Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Squid Game and minor spoilers for Battle Royale and The Hunger Games. It also discusses suicide and sexual assault. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, contact a suicide prevention organisation near you. For those in the US, you can reach the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1–800–273–8255 or find them online at suicidepreventionlifeline.org. If you are in the UK, you can call The Samaritans on 116123 or visit their website at samaritans.org.
In the most direct class warfare narratives, a working-class underdog or underdogs battle against a greedy and openly disdainful elite. Such explicit depictions of the struggle between rich and poor remain vital in an era where politicians and PR departments tell us that the very companies ransacking our planet and eroding our quality of life are our benevolent allies. Nonetheless, there are conflicts fought within capitalism and aesthetics of capitalism that these naked rich vs. poor narratives do not depict.
Proponents of capitalism often point to market competition as a strength of their chosen economic system. Because everyone within a capitalist society is pushing to outdo each other, we theoretically end up with the best products and services. We can point to many areas of the economy where capitalist forces actually reduce the market competition, but there is another tack to take in criticising this philosophy. The breakthrough 2000 film Battle Royale describes a society in which all parties are in conflict and observes that it is an atrociously violent one.
Canonically, Battle Royale is about children living under the yoke of an authoritarian government, but it has long been seen as a satire of a highly capitalist Japan and even world. You could say that Battle Royale is an exaggeration of contemporary politics: That we neither expect children to compete in the labour markets nor does anyone die in trying to sell labour to an employer. However, not only is artistic exaggeration capable of bringing overlooked truths to the surface, but in some parts of the world, child labour is a reality, and the children that don’t work, starve. In many countries, the losers of the labour market are condemned to violence and even death. And while, in many developed nations, a child can’t go to work, they still exist in a state of competition with their peers from a young age. Many modern parents are aware that they have to make their child look exceptional compared to the pack if they are to enter a successful career post-education.
Still, one bizarre reality of the last couple of decades is that not only have capitalists gone into overdrive to disguise this violence, but they may even publicly sympathise with some members of the working class. In 2012’s Hunger Games, the people who subject teenagers to a battle royale also present themselves as invested in those teens’ successes. They extol the virtues of the combatants and generally do not acknowledge that they are the ones setting them against each other. If we didn’t know better, we’d conclude that the rich in The Hunger Games had nothing to do with organising the competition and that it had arisen outside of their control.
That dissonance between the attitudes of these rich characters and their actions may seem inexplicable were it not for infinite real-world examples of the same thing happening. The Hunger Games allows us to see the rich’s ostensible acts of charity and empathy not as dulling class conflict but perpetuating it. This false altruism lets the elite avoid looking like the bad guy and maybe even convinces them that they’re not. The titular Hunger Games’ existence as a media spectacle also reflects the modern obsession with “poverty porn”. The media and the rich love stories of poor people who break their backs to make ends meet or citizens who “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” to become one of very few who ascend through the classes. The fetishisation of the suffering of the poor and the suggestion that class mobility is possible are both boons for anyone running a system where the poor work long hours for little reward.
Still, even The Hunger Games has its limitations. Protagonist Katniss Everdeen is an example of someone who pulls herself up by her bootstraps. Within the film, she becomes the rich’s poster girl for the “good” worker. In the real world, capitalists often express opposition to social programmes that may help the poor because they worry about the people who don’t fit the Katniss mould. “We’d love to provide social support for the working class”, they say, “But we help people who help themselves. If someone takes to crime or drugs or inadvisable loans, if they’ve gotten themselves into that mess, they must get themselves out of it”. Fearmongering over helping the “wrong” kind of poor people is an essential tactic to rescind help from all poor people. But what if there was a battle royale story about the humanity of the wrong kind of poor person?
