Filmmaker Boots Riley at the Sundance Film Festival, Jan. 19, 2023, in Park City, Utah. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
Boots Riley is a successful Hollywood filmmaker. He’s also a communist activist.
The 47-year-old Riley, who is also a hip-hop artist, made his feature film directorial debut with the film “Sorry to Bother You” in 2018.
It would seem that raking in money in entertainment would be counter to what one thinks of as a communist, but there are actually communist entrepreneurs.
Here are seven things to know about Riley becoming commercially successful as a communist.
So what is communism? What is socialism?
The political and economic doctrine of communism focus is to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership, as defined by Britannica. Communism is actually a more advanced form of socialism, according to its advocates.
Under socialism, meanwhile, individuals do not live or work in isolation but live in cooperation with one another. “Furthermore, everything that people produce is in some sense a social product, and everyone who contributes to the production of a good is entitled to a share in it. Society as a whole, therefore, should own or at least control property for the benefit of all its members,” according to Britannica.
Boots Riley’s net worth is is $3 million. And his debut film, which he directed and wrote, made $18.2 million. at the box office. It was made with a production budget of $3.2 million, meaning the film more than made back its money.
Boots is a film director, producer, screenwriter, rapper, as well as a communist activist. He is the lead vocalist of the political hip-hop group The Coup and the alternative group Street Sweeper Social Club. He made his feature-film directorial debut with “Sorry to Bother You.”
He was born in 1971 in Chicago. His parents were social justice organizers, so activism was always a part of his life. His father is Walter Riley, an African-American attorney, and mother is Anitra Patterson, whose father was African-American and her mother (Boots’ maternal grandmother) was a Jewish refugee who fled Europe in 1938, reported Boston Review.
“I have a memory of my father coming home with his ribs bandaged up and me, a kid, asking what happened,” he told Huck Magazine. “He’d be like, ‘Yeah, well, we went to fight the Klan, and one of them blindsided me with a two-by-four in the back.’”
Riley’s family had moved to Detroit and when he was six and then to Oakland.
Riley joined the International Committee Against Racism at age 14 and the radical Progressive Labor Party at age 15.
As a young man he took various jobs, working part-time for United Parcel Service (UPS) — a teamster job where he met aspiring rappers Spice 1 (Robert Green Jr., who became a prominent gangsta rapper in the ’90s) and E-roc (Eric Davis). They formed The Coup in 1991.
“We’d rap in the bellies of planes we were loading up at Oakland airport,” Riley recalled. He and Davis founded the Coup with the East Bay DJ Pam the Funkstress, and when they landed a record deal, Riley quit school,” the New York Times reported.
In 1992, The Coup signed to Wild Pitch Records/EM and released their debut album “Kill My Landlord” in 1993. In 1994, The Coup released their second album, “Genocide & Juice,” featuring guest appearances by E-40 and Spice 1. After a few years they left the label and their 1998 collection “Steal This Album,” was released on indie label Dogday Records. The group’s fourth album, “Party Music,” was released on 75 Ark Records in 2001. It was named “Hip-Hop Album of the Year” by Rolling Stone. In 2006, The Coup released “Pick a Bigger Weapon” on Epitaph Records, featuring guest appearances by Tom Morello, Talib Kweli, Black Thought from The Roots, and Jello Biafra.
Riley published the book, “Another World Is Possible.”
Then with guitarist Morello, he formed a band named Street Sweeper in 2006. The name was later changed to Street Sweeper Social Club. They released their self-titled debut album in 2009.
Riley later returned to his first love–film and started writing the screenplay for “Sorry to Bother You,” finishing in 2012.
With the film becoming a success, he’s on to another project. In June 2020, he announced plans for a new seven-episode series entitled “I’m a Virgo.” The show premiered at the South by Southwest festival on March 11, 2023, and will be released on Amazon Prime Video later this year.
Riley identifies as a communist, and in 2011 formed an activist organization called The Young Comrades. During the fall of 2011, Riley became heavily involved with the Occupy Oakland movement.
The film centers around a money-hungry telemarketing company making millions off of slave labor while taking advantage of unsuspecting consumers. The social satire has been praised as one of the best movies of 2018.
On film and in person, Riley often calls out capitalism. and when asked by Democracy Now about working in capitalist Hollywood, Riley responded, “Yeah. I mean, it’s never been my mission to create a separate, safer capitalist model, because that’s what it would be doing, you know, is like ‘Let’s create this other distribution network,’ whatever, which, if you’re operating under capitalism, ends up being just a baby capitalist model that is maybe not as effective as the ones that exist.”
He added, “So, it is—I mean, I wasn’t there, but I believe how even ‘The Communist Manifesto’ got out was that the books were distributed, that these books are sold. So, even Marx sold books, right? So, and it wasn’t because he was like, ‘I need to create something inside of capitalism that shows this model.’ I mean we’ve been seeing that for a long time. I mean, the U.S. has had socialist communes since the 1800s. And as artists, too, we give ourselves that out, like, ‘I’m creating a model, you know, that other people can emulate.’ And it’s really just a cop-out, because it’s harder to organize people and get them to get involved in a movement. It’s easier to find other people that already agree with you, and then do that thing.”
Riley discussed the politics of his film versus his own personal politics with Vice.
“I am a communist, but I don’t think the film goes all the way there. The film has a class analysis which would lead you to the idea. When you point out that capitalism’s main contradiction is the exploitation of labor, then it leads you to the idea that maybe the people should democratically control the wealth that we create with our labor. And so the idea that it leads you to is a communist idea,” he explained.
He continued, “Here’s the thing: most people in the world understand that capitalism isn’t working for them and is something they wish could be different. However, many of us just think it’s just a fait accompli – it just is, and there isn’t anything we can do about it. So, there are people in all sorts of positions that wish the world was different. I mean, last year there was a right-wing think-tank that published the results of a survey they’d done – and they were up in arms about it – but they’d polled 1,400 millennials and one in two of them said they want a socialist society. You see all these things in Russian newspapers of surveys of their readers who say, ‘Well, it was better before we moved to capitalism, when we had free healthcare and all that stuff.’ So the basic ideas are just human ideas.”
Filmmaker Boots Riley arrives at “Opening Night: A Taste of Sundance,” at the Sundance Film Festival, Jan. 19, 2023, in Park City, Utah. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
