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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SQUID GAME 2, AN ALLEGORY OF CAPITALISM VERSUS DEMOCRACY  
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Caitlyn Clark
January 8, 2025
Jacobin
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_ In the nail-biting new season of Netflix’s hit series Squid Game,
players’ desperate circumstances push them to make fatally risky
bets on individual success even when collective action might save
them. _

The futile elections in Squid Game 2 are a perfect analogy for how
capitalism constrains and compels the actions of the working class. ,
(No Ju-han / Netflix)

 

If the debut season of the Korean Netflix series _Squid Game_ laid
bare
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ails of modern capitalism, its highly anticipated second season
reflects the challenges to organizing against it.

Initially released in 2021, _Squid Game _became an overnight global
phenomenon. In the dystopian survival show, financially desperate
players enter into a series of challenges adapted from Korean
children’s games in hopes of winning a hefty cash prize. The stakes
are lethal: lose a game, and you’re eliminated — permanently.

Any time one of the roughly four hundred players dies, the total prize
money is raised by 100,000,000 Korean won (approximately US$70,000).
After each round, players are given the option to take a popular vote
on whether or not to continue the games. If players vote to end the
game before all six rounds are completed, the prize money will be
divided evenly among the remaining players.

In season one, the players successfully vote to discontinue the game
after just the first round. However, upon returning to the reality of
debt and financial despair of their everyday lives, they decide to
come back to the games. Rather than scrounging for pennies in the real
world, players stake their lives for the chance to free themselves
from poverty and debt. It’s the crushing exploitation and unfairness
of the capitalist system that brings the players back to the game.

_Squid Game 2 _makes even greater use of voting, dramatizing the role
of elections in upholding capitalism. (If you want to avoid spoilers,
stop reading now.) In the second season, protagonist Seong Gi-hun
returns after winning the first season’s games and the 38 billion
won (approximately US$26 million) prize money. His aim is not more
wealth; he wants to find the ring of sadistic ultrarich elites running
the games and end them for good. After an insurgent paramilitary
strategy fails, Gi-hun’s only option becomes to convince the other
players to vote to stop the games.

The anonymous “gamemaster” delivers a lecture to Gi-hun on the
“benevolence” of the games, which offer the poor and downtrodden
“trash” of Korean society to redeem themselves through the alleged
meritocracy of the gory games. Gi-hun is committed to proving him
wrong. But rather than vote to save themselves, the players, racked
with debt from medical bills to scam cryptocurrency investments,
continue to narrowly vote to stay in the games. Lured by the
ever-growing pot of prize money in an enormous glowing piggy bank,
players convince themselves and each other that they can play “just
one more game” before calling it quits.

The gamemaster, disguised as a player, gloats to Gi-hun that the
results of the elections prove his point: the players are selfish,
stupid, money-hungry, and not worth saving if they are not even
willing to save themselves. In other words, the players are “voting
against their own interests” and deserve whatever comes their way.

Yet far from illustrating ordinary people’s fundamental idiocy, the
futile elections in _Squid Game 2 _are a perfect analogy for how
capitalism constrains and compels the actions of the working class.

In _The Class Matrix_
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sociologist Vivek Chibber argues
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when a capitalist society lacks credible forms of working-class
organization, workers’ pursuit of individual self-interest is a
rational decision. Without labor unions and workers’ parties, the
costs of taking collective action against the capitalist class become
unreasonably high. Only when working-class organization exists do we
see a systemic, collective challenge to capitalism.

Chibber is arguing here against the ideas of false consciousness and
cultural hegemony. It’s not that workers are confused (the basic
premise of Friedrich Engels’s notion of false consciousness), but
rather that they are making rational decisions out of their own
material interest by taking individualistic action when there is no
existing form of organization that would make collective action
desirable or even possible.

This is a materialist retelling of a story often dominated by culture,
even among Marxist thinkers. For Antonio Gramsci, on a popular reading
of his work, the capitalist class uses its dominant position to shape
the ideas, beliefs, and values of a society to support capitalism —
a process called cultural hegemony, which again suggests that workers
have been duped. But for Chibber, it’s actually the material
structure of our society that primarily determines what workers do,
not their ideas, whether right or wrong. In Chibber’s words
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“Workers accept the system not because they find it legitimate or
desirable but because they see no other choice.” Capitalism
“remains stable because the ‘dull compulsion of economic
relations’ keeps bringing workers back to their jobs every day,
whether or not they’re happy, whether or not they’re satisfied.”

In _Squid Game 2, _we see this happening in real time as the players
repeatedly vote to continue the games, even after seeing others die
right before their eyes. Through the eerie speakers, the anonymous
announcer urges players to respect the legitimacy of the “free and
fair” elections, while threatening to punish players like Gi-hun for
attempting to convince other players to quit. All the while, armed
guards stand before the players in a line.

The players are not merely deluded. They’re not thinking
irrationally. Their choice in the game is made in the context of
a _lack of choice_ over their economic conditions outside the game.
They’re not “voting against their own interests,” but rather
soberly assessing their bleak prospects for resistance and betting on
individual success instead. Gi-hun’s task — the task of politics
— is to make collective action a viable, rational choice.

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Contributors

Caitlyn Clark is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Her
work has been featured in Labor Notes, More Perfect Union, and more.

 

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