The future has arrived (as predicted)

My new book, Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, is out in November. It’s a timely one, I think (unfortunately) – about how the future, particularly dystopian futures, have been depicted in science fiction films and why ‘we’ haven’t have taken these visions seriously enough.

Here in the 2020s, we’ve reached the point depicted in many sci-fi films of the past fifty years. Reviewers love to point out what sci-fi stories got wrong (‘where’s my flying car?’ etc). But my book focuses on what many of these films were really warning us about - the dystopian future(s) - and how in these respects they were fundamentally right.

Last year, 2022, was also the fiftieth anniversary of the most important report most people might never heard of, The Limits to Growth. A media sensation at the time for predicting social collapse, it’s still unnervingly prescient about our present and helps to explain what’s happening now.

The book uses blockbuster and cult classic sci-fi films to describe what’s coming next – in politics, economics, technology, the environment, and our day-to-day lives (I’ll briefly introduce the selected films in later blog posts). It shows how the predictions contained in studies such as The Limits to Growth are now coming true (indeed, The Limits to Growth even directly informed some of the films I discuss in the book).

So, we can’t say we weren’t warned, including by some of the best science fiction films of the past fifty years, which I use in the book to discuss what’s going to happen next. I also uncover the sometimes surprising yet hidden-in-plain-sight meanings of these films – meanings that are, however else some of these films might seem dated, now more relevant than ever (inevitably, there are major spoilers for the films, if you haven’t seen them already).

Of course, the films represent a personal collection of favorites, but, I hope, also a pretty good selection based on their predictive power, for their ability to foresee the future. In addition, they’re a way of telling the story presented in the book, of how we lost the future, or rather how it was taken from us.

Indeed, at times they become part of the story itself; in some cases their dramatized warnings were (and still are) dismissed as alarmist, even part of a progressive ‘plot’ to end progress and immiserate millions. Obviously, their inclusion in the book is intended to indicate that they shouldn’t have been dismissed at the time, and neither should they now.

So, the book is really less about how dystopias have warned us about some distant, possible future, and more what they’ve told us (and still can tell us) about the fast-oncoming, increasingly probable present.

Some might say, since we’re here now, it might be time to move on from fictional dystopias. Obviously, good sci-fi continues to be produced, and consumed, as it should. But, we might ask, what do they really tell us that we don’t already know – about ecological catastrophe, class exploitation, and technological hubris? Just as the films included in the book predicted, the future is becoming less unknown.

This doesn’t mean it’s over. There might be no future emergency for which we must prepare. Dystopia is here already for some people – it has been for a long time – and for more of us soon. Magical technologies won’t save us, nor will charismatic leaders touting simplistic solutions. But as I argue in the book, creativity, communities, and commitment will help to save some of us, in some times and places. Just how many times and places, and how many people, is still up to us.

Come With Me If You Want To Live is the history of why we didn’t get the future we were promised, and who is responsible for this – but how we will get the future that was predicted fifty years ago. It’s not the future their creators wanted then, or we want now (most of us, anyway). But the more we understand what’s coming, the more we might be able to prepare for it.

Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, is out in November from Lexington Books. You can read more about it here.

Why The Creator is so important to the future of science fiction on film

Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, just opened in cinemas, is a notable return from the director of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Godzilla (2014). Reviews have ranged from mixed to very positive; critics have generally praised its world building and effects, while suggesting that story-wise it doesn’t do anything new. Even if that’s fair (I think it’s a bit grudging myself, having greatly enjoyed seeing it this weekend), the real importance of the film might be in how it was made and what this could mean for the future of filmmaking, including science fiction.

It's true that The Creator evinces a set of sci-fi tropes (Edwards himself has described the film as “Blade Runner meets Apocalypse Now”). It’s 2070, and the world is split between a United States waging war on artificial intelligence and a ‘New Asia’ where A.I. peacefully co-exists with humans. Ex-special forces agent Joshua (John David Washington) is recruited to hunt down and kill an elusive figure known as Nirmata (Hindi for ‘creator’), the architect of an advanced A.I. that could make a decisive difference in the conflict. Joshua reluctantly journeys into the dark heart of A.I.-occupied territory (the most humanoid of which are called ‘simulants’ in the story), only to discover that the weapon he’s been instructed to destroy is in the form of a young child…

Certainly, you can anticipate some of the key plot developments and even how it all resolves, and there’s a fair critique that the film falls into a familiar cyberpunk-style (and ironically somewhat dehumanizing) ‘techno-Orientalism.’ But appropriately from the director of Rogue One, rather than an exploration of artificial intelligence, really The Creator is an anti-imperial(ism), anti-War (on Terror) story. Edwards has acknowledged that Star Wars’ ‘used future’ aesthetic is amongst its sci-fi inspirations (there’s even a looming, all-powerful Death Star that must be destroyed), but there are many other influences and references that genre fans can enjoy identifying, if they want to.

Yet focusing on these influences risks overlooking what might be most original, and potentially game-changing, about The Creator, which is how it was, well, created.

Edwards’ background is in VFX. As is well-known, he basically single-handedly crafted the impressive special effects in his debut feature Monsters (2010) – well-worth catching up on if you haven’t seen, and which shares several themes with his latest film.

Monsters was made for less than $500,000; The Creator reportedly cost $80 million but looks like something typically made by Hollywood for $250 million or more. While the storied ILM did most of the effects, Edwards was able to achieve his vision by effectively reverse engineering the typical (sci-fi) filmmaking process. Rather than relying on expensive studio sets and green screen work, he deployed a small crew and was able to travel to (it’s said) 80 locations to give The Creator an expansive, epic scope, only adding in the effects after the film had been fully edited (places used included Nepal, the Himalayas, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tokyo, and across Thailand). He even shot on a Sony FX3 – a prosumer camera – with some beautiful and spectacular results.

This is where The Creator really distinguishes itself, in being an original (meaning, not based on some existing intellectual property), non-sequel/non-franchise, theatrically released serious sci-fi film – here in the 2020s when arguably we need sci-fi more than ever to help us anticipate some potential dark futures ahead of us.

Of course, there’s a long history of inventive, low-budget sci-fi (and genre movies generally), but ironically even with (or partly because of) the CGI revolution, what we’ve been losing are the kinds of mid-budget, challenging, socially critical sci-fi movies that flourished from the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s (the kinds of films I discuss in my forthcoming book). When you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars, commercial logic dictates that you must veer towards crowd-pleasing acceptability (but which ultimately probably ends up pleasing no-one). The Creator – certainly in its realization, if arguably less so in its revelations – shows how it’s once again possible to produce serious science fiction on film and still (hopefully) make money. In this respect at least, it presages a bright future.

Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films is published in November 2023 from Lexington Books.

“Now read on… into the fantastic world of the future!”

Here’s the draft preface to the book I’ve completed recently (it’s currently out to publishers and agents for consideration). You’ll hopefully get the idea of the book from this - let me know what you think!

“That’s how each of the three sections (robots, cities, space travel!) of The Usborne Book of the Future begins. Written by Kenneth Gatland and David Jefferis, it was published in 1979, and it was one of my favorite books when I was growing up.

Nothing dates as fast as ideas about the future. And you can certainly play that game with the Book of the Future, subtitled A Trip in Time to the Year 2000 and Beyond. So no, our houses don’t yet have automated servants handing out trays of drinks, and there aren’t robotic forest firefighters. Or everyday Space Shuttle flights, space elevators, factories in orbit, or massive domed cities, let alone an Olympics on the Moon (predicted for 2020). Many of the timescales for new technologies are way off, although maybe one day we will inhabit cities in space (indeed, some of today’s billionaires are counting on it).

