This review contains no major spoilers. Submit your own analysis of the film to CHALLENGE.
The pro-revolutionary rapper-turned-director/writer Raymond Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You captures the madness and absurdity workers are forced to live in every day under capitalism. This is a must-see anti-capitalist movie filled with revolutionary potential and optimism that centers a Black worker-led multiracial cast fighting for a greater truth.
This trippy genre-breaking film is about a Black working-class anti-hero Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) who moves up the corporate telemarketing ladder by “sticking to the script” and using his “white voice.” Riley combines workplace comedy and a messy existential, political drama with a sci-fi dystopia not far from our own reality. The conclusion is nightmarishly poetic and a true show of multiracial unity and fightback—all done through real working-class characters that resonate with the masses.
There are so many ideas this film touches on, including: the racist nightmare you can’t wake up from when you choose your individual success over the collective; the billionaires that exploit workers in what is basically prison labor and hide it through their hippy New-Age-type maxims; how the logic of capitalism (drive for profit) inherently leads to churning human beings into workhorses; real characters who have contradictions and struggles; a fully-formed female character, Detroit (Tessa Thompson), who has a struggle between organizing and art; the art scene that’s doomed when isolated from class struggle; and the impossibility of making change by yourself. There is no way we can explore them all (that’s where you, dear reader, come in!)
A scab is the scum of the earth
It is very significant that the central action around which the story develops is a work stoppage. This event presents the main characters with the choices that force them to confront their main contradiction, one the director has posed as one of individualism versus collectivity.
Sorry to Bother You re-introduces the term “scab” into mass consciousness, and does so in a way that retains the utterly reprehensible character of the scab established over many decades of bitter class struggle, much of it communist-led. A work stoppage is posed as the only meaningful political intervention, voting as a strategy for real change is dismissed in a masterful minute of the film. Riley in an interview with the New York Times says,

All we’re taught is that those who are rich deserve to be rich because they worked harder than the rest of us or they’re smarter… [B]ut there are definitely very poor people who are very smart and work hard. It’s just that this system can only have a few people on the top. Yes, maybe you can make better choices and be the crab that gets out of the bucket — but that’ll be at the expense of all the other crabs in the bucket.
Also, can we recall a major film where the police are so irredeemably brutal, so unquestionably on the wrong side?  

 The main characters are all Black —Cassius and Detroit—but this is not a “Black film” that panders to identity politics. Rather, it is a film where, very intentionally, class politics eclipse race politics, and Black people take the lead in the class struggle. This is another choice that cuts against the grain of dominant bourgeois consciousness today.
Why would Hollywood back this?
We should ask the question, why does Hollywood promote this movie? Why now? The short answer is that capital wants to control everything, including anti-capitalism. This dynamic is not under Riley’s control.
Hollywood is an engine of ideological production and it does not practice “free speech.” Hollywood has a long history of smashing communists. The old communist movement, though mortally wounded by self-inflicted revisionism, presented a threat that nonetheless could not be tolerated.
At the moment, Riley is being treated differently. The big difference is that, for now, he has renounced the need for a revolutionary political party and hews more closely to the more (in the long term) harmless decentralized style of activism of the Occupy phenomenon. (Let’s not forget that Occupy was orchestrated by the CIA and its brutal crackdown was coordinated by the FBI.)
The bourgeoisie can try to smash its enemies or absorb them. The latter works just as well as the former from the perspective of capital.
It is not a knock on Riley to say big media network pushing for Sorry to Bother You in a major way maintain direct lines of communication with the State Department and Pentagon. Hollywood has a state-coordinated program to produce films that result in a more patriotic U.S. populace versed in a diverse set of war scenarios, both present and future.
To his credit, Riley is careful to shine a light on the depravity of the “art” scene both high and low in Sorry to Bother You. Take a look at what big media outlets bombards society with and even what “cultured” folks are willing to pay money for in the film and you are horrified by the moral rot of a society in the grips of growing fascism.
Though Riley has a long-term relationship with major media outlets and the art scene, his film directs a withering critique at those same institutions.
Liberal bosses want to control the narrative
The press that represents the main liberal wing of the U.S. ruling class is all over Riley. The New York Times published a long reverent piece of Riley and even did a special screening and a conversation with Riley and Lakeith Stanfield. Part of that conversation was about the “presence of labor” in film and the importance of art to reflect and advance reality:

