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What "Capitalism" Is Not

By Terrance Heath Created 10/02/2009 - 11:26am

If I were to summarize message Michael Moore's new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story in one sentence, it would be this: Capitalism is not a form of government. That's the answer to the question posed at the beginning of the movie, via 1950s educational/propaganda films.

Capitalism is not a form of government. It is a tool we've allowed to be used as a weapon. We threw out the instructions and rules for its usage, and it became a weapon — much like a hammer can be used to build a house or smash a skull, depending on whether it's wielded by a carpenter or a psychopath.

Moore spends the rest of the movie showing us how we not only tossed out the rules, but junked every other tool in our collective toolbox, and left ourselves with the hammer. But everything is not a nail, and the hammer isn't suited to every aspect of the task in front of us. Moore gives us until the end of the movie to figure out what that seemingly abandoned task might be.

Capitalism is populated by people whose names we know and people whose names we don't — all characters in what Michael Moore has subtitled "a love story." We know the speeches of the former, and the stories of the latter, because we've watched those same stories unfold in our own communities in the last couple of years. The speeches were intended to arouse our passions, by retelling part the most recent chapter in the story of how we got here — the part that happened on Wall Street and in Washington.

Continued

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