I went to see Michael Moore’s latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story. It is vintage Michael Moore, and that’s why I was disappointed.

As usual, it was funny and it skewered some of the nasty players who have helped to bring the world’s economy to its knees. The outrageous confrontational stunts that have become a Moore hallmark were brilliant. And the film shone a light on two remarkable women who should probably be given the keys to the US Treasury – Elizabeth Warren, Congressional Oversight Officer, and Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio). Among the government officials appearing in the film, or on the evening news during the last year or so, these two appear to be alone in ‘getting it’.

But Capitalism left me wanting more. It didn’t aim sufficiently for the jugular, and in many cases failed to hit the ball out of the park – there were several subjects where Moore started his wind-up pitch, and then fanned the batter. I was really hoping the film would be much more of a call to arms, but perhaps that’s why it’s subtitled “a love story”.

At the risk of stating the obvious, most of our social, environmental, and economic problems are the direct result of unfettered corporate power. They create the problems, and they are masters at perpetuating them – mostly with deliberate intent, although sometimes through exercise of a radiant stupidity. Two obvious questions this raises are whether that misused power can be tamed, and can the economic system that so troubles Michael Moore be civilized?

Let’s take it as a given that many people, maybe most, would like to see some economic reform. Before any effective changes can even be considered, two things will have to happen. First, there would need to be a widespread awareness among the public of the depth of the problem. We may be there now, or close to it. Second, any movement to challenge corporate influence and excesses, along with the predominant business elite, will need to be led and coordinated with skill. We’re nowhere near that.

These days, corporations and their CEOs are commonly portrayed in books, movies, and television as at least mildly bad, and sometimes positively satanic. These caricatures didn’t arise out of nothing – there is basis in fact for seeing these people as vicious parasites.

With the holiday season upon us, television stations everywhere will be running those old movie chestnuts It’s a Wonderful Life and some version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. That’s going to give us all a chance to remind ourselves why Mr Potter and Mr Scrooge are such odious characters. We’ll sneer on cue, we may even see the obvious parallels with our own situations – and that will be that. Because there is no solid effective move afoot to channel the ubiquitous disdain, distrust, and disgust for the business establishment.

It’s a mistake to consider social, economic, and environmental matters as separate from each other. They share much in common, and efforts taken in one area inevitably result in a response in the other two.

There are actually legal requirements for CEOs to act like bastards (type-casting for most of them) which has led to horrendous social, economic, and environmental abuses by corporations. We all know that government (not everywhere, but almost everywhere) is the lickspittle of the corporations, and we know they have stonewalled any attempts at meaningful curbing of corporatism. So huge numbers of advocacy groups have grown up, each dedicated to fixing some problem caused by corporate power.

“Humanity is exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity for our species … If the Earth were to suffer a catastrophic…event over the next ten years, which it will, American business would continue to focus on its quarterly profit and loss. There is no economic mechanism for dealing with catastrophe. And yet government…[is] not talking about this situation…[consenting instead] to be run by neoclassical economics, an obvious pseudo-science. We might as well agree to be governed by astrologers… Free market fundamentalists are dragging us back to some dismal feudal eternity…”

That comes from a science fiction novel called Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson, but it is no less true for being a work of imagination. Conventional capitalism (read ‘corporatism’) is bad enough. But capitalism’s inherent greed has grown beyond all expectations and the management of economies has become loathsomely complacent. With the demise of communism on any large scale, capitalism sees itself as the only game in town. In fact, future historians – assuming there is a future – may trace the inevitable demise of capitalism back to the fall of communism. I say capitalism’s demise is inevitable because there is little choice at this point but to reform it in a big way, or to watch as the uncontrolled cancer of the globalized free-rape, er free-market, system eats itself.

There are probably at least some CEOs and a few politicians who can see past the quarterly reports, but none of them has dared so far to raise his or her timid head above the crowd. None of them can individually opt out of the present cutthroat system without cutting his or her own throat.

So it should be obvious to everyone by now, especially after governments around the world chose to reward the corporate gurus who have utterly ruined the world’s economy by bailing them out instead of shooting them, that this isn’t going to get fixed by the system itself. It’s going to take political pressure – and that means you and me and him and her. If ever there was a time for the disparate groups on the left – each fighting for its own little niche of social justice – to come together, this is it.

Each of the social groups who are trying, in their own way, to make things better have failed, for the most part. Not from lack of trying, but from lack of foresight. It is only a small group of those social activists who ever think to blame the economic system itself for all the drowning people. Maybe it’s because they spend all their time trying to rescue the drowners that they don’t have time to think about changing a system that is so clearly harmful to so many. I’m not questioning that saving people from drowning is a noble goal, but keeping them out of the river in the first place would be even nobler.

So if even Michael Moore is unwilling to hit for the fences with his movie, he did at least urge at the end of the film that we rise up and take some action. But get it through our heads, folks – we don’t have a system that needs a little tinkering, or even a lot of tinkering. We have a system that belongs in the garbage heap. And it ain’t gonna happen until you and I make it happen.

Read his bio and more articles by
Paul Richard Harris, Editor, Axis of Logic