NYT’s mouthpiece Logan Hill: A film that talks about labor, something we don’t talk a lot about in movies—
Riley: Which is weird because they are in our lives. They are in all of human being’s lives since the beginning of work but they are not in film. How much editing has there been in writers’ heads and producers’ to keep these issues out? How many noon-time cafe dates have you ever had? How many noon-time cafe dates are in films?

The bourgeoisie seems to want to absorb Riley. They aim to launch a very broad-based movement for a more inclusive imperialism, a more multicultural fascism. The Trump phenomenon has deeply alienated many people, some so greatly that for perhaps many millions, Sorry to Bother You will come as a breath of fresh air. These millions are up for grabs, and our Party is small.
‘You have to join with other people’
Sorry to Bother You is another chance for communists to make our case, to show how powerful our ideas can be. Boots Riley was, after all, raised by Progressive Labor Party. His pro-revolutionary ideas were forged in PLP. He was introduced to us at 14 and he participated at a Summer Project around organizing farm workers in Delano, California. His father Walter Riley was an auto-industrial organizer and leader in Detroit.
Short of calling for communism and joining the Party, this is THE film to watch and discuss with your friends, co-workers, family, and community members. As Riley said in an interview with Vox (6/6):

You’re not going to change any of this by yourself. You’re not going to change it by making a cute art statement, you’re not going to change it by just figuring out how to be there, to do something that gives you more power on your own. You have to join with other people and make a movement.

Does that inspire you to join a mass organization and present communist ideas in a way that’s accessible to everyday people? It sure inspired us.

CHICAGO, July 23—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined over 100 multiracial hospital workers downtown to protest racist and sexist working conditions promoted by the bosses’ healthcare industry. They led chants and blocked traffic, directly challenging the profit-hungry hospital bosses. This action planted seeds for future revolutionary communist struggle.
Workers organize to confront the bosses
The action was months in the making, organized through the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare local. Our main target was the downtown office of the Illinois Hospital Association (IHA), a powerful lobbying group of hospital bosses from all over the state. These bosses regularly meet to scheme on how to influence local government bosses and collectively agree upon the lowest standards of pay and benefits for hospital workers across the board. These mainly women workers make poverty wages under disgusting working conditions, despite serving and saving patients’ lives every day.
Comrades in working at a nearby hospital have been active in a campaign to unionize with our co-workers, and therefore have been connected with SEIU and were able to help plan this action. Workers decided to include an element of surprise against the IHA. Clearly visible were the hospital workers gathering in front of the IHA’s corporate office to hold a press conference; what the bosses didn’t expect were the workers and organizers on the edges of the lobby inside waiting to strike!
Black workers key to revolution
At the given signal, twenty hospital workers swarmed into the lobby and linked arms in a circle. A PL’er helped lead a mic check in the center of the circle, calling out the IHA for its racist, anti-worker attacks. Some Black women workers issued the collective demands of the hospital workers throughout the city area: a $15 per hour minimum wage, the right to unionize, dignity and respect on the job, and affordable health insurance from the bosses.
The scant building security was unprepared. They tried to break up the protest with intimidation, but the workers just locked arms tighter and chanted louder. The most inspirational moment came when dozens of hospital workers who had been standing outside spontaneously rushed the front doors to completely crowd the lobby and demonstrate working-class solidarity.
The demonstrators then spilled out into the street. They marched across the Adams Street bridge, temporarily blocking traffic. It ended at the nearby Presence Health System corporate office, which despite raking in millions in profits, was recently given a $5.5 million dollar handout in tax money from the racist city council (Chicago Sun-Times, 1/17). These are the same hospital systems that try to claim that they’re broke when workers ask for raises, new equipment, and more staffing!
A woman worker took to the bullhorn to detail the sexist working conditions that she faces while working for Presence Health, including intimidation from the bosses and wage freezes. Personal stories like these really drive home the rotten nature of the capitalist profit system.
Understanding reform limits and revolutionary change
Practically everyone who participated in the action came out of it feeling fired up. It’s important to analyze the balance of forces at play, and what signifies a lasting victory for the working class.
Even at their most militant and progressive, the role of trade unions under capitalism is to negotiate the terms of workers’ exploitation by the bosses, and to put a cap on any workers’ struggles that seek to directly challenge the existence of such an exploitative system. To achieve true workers’ power and an egalitarian society, the struggle needs a revolutionary mass movement led by the communist PLP to completely destroy the profit system.
What’s more, if the bosses were to provide a $15 per hour minimum wage, they would use their state power over the capitalist economy to regain those lost profits through charging more for our living essentials, such as housing, education, and medical care. In other words, what the bosses give up with one hand, they take away with the other.
We will continue to share ideas like these with our working-class sisters and brothers as we build the fight not only against our specific hospital bosses and the IHA, but also against the entire racist and sexist capitalist system. Black and Asian women hospital workers have been among some of the most active and outspoken organizers in the campaigns in which we’ve been involved, reinforcing our Party line that these sections of the working class have always represented a key revolutionary force.
Today, reform may have won. With struggle we will win our class to understand how workers create everything of value, and that communist revolution is the only way to ensure our needs are met.

