Movie Review: Capitalism: A Love Story
Directed by Michael Moore
Now Playing • 127 Minutes

Michael Moore’s films are no stranger to controversy, and his latest work, Capitalism: A Love Story, is no exception. Debuting in the midst of a world recession, while large sectors of the population are questioning the foundations of the “free market” system, the movie’s very existence is contributing much to solidifying that vague mood of dissatisfaction into a coherent criticism.

Capitalism is a welcome change from Moore’s earlier films, which focused on individual social ills and advocated band-aid solutions that fail to address the root cause: the capitalist system itself. Moore refers to Capitalism as “the culmination of all the films I’ve ever made,” and in that he’s right.

The film criticizes capitalism from a humanistic standpoint, opening with a scene in which a family films themselves being evicted from their home by a police squad.

One of the movie’s more gripping scenes is the showing of a privatized juvenile detention center in Wilkes-Barre, Penn. The facility’s owners made tens of millions of dollars bribing judges to unjustly convict over 6,500 kids and lock them up for months for dubious offenses, from throwing a piece of steak at their parents to making a MySpace page about their assistant principal.

Moore also doesn’t fail to point out the link between the capitalists and their state, exposing the financial coup d’etat that the big business elite staged last October, when a mass wave of popular anger led to Congress rejecting then-Treasury Secretary Paulson’s first version of the bank bailout bill.

It only took a few weeks of behind-the-scenes dealings for Congress to change its tune, with both major presidential candidates, McCain and Obama, playing a key role lobbying for the bailout’s passage.

Casting aside all reformist illusions in capitalism, Moore sums up our “democratic” system thusly: “The richest 1 percent have more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined. When you have a situation like that, where the 1 percent own not only all the wealth, but call the shots in Congress, are we really telling the truth when we call this a democracy?... Just because we get to vote every now and then, we can call this a democracy, when the economy is anything but? We have no say in it. The people listening to us today have no say in how the economy is run. There’s no democracy in the workplace. Through most of our daily lives, the idea of democracy is 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.”

While Moore does an excellent job at diagnosing the evils of capitalism, he is less apt at prescribing a solution. While Moore makes an appeal at the end of the movie for viewers to join him in the struggle to replace capitalism with “democracy,” it is left unclear what form that struggle would take.

As workers, we can’t rely on voting for corporate politicians from either the Republican or Democratic parties and hope for change.

We need to organize ourselves as a class, united to end capitalism and build a working people’s republic, with an economy that is organized and designed to meet the needs of all. Only such a system, formed on the basis of revolutionary industrial unionism, electing representatives who make no more than the average worker and can be recalled any time, can create the kind of world that Moore is grasping for. That’s workers’ democracy — the democracy of the true majority.

We need an all-sided approach to effectively fight against capitalism. The film, which is popularizing anti-capitalist ideas and bringing them into the public debate, gives a peek of what an alternative, pro-worker cultural movement could bring.

The workers’ movement has to organize cultural, economic and political arms to win the battle of democracy. If you agree with this perspective, we invite you to join with us, the Workers Party in America.