Resources & References for Capitalism: A Love Story

Posted on Oct 01, 2009 Posted by decolonize

Houston theaters are showing Michael Moore's new film Capitalism: A Love Story starting this week. Over a thousand screens across the United States, a record for an independent documentary, are showing the new offering by the director of Sicko, Roger & Me and Fahrenheit 9/11, among other films. Some audience members are looking for reference material and resources to help understand Capitalism: A Love Story in today's economy. The FIRE Collective is providing to Houston/Galveston residents information on the question of capitalism that has been opened up by this film.

In the coming few days, we should develop an analysis of both Moore's critique of capitalism, and his proposed solutions.

by decolonize

The new film is Michael Moore's indictment of profiteering by the haves at the expense of the have-nots. Moore represents wide range of troubles in Capitalism: A Love Story, from foreclosures and evictions to the crumbling of major businesses to financial excesses among the wealthy. Moore provides plenty of statistics, research, interviews and news reports to give evidence to the assertions made in Capitalism: A Love Story, and the defenders of unrestricted free enterprise are feeling the heat.

The Glenn Beck crowd is already trying hard to defend capitalism gone wild, and has plenty of people to accuse for what Michael Moore exposes in Capitalism: A Love Story. They say a smaller government and privatizing the world is the solution. A smaller government, they reason, will ensure capitalism's abuses do not occur. But reducing government and its regulations has done nothing more than benefit the upper class, business owners and their friends. Capitalism: A Love Story brings this hypocrisy to light.

The bottom-feeder right-wing forces (white supremacists, petit bourgeois aspiring rulers) are attempting to pin capitalism's failure on Black people, Latinos and other people of color. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, has documented a rise in their numbers since Barack Obama's election. Richard Cohen, SPLC president, recently wrote, "We're supposed to believe that impoverished blacks and Latinos across our country brought down the titans of Wall Street with their wild-eyed dreams of owning their own homes, taking out mortgages they couldn't afford. We're supposed to believe that's why stock markets are plummeting and the global banking system is collapsing like a house of cards. Do Americans really buy this kind of nonsense? Unfortunately, many do... People who are down and out, who are buffeted by global events beyond their control, want to understand what has happened to them. Some will look for scapegoats in all the wrong places. And some will be seduced by the rhetoric of hate."

Oppressed people are not responsible for capitalism and its failure, though. Capitalism itself is destined to fail because it is built on greed and the rich getting richer.

Mother Jones says of Capitalism: A Love Story:

Its chief premise, though, is blunt and easy to follow: capitalism is bad beyond salvation. Moore even brings in a series of Catholic priests to back him up on this. WWJD? Certainly not bundle sucker-subprime loans into securities backed by credit default swaps in complicated deals that enriched the moneychangers while eventually causing millions to be thrown out of their homes, often by pawn-of-the-system sheriffs doing the bidding of the monied elites. Also unlike Sickoâ€”which essentially was a call for the United States to adopt a health care system like that of Canada, England or Franceâ€”this film doesn't end with a compact policy idea. "Capitalism is an evil," Moore narrates, as the film concludes, "and you cannot regulate an evil. You have to eliminate it." Perhaps, but then what? Moore doesn't say.

In our new declaration, the FIRE Collective proclaims capitalist exploitation is destroying the planet. "The outrages and uprisings of the current period have given rise to many new radicals and revolutionaries from a new generation, and that is something that has to go much further."

There are many important references and resources available to understand the context for Capitalism: A Love Story.

The Kasama Project offers Communism Dead? Capitalism Permanent? THINK AGAIN. An excerpt:

Whatâ€™s wrong is this system, the system that was built on the hunting and sale of Africans into the plantations of the New World; the system that can only grow by intensifying its exploitation of laboring people, in sweatshops and factories around the world, from Guatemala City to Guangdong, China to Lagos, Nigeria; the system whose inherent anarchy and global competition has led to two global wars in the 20th century, and countless other brutal â€˜expeditionsâ€™ including the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Who gains from this unremitting suffering of the people of world? Capitalism does. This crisis was not caused by people struggling to pay the interest on their mortgage while the government and banks jerked those interest rates upward. This crisis was caused by global capitalismâ€™s insatiable hunger for ever more profit, no matter what. That drive for profit leads capital to herd people around the planet from one country to the next in search of work; to clear-cut rainforests and to leave huge toxic waste dumps in its wake; to set up sweatshops in the middle of every depressed community and low-income country around the globe; to set capitalists betting against each other over the price of money and speculating in the financial derivatives which have come to dominate credit and finance.

A classic reading is Marxâ€™s Theory of Crises:

"The credit system appears as the main lever of over-production and over-speculation in commerce solely because the reproduction process, which is elastic by nature, is here forced to its extreme limits, and is so forced because a large part of the social capital is employed by people who do not own it and who consequently tackle things quite differently than the owner, who anxiously weighs the limitations of his private capital in so far as he handles it himself."

Another important read is Lenin's "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism":

"It must be observed that in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism among them and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement, revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; for two important distinguishing features of imperialism were already observed in Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth centuryâ€”vast colonial possessions and a monopolist position in the world market."

Maoist-Influenced Revolutionary Organizations in India is worth reading too.

An exploration of groups in India which fight for a world far different than capitalist exploitation or the Third World forced into semi-colonial servitude. These Maoist revolutionary groups in Indiaare striving for a new tomorrow.

There is also a good review of William Hintonâ€™s Through a Glass Darkly: U.S. Views of the Chinese Revolution, which takes on U.S. misinformation directed against Mao and Chinese anti-capitalism. An excerpt:

Hintonâ€™s defense of the revolution itself is perhaps strongest when he defends the necessity of state support of the successful communes (such as Dazhai) and state intervention into the economy more generally (such support and self-reliance or mutual aid go hand in hand), and of the â€œforcefulâ€ liberation of women from clan and patriarchal systems in the villages, including the traditional family structure.

Though imperfect, Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story gives many opportunities to begin conversations. Eric Ribellarsi of our collective has written a review of the film. Feel free to peruse our site, thefirecollective.org, to find more resources in the fight against capitalism.