Learning to Walk the Communist Walk
This Boots Riley film is about a group of women (boosters) who shoplift expensive designer clothing and resell it at a low price. When I was young, I loved designing and making clothes. I went to school (Fashion Institute of Technology) to fulfill my dreams of someday becoming a part of that world. However, I discovered that the garment industry was run by backstabbing capitalists who exploited workers to make profits. When I was watching this film, I understood the character of Corvette and how she is torn between fulfilling her dreams and fighting the capitalist system.
Corvette and her comrades work at a chain of clothing stores where the conditions are bad and the pay is low. They hate their boss. Initially they become Robin Hood types who steal from the rich (designer) and give/sell to the poor (fellow workers). But this scheme is not enough to make a difference. When they meet a worker from China where the garments are produced and hear about the horrible conditions there, they join forces and organize an international strike.
To travel to China and back to Oakland they use a gizmo called a “situational accelerator.” It can transport a person to a different place and time. It can heighten contradictions and deconstruct them. Clever, but I don’t think this really helped people to understand dialectical materialism (DM). But a comrade I spoke with the next day said he thought “the attempt to make DM accessible to a mass audience was a solid attempt” and he “appreciated the directness of the film in that it had a clear position, and it was interested in conveying that position to the audience.”
In a transcript of a recent program on KQED there was an extensive history of Boots Riley’s life as an activist in the Bay Area. Some of us older members of ICWP have known Boots since he was a young teenager. He was then and has continued to describe himself as a communist. However, this film does not conclude that we need a communist revolution. He says, “The idea then was the same as my idea now, which is to get the working class involved in class struggle.” This is not enough. Just struggling for reforms will not get rid of capitalism.
Of course, we know that if he made such a film the rich people that back him financially (and Boosters was a very expensive film to make!) would never let it come out. Historically, many creative people who were communists during the 1950s were blacklisted if they expressed communist ideas. But we have Red Flag and we know many talented and creative people. Let’s encourage them to contribute to the paper…and create communist culture.
—A former fashionista