Boots Riley: ‘Theft is not outside of capitalism, it’s what it was built on’

D on’t call Boots Riley an anti-capitalist, at least not without qualification. “I’m a communist,” he clarifies. “A lot of stuff that calls itself anti-capitalist is doing so because they’re afraid of calling themselves socialist or communist or something else.” But the one-size-fits-all label persists for a reason.

From his early work with the Coup, a subversive hip-hop group that gleefully mocked the genre’s prevailing culture of wretched excess on albums like Kill My Landlord and Genocide & Juice, Riley has made art that treats capitalism less as the operating system for daily life, complete with its expected bugs, than an axeman lurking under the bed. As a director, Riley uses dark comedy and magical realism to render capitalism a tangible bogeyman, suffocating the ambitions of young strivers. His debut feature Sorry to Bother You, which shares its title with a Coup album, skewers telemarketing avarice and predation; his limited series I’m a Virgo, about a 13ft-tall Black teen raised in near-total isolation, extends the critique into the commodification of Black bodies, where value is assigned before agency is even possible. His latest film, I Love Boosters , turns shoplifting into a Robin Hood–style proletarian allegory, where stealing itself is a mode of survival. And it arrives amid renewed debate over retail theft, with some on the left framing small-scale “boosting” as a form of resistance , and labor advocates warning that it ultimately harms workers while giving retailers cover to escalate enforcement and pursue felony charges . “Theft is not outside of capitalism; it’s what capitalism was built on – and not even, like, metaphorically,” Riley says. “The bourgeoisie was no different in that they stole land, stole minerals, stole labor. But that theft is thought of as legal.” Boosting, he adds, is a moral distinction that gives cover to industrialists who pursue perpetual growth at all costs. “I don’t buy the idea that retailers have to raise their profits because of shoplifting; they’re just using it as an excuse,” he says. “We found a clear example of that here with [Walgreens] in the Bay Area saying shoplifting was causing them to close and restructure – and then a recording of [executives] telling shareholders that, really, shoplifting had nothing to do with it .” In I Love Boosters, Keke Palmer plays Corvette, a sharp, fashion-obsessed design aspirant haunted by a literal boulder of debt. She squats inside an abandoned fried chicken shack and leads the Velvet Gang, an all-female shoplifting crew that hits high-end San Francisco stores and funnels the goods back to her working-class Oakland community. Demi Moore is Christie Smith, a haute couturier who embodies capital itself, treating fashion as a form of population control – selling color while styling herself in monochrome – and raging at the Velvet Gang’s repeated disruptions to her business.

Key points

• From his early work with the Coup, a subversive hip-hop group that gleefully mocked the genre’s prevailing culture of wretched excess on albums like Kill My Landlord and Genocide & Juice, Riley has…
• As a director, Riley uses dark comedy and magical realism to render capitalism a tangible bogeyman, suffocating the ambitions of young strivers.
• His debut feature Sorry to Bother You, which shares its title with a Coup album, skewers telemarketing avarice and predation; his limited series I’m a Virgo, about a 13ft-tall Black teen raised in…
• His latest film, I Love Boosters , turns shoplifting into a Robin Hood–style proletarian allegory, where stealing itself is a mode of survival.
• And it arrives amid renewed debate over retail theft, with some on the left framing small-scale “boosting” as a form of resistance , and labor advocates warning that it ultimately harms workers whi…