"

Moore 's continuing attachment to a president whoa left acquaintance of mine reasonably calls "Wall Street Barry" is emblematic of the almost pathetic desperation and myopia imposed on many progressive-leaning intellectuals and activists by the corporate-managed fake-democracy that passes for popular governance in the U.S. The narrow, big business-friendly spectrum of U.S. political culture has created what Ricardo Levins-Morales calls "a paradigm of learned helplessness" on the nation's "left intellectual strata." Under the terms of that paralyzing paradigm, fed by the nearly complete absence of genuinely left (socialist or laborite) candidate and party choices on the U.S. "electoral market"[33], U.S. progressives are conditioned to doubt their ability to meaningfully advance anything politically beyond the election and defense of corporate Democrats. As Levins Morales notes, "When liberals are in power we are compelled to defend them lest the Republicans return. When the right is in power we must replace them at all costs, which means backing the Democrats. Logically that means there will never be circumstances that would justify building a movement that speaks with its own voice."[34]

For an almost perfect, textbook expression of this "paradigm of learned helplessness," we can, it happens, read Michael Moore's April 2008 endorsement of Obama, where he anticipated critics to his left as follows:

"I know some of you will say, 'Mike, what have the Democrats done to deserve our vote?' That's a damn good question. In November of '06, the country loudly sent a message that we wanted the war to end. Yet the Democrats have done nothing. So why should we be so eager to line up happily behind them?"

"I'll tell you why. Because I can't stand one more friggin' minute of this administration and the permanent, irreversible damage it has done to our people and to this world. I'm almost at the point where I don't care if the Democrats don't have a backbone or a kneebone or a thought in their dizzy little heads. Just as long as their name ain't ‘Bush' and the word ‘Republican' is not beside theirs on the ballot, then that's good enough for me."

"I, like the majority of Americans, have been pummeled senseless for 8 long years. That's why I will join millions of citizens and stagger into the voting booth come November, like a boxer in the 12th round, all bloodied and bruised with one eye swollen shut, looking for the only thing that matters -- that big ‘D' on the ballot."

"Don't get me wrong. I lost my rose-colored glasses a long time ago."

"It's foolish to see the Democrats as anything but a nicer version of a party that exists to do the bidding of the corporate elite in this country. Any endorsement of a Democrat must be done with this acknowledgement and a hope that one day we will have a party that'll represent the people first, and laws that allow that party an equal voice."[35]


But deferring the dream for "a movement that speaks with its own voice" is a vicious, self-defeating and self-fulfilling circle. As Levins-Morales added in an important passage that helps us understand how and why left-liberals like Moore align their hopes with corporate Democrats:

"The absence of such a voice makes us even weaker at each new juncture and that fact becomes an argument for further timidity. With no countervailing pole to the left of them the Democrats continue to move right in the Republican wake."

"A strategy of timidity today will only reproduce the pathetic spectacle of the health care ‘debate': orchestrated, right-wing mobs launching attacks against a tepid, corporate-friendly ‘reform' that sets no one on fire (despite mass public support, single payer is declared ‘off the table' by the ruling Democrats). If things have deteriorated to the point that the selections on the political menu range from neo-liberal to neo-fascist it is past time to proclaim another option rather than select among those offered. After decades of rightist propaganda people are hungry for someone, anyone, to unapologetically declare for cooperation, generosity and solidarity. That's what they thought they had found in Obama. Millions of people stepped up to support what they thought was a radical turn toward justice, peace and compassion."[36]

Nicely said.


THE BAMBOOZLED AS BAMBOOZLER

Of course, Moore isn't just some silly, burned out campus-town liberal with an Obama bumper sticker in which the first letter of the president's last name is written (ala Orwell) as the Peace symbol. He's an influential "left" icon, someone whose opinions hold water with a considerable part of the nation's progressive citizenry.