MEXICO CITY, August 8—A multiracial, multi-generational group of Progressive Labor Party comrades intensified the contradictions at a mass youth conference for the Summer Project here. We struggled with people to break away from venomous identity politics with the antidotes of internationalism and multi-racial unity.
The conference was advertised as anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and democratic.  PLP met young workers and students from across the world. Participants included delegations from Mexico, the U.S., El Salvador, Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Turkey, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and more. Each day the conference featured a central panel discussion on various topics such as fascism, imperialism, democracy, women’s liberation, self-determination and education.
PLP stood out from the rest of the groups, sharing the revolutionary idea that poisonous identity politics such as nationalism and feminism only serve the bosses.
Education under capitalism serves capitalism
PLP members presented our communist analysis to the conference as a whole and various groups facilitated workshops and panels. During the education panel, we stated that all education serves the bosses under this capitalist system, so long as we are taught racist, sexist, and nationalist ideas that prepare the working class for war. For those youth who are too broken by capitalism, there is a school to prison pipeline so the ruling class can find another way to profit off the backs of the working class, since jobs can never be guaranteed under capitalism.
Our words were well received, and we were able to distribute over 500 DESAFÍOs, leaflets, and Road to Revolution IV (Progressive Labor Party’s manifesto). We could have distributed more, but we ran out! This reflects the long term work that the Party once had on the host campus.
Project participants also met up with a group of friends from Puerto Rico that we met during a summer project on the island (see letter below).
No need to settle for socialism
During a workshop on “Capitalism in Crisis,” a debate arose on the topic of socialism as a necessary stage to go through before advancing to communism.
During that discussion, we realized that many of these “left” organizations attending the conference do not have confidence in the working class. They argued that the workers of the world were not capable of going directly to communism because they are so backwards after living under capitalism for so long.
PLP members argued that all workers can understand communist ideology and use the science of dialectical materialism and political economy to destroy capitalism and create a true workers’ state under communism, without a cult of personality or a vanguard.
Though many disagreed with our comrades, there were some who agreed that what we were saying was the correct analysis of what went wrong in the old communist movement.
Confidence in the working class
Bilingual PLP-led study groups on dialectical materialism and political economy with friends of the Party provided a sharp contrast to the conference workshops. At the conference, “experts” presented at length, leaving little time for people to speak on their experience, to debate, and to ask questions.
In contrast, Party study groups were facilitated in circles, where each participant was encouraged to speak and share their experiences. That is the difference when facilitators believe that the working class can truly lead society.
We simultaneously translated for a Black comrade from the U.S. who came because PLP is serious about one international working class, one party and one world. Simultaneous translation is difficult, but PLP members and our base were up to the task in breaking the language barriers caused by the bosses (see letter, page 6). Under communism, workers around the world will not be barred from communicating with each other. We will break the bosses’ racist borders and their divisive languages.
PLP has confidence in the working class that we can learn dialectical materialism, no matter where we are in the world, as opposed to revisionists who believe only a vanguard elite can learn the science of communism. Workers are smart enough to produce what society needs so we can also learn the science we need in order to arm us with ideas that will help us take our world back from the bosses’ death grip.
Struggling to break down gender roles
At the first study group, we were welcomed with delicious home cooked food made by several women. Two of the male comrades offered to contribute in the kitchen. The women refused, indicative of how prevlaent sexism is in this bosses-led world.
In the evening we traveled to another house where we studied political economy while eating delicious pastries and drinking coffee to fuel our discussion. The studygroups were held in two different houses with different workers. Intense as it was, it was met with enthusiatic participation.
In both studygroups, workers from Mexico and the U.S. discussed struggles we were involved in, from uniting teachers and students in Oaxaca, Mexico City, LA, and NY, to organizing on the job and in our neighborhoods.
Internationalism
Participants discussed the horrible working conditions that our class suffers around the world, including slavery in many parts of the world. We discussed attacks on our class, from the bosses ideas to the systematic murder of our working class sisters and brothers. We discussed communism as the only salvation for the workers of the world, where we will run society for the benefit of the many, not the few elites.
Exhausted & hungry, we all ended the night with pizza for dinner. A comrade indicated how important these study groups are, because the entire working class needs to break with capitalist ideology and free themselves with communist ideas in order to have a revolution.
We all felt honored to participate in the project, and hope to get together again soon. Smash racist borders! Fight for communism!

*****

Friends from Puerto Rico debate PL politics

The friends that Progressive Labor Party made in Puerto Rico (see CHALLENGE 8//8) joined the Mexico project. They are a strong young group of fighters trying to improve the quality of education on their campus, as well as the living conditions in their community.
We met them for lunch at a local diner where we discussed the party’s line. They said they agreed with most of our politics.
The diner was closing so we went back to the college campus where we sat on the ground, underneath a tent to continue our discussion. It seemed that we were having a disagreement on feminism. We made the point that feminism, like Black nationalism, is dependent on unity across classes—that means the oppressor and oppressed workers and bosses. We must never make this mistake because the ruling class by the nature of this system must exploit and oppress the working class to function. Some agreed with this while others explained that feminism doesn’t have the same meaning in Puerto Rico as it does in the U.S., that it wasn’t a unity with the bosses. They’re may have been some traces of nationalist ideas.
The friends said they are very new to these ideas and has yet to become consolidated as a group. They also disagreed among themselves about feminism and nationalism. As a whole, the group looks promising because they practice criticism and self-criticism.
All members of the working class must struggle through these ideas. Because they choose to struggle, they have earned our respect. They expressed that they would like to collaborate because they recognized similar struggles the working class is facing in the U.S., Mexico, and Puerto Rico.
This is inspiring and a small leap for the international communist movement. We concluded our discussion with hugs and promises to link up soon. We look forward to continue the process of struggle and growth with these new comrades.