And yet, as anticipated in The Book of the Future, we do carry minicomputers in our pockets, much more powerful than the ‘risto’ watches featured in the book, and our homes are full of inter-connected gadgets. Robots have “increasingly take[n] over the jobs of skilled engineers in factories.” Artificial intelligence is advancing into our lives. Shopping is increasingly online (The Book of the Future predicted that TVs will be “used to order shopping via a computerized shopping center a few kilometers away”). Electric vehicles will eventually become widespread (the book predicted an “almost totally electric world”). Computerized weapons systems are shaping the future of war. “Electronic conferencing” is finally common, but not, as we now know, because of “convenience”. And some people are experimenting with sea-borne living, like the floating pyramid cities featured in the book.

That it got at least some of these predictions largely right isn’t surprising. The Book of the Future was based on the research of scientists and organizations including Bell Aerospace, Boeing, and NASA, alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Omni magazine. But there were other things about the future the book spent much less time discussing.

I was born in 1971. The generation before me, some of them, could still be excited about The Future. As in The Book of the Future, they could believe they would go into space and eliminate poverty, crime, war and disease on Earth. A generation later, as a child I still read comics about daring space adventurers, but I also knew they had a decidedly retro, 1950s feel to them. They were yesterday’s future, not the actual future.

As I grew up, the future seemed to get darker, it was darker: the possibility of nuclear annihilation in the Second Cold War, demonstrations, strikes, mass unemployment, increasing inequality, and the growing sense, as the punk movement put it, of ‘no future’. As we’ll see, this was reflected in fictional depictions of the future. From the late 1960s onwards, there was a new adultness in science fiction, including at the movies. Technical advances in filmmaking helped, but the real progress was in its subjects: there was less about fantastical aliens, and more fatalism about humanity and its future (or lack of it).

Today, young people are even more anxious about what’s to come. Unfortunately, it’s probably worse than most of them imagine. In their future, they could see civilization collapse, due to everything from climate change to wars over dwindling resources. In some of its fundamental warnings, the dystopian sci-fi of the 1970s is fast turning into fact.

To understand what happened to the future, we have to go back to when I was young, to a point when two very different futures were possible and the choice between them was still being made. In between its Lunar Olympics and interstellar starships, what really strikes me looking back at The Book of the Future (and at the time, as I remember), is the double-page spread titled “Two trips to the 21st century”, and the stark contrast it presents between a “Garden city on a cared-for planet” or a “Polluted city of a dying world.”

In the latter, there’s over-population, vehicles trundle along powered by gasoline (alternatives were not pursued, leaving no options as oil runs out), the environment is dying, the air is a chokingly thick brown orange (people wear gas masks), urban infrastructure is decaying, and people are out of work and under-fed. Fake plastic trees line the roads. But in the former, fumeless hydrogen and electric powered vehicles glide through a refurbished, greenified city beneath a monorail and alongside pedestrian and cycling lanes. The air is a fresh spring blue. The plants and trees are a vibrant green.

There were two possible futures back then, so it seemed, one darkly dystopian, the other much brighter – not a whizzy 1950s Jetsons techno-utopia, but still a pretty good one.

What I realize now, and we’ll discuss in this book, is that these two futures were based on predictions set out in landmark publications like The Limits to Growth, published just a few years before in 1972. And we’ll examine how, contrary to their fierce critics at the time, the scary predictions made in these publications are increasingly coming true.

We didn’t heed these warnings, or those depicted in popular culture ever since. This book is about why. The short answer is that, starting in the 1970s, an organized and well-funded campaign was mounted against recognizing the threats we faced, and it succeeded in persuading people the future would effectively take care of itself.

Indeed, we’ll see how it was these predictions of a dark future that helped to propel – in some ways helped to create – a new political movement, which until the 1970s was relatively marginalized. What’s been neglected in previous histories is how its attractive promises – that there were no limits to growth, and technology would solve the problems we face – were crucial in bringing them, and a new type of politician, to power. And so we set off towards one of the two futures sketched in my children’s book – the wrong one.

We can’t say we weren’t warned, including by some of the best science fiction films of the past fifty years that depicted future dystopias, which we’ll use here to discuss what’s going to happen next. We’ll also uncover the surprising hidden meanings of these films, meanings that are now more relevant than ever (there are major spoilers for the films).

It’s not the future we want (most of us, anyway), and it’s not the one we were promised. But the more we understand what’s coming, the more we might be able to prepare for it.

So, read on, not into the fantastic, but definitely into the dramatic, world of the future…”

Read the Introduction from Stay Alive: “Real or not real?”

Here’s an edited version of the introduction to my new book, Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games - out now from Zero Books.

“There must be some special girl. Come on, what’s her name?”

The first book in the series, The Hunger Games, introduces us to Panem through Katniss Everdeen, a 16-year-old woman. In just a few pages, we learn about the world she wakes up in everyday. We enter the deprived, slave labor prison of District 12, where most people don’t have enough food to eat, and the Seam, the dirt poor coal-mining area where Katniss lives with her mother and her younger sister Prim.

Katniss has lost her father in a mine explosion a few years before. We’re given a sense of her psychological damage from poverty and loss. Katniss’s mother is “blank and unreachable” after her husband’s death. Katniss is in many ways also numb to the world. She’s annoyed at her mother for shutting down, but she doesn’t really see how she’s done the same.

Katniss is a survivor, practically in using her hunting skills to secure a little more food for her family, and emotionally in finding her own ways to cope. Given the knowledge she’s inherited from her father, Katniss could provide for her family, but hunting is illegal.

The Hunger Games isn’t just the brutally honest name of the annual fight-to-the-death competition organized by the Capitol, the city that dominates Panem. It’s the way that its elite controls the districts. Starvation, scarcity and minimal rewards doled out to subservient districts; the Capitol uses hunger as a weapon against the masses. It’s also a powerful metaphor for the economic system we live under today, so much so that “the Hunger Games” has now become shorthand for any especially brutally competitive environment or economy.

Despite this, Katniss is a natural rebel, though she doesn’t think of herself that way (in time she will, though). She finds the weak spots in the fence surrounding the district and escapes into the woods to hunt, but really just to find a few hours of freedom in her highly-surveilled society. And yet, Katniss’ acts of everyday rebellion will have major consequences. They will come to represent the seeds of a different world.

“It’s to the Capitol’s advantage to have us divided among ourselves”

Like all of Panem’s subjects, Katniss has learned it’s not safe to criticize the system. She’s somewhat aware of the impact this has had on her, to “hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts.” Looming over her, over all of the young people who live in the districts, is the Hunger Games, a brutal televised fight to the death. Today is reaping day, the day of the public lottery for participation in the Games.

The odds that any given child will be selected for the Games are relatively low - lower in districts with large populations (unlike the small District 12). But the fear is real. Even here, the Capitol reinforces its control through division. Other districts, those more favored by the Capitol, are better trained to compete. Their tributes, called “careers,” even look forward to being chosen for the Games.

The Seam, where Katniss lives in District 12, is the poorest of the poor. But some families in District 12 are comparatively better off, for example those who run small businesses. They can reduce the likelihood that their children will be selected for the Games, whereas the likes of Katniss and her closest friend Gale are forced through threat of starvation to increase their odds of selection in exchange for desperately needed food rations. As Gale says, it’s the Capitol’s strategy to divide the districts between each other, and within them.

“You sit on a throne of lies”

The film of The Hunger Games starts differently from the book. After some introductory text, we open on a discussion between Caesar Flickerman, the Capitol’s television host for the Games, and Seneca Crane, the Head Gamemaker who designs the Game arena. They’re discussing the “bonding importance” of the Games, how it’s “our tradition...the way we’ve been able to heal.” At first the Games were a reminder of the first rebellion and the “price the districts had to pay,” as enshrined in the country’s Treaty of Treason, but now apparently it’s “something that knits us all together.”

The Capitol audience, comfortable in their plush auditorium, applauds warmly. Caesar asks Seneca what describes his “personal signature” as Gamemaker. Cut to a horrifying scream and a bleak shot of District 12. It’s Prim, waking up on the day of the reaping after a nightmare. What defines the Games, this year and every year, is not healing, but horror.

This new scene added for the film emphasizes the political nature of the story, starting in the Capitol’s construction of a self-justifying national myth, its attempt to rationalize oppression and exploitation in the name of order and unity. But what we mostly see is how the system affects the young people existing in the shadow of the Games, the horror they experience in the arena, and the psychological trauma of trying to survive under the Capitol’s rule.

“Well, that’s a sunny view of our situation”

Later, during the reaping ceremony (in the film version), a propaganda video is shown to the districts. President Snow, the ruler of Panem, provides the voice over, reiterating the “hard fought, sorely won” peace that his new order has ensured. Of course, this is only how the Capitol wants the districts to remember “our history.”

The Hunger Games takes place at an unspecified future date, in the dystopian, post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, located in what is now the United States. The country is smaller than today, geographically and demographically. Large areas of land were made uninhabitable by rising sea levels and many people died (for example, the population of District 12 is said to be just 8000 people).

Panem consists of the wealthy ruling Capitol city, located in the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by 12 (originally 13) poorer districts. Katniss’ District 12 is located in today’s Appalachia. The furthest from the Capitol, it specializes in coal mining. District 13 was a center of military-industrial production. When the Capitol crushed the rebellion, it reduced District 13 to ashes.

The government is a dictatorship, a surveillance state in which the districts are forced into subservience to the Capitol, expected to provide goods in exchange for “protection,” for peace and prosperity. But only the Capitol is lavishly rich and technologically advanced, while the districts survive in poverty and distress. In place of the actual history of America/Panem, the Hunger Games is part of a national myth, told by self-serving elites.

“These things happen in war”

Panem is founded on a core conservative idea, one that still holds a powerful grip on today’s politics: that the state restrains us from all-out civil war. This was first set out by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), particularly in his most famous book Leviathan (1651). Hobbes was informed by the English Civil War or civil wars of 1642-46 and 1648-51 – he often uses the word “rebellion” – that led to the execution of the king and the declaration of a republic.

At the time, England was divided, politically, economically, socially, religiously, then militarily. Hobbes’ argument was rooted in a deeply pessimistic view of human behavior, dressed up in some crude “science” (as conservatives still do today). We are driven by greed and fear. Without an authoritarian state, we compete, often violently, to secure the necessities of life and seek reputation (“glory”), both for its own sake and for greater security. Hobbes’ state of nature is perpetual strife, endless dark days comprising a “war of all against all,” leavened only by temporary alliances to stave off graver threats and imminent perils. Hobbes thought that the inevitable condition of humankind was one in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” a relentless quest for power that “ceaseth only in death.”

In such bleakness, our only “hope” is all-powerful authority. People must surrender their power to the ultimate peacekeeper, the sovereign ruler. But in reality, this idea just normalizes the actions of some selfish, amoral people as “natural,” and supports exploitation and right-wing authoritarianism, even fascism.

“I’m sick of people lying to me for my own good”

There’s a deeper, psychological explanation for this attachment to authoritarianism.

One of the thinkers we’ll refer to in this book is Alice Miller, a Polish-Swiss psychologist/psychoanalyst noted for her work on parental child abuse, sometimes called “controversial” because she was so direct in her challenge to abuse and its links to authoritarianism.

In For Your Own Good (1980), Miller introduced the concept of “poisonous pedagogy” to describe the child-rearing practices prevalent in Europe, especially before the Second World War. She believed that the pain inflicted on children “for their own good” was parents unconsciously re-enacting the trauma inflicted on them when they were children, continuing the cycle of trauma down generations.

Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (1990) is perhaps Miller’s most explicitly political book. Written in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Miller takes to task the entirety of human culture. The “wall” is the metaphorical barrier behind which society (academia, psychiatrists, clergy, politicians and the media) seeks to protect itself by denying the mind-destroying effects of child abuse. Historically, children were seen as less than human, as evil wretches in need of constant coercion and control. The goal of child-rearing was to stamp out willfulness in children, to crush their spontaneity and spirit, thought necessary in order to make them upstanding and virtuous citizens.

To Miller, the command to “honor your parents” leads us to accept and repeat abusive parenting and direct our unresolved trauma either against others (through war, terrorism, delinquency) or ourselves (in eating disorders, drug addiction, depression). This is also the root of political authoritarianism: dictators seek to pass on their trauma to society, and we accept their abuses of power because of our indoctrination into the legitimacy of the harsh parent. Only by becoming aware of this can we break the chain of violence.

In The Hunger Games, the Capitol claims the right, the necessity, to rule over the otherwise disobedient citizens of Panem. Panem needs to punish its children to avoid further conflict. Trauma is passed down and legitimized. And Katniss, like her peers, is emotionally numb and politically passive, despite her repressed rage at the cruelty of the Capitol. As Miller wrote in Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, “The reality of adult cruelty is so beyond their comprehension that the child is in a state of constant denial in order to survive.”

Miller didn’t accept that we’re naturally evil. If we recognize the causes of trauma and the roots of authoritarianism, we can heal and recover. This is the emotional journey that Katniss will go on, and perhaps the one we all need to undertake.

“And they say no one ever wins the Games”

A much more benign view of how we can and do act can lead us to envisage a very different kind of society, in which centralizing power is not the solution, it’s the problem. If this is the political journey that Katniss will go on, in another way, as we’ll see, she was there from the beginning.

Another purpose of Hobbesian propaganda is that people will accept shortages, hardship, cruelty, misery and the curtailing of their freedom if you convince them they’re in a perpetual state of war, or would be without the powerful parental state. As we’ll see, even though many people in the districts don’t fall for it, this ideology helps to justify their privation.

Of course, not all of our societies suffer under authoritarian regimes, despite Hobbesian thinking still being prevalent. But environmental, economic and political collapse, and the fear and chaos they will bring – our own coming hunger games – are likely to lead us toward our own version of Panem.

“No, I want you to rethink it and come up with the right opinion”

The Hunger Games starts with a Hobbesian state, but never accepts it. This is based on a fundamentally different view of human nature to the Hobbesians. Not a naive view – Collins depicts the cruelty that people can inflict on others under an authoritarian ideology. But a view that suggests how the state is the real source of violence in society and how it engineers conflict as a means of control.

The alternative view is that our environment shapes how we behave, that left to our own devices we are more likely to find ways to cooperate peacefully, even to sacrifice ourselves for others, than we are to engage in an endless war against all. What raises The Hunger Games above most dystopian stories is that it also depicts how goodness can flourish even in the most dehumanizing circumstances.