In 2021’s Squid Game, protagonist Seong Gi-hun is a gambler and alcoholic unable to pay back the loan he has taken from organised criminals. He lives with his mother, whom he hassles for money, but whom he tells not to work so much. He is further unable to provide for his daughter. Gi-hun is also the hero of the series. The programme concerns a group of 456 indebted South Koreans who enter a game to win a share of 45.6 million Won (about 38 million American dollars or 28 million British pounds). Unbeknownst to them, the tournament involves playing a series of children’s games (red light green light, marbles, etc.) with losers facing execution. Squid Game’s story is unambiguously about working-class in-fighting and starts with Gi-hun describing the titular game: a real pastime for Korean children. For someone who hasn’t heard the rules of Squid before, they can seem arbitrary and comically complicated, but this is also the nature of labour under capitalism as Squid Game views it.
While Gi-hun’s hard-working mother toils away at her job, he visits the bank where he wracks his brain to remember the PIN to his and his mother’s bank account. The symbolism is clear: it’s not just that Gi-hun lacks money but also that his access to gaining money is limited. He uses the cash he withdraws to bet on a horse and makes a substantial win but is soon chased by the gangsters from whom he took his loan. Running from them, he collides with a pickpocket who steals his winnings: Kang Sae-byeok. Gi-hun losing his prize is in line with the show’s general view of poor peoples’ fate under capitalism: even when they find a way to make money, they often still lose. We will later learn that Gi-hun’s financial failure isn’t for lack of trying. He worked at a car manufacturing plant but was fired in a mass-layoff caused by the owners running it into the ground. He also had two businesses of his own, but both went under.
When the criminals catch up with him, he promises to pay them in a month. Their leader cuts open his nose and has him sign a contract in his blood. The agreement says that should he fail to pay off his debt, the loan sharks will take his kidney and then his eye. Gi-hun meets with his child daughter, Ga-yeong, for her birthday. He gives her the present of a cigarette lighter in the shape of a gun, saying that with increasing gender equality in the world, even women in her generation will go to war.
He will later learn from his mother that his ex-wife and her new husband plan to move Ga-yeong to the United States. Gi-hun’s mother drums it into his head that this will drive not just a geographical gap between him and his daughter, but a cultural one too. A lawyer friend of Gi-hun’s tells him that he can gain the legal right to see his child if he can prove that he has a reliable income. The protagonist will also make a surprise visit to the hospital where he finds that his mother has developed diabetes and could lose her foot. The two do not have health insurance as Gi-hun cancelled it for monetary reasons.
While it is easy for media to abstract money and thus ignore the essential purpose it serves for the impoverished, Squid Game grounds it in material and emotional needs. For Gi-hun, the money is not a figure in an account: it is there to preserve the body of him and his mother and save them from agonising violence. It is also the only security he has to ensure that he can see his child. Many characters in the series either need the money for their families or to escape immediate death. In this sense, all the working class are indebted under capitalism; even if we don’t owe anyone any money, we must continually strive to earn it or face the suffering or even demise of ourselves and our dependents.
Gi-hun meets the recruiter for the murderous games: an impeccably polite and formal man who approaches him with a briefcase full of cash. He accuses the man of being a proselytiser and running a pyramid scheme, which, in the moment, seem incorrect assessments. However, with the games being a metaphor for competition under capitalism and the show viewing that competition as a well-packaged pyramid scheme, Gi-hun is basically on the money here. The representative of the rich challenges him to a game of ddakji, from which the protagonist stands to win a handsome sum.
Gi-hun loses, but the man says he can “pay with [his] body”, slapping him in the face on each loss as a way to make good on the bet. While this penalty and the deadly tournament it foreshadows may seem to overstate the cost of living under capitalism, consider the fate of Gi-hun’s mother. She has earned what she has by working to the point where she can barely walk. Later in the series, we see that factory worker Abdul Ali has lost two fingers working as a manual labourer. The expectation under “legitimate” employment that Abdul or Gi-hun’s mother risk their bodies does not differ from the extortion that the loan sharks or the recruiter visit on Gi-hun: threatening to take his organs if he doesn’t pay up. All of these people are paying with their bodies.
