Kinder, gentler capitalism?

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Socialist Action novemBER 2009 11 “Capitalism: A Love Story” is Michael Moore’s most ambitious but not most successful film. He wants to show how capitalism in America today does not work as well as it did in the past due to mismanagement, corporate greed, and the failure of government oversight. He hopes for “a kinder, gentler” capitalism. Unfortunately, Moore is not radical enough; he does not grasp the root cause of economic oppression.

Still, there is much to applaud here. In this film Moore puts a human face on the victims of the system. He shows people losing their homes, fired from their jobs, jailed without cause, and swindled by the despicable schemes of employers and insurance companies. He shows the devastation left behind on cities and towns when companies collapse or move away in search of higher profit.

Perhaps even more important, Moore shows people banding together and fighting back, preventing housing foreclosures and, in the case of Republic Windows and Doors, preventing companies from throwing workers out like trash. The old slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” comes to life in this film.

Moore continues his unique style of confrontational ... Taliban (continued from page 8: “Pennsylvania’s governor what could be the third and final warrant for”)

some U.S. military and political leaders is giving up trying to control the entire area of conflict but continuing to stage strikes to keep any important threat to U.S. interests from developing—creating a “Chaosistan,” an area of permanent chaos, would not remove the dangers either. Such would create a festering sore, like Gaza or Somalia, that would drive more and more of the local population to desperation and foster deeper and deeper hated of the United States.

On a world scale the political costs for the U.S. would steadily increase, as they have grown for Israel because its similar policy toward Gaza. The area of conflict in Afghanistan and western Pakistan is too big and strategic to be kept in chaos. It is on a scale incomparably greater than Gaza, to say nothing of remote and forlorn Somalia. The Oct. 27 statement of the regional powers makes that clear.

Moreover, the prospects for achieving stable neocolonial regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan look more and more remote. In its Oct. 28 issue, The New York Times revealed the depth of the U.S. involvement with corruption and gangsterism in Afghanistan, by reporting that Hamid Karzai’s brother has been on the payroll of the CIA for eight years and that he runs a Mafia-like operation engaged in the opium trade.

A large percentage of the Pushtun, on which Karzai depends, will probably not vote again if an election proceeds. Much of this area is controlled by the Taliban, who are threatening reprisals against anyone who goes to the polls.

The farcical nature of the Afghan elections on Aug. 20 forced a reluctant comedy, where simple common sense runs afoul of corporate greed. His effort to retrieve misused bailout money and return it to the federal treasury, for instance, is flat-out hilarious. So too with his failed attempts to seek interviews with people in power so that he may speak truth to them. Their arrogant silence conveys an essential lesson: power means never having to say anything to anybody. From these humorous situations Hamid Karzai to accept a run-off vote.

But on Nov. 1, Karzai’s main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out of the new election on grounds that Karzai had refused his demands on changes to the electoral commission to prevent fraud.

The electoral conflict had threatened to divide the country on civil war lines between the Pushtun and the peoples of Persian language and/or culture in the north and west of the country.

Abdullah appeared to offer no alternative to the present regime other than a different sectional interest, undoubtedly even more dependent on the warlords of the old Northern Alliance.

In the Oct. 27 British Guardian, Nushin Arbabzadah wrote: “Given that only a third of the population chose to exercise their right to vote in the first round, there are strong grounds to believe that the disenchanted represent a majority of the Afghan population.” Moore draws out his essential theme, that America needs more democracy.

Though Moore excels in portraying the symptoms of oppression—no small achievement—he does not grasp the nature of exploitation within capitalism. It’s as if everything went wrong with federal deregulation and the election of Ronald Reagan, while capitalist oppression will end if Obama adopts the crusading spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and implements a steeply progressive tax code. Moore fails to distinguish between bad policies and a bad system. He does not recognize the fundamental and irresolvable social antagonism between capital and wage labor.

Workers must produce more value than they earn. The extra value which they produce goes into the hands of capitalists. Without profit founded on inequality, a form of theft perpetrated every day on millions of people, capitalism could not exist.

Since exploitation is built into capitalism, the system cannot be altered fundamentally by reforms, no matter how thoroughgoing, no matter how necessary and just. To survive, capitalism must expropriate profit from workers. Real democracy means that “the expropriators must still be expropriated.”

Few other films put social oppression on the screen and ask whether the economic system that creates and thrives on human alienation and suffering should continue to exist. Credit Moore for raising the essential questions, ones that will linger in a viewer’s mind long after the closing credits. n In Pakistan, the army offensive in South Waziristan prompted some questions about whether it was possible to finally integrate the Federally Administered Tribal Areas into the Pakistani state. The conclusion was that this was unlikely because it would require a social revolution, for which the Pakistani government has neither the will nor the means. The structure of the country remains an unwieldy hybrid of feudalism and gangster capitalism. It will not change without a real social revolution that sweeps away the bourgeois structures as well as the feudal ones.

Such an upheaval would change not only the region but the world. If it approaches, its footsteps would resound around the globe. It will obviously be a difficult process. But for the Pakistani people, as well as for the Afghanis, the only alternative is deepening chaos and fratricidal civil conflict. n