When I was a student radical, I told comrades I was willing to fight at the barricades for the cause, get jailed for justice, be tortured for the people, and even die for the revolution. But there was one sacrifice I refused to make, drawing the line at reading Das Kapital, Volume I—let alone Volume II. But if Karl Marx’s tomes were rendered as entertainingly as the documentary Capital in the Twenty-First Century, I would’ve gladly changed my mind.
New Zealand filmmaker Justin Pemberton’s 103-minute film provides a breathtaking overview of capitalism over the ages. It is based on French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2019 bestselling book of the same title, which the Financial Times called the “most important book of the new millennium.”
Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics and France’s prestigious EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), is one of the documentary’s commentators. But instead of using the staid, stale technique of overreliance on close-ups of talking heads like the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, commentaries are accompanied by startling, highly cinematic imagery, and a great soundtrack.
Capital opens with Piketty musing on the Berlin Wall’s fall and the “complete failure” and “fraud of the communist promise” when he was eighteen. The Parisian notes that he traveled throughout Eastern Europe and trenchantly observed how Soviet-style socialism’s collapse “greatly reinforced the capitalist argument . . . led to infinite faith in the deregulation of markets” and the “glorification of private property.”
Capital is not content to merely interpret the oligarchy; this documentary actually wants to change the world.
Indeed, as we’ve seen in the almost third of a century since those heady days, manna from heaven in the form of free markets did not descend on those former Eastern Bloc nations—nor on the rest of the world, where class divisions not only persisted but, as Piketty points out, deepened and worsened.
Capital slyly makes this point by including a cameo by Stanford University political economist Francis Fukuyama, who in the wake of the USSR’s downfall absurdly proclaimed it was “the end of history.” But Piketty’s ponderings quickly extend way beyond the Gorbachev era, and Capital flashes back to eighteenth century feudalistic societies and the Industrial Revolution.
Discourses by experts on European aristocracies—with their concentrations of land ownership, wealth, and power—are intercut with scenes in black and white and color from the 1935 Hollywood adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and 2012’s Les Misérables.
A sequence from the 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice dramatizes Britain’s rigid class hierarchy, where Williams acidly observes “a megalopolis is formed . . . where money marries money.” The Financial Times’ Gillian Tett adds, “The way the elite stays in power is . . . by shaping the way that we think.”
As Capital sweeps through the centuries and around the globe, other highlights include a sequence apparently from D.W. Griffith’s 1916 masterpiece Intolerance, wherein striking American workers are machine-gunned by U.S. soldiers. The song and dance number “We’re in the Money,” from the Hollywood musical Gold Diggers of 1933, expresses capitalism’s irrational exuberance, which Stiglitz derides as “giddy . . . like every other bubble it broke.”
This is counterpointed with a scene of dispossessed “Okies” getting evicted from their family farm by a faceless bank in John Ford’s immortal 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, followed by news clips of Depression era labor strife.
Williams posits a direct correlation between “the rise of fascism and extreme poverty,” and clips from Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 account of the Nazi Nuremberg rallies, Triumph of the Will, depict the “seductive” allure of totalitarianism.
A series of shots of bombings ending with a mushroom cloud over Japan—one of Capital’s excellent montages—encapsulates World War II, which ends with footage of elated multitudes celebrating in the Allied nations. Capital later cuts to Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street, with Michael Douglas playing über-capitalist Gordon Gekko ominously declaring: “Greed . . . is good.”
The cinematically structured documentary inexorably proceeds to the twenty-first century, with Piketty pontificating on the implications of inequality. British journalist Paul Mason discusses the fiscal fiascoes that led to 2008, when “the system blew up.”
In one visually imaginative sequence, a Monopoly board and playing pieces are rendered in close-ups, as clinical tests reveal the psychology of randomly advantaged winners displaying “less compassionate” patterns of behavior vis-à-vis those losing the real estate-inspired game.
But Capital is not content to merely interpret the oligarchy; this documentary actually wants to change the world. It offers specific prescriptions for progressive taxation and an end to tax havens like Bermuda and other ways the bourgeoisie avoids paying its fair share.
The visionary Piketty philosophizes about the urgency of learning from history, expressing his optimism that we can “control capital to go beyond capitalism with ways that are more democratic, more inclusive.”
Like the film his book inspired, it’s a capital idea.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century debuts on May 1 (May Day) and can be viewed at: http://kinomarquee.com/capital.