I saw Michael Moore’s Capitalism – a Love Story last night. I liked it. Yes I agree with the many critics that it’s low on solutions and bombastic. But that’s Moore’s style. Its real strength for me was the insight into the lives of disillusioned Americans who bought into a myth of the American Dream.
Any sane person is left after the film feeling pretty disgusted at the way we seem to have designed a political economy which rides roughshod over people and planet. What comes out most strongly is the way our current form of corporate-consumer-growth-capitalism really is an efficient machine designed to concentrate wealth into the hands of the few. There are solutions in the film – such as the bread factory which has shifted to a worker-owned co-op. The CEO earns the same as the workers. The workers earn $60,000. That’s three times the average income of US domestic airline pilots.
Because I saw the film in my favourite local cinema in Bristol (it’s a social-enterprise), and because Bristol is funky and ‘alternative’, we had been told on booking that there would be no adverts before the film. In a rich irony for a film about capitalism, the cinema found they had no choice and had to run a long (20mins) series of the usual mind-bending adverts before the film. At least one member of the audience went out to complain. We were told how VW Golfs were going to make us better people and something about how Unilever’s Lynx would make you ‘cool’.
The film interviews a host of neo-liberals who are clearly off with the laissez-fairies. It shows just how strong a hold Goldman-Sachs has over US politics. But there are also a number of Senators disgusted with the way the bank bailouts were foisted onto them in a last minute pressurised vote. Also numerous faith leaders who describe at length how Capitalism is now an evil formulation and quotes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount of “But woe to you that are rich! for you have received your consolation”.
By the way is it just me that can’t help think of Monty Python’s ‘blessed are the Greek’ sketch whenever I think of the Sermon on the Mount? Sadly, I don’t think they are blessed anymore.
Perhaps the most honest and chilling part of the film is the infamous ‘Plutocracy’ memo from Citigroup which crows about the success of Capitalism to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few most worthy and declares a never-ending free for all for the world’s most powerful. The section of the film where a series of bankers and economists try to explain complex derivatives is side-splitting. For an even funnier and slightly more uplifting version of events it’s worth reading this wonderful parody of the penny dropping for Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.
Whilst the film is light on solutions I still think it’s a refreshing change from the manufactured consent pap we are mostly fed by the corporate media. And I don’t agree with Phillip French when he suggests that Kropotkin was an anarcho-syndicalist. Politically I don’t think he was. What Kropotkin felt was that we humans have a constant tendency towards anarchy as a way of evolving and leaping through into new norms. What he felt most strongly was what Margot Ostrom has just won a Nobel Prize for – that fundamentally we are co-operative beings. This is what I took from Moore’s film. The sense that – despite capitalism telling us we are competitive, solitary, nasty and brutish creatures which need controlling – we are in fact highly social co-operative creatures. And that the way forward is to build on that side of our nature. The citizen side of us.
For solutions we have two leading thinkers from the progressive left and right to listen to. I’ve blogged about Robert and I hearing them debate in Wales. Both Leadbeater and Blond have perspectives well tuned in to the possibility that we are indeed not nasty, solitary and brutish creatures and that in fact a more co-operative, community and citizen-like way of life HAS to be the future. Now all we need is a political leader with the vision and guts to take us there. Don’t hold your breath though. That future depends on all of us being the change.
