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this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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I watched the new Boots Riley movie at the theatre, 'I love boosters'. Without spoiling the movie, the movie uses Marxist concepts as major plot points in the film. At one point in the movie, a character just starts saying things like: "dialectical materialism", "heightening the contradiction", labour value being stored within commodity, etc. It even explains Hegel's Dialectic Method.
To me, the movie felt very direct in references to Marx. However, I'm not sure that other people who watched the movie in that theatre were catching the references. I think there's not many socialists in my area.
I overheard other groups of people in the theatre saying the movie was weirder than they expected. I hope that people who like the movie will remember the Marxist terms used in the movie and research those terms. Those people might accidentally discover Marxism.
Women's liberation is another big theme in the movie. The movie evokes the idea of like: don't be a side character in a man's story, women should follow their own ambitions, and women aren't obligated to fix men.
I had the same thoughts. I picked up on all the marxism but I don't think it was said in a way for general audience to understand. I liked the gags though, fun movie
spoiler
The movie has like a magical communism device with 3 functions: portal to China, "situational accelerator" ie accelerationism, and "deconstruction" ie reverses the commodity process.The portal to China function is self-explanatory. The device was made in China and China practices Marxism.
The characters in the movie describe the "situational accelerator" mode as "heightening the contradictions". Contradiction is a disagreement between 2 opposing forces. Heightening the contradiction means like increasing the tension or making the disagreement more visible.
In one scene of the movie, they are pointing this device at each character to experiment the functionality. One woman is zapped with the "situational accelerator" and it transforms her clothing to look like breast and genitals made from fabric. The opposing forces in this situation are that 1) clothes are intended to cover one's nakedness 2) women's clothing is sexualized. By transforming the clothing into the appearance of nakedness, the conflict between these 2 opposing forces is made to be more apparent.
The "deconstruction" feature of the device has the ability to reverse the process of creating a commodity. When they use this functionality on clothing that has been made in the Chinese factory, a cut the hand of the Chinese worker who made the clothing becomes healed. It is explained in the movie that this occurs because the labour inside of the commodity was returned to the worker. The is a metaphor of Marx's Labour Theory of Value. Marx explains that the value of commodities comes from labor.
Another character in the movie was diagnosed with cancer due to chemical exposure in a Blue Jeans factory. When deconstruction was used on Blue Jeans, the labor was returned to the worker, reversing the exposure, and curing the character of cancer.
I asked my bro what he thought the movie was about and he said he thought it was about Time Travel. Some critic reviews online also think that the movie is about Time Travel and even referred to the Chinese device as a "Time Machine". I don't remember Time Travel being mentioned in the movie but maybe I missed it.
I think that people who are not familiar with the Marxist terminology are misinterpreting the devices functions to be "go forward in time" (accelerate) and "go backward in time" (deconstruct). Near the end of the movie, the accelerate function is used to increase the pressure caused by labor union strikes, which could have been misinterpreted as fast forwarding in time. The deconstruction of a commodity could be seen as a reversal of time, but I had interpreted it to be simply disassembling the commodity but in a more literal sense.
I'm guessing it's a bit more surrealist than they expected, judging from his other recent movies?
I'm glad to hear it's out in theaters now. I'll have to go watch it.