The game recruiter beats Gi-hun at ddakji again and again. While it may appear that the rich and poor have an equal chance of earning money, you cannot help but get the sense here that the wealthy man has had training and experience that Gi-hun hasn’t. Eventually, Gi-hun wins and reflexively goes to hit the recruiter, but the recruiter stops him and hands him his money instead. It would seem that paying with your body is only something the poor have to do. And as an internship for an exploitative company can be a gateway to a long-term abusive dynamic between employer and employee, ddakji is just bait to invite Gi-hun to the events proper.
To participate, all the contestants had to sign away the rights to their well-being. Again, the programme draws an equivalence between the contract that Gi-hun signed with the criminals and the one he signs for the rich. One he marks his name on with literal blood, and the other merely metaphorical blood, but the outcome is the same. However you slice it, debt is the threat of violence.
The staff who run the murder games dress in red jumpsuits, and all wear masks. Throughout the season, they emphasise rules and formality. In their language, they appear to have enormous respect for the game’s players and for its regulation. They use the speech and dress of capitalists in our time: official and bureaucratic, even while enacting terrible violence. Classical music piped into the games facility further creates the impression of the upper class and proximity to them. The red suits state that keeping the staff anonymous preserves the integrity of the games. The administrator of the games, The Front Man, later tells his employees, “once they find out who you are, you’re dead”. That is, if the workers started to recognise the people engineering class conflict for who they are, the whole system would come tumbling down.
The staff ferry the participants to and from the games through a complex jumble of overlapping staircases. There are visual parallels between the staircase room and M.C. Escher’s famous lithograph Relativity. The staircases suggest that the games convey mobility upwards through the classes, but the Eschereqsue take on them posits that it’s a lot more complicated than that. What appears to be up may not be up at all, or at least, only exist relative to other ups. The games are not the get rich quick solution they initially appear to be.
Much of the show is about how the characters deal with class conflict. Even individual people vary their techniques, but they do all tend towards certain behaviours. Business school graduate Cho Sang-woo is ruthlessly pragmatic, even when aiding those around him. North Korean defector Kang Sae-byeok is a loner. Pakistani immigrant Abdul Ali is trusting and deferent to those who might help him. The gangster Jang Deok-su brutalises and intimidates. The wild-eyed Han Mi-nyeo uses seduction and an aggressive diplomacy that rarely convinces people. Player 244 prays to the Christian God, which ultimately does not work either.
Gi-hun is selfless and helpful. He wrangles other friendly players into a team, makes participants feel better when they’re failing, and stands up for those who aren’t going to be the strongest in the games on their own. One of the most defining friendships Gi-hun forms in this place is with the elderly and infirmed Oh Il-nam. Il-nam cannot provide any tactical benefit to Gi-hun. In fact, he’s likely to slow him down, but Gi-hun gives everything he has to lift the prospects and spirits of Il-nam.
Every character I have mentioned here, however, has some survivability. Many of the contestants react by perishing out of pure fear as they attempt to run from the guns shooting down players in the first game: red light, green light. Later in the games, some participants will die of suicide. The childrens’ games that feature throughout the tournament show us that competition within the working class is not just violent, but that it’s juvenile. Competing with the people around you in the rich’s arbitrary framework for a chance at a fortune is not the height of maturity. It is childish, and it is debasing for those who participate in it. Even the colourful staircase room looks like a child’s play area.
Appropriately, the uniforms of the contestants and the staff match the gameplay of red light, green light. The contestants are in green; they give the “green light”, allowing each other to get closer to the cash, either by dying and thinning the herd or through mutual support. However, the staff, who claim to be the contestants’ ticket to wealth, are marked as red lights, disallowing their progress. After the opening game, the contestants are brought back to the shared sleeping area where a transparent plastic piggy bank descends from the ceiling. It fills with the winnings that would have gone to the now deceased contestants. It’s a visual metaphor for how the poor are incentivised to eliminate each other because it gets them a larger slice of the pie. However, we cannot overlook the importance of the placement of the piggy bank. It hovers far above the participants’ beds: in the rich’s system, unimaginable wealth is always in view of the working class, yet far out of reach.
