Michael Moore’s latest documentary film-Fahrenheit 911-grossed $80 million in its first week. Despite initial attempts to stop the film’s distribution and screening and right-wing claims that the film is inaccurate, it has been seen by sell-out cinema audiences and won all manner of applause from US ‘liberals’ and the Left everywhere.
Moore has clearly made a first-rate documentary here, showing George Bush up as the first class moron we always knew him to be and heading a corrupt administration drooling oil and dripping from every pore with workers’ blood, unashamedly prepared to go to any lengths in the name of profit.
However, nowhere, does Moore locate his film in a wider social and political context-in the capitalist system itself, in a system racked with contradiction, an exploitative social system that consigns hundreds of millions throughout the world to abject poverty. While he clearly makes the link between oil, profits and the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, he nowhere suggests that war, all war, is the continuation of business by other means; that in capitalism wars are fought over trade routes, overseas markets, mineral wealth or areas of influence; that if you build empires you have to be prepared to kill people
But Moore is no revolutionary, no class warrior. In the film he talks to a woman whose family have a long military tradition and who proudly unfurls the stars and stripes outside of her house each morning. Moore, ever the patriot, suggests she must be a proud woman and himself qualifies her pride in her soldiering offspring with the line “it’s a great country”-and well worth dying for, no doubt? Later on, and referring to the many US soldiers from impoverished towns-such as Flint, with 50 percent unemployment-who have been killed since the invasion of Iraq, Moore says: “They offer to give up their lives so we can be free”. In this, Moore shows he holds the same ideas of freedom that Bush and his ilk are always asking workers to defend. In a land where there exists a ‘Patriot Act’ that restricts many hitherto taken-for-granted ‘freedoms’, where trade unionists have recently been forbidden to engage in strike activity, where speaking out against the status quo is seen as dangerously subversive, where the prison population borders on two million, freedom only means that workers chooses which capitalist is to exploit them. Moore leaves the capitalist system very much unscathed and so free to go on killing.
The documentary, with its frontal attack on the present Republican administration, has viewers assuming that a USA headed by a more liberal-perhaps Democrat-government would not be so militaristic or so friendly with its corporate elite. In truth, any new government, a one headed by Nader included, would have to serve primarily as the executive arm of corporate America, charged with pursuing the interests of the profit-hungry US ruling elite at home and aboard, ready always to call in the troops and bombers if US profits are threatened. The history of US foreign policy since 1945 is testament to this fact.
Bush may well lose the coming election, perhaps partly thanks to the production of this film, but capitalism will continue in the US as it does everywhere else on the planet, and the myriad injustices Moore himself catalogues in his book Stupid White Men will continue. Whilst one can clearly understand why audiences, who have watched Fahrenheit 911, have chanted “Bush out, Bush out” as the film ended, they are clearly mistaken in thinking the unseating of the Texan idiot will better their lot one iota. They will exist as wage slaves, every aspect of their lives subordinated to the dictates of capital, just as much under Kerry as under Bush.
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