Capitalism: A Love Story - Michael Moore's new film debuts October 2

I'm looking forward to it.  Hoping I can actually make time to see it in a cinema when it comes out.

The cameraman still rolling while they hold the door open and are trying to get Moore and crew to leave totally reminds me of the cameramen we work with...  Don't stop shooting!  Get the shot!

It's a well known fact that all the movers and shakers do their networking after 5 o'clock.

M. Spector wrote:

2-min. Trailer:

I like the guy who says, "There's gotta be some kind of a rebellion between the people that have nothin' and the people that's got it all."

Timebandit wrote:

I'm looking forward to it.  Hoping I can actually make time to see it in a cinema when it comes out.

The cameraman still rolling while they hold the door open and are trying to get Moore and crew to leave totally reminds me of the cameramen we work with...  Don't stop shooting!  Get the shot!

Before I read your second sentence I thought you saying you were looking forward to the revolution. Damn.

I wonder if these movies are effective in moving the public left.

Still, I am stunned by how very little comment the film has garnered here since it came out.

What's the problem, folks? Waiting for the next anti-capitalist blockbuster to advance an opinion or, God forbid!, a recommendation?

I am talking about OUR own silence. I have seen many more enthusiastic reviews and references to this film in those nasty mass media than on Babble.

martin dufresne wrote:

I am talking about OUR own silence. I have seen many more enthusiastic reviews and references to this film in those nasty mass media than on Babble.

 

You DO see the irony in your complaint, don't you?

I'm waiting until it hits the cheap second-run cinema.  I've seen a few of his pictures; he's a little too self-centred for my taste.  Even though I can agree with his ideological slant to some degree, I think he's overrated.

Moore's films are a laugh-riot. I can still remember him shouting over a bullhorn at the guys in the towers at Gitmo and demanding that the 9/11 heroes receive the same socialized medicine US taxpayers are providing alleged al-CIA'duh prisoners abducted from all over the world in an attempt to give their phony war credibility. Way funny.

Gee, I miss the old days when people would post recipes when they wanted to derail threads.

The two that immediately come to my mind are;

1) the part shot inside a door a Chicago door and window factory that was occupoied by the workers when the owner shut it down and pretended there was no money to pay the back salary and pensions owed the workers. Moore manages to interlace very moving scenes of common folks stupefaction, pain and determination at seeing a system they had served with dedication and pride turn viciously against them, seizing their homes, paying them a last dollar to burn all they have an make way for a neew owner, who sometimes is a self-described vulture. He LISTENS as the salt of middle America speak slowly, cry, organize and - in that factory - win! He traces this reckoning and resistance process to that of the late thirties, when Roosevelt sent the National Guard in similar circumstances to hold back not the workers but the factory owners and the cops. Against the cynics, he manages to make us think that a similar change of heart may be possible today. The scene where the current Chicago bishop comes in to the factory and concedes that the government and the owners are evil incarnate - well, he may not be that blunt, but others are - may change your ideas about how religion can sometimes be a fortitude factor for the downtrodden. 

2) I also liked Moore's conversation on the steps of the Capitol with a soft-spoken but devastatingly candid female Representative who explains in plain words how the Democrat leaders turned against their constituency to help Bush bail out the bankers to the tune of 427 billion dollars, even though that proposal had been roundly defeated days earlier in Congress. You sense her and his awe at the extent of this grab - and the attendant failure of democracy - and the cynicism of those who gave and received that money. Another expert explains how it was done and how the system rewards not the competent but the complicitous.

And of course there is the fun Moore pokes at the ideology machine that got all North-Americans to work so hard and spend so much to fuel the American Dream and how all this went down the tube when they hit the brick wall of an imperialism that was running out of countries to fleece, during the seventies. Very funny dubbing of old peplum films to imagine how Jesus might have sounded had he been a Wall Street flunkie.

Definitely a must-see. Don't wait too long Al-Qa'bong...

"Don't wait too long Al-Qa'bong..."

Even if I know all this?

Will seeing this picture make someone whose type of leftism has been around since Spartacus, Watt Tyler, Fred Engels and Tommy Douglas become even more leftist, or is there a possiblity that Moore's LOOK AT ME style will be off-putting and turn one rightwards?

Conversely, will those who aren't leftist already pay the eight bucks to go see some dishevelled slob tell them their world view is wrong?

Unfortunately it's not playing anywhere near me. Nearest place I found is a three hour drive. I did check.   Will likely have to wait for DVD or pay-per-view.

al-Qa'bong wrote:

Will seeing this picture make someone whose type of leftism has been around since Spartacus, Watt Tyler, Fred Engels and Tommy Douglas become even more leftist, or is there a possiblity that Moore's LOOK AT ME style will be off-putting and turn one rightwards?

Yes, I know what you mean. I haven't even seen the film yet, and already I'm thinkin' Road to Serfdom and practicing my open handed salutes, just in case. 

It seems there may have been this distortion in Michael Moore's movie.

He implies that in the 1937 sit down strike, the national guard was brought in to protect striking GM workers.

That doesn't seem to be the case:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/capitalism-a-love-story/There is one scene toward the end of "Capitalism: a Love Story" that really piqued my interest. For Moore, the formation of the UAW was a key historical step forward, an insight that naturally would come to somebody growing up in Flint. He reveals that his uncle was a sit-down striker in 1937, one of the biggest labor struggles of the 1930s. For Moore, a key element in winning union recognition was FDR's deployment of the National Guard to Flint. Supposedly, FDR-unlike other presidents past and future-saw the National Guard as a pro-working class force. In February 1937, for the first time in history, the Guard protected strikers from the Flint police on FDR's instructions and the battle for union recognition was won.

I have an interest in Flint labor history as well, mostly as a comrade of the late Sol Dollinger, a long-time UAW member and revolutionary socialist. Although not a participant in the sit-down strikes, Dollinger was married to Genora Dollinger who was a leader of the Woman's Emergency Brigade in Flint in 1937. She was known as Genora Johnson at the time, married to Kermit Johnson at the time, a strike leader and socialist like her.

Sol Dollinger's "Not Automatic", a book about the Flint strike that depends heavily on Genora's papers and recollections, paints a somewhat different picture from Moore's. I reread Genora's report on the sit-down strike, which is contained verbatim in Sol's book. I also looked at the chapter on Flint in Art Preis's "Labor's Giant Step", a book I read shortly after joining the Socialist Workers Party in 1967, Jeremy Brecher's "Strike!", and N.Y. Times articles from February 1937. Here is what all this material adds up to, from my admittedly far-left-of-center perspective.

To start with, the decision to send in the National Guard was made by Governor Frank Murphy, a Democrat who did have strong New Deal sympathies but those sympathies were not exactly in sync with the deepest aspirations of the strikers. Murphy's intention was to get the strikers out of the factories and not to defeat General Motors. He hoped for a peaceful settlement of the strike and negotiations at the table. To put pressure on the sit-in, the Guard was instructed not to allow food to be sent into the factory. To my knowledge, the same pressure was not applied on the men and women who owned General Motors, who continued to enjoy three square meals a day.

Not long after the Guard was mobilized, Genora Johnson formed an Emergency Brigade of women who not only put their bodies on the line but dramatized the willingness of the entire community to come to the aid of the workers. Workers flowed into Flint from all around the industrial heartland in caravans, each one ready to confront any armed force that would be used against workers, either the local police or the National Guard. Additionally, many of the National Guardsmen were workers themselves who could not be relied on to shoot fellow workers. All in all, Murphy had to step gingerly around what was arguably the greatest display of working class militancy in the 1930s.