In the nail-biting new season of Netflix’s hit series Squid Game, players’ desperate circumstances push them to make fatally risky bets on individual success even when collective action might save them.

f the debut season of the Korean Netflix series Squid Game laid bare the ails of modern capitalism, its highly anticipated second season reflects the challenges to organizing against it.

Initially released in 2021, Squid Game became an overnight global phenomenon. In the dystopian survival show, financially desperate players enter into a series of challenges adapted from Korean children’s games in hopes of winning a hefty cash prize. The stakes are lethal: lose a game, and you’re eliminated — permanently.

Any time one of the roughly four hundred players dies, the total prize money is raised by 100,000,000 Korean won (approximately US$70,000). After each round, players are given the option to take a popular vote on whether or not to continue the games. If players vote to end the game before all six rounds are completed, the prize money will be divided evenly among the remaining players.

In season one, the players successfully vote to discontinue the game after just the first round. However, upon returning to the reality of debt and financial despair of their everyday lives, they decide to come back to the games. Rather than scrounging for pennies in the real world, players stake their lives for the chance to free themselves from poverty and debt. It’s the crushing exploitation and unfairness of the capitalist system that brings the players back to the game.

Squid Game 2 makes even greater use of voting, dramatizing the role of elections in upholding capitalism. (If you want to avoid spoilers, stop reading now.) In the second season, protagonist Seong Gi-hun returns after winning the first season’s games and the 38 billion won (approximately US$26 million) prize money. His aim is not more wealth; he wants to find the ring of sadistic ultrarich elites running the games and end them for good. After an insurgent paramilitary strategy fails, Gi-hun’s only option becomes to convince the other players to vote to stop the games.

The anonymous “gamemaster” delivers a lecture to Gi-hun on the “benevolence” of the games, which offer the poor and downtrodden “trash” of Korean society to redeem themselves through the alleged meritocracy of the gory games. Gi-hun is committed to proving him wrong. But rather than vote to save themselves, the players, racked with debt from medical bills to scam cryptocurrency investments, continue to narrowly vote to stay in the games. Lured by the ever-growing pot of prize money in an enormous glowing piggy bank, players convince themselves and each other that they can play “just one more game” before calling it quits.

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