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Eat the rich. š«š«š«
I agree with this. Man, now I want to write my own thoughts because Season 2 is so interesting to me. Especially since I was immediately reminded of American politics, with the two parties that are pushed to fight each other when really our true enemy is those trying to control us, when they were told to vote. I knew instantly that the game makers were trying to pit the two sides against each other. Especially with the red and blue colors. The other analogy being made is the two sides representing the red and blue pills from the Matrix.
Squid Game Season Two Analysis: Capitalist Ideology, The Illusion of Democracy, and The Necessity for Revolution
Why the second season of Squid Game is a great follow-up to the first season and offers us an even more radical critique of capitalism and its supposedly "free" and "democratic" institutions.
(Spoiler warning for both seasons. I won't go into too much detail, but some spoilers for the bigger plot points will be present)
I really enjoyed the second season of Squid Game, so I was surprised when I learned that a good amount of fans of the first season did not feel the same.
Because of that, I wanna give my thoughts on the themes and messages that this season in particular offers us and why I believe season 2 is, in many ways, even more radical than season 1 in its narrative choices.
Season One: The Dehumanizing Nature of Capitalism
Season 1 did a great job as a more general critique of capitalism (with some elements that are more specific to South Korea). It showed us a story of impoverished people that are so desparate that they find themselves trapped in a literal game of life and death that forces them to not only compete with other participants who are in similar financial situations, but to sometimes even betray and kill them just to survive and possibly win the big money at the end of all rounds.
To make it all even more cruel: It is soon revealed that the whole game just exists for the entertainment of rich elites who change the conditions of the game as they please when they are bored.
Needless to say: The game in Squid Game is a pretty heavy-handed allegory for the predatory nature of capitalism and how it literally kills us. The creator himself has stated this multiple times, since there are still people who (willingly or unwillingly) deny this.
There are already plenty of great analyses of these aspects in season 1 (I really recommend the video on YouTube called "Squid Game: Ideology and The New Soviet Man" by Kay and Skittles), so let's move on to season 2.
Season Two: The Setup
Our protagonist is once again Gi-hun, the only survivor of all games from season 1. He is practically a billionaire since he won all the money in season 1, and could therefore live a pretty comfortable life.
And yet he is fixated on one singular goal: To track down the location where the games take place to put a stop to them once and for all. Gi-hun feels guilty to spend his fortune on anything else than this one goal, since it's a fortune that came from the deaths of his friends and countless other people.
Gi-hun eventually finds himself back in the game after every other approach failed. Unfortunately for him, the tracker that he surgically implanted in his tooth got removed while he was knocked out and transported into the game. He is once again forced to participate in the game, since his rescue team that was supposed to save him and attack the island on which the games take place cannot locate him as of now.
The Greatness of Gi-hun: Resisting Hyperindividualism, Cynicism and Capitalist Ideas of Worth
I really like Gi-hun as a character. He started out as a deadbeat dad who got into severe debt because of his gambling addiction. Gi-hun is someone who many people that are entrenched in neoliberal capitalist ideology wouldn't feel much sympathy for at first, as he's shown to be pretty reckless and just overall far from a noble hero when we first get introduced to his character in season 1.
If you're from the west (or a country like South Korea which has a similar hyperindividualist capitalist culture), then you are taught to see Gi-hun's situation as something self-caused, as something he freely chose to be in with his own bad decisions. Furthermore, you're taught to see his socio-economic situation as a direct reflection of his value as a person.
In the series itself, the Front Man, the VIPs and even some other players in the game reinforce this way of thinking. They constantly express the sentiment that the players in the game are "worthless", "scum" and "trash" that deserves to be "filtered out" (killed) because they are responsible for the situation that they are in and have no worth anyway, as their socio-economic status shows according to this logic.
Gi-hun is someone who rejects all of this.
In season 2, we see him more determined than ever to save as many people as possible in the game, and to ultimately put an end to the game itself. He does not believe in the narrative that people's worth is determined by their socio-economic status, nor that they are completely self-responsible for their situation and therefore deserve to be killed in the game.
Gi-hun calls the game out for what it is: A predatory and cruel tool of rich capitalists that preys on people's fears and vulnerabilities to encourage the worst aspects of people's personalities to flourish, all just for the entertainment of rich investors who see the players as expendable and enjoy watching them die and betray each other.
Gi-hun isn't particularly gifted or talented, he's not the exceptional, flawless individual that neoliberalism fetishizes. He can be cowardly, insecure, frightened and even selfish, as we saw in season 1 when he lied to the old man to save his own life.
But at the end of the day, he is someone with an unwavering belief in the worth and potential of people despite what his hypercapitalist neoliberal culture (and people deeply embedded into it) constantly tells him. He's someone who, despite all his flaws, risks his life and happiness for that simple belief.
Gi-hun is the antidote to a deeply cynical, hyperindividualistic and neoliberal capitalist society that conditions us to not believe in the worth and potential of other people beyond their wealth and social status.
The Illusion of Democracy: A deceptive Facade of Free Choice and Equality
Let's look at the game itself this season, since there have been a few changes to its rules.
In this season, the surviving players are given the opportunity to vote after each round to either continue into the next round or to stop playing and divide the money that has accumulated so far among each player that survived. The more players die, the more money gets added to the final prize and the fewer people need to share the total sum with each other, meaning each player gets more money in the end if the majority votes to stop playing.
The staff of the game keeps emphasizing how the players chose to be part of the game, how they always have the option to leave, how the game respects free choice and values democracy, how everyone is equal in the game, and how the rules are fair and universal.
Unsurprisingly, this is all nonsense.
The players are not even aware that they are playing with their lives at risk until after the first game, a game called "Red Light, Green Light", which has a high fatality rate because once the first player dies, the shock and sudden rush of fear causes people to panic, leading to more deaths.
The first season also showed us that the VIPs can change the rules and conditions of the game whenever they feel like it, even during a round.
Age, health, knowledge and experience with the particular games that are being played in each round can also make the difference between life and death. Sometimes the games also straight up involve a factor of luck that the players have no real control over.
Then there's also the fact that not every player is in the same situation. Some players, such as Hyun-ju or Yong-sik, are shown to have severely more debt than others and lost significantly more in their life, which means some have the privilege to be all set again after just one or two rounds (if the majority votes to stop playing) while others will have barely earned enough money to fix their life, and would therefore need to play more rounds to achieve that outcome.
Some also have family and friends that need them, while others lost everything and have no one to come home to. All these factors make them unequal and shape the way they vote.
So basically: The players are stuck in a game that they didn't even know puts their life in danger until after they played the first round. The only reason they entered in the first place was because of their precarious situation that varies in severity from person to person (which means some have the privilege to vote to end the game early with their financial issues fixed, while others do not). Some players have more advantages than others in each round because of age, health, knowledge, experience or even just sheer luck. And the VIPs can just change the rules of the game whenever they feel like it.
Squid Game tells us very clearly that it thinks very little of the rhetoric of "free choice" "free democracy" and "equality" in a structurally coercive, brutal and predatory system with fundamentally unequal conditions such as our capitalist society.
The Front Man: Cynicism, Vote Manipulation and Counter-Revolution
A key aspect of the second season of Squid Game is that the Front Man himself pretends to be a regular player; he participates in the games among Gi-hun and the rest as player 001. The Front Man deliberately gets close to Gi-hun and even manages to win his trust pretty easily with his down-to-earth and kind facade, making him involved in Gi-hun's every move.
The Front Man is, in many ways, the opposite of Gi-hun.
He is shown in both seasons to think very little of the players and humanity as a whole. He sees the participants of the game as worthless trash that deserves to get sorted out. The Front Man believes humanity is selfish, greedy and cannot be better than what it is right now, which makes the game a necessary part of the world to him.
The Front Man is thoroughly entrenched in the cynical, neoliberal capitalist worldview that sees humans as fundamentally selfish and greedy beings that only have themselves to blame for their situations.
It is noteworthy that the Front Man is very fixated on Gi-hun, and even seems to grow a liking to him because of his unwavering belief in the value and potential of people that he upholds despite all the horrors and betrayal that he witnessed. This suggests that a small part of the Front Man might still have hope that Gi-hun is right and wants him to succeed in his goal.
But at the end of the day, we see that his cynical and neoliberal view on humanity rules over what little hope in a better world he might have.
As such, the Front Man ultimately sabotages Gi-hun's efforts whenever he can. When the vote was tied after the first round, he votes to continue into the next round so that more people die, something Gi-hun fought to prevent by making it clear to the other players that more people will die if they continue.
But this is not the only time he manipulates Gi-hun's efforts: When Gi-hun organizes an armed resistance to finally put an end to the game itself for good, the Front Man betrays him in the last minute by kiling members of the resistance group and then shooting Gi-hun's best friend in front of him in order to emotionally break Gi-hun and make him lose hope.
The Front Man is not just a despicable antagonist, he also serves as a pretty blunt example of a member of the ruling class that rigs elections and destroys revolutionary movements from within, a strategy that imperialist powers such as the US have utilized many times in history already.
When Voting isn't enough: The Necessity of Revolution and Class War
Despite Gi-hun's attempt to end the game for good having failed (at least for now), I don't believe the message of Squid Game's second season is one of resignation. Not only is the game shown to be fundamentally unjust and rigged, but voting alone is also portrayed to not be enough.
Throughout the whole season, those who vote to end the game never succeed. This is not a coincidence. The game is designed to make it the less likely outcome not just because of the involvement of Front Man, but because the game preys on people's despair and precarity, all while also encouraging selfish, greedy and reckless behavior in its very design.
But even if enough people voted to end the game: The next batch of players would just be thrown into the same situation Gi-hun and the others just escaped from. A successful majority vote to leave the game would save many lives, but Gi-hun's fight would be far from over. His goal to put a permanent end to the game would not be achieved yet.
The staff of the game also makes a deliberate choice to put a big X or O onto the jumpsuit of each player depending on how they voted. This encourages players to define themselves as either Xs or Os, which leads to hostility towards the players of the other fraction.
This reaches a point where players of both fractions plan to murder the other fraction in order to secure the next vote for themselves.
But Gi-hun puts a stop to that.
He realizes it's a deliberate distraction so that people fight each other rather than the game itself. He proposes that the players should instead organize together to fight the real oppressors that forced them into the whole situation in the first place.
They are not Xs or Os. They are impoverished and desparate people who were manipulated to participate into a literal game of death that requires suffering, betrayal and murder for victory.
The message of Squid Game Season Two is one of collective resistance and revolution:
The institutions of a fundamentally rigged and predatory class system are not enough to abolish the system itself. Voting can be used as a form of damage control, but it cannot replace collective action and organizing.
Instead of fighting each other, we need to organize together to fight the system itself. It is the only way we can truly all be liberated from the death game of capitalism.
Me reading Qin Zheng's speech during the coronation
there is something so incredibly poetic about leftists/tankies claiming to care about anti-imperialism whilst frothing at the mouth to stomp on any oppressed peoples that get hurt by a non-western gov.
they have no concept of empathy. all they know is āusa bad,ā so they will actively assist and promote other genocidal states as long as they hate the us. its amazing, right?
anybody else deeply hate spotify rn. like i used to use it all the time, i have around 50 playlists. but now it sucks ass. like 2 minutes of unskippable ads for like 5 songs. and now you cant even play individual songs! you canāt shuffle playlists. if you had your playlist on shuffle before the update, now itās stuck that way.
itās become more convenient to use basic youtube for music now. only 10 seconds of unskippable ads per song, plus you can play individual songs, make playlists, and shuffle/loop playlists!
i never thought weād see the day where youtube became a better music platform than spotify. but here we are. corporate greed ruins everything.
as a young afab queer person going into computer/data science, it makes me so sad that the face of the tech industry is a largely misogynistic homophobic transphobic trump-suck-up unethical billionaire bro club like musk, bezos, and zuckerberg. like, computers and the internet have limitless potential, but weāre using it for this????
i cannot wait until all these dipshits get whatās coming to them so a new generation of leaders can rise up and make tech kind.
Ok no but seriously the Montreal Marxist Winter School was amazing. Go next year. Do it. https://marxist.ca/school
If you are in/can make it to Montreal on February 17-18, consider registering for this year's Marxist Winter School! 100 years have passed since the death of Lenin, but he lives on in his writings and, to the best of our ability, in all of our work today. This is why the theme this year is "In Defence of Lenin." Hyped to meet new comrades and consider/discuss the revolutionary ideas and historical lessons of Lenin! See you there <3
Donāt cross picket lines, people!
Hundreds of union employees at three U.S. Nabisco bakeries that make Oreo and Chips Ahoy cookies and Ritz Crackers have gone on strike to protest proposed changes amid contract negotiations with parent company Mondelez International, Inc.
Approximately 200 workers at a factory in Portland, Oregon, have been on strike for two weeks and were joined on Monday by about 400 employees at Nabiscoās bakery in Richmond, Virginia. On Thursday, workers at Nabiscoās bakery in Chicago also walked off the job to go on strike.
Employees at a sales distribution center in Aurora, Colorado, also joined the strike on Aug. 12. All of the workers on strike are members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union, which announced the Chicago strike on Thursday.
āThis fight is about maintaining what we already have,ā Mike Burlingham, vice president of BCTGM Local 364 in Portland, told TODAY Food. āDuring the pandemic, we all were putting in a lot of hours, demand was higher, people were at home, and the snack food industry did phenomenally well.
āMondelez made record profits and they want to thank us by closing two of the U.S. bakeries (last month) and telling the rest of us we have to take concessions, what kind of thanks is that? We make them a lot of money. Itās very disheartening. How is that supposed to make us feel?ā
The union is in the midst of negotiating a new four-year contract with Mondelez after the previous one expired in May.
Union leaders say that Mondelez has proposed switching from eight-hour shifts, five days a week, to 12-hour shifts, three or four days a week, without overtime, and with increased mandatory work on weekends without extra pay.
itās getting so hot they have to start making up new colors for heat on heat maps
Democrats and Republicans are completely cool letting you die so long as their corporate donations keep coming.
Join the red terror
We have zefir and basic human decency
Don't mind me I'm just wasting my time arguing about the USSR with one of those "my dad left communism to pursue the American dream" kids
āhow can you be a communist youāre an individual and like freedomā
*grabs megaphone*
democracy in the workplace is still democracy people
The Industrial Revolution of the 1800s saw a boom in manufacturing and technological achievement. Products as diverse as car parts to cleaning supplies were being assembled, built, woven, or otherwise created on a scale never before seen. But this renaissance required workers - lots of them. In capitalist countries in the West, business tycoons made profit off of the cheap labor of thousands of men, women and children. Most of them worked up to 16 hours a day, in insanely dangerous conditions. But where there is oppression there is resistance, and in the 1880s, workerās unions across the United States began to fight for their rights.Ā Ā Ā
Many members of the movement at this time were communists and anarchists, who believed that the capitalist system exploited members of the working class. They demonstrated for an 8-hour day, as well as better wages and working conditions.Ā
In 1886, in the first days of May, thousands of Chicagoās working class went on strike. Ā In Haymarket Square, a meeting of up to 3,000 radicals gathered to protest the conditions they worked in. When the Chicago police came to disperse the demonstrators, someone threw a bomb. At least 8 people died, and more than a hundred were wounded.Ā
Three years later, in commemoration of what was called the Haymarket affair, the International Socialist Conference declared May first an international holiday for the worldās workers. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (now know as the American Federation of Labor) declared that āeight hours shall now constitute a legal dayās labor.āĀ
But the US no longer celebrates Labor Day on May first, or May Day. During the Cold War, May first became associated with the socialist and communist movements that it had been born from. President Eisenhower signed a resolution renaming May Day as āLoyalty Dayā, a holiday dedicated to American patriotism. We now celebrate Labor Day on September second.Ā Ā Ā
But hey, in recognition of global celebrations and the industrious working class, hereās a shout out to May Day. Equality and vacation days for all!Ā
Year 5: Surviving, Living, Changing
Surviving #TSS changed me. But one turn that I have never talked about is in my politics.
#WhenIWas is trending today on Twitter, and while that is about sexual assault and harassment, it strikes me as particularly, I donāt know, fateful that it would be today, April 19, 2016.Ā When I was 21, my world changed.Ā When I was 21, I died.Ā And when I was 21, I became alive again.Ā And everything that happened on April 19, 2011, everything that has happened in the five years since, so muchā¦
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āCommunism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriations.ā
ā Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels,Ā āThe Communist Manifestoā
Well, weāre in an unfortunate sitch Since our senate is headed by Mitch He helps bougies seem queens So letās build guillotines And, as Karl Marx said, āEat the richāĀ - Mods E, M, and B
I don't want to sound like a bitch Or end up dead in a ditch It's really not funny That college costs money So pleaseāreally, pleaseāeat the richĀ - Mod E
Friendly Fascism
Haven't we all though?
I donāt study genocides war crimes and human rights for fun. I study it bc my people have been at the foot from the very first genocide of the 20th century and previous attempts to exterminate my entire race. The fact that no one is speaking up when another genocide is at the brink of occurring to the ethnic Armenians living in Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) is mind blowing. I have to say Iām not surprised by the lack of effort - Americans, especially, are the most self interested humans Iāve met. This isnāt about narrative, this is about rapid belligerent individualism. We can philosophize all day about it but at the end - people donāt give a shit about anyone but themselves. There is rarely any altruism left in this world. As Monte said, no ones gonna fight for us, we will have to fight on our own to survive. The alternative is not an option.
@sarinezeitlian on IG for the photos