The second episode, which looks at the wider casts’ lives outside the game, is appropriately called “Hell”. The operators of the game state that they run it democratically and that the players may leave at any time if 50% or more of players vote to end it. In doing so, all players forfeit all prize money. This episode mostly deals with the false choices that are presented to the working class under capitalism. Just as capitalists represent working-class in-fighting or taking a particular job as a personal decision, the organisers of the games represent participation as a matter of free will. However, outside the game, just like outside of capitalist employment, many potential contestants face different kinds of violence, and the collective pressures on their families and lives force them back into the game.
Asking someone to choose between violence and violence is not a choice, and holding a gun to someone’s head or to their family’s head, as capitalism often does, does not result in true consent. These people are coerced by severe threats. As Han Mi-nyeo says, it’s just as bad out there as it is on the inside. The difference is, inside the games, there’s at least the illusion that the poor could receive a financial windfall. We further see the absurdity of advising the working class to just pick the right financial decisions in the stories of Abdul and Sae-byeok. Abdul has sacrificed for his job, but his boss withholds his wages, which happens a lot in the real world. Sae-byeok paid someone to get her family out of North Korea but got scammed and must start from square one. What is she meant to do? After all, there’s not a legal channel for getting people out of North Korea.
We could also read this episode as a satire of the hollowness of elections under capitalism. The voters can press the red button or green button, but neither changes the nature of the world they live in. They are still subject to the same economic circumstances and threats. It may even explain why voters choose conservative parties and candidates. They’re living in hell either way, but the more conflict-heavy hell promises a tidy cash sum with which they could ascend out of it.
This episode also sees Gi-hun talk to his childhood friend Sang-woo outside of the games. A business prodigy in his home town, Sang-woo spiralled into debt because he stole from his company and bought up some securities that didn’t yield the value he expected. Gi-hun and Sang-woo are both gamblers, but we don’t describe betting on the stock market as gambling. It is only the working class kind of gambling we taint with a stigma.
In the fourth episode, “Stick to the Team”, a fight breaks out over food rations, as other contestants accuse Jang Deok-su and his gang of stealing them. In reality, the organisers reduced the amount of food available to turn the players against each other. That night, a riot takes place within the dormitory that kills no small number of contestants. Squid Game establishes a relationship here: as the resources that the working class have to take from dwindle, violence becomes more common. The impoverished will hurt each other even outside of the direct coercion of capitalist workplaces.
Episode five, “A Fair World”, pays special attention to the theme of inequality under capitalism, especially demographic inequality. When The Front Man discovers that some of his employees have been sneaking information about the upcoming games to a player, he has them all executed. He makes the contestants aware of the situation and apologises for the breach of equality. In private, The Front Man talks about how discrimination such as sexism, that exists in the outside world, does not live in the game: the players can escape from it on the inside. It is reflective of the promise that many neoliberals make of capitalism’s fairness. If employers want quality labour, then employers are apparently disincentivised from discriminating based on skin colour, gender, sexuality, and other group characteristics as none of these things indicate labour quality. However, what it’s rational to do and what a human will do are not the same thing.
In “Stick to the Team”, the players were instructed to form their own teams for the games and most roundly rejected women. Using broad statements about women’s strength and stereotypes about their interests, they conclude that women will provide inferior labour to aid them in their work. At first, this assumption appears to be correct as the teams are forced to compete in tug of war games, but it’s strategy that wins the day rather than brute force, and many of the women come out on top. In that episode, Han Mi-nyeo became an example of how class conflict encourages misogynistic behaviour from women. She plays up her own skills using stereotypes and trashes women who could otherwise be her allies to get ahead.
It is also true that people may not be able to perform on equal footing in capitalism due to disability. Sang-woo tells Abdul to hide the two missing fingers on his hand in this game as other players won’t want to work with someone who appears weak. Of course, the cause and effect are not worlds apart. Abdul’s body was damaged by his capitalist work, but that damage also impedes his ability to work under capitalism.
