Capitalist Punishment
by Frank MacDonald
(In a light-hearted way, this article takes up many of the points dealt with by Catholic social teaching under the heading "solidarity")
I've been pitching my ideas to a bunch of reality television producers.
The first idea was for a television show in which people are stranded (along with a few camera crews, a producer, a director, fifteen or twenty gofers, a resident doctor and nurse, a Medivac helicopter, a catering company and a couple of chefs) on a deserted island. The point of the show is to see how these people pool their talents, knowledge, resources and bottled water to rescue themselves from the ravages of special effects, makeup artists, hair-do designers and other destructive forces of nature.
So far, every rejection reads the same: Sorry, but we are a reality television company, we don't do fiction.
It's not fiction, I fire back, it's fact. History is full of examples of people pulling together to overcome political, social or economic oppression. They cooperate. That's why I've tentatively titled my show The Cooperators. In the show, people work together to overcome all sorts of obstacles: deserted islands, being locked up together in a web-cam house, helping each other face their worst fears, trying to dress their kids for a new school year without ever entering a Wal-Mart....
"Communism," one producer wrote back, "has been defeated in order to make the world safe for Capitalism. The values you propose we air on our program, the ideas you want us to propagandize, would draw the ire of every significant bank and corporate sponsor in this country.
"We are a family viewing network, with Father properly enthroned in his, yes, whether you like it or not, in his low priced Wal-Mart recliner. With Mother serving him his fresh-from-the-microwave supper while settling the children when they complain, "Not spaghetti again!" by convincing them to pretend the spaghetti is worms just like those people on television are eating. That's the 'family values' way we do things these days, sir."
So I took my idea back to the proverbial drawing board for a re-drafting.
My new script is set in a Maritime community where the people, devastated by the closure of a call centre (which replaced the fishery, pulp and tourism industries), and the closure of the big-box stores, pool their talents, resources and knowledge to form a co-operative grocery store so people don't have to drive an hour to a corporate grocer; they begin a modest fish cooperative processing what economists call 'an underutilized species'; begin running a community-based school to save their children three to four hours a day on a bus to a big box school; start an artists' co-op and a fuel co-op; form a community economic development fund for people to invest in themselves and their hometown; and even manage to train every loonie in the local economy to take at least three spins through town before leaving for points elsewhere in the larger economy beyond the town boundaries.
Soon the dying town, miraculously cured by the co-operative spirit of its people, is making front page news in business sections of newspapers, carrying the message that "There's money to be made here once again!"
Back comes the corporate groceries to crush the local co-op, the big box stores to shut down the string of Main Street cooperatives, the oil companies to undersell the fuel co-op, a corporate fish company to fillet the local operation until there is no more profit to plunder and then, like serial economy killers, move on to the next upstart town that thought it could stand on its own two feet!
"Love it!," wrote the reality television producer of my revised script. "Let's find a town we can do this to in twenty three episodes. How do you feel about the title, Capitalist Punishment?"
(This article, Frank MacDonald's October 2004 "Assuming I'm Right" column, is reproduced with permission from The Atlantic Co-operator website at www.theatlanticco-operator.coop)