Michael Moore is from a working-class family in Flint, Michigan. His father was an auto-worker for GM and his uncle participated in the legendary Flint sit-down strikes in the late 1930s. Also participating in these strikes were Bert Cochrane and his wife Genora Dollinger, who were leaders of the Trotskyist movement. In the early 1950s Bert went into opposition to the SWP leadership because he thought that there was false optimism about the possibility of a working class radicalization. He went on to form the first "new left" magazine in the US, called American Socialist. I am a neo-Cochranite.
Moore started a newspaper in the early 1980s called the Flint Voice. It was not unlike the myriad of alternative newspapers that got started in the 1960s, except that it oriented to working-class issues and people. Autoworker Ben Hamper, who helped to edit the paper, wrote the highly-acclaimed "Rivethead : tales from the assembly line." The newspaper was financially and politically successful and eventually was sold to other interests. It was expanded and became known as the Michigan Voice.
Moore's success got him an invitation to take over as editor at Mother Jones. During the contra war in Nicaragua, the magazine started to shift to the right. The publisher, whose name I can't recall, was a trust-fund rich kid whose family made its millions in South African diamond mining. He told Moore to publish an anti-Sandinista article by Paul Berman, who had been writing this kind of crap in the Village Voice for a couple of years. Moore told him that Berman was objectively assisting the Reagan administration and refused to print the article. For this he was fired.
About a year after this happened, I broached the subject with Moore of debating Berman in NYC at an event sponsored by the Nicaragua Solidarity Committee. NACLA persuaded me that John Weeks, an idiot professor from Vermont, would be a better choice. So Weeks came down and he was totally unprepared. His analysis was a bunch of Maoist crap that he had kept hidden from us. So the debate turned into Weeks arguing that the Sandinistas were not radical enough and Berman arguing that they were too radical. One of my biggest regrets is that Moore was not invited.
Shortly afterwards Moore's documentary film "Roger and Me" premiered. It is about his search to get a face-to-face interview with Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors. He wanted to confront him about downsizing, while Smith keeps avoiding him. One of the more memorable scenes was Michael Moore on the Manhattan sidewalk in front of GM headquarters with a bullhorn imploring Smith to come down and talk to him. It was the highest-grossing documentary in US history.
In the wake of the success of the film, Moore produced and hosted a show on Rupert Murdoch's network called "TV Nation." It had the same kind of satirical edge as the movie and was very successful in terms of ratings and critical recognition. Murdoch dumped it for obvious class reasons.
Moore then wrote a book called "Downsize This," which is a satirical attack on downsizing. It made the NY Times bestseller list. The movie "The Big One" recounts his nation-wide tour promoting the book and getting into the kinds of shenanigans depicted in "Roger and Me," except with different corporate targets. He also made a movie about US-Canadian economic tensions (I believe) called "Canadian Bacon" which I have not yet seen. It was only in NY briefly and not as critically acclaimed as "The Big One."
Moore's financial success and outspoken views on the problems of the left have made him a lightning rod for critics within the left. His most outspoken opponent is the irascible Alexander Cockburn who faults Moore for living in luxury and being aloof from grass-roots organizations. It should be understood, however, that Moore is a major philanthropist for left causes. Nobody, including Cockburn, denies this.
More controversial is a Moore column that appeared in the Nation a while back. He says that the US left fucked up in the 1980s by running off to Nicaragua instead of working in places like Flint. Well, okay, I don't necessarily agree with this since that was what I was doing and I don't like getting my own ox gored. But he does have a point. In any case, the age of anti-imperialist revolutions might be behind us anyhow (except for Chiapas and Indonesia this week). If we are going to get our act together on the domestic front, we have to clean a lot of mothballs out of the closet. On this I agree with Moore's general approach. At any rate the questions he has raised are of fundamental concern to socialist or radicals.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)