In episode six, “Gganbu”, players split off into teams of two, only to discover that in this game, those sets of two will be playing marbles against each other to live. This switch-up is symbolic of the uncertainty in the job market of whether you will be cooperating with or competing against any one person. Gi-hun is pitted against his beloved friend Il-nam who appears to be suffering a psychotic episode. With his life on the line, Gi-hun exploits Il-nam’s apparent psychosis to lie about the bets each of them have made and ultimately win the game. Perhaps the greatest tragedy in Squid Game is not any one death, but this moment in which Gi-hun, the ultimate altruist, abandons his principles to kill his best friend. We can see in the episode that the same conditions of economic desperation that force people to rely on each other also force them to compete with each other. Therefore, misery and betrayal are inevitable.
In episode seven, “VIPS”, a group of high-rollers arrive to see the games conducted in person. Usually, they would watch via television. The VIPs observe the contestants playing a game in which they must make their way across a glass bridge one by one. The bridge consists of pairs of panels. In each pair, one pane will support the player’s weight, and one won’t.
This is the height of the show’s refutation of capitalism as a meritocracy, as winning this challenge is effectively random. The chamber for the glass bridge game frames it as a literal circus. While capitalism claims to allow people to apply their full capabilities to a task, this episode also shows that pressures on labourers often make them do the opposite. One contestant claims to have worked as a glass manufacturer for decades and have the ability to tell the trick panels apart from the stable ones. His technique works, but eventually, Sang-woo pushes him to his death as the players are coming up on the time limit, and he wants to move things along. A similar criticism arises in other episodes as a lack of food and sleep impacts the players’ performance in the games. Poverty does not lead to quality labour.
The VIPs describe the contestants as animals for turning on each other in much the same way real working-class people are often described for this behaviour. However, the show highlights this as highly ironic, as it’s these elites who’ve built this cutthroat system. In Squid Game, they wear animal masks and relax in a jungle-themed lounge while deciding who the “animals” are. We also further see the idea of the games being fair fall apart as The Front Man repeatedly puts his thumb on the scale, often at the request of the rich. He drops a hint about the nature of the game when the rich feel their workers are dragging their heels and then turns out the lights when it seems like they might have too great a chance of success. At the end of the round, all the remaining glass shatters, meaning that even Sae-byeok, who won the round fairly, is injured. Again, you can do the intended work under capitalism and still be the victim of violence, just like Abdul or Gi-hun’s mother.
One of the VIPs tries to take a waiter serving him into a private location and rape him. While in the modern world, we are seeing increasing cultural opposition to the sexual assaults by the powerful, it’s rare that a piece of media that does what Squid Game does and relates that capacity for sexual violence to the financial dynamics of people. It’s not just that the VIP is a powerful man who tries to violate someone; it’s the financial power imbalance between him and his employee that lets him try it.
By episode eight, “The Front Man”, it has become clear that Sang-woo is a calculated traitor. Within this context, we might call him a class traitor. He appears to have engineered the social structure and the competition around him to leave him with the enemies he thinks he’s most capable of dominating. It’s likely Sang-woo’s statuses as the business school graduate and the middle-class financier that make him so dangerous to the working class. By the close of the fifth round, he, Gi-hun, and Sae-byeok are the only three contestants left alive. As successful participants of the class struggle, they get to enjoy suits and fine food. Gi-hun tries and fails to prevent Sang-woo from killing Sae-byeok. By this point, the class struggle has not only pushed Sang-woo to disagree with Gi-hun but to hate his generosity actively.
In the background, police officer Hwang Jun-ho is undercover on the island, investing the games. Back in “Hell”, Gi-hun tried to alert the police to the existence of the games, but the force did not take his claims seriously. Although he forwarded the department the phone number for the games, the woman who answered the cops sounded like a regular citizen who had no idea what was going on.
Jun-ho did, however, follow up on the mystery, looking to find out what happened to his brother In-ho who disappeared under circumstances similar to Gi-hun’s. When Jun-ho faces down The Front Man, he tells him that the police will be on their way, only for The Front Man to remind him that the Korean police have never been quick to act. The Front Man removes his mask in front of Jun-ho, revealing himself to be In-ho. He then shoots Jun-ho. All of this constitutes Squid Game’s opinion on the police and class conflict.
