Donkey Kong is a Communist.

Yes, Donkey Kong is a dirty, rotten commie.

It has become woefully clear to me that the original 1981 Donkey Kong arcade game is, in fact, a Marxist propaganda piece, perpetrated on unsuspecting American markets. Think about the way Donkey Kong is structured, I mean really think about it. Is it not just a stripped-down allegory of Marxist class struggle?

Our hero is Mario, a plumber and apparent first-generation Italian immigrant. His ill-advised mustache and trademark overall and hat combo (which are, suspiciously, colored red...) mark him as the representation of the common, workaday, proletarian everyman.

His nemesis is Donkey Kong, a monstrous ape who symbolizes the oppressive, bourgeois capitalist overclass impeding Mario’s progress up the economic ladder. Donkey Kong begins at the top of the screen in each level, automatically occupying the most advantageous position via some unarticulated privilege, but Mario must struggle to attain that lofty perch.



In the opening cinematic the platforms are evenly spaced, but Donkey Kong immediately slants them into a different configuration so that his barrels can roll down on you. This represents how easily the bourgeois can manipulate the work environment for his own gain.

The barrels themselves represent resources, an infinite supply of capital that Donkey Kong uses to hinder the progress of the little guy. Mario’s only weapon is the hammer, a working man’s tool which can, when the need arises, be converted into a weapon, which of course is why it graces the flag of the Movement.

Anyone who has played the game knows that you have to keep moving. If you stay still, then the fireball will eventually catch up with you. The fire, clearly, represents the burning need of the working man’s necessities; food, shelter, and clothing. To avoid being destroyed by need, Mario must always be moving forward. Only Donkey Kong, the rich elitist, has the luxury of remaining stationary.

Perhaps the captive woman symbolizes the working man’s pursuit of a happy domestic life, or perhaps we’re meant to associate her with Fay Wray from the original “King Kong”, in which case she becomes a symbol for fame and old-fashioned Hollywood glamor that serves as an opiate for the masses. Like all working class peoples, Mario believes that if he just works hard enough and climbs high enough he too can enjoy that happy, wealthy lifestyle.

But it never happens! When you get to the top, the next level starts and you end up right back at the bottom. Play for long enough and the game just resets. No matter how hard Mario works or how high he climbs, he’ll never achieve his goals.

His is a life of endless toil, a literally never-ending struggle against the machinations of a plutocratic primate whom he can never permanently vanquish. All of his progress is just an illusion. Surely there is no more poignant and heartbreaking metaphor for the plight of the working man than this?

By now I’m sure you understand how it all works. I don’t need to explain, for example, that the deadly spring mechanisms in level three represent how the industrial revolution destroyed the artisan class and how increasing reliance on mechanization has devastated modern labor. You have no doubt reached those conclusions on your own.

"Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor."

It’s all so simple once you take the time to put the pieces together. Those slimy pinko bastards have been slipping their ultra leftist revolutionary tripe into our arcades for almost thirty years!

But even the diabolically subversive Donkey Kong game pales in comparison to the terrifying Stalinist overtones of Tetris. Tetris, of course, is a game in which you combine interlocking puzzle pieces together in such a way as to cause stacks of them to vanish. Allow them to pile up too high and the game ends.

In Stalin’s “Marxism and the National and Colonial Question” he talks about the advantageousness of unifying disparate national groups in a common cause. Left to themselves, these various subclasses were easily exploited, much the same way the falling Tetris blocks will, without guidance, pile up and accomplish nothing.

Tetris requires an all-powerful central figure to dictate the position of the blocks and teach them to compliment each other, the way that the Russian Communist party did with the various, scattered peasant populations.

But wait, you say, don’t the blocks disappear when they’re put into the proper arrangements? Indeed they do, Comrade. However, that is for the good of everyone. If we let the blocks stack up too high, they would soon reach the top, and the game would be over for us all.

Sometimes is it necessary to direct them to move into a position that necessitates their own destruction so that the rest can carry on. “You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves,” after all.

That must be why the game is all about moving around blocks. It’s easier to comprehend those kinds of decisions when you think of them in terms of mechanical components instead of people.

Chilling, isn’t it?