This essay is adapted from my Turkish-language CultPost podcast episode, first released in May 2024. It has been translated and edited for international readers while preserving the original argument, examples, and theoretical framework.

Few television dramas of the past decade have traveled as widely as La Casa de Papel (Money Heist). First broadcast in Spain in 2017 and later acquired by Netflix, the series became a global phenomenon. Its red jumpsuits, Salvador Dalí masks, and use of “Bella Ciao” became instantly recognizable elements of contemporary popular culture. Across its five-part run, the series follows a group of outsiders who, under the direction of the Professor, carry out spectacular heists targeting the Royal Mint and the Bank of Spain.

The series’ popularity raises an intriguing question. Why has a story about attacking the symbolic and material centers of capitalism appealed to millions of viewers living within that very system? Its narrative is openly rebellious and frequently adopts the language and imagery of revolution. Yet the rebellion reaches its audience as a commercial entertainment product, distributed by one of the world’s most powerful digital platforms.

I argue that La Casa de Papel is best understood as a Marxist allegory produced by the culture industry. The two parts of this claim may initially appear contradictory. A Marxist allegory would seem to challenge capitalism, whereas a product of the culture industry is designed to circulate within it. This contradiction, however, is precisely what makes the series culturally significant. La Casa de Papel turns anti-capitalist desire into a spectacle that can be consumed without disturbing the social order it appears to oppose.

The Culture Industry and the Management of Discontent

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer introduced the concept of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment, first published in 1947. Writing in the shadow of fascism, the Second World War, and the expansion of monopoly capitalism, they asked how modernity’s promise of emancipation had produced new and devastating forms of domination.

The Enlightenment had elevated reason, individual freedom, and progress as the foundations of modern society. By the twentieth century, however, reason had increasingly become instrumental: it was used to organize states, bureaucracies, industrial production, and populations with unprecedented efficiency. Systems that claimed to advance civilization could therefore subject human beings to violence, conformity, and control. This is the central dialectic identified by Adorno and Horkheimer: enlightenment, when reduced to calculation and domination, can turn into its opposite.

The culture industry is part of this process. The term refers to the industrial production and circulation of culture through cinema, radio, popular music, advertising, and entertainment. Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument is not simply that mass culture distracts people or communicates explicit propaganda. Rather, it organizes leisure, pleasure, and imagination in ways that make the existing order appear natural and inescapable. Cultural products offer excitement, individuality, and even rebellion, but these experiences arrive in standardized and marketable forms.

People may recognize the injustices surrounding them. They may feel the pressures of insecure employment, growing inequality, surveillance, or social exclusion. The culture industry does not necessarily silence these frustrations. More often, it absorbs them, gives them an attractive narrative form, and sells them back to audiences as entertainment. The spectator experiences the emotions of criticism and resistance while remaining a consumer.

This mechanism remains highly relevant in the age of streaming platforms. A viewer who worries about surveillance and the power of digital technologies can watch Black Mirror and find those anxieties dramatized on screen. The same viewer may then return immediately to the platforms and devices that produced the anxiety in the first place. Recognition does not automatically lead to action. Critique itself becomes a commodity.

La Casa de Papel operates in a similar way. Blue-collar and white-collar workers alike may experience frustration with a system in which wealth is concentrated, employment is precarious, and social mobility is increasingly uncertain. Many people carry a latent dissatisfaction with capitalism without having a clear political language or collective means through which to act on it. Netflix identifies this critical potential and transforms it into an intensely pleasurable narrative of rebellion.

A Marxist Allegory

Several elements of La Casa de Papel invite a Marxist reading. The most obvious is the Professor himself. He does not simply plan a robbery for personal enrichment. He assembles a group of people who have been marginalized, criminalized, or otherwise damaged by the existing order. He turns their individual grievances into a collective project, teaches them its logic, and demands discipline and solidarity.

The Professor rarely participates directly in the action inside the target. His role is theoretical and strategic: he develops the plan, interprets the system, anticipates the response of the state, and provides the group with a shared consciousness. In this respect, he can be read as a figure resembling Karl Marx—the intellectual who formulates a critique of capitalism and theorizes the possibility of collective struggle. Berlin, by contrast, acts as an organizer in the field. He translates the Professor’s theory into practice, leads the group inside the building, and enforces its rules. Together, the two characters embody the relationship between revolutionary theory and revolutionary action.

The characters’ assumed names reinforce this allegorical structure. Berlin, Tokyo, Rio, Nairobi, Denver, Helsinki, Moscow, Palermo, and Stockholm abandon their personal identities and name themselves after cities. On the practical level, these aliases protect them. Symbolically, however, they give the group an international character. Marxism has never been merely a national project; it imagines solidarity among working people across borders. The names evoke a transnational collective whose members unite against institutions of capital and the state.

The heists themselves are also presented as more than crimes. In the first operation, the group occupies the Royal Mint and prints new money rather than simply removing money that already belongs to someone else. This distinction allows the Professor to claim that they are not robbing ordinary people. In the later operation against the Bank of Spain, the country’s gold reserves become the target. Both institutions represent the material foundations of state and financial power. By attacking them, the group appears to challenge the legitimacy of the economic order rather than merely seeking a place within it.

The series reinforces this interpretation through a carefully constructed revolutionary iconography. The red jumpsuits create a collective identity, while the Dalí masks erase individual differences and provide an image around which public support can gather. “Bella Ciao,” historically associated with the Italian resistance, gives the group’s actions an emotional connection to anti-fascist struggle. These symbols allow an armed robbery to be experienced as a popular uprising.

This helps explain the intensity of the audience’s identification with the characters. Viewers are not encouraged to see them simply as criminals. They are outsiders taking on institutions far more powerful than themselves. They appear courageous, loyal, and willing to sacrifice their lives for one another. Watching them, the audience can temporarily imagine that it too is confronting the system rather than accommodating itself to it.

Revolutionary Romance and the Problem of Violence

The series’ revolutionary narrative nevertheless rests on a troubling treatment of violence. La Casa de Papel draws on a popular image of classical revolutionary Marxism in which social transformation occurs through a sudden and forceful rupture rather than gradual reform. Its protagonists do not organize workers, build institutions, or develop an alternative political order. They seize symbolic centers of power through weapons, hostages, and spectacular confrontation.

Violence is therefore not incidental to the narrative; it is one of the main sources of its excitement. The series repeatedly frames armed action as bravery and sacrifice. Because the robbers are presented as the “good” side of the conflict, their violence appears more legitimate than that of the police or the state. They insist that they do not wish to harm the hostages, form emotional bonds with some of them, and repeatedly describe themselves as a family. These elements invite the audience to interpret coercive relations through the language of intimacy and solidarity.

The transformation of Mónica Gaztambide into Stockholm is a clear example. She begins as a hostage but later falls in love with Denver and joins the group. Within the emotional logic of the series, love seems to cross the boundary between captor and captive and to confirm the moral appeal of the robbers. Yet this romantic framing also softens the coercive conditions under which the relationship begins.

Berlin presents an even more disturbing case. Charismatic, intelligent, and terminally ill, he is portrayed as one of the series’ most compelling figures. He is also cruel, authoritarian, and sexually violent. His relationship with the hostage Ariadna takes place under the threat of death and cannot meaningfully be understood as consensual. Nevertheless, the narrative repeatedly aestheticizes Berlin’s behavior through his charisma, his cultivated romanticism, and, finally, his sacrificial death. The series ultimately recalls him as a tragic revolutionary hero, an image reinforced by the recurring use of “Bella Ciao” throughout the narrative. The violence he has inflicted—particularly against women—therefore risks being pushed to the margins of the audience’s memory.

This contradiction matters because the series associates liberation with masculinized forms of domination. Its characters claim to be escaping an oppressive system, yet they frequently reproduce coercion within their own supposedly revolutionary space. The fantasy of emancipation is therefore entangled with spectacle, sexualization, and graphic violence. Rather than inviting sustained reflection on the ethics of political struggle, the series turns revolutionary rupture into an affective and visually compelling experience.

A Revolution That Changes Nothing

The most important limit of the series becomes visible when we consider the consequences of the heists. The characters challenge the state, seize money or gold, and eventually escape to distant locations where they can enjoy their wealth. Their individual circumstances change dramatically. Society does not.

Capitalism continues to function, economic inequality remains intact, and the lives of working people in Spain are not transformed. The protagonists redistribute wealth to themselves, not to society. What appears to be a revolution therefore ends as a highly successful exit strategy. The characters beat the system, but they do not replace it. Their goal is ultimately to secure private freedom through extraordinary wealth—the same promise on which capitalist fantasy itself depends.

The crowds that gather outside the Bank of Spain make this contradiction especially visible. Wearing Dalí masks and celebrating the robbers as figures of resistance, the public offers enthusiastic symbolic support. Yet the people remain spectators. Their material conditions do not change after the heist, just as the lives of Netflix viewers do not change after watching the series. The crowd within the narrative mirrors the audience outside it: both participate emotionally in rebellion while remaining politically inactive.

The Dalí mask illustrates how the culture industry performs this conversion. Whatever its original artistic associations, the mask becomes a reproducible commodity and a globally marketable sign of dissent. The same is true of “Bella Ciao,” which gained renewed popularity through the series. Historical symbols of artistic transgression and anti-fascist resistance are detached from their contexts and incorporated into the branding of a commercial entertainment franchise. Revolution becomes an aesthetic that can be worn, streamed, shared, and purchased.

Adorno and Horkheimer write that “the culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises.” It promises fulfillment but continually postpones it, offering the image of satisfaction in place of the thing itself. La Casa de Papel promises the overthrow of an unjust order, yet what it delivers is the pleasurable spectacle of that overthrow. Viewers pay for a subscription, consume the fantasy of revolution, and then return to the same routines, hierarchies, and inequalities that made the fantasy attractive in the first place.

This does not mean that the series is politically meaningless, nor that its viewers are simply deceived. La Casa de Papelgives recognizable form to widespread anger about inequality, state power, and financial institutions. Its popularity demonstrates the persistence of a desire for collective resistance. But it also reveals how easily that desire can be contained within the circuits of commercial culture.

The achievement and the limitation of La Casa de Papel are therefore inseparable. It allows a global audience to imagine itself in rebellion against capitalism, but only within a narrative that capitalism can distribute, monetize, and absorb. The series does not suppress anti-capitalist desire. It packages that desire as entertainment, offering viewers the emotional rewards of revolution without the difficult and uncertain work of social transformation.