Capitalistic Conspiracy

In what seems like a mainstream realization of the greed that capitalism breeds, Michael Moore packs a punch with 'Capitalism a love story'. It is a more contemporary version of what 'Zeitgeist' and 'The Money Masters' attempted to unveil long before the big avalanche on the stock market in 2008. Were they just conspiracy theories or was capitalism the real conspiracy?

The movie starts off with an attempt to define the capitalism that US once romanced and got married to during Reagan's era. The honeymoon was long over but even as America tries to come to terms with the real avaracious and shortsighted face of the ideology it married to spite Russia, it is in serious denial that anything can go wrong with it. As it grapples with it's own daily battles to survive this bad marriage, everyone from Paul Krugman to Michael Moore is screaming for a divorce. They are calling for government regulation and not 'free enterprise'. The moment such a thing is even suggested, one gets labeled as a commie because a large part of America still thinks economic ideology is binary: capitalist or communist. There is no happy medium and even though Obama burst onto the scene with promises to rescue people's money, they do not want socialism because they view it as a betrayal to the very foundation on which their nation grew to such great heights and was revered by the world. But Michael Moore questions this sense of betrayal stating that the founding fathers of America never laid down capitalism as the pedestal of this country.

The movie has the uncut version of everything that got onto Michael Moore's camera especially if it was sensational like a guard at GM denying the filmmaker access into the building. But it is not unedited random shooting: it spoke a language that people in the theater cheered and identified with as their own. It told a story of broken homes and broken cities that vaguely resembled the crumbling erstwhile USSR. It told a story of broken dreams, despair, angst and outrage that raged across the nation like wildfire within a span of a year. But Moore doesn't simply stop at the disease and its symptoms, he also tells the story of the healing process: worker protests and co-operative societies forming companies : something that India has long adopted as a socialist nation, something that for once, I believe the architects of our nation did not get wrong!

Moore finally ends with his trademark symbolic shenanigans: parading outside Wallstreet trying to make a citizen's arrest of the bank CEOs and cordoning off the NYSE building with crime scene tapes. What intrigued me the most was not so much the content or theme, but the fact that artists have some of the most powerful instruments and vocabularies to reach out and make their thoughts heard and yet it is very few artists who take that gift and become the voice of the society.