Squid Game
And there we have it. The discussion everyone is currently having is Squid Game, the South-Korean TV series that has quickly climbed Netflix’s popularity chart. It seems like it’s been years in the making; steady trends of Korea-mania around the globe and the series’ own excellent performance have made it very reminiscent of Stranger Things’ trajectory from 2016. The plot is quite simple: put a bunch of indebted people together and make them play for 45.6 billion won. The winner wins, obviously. The loser(s), die. Think you can handle it yourself?
Pseudo-scientific communists reading this are rubbing their hands with glee. Has Squid Game transformed Republican Dimitri from a capitalist-upholding pig into a socialist proletariat? The answer is no. Thematically, the series is similar to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, a discussion about wealth gaps as well. Are both trying to show the flaws in capitalism? Not quite. It did not feel like it to me. Will it be a political discussion? Most likely. Moreover, Squid Game seems to refer more to the wealth inequality rampant everywhere. This applies to both capitalism and communism. No matter the era nor the government, there is always someone at the bottom of the food chain.
The games are run by wealthy people, an obvious allegory for how the wealthy treat the poor in reality. Those that are poor are often carrying enormous sums of debt, not to mention the daily struggle to make ends meet. The series shows Seong Gi-hun, the leading character, in desperate need of money to rejoin his immigrating daughter and also the exorbitant hospital fees his sick mother is bound to pass on. In fact, the main characters of the series all have their financial motivations to enter these games. Make no mistake, nobody is forcing the players to join this bloodbath, but the harsh realities of living miserably outside can only go on for so long. It is worth noting that nobody enters the game out of personal greed, more because they are cash-strapped enough to.
The nine-episode series is packed with savagery and rigorous emotional strains, and thanks to the help of social media hashtags, it has grown exponentially in popularity. Of course, the acting is phenomenal and everything looks beautiful. The memes have flooded the internet already. And yet, we should also ask ourselves why a series about human suffering fascinates us so much.
In defence of our messed up psyches, the series is very relatable on a personal level. Money is always such a taboo subject, especially for people in the middle and lower class bracket. We don’t get to buy the latest tech gadgets, we don’t get to maintain luxurious lifestyles, and we certainly don’t get to host survival games on a remote island. Instead, many of us can claim to struggle with hospital fees, groceries and God forbid, rent. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the weight of financial instability a constant backdrop, and having to watch our celebrities still live deliciously on social media, it is easy to point the finger at our broken system. The concept of survival has been cooking in the film industries for a while already. There are dystopian ones such as The Hunger Games and horror tropes like Saw. They all follow the protagonist in their bid to survive wave after wave of challenges. Hence, the impetus of Squid Game.
Capitalism
Starting with the system almost all liberals hate nowadays, everyone seems to have a different definition for it. It is coined as whoever makes the most capital and can generate the maximum profit until everyone else can inevitably get cyclically fucked. Then, there are those who outsource labour to countries who have essentially enforced poverty for the benefit of rich countries, all in the name of money from the wealthy elite. The driving force of capitalism would have to be the need to racketeer competition. In a nutshell, this system is the reason for oppression.
All 456 players go through a set of children’s games, and while it can cause a degree of cognitive dissonance (the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes.) On the soccer field, children tend to pick the fat kid to be the goalkeeper. In musical chairs, whoever doesn’t get the chair is left out. Failing to heed proper instructions during Simon says means elimination. These are children’s games with no obvious impact on society, but someone has to be at the wrong end of the boot. This playground, however colourful it may be, is eerily similar to the microcosm of dog-eat-dog capitalist system.
Socialism
Lenin famously said:
The goal of socialism is communism.
Let’s not go there yet.
Socialism talk is particularly prevalent in today’s generation, who are at the forefront of campaigning for social progressiveness. Interesting note, everyone’s definition of it is different as well. In my opinion, it is governmental control of banks, wages and prices, hospitals, and even further inroads into commerce and private industry. The big difference between that and communism would be increased power from the government to control everything. It’d be the ownership of banks, mass media, factories, retail outlets, hospitals, doctors’ offices, medical corporations, research corporations, unions, farms, ranches, real estate, without limit, in order to attempt a planned economy for a nation of hundreds of millions. Communism also bans voting, bans democracy, and bans all other political parties except the Communist party. It bans all news stations except the Communist news stations. It will use federal police and the army to stomp out any rebels. (The former USSR, for example, killed countless millions of rebels from 1917–1991.)
In order to lessen the burden experienced by lower-income families, politicians propose socialism, or at least some variation of it. Bernie Sanders calls it Democratic socialism, the pink-haired chick with they/them pronouns who’s obviously a she/her calls it Anarchism. The goal is to keep big corporations in check and prevent greedy merchants from taking advantage of down-trodden citizens. Who knows, maybe this would’ve stopped the games from happening.
What Next?
Today’s generation seems so hellbent on blaming everything wrong with society on capitalism. It is absolutely ridiculous to think that. Neither system is perfect and has flaws which its citizens can take advantage of. Socialist claim that real socialism has not been tried because of dirty capitalists’ interference, which means the whole operation is just compromised. They typically reference the US-Cuba trade embargo. On the bright side, socialist countries pride themselves on better healthcare, education, literacy and innovation than the capitalist countries at the same level of economic development. There’s always talk about raising taxes on the upper class to even out the playing field. Just look at the Scandinavian countries.
The Front Man insists that everything is equal, but we know all that’s not true. Disobedience still runs amok in the games. Think about the doctor who squid game guards give special privileges for harvesting organs to be sold in the black market. Cho Sang-woo discovers the honeycomb game before anyone else thanks to his childhood experience playing the same game. The point is, you can try to create a world as uniformly equal as you want, it will never last.
Man will always be man. There is no new man. We tried so hard to create a society that is equal, where there’d be nothing to envy your neighbour. But there’s always something to envy. (Enemy at the Gates)
Free healthcare certainly sounds good. In the US, people avoiding medical care because they can’t afford treatment has been a brewing problem for the past decade. Sky-high hospital fees can instantly empty out your savings, which is understandable when people start complaining about having to worry about missing out on their insulin medication. There are many factors that lead to this though. For the longest time, hospitals’ biggest competitors have been insurance companies. Looking back at insulin again, “when insurance companies started using co-pays for prescriptions, and when newer insulins (like Humalog, Novolog, Lantus, etc.) and delivery systems such as disposal pens, became available circa 2000.”, that was when human insulin prices went up. This has nothing to do with capitalism.
Reuters recently studied how “US Medicare patients might have saved money on their prescription drugs if they had paid out of pocket rather than using their insurance plan. Twenty-five states have enacted laws banning “gag clauses” that prohibit pharmacists from telling patients when this is the case. This lack of transparency is an unfair disservice and a betrayal of one of the key elements that make markets work: reliable information for consumers.”
To say that capitalism is this greedy moth ready to plague the world is comical. A good example of free-market capitalism employs competition, price transparency, and choice, something that merging all health sectors into one elephantine government program like “Medicare for All” does not. Like it is with business, we should reinvigorate competition by undoing bureaucratic burdens, and putting the choice back into the hands of potential patients. Do you unequivocally trust your government with everything? I doubt it. So why do you think that the government is more competent to manage healthcare finances?
Much like the characters in Squid Game, our biggest flaw is also an incurable need for improvement. We see someone with more money, without any need to worry about everyday finances, so we go through phases of desire, jealousy and then indignance. We want it too. In a theoretical Marxist world, there could not be any wealth gaps. Many self-proclaimed communist countries are more just state capitalists with large wealth gaps. So you basically have 99% of the population equal. Socialism and true communism are literally impossible to accurately achieve, because of our easily corruptible mindsets. Someone has to be the leader in this communist utopia, be it Mao or Castro or Stalin. Can you be honest with yourself and say you wouldn’t make a mad grab at power? Don’t forget that it’s a “one state — one party” system. A world without classes or money seems amazing, but humans need hierarchy, or at least some form of pecking order. How many times have our socialist-utopia experiments failed? Capitalism may be somewhat at fault for ruining the lives of thousands, but socialism and communism are somewhat responsible for millions. When we do attempt to follow this socialist agenda, the countries are just stuck in between a socialist or capitalist state, unable to progress in either direction. The citizens end up suffering. Communism can succeed if everyone is 100% onboard, meaning that nobody fully believes in it and doesn’t try to take advantage of another.
Fun factoid: Marx didn’t really describe how a communist country could actually work in practice, and things that he based his ideology on (Labor theory of value) easily fall apart under scrutiny. You then get into anarchist communism, which rejects Marxism and wants to skip transition states and the government’s involvement altogether. This idea certainly has more merit than marxism to me, but again we haven’t really seen it succeed on a large scale for a long period of time. Could it be achieved? Maybe. Has it been in reality? Not really. Should we keep trying to achieve real communism, hoping that we won’t turn out with failures like the previous ones? Depends on who you ask. Some see it as doomed to fail, while others see it as achievable under the right circumstances that places like the USSR and China didn’t have. Every thriving socialist country today can owe part of its gratitude to free-market capitalism. The Scandinavian countries’ robust social safety nets are paid for by sky high taxes. Communist China’s economic boom after decades of poverty and famine, began in Shenzhen’s free-market experiment. Every “successful” communist or socialist country today has incorporated a certain element of capitalism.
In a rather conservative approach as well, where limited government is the goal, capitalism aims to make both the buyer and the seller happy. Zero-sum game. But you and I are both tired of talking about this. So here’s a final question. How many anti-capitalists can actually give the definition of capitalism and objectively name the pros and the cons? I could go on and on about how good the market is, but here’s a statistic that might surprise you: 80% of millionaires are first generation. That means they weren’t born wealthy — they got there through the choices they made.
Back on topic
Don’t misunderstand. This is more of a defence of capitalism than arguing for socialism. What many of the articles discussing Squid Game do is create a scathing commentary for capitalism, claiming that despite the choices players have, it is still just another way for the elite to control the less fortunate. They try to lead the conversation into how we can blame discrimination and tragedy onto a free-market system, how it can even lead to racism and sexism. It tries to paint a carnivorous society that thrives on putting down others while promoting the elite minority. That is not the case. Squid Game is a depiction of what individual humans are capable of, regardless of wealth. When pushed to the brink, what terrible deeds are we capable of? Killing a friend?
Every single socialist influencer or friend you’ve got would not last a day in their utopia. Almost none of the famous actors and politicians preaching to the lower-class have made a significant difference. They’re all hypocrites. Self-proclaimed communist and BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors goes around playing monopoly with real estate. The intellectual Twitch streamer Hasan Piker made a video addressing his monthly income in comparison to the common day worker, but talks more about socialist theory than in practice. The annoying part about choosing between capitalism and socialism is that everyone always has a new argument supporting their point. Nobody can ever fully convince the other person.
I am hoping this Squid Game thing will not happen in real life, because that’s really messed up. However, I do understand how powerful the powerful have gotten, to the extent of being able to control people’s lives. In a sense, some governmental control over large corporations like Facebook and Walmart could be beneficial. You don’t want the rich to exploit the poor after all. A certain blend of capitalism and socialism might just be the best option moving forward. How much of what? I can’t answer. Maybe an emphasis on capitalism to encourage friendly competition? But what I can say dogmatically is that a Korean show about the struggles of poor people is not a platform to blatantly boo capitalism.
