So, I am admittedly quite behind on my watching of progressive documentaries, however I made a small step to catch up tonight by watching "
The Corporation." I had heard it was pretty good from some friends and have actually been pretty excited to see it ever since I had heard about it being made.
So, now is the part where I tell you what I thought of it.
I didn't like it.
It was WAY too long and it seemed very jumbled. It jumped frequently between topics without doing a good job of tying all the ideas they presented together. It is actually kind of hard for me to understand how that thing could have left the editing table in the state that it was in.
And, they totally missed great opportunities to refute conservative talking points.
For instance, towards the beginning when some "everything-should-be-for-sale" guy was talking about providing jobs for poor people and "saving them from starving", they really should have called him on that bullshit because it totally ignores the global dynamics that those "poor starving people" are now dependent on those corporations due to neoliberal economic policies whereas they were not before. There is a reason that they are starving now and its not because they have been helpless and starving for thousands of years - because thats just not true. Many of those "modernizing countries"(1), where people are now finding sweatshops and dirt-poor labor as the only options for work, used to have thriving economies that were fully self-sufficient or had trade agreements with neighboring countries that benefited both parties. The globalization of capital has caused the currency speculation crises and the race to the bottom all around the world. Companies are not doing any favors to the poor suffering people of the world by exploiting their labor at the cheapest possible rates. All of that surplus labor value is LEAVING THE COUNTRY via sweatshop franchises and going to shareholders and corporate coffers of the modernized countries.
The market is no equalizer. A market can only provide conditions for equal exchange under the precondition that players have equal power - a situation that never happens.
These are not difficult concepts to explain and I think the writers and producers of "The Corporation" should have put more effort into making some of these issues clearer and more obviously connected to each other.
Now of course there were some very good bits and pieces of the movie. They had plenty of good footage. I just wish they had woven the narrative a bit tighter and in a more compelling pattern.
Anyway, I am certainly glad the movie was made and I clearly want more movies dealing with these topics to see the light of day. Its just frustrating to see a movie that I had big hopes for seemingly flounder for a clear and concise message. It is perhaps most frustrating because of the fact that that aspect alone reflects the messaging inadequacies of the Left so well.
We still have a lot of work to do.
(1) Oh and by the way I may have stumbled on the term I like for describing what are commonly called "third-world" or "developing" countries. I think that "modernizing" and "modernized" countries work better. There should be no assumption made that the countries in question are indeed "developing" in some progressive "things are getting better" kind of way because quite often, the opposite is the case. Using the term "modernizing", I feel, implies less of a necessarily positive trajectory - it simply means that conditions in that country are becoming more like those in richer countries. That they are becoming more "modern" - for better or worse. Although, actually the more I think about it, the more I realize that may not really be true either. There should be no assumption made that the poorer countries are becoming more like the richer countries. Perhaps the most accurate terms are simply "more exploited" countries and "more exploiting" countries.