This article appears in the April 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Around the time in the 19th century when Kier Eagan was founding Lumon Industries—in the world of Apple TV+’s Severance—Karl Marx was, in our world, arguing that when people go to work, they cease to be themselves. Does the worker “who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc. … consider this twelve hours weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shoveling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life?” He does not, Marx answered. For the worker, “life for him begins where this activity ceases.”
Severance’s dystopian premise is that Lumon has created a technology allowing “innie” workers to literally alienate themselves from their non-laboring selves (their “outies”), so they can function as—and consider themselves to be—new and different people, with no knowledge or memory of who they are outside of work, and vice versa. In the show, this is accomplished by a chip inserted into the brain, developed and marketed by a giant Apple-like corporation. And yet Kier Eagan’s original invention, along with the totalizing philosophy that Lumon Industries has brought to life over the past century and a half, turns out to have been a form of quiescence-producing ether, perhaps precursor and inspiration to the “severance” procedure. Put simply, he invented Marx’s “opiate of the masses.”
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It might seem strange that a giant capitalist corporation has made a show literalizing Marxist ideas, and that, over the course of the first season, our protagonists—a quartet of innie office workers engaged in bizarre, nonsensical computer “refining” tasks—not only develop class consciousness as antidote to their indoctrination, but they collectively conspire to rise up against their oppressors. This show, produced by Apple, Inc. (AAPL -4.85%), presents their revolt as wholly intuitive and natural. After all: What have they to lose but their chains?
Severance is actually one of a cohort of shows that emerged from the pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, and the #resistance era of the first Trump presidency with a kind of radical class politics embedded in their premise, something that would at least seem to be sharply at odds with their consolidated corporate-studio creators. In fact, like HBO’s The White Lotus and Disney’s Andor, the first scene in Severance opens with a (metaphorical) corpse who “comes to life” over the course of the season. If the floating body in The White Lotus tells a story of careless rich people and their working-class victims, and the dead man walking in Andor jump-starts the show’s excavation of how a revolutionary martyr is made, Helly R’s awakening on a conference room table offers an equally potent metaphor for what her corporate masters want a worker to be: an empty, confused vessel to be filled with dogma, exploited and consumed. (“Am I livestock?” she asks, before she knows anything else.) Her first impulse is to attack her manager, a wholly reasonable reaction that crystalizes the first season’s general vibe.
Much has changed, however, in the three years since the first season of Severance aired (to say nothing of the decade since Dan Erickson’s screenplay for that pilot episode caught the eye of Ben Stiller, whose production company would eventually sell the show to Apple). A script written during the Sanders campaign’s surprising success, and produced during the high-water mark of perhaps the largest protest movement in U.S. history, has in the years in which both progressive movements have been mostly crushed become a subtly but distinctly different kind of story.
In Season 2, the show not only shifts whose perspectives and stories it prioritizes, but what it seems to be critiquing.
Season 1 was about the alienation of office life, at a time when many workers-from-home could perhaps afford some nostalgia for the office. Season 2 opens with a parody of the way corporations attempt to co-opt revolutionary energies with rhetorical gestures and superficial reforms, coming, ironically, as corporations like Apple, whose CEO donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration, are throwing off the mask. In the immediate aftermath of their partially successful jailbreak attempt, the show’s protagonists are shown a glossy corporate video, celebrating their actions and introducing the new policies and worker amenities Lumon has been inspired—out of the goodness of their hearts—to establish.
It is often the case that television shows start with one premise and migrate, over time, toward another. Their production over time—as the zeitgeist shifts—may be what most distinguishes television as a storytelling medium: If novels or movies are conceived and produced as singular stories, the pilot episode of a television show is almost always completed years or even decades before anyone even starts to think about what to do with the finale. A show conceived with one set of plans will very often be subtly (or dramatically) transformed, for better or for worse.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing that Severance’s vibe has shifted, but in Season 1, Adam Scott’s Mark S and his three co-workers were workers, in a more basic and Marxist sense. Lumon Industries used surveillance, indoctrination, and torture to break them, and extract from them a form of labor which they could only regard as “mysterious and important” because they had no idea what they were doing, or why. As a dystopian refraction of workplace alienation, the show’s starting point was therefore profoundly critical of what it means to sell your labor to capital. Because our protagonists longed for full and complete lives—struggling for love and to make meaning of their work—their only option was collective struggle, and the formation of a newfound family in the process. They plotted, organized, and rose up to “burn this place to the ground.”
In Season 2, the show not only shifts whose perspectives and stories it prioritizes, but what it seems to be critiquing (if, indeed, it is). The writers efficiently isolate each character off on their own stories, most of which concern a love triangle of some kind. Workers struggle with each other, and innies find their interests in irreconcilable conflict with their outies. Though John Turturro’s Irving and Zach Cherry’s Dylan have compelling subplots, they have almost nothing to do with the main plot, in which only Mark S’s emotional labor turns out to matter. Meanwhile, managerial figures like Milchick, Cobel, and the Eagans are no longer unambiguously menacing (if occasionally comic) villains: By exploring their backstories, struggles, and traumas, Season 2 seems to suggest—sometimes in almost farcically contrived scenarios—that they might be sympathetic allies for the working class. If the plotting literally echoes the corporate propaganda it begins with—as the workers’ revolt inspires their supervisors to follow suit and rebel against the C-suite—something crucial has been lost when the show forgets about its workers (or, in the case of Irving and Dylan, literally writes them out of the office). What began as a more Kafkaesque black comedy about workplace anomie, with radical edges, becomes a basically conventional SF thriller.
