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The international success of The Hunger Games saga has been seen by some commentators as a sign of renewed interest in revolutionary ideas. The Guardian’s Ben Child recently examined the “anti-capitalist message” of the films in an article about “how The Hunger Games inspired the revolutionary in all of us,” while Donald Sutherland, the actor who plays the cruel and merciless President Snow, declared that he wanted The Hunger Games “to stir up a revolution” that could “overturn the US as we know it.” Many view the world described in the movies based on Suzanne Collins’ trilogy as a metaphor for our own society. This isn’t surprising — the extreme inequality between the districts and the Capitol of Panem, the technologically advanced city in the series where the elite live, is reminiscent of the world we live in. But the politics of The Hunger Games aren’t quite what they seem, and its heroine, Katniss Everdeen, won’t be inspiring an anticapitalist revolution anytime soon.

Cyber-Feudalism The world of The Hunger Games can be a metaphor for many things but certainly not for the capitalism we live in today. If anything Katniss lives in a cyber-feudal, rather than a neoliberal, society — a difference well-illustrated by the fact that the “districts” into which Panem is divided represent a caste society (additionally divided on the basis of race) rather than one based on class. The participants of the Hunger Games are seen as “tributes” that each district is required to deliver to the Capitol, mirroring an economic system based on feudal duties rather than the free market. Indeed, the Capitol’s wealth is amassed by the direct expropriation of goods from the outer districts and not through the mediation of the market. Political and economic power are unified in the hands of President Snow, who dispatches his troops, the “Peacekeepers,” to both punish rebels and enforce higher production quotas. So it is the extreme violence perpetrated by the autocrat’s henchmen rather than the impersonal logic of the market and the exploitation of free laborers that guarantee the accumulation of wealth. The whole system of Panem works thus through direct repression rather than through economic necessity. For example, geographic immobility (the citizens can’t move from one district to another) is implemented not by the lack of economic resources but by a legal caste system maintained by violence. It’s the exact opposite of the fantastical world depicted in Andrew Niccol’s 2011 film In Time. There, the characters’ inability to move from one “time zone” to another is directly dictated by their wealth (or their time, which functions as currency). The system normally works without violence; inequality and exploitation are direct consequences of market rules rather than violent expropriation. The “Time Keepers,” unlike the Peacekeepers, exist to make people respect the rules, not to maintain an arbitrary and authoritarian regime. The elites that live in the Capitol are also much more reminiscent of a decadent aristocracy than the bourgeoisie. The movies themselves insist on the aristocratic nature of the Capitol’s inhabitants by giving them classical Roman names — like Coriolanus Snow or Seneca Crane — and dressing them in flamboyant costumes and wigs that we might expect from the French ancien régime rather than capitalists today (it is thus relevant that Plutarch Heavensbee, the gamemaker who betrays the Capitol to work for the rebellion, bears a Greek name). And if the fact that thirteen districts were involved in the first rebellion against the Capitol makes a painfully obvious allusion to the thirteen original American colonies, it is again the memory of a rebellion against a monarchy rather than capitalism that is evoked. All of this is to say that The Hunger Games present a grab bag of allusions to historical systems of oppression (that are then augmented by contemporary dictatorial regimes in the two parts of Mockingjay) that make us think of anything except for capitalism. The most likely form of revolution inspired by the movies is actually one that attempts to establish a capitalist society rather than abolish it. Moreover, treating the universe of Panem as if it did mirror our world constitutes the quintessential neoliberal illusion. Far from helping us reveal our most pressing contemporary problems, the liberal ideological message of The Hunger Games is that the major problems facing society today are state domination, dictatorships, and the restriction of individual liberties — in short, everything except for exploitation and capitalism.

Ideology as Propaganda The Hunger Games is also a particularly clear example of modern blind spots regarding ideology. In all the movies the vast majority of Panem citizens are fully aware of the dictatorial aspect of the system. They maintain a critical distance from the official discourse and to the speeches of President Snow (they know it’s propaganda) but are resigned to their lot (they lack “hope,” as Snow would put it). They need only a spark to give them the will to overthrow the whole system. This vision, reproducing the common idea that ideology is only something imposed on us from the outside (generally from the state), diminishes ideology to mere propaganda. Ideology is made to resemble a pair of glasses that the state or some other source of power forces us to wear, distorting the true world and the power relations that define it. Slavoj Žižek argues that the genius of John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live — where it’s by putting on, rather than removing, the glasses that the hero becomes aware of his true world — is that it shows that to see ideology we need to wear the glasses rather than struggle to take them off. As Žižek writes, “we are naturally in ideology, our natural, immediate, sight is ideological.” Ideology is within us, in the way we spontaneously see the world. It is not simply imposed by an external force like the state or capital. The Hunger Games films’ representation of a society controlled by an authoritarian regime backed by a coarse propaganda apparatus doesn’t map onto the true challenge of our time. Today’s battles aren’t about struggling for freedom of speech or an independent justice system, but precisely the opposite: they’re about a society that has established the ideological consent of the vast majority of the population without any of the barbarian and violent excess depicted in The Hunger Games. Moreover, capitalism is implicitly presented as a solution to most of the concerns of the movie: we are not executed without a trial, we are not separated into districts by race, we have freedom of speech and of association. All these rights are — formally at least — perfectly compatible with capitalism.