Reality TV is everywhere. From game shows to talk shows, "funniest" home videos to "COPS", it can be found on most any channel every day of the week. And, in 1999, CBS released the first edition of its hit reality TV show, also known as the Survivor franchise. The premise of this "reality show" was to put sixteen contestants on a tropical island and see who the last person standing would be. Basically, it's a true Darwinian survival of the fittest (Class Lecture, 2002). Every week, the contestants would vote off the contestant who they felt did not help the others' chance of survival. In the end, the one remaining contestant would win the grand prize of $1 million for being the sole survivor. The first Survivor and its two sequels have proven to be major successes for the CBS network and its genre. It has created tremendous financial income for CBS, and it has also become one of the most consumed television shows in American history. According to the United States' capitalist beliefs, this would be a win-win situation since it generates money for the network and provides entertainment for the people watching it. However, according to Marxism, the contestants and the consumers of the show become pawns in the capitalist system and never become aware of it. In this paper then, it will be argued from a Marxist perspective that Survivor is an example of capitalism exploiting the proletariat, while at the same time, capitalist ideology makes the American people and viewers of the show unaware of this fact.
             Through the use of an analogy, it can be seen that Survivor is an example of capitalism exploiting the proletariat. The appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production, and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it. Even if the capitalist buys the labor power of his laborer at its full value as a commodity, on the market he extracts more value from it than he paid for it ("Communism," 1996...