The police are not the ally of the working class and do not take the violence that they suffer as part of class struggle seriously. The rich put on an entirely different face when they communicate with the police as opposed to the workers. More than that, the police work for the rich as key facilitators of the violence. Should a “good” cop try to reform the system from the inside, they will simply be swatted down by a more senior cop. One night in the facility, Gi-hun has a traumatic flashback to the police violently assaulting his co-workers for protesting against the car manufacturer that fired them. The event mirrors the real 2009 Ssangyong Motor Company protest in which Korean police did the same thing.
In the final episode, “One Lucky Day”, Sang-woo and Gi-hun fight to the death in a high-stakes version of Squid. Gi-hun brings Sang-woo to his last legs but refuses to kill him. He invokes a vote to end the games. As there are now two players, if he vetos the competition, the requisite 50% of players will be able to trigger its termination. Sang-woo stops him by plunging a knife into his own neck so that Gi-hun can win and use the prize money to help Sang-woo’s family. Capitalism again incentivises self-destruction.
As The Front Man delivers Gi-hun back to his hometown, the protagonist expresses confusion and outrage over the games. In-ho tells him to think of his experience as “a dream”. This lines up with the staff’s practise of using sleeping gas to knock out contestants so that they cannot tell where they are being transported for the games. Entering a dream is a common metaphor in film and literature for sinking into a delusional state. The person believes themselves to be conscious but is, instead, perceiving a false world. In Marxist theory, “false consciousness” refers to the phenomenon of the working class taking on the ruling class’s ideology. Members of the proletariat pursue a profit motive, believing the rich that it will bring class mobility, but this is, is course, untrue. It’s worth remembering that in Squid Game, every player believed they could walk away with a share of the money, but it was one player in 456 that survived.
Returning to his home, Gi-hun finds his mother dead. He spends the next year without touching his winnings, feeling guilt over how he earned them. He is a different person than when he went in: unresponsive, depressed, and deeply scarred. Despite having won the games, he appears more impoverished than before he participated. Like Gi-hun’s mother, many real people die waiting for that big stroke of luck that will finally lift them out of poverty. On a cold winter night, a year after the games, Gi-hun is invited to an apartment block by Il-nam, who is miraculously still alive.
Il-nam, now on his death bed, reveals himself as the man running the games. He is a moneylender, just like Gi-hun’s debtors. He explains that despite his wealth, he and his associates got bored. It’s a grim fact: that all that violence didn’t bring even the people at the top happiness. But, he participated in the games because he wanted to feel like he did as a child. In retrospect, he coerced Gi-hun to return to the games, and his subtle suggestions aided him. The game was rigged from the start. What’s more, Il-nam’s false competitor status reveals how the rich masquerade as friends to the impoverished, even while killing them, and how they appear to be subject to the same rules as the poor but are clearly not. It is also symbolic of how the rich prey on the generosity of working people.
Il-nam tells Gi-hun all this in exchange for one last game. Gi-hun bets all his money that someone will help a drunk and homeless man freezing to death in the street before midnight. Il-nam bets against him. The rich are always betting against the poor being able to help each other. In the seconds before midnight, a kind citizen arrives with help for the man, and on the stroke of twelve, Il-nam dies. The move from one day into the other is a cultural symbol of transition, and here it is at the point that generosity starts that the rich predator dies. The parasitic class cannot exist in a world where regular people mutually support each other. It is also here that Gi-hun can effectively set out to fight against the system that created the games. He is armed with knowledge of the system, a motivation to stop its operators, and a belief in human generosity.
In the next scene, the camera sweeps past a television showing a news report about the record debt Koreans are suffering. The problem of debt is now in the foreground of Gi-hun’s world. He has his hair restyled, finds Sae-byeok’s little brother, and leaves him and a suitcase full of money with Sang-woo’s mum. He heads to the airport to visit his daughter, but along the way, sees the recruiter again playing ddakji against a man. He chooses not to get on the plane, instead, pursuing the creators of the game. He is now class conscious. Thanks for reading.
