More on Moore

James,

I appreciate your critique of Capitalism: A Love Story and am happy to publish it. Discussing the film around the office, we felt like your review would serve as a great launching pad for further conversation about this provocative but flawed movie.

I thought the movie was doomed from the start because it failed to define its topic. I don’t know how anyone can have a meaningful discussion of capitalism without at least a cursory survey of pre-capitalist economies and societies, Adam Smith, and the Industrial Revolution.

The subject of so much of Moore’s film is not really the system of capitalism but rather some relatively recent market excesses that destroyed—or at least severely dislocated—Moore’s notion of fairness and stability. In the film, these include some of the usual suspects for our recent meltdown: derivatives, credit-default swaps, and the securitization of subprime mortgages. He also presents the ghoulish “dead peasant” insurance policies and Pennsylvania’s punish-for-profit system as evidence of capitalism’s anything-for-a-buck attitude.

As scattershot as those examples are, Moore’s right: That’s capitalism. The problem he has is finding another, noncapitalist place to stand and apply his criticisms. Moore waxes lyrically about the 1950s America of his youth, where Dad had a good-paying, union job, with paid vacations at the lake and a regularly replaced shiny car in the driveway. But where did that utopia come from? Industrial factories were practically synonymous with the development of capitalism. And don’t forget the fact that nearly all of the post-Depression revival of American manufacturing came from building not just cars but weapons; what Moore paints in this film as postwar paradise he’s criticized elsewhere as the military-industrial complex.

Similarly, Moore swoons at the role of unions in Germany or health care in Japan, but let’s be clear about this: Those economies are capitalist through and through. Having a union guy (with minimal power, and often subject to corruption) sitting on the board of directors of big companies, as Germany does, may or may not be a good idea, but it hardly equates to putting the means of production in the hands of the proletariat.