This is the first of a three-part review of the young adult sci-fi trilogy by Suzanne Collins that made the NY Times best seller list. It is widely being used by high school reading and English teachers and has now been made into a much-anticipated motion picture.
Hunger Games, the first book and also the name of the series, begins at some indeterminate future time after natural disasters, droughts, storms, fires and finally a brutal period of wars have devastated North America. While there are futuristic, sci-fi gimmicks throughout the story, the main characters are very down-to-earth, mostly young adults, from working-class families. The society described is an openly fascist one with many parallels to the current day U.S.
Following the natural disasters, a nation “Panem” was created with a luxurious “Capitol” city of the rich rulers and their allies (somewhere in the Rocky Mountains), surrounded by thirteen districts whose workers and resources are exploited for the profit of the rulers. The districts rebelled but were defeated. District Thirteen was apparently leveled into dust and left abandoned as an example of how futile any acts of revolution would be against the Capitol rulers.
‘Games’ Extreme Version of Capitalist Culture
The rulers also tried to discourage workers’ rebellion by creating a yearly “Hunger Games” in which each district was forced to send a boy and a girl (chosen by lot) between the ages of 12 and 18 to a televised battle to the death where only one child can survive. The Games represent an extreme version of the current capitalist culture’s obsession with “reality” shows where there can be only one winner in survival, love or creative pursuits, or where the lives of working-class young people are exploited for entertainment.
The story begins in District 12 (Appalachia) and is narrated by the 16-year-old heroine, Katniss, who hunts and forages for food to help feed her mother and younger sister. A fiercely independent daughter of a worker who lost his life in a coal mining explosion (coal is what “12” supplies to the capital), Katniss is rebellious but in a very individualistic way. She sees the horror and injustice of the society around her, but is too cynical, for the most part, to unite in struggle with any others but her one friend, Gale, and her family.
When the lottery for the current year’s Hunger Games is held, Katniss’s younger sister “wins” the lottery, but Katniss courageously volunteers to replace her in the Games. Katniss and a boy, Peeta, who once befriended her, are whisked to the Capitol as two of the Games’ 12 gladiators. Mass media manipulation then builds a frenzy of competition (and wagering by the wealthy viewers) to see who will be the one survivor.
Make Alliances to Challenge Rulers
Some contestants are bloodthirsty and vicious, mimicking the ideas and actions of the rulers, but Katniss is smart and resourceful and learns to make alliances with a few others who challenge the rulers’ game ideology of everyone only for themselves. Peeta, both from social conscience and love, shows he is willing to sacrifice himself so that Katniss can survive. Another young woman, Rue, forms an alliance with Katniss, even though as a 12-year-old with no fighting skills she has little chance of survival.
When Rue is killed, Katniss avenges her death by killing her attacker and surrounds her body in flowers as a protest against the rulers’ games. When the survivors are down to six, Katniss joins forces with Peeta, and the rulers try to take advantage of their “love” alliance (although to Katniss it is a political alliance) by changing the rules and saying that this year two will be allowed to survive. When only Katniss and Peeta have survived, the rules are changed back to only one survivor allowed. Katniss and Peeta refuse to fight each other so that there will be no winner (Katniss estimates that the rulers need to parade a winner to maintain their image in the districts).
Katniss is a strong anti-sexist character. She is thoughtful (whether we agree with her conclusions or not) and willing to take action, including necessary violence, to fight for what she believes in. Katniss is an honest working-class woman whose ideas develop positively as her experiences expand. There is no passivity or pacifism in her, or really, in the story.
Early in the book, Katniss puts down thinking about history and social conditions because that “doesn’t put food on the table.” Later in the Games, she changes direction and tries to expose the rulers’ manipulations, actions that gain her support from the workers in Rue’s District and which also lead Thresh (the other representative of that District) to save her life.
There’s no sugarcoating of the oppression in Panem. Starvation is used as a weapon to weaken the working class (hence the irony of the Hunger Games). Fascist violence and death are used to crush rebellions.
Using Privileges to Maintain Power
In the beginning, Katniss’s friend Gale argues that allowing some workers a little more privilege than others is just a tool for the rulers to set workers against each other. He echoes how today’s capitalist rulers use racism, nationalism and wage differentials to maintain their power.
The districts can be seen as oppressed by the rulers’ Capitol much as the working class and resources of lesser-developed countries around the world are exploited by the U.S. and other major imperialist powers. While the local rulers installed in some districts (like 12) are on the surface less oppressive than others, the story makes clear — as do the actions of smooth-talking liberals like Obama — that this has little effect on the wars and exploitation that workers face .
Terms such as capitalism, the ruling class or the working class never appear, but it is not hard to show many similarities between Panem and the U.S. today. The ideas in the book are often left vague and there’s no hint of a communist alternative, but this book is a lot more than a Harry Potter fantasy world.
These books, unlike much of the romantic and senselessly violent trash that our youth are given to read, support the idea that rebellion against injustice is necessary and inevitable. There are real working people and real social conditions in this story, and we in PLP need to engage students, teachers and others to bring forth the ideas of communist revolution as the only alternative that would liberate the workers of Panem.