Review | Industry

Toby McKenzie-Barnes reviews Industry, a series that lays bare how the apparently impersonal power of finance capitalism is, in fact, deeply personal and viscerally material.

When I’ve chatted to friends about the BBC/HBO show Industry, the phrase ‘adult Skins’ has come up. It’s easy to imagine the cocky, horny teenagers of the hit 2000’s shows growing into these arrogant finance postgrads. This comparison potentially denigrates Industry’s exploration of the finance industry (along with Skins’ exploration of young adulthood) with the implication that the primary drives for watching are the stylishly presented sex, drugs and fabulous wealth. Looking past the latent insult, this analogy allows us to think about how these libidinal drives are inseparable from Industry’s deeper themes. Both shows come in and out of a melodramatic tone, giving us as viewers chances to explore fantasies of the extreme highs and lows of the journey into adulthood. 

Our protagonists, Harper, Jasmin and Rob, traverse their initial post-grad finance positions into the heights of the British class system. Every step along the path of upward class mobility is lined with orgies of chemical and tactile indulgence, with sharp directing and a brilliant soundtrack nailing the burning hot appeal of these moments. What were once the illicit binges and affairs of teenage years have become part and parcel of the social world of financial capitalism. While graduate-level critical thinking may be a bonus for their bank, Pierpoint’s grads, what their employer is really after is an instinct for high-stakes gambling in the global casino of finance capital. Players must manage the risks of both professional and extra-curricular activities and balance sex work, drug dealing, and illicit information trading – the unspoken lubricants of capital’s flows. 

Although scenes of characters staring at terminal screens while suspenseful techno throbs lend their trades an air of grave magnitude, often the most these gamblers risk is losing their jobs and descending into the professional middle class. The show makes clear how consistently and thoroughly lines have to be crossed for insulated city traders to be subject to the more direct dangers that befall working-class participants in the same kinds of criminalised and moralised activities. This is most starkly shown when we follow senior ‘execution guy’ Rishi’s descent into the depths of gambling addiction, with his continual doubling down eventually resulting in his underground bookie executing his wife, Diana.

As Xuanlin Tham reminds us in Revolutionary Desires, despite audiences’ increasing discomfort with sex scenes, they play a crucial role in telling us about how social position and power function in the fictive setting. In season 2, Rob’s relationship with wealthy client Nicole develops into an explicit sub/dom dynamic. When he grants her access to a younger colleague, the postgrad’s subsequent report of assault travels up the chain of command – where it is deliberately buried by a company executive. Nicole’s sexual aggression, which Rob initially tolerates with the understanding that it’ll be good for his career, is clarified as an institutionally protected behaviour through this arc. 

In the latter 2 seasons, the role sexual power plays in ruling class formation and maintenance is made increasingly explicit – particularly through Yasmin’s journey. When she refuses to help her drowning father, a publishing magnate who is also a serial groomer, on board the Yacht ‘Lady Yasmin’, the show makes a reference to the Maxwells that is hard to miss. Following this oedipal victory, her vulnerability to the legacy of her father’s crimes pressures her to marry Baron Henry Muck, entering into the protection of a powerful aristocratic-bourgeois family. Finally, in season 4, Yasmin and Henry are implicated in the fraud and sexual blackmail of tech founder Whitney, with their eventual financial ruin positioning Yasmin to sacrifice her husband and fully embody the show’s Ghislaine analogy – utilising sexual access to young women and girls to secure purpose and position within the ascendant far-right. 

This ending serves a dual function. Firstly, Yasmin increasingly mirrors her father’s relationship to underage women as sex objects, although this seems to be sublimated by viewing her father’s behaviour as ‘weak’ for preying on them, whereas hers is a strength to bring them and herself into proximity with power. Secondly, in a culminating conversation between the two women at the heart of the show, Harper has to confront the threat that even if she can enter the international bourgeois class, her position as a black woman means this ascendency will be fundamentally insecure as nationalist reactionaries take power.

In its increasing focus on the specific mechanics of an ‘Epstein-class’, Industry becomes a useful cultural object in offering its critique of finance capital. Over the course of the show, it shifts from a moral critique of greedy bankers’ love for coke-filled parties to a structural critique that reveals how these are merely lubricants that are useful for enabling fossil fuel deals at the COP. Obviously, we, as communists, should not be surprised that a glossy BBC drama doesn’t even attempt to address how working-class power could be built against such opponents. But there’s value in storytelling, which allows us to view our enemies as they are, flawed people using social mechanisms to enable capital’s accumulation. In its brightest moments, a show like Industry has the potential to spark, enliven and deepen our imagination of forms of confrontation.