It’s possible to imagine a peaceful Panem without the state, a society of mutual trade and cooperation, of solidarity and fraternity. But Katniss can’t allow herself to imagine this world for more than a moment, not because it would be against nature, but because the state would punish them harshly for even trying to live differently. She might be a survivor, but she’s mired in resignation. Before the reaping, Katniss listens to Gale’s dreams of escape, but can only respond that it’s impossible, to leave their families, to put them at risk, let alone to hope that another Panem is possible.

“What am I supposed to do? Sit here and watch you die?”

Some dystopias drop us into howling post-collapse wastelands in which the problem is the lack of government, a lack of any institutions really, or travel through lawless cyberpunk cityscapes in which there’s a lack of a state standing up to towering corporations. Hobbes would surely recognize his state of nature in these stories.

As we’ll see, these views of human nature are also fundamentally about capitalism. The rationale for the Hobbesian state is also used by conservatives to justify an exploitative economic system in which elites dominate and the poor suffer. It’s just as much a lie as Panem’s propaganda is for punishing its districts.

But for now, the Capitol is in control. And it’s Katniss’ sister Prim, in her first reaping, who’s selected for the Games.

“I volunteer!” I gasp. “I volunteer as tribute!”

When Katniss volunteers for the Games in place of her sister, the crowd understands it’s suicide, given her district’s poor record in the Games and its disadvantages against the other districts. Despite the Games supposedly being a national pageant, they respond with “the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone.” Later on, Katniss will learn that many other districts are also ready to defy the Capitol.

Although she doesn’t intend it, Katniss’ instinctive reaction to volunteer represents the start of a revolution, a spark that will ignite a fire that will eventually engulf Panem. What that revolution means, and what she’s really fighting for, are critical questions at the heart of The Hunger Games.

“She has no idea, the effect that she can have”

And then, something unexpected happens. Almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds them out to Katniss. It’s an old, rarely used gesture in District 12. It means a combination of thanks, admiration and goodbye to a loved one.

The Hunger Games struck a chord from the start. The first book in the series, published in 2008, was an instant bestseller, appealing both to teenage readers and adults. In 2012, the first of four films based on the novels was released (the final book was split into two films), starring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. The series has earned $3 billion at the worldwide box office. Clearly, the story has resonated with audiences, particularly young people. The question is why, and whether it means anything politically.

“I really can’t think about kissing when I’ve got a rebellion to incite”

Some commentators assumed its appeal centered on the love triangle between Katniss, Gale and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta. But this isn’t the focus of the story, it’s a subplot to bigger political questions, notably how to survive under an authoritarian regime, the price people are prepared to pay to bring it down and whether this corrupts the post-regime society they long for.

Really, it’s more of an anti-romance. Katniss is a rounded, believable, brave, compassionate, flawed, self- doubting character, who continues to inspire young women in particular, personally and politically, not because she’s flawless, but because she isn’t.

Katniss is surrounded by expectations about what she should be and how she should act. As we’ll explore, the reality TV show of the Games and state spying means that Katniss and her peers are often acting for the audience, a pressure felt by young people in our own age of social media surveillance. But this means that Katniss continually distrusts the motives of Peeta in particular. She even often doubts her own motivations.

“This isn’t just adolescent, it’s insubordination”

In how young people are contained and punished, The Hunger Games also reflects adult fears of adolescence as a powerful destabilizing force. Even in her hopelessness, Katniss challenges the fixed boundaries of her world, literally in the sense of temporarily escaping the Seam to hunt and feel free. But to stop here ignores the obvious themes of the story. As Rolling Stone put it, “It’s about something pertinent, the mission to define yourself in a world that’s spinning off its moral axis.” It isn’t a high school drama, it’s a political coming-of-age story about class and conflict, for its characters, and for its audience. As Suzanne Collins has said, “I don’t write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.”

“That’s why we have to join the fight!”

Talk about great timing. The first book was published in the midst of a global financial crisis, from which the resulting austerity was inflicted mainly on the young, poor and minorities. Much of The Hunger Games’ generation has lived with a lack of opportunity and growing inequalities in generational wealth and power, alongside war and terror and reality-twisting politicians.

As many reviewers have noted, Collins is a very deliberate world builder, with lots of historical references and allusions. But the story really resonates because it looks forward. The future in the story isn’t really so futuristic, it’s fast oncoming social fact. Young people are offered up as sacrifices for the elite-controlled state. They face a punitive and divisive economic system, environmental collapse, authoritarian populist politics, sophisticated media manipulation and total surveillance. For Americans and others who don’t recognize the dystopia that’s already here, let alone the one to come, it’s either because they feel safely ensconced in the Capitol or because they’ve already accepted its Hobbesian propaganda.

“I’m going to be the Mockingjay”

The Capitol’s ritual televised sacrifice of tributes, the watching of which is mandatory, demonstrates its domination of the districts. The Games promote a brutal competitive individualism that seeks to obliterate all other values, and humanity itself. They exert the Capitol’s control beyond its economic exploitation of the districts, into peoples’ ability to envision an alternative future free of domination. However, the spectacle of the Games also creates an opportunity for the subversion of the Capitol’s story of subjection for the “good of the nation,” ultimately into one of personal sacrifice, of love, demonstrating a different kind of unity. This is the spark that Katniss sets off when she volunteers.

“They just want a good show, that’s all they want”

We might be suspicious of Hollywood selling us ‘rebeltainment’. The criticism is that The Hunger Games and its imitators might represent some of the fears, frustrations and anxieties of today’s precarious young proletarians, but it doesn’t really name the system of oppression or its possible replacement.

Even if this were true, if Hollywood is the creative Capitol, we can claim and subvert its stories. Katniss introduces a new story to the Games, of defiance in place of deference, cooperation instead of competitive individualism, self-sacrifice rather than subservience. Once these seeds have been sown, it’s the Capitol that becomes terrified of their reaping.

It’s better surely to act like the rebels in the story and recognize when some useful revolutionary symbolism has been thrown our way. Or as Mark Fisher (“Precarious Dystopias”) puts it, “[I]f blockbusters about class revolution perform their ultimate ideological function – maintaining business as usual – by encouraging our cynical distance from those underlying fantasies, the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the dream but to stick to the desire that sustains it.”

Just as Katniss despairs at the start of the story, the Capitol depends on us believing that change is impossible, that the system is too strong. But unbeknown to her and Gale and Peeta, the revolution is about to begin, the districts are more ready to revolt than they know, and the Capitol is more vulnerable than they assume. Sometimes it just needs someone to supply the spark.

“If desperate times call for desperate measures, then I am free to act as desperately as I wish”

Which is why The Hunger Games is about containment, and the fundamental fear that Capitol elites have about the people of the districts. Katniss, the other tributes, the districts, even the victors – all are constantly contained and herded, by fences, borders, Peacekeepers, artificial arenas and deadly hazards, pervasive propaganda and reality TV productions.

Today’s young people will live in a future of walls, of containment driven by collapse, environmental destruction, scarcity and a sociopathic elder elite’s fear of losing power. More than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, young people are unconstrained by fears of authoritarian “socialism.” New walls need to be constructed, of individualism, intolerance, hopelessness and passivity. Working out what’s real and what’s Capitol propaganda will be crucial, the first step to surviving the coming hunger games. And let’s remember that the Capitol wouldn’t bother with its propaganda if it didn’t fundamentally fear us.

