This is the true story of two Jesuit priests who built a mission in the middle of the Amazon in the 1700s, using modern technology (of the day) to create a community of unprecedented prosperity – building musical instruments and harvesting crops for export, and otherwise being self sufficient.
(The movie is in technicolor, actually; the emotions are not.)
Their commerce is so successful that the colonial powers back in Europe, coerced by the prosperous owners of nearby slave plantations, convince the Papal authorities to get rid of the Jesuit mission to nix the competition.
We’re supposed to think, my how evil the west is. How ruthless we are. How utterly materialistic. These two brave Jesuits fashioned a wonderful community out of stone age Neanderthals with no wages and everybody working in harmony for the common good – utopia!
Then the evil capitalists destroyed it out of sheer greed. Egad, the Vatican sanctioned all of this!
This anti-capitalist theme is actually so stated in the dialog, many times and in many different ways. When the mission goes up in flames our belief in the capitalist system goes with it. Hey, it’s a true story.
You can’t argue with the truth.
Robert de Niro doesn’t lie!
The reality is far more sublime. These primitive peoples had a society far different than ours. They were cohesive, to such an extreme degree that they were literally one great big family. (Perhaps genetically, too, for such a small group living in an isolated mountain gorge for centuries.)
We cannot judge them in the same way as if they were a fractured, divided society like is the status quo in the modern day.
The failing of a modern commune these days is that if each individual doesn’t get a share of the profits/produce/goods – if each person is fed and clothed no matter how little or much they produce – they stop working hard.
It’s human nature, proven a hundred times over. Why bother to work more than you need to? I don’t know any of these other people. They aren’t working their butts off for me. Why should I do so for them?
However, if all the other people in the community are family, if the social structure is highly cohesive, everybody keeps working hard. You don’t mind helping a lame uncle or a pregnant niece. They’re family. They’ll work hard when I’m in a bad place. That’s how this “primitive ” amazon community was.
No doubt, a few years or a generation later, the idealistic commune would have failed. Some would prosper more than others and individuality and autonomy would take root.
A Marxist commune only works if everybody works equally hard all the time, happily and with no coercion. It works only if everybody has the same output, within reason. If that doesn’t happen, then somebody has to enforce rules or standardize output or provide some kind of incentive to keep the operation going.
These controlling influences are managed by the elite. Inevitably, you end up with a ruling class and de facto slavery for everybody else.
Marxism applies a totalitarian discipline from outside. Capitalism uses a gentle system of rewards to motivate people. Even then, some people don’t cooperate and, after remedial measures fail, they’re punished.
In the extreme, they may even go to jail (for behavior so antisocial it’s criminal). The goal is a better, self-disciplined human being not an army of slaves. Even those who screw up get a second chance eventually.
Marxism may look good in theory but in practice it represents a strict caste system and slavery for everybody but the elite.
