Why write about The Hunger Games?

I didn’t expect to write about The Hunger Games. Just like my book on Star Wars (or rather, today’s politics as interpreted through the world’s most popular space saga), I like and admire Suzanne Collins’ story of a dystopian regime and the revolt against it. But in neither case could I call myself a superfan.

When The Hunger Games began in 2008, many commentators lumped it in with other young adult genre fiction such as Twilight and Divergent. But The Hunger Games is political, and it’s since become a defining story for a generation that’s grown up with economic crisis and never-ending war. It’s about an elder elite that uses state power, a compliant media, and violent spectacle to pacify its population. It’s about how a rebellion is sparked by defiance and spreads through subversive symbols, while the regime responds in the only way it knows.

In Panem, the post-disaster United States setting of the series, an uber-rich ruling class gorge themselves in their gleaming high-tech Capitol, while working people are left behind to survive in exploited districts. Revolution is a forgotten hope kept at bay by brutal policing, aching poverty, and rigid class segregation. And yet…

The year 2019, when I started the book, saw youth-led revolts in many countries around the world, from Hong Kong to Chile, Thailand to Columbia. Despite different local flashpoints, underlying all of them were extreme inequalities which especially disadvantage young people, and the willingness of elites to crush any challenges to their power. The world hadn’t seen a wave of street protests like this since the late 1980s, surpassing the scale of the Arab Spring protests of the early 2010s.

The Hunger Games generation, if we can call them that, are the tributes thrown into an arena of increasingly brutal competition from which it seems like there’s no escape, their futures sacrificed for a greedy, corrupt elder elite. No wonder the series still resonates with young people today.

Not coincidentally, a number of these protests also used imagery and slogans from The Hunger Games. In an important sense, the series predicts how regimes around the world are likely to respond to increasing youth-led protests against their power. And with the climate crisis and environmental disaster, the series is about a coming future of enforced scarcity and segregation, and an emerging form of authoritarian statism I call in the book ‘Capitolism’.

It’s the story of our times, and most likely of our future as well.

As I discuss in my book, called Stay Alive (those who have read the books or seen the films will get the reference), The Hunger Games is about how regimes fall, but how the revolution against power and exploitation can never end. It’s about collapse, war, rebellion, trauma, and recovery. It’s dark, emotionally and politically truthful, and while it doesn’t flinch from the horrors of its setting, it’s also ultimately, eventually, realistically hopeful.

The real hunger games are just beginning. But so is the struggle against the Capitol. We need to return to Panem.

That’s why I’ve written about The Hunger Games.

Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games, will be published in April/May 2021. Here’s where you can pre-order the book.