I saw "Roger and Me" right after it came out on video. My first reaction (which I never followed up on, alas) was to write to some outfit like Solidarity and offer to underwrite the first $50 of the costs if they could get it dubbed into Russian and ship it over to the USSR to warn our fellow workers there what was coming. Anyone who doesn't think the film is a critique of capitalism needs some sort of cultural readjustment.
I saw two films in juxtaposition years ago. One was a 15-minute or so short about life on the line in a U.S. auto plant. There was lots of noise and things flying by you at 100 miles per hour, intercut with quotes from Marx. It was, in other words, didactic to the max and incapable of driving a carpet tack without a sledgehammer.
The other was Louis Malle's "Humain, Tout Humain" in which scenes from a French auto plant are intercut with scenes from the bourgeoisie at a car show. It starts with an overhead crane carrying a roll of sheet metal slowly and gracefully over the plant floor, then moves to the upholstery shop. As it meanders through the departments of the plant, you gradually go from the slower ones to the faster ones, picking up the tempo of the work. At the end of this one hour film, I walked out of theater exhausted. I think Malle's film is a far more effective piece of anti-capitalist propaganda than the sledgehammer.
The left isn't totally irrelevant in this country. We get a few things done, some of them well. But we're a hell of a lot smaller than we used to be, we don't have near the base in the working class we used to have, and our organized segments tend to be pretty evenly divided between those arguing with each other in the style of medieval scholasticism and those who have effectively become militant liberals, looking for ruling-class politicians to "influence" (i.e., suck up to).
I first went to work out of high school in 1955, tried going to college but couldn't handle it financially and joined the Marine Corps. When I got out of there, I went back to work in a wide variety of blue and white collar jobs, mostly in small to medium-sized shops and offices. (By "shops" I mean machine repair, printing, etc., not retail.) Until about 15 years ago I never worked in a single shop, nor was I in a single unit in the Marines, where there wasn't at least one other socialist. My guess is that about 10% of the U.S. working class considered themselves socialists of one sort or another (mostly very mild social democrats) up until this last generation. I don't think that's true anymore. The historic continuity has been just about totally broken, and we have to start over from scratch. There's no point in blaming Michael Moore for it.
Tom Condit