He is clearly helping retain the absolute monarchy in power.

Bowser is not a freedom fighter either, he is comprador. But like all compradors, he doesn’t know it. He thinks once the USA lets him have power, he will be rich. In truth he is a Batista, only allowed in power if he succeeds and deposed as soon as he stops being useful.

How do you think he’s recruiting all the goombas and koopas for his army? And their weapons? Not to mention the logistics of maintaining and deploying such an army. Of course he has an international backer.

If Mario was a communist, he would let the bourgeoisie fight while building dual power with the many minorities of the mushroom kingdom’s past imperialist conquests.

To also settle this question, toads are NOT class-conscious workers. They are the elite, loyal guards of the monarchy (see the Sunshine leaks for example: Toads formed the Princess’ escort during her vacation to US-aligned Delfino island). They are a fiercely loyal, fascist guard meant to quell any worker uprising. Is it any surprise that this guard is all picked from the same ethnic group? Much like Banderites and Azovites in Ukraine, they have a few pogroms under their belt and terrorise civilians of the Mushroom Kingdom. Hopefully the opening up of the kingdom’s archives after a socialist revolution will shed some light on events that still have no conclusive answers.

In this struggle, you might think the monarchy is the progressive force compared to whatever the comprador Bowser will enact with help from the great Satan. It is true in a way, but this would ignore that the US is actually funding BOTH Bowser AND the Monarchy!

Much like Afghanistan or Cuba in their time, the US through the CIA and NED is funding everyone and their mother and will formalise relations with whichever group comes out on top.

The Mushroom Kingdom is not being funded, you say? Then how do they rebuild so fast after Bowser shells the country and the royal capital? The mushroom kingdom has no natural resources and their economy is predicated on tourism – what little there is. There is no conceivable way they should be as wealthy as they are.

Where do you think Bowser gets his bombs and weapons? In this way the USA is double-dipping: first it sells weapons to Bowser, then it sells loans to the monarchy to rebuild the damage those bombs caused. This is a Syrian scenario and is nothing out of the ordinary for Amerika.

In this analysis, Mario might be the synthetic left, appropriating common communist symbols (such as the color red) to prevent class-consciousness from forming and redirecting any revolutionary urge into the “left-wing” of the monarchy. He might as well be funded by the CIA for all we know.