PAKISTAN, August 6—A wave of coercion from the judiciary, military, and inter-service intelligence agencies has rigged the general elections in favor of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and its leader Imran Khan. The PTI has 174 seats in the parliament, effectively forming an absolute majority. The bosses’ infighting is played out on the backs of the working class here. Pakistan, a nuclear power and the world’s sixth most populous country, is positioned at the crosshairs of a U.S. and China rivalry (see editorial, page 2). The country’s outcome has ramifications for the international working class.
Progressive Labor Party is putting our revolutionary line of “don’t vote—revolt” before the masses. The working class needs organize under our red flag to get rid of this barbaric capitalist system by fighting for an international communist revolution.
Terror against working class
Different groups are executing terrorist attacks. Two hundred innocent people have been killed in just the first 15 days of July. It is not uncommon for the losing party to accuse the winning party of rigging the election and to foment violent protests in the streets.
These murders have provided the military grounds to deploy 371,000 troops in order to ensure a “fair and free” election.
“The army was hell-bent upon securing Khan’s victory and even encouraged political parties with overt ties to terrorist groups to field several hundred candidates, alongside some 1,500 candidates tied to Pakistan’s right-wing Islamist parties” (Foreign Affairs, 7/27).
The military has arrested and threatened political rivals, including the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), in the months leading up to the elections. They have also worked to disqualify PML-N candidates from running. The PTI represents the capitalists, feudalists, religious clerks, and retired officials supported by the state.  Left with few options, the army cultivated Khan and his PTI party.
No good capitalist party
Capitalist bosses try to spread the illusion that “capitalism is good but the ruling party is bad so people need to bring a new party to rule them.” But we in Progressive Labor Party are exposing the bosses’ intentions to keep the capitalist system intact by blaming one or other ruling party.
There was censorship of the newspapers, social media and TV channels. The level of interference and political engineering is unprecedented,” said the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan official. The National Accountability Bureau has been described as being used by the state to bring politicians in line by threatening to bring corruption cases against them.
The PML-N’s campaign material was allegedly ripped apart by authorities while leaving PTI campaign materials untouched. There have been suggestions that candidates belonging to PML-N have been coerced to switch parties.
Punjab is the most populous province and remained key to elections. On the last day of scrutiny of nomination papers, seven PML-N candidates from Southern Punjab returned their tickets leaving no option for PML-N to field replacement candidates. This move prevented them the opportunity to win those seats. There have also been reports of election engineering in all provinces. This is nothing new; it happens in every election because capitalists always manipulate elections and manage their parties according to their interests.
Capitalism makes everyone in the ruling class rotten. The system only produces exploitation, poverty, inequality and injustice. Only communist revolution is a way out of this hell and PLP is striving to win the masses to the idea that elections are not a solution for our problems.
Courts protect ruling-class terrorism
The courts and the intelligence agency have been working with the military to elect Khan. In 2017, a corruption investigation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was launched. In response to this, the Supreme Court ousted Sharif disqualified him from holding office under Article 62 of the constitution.
The authorities have also launched an anti-terrorism investigation against PML-N leaders and opened criminal cases against nearly 17,000 party members.
The PTI recently gave 300 million rupees to Madrassa e Haqqaniya, a religious school which is a factory of terrorists. It produced all the terrorists who fought against the USSR and now it is producing “good terrorists” to kill the progressive and working-class people. Terrorism is of course supported by the state. Three terrorist political parties are expected to side with Imran Khan.
Don’t vote—revolt!
Comrades are explaining that the Pakistani state is under the control of brutal capitalist bosses. That’s why nobody can talk against the narrative of terrorist organizations; nobody can raise a question about the internal and external security issues; and nobody is allowed to talk against the false ideology of Islamist organizations. Workers have no right to discuss communism or to criticize capitalism or to talk secularism. But fundamentalists have the right to kill anybody, anywhere and at any time. There is no security for the working class—they are being killed by extremists to spread terror across the country.
We are speaking against the elections with the slogan “Don’t vote—Revolt” in order to convince the masses to forge a struggle for an international communist revolution under the red flag of PLP.
Capitalist bosses are confusing the working class by giving them an opportunity to vote to change their masters. No boss has an agenda to bring prosperity, equality and justice in the lives of workers. Comrades are bringing the working class closer to our line by exposing the reality of elections and the necessity of revolution. Long live international communist revolution and PLP!