In The Hunger Games, Katniss is the last person to recognize her significance, and our potential to bring down the walls. The Capitol and the rebels identify her power long before she does. What she wakes up to is not the full horror of the system, she’s more than aware of that. No, what she comes to understand is that, in the world of Panem, survival is unavoidably a revolutionary act.

Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games is published in paperback and e-book by Zero Books and can be ordered from the following places now:

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“At this point, unity is essential for our survival”

On International Workers’ Day, also known as Labour Day or May Day in many countries, here’s a short excerpt from chapter nine of my new book, Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games:

There was always an alternative to capitolism’s Hobbesian order based on fear and obedience. It’s solidarity, and contrary to Capitol propaganda, it’s entirely natural to us.

As Astra Taylor and Lean Hunt-Hendrix note (“One for All”, New Republic, 26 August 2019), as a social theory, this idea first emerged in the legal texts of the Roman Empire, although of course as a social practice it goes back long before that; it’s how we’ve survived as a species. In the Roman era, when people held a debt in common they were said to hold it in solidum. Being in communal debt was the basis of solidarity, a very different kind of debt to capitalist hierarchical debt. If one individual faltered, its members would either bail each other out or default together.

In its original formulation, solidarity was a common identity underpinned by collective indebtedness and obligation, shared responsibility and risk, interdependence and mutual aid. Terms like “bonds,” “trust” and “mutual funds” are now used by bankers to describe financial mechanisms. But real solidarity, in contrast to modern contracts, has to be cultivated. It’s the practice of creating social ties, of inventing collective identity.

“In the early nineteenth century, solidarity became central to the growing labor movement. Craftsmen and laborers from a range of industries, who once saw themselves as unconnected, began to share a larger common character as workers. As industrialization spread, this new working class strengthened their common bonds through acts of resistance and strikes. Solidarity was also central to the creation of welfare systems and social safety nets.

These understandings of social belonging have been eroded under the corrosive pressures of contemporary life. Modernity made the individual sacred, but also separated, isolated, as we saw in the statistics on mental health. Capitol propaganda and division has also de-socialized us, through economic stratification, privileges for some, and shaming the poor.

Today, “solidarity” is most associated with inter-group expressions of comradeship, for example international campaigns in support of groups resisting oppression. Such campaigns say we do not agree, we do not condone. (As noted in the prologue, solidarity is also crucial to direct action movements, as in the Hong Kong protests.) Perhaps, in place of nationalistic supposedly unifying myths, we might be able to tell alternative stories, including for democratic self-governance at a global level. To Hauke Brunkhorst (Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community), this might be being modeled in recent global protest movements, the beginning perhaps of a transnational civic solidarity.

The enormous challenges we face, from capitalist authoritarianism to climate change, require that social movements forge a radical solidarity. Building of bonds and diverse coalitions is essential to the struggle for a just world. The Capitol will of course push back, buying off some of us, but mostly trying to turn us on each other, to keep their games going. But there is no survival, let alone freedom, without each other.

Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games is out now in paperback and e-book from Zero Books and can be ordered from the following places:

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The four words that explain why The Hunger Games resonates politically with young people

I’d suggest the words are: the game is rigged.

Talk about great timing: the first Hunger Games book was published in the midst of a global financial crisis - literally on the day investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and the crisis entered its most acute phase. The resulting austerity was inflicted mainly on the young, the poor and minorities. Much of The Hunger Games’ generation has lived with a lack of opportunity and ever-growing inequalities in generational wealth and power, alongside war and terror, and reality-twisting politicians.

Put simply, many young people don’t believe they stand a fair chance anymore. Nor do they think this is likely to change; we’re probably going to see the same thing happen in the wake of the pandemic, in which again, already, the young, the poor and minorities have been hardest hit economically.

And what should worry elites most is that many young people also know why.

This is from chapter five of my forthcoming book Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games, out on 30th April/1st May 2021:

“The Games aren’t just a distraction. They also perform a propaganda role in establishing a dominant set of social values, values that legitimize the state’s brutality and enforced inequality, and corrode the natural social solidarity that might threaten the Capitol. The Games model and promote, attempt to naturalize, the Capitol’s broader ideology: brutal competitive individualism for the masses, eternal punishment for the poor, and a hopelessness that they can ever really win. They are the engineered embodiment of the degradation for which the Party in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four strives: “In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement...Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.”

Even the Capitol’s presentation of the Games – two young tributes from each district “to be trained in the art of survival and to be prepared to fight to the death” – is deceptive. The environment of the arena provides the illusion of choice: competitors can adopt different strategies and use whatever skills they like. They could even make the “choice” not to kill. But as noted, its meritocracy is a myth, since the career tributes typically win, and sponsors typically favor those most likely to prevail. It’s possible to grant the Capitol credit that this may also be a conscious part of its ideological design for the Games, a way to reinforce that the game is rigged against the poorest districts from the start.

But in theory at least, the Games are every man and woman (child, really) for themselves (the supposedly natural elite of the Capitol never puts up its own competitors). The objective is to crush feelings of solidarity and interdependence between the districts, which is to say, the ordinary working and middle class (such as they are) of Panem. Much as how modern states use class, religious, ethnic and other differences to divide the working class and hinder their organization, Panem uses the Games to foster competition rather than cooperation between the districts, despite the fact that they have more in common with each other than anyone inside the Capitol’s citadel. They literally get the districts to fight against each other.”

Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games is published in paperback and e-book in April/May 2021 by Zero Books and can be pre-ordered from the following places now:

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Read the preface from Stay Alive: “If we burn, you burn with us”

A flag reading "If we burn, you burn with us," erected outside Hong Kong's legislature, July 1, 2019.

In July 2019, a new theme park opened in the People’s Republic of China. Located in Hengqin, Zhuhai, in the Guangdong- Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, Lionsgate Entertainment World is a movie-themed “vertical theme park” spanning 22,000 square meters of indoor space. Designed to appeal to the “young adult dating crowd,” it features attractions based on franchises owned by the major American media corporation. These include The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ hugely successful future dystopian fiction series about a totalitarian regime and its annual state-sanctioned child murder pageant.

As described by Forbes magazine, “With an entire level devoted to The Hunger Games, visitors will be immersed in the wealthy Capitol City with a gold and marble streetscape, a themed gourmet restaurant, a bakery, and a hair salon inspired by the outrageous styles in the film.” Inadvertently echoing the desperate enthusiasm of Effie Trinkett (a character from the series), Selena Magill, General Manager of Lionsgate Entertainment World, exclaimed that: “We expect guests in China and all around the world to enjoy sensational experiences here that they won’t soon forget.”

For a more authentic experience, fans could travel just an hour away to Hong Kong, where the Beijing-backed government was clamping down on the protest movement led by young people against very real encroaching Chinese tyranny. At times the streets of the city resembled scenes from the films, with Hong Kong police, acting like The Hunger Games’ perversely named Peacekeepers (state military police), beating young people in the streets and firing tear gas indiscriminately into crowds, while protesters brandished bows and fire-dipped arrows.

The loosely coordinated but often highly disciplined protesters, drawn from the self-described “cursed generation,” used social media savvily, often employing tropes from popular culture, including spray painting one familiar (to Hunger Games’ fans) slogan on walls and subways: “If we burn, you burn with us.” The protesters wore black, like the forces of the Mockingjay revolution (the rebellion in The Hunger Games), while pro- government agents and Triad thugs wore white, like President Snow (the dictator of the series’ fictional country of Panem) and his brutal army of Peacekeepers.

This wasn’t the first time protesters had drawn on the series. In 2014, during the Umbrella Revolution, they’d used the three- finger salute from the story, a symbol of solidarity and defiance. After the failure of their first rebellion, the protesters left signs reading “We’ll be back.”

They kept their promise. The year 2019 saw months of sustained protests and mass marches. But the Hong Kong and international business community largely looked on, while investors only fretted about the impact on China’s plans to turn the region into a financial and technological hub to rival Silicon Valley – a gleaming twenty-first century Capitol (the wealthy ruling city of Panem), surrounded by servile industrial districts and factories with “suicide nets” to stop workers killing themselves.

The protests were for freedom and democracy, a last chance for basic rights. But they also represented anger at Hong Kong’s largely unregulated capitalism, with young people priced out of the most expensive housing market in the world and seeing few opportunities in their future, all the while being ordered to act as “patriotic citizens” by the super-wealthy political-business elite who run the city.

An uber-rich ruling class gorge themselves in a futuristic playground, while working people struggle to survive in exploited rural areas. The possibility of revolution is only a distant memory, a forgotten hope kept at bay by brutal policing, aching poverty and a rigidly segregated class system. The Hunger Games could be seen as a critique of states like China – an authoritarian, propagandized, militarized, state capitalist economy, which runs prison camps for political dissidents, including using forced labor to supply goods for Western corporations. But that wasn’t the series’ aim. Its setting is a post-collapse North America. It’s both a warning about the near future and a cutting critique of the present-day United States, of reality TV politics, the demonization of the poor, state violence and oligarchy.

When The Hunger Games began in 2008 – it’s since become a defining story for a generation that’s grown up with economic crisis and never ending war – many commentators lumped it in with other young adult genre fiction such as Twilight and Divergent. But The Hunger Games is political. 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.

The year 2019 saw youth-led revolts in other countries as well, from Chile to Lebanon, 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.

In an important sense, The Hunger Games predicts how regimes around the world are likely to respond to increasing youth-led protests against their power. 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. It’s a story about how regimes fall, but how the revolution against power and exploitation can never end. And with the climate crisis and environmental disaster, it’s about a coming future of enforced scarcity and segregation, and an emerging form of authoritarian statism we’ll call capitolism. It’s the story of our times, and most likely of our future as well.

The real hunger games are just beginning. We need to return to Panem.

Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games is published in paperback and e-book in April/May 2021 by Zero Books and can be pre-ordered from the following places now:

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10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #10: “Because that’s what you and I do. Protect each other”

The real revolution that lies hidden at the heart of The Hunger Games

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 The Hunger Games, young people are offered up as sacrifices for the elite-controlled state. They face a punitive and divisive economic system, environmental collapse, authoritarian populist politics, sophisticated media manipulation and total surveillance. For Americans and others who don’t recognize the dystopia that’s already here, let alone the one to come, it’s either because they feel safely ensconced in the Capitol or because they’ve already accepted its Hobbesian propaganda.

It’s the authoritarian populists of the right who’ve benefited the most politically from early collapse. As it advances further, collapse will tear to pieces the left’s desire to direct an essentially stable state to share wealth much more widely. Collapse is corroding social trust, tolerance, truth. Crisis and scarcity are being used to spread fear and scapegoating. The elite’s endgame is working.

As our societies struggle to respond, people’s despair and disengagement with democracy will continue to grow. Confidence in it has already weakened across Western countries; this has increased political instability and made populaces more prey to demagogues and disinformation. More people will look to seemingly ‘strong leaders’ and reject liberal principles in favor of promises of greater ‘security.’

Unfortunately, because of early collapse, our age of conflict, anger, polarization and denial is the worst possible context in which to try to engineer a more rational future. The Capitol is winning collapse. It looks like the districts have already lost.

In the backstory to The Hunger Games, during the Dark Days, the war between the Capitol and the districts nearly wiped-out humanity. At some point the districts were forced to surrender, perhaps to save whoever remained. An armistice was signed, resulting in the Treaty of Treason. Perhaps the ultimate advantage held by the Capitol is that it’s happy for people to die to protect its dominant position in Panem. Just like elites in our world.

For the center-left, there will be no steady progress toward the perfect social democratic, let alone democratic socialist, order. For the radical left, there will be no universal global revolution. Once, we might have thought that if we want to live in a different world, this world has to end. Now, this world is going to end, but in totally inhospitable ways. The challenge is how we might survive, and maybe one day, begin to build different worlds.

But The Hunger Games also contains the seeds of a different, better world, and it plays out starting in the Arena. In the Games, Katniss befriends a young girl from District 11 called Rue. When they become allies, they learn more about each other’s districts than they’ve ever been taught in school or through Panem’s state-controlled media. This begins to bridge the system of segregation: a cross-racial alliance between two of the poorest districts in Panem. Katniss and Rue recognize their common oppression under the power structure. This is not how the game is supposed to be played.

Then, Rue’s death politicizes Katniss, or rather, brings to the surface her buried emotions. It breaks through Katniss’ wariness about connections with people. Now, the debt becomes political, the obligation becomes for Katniss to make a statement, to defy the Capitol.

Katniss memorializes Rue in a bed of flowers, an act of humanity. Now her actions are conscious: she repeats the three-finger solidarity salute from District 12. It’s a clear demonstration of defiance: if the Capitol doesn’t own her, maybe it doesn’t own the districts either…

In the film, we cut to a seemingly spontaneous uprising in District 11. The workers destroy machinery and sacks of crops. Peacekeepers rush to snuff out the spark of revolt. But something has started, something that can’t be unseen. 

Katniss would like to be totally self-reliant; she thinks this is crucial to survival under the system. But she can’t be, and The Hunger Games is partly the story of how she comes to realize the importance of her interdependence with others. Survival, let alone social change, can’t be individual, it has to be collective. It can only happen together.

Such small acts of kindness might seem inconsequential, but they can be the seeds of change. In our political climate, which increasingly rests on the idea that empathy is impossible, kindness might not be a distraction from radical change. Maybe it is radical change – or at least the beginning of it, as the spreading ripples of cooperation and compassion played out in the Arena, and subsequently beyond, suggest.

In The Hunger Games, a revolution emerges – or had it been planned for some time? My new book, Stay Alive, ends by examining the nature of this revolution and its implications for dissent in our own world – what it suggests about how regimes fall, and most importantly how revolutions need to be based firmly in justice if they stand any hope of creating a truly just society.

Some commentators suggest the ending of the series is essentially anti-political. The new Panem is no utopia. In the longer-term it may not even survive as a free and fair society. Katniss seemingly withdrawing from it, at least from its political life. Not continuing to fight for justice, isn’t this what the Capitol would have wanted? What kind of journey has she been on, if she ends up here?

But as I write in the book, there’s another interpretation. Katniss not only survived the Hunger Games, she did it through collaboration and compassion. And ultimately, faced with a difficult choice, she stood against hierarchy and exploitation in all its forms, and paid the price. Now, understandably, she hopes for healing.

What Katniss really represents is a hidden revolution – a kind of revolution that we don’t have to wait for, one that we can start to live every day, starting now.

But for more about that, you’ll have to buy the book.

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:

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10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #9: “They’re afraid of you”

How regimes try to contain young people

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.

Brutal competition, the stark division between winners and losers, constant surveillance, the pressure of perfomative living, the fear that life might be over before it’s really begun...of course The Hunger Games speaks to young people. In its dramatization of ordinary young heroes fighting for their lives, and to retain their dignity and integrity, they see their own world and who they might have to be in it.

The Capitol and its commentators want them to submit to its propaganda, to doubt their own senses, and to blame themselves for failing to fit into its fraudulent constructions. But the reality of the system is revealed in what they feel and experience: fear, anxiety, trauma, alienation, hopelessness.

But why does the Capitol go to all of this trouble to treat ‘its’ young people so horrendously, at the risk of generating widespread disgust at its rule? The answer is because its fear of them is even greater.

Which is why The Hunger Games is about containment, and the fundamental fear that Capitol elites have about the people of the districts. Katniss, the other tributes, the districts, even the victors – all are constantly contained and herded, by fences, borders, Peacekeepers, artificial arenas and deadly hazards, pervasive propaganda and reality TV productions.

In our world, young people will live in a future of walls, of containment driven by collapse, environmental destruction, scarcity and a sociopathic elder elite’s fear of losing power. More than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, young people are unconstrained by fears of authoritarian ‘socialism.’ New walls need to be constructed, of individualism, intolerance, hopelessness and passivity. Working out what’s real and what’s Capitol propaganda will be crucial, the first step to surviving the coming hunger games. And let’s remember that the Capitol wouldn’t bother with its propaganda if it wasn’t fundamentally scared of us.

In The Hunger Games, Katniss is the last person to recognize her significance, and our potential to bring down the walls. Despite starting the story in numbness and self-doubt, Katniss will come to recognize she’s not to blame, that it’s the system, and that recovery and healing, personal and collective, will only be possible if the true source of terror is confronted.

But the Capitol and the rebels identify her power long before she does. What she wakes up to is not the full horror of the system, she’s more than aware of that. No, what she comes to understand is that, in the world of Panem, survival is unavoidably a revolutionary act.

The Capitol tries to contain its children because it’s terrified of them politically, because despite its propaganda, there’s nothing natural or inevitable about the state it’s created and coerces people into accepting. Its fear of youth is really its fear of how they could challenge its institutions of exploitation. In Panem, the Games are a pre-emptive punishment against young people’s revolutionary potential.

What The Hunger Games points to, an important part of its success with young readers, is its examination of how youth oppression is so normalized that we often don’t notice it.

Adults should protect young people, not punish them. But protective adults are too often absent. The activist and organizer Andrew Slack has noted the prevalence of “orphans versus empires” in much popular fantasy, from Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and Superman and many other superheroes, to Harry Potter. As Andrew suggests, this isn’t a coincidence.

Orphanhood is also reflected in The Hunger Games. Katniss and her sister Prim have lost their father and effectively their mother as well. Katniss is angry about her mother’s resignation, even though she can understand it. Like many children from dysfunctional homes, Katniss keeps their situation secret from the outside world, out of fear of the authorities taking her and her sister away into ‘care.’ The other young people don’t really seem to have present parents either. And then, being taken from their homes and forced to fight in the Games represents the ultimate orphanhood.

But politically as well, as young people push further into the world, they discover another orphanhood. There is no real adult leadership, responsibility or nurturing in Panem. And not enough in our world either. Young people are orphans of a system that has abandoned them, and humanity. Like Katniss, they’re a generation left to figure it out for themselves.

Oh, and it turns out that the elders in the Capitol are right to fear the young people of Panem.

In our world, as conditions worsen, there will probably be some kind of generational rebellion. Frustrated by the lack of response to crisis, some young people will become more militant, even take violent action against a system that’s doomed them. But like the first rebellion in The Hunger Games, against the overwhelming power of the Capitol this is likely to fail. Violent protest will be used to justify state repression, and then we’re heading into the hunger games.

So whether we read The Hunger Games in generational, geographical, historical, colonial, economic, environmental or class terms, it depicts our most likely endgame. Propaganda about freedom and free markets will be replaced by calls for security for a few and serfdom for many. The Capitol will openly serve corporate interests against workers. Control will be achieved through state repression and economic segregation, an authoritarian capitalism. These regimes will favor older people and contain and immiserate the young. The serfs will be heavily policed and militarized, aided by advanced technology and near-total surveillance, a digitized dictatorship. Media spectacle and shock tactics – perhaps some future version of the Hunger Games, probably a punishment for ‘political dissidents’ – will be used to deter popular resistance.

For the masses, the system will induce exhaustion and a focus on survival. A minimal meritocracy will buy-off a small part of the non-elite, but in reality social advancement will be severely limited. This new order will not be popular, but it will be justified as necessary to preserve society against ‘hostile forces.’ This system needs a name. After The Hunger Games, we could call it ‘capitolism’.

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:

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10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #8: “It’s all a big show. It’s all how you’re perceived”

How elites try to manipulate reality – and how we feel about ourselves

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.

Suzanne Collins has stated:

“Bread crops up a lot in The Hunger Games. It’s the main food source in the districts, as it was for many people historically... But there’s a dark side to bread, too. When [Head Gamemaker] Plutarch Heavensbee references it, he’s talking about Panem et Circenses, Bread and Circuses, where food and entertainment lull people into relinquishing their political power. Bread can contribute to life or death in The Hunger Games.”

‘Bread and circuses’ refers to the Roman Caesars’ strategy of quelling public discontent by providing people with food and entertainment. (Of course, the Capitol doesn’t really provide the bread; even the name of the country is a lie.) The phrase was coined by the Roman satirist Juvenal, describing how the state pacified its subjects by distracting them from political reality. The entertainment was largely provided by gladiatorial games.

In The Hunger Games novels and films, these contests are crossed with reality television techniques to create Panem’s Hunger Games. The setting draws a link between Ancient Rome and the present-day United States, with the almost limitless distractions provided by the latter’s media entertainment complex taking the role of the gladiatorial games.

We’ve already noted some of the reasons that The Hunger Games was a generational phenomenon. Another reason is this manufacture of images and storylines. Through Katniss’s experience, we see how the regime creates and manipulates these for its own ends.

By design, the Hunger Games commodify the competitors, turning them into objects, always a precondition for abuse and exploitation, so that the audience can be entertained rather than horrified by their suffering.

Leading up to the Games, the tributes are expected to act cheerfully and hide how afraid they are. Katniss and Peeta and all of the other tributes are taken to the ‘Remake Center.’ Katniss is literally scrubbed clean of the scars of her life in District 12. They’re styled for a grand parade, then have to pitch themselves on a confessional-style talk show. Each tribute is treated as a character, distinct from the human being who is about to kill or, more likely, be killed. The audience doesn’t experience them as real people, which might induce empathy with their plight.

Katniss even has to pretend she’s humbled, awed, to be in the Games, “this little girl from District Twelve.” And then in the arena, the competitors have to consider how to solicit crucial supplies from rich ‘sponsors’ in the Capitol (as her Games mentor Haymitch advises Katniss, “You really wanna know how to stay alive? You get people to like you”). Just before being thrown into the arena, the tributes are given a rating by the Gamemakers based on their chances of survival, which is important to attracting sponsors. Obviously, because no one wants to back a loser.

Suzanne Collins’ most obvious inspiration was reality TV. She’s explained that: “I was channel surfing between reality TV programing and actual war coverage when Katniss’s story came to me. One night I’m sitting there flipping around and on one channel there’s a group of young people competing for, I don’t know, money maybe? And on the next there’s a group of young people fighting an actual war. And I was tired, and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way...”