Moreover, as the world outside the office comes more clearly into view, Lumon Industries feels less like a broad metaphor for capitalism, and more like a uniquely perverse and evil company. Severance’s world has much in common with ours—shared historical and cultural touchstones include World War I, MILFs, and the state of Delaware—but it takes place in a “sort of an alternate, vaguely now-ish timeline,” as Erickson has said, in which Kier Eagan not only founded Lumon Industries in the late 19th century, but transformed the world in doing so. But while the show’s outies live in a dystopian company town that has no real equivalent in our world (their cars’ license plates read “Kier”), the “severance” procedure is controversial even there, and severed outies are regarded with alternating pity and disgust. Instead of exaggerating our own reality, in order to expose the grotesque violence that we have come to normalize, Lumon is recognized as exceptionally twisted and evil in the show’s own timeline. If Lumon is an exaggerated version of Apple itself—which the show’s creators have stated explicitly—the exaggeration is so great that it makes Apple look, frankly, pretty good by comparison.
And however cringey Apple’s self-representations may be—from the 1984 Super Bowl commercial in which the personal computer breaks the spell of a Big Brother–like cult to the more recent, differently wince-inducing framing of the new iPad as the omni-tool constructed by crushing all the others—Lumon’s explicit appeal, in the world of the show, is not creative tools for living but wouldn’t it be great to turn off your brain? It’s exactly the point that capitalism has never sold itself this way. In the show, nearly every character who isn’t literally an Eagan eventually rejects the sales pitch.
Seeing it this way helped me answer a question that has bugged me from the show’s beginning: Why does this show seem to take place in a kind of capitalist version of the USSR? An engraving of Kier Eagan’s head in Lumon Industries’ mid-century headquarters is unmistakably reminiscent of famous side-portrait of Vladimir Lenin, and Dylan wears what might as well be a Karl Marx mask at one point. A variety of other little Easter eggs are scattered through the show for sharp-eyed viewers to accumulate, from names that line up in evocative ways (“Mark S” sounds like “Marx”; “Kier Eagan” sounds like “Reagan”) to the fact that Mark S wears a Soviet-era Vostok Komandirskie watch. The endlessly wintry backdrop resembles a Siberian climate zone, and there are far too many Slavic names for it to be a coincidence. Meanwhile, the show’s drab, utilitarian cars and pre-digital technology—a nonsensical mix of outdated machinery with futuristic capabilities—nicely evokes the Soviet bloc’s technological lag behind the West (as well as, more generally, the time period when the Cold War burned the hottest).
At the risk of deducing a blueprint for a show that may not even have one—Season 2 ends on a cliffhanger, as usual, a mess left for Season 3’s writers to make sense of—I think Severance asks this question: What if, in the 19th century, a capitalist visionary had taken the historical place that was occupied by Marx in our timeline? And what if the revolution he inspired produced a corporate dystopia instead of a communist one? After all, despite the winking references to Soviet communism embedded in the set design and alluded to in the script, no one within the show ever references the USSR or Marx or Communism; whatever else it may have in common with our reality, the world of Severance does not seem to contain the Bolshevik Revolution, gulags, or the KGB. Instead, we find ourselves watching a familiar narrative about late communism—“cynical workers doing meaningless tasks on outdated technology to fulfill the opaque mandates of a strictly hierarchical organization that doesn’t seem to turn a profit but does justify itself according to a utopian creed,” as someone aptly observed—but this time, it’s a capitalist Soviet Union. Perhaps outside of the state of Kier, and outside the bounds of the show, the socialist leader of the free world is building a parallel hegemony to that which brought about glasnost?
In any case, the show’s reliance on Cold War tropes and iconography illustrates how inadequate its critical edge is to the state of contemporary capitalism, and state control. Severance may explicitly iterate Marxist concepts, but the show’s actual critique is always reserved for a kind of dystopian capitalism that resembles—especially in folk memory and triumphalist propaganda—the United States’ historic enemy, a communist adversary that did not, in the end, have very much in common with the oligarchs now ascending to the towering heights of the U.S. economy and government.
It may be true that founder-oriented corporate hagiography can tend toward the cultish—and Big Tech companies might resemble mini-states, or even aspire to break away into “network states” that can function as libertarian enclaves—but the substance of Lumon’s authoritarianism is distinctly Soviet bloc–style state control. Its universal surveillance, indoctrination, incarceration, and torture goes far beyond anything any company like Apple has ever been accused of. How much can a critique of communism-with-American-characteristics have to say about the tech oligarchs currently hitting “delete” on the entire concept of government?
After all, our timeline really does have billionaires proposing to put chips in our brains, but Severance’s Lumon is overt and brutal where contemporary technologies of control disempowerment are subtle, distributed, and algorithmically layered; it is sincere and self-righteous where today’s titans of tech are cynical, ironic, or even unashamedly full of bullshit. In Severance, Lumon is being undone by its true believers, who feel betrayed by their faith in the company (which is perhaps a not wholly inadequate account of what happened to the USSR). But the defining characteristic of our reactionary tech broligarch masters is their sneering, trollish nihilism. As Elon Musk’s relationship with Vladimir Putin hits right on the nose, they resemble the Soviet Union far less than the oligarchy that replaced it and feasted on its corpse, after communism fell.
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