10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #4: “Welcome to the Capitol”
A corrupt elder elite controls society from a shining city. The Capitol already exists in our world
This is a series of blog posts based on my new book, Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games, published in April/May 2021 by Zero Books.
In contrast to how many older commentators characterize young people today, in The Hunger Games, as embodied in the Capitol, it’s the adults who are frivolous, vacuous, narcissistic, entitled, swayed by melodrama and sentimental emotion. Meanwhile, the young people in the districts act for each other and their families. Throughout, Katniss always tries to behave responsibly, agonizes over how to avoid further violence, tries to consider what’s the best choice in every moment, but also the longer-term consequences of her decisions.
In a later post, we’ll discuss how The Hunger Games anticipates a future of social collapse. Actually, there will be two futures happening at the same time. The elite will effectively be living in the secure future, the rest of us will be marooned in the crisis-ridden past. This is depicted in The Hunger Games as well. As the commentator Mark Fisher noted:
“...the Capitol’s decadent (post)modernity, its apparently unlimited consumption and foppish, infantilised spectatorialism can be set against the conspicuous authenticity of older forms of labour, with their dirt poor privations and honest work ethic. When Katniss, the daughter of a dead miner who survives by hunting on the land, is conveyed to the Capitol by high-speed train, it is as if the nineteenth century is brought face to future-shocked face with twenty-first century media culture.”
Katniss and Peeta have never been to Panem’s ruling city before, but despite having seen it on television, they’re amazed by the magnificence of its glistening towers, the shiny cars that glide down its wide streets, and its oddly dressed people with bizarre hair and painted faces who’ve never missed a meal.
It’s one thing to hear about vast differences in wealth and power, it’s another to experience them for yourself. And the fictional world of Panem reflects our reality. Two-thirds of our world survives on less than $10,000 – not even 2 percent of global wealth. Meanwhile, just 26 people own more than half of the world’s population. Apparently, the Capitol is home to 5.6 million people, meaning that, statistically, the fictional future Panem understates the extent of the inequality in our actual present.
The elites of Panem are self-absorbed, vain, greedy, gluttonous hedonists. Given rapidly increasing inequality in our world, we’ve returned to a golden age for the gilded class. The production design in The Hunger Games films reflects the historical allusions, the Depression-era District 12 compared to the decadent art deco Capitol city. It also reflects the natural entitlement of the Capitol. The districts are just there to serve their needs, if they’re thought about at all. Apart from once a year, when the residents of the Capitol watch from their high towers as district children are sacrificed for their entertainment.
The Capitol is known for fashion, food and media, much like our global cities (tellingly also called alpha or power cities): New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong... They’re swollen by socially unproductive sectors (finance, advertising, marketing, PR), so different from the laboring districts. The Capitol is where you dream of finding fame and success. More likely, if you’re from the districts, you don’t stand much chance; these sectors are dominated by the sons and daughters of privilege.
As Joel Kotkin (The New Class Conflict) suggests, this reflects a new geography of class struggle, which pits a new elite – oligarchs, technocrats, bureaucrats, the creative class – against the middle and working class, as well as generationally between old and young. Many millennials, saddled with low incomes and high debts, are forced to leave because they can’t afford to live within the walls of wealth. And outside the walls, this geography has increasingly turned former heartlands, anywhere outside the Capitol(s) really, into dislocated, declining districts.
None of this is natural or inevitable. Historically, capitalism has always been an imposed, engineered system – a social order. But in our time, neoliberal economists have told a very different story, inventing elaborate, often heavily mathematically-based theories to ‘prove’ that capitalism is natural. They’ve been so successful that any attempts to limit the power of capital and corporations are said to interfere with ‘natural forces.’
But of course, the Capitol elite aren’t great entrepreneurs, bold visionaries, ground-breaking scientists, Panem’s pioneers. It’s the districts who have the skills and knowledge and do the work. The residents of the Capitol reflect the largely unproductive lifestyles of our own rich, born aloft by inherited wealth and illusory property bubbles.
As Thomas Piketty demonstrated in his Capital in the 21st Century, there’s been a growing imbalance between labor and capital due to the rise of inherited and asset wealth. A tiny plutocracy perches at the top, possessing awesome economic and political power. Below them is another part of the elite who also gain from capital, what Piketty calls patrimonial capitalism, that is, wealth gained through inheritance rather than entrepreneurship.
At the other end of the scale, as Guy Standing (The Precariat) has set out, there is a salariat, with some employment security, pensions, paid holidays and other non-wage perks. But they (the lower middle class, essentially) are shrinking, and the old proletariat is also dwindling, undermined by cuts to welfare, eroding secure and stable employment, and attacks on unions. What has grown is the precariat, who experience unstable labor, are subject to “flexible” contracts, and work mainly as temps, casuals and freelancers. This creates a continual consciousness of deprivation, of anxiety, anomie, alienation – and anger.
So, The Hunger Games is barely fiction at all. Income inequality in the United States is at a 50-year high, and the rich pay less tax than the poor. If Panem seems exaggerated – why doesn’t the Capitol just share out a bit more of ‘its’ wealth? – we might ask the same question in our own world. The answer is that the Capitol doesn’t care.
Most importantly, as we’ll see, the story promotes a very different set of values to this ideology of elite-favoring corporate ‘libertarianism’. cooperation and collaboration are crucial to surviving the Capitol’s Games. But that’s in the future.
Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games is published in April/May 2021 by Zero Books and can be pre-ordered from the following places now: