The story like capitalism ends with winners and losers. Charlie wins the factory and becomes a capitalist in his own right whereas the other children become the losers and end with nothing but some candy “commodities.” As the other four children lose, their loss is perceived by the Oompa Loompas and the story teller as a result of their own faults. Willy Wonka is never to blame. Industrialization reveals the metal of the “man” Those who are good remain and those who are a “bad nut” are discarded.
Self regulating markets are in a sense moral, they end up rewarding the hard working, the serious, and the deserving or so their defenders claim. The system reserves its top prizes for radical risk taking individualism and in this world you're on your own. (George,1999:172)
John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man describes the system as
It is not driven by a small band of men but by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits. This belief also has a corollary: that those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born at the fringes are available for exploitation.
The concept is of course erroneous. We know that in many countries economic growth benefits only a small proportion of the population and may in fact result in increasingly desperate circumstances for the majority. This effect is reinforced by the corollary belief that the captains of industry who drive this system should enjoy a special status, a belief that is the root of many of our current problems and is perhaps also the reason why conspiracy theories abound. When men and women are rewarded for greed, greed becomes a corrupting motive. When we equate the gluttonous consumption of the earth's resources with a status approaching sainthood, when we teach our children to emulate people who live unbalanced lives, and when we define huge sections of the population as subservient to an elite minority, we ask for trouble and we get it (2004:xii)
The exploited Grandpa Joe who lost his job in Wonka's factory through no fault of his own and who is not covered by any form of social protection in his old age save his son who can only afford to keep him in bed with three others serving him cabbage soup every day sings the praises of Mr. Wonka, the industrialist, Chocolateer. He describes him as,
the most amazing, the most fantastic , the most extraordinary chocolate maker the world has ever seen!” and then adds “: I though everybody knew that” (11)
The story is full of admiration for Mr. Wonka and for everything that he does in respect of the Capitalist tradition which insists on exalting an elite minority despite their endless search for gain and their exploitation of human and earthly resources.
The story book teaches the children to be fascinated by Mr. Wonka and to dream about owning a factory which does not use human workers because they are disloyal but to seek black workers from Africa who will devote all their lives to serve the owner of the industry in return for food. They are taught to admire success and inhumanity. They wait upon lady luck to come and knock the door. They hope that because they are better-mannered they would perhaps be rewarded.
The Oompa Loompas are so similar to the African salves on the American continent that worked for subsistence and should think of themselves as lucky because they were saved from the barbaric life of the jungle symbolized by the eating of worms. Perkins says that such a system “fosters slavery” and it does. (xiii) It is also interesting that the Oompa Loompas are also devoid of a desire to own the place where they live and have no interest in property rights while enhancing and protecting the property rights and the wealth of Mr. Willy Wonka who managed to own the largest chocolate factory in the world.
Perkins says,
One of the corporatocracy's most important functions is to perpetuate and continually expand and strengthen the system. The lives of those who make it and their accoutrements- their mansions, yachts and private jets are presented as models to inspire us all to consume, consume, consume (xiii)
The truth is that “Capitalism produces unheard of degradation.” Even working for a factory for long hours with low pay becomes a dream for Charlie's father who is now unemployed. As capitalism and industrialism progress and seek to maximize profit and reduce cost, many attempts were made to ensure that jobs have no security or benefits. Employing women and children , casual labor, etc became further means to reduce wages and benefits. Araghi describes “feminization of cheap labor” as one of the attempts to reduce the cost of labor
Conceived As a political project, global restructuring could be seen as a process of dismantling the postwar wage labor regime through maquiladorization, casualization of work, subcontracting and modern putting-out systems, feminization of cheap labor..” (1995:154)
Women were hired to do the jobs that men used to do and were given lower wages. Varuka's father has a nut company and his employees are women. Yet, Wonka is described as smarter. He has found an even cheaper substitute for the women workers and that's the trained squirrels who are more efficient than any human being at shelling nuts.
Charlie's family is a patriarchal family where the father works and the mother is a stay at home mom and so are both grandmothers. Charlie is a boy. Wonka is a man. A boy will inherit the factory of the man. The last two contenders for the factory are boys. The mother who cooks the cabbage soup and supports the husband during unemployment is almost “invisible.” Her role is marginalized.
The public sphere is clearly divorce from the private sphere in Charlie's life. The women play a part only in the private sphere.
This ideology identified male activity and masculinity with the public sphere of politics and market and female activity and femininity with the private domestic sphere of the household and reproduction. (Rose, 1997:141)
but
Charlie's mother is as industrious as the husband and plays an important role as a worker. She manages the family income and controls the thinness of the meals and the portions so that the meager wages of her husband are enough to spare the family starvation. She shares his suffering, his anxiety and works as hard to manage the meager resources of this cruel system. She shares with her husband the same group identity, that of belonging to the same class.
The mother is happy with her status and does not express any desire to change it. Perhaps this is because she and many women find security in such a system where the man is held responsible for feeding the family. The man becomes her sense of security from want and need. It is like striking a bargain as Deniz Kandiyoti says in “Bargaining with Patriarchy.” (1988) Yet in Charlie's story we wonder as audience why she doesn't start looking for a job since the man is no longer able to support her. The capitalist system is going to have its toll on the family structure
The story and the movie through selection and omission project another capitalist point of view about the role of the state. Where is the state from all of this? Like Mrs. Bucket, the state is invisible. This vision shows that the state does not work for the good of all the people. Abrams says that the state as such is an illusion,
The most important single characteristic of the state is that it constitutes the illusory common interest of a society; the crucial word there being illusory (1988: 64)
Polanyi describes the evolution of market patterns and how the three fictitious commodities came to exist: labor, land and money. In his study of Speenhamland, 1795 he shows how taking away the commons, repealing the corn law has reduced farmers to workers when there is need for them to work in the industrial cities and paupers when they are too tired to work or when the factories do not need them. A situation applicable to Charlie's father and grandfather.
A blind faith in spontaneous progress had taken hold of people's minds' and with the fanaticism of sectarians the most enlightened pressed forward for boundless and unregulated change in society. The effects on the lives of the people were awful beyond description. Indeed human society would have been annihilated but for the protective countermoves which blunted the actions of this self-destructive mechanism (1944:79)
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