 Squid Game, the breakout Korean series about players competing to the death for a giant piggy bank full of cash, is Netflix's biggest series launch, and the streamer CEO, Ted Sarando, says, there's a very good chance it will be our biggest show ever. Critics have argued that the show offers a devastating critique of contemporary capitalism. This could be seen as a metaphor for capitalism. The players represent the working class, and the guards, the middle class. In a Jacobin review headline, Squid Game is an allegory of capitalist hell, the writer of search that Korea's extreme inequality is Squid Game's central theme. A New York Times reporter wrote that it has tapped a sense familiar to people in the United States that prosperity in nominally rich countries has become increasingly difficult to achieve as wealth disparities widen and home prices rise past affordable levels. And the show's creator told Variety that I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society, something that depicts an extreme competition, somewhat like the extreme competition of life. Is there a theme more unifying in global pop culture than capitalism is bad? Asks Vulture writer Roxanna Hadidi in her recap of one episode, before continuing, it helps that the statement is true of course. But Squid Game has a much richer and more resonant message than capitalism bad. That was Frontman, the Darth Vader-esque manager of the game, chastising participants for violating the rules and ideological purity of this insulated world. Where the pink uniformed workers are all masked, with only symbols distinguishing their rank in the collective's hierarchy, as the elites sit cloistered, observing the spectacle from above. Does this sound like capitalism? Or more like another economic system that's haunted the Korean peninsula? North Korean escapee, Kang Savyuk, is competing in the games out of a desperation for money to bring the rest of her family over the border after a sleazy human smuggler ripped her off. Is that capitalism? Well, it's a market, but it's a black market that exists because of the horrors of the totalitarian communist state looming just to the north. More than a thousand people a year risk their lives trying to escape the democratic people's Republic of Korea, and the majority of the successful escapees settle in the south, according to the charity Connect North Korea. Pakistani Ali Abdul also finds himself in dire straits because of exploitation from a boss leveraging his immigration status against him. In other words, the consequences of a gray labor market emerging in response to state-imposed border control. And what about the main character? He's an unemployed gambling addict in trouble with loan sharks who's drawn into the game because his wife is threatening to move his daughter abroad with her new husband. Making a quick fortune is the only way he sees out of this. We later learned that his life troubles began after a strike at the car factory that killed his co-worker and caused him to miss the birth of his child. His story is based on the real-life 2009 Sangeong Motor Strike that ended in a militarized raid by Korean riot police. Now this is approaching a substantive critique of modern capitalism, except that even that is complicated by the fact that in the case of this real-life company, it had three years earlier been taken over by Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, a Chinese state-owned operation. Is that free-market capitalism? One key to understanding Squid Game's deeper themes is the distinctive wardrobe, in particular the green track suits the contestants all wear. The show's art director told The New York Times there are reference to the green uniforms of the Seimu Andong, or New Village Movement, a state-led industrialization program. This was government industrial policy, centralized planning, and like China's cultural revolution under Mao's communist regime, involved stripping communities of their local customs and identities through a program known as Misatapa Andong, or Movement to Overthrow the Worship of Gods. Yes, there are some obvious symbols of capitalist excess in the show, like the crass, golden-masked Westerners who watch the proceedings from a luxury box while placing bets on the desperate contestants as if they're the very racehorses our protagonist squanders his money on, or the arrogant, broke financial advisor who believes everyone gets what they deserve. And of course there's that giant piggy bank filling up with more money every time someone's eliminated from the competition. But just because a show portrays capitalism as a cutthroat zero-sum game doesn't make it reality. South Korea, unlike its communist neighbor to the north, experienced massive economic growth, the miracle on the river Han, from the 1960s on, thanks to market reforms, growth that raised the standard of living for rich, middle-class, and poor, far above that of most of its neighbors. Today the country has the 37th highest GDP per capita in the world and ranks 26th in the Fraser Institute's Human Freedom Index. As with so many market reforms, though, Korea's approach was less than perfect. A freer market doesn't mean completely free markets. Housing prices have skyrocketed as South Korea's idiosyncratic regulatory regime has encouraged rampant real estate speculation, and its loose monetary policy fueled troublingly high levels of personal debt and price inflation, trends that have accelerated in the COVID era. All of these are serious crises facing the country, and an increasing swath of advanced economies worldwide. South Koreans, like an increasing share of savers across the globe, are putting more money into cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, something the New York Times characterizes as emblematic of the get-rich-quick culture of Korea, but could also be the result of a crisis of confidence in centralized banking and the legacy financial system, represented by the main character's bottomed-out, hot-shot financial advisor friend. Maybe the reason for Squid Game's global resonance isn't its leftist critique of capitalism. Those are abundant in Hollywood, but a result of it tapping into something more fundamental and universal. A growing unease with systems of centralized surveillance and control. At bottom, this is what the game is all about. A central horror of Squid Game is that participation is voluntary, to a degree. Participants sign away their lives and their rights, which can only be regained with a majority vote. This conceit too misunderstands the nature of capitalism and contracts. In a truly free society, you always have the right of exit. Instead, the game's structure is more reminiscent of social contract theory, which is regularly employed to justify gross governmental violation of rights so long as those carrying them out are appointed through an ostensibly democratic process. Squid Game is not about volunteerism, but force, deception, and coercion. It's not about free markets and choice, but about dehumanization and forced assimilation into a collective. As the show's star told The New York Times, it's about people. I think we pose questions to ourselves as we watch the show. Have I been forgetting anything that I should never lose sight of as a human being? Our hero learns a lesson from a seemingly deteriorating old man who reminds him that sharing with others is a wonderful thing when done voluntarily. And in the end, our hero regains his personal agency at the last possible moment and decides not to play any longer, even with victory assured, leaving him battered and traumatized but with his soul intact. Squid Game isn't really about capitalism properly understood. It's about developing strategies for undermining and resisting authoritarian control and retaining your humanity under a system designed to strip it all away.