Michael Moore's "Capitalism, A Love Story": A Review

Well, it's not much of a love story. Moore has to go back to his childhood to find capitalism's "warm fuzzies". Back to being a kid in Flint, Michigan in the 1950s and 60s where his dad, with a union job, paid off the house in a few years, a new car every three years, private Catholic school and college for the kids, all without mountains of debt, etc. Unfortunately, if you are 40 years old or younger chance are you don't remember these times.

The rest of the movie has little love, lots of pain, and some stirring stories of people taking matters into their own hands and fighting back.

Moore's "Capitalism" is a long movie; about two and a half hours long. It has to be a long movie because the subject, capitalism, is a long and complicated story. Moore tells the American capitalism story well. There's not lots of narration; less than in Moore's previous films. There's no lecturing and no "theory" as us Marxists know it. Instead, the trajectory of American Capitalism is told through vignettes and example type stories; and there's lots of them. There's film vignettes of folks being evicted and theirs vignettes of folks being evicted and they and their neighbors fighting back as they re-occupy a foreclosed home. There's there's the stirring victory of the Republic Door and Window workers. There's also U.S. Bank's prospectus offering to its extremely wealthy clients. U.S. Bank, with great joy announces to these wealthy parasites that we have entered a new phase, democracy is dead they announce with glee; we have entered a new age of wealth accumulation... The Age of "Plutonomy" U.S. Bank calls it. For this ilk, this is progress. And there's the Wall Street Journal columnist who is passionate in his belittlement of the notion of democracy. As this guy puts it, democracy could unfortunately get in the way of capital accumulation. That 99% of the population could actually interfere with the greed of the top 1% of the population is what this guy is most concerned about.

The complexities are handled well. Moore is loyal to the chronology of events. From the 1950s Golden Age to the mass de-industrialization and de-unionization of the 1980s, to the gouges of the late 80s/early 90s savings and loan collapse, to the massive de-regulation of the finance industry of 2001/2002 to capitalism right here and now as "Condo Vultures" makes a fortune buying up foreclosed condos at fire sale prices, to the guy and his wife who are paid $1000 by the bank to clean out their own house for a nice clean eviction.

As the story builds from one decade to the next there's a sense of a monster growing further and further out of control. Those of us who are on the left know this stuff... Still, the sense of political-economic horror is there even for us who live and know the capitalist modus-operendi intimately.

Make no mistake about it, this movie contains plenty of humor and plenty of the type of irony that Moore does so well. Still, unlike Moore's previous movies, there's a quiet desperation in "Capitalism". The feeling is that maybe capitalism, the monster, has grown so large as to be unhandlable; that political economic reality might have reached the point of being totally out of control. For Moore, the very foundation of a democracy society is deeply threatened to its core by this current American plutocracy.

So, the movie ends with Michael Moore stretching a yellow "crime scene" ribbon around the New York stock exchange. He's there to make a citizens' arrest he tells the viewers. Alone, Moore yells "come out... prison for you really isn't that bad". Crimes have been committed; there are millions of victims. Would you like to join him with this citizen's arrest, Moore asks the viewer? If you will join him, please make it sooner than later... Moore's tone suggests to us that there might not be much time.