Michael Moore has really hit his stride as a film maker with his latest venture, Capitalism: A Love Story. The film is the best he has made since Roger & Me, and the two films bookend his career nicely. While Mr. Moore has certainly grown into a more mature film maker, his major shortcoming remains. Namely, a touching faith in the electoral process and kid gloves for his favorite Democrats, in this case President Barack Obama.

Capitalism addresses the legalized gangsterism that allowed the financial crisis to happen in the first place. The fox is literally guarding the hen house as the Treasury Department is riddled with former employees of Goldman Sachs. And not just any employees, but employees that used to work on the types of exotic, speculative wealth schemes are are continuing to enrich a tiny, privileged elite. However, Michael Moore’s trans-class, “progressive” analysis makes him incapable of taking the next step and saying how such things happen. This confusion is most apparent in his analysis that the corporate media was “in the tank” for the first bailout bill. The corporate media could not be otherwise. Owned by a few small media conglomerates, including war profiteers and other scoundrels, the corporate media is in 2009 little more than an unofficial propaganda wing of the ruling class and their toadies in Congress. Mr. Moore is particularly sad when he lauds the corporate media for somehow turning on their corporate masters in coverage of a “revolt” against the banks.

But the film isn’t all bad, not by a long shot. The story of the Republic Windows and Doors sit-down strike is something that every working class person should know about. Mr. Moore’s interviews with the workers are both poignant and powerful. It is important to see these fighters for workers everywhere talking in their own words for a variety of reasons. First, it undercuts the almost constant propaganda that working class people are stupid, lazy, and apathetic. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it shows that there are ways to successfully fight back. Finally, the Republic Windows and Doors strike (which, by the way, was illegal) vindicates the analysis that the working class- particularly those who are most exploited- will fight back and fight back the hardest. The rust belt working class has provided the only meaningful and successful opposition to the wholesale theft and immiseration that has gone on over the last 30 years under the auspices of the financial deregulation and trillion dollar giveaways to thieves. The Republic strike confirms that the working class, and not some other force, is the one and only revolutionary class in the world, whose militancy never ceases to impress and inspire me. Their victory shows the way forward, and such victories can only embolden further working class militancy.

Also of interest is Mr. Moore’s interview with families that are losing their homes due to the financial crisis. His coverage of the Hacker family in that most American of hamlets, Peoria, IL, is simultaneously poignant, disgusting, and inspiring. Poignant because any person with a hint of revolutionary potential is saddened seeing a working class family being turned out on the street (and in the case of Mrs. Hacker, away from her family’s farm land) for the crime of having to live on disability checks. Disgusting, because in a final insult and humiliation the bank skipped having professional cleaners and movers clear out the house, paying the Hackers a pittance to dispose of their own belongings, and tidy up a house for the benefit of the very thieves forcing them out on the street. Inspiring, because Mr. Hacker displays a militancy and nascent revolutionary consciousness which the corporate media repeatedly and constantly claims is “impossible” for men like Mr. Hacker.

I suspect that such scum will be frequently surprised by just how militant working class people in Peoria are in the coming years.

Mr. Moore has also stepped up his ability to elicit strong emotion from his viewers. I cried for the first time in a long time at scenes of families whose loved ones died, and in their death turned a handsome profit for the companies they worked for. In a scheme known as- by capitalists, not the media- “dead peasant insurance” corporations actually bet on their employees to die. And the younger they die, the greater the profit. One might rightly wonder what is to prevent companies from surreptitiously murdering their employees for the life insurance policy. Particularly as the insurance companies lament that not enough people are dying to make the policies a good sales pitch. What will prevent them, indeed.

However, as mentioned above, Michael Moore does not provide much in the way of real solutions. He sidesteps the issue of Barack Obama (and, I might add, the Democratic Party) being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the banking industry, portraying him as a champion of the downtrodden who the financial sector “tried” to buy. There is literally nothing in his film about Barack Obama’s endorsement of a second “bailout” fleecing of the American treasury (which indicates that the financial industry was quite successful in buying him), nor his constant conciliation to the far right of American politics.

But even more troubling than this is his glowing depiction of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Second Bill of Rights” completely divorced from any historical or economic context. FDR was able to offer broad concessions to the American working class as the Second World War drew to a close. However, there are two elephants in the room that Michael Moore does not address. The first is that at the end of the Second World War, American capitalism had bombed all of its rivals into oblivion, leaving it poised to be the industrial powerhouse of the world. This fact is briefly addressed at the beginning of the film, however ignored at the end while Mr. Moore pitches woo to the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party. Simply put, the productive capacity and wealth existed to make such offers in 1944. It does not anymore. The second elephant in the room is the Red Army. Yes, Germany and Italy had very progressive constitutions at the end of the Second World War. They also had an army that expropriated capitalists everywhere that it went, and the very real threat of a workers’ uprising (particularly in Italy), lurking always around the corner. As much as Michael Moore would like to ignore these facts, pretending they are irrelevant, they most certainly are not.

Capitalism: A Love Story is an interesting film for its discussions with average, working class people fighting back against a system which thrives on exploitation. But Michael Moore’s analysis of what to do about it is ultimately tied to electoral politics, specifically the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party. While I would urge people to go see it go get their rage levels up, and to see inspiration in the faces of ordinary, working class Americans whose militancy is very, very real, I would also urge them to not look to the film for political analysis. In this regard, the film comes up totally short.