Yesterday we saw the new play by our comrades in Antrakt7: Fairfly. It’s a play written by the Catalan author Joan Yago which tells the story of four white-collar workers who, upon getting the news of their potential layoff, decide to “change the world.”

Let me briefly summarize the story here. If you don’t want to get spoilers, skip this paragraph. Santi, Irene, Martha and Pere are white-collar workers employed by a small baby food manufacturer. The company decides to lay off an uncertain percentage of workers after being pressed by Novalis, their biggest distributor, to decrease prices. Hearing this unwelcome news, the quartet first decides to organize within the company to oppose layoffs. While writing a leaflet to invite other workers to organize, they start to argue: Do they want to fight collectively or find a way for their individual salvation? This argument eventually leads to the decision to found their own baby food company based on Pere’s revolutionary idea of using fly larvae as the main source of protein which is superior in nutritional content and much much cheaper. The company becomes a success once they overcome the biggest obstacle: convincing people to feed their babies insect-based food. They create a new market which, unsurprisingly, attracts competitors. Eventually their rate of profit starts to fall. Facing the risk of bankruptcy, they decide to give in and work with Novalis. This decision creates turmoil in the group and Irene decides to leave Fairfly because of ethical concerns. After two babies get hospitalized because of some other company’s larva-based baby food, Novalis decides to stop distributing Fairfly products, which means the downfall of the company.

It’s hard to do justice to the scenario with a brief summary. There are a lot of nuances in the story and the characters have their own quirks. All four are caricatures of a type of individual abundant in society: conservative, idealist, individualist and hypist. With the pleasantly surprising acting of the actors and actresses, Fairfly was entertaining. It was a funny critique of capitalism and neoliberal individualism that triumphs in society today.

After the play, Antrakt7 crew held a panel to discuss with the audience. Two people made comments about the play that made me realize something about the function of ideology. One lady commented that they couldn’t interpret the story as a critique of the system because in the end what caused all this was the flaws of the individuals. They were simply not “good” enough to not be transformed by the system that they were trying to change from within. Another guy said that they also couldn’t see this as a critique of capitalism because the play showed the capitalists (the quartet) as humans who, deep down, care about their workers, the environment and a better future. These comments were deeply concerning to me. They show that ideology doesn’t just function as a salience landscape but as a sense-making mechanism.

As a Marxist myself, I found the story to be a proper critique of capitalism. Attempting to change the system by participating in it naturally traps you in the Moloch. Capitalism is not bad because capitalists are evil. It’s bad because the system functions by transforming regular people into greedy individualists—there’s simply no other way to survive in it. Does my interpretation stem from my ideology? Yes. So do the lady and the guy who attributed all problems to the lack of morality in the individuals. Ideology precedes the interpretation. I was always wary of the notion that art can produce a short circuit for people to break through the mainstream ideology. Yesterday this further cemented for me: Ideology acting as a sense-making mechanism is going to distort the signal that you hope to cause a short-circuit with.