The titles alone of well-known programs indicate the ‘values’ they promote: Big Brother, Survivor, American Gladiators, Fear Factor, Naked and Afraid... Critics have suggested how reality TV combines neoliberal ideology (competition, individualism, the offer of instant wealth, the humiliating ‘elimination’ of losers) with the normalization of a surveillance society.

In the story, the Hunger Games aren’t designed as a distraction, then. They perform a propaganda role in establishing a dominant set of social values, values that legitimize the state’s brutality and enforced inequality, and corrode the natural social solidarity that might threaten the Capitol. The Games model and promote, attempt to naturalize, the Capitol’s broader ideology: brutal competitive individualism for the masses, eternal punishment for the poor, and a hopelessness that they can ever really win.

Collins also captures how contemporary capitalism creates pressure for young people to commodify themselves, to craft a personal brand, perform, and promote their ‘best’ identity. Of course, social media provides the perfect vehicle for this. As Jia Tolento argues in Trick Mirror, these platforms are all about commodifying selfhood, but are leading us to mass alienation. Social media offers a kind of ameliorative solidarity which isn’t real; we gravitate to social media in order to feel more connected, but often feel more isolated (in a later post, we’ll consider actual solidarity). It’s just one respect in which The Hunger Games is less sci-fi dystopia than current critique.

Later, in Mockingjay, the third part of the series, Katniss is used as a symbol by the revolution, but she’s equally deeply conflicted about adopting this persona, both about her ability to play the role effectively, and the consequences of the conflict with the Capitol. It takes Katniss a long time to recognize that her power actually lies in her fragility, vulnerability and flaws – in her humanity (“The damage, the fatigue, the imperfections. That’s how they recognize me, why I belong to them”).

But perhaps the most insidious, often invisible erosion of the self derives from the daily grinding focus on survival, a kind of identity theft by a cruel, corrupt society. Katniss’ struggle will be to recognize who she really is, something that totalitarian regimes never encourage, since the beginning of the true self is often the beginning of the end of tyranny.

And indeed, Panem’s total surveillance society will come to be turned back on the Capitol. Katniss’ actions during the Games, which are not purposefully revolutionary, at least consciously, will play out in the most public way possible. The TV spectacle of the Games is a national focal point (viewing is mandatory for all of Panem’s subjects), but this is also what creates such a perfect platform for their subversion.

The Mockingjay revolution starts here.

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:

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10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #7: “I’ve never been a contender in these Games anyway”

The games the Capitol makes us play are not natural at all

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. 

The Hunger Games are a televised gladiatorial combat event in which 24 teenagers, called tributes, are forced to fight to the death in a deadly, natural-looking but actually artificial arena. The winning tribute and their home district are rewarded with food and riches. The Games provide entertainment for the Capitol. Most importantly, they remind the districts of its overwhelming power.

Panem’s rulers present the Games as a celebration, and also perversely an unending punishment for the districts’ past rebellion. But the Games embody the Capitol’s ideology in a deeper way. They normalize a destructive set of social ‘values’ which serve the elite, namely brutal competitive individualism among the poor. This is really why the Games are so important to the Capitol.

The Games promote a brutal competitive individualism that seeks to obliterate all other values, and humanity itself. They exert the Capitol’s control beyond its economic exploitation of the districts, into peoples’ ability to envision an alternative future free of domination.

But the Games also have another role: promoting the illusion of meritocracy. In the film adaptation of the first book, President Snow explains to Seneca the Gamemaker the reason for the Hunger Games. He could easily pick 24 children from the districts and shoot them, but the important thing is to have a winner. This gives people a glimmer of hope: “A little hope is fine. A lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is fine, as long as it’s contained.”

Suzanne Collins suggests how the system manages dissent through this modicum of meritocracy. The economy offers no possibility of advancement, but through the Games there’s the promise to the victors of a life of luxury and the adulation of the Capitol. Of course, it’s a small chance, first to be chosen for and then to survive the tournament. But while the Games strike terror in the poorer districts, competing in them is something that some young people in the career districts actually hunger for.

The Capitol’s presentation of the Games – two young tributes from each district “to be trained in the art of survival and to be prepared to fight to the death” – is of course deceptive. The environment of the arena provides the illusion of choice: competitors can adopt different strategies and use whatever skills they like. They could even make the ‘choice’ not to kill. But as noted, its meritocracy is a myth, since the career tributes typically win, and sponsors typically favor those most likely to prevail. The game is rigged against the poorest districts from the start.

It’s frequently forgotten that the term ‘meritocracy’ was not meant to be taken literally. It was coined in 1958 by the sociologist Michael Young in his essay The Rise of the Meritocracy as a satire of the seemingly merit-based education system in the UK at the time. Young claimed that this system only appeared to reward the intelligent and hard-working; in reality its testing masked a selection process that served the already privileged, rather like the pre-Games judges’ scoring system in The Hunger Games that favors the career tributes who have been training from a young age. Even if a few can climb into privilege, this doesn’t justify the wealth of the Capitol. In a deeply unjust system, meritocracy is a myth. The odds are never in our favor.

This meritocracy serves another purpose. In theory at least, the Games are every man and woman (child, really) for themselves (the supposedly natural elite of the Capitol never puts up its own competitors). But the objective is to crush feelings of solidarity and interdependence between the districts, which is to say, the ordinary working and middle class (such as they are) of Panem. Much as how modern states use class, religious, ethnic and other differences to divide the working class and hinder their organization, Panem uses the Games to foster competition rather than cooperation between the districts, despite the fact that they have more in common with each other than anyone inside the Capitol’s citadel. They literally get the districts to fight against each other.

At first sight Panem may not resemble a ‘free market,’ but there are more similarities between the two than we might think. The Games particularly model capitalist competition. We’re compelled to see others as tributes. There are limited resources – artificially limited, in turns out, to force us to fight each other.

The only times that more supplies are made available, this too is designed to make competitors act more ruthlessly. This happens at the start of the Games to ensure an initial spectacular bloodbath, and later on, when the Gamemakers construct a ‘cornucopia’ in the center of the arena, a treasury of weapons and supplies that the tributes can try to seize. (Smartly, Katniss goes in the opposite direction, and later she destroys the cornucopia to try to level the playing field. It’s a victory, but it still means she’s trapped within the competitive logic of the Games, leaving the other tributes hungrier and more defenseless.)

As in our economy, the people of Panem instructed that the rules are unchangeable, even though the Gamemakers manipulate them for the Capitol’s benefit. As competitors, we’re fundamentally on our own. And we’re told that the winners – in theory the strongest and smartest, but actually those most suited to this particular game – deserve all of the spoils.

Even if we see how the game is constructed, we find ourselves thinking that any alternative values such as kindness, compassion, collaboration are for losers. Like Katniss, we come to believe that such impulses, rather than being the only route to our collective survival, represent our greatest danger. This is the struggle, then, for us to avoid becoming the monsters they want us to be.

However, the spectacle of the Games also creates an opportunity for the subversion of the Capitol’s story of subjection for the “good of the nation,” ultimately into one of personal sacrifice, of love, demonstrating a different kind of unity. This is the spark that Katniss sets off when she volunteers. And it won’t stop there.

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:

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10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #6: “You sit on a throne of lies”

How The Hunger Games reflects a philosophy that’s still very much alive 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.

The film of The Hunger Games starts slightly differently from the book. After some introductory text, we open on a discussion between Caesar Flickerman, the Capitol’s television host for the Games, and Seneca Crane, the Head Gamemaker who