When Moore gets (involuntarily or voluntarily) "punked" and "bamboozled" by "Barack," so do untold masses of much less culturally privileged and empowered Americans (and others) who watch his movies and follow his spoken and written commentary on his Web site and in numerous interviews on television and radio.

It's nice and important to see him tackling the problem of capitalism. The human race's viability probably can't survive more than another two decades of the profits system. It would be nicer still to see Mike understand Capitalism: A Love Story" as the beginning of a genuinely radical new phase in his movie-making, not a moment for shoulder-shrugging resignation, and to see him dramatically upgrade the moral and intellectual level of his understanding of the Obama phenomenon and presidency.



Personally, for what it's worth, I was just starting a book called "It's the Capitalism, Stupid." Unfortunately, I've had to put it aside for a couple months to write a short stranger-than-fiction political volume titled "The Re-Branding: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power and the Politics of Progressive Surrender." If it was a movie, I'm afraid that my casting department would be suggesting Mike for a starring role.

[What Would Durruti Do?]

And now the capitalists are responding with their "we don't have true capitalism" stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwQ41Yo60og

[Q]

And now the capitalists are responding with their "we don't have true capitalism" stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwQ41Yo60og
Nice how one question points out how limited Moore's alternative really is. What is exactly meant with "democracy in the economy"?

That's our role here: Make clear that socialism must be the answer and that the "free market" caused this mess and that there is no such thing as a free market in the first place (at least, not the one of the "American dream"). For this we need to be out there, organising on campuses and hold meetings. Especially right now in the US and Canada, where the movie already aired a week ago.

[cyu]

What is exactly meant with "democracy in the economy"?


See http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1546568&postcount=37 and the discussion afterwards:

0. [This one I wouldn't actually "settle" for, but at least consider it better than capitalism.] From above: every company is democratically run, but there was still a strong current in society that caused the employees of many companies to still vote for unequal pay in the company. The fact that people still believe in unequal pay would be a belief I would be working against - similar to working against the belief that murder and rape should be tolerated.

These are the ones I would "settle" for:

1. Elaborated from above: Everyone gets 100 votes as to what sectors of the economy they wanted to expand. If one person wants 30% more going into marine agriculture and 70% going into starships, and another person wants 40% going into marine agriculture and 60% into democratic media, then adding all that up, you might get 35% going into marine agriculture, 35% into starships, and 30% into democratic media.

2. From http://everything2.com/user/gate/writeups/equal+pay+for+unequal+work (http://everything2.com/user/gate/wri...r+unequal+work) - Everyone in the economy gets paid the same monthly salary. They then spend that money in a market to buy what they want / need. Market pricing still determines prices. However, instead of higher profits going to the producers, the extra money going into those industries just means there is more demand for those products and services. So the money is used to pay new producers in those industries, thus increasing supply - and everyone still has the same monthly salary.

3. Some combination of 1 and 2 where a certain portion of economic allocation is determined by vote (#1) and another portion is determined by market socialism (#2) - depending on what the electorate wants, there may be different percentages of the economy determined by #1 or #2.

4. As you've said, If you're "lazy" and don't feel like doing anything, nobody forces you to work. You are free to stay at home and watch TV or surf the internet all day. However, instead of being constantly bombarded with ads trying to make you greedier, you are instead bombarded with ads trying to get you to want to go out and do stuff that society thinks needs doing. As long as people see value in doing something, they are free to support advertising for that kind of activity. Sports, for example, are good for people's health, and, in cases like swimming, can save lives. However, if some other activity could not only provide exercise, but also help out other people at the same time (for example, building a wheelchair accessible trail along a scenic mountain path), then I could easily see more people gravitating toward promoting that other activity.

[RadioRaheem84]

Moore could at least say he's a social democrat! But is that even too much of a bad word in the States? I mean he had Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders in the movie and he admitted that he was a socialist.

1.) Why is Moore so scared to critique Obama?

2.) Why is Moore so scared to admit that he is a socialist or at least a social democrat?

[cyu]

1.) Why is Moore so scared to critique Obama?

I'm willing to bet that it's going to happen in his next film. Moore is probably less cynical than I am (or at least wants to appear less cynical in public).


2.) Why is Moore so scared to admit that he is a socialist or at least a social democrat?

If I were a Republican polician in America who was a closet fascist, I wouldn't admit that I was a fascist in public either.

[Q]

The Weekly Worker also had a review this week (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/788/searing.php):


Searing indictment of US capitalism spoilt by nostalgia for Roosevelt’s New Deal

Jim Creegan reviews Michael Moore’s (director) Capitalism: a love story 2009 (no UK release date yet)

Reporting over a year ago in this paper on the US presidential elections, I observed that ‘capitalism’ is a word seldom heard among the radical-liberals who comprise most of the American left. Michael Moore has gone a long way toward correcting this omission.

In his latest documentary, Capitalism: a love story, Moore takes advantage of the still reverberating shock waves from the great crash of 2008 to move beyond the single-issue muckraking of his previous films. Capitalism is nothing less than a full-fledged indictment of the social order. A profit-driven economy, Moore concludes toward the end of the movie, is irredeemably evil. It cannot be regulated to serve human needs. It must be abolished. Such an explicit declaration represents a radical departure for one who is perhaps the best known spokesperson for a broad leftish current that has not dared to dream about revolution for over 30 years. Yet, as we shall see below, Moore’s indictment is not quite as sweeping as it may at first appear.
Trademark tropes

Anyone expecting Moore’s bold new content to be accompanied by corresponding innovations in technique will be let down (or reassured, depending on taste). All his trademark devices are on full display.

There are the self-dramatising stunts: once again, the faux-naive, ursine everyman in a baseball cap shambles forth to confront the CEO of General Motors as he did 20 years ago in his first film, a meditation on the auto industry in decline titled Roger and me, only to be unceremoniously rebuffed for a second time. He then descends upon Wall Street carrying a burlap sack into which the financial behemoths are invited to deposit their misspent bailout billions for return to the US treasury. When they refuse, Moore single-handedly cordons off the New York stock exchange with yellow police tape, informing the occupants through a loud hailer that they are all under “citizen’s arrest”.

There are also the familiar mordant juxtapositions of current news clips with archival footage and sound. Capitalism opens with an old made-for-the-classroom movie about fall of Rome, intercut with parallel scenes of contemporary American decay, starring Dick Cheney as a latter-day Nero. Franco Zefirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth is redubbed to produce a neoliberal Christ, who refuses to heal the lame beggar on the roadside because his affliction has been classified as a “pre-existing condition”. But, now as before, Moore is at his best in bringing to light tales of horrific suffering inflicted as a result of capitalism’s insatiable and calculating profit lust.

Capitalism takes the audience into the living room of a Tennessee family, nervously huddled together filming its own eviction for mortgage delinquency at the hands of the local sheriff. He is beating down their door with a crowbar, backed up by six squad cars of police.

In a segment that Dickens could not have outdone, Moore interviews several teenagers sentenced to confinement in a recently privatised ‘juvenile detention facility’. Their offences included “throwing a piece of meat at my mom’s boyfriend” and posting sarcastic comments on the web about an assistant headmaster. It was later discovered that the judge who gave some of them a year in jail after hearings lasting about two minutes each was being bribed by the reformatory owners to lock the kids away so the owners could collect a per-head government fee on their incarceration.

We are introduced to a grieving widower whose young wife recently died of an asthma attack. He accidentally discovered that her employer had collected $1.5 million on her death from what is known in business circles as a ‘dead peasant’ life insurance policy, taken out in secret by the company, which gave nothing to the bereaved family. A lawyer-expert says this practice is routine among some of the country’s biggest corporations; he produces an actuarial analysis from one firm, which concludes that the insurance policies did not meet original expectations of profitability: although as many insured employees died this year as last, two of this year’s deaths were suicides, which could not be counted upon to recur regularly in future.

Then there are the full-time airline pilots paid less than a McDonald’s restaurant manager by their non-union companies (between $16,000 and $20,000 a year). One of them was forced to moonlight as a waitress in a coffee shop, another to take government food coupons. The propeller jet that went down in a ball of flame over Buffalo, New York, last year, killing all aboard, was operated by two such underpaid, undertrained pilots. In a typical attempt to blame workers for the disaster, the media reported that the plane’s black box had recorded the pilots chatting about their careers at the time of the crash. Moore points out that their ‘career chat’ consisted of complaints about low pay and exhausting flight schedules.

Tales like the above are not only heartbreaking; they are also becoming typical. Sicko, Moore’s 2008 exposé of the American healthcare industry, concentrates not on the country’s 47 million uninsured, but rather on tales of woe from those who could afford to purchase the commonly high-priced, woefully inadequate coverage offered by the insurance profiteers. Similarly, Capitalism’s horror stories are told not only by illegal immigrants or denizens of impoverished black ghettos, though these are included. The subjects are also white people - of city and country, young, old and middle aged, most of whom have solid work records and consider (or until recently considered) themselves solidly middle class. With Katrina fresh in the country’s collective mind, and the crash of 2008 still sending out tidal waves of evictions and redundancies, feelings of solidarity across racial and national lines may be quietly gaining ground - a process toward which Moore’s Capitalism is an outstanding contribution.
Contradictions of Capitalism

Yet if Capitalism exhibits many of Moore’s characteristic strengths, it also suffers from his principal weakness: the absence of a solid explanatory framework. His films are like rambling monologues, in which images, soundbites and talking heads tumble forth in torrents, sometimes forming divergent streams or, at other times, running in counter-currents.

So, for instance, one part of Bowling for Columbine, Moore’s 2002 reflection on US gun violence, notes that the death-by-firearm rate in Canada is lower than that in the US by several orders of magnitude despite the ready legal availability of guns in both countries. The overall argument of the film, however, is for stricter anti-gun laws in the United States in order to prevent grisly shootings like the one perpetrated by alienated students upon their classmates at Columbine high school in Colorado. But surely the US-Canada comparison indicates that the absence of tougher American gun laws cannot explain the disparity in violent crime? The inconsistency is never resolved.

In Capitalism Moore meditates on a much bigger theme, and is caught up in a far more serious contradiction. The movie’s major premise is that capitalism cannot be fixed and must therefore be abolished. Yet the film is awash in nostalgia for capitalism’s ostensible golden age of the 1950s and early 60s. Old home movies show a carefree pre-teen Moore romping in the backyard of his family home in the auto-manufacturing town of Flint, Michigan, where he grew up. His accompanying voiceover speaks wistfully of the plentiful, decently paid jobs and accessible higher education of that contented time. He says our bygone prosperity was grounded in an economy that produced useful things like cars and steel, as opposed to credit default swaps.

One of Capitalism’s final clips is of Franklin Roosevelt reading a proposed bill of economic rights a year before he died. This is followed by scenes of the grieving multitudes that thronged Roosevelt’s funeral procession, accompanied on the soundtrack by the plaintive lilt of (Thomas) Moore’s ‘Last rose of summer’. Elsewhere in the film, Moore speaks glowingly of western European welfare states.

The above segments pose a number of questions. How did we get from the post-war halcyon days of Moore’s home movies to the security-camera film of bank robberies, with which Moore opens the film and intends to symbolise the gangster capitalism of today? And are not the more congenial capitalist regimes the director praises - under Roosevelt or in Europe - capitalist regimes nonetheless? Would it not be more realistic - and maybe a lot easier - to humanise the social order, as it was humanised, in the past and in other places, than, as Moore proposes, to risk the well known pitfalls of attempting to abolish it altogether?

If Moore is suggesting that the welfare state was due in significant measure to the beneficence of a Roosevelt, and - as he also implies in the film - that its undoing can be traced to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, cannot a less voracious capitalism be restored by the rise of another liberal benefactor (like Barack Obama, perhaps)? These questions are barely raised in the Capitalism, let alone seriously answered. They are obvious enough, however, to have popped up in various forms on the television talk shows where Moore is now appearing to publicise his movie. His answers are no more convincing there.

A popular documentary is not a theoretical disquisition. It would be unreasonable to expect Moore to delve into the falling rate of profit or Kondratiev’s long waves. Yet Capitalism would benefit from a stronger interpretation of recent history. It might go along lines something like these:

Ever since the industrial revolution got into full swing following the civil war, the United States has been dominated economically by the owners of capital, which is, broadly speaking, huge hoards of privately owned money in search of profitable investment. The capitalist ruling class that controls these hoards has also enjoyed the decisive voice in politics.

However, in times of great crisis, when the economy has ceased to function, and greater numbers of people are becoming disaffected with the system, the ruling powers sometimes feel constrained, albeit reluctantly, to concede to certain popular demands in order to rescue the system as a whole. Such a time was the great depression, and such concessions were embodied in the ‘new deal’. Then the population obtained government old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and the right of (mostly white) workers to form unions, bargain with their employers over wages and working conditions, and strike.

But the ruling class was never completely reconciled to these broad popular gains, as they will never be to any major reforms of benefit to the working class. What is more, the enormous wealth concentrated in their hands gives them not only the will, but also the power, to undermine progressive reforms. In the decades immediately following World War II, when unions were strong and the US was unrivalled among imperialist powers, it was true that most of the American bourgeoisie concluded that a frontal assault on the new deal was not worth the social and political risk. They contented themselves for a time with more modest efforts.

The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 placed severe limits on the use of the strike weapon, but did not challenge the right to organise and strike as such. Employers did not as a rule use scabs to break major industrial strikes. Instead, they quietly began investing less of their capital in the union-dense industrial belts of the northeast and midwest and more in the non-union south and southwest. This was the period that certain liberal historians have dubbed capitalism’s ‘golden age’, in which there was said to be an tacit ‘social contract’ between capital and unionised labour.

As US world hegemony eroded in the early 70s, the previous class détente began to come apart. Other major capitalist powers, devastated by the war, were on their feet once again, offering competition to American products in both foreign and home markets. The American policy of ‘containment of communism’ had suffered defeat at the hands of third-world revolutionaries from China to Cuba. The Vietnam war was bankrupting the treasury, and turning a whole generation of American youth not only against the government, but against the entire greasy-poll-climbing ‘work ethic’ upon which the system operates. And, most important, all these trends were reflected in a severely diminished rate of corporate profit, which fell precipitously in 1966, never to regain its previous heights until the late 90s, and then only briefly.

Faced with these challenges, the capitalist class’s former attitude of grudging complacency was clearly no longer sufficient. With the labour movement now bureaucratised and purged of radicals, and the system as a whole not threatened as it had been in the 30s, the capitalist class felt less inhibited about fighting back. Beginning hesitantly under the Carter presidency, but growing exponentially under Reagan, a series of attacks were mounted on the people’s standard of living through monetary and fiscal policy, union-busting and corporate deregulation. The attacks met with a degree of success that probably surprised even the attackers. And the fact that the ‘reforms’ Reagan put in place were not significantly reversed, but consolidated, under the eight-year term of Democratic president Bill Clinton illustrates that what Reagan had wrought was viewed as a gain for the whole ruling class, and not just its Republican faction.

Efforts were no less intensive - and just as successful - on the foreign front, where the US was also striking back with redoubled vigour after the ’loss’ of Vietnam. These efforts paid off in the Suharto coup in Indonesia in 1965, the overthrow of Allende in Chile, the negotiated defeat of the guerrilla insurrection in El Salvador, the peaceful toppling of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, and the most spectacular victory of all - the downfall of the USSR and its eastern European client states (the US and its allies did not bring about this development, but helped it along at crucial points, and did not hesitate to take credit for it).

These events, in turn, created the most hospitable climate for international business investment since before World War I. No longer fearing third-world revolutions or nationalisations, corporations felt free to invest around the world where labour was cheapest, hollowing out the industrial base of the west and further weakening first-world unions and political parties based on them.

What does this history teach us about the capitalist system as a whole? Moore could have argued that, even in the preternaturally unlikely event that the conditions that produced the New Deal could be reassembled, economic power, and hence the balance of political influence, would remain in the hands of a minority dedicated to undoing whatever was accomplished, and hence that the only way to ensure uninterrupted progress is to break the power of the capitalist class and move toward a society in which no-one will have any motive to challenge rule by the majority for its own welfare.

But Moore avoids such an interpretation of recent history, and the conclusions that would seem to follow from it, not because it would have been too arcane for the broad public he is trying to reach. Had he been inclined in the direction of a more systematic critique, there are a number of Marxist authors and professors (Richard Wolffe and Adolph Reed come to mind) who could have filled in the details in a lucid and publicly accessible way. It is rather that such an analysis would have shifted the film’s focus from morality to the struggle between classes with irreconcilably opposed interests, and from reform to revolution.

So Moore invokes the memory of Roosevelt as opposed to Lenin (or even Eugene Debs or Mother Jones), seeks anti-capitalist inspiration from two Catholic priests and a bishop from his native Michigan rather than from Marxists, and views democracy rather than socialism as the answer to the crimes of the profit system his film does so much to expose.

Capitalism is animated by the commendably radical impulse to synthesise the disparate issues of recent ‘social movements’, as well as those of Moore’s previous films, into a more comprehensive critique of the social system. This intent is, however, compromised by what seems like the director’s almost irresistible urge to lapse back into liberal ideology, just as his 2000 support of the independent presidential candidacy of Ralph Nader was followed by his hasty 2004 retreat back into the Democratic fold, when many left-liberals sheepishly concluded that their earlier experiment with political independence had helped to re-elect George W Bush.

Much of Moore’s equivocation no doubt arises from the genuine confusion of our time, in which the way forward is much less certain than it once appeared. It probably is the case that Moore’s anti-capitalism is grounded less in Marxism than in the Catholic activist inspiration of his youth, which the film emphasises.

But he is much more aware of the Marxist tradition than he chooses to let on, and one cannot escape the suspicion that the sentimental, soft-focus, moralistic anti-capitalism of Capitalism contains a strong element of political calculation as well. Moore probably feared that a harder, more analytical presentation would have been badly received, given the disrepute into which Marxism has fallen with the disappearance of the USSR. Maybe he was right.

But what his strategy gains in public acceptance and critical acclaim it loses in intellectual consistency. One can only hope that, in his future efforts, this cautiously treading partisan of the working class will see fit to carry his radical impulses through to their logical conclusion.

[RedSonRising]

I think Moore was trying to point out (during the Obama segment) that the attitudes and values of United States citizens are shifting; this is culturally and politically significant, since this demonstrates the will to seek alternatives to traditional leaders; the masses thinking they picked a real societal "change" at least shows that they wanted one. He does bash the democrats, and should have talked about the stimulus package, but at least touches on the fact that his campaign rode on the wave of mass corporate donations; that is enough of a seed of myth deconstruction for liberals without alienating them.

We can all see the lack of championing socialism, but he played his cards a bit carefully for a reason. We shouldn't depend on him for furthering the movement, but thank him for exposing the enemy in the minds of US citizens. He had one movie to fit it all in, and he chose to demonize the current ideological economic order more than propose a model that lacks convincing evidence (relative to the audience.)

[RadioRaheem84]

I agree but he still makes himself look like a fool when he defends Obama as if he's some kind hearted gentlemen who's being duped by his economic advisers.

Plus, did anyone hear his response to when Blitzer asked him about how NAFTA was enacted by Clinton? It was laughable as Moore said that Clinton now feels sorry for that bit of policy.