SPOILER ALERT: This essay contains spoilers for Beef season 2.
It took me way too long to finish the second season of Beef on Netflix. Every time I sat down to watch it, I would tire in the middle of an episode, nothing having to do with the quality of the show, but instead with the heavy themes of capitalism and Marxism that Lee Sung Jin, the creator, went to lengths to explore. And every time, my brain was too wary, my body too tired, to focus on it the way the show deserves.
Beef focuses on two couples: an older couple Josh (Oscar Isaac) & Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) and a younger one, Austin (Charles Melton) & Ashley (Caileey Spaeny). Josh and Lindsay have spent years chasing proximity to wealth and status and move to California to run a prestigious country club that caters to the 1 percent. Austin and Ashley are deep in the kind of naïve, all-encompassing, idyllic infatuation that only young love can produce. They don’t have much, but at least they have each other.
What sets this season off isn’t road rage à la season one, but something more dramatic in my opinion: the younger couple witnesses—and subsequently films—the older couple fighting with rage and violence. The footage becomes a tool of blackmail, setting off a chain of chaotic events, entanglements, and plot twists. The young couple’s hope is that the video can be leveraged to move up the ranks at the country club—and it works. But that’s only the beginning.
The real plot isn’t actually about the incident itself, but about what proximity to power does to people. As the season unfolds, nearly every relationship becomes shaped by usefulness. Beef suggests that capitalism does not merely shape our working lives but fundamentally reshapes our emotional ones too, conditioning people to approach love through utility, stability, leverage, and survival rather than emotional vulnerability and real connection, whatever that means. The tragedy of the show is not that love is impossible, but that under systems defined by scarcity and competition, healthy relationships require forms of emotional risk and mutual care that capitalism actively discourages.
At the center of the country club is owner Chairwoman Park, a billionaire whose wealth and influence quietly dictate the moral logic of everyone beneath her. Park embezzles money out of the club to cover up wrongful deaths by her younger plastic surgeon husband, Dr. Kim. As scandals surrounding the family begin to surface, the people orbiting Chairwoman Park become increasingly willing to lie, betray, and commit heinous crimes in exchange for power, protection, and upward mobility.
When Eunice, the chairwoman’s assistant, grows close to Austin, he begins to believe he’s experiencing something deeper than the idyllic infatuation he shares with Ashley. But what he mistakes for intimacy is actually just usefulness. While Ashley pours all her love into Austin unconditionally as a codependent compulsion, Eunice merely relates to Austin as someone tied to her own survival under Chairwoman Park.
If looked at under a Marxist framework, Josh, Lindsay, Austin, Ashley, and Eunice are all members of the working class “proletariat” who, in the end, should theoretically bond over their shared exploitation and worsening inequality plaguing their lives. In the eyes of Chairwoman Park, they are all the same, even though Josh and Lindsay have spent years aspiring to align themselves with the very people who exploit them.
I thought that Dr. Kim’s monologue did a lot of the heavy lifting to set up the ending of the show. He basically gives Austin, Ashley, and Lindsay a cautionary warning about their future, and an offer to escape the capitalist structure he failed to remove himself from, but they totally miss it because they don’t speak Korean. It’s my favorite scene in the show. Marx believed capitalism itself would eventually push the working class toward collective action because of their collective struggle. But in the end, collective solidarity never materializes. After all, they have to survive somehow. And the people at the top will do everything in their power to stop the working class from banding together.
In the finale, Austin realizes he has not been failing at love so much as participating in another form of transactional relationship entirely. What is most harrowing is what he does with that realization. Rather than stepping outside the system, he chooses it because it feels safer to inhabit a world where relationships are openly transactional than to risk the vulnerability of being unwanted. Moral compromise and exploitation become not obstacles to his ascent, but the very mechanism through which he rises. In the final scene, he and Ashley run the country club, just as Josh and Lindsay once did.
Josh is the only one who is able to break the cycle. He gives up status, leverage, and any possible return to that society when he takes the fall for the embezzlement. There’s no upside, no deferred benefit, no guarantee Lindsay even remains loyal to him until his prison release (she doesn’t). For once, love is stripped of status, utility, and self-interest. It exists outside exchange value. It lines up with the Marxist idea that once relationships are no longer mediated by utility, something more genuinely human can appear.
Capitalism and relationships are deeply intertwined. There’s no one without the other. Human relationships, and most significantly romantic ones, are tied to value, stability, future payoff, and security. Capitalism doesn’t just distort love but it conditions people to prefer exchange over vulnerability. Who do we want to be and what do we want? How can our partners help achieve that?
A lot of online discourse about Beef has touched on how the show paints love as futile. Lee Sung Jin isn’t offering up any groundbreaking statement about why love doesn’t work today. Every generation suffers under the pressure of capitalism, even when it believes it profits from it. Trauma is nothing new, we learn behavior from our childhoods, and we all bring our pasts into our relationships. All of this creates deeply destructive, and often dysfunctional, relationships that survive for the sake of mutual survival, convenience, and fear of loneliness.
The ending, as pessimistic as it is, felt oddly refreshing. I don’t think Lee is suggesting that love is futile, but rather asks why humans remain so obsessed with winning—both in romance and within society itself. How can we build truly healthy, harmonious relationships when we exist within an economic system that keeps us in a constant state of instability, competition, and self-preservation?
It’s not lost on me that there’s an insane rise in popularity of online relationship gurus like the “sprinkle sprinkle” lady and others championing women to be “in their feminine” to find a provider man. What’s framed as a return to femininity, softness, or traditional romance is actually a symptom of late-stage capitalism and further reinforces the patriarchy. Men are conditioned to believe that their only value is in their ability to provide, and women are conditioned to perform the emotional and physical labor that makes it necessary for that to happen.
What’s underlying these creators’ quippy videos is the pervading fantasy of relief. A lot of women are not necessarily fantasizing about dependence in the old-fashioned sense. They’re fantasizing about relief from precariousness, from optimization, from having to constantly monetize themselves, self-improve, negotiate, hustle, perform emotional labor, maintain beauty labor, build careers, and somehow still remain desirable and emotionally available. The “provider man” becomes less a romantic archetype and more a fantasy of structural stability in an economy that increasingly feels unstable and extractive.
Marxist feminists believe capitalism and patriarchy reinforce one another through the nuclear family unit itself: women uphold the family through unpaid emotional and domestic labor, while men control the family through provision and productivity. Patriarchy may privilege men structurally, but it also punishes male vulnerability. Which perhaps explains why so many modern relationships feel emotionally starved beneath all the language of “masculine energy” and “feminine softness.” Everyone wants tenderness, but no one feels entirely safe stepping outside the role they believe secures their survival. Under capitalism, relationships are economic arrangements. Everyone becomes a portfolio of assets.
I write all of this as at least three girlfriends send me daily voice notes about their dating woes and how “men are not lonely enough.” No one seems to be having a particularly good time dating right now. Some people persist in searching anyway, clinging to the possibility that intimacy might still redeem the exhaustion of modern life. Others are opting out altogether. As another friend says, “it’s a really bad time for straight men right now.” I would argue it’s bad for straight women too.
I have spent a great deal of time in psychotherapy and one of my favorite things my psychoanalyst has told me is, “The beauty of relationships is that you can craft the exact situation you want.” Which is why life feels most meaningful in the rare moments when people stop performing curated versions of themselves and allow their real desires, griefs, disappointments, and vulnerabilities to emerge. Someone once told me that a good first-date question should be: What are your core wounds, and how are you actively working through them? Which is an intense thing to ask someone you just met. But just imagine…what if we were able to answer this question honestly?
Maybe what people are actually searching for is not a perfectly optimized partner, but relief from performance itself. Relief from having to embody competence, desirability, status, control, self-sufficiency, emotional management, all at once. Perhaps this is why genuine vulnerability now feels almost radical: it briefly allows people to encounter one another outside the rigid rules of performance, transaction, and survival. There is light here, but it’s thin and often fragmented. That fragile refusal to give up on one another may be the most hopeful thing left in us.