Coachella here ♦ Letter about “Sinners” here ♦
Coachella: Spectacle, Luxury, and Capitalist Decadence in Wartime
EL SALVADOR, April 20— Nine comrades discussed how working-class life under capitalism is deemed worthless. “They were hyping up the event at Coachella. While thousands consume ‘experiences’ in the desert, the world burns. Imperialist wars, crises, hunger, displacement: this is the flip side that Coachella conceals. It’s not a contradiction. It’s the very same system—one that generates misery for the entire working class while providing luxury for a privileged few,” stated A.
The annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival presents itself as “a symbol of culture, freedom, and celebration.” Thousands of young people travel there to consume music, fashion, and experiences beneath the desert sun. “Behind that constructed image, Coachella functions as just another cog in the machinery of global capitalism,” added J.
“That’s right—it isn’t culture. It’s business. It’s a capitalist showcase where music, rebellion, and identity are sold off to the highest bidder. Nothing there is truly free. Everything has a price,” said D. “It’s not merely a festival. It’s a display window for consumerism.”
“The irony is that Coachella was originally created to push back against festivals with exorbitant prices, but now it has transformed into the very thing it rebelled against 26 years ago. You cannot change the system from within,” a comrade from Los Angeles shared with us.
This year’s festival highlighted the first Salvadoran band to ever perform there—Los Hermanos Flores—as well as Karol G, the first Latina artist to headline the event. It’s clear that the allure of culture is utilized and manipulated to market the festival as culturally sensitive and diverse.
Tickets, corporate sponsors, brand names, and the commodification of “alternative” aesthetics: everything, is designed to transform culture into a marketable commodity. Music ceases to be a form of expression and becomes a product. Identity becomes a sellable image. And experience becomes mere content for social media.
In this sense, Coachella is not an exception, but rather a concentrated microcosm of how contemporary capitalism operates. This spectacle is no accident. It serves its purpose: to distract, to fragment, and to depoliticize. “Instead of questioning the system, it offers an escape valve—a space where everything seems possible, but only as long as one can pay,” said C.
“Therefore, we must strengthen class consciousness, instill our communist ideas, and open the eyes of all young people to the smokescreen created by this rotten system of profit,” C emphasized.
Expressions of criticism within the festival itself—as well as artists speaking out on social justice or delivering political messages from the stage—ultimately end up being absorbed by the logic of the capitalist market.
The problem is not the music, the art, or the need to gather and express oneself collectively. The problem is that these cultural spaces end up being subordinated to profit.
Capitalism dominates the economy, life, leisure time, art, and dreams. As long as it goes unquestioned, every “festival” will be nothing more than another showcase of inequality. There is no free culture in a system based on exploitation. There is no free art where everything is bought and sold. The spectacle continues—and so do war and misery.
The question is not whether Coachella is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but rather: what does it represent? It represents a culture captured by the market. One where collective experience is supplanted by individual consumption, and where access is determined by one’s ability to pay.
The future is in our hands. Let’s put an end to capitalism—to all its forms and practices. Let’s do away with all its corporate giants.
Under communism, life will be peaceful. No more nations, bloody wars, or private property. Art, culture, and wholesome recreation will be available to all. With no corporations of any kind, nothing will be bought or sold. Let’s fight to put an end to the profit system! Let’s fight for our communist revolution! Join the ICWP!
Letter: Sinners: Destroy Money and Capital with Revolutionary Communist Violence
The vampire film Sinners won four Oscars. The writer, producer, and director, Ryan Coogler, won Best Original Screenplay.
“What did you think of the movie?” I asked several friends.
“I loved it; it has so many layers that I need to watch it again.”
“I really liked how blues music formed an integral part of the plot.”
“The relentless fight against the vampires was impressive,” were some answers.
However, everyone I spoke with overlooked the subtle yet scathing critique of money—and, by extension, capital. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx developed the idea of money as the supreme social nexus. Money becomes the “universal agent of separation” and an “inverted force” that transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hatred, and virtue into vice.
In the film, the Moore twins attempt to use money earned in Chicago to “buy” their way back into the community—and their redemption. However, that money (the nexus) acts as a barrier. Locals view them with suspicion. And in the end, capital fails to purchase the respect or security they seek within a segregated and racist system. Here, money supplants genuine human relationships. Instead of connecting through who we are, we connect through what we can buy.
Marx wrote that money can make a cowardly man appear brave or cause an ugly man to be “loved.” The gold coins offered by the vampire Remmick are part of this inversion. The promise of wealth transforms the desire for freedom of characters like Mary into eternal servitude. Money “inverts” their humanity: to attain “eternal life” (wealth/power), they must die as humans and become parasites (vampires).
“Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, only lives by sucking live labor, and lives the more, the more live labor it sucks,” Marx says in Capital. In Sinners, vampirism serves as a literal representation of this Marxist concept. The vampires do not merely seek blood; they seek to appropriate cultural vitality and art—specifically the blues—to transform them into inert commodities.
In the section of Capital analyzing the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Marx adds; “If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a bloodstain on one cheek,’ capital is born dripping blood and dirt from every pore, from head to foot.”
This is capitalism, born feeding itself on the blood of humanity. It has robbed us of our very existence. And it continues to do so. Especially in times of environmental destruction, of repeated genocides, of kidnappings and disappearances, of a third World War, and many other atrocities.
Here, the only option we have is organized violence. Like that of the Choctaw vampire hunters and the community faced with the onslaught they confronted, depicted in Sinners.
Yet, unlike theirs, ours will be an organized, revolutionary, and communist violence that will unearth capitalism—along with its capital and its money—completely and finally. And in the process, we will be building a communist world—one developing and marching toward its full maturity where every single human being will live to their full humanity.
—Marxist Poet
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