How do you explain a country’s economy through popular series? Read below the opinion piece by prof. Ilya Levine for the renowned online magazine, Quillette, about the political economy of the Korean series squid game.
What the Korean hit gets wrong about capitalism and right about government.
Squid Game is back. The market voted with its clicks and wallets and Netflix obeyed, producing two more seasons of the hit Korean thriller, which many have argued is a critique of capitalism. The show follows desperate and greedy contestants as they try to make their fortunes in a deadly underground game. Their suffering is watched by the ultra-wealthy VIPs who fund the sadistic spectacle. While they may enjoy the show’s pulp violence, some Netflix subscribers surely like to think they are consuming thoughtful social critique at the same time. However, Squid Game’s critiques of capitalism miss the mark.
Squid Game fits the anti-capitalist mould with its themes of exploitation, inequality, and ruthless competition. Nonetheless, the game is a poor metaphor for market capitalism. The contestants are recruited under false pretences and prevented from leaving. In a free market, people enter into contracts voluntarily, without fraud or coercion. Forced labour—literally at the point of a gun in the show—is more characteristic of pre-capitalist systems like serfdom and anti-capitalist systems like communism. Under the latter, all labour is forced in the sense that everyone must work for the state and attempts to leave that state can be deadly. However, some have it worse than others. Many Marxist regimes have used labour camps to brutally exploit and punish suspected enemies.
Communists can also sell their subjects’ forced labour abroad. Cuba sends thousands of doctors to work overseas while its own healthcare system crumbles. The regime converts their labour into both propaganda and hard cash, keeping up to ninety percent of their earnings. These doctors endure isolation, threats of retaliation, and harsh working conditions. Life is even worse for the North Koreans who toil in Chinese factories. They describe “enduring beatings and sexual abuse, having their wages taken by the state, and being told that if they try to escape they will be ‘killed without a trace.’” Their hard currency earnings are stolen by the regime to buy the loyalty of the elites. Imports of luxury items more than doubled in the year after Kim Jong Un became the third Supreme Leader. Tens of millions of dollars were spent on imported high-end alcohol, electronics, and luxury watches in a country that is chronically reliant on foreign food aid. North Korea’s juxtaposition between the lavish lifestyles of regime VIPs and the suffering populace hews closer to Squid Game than does South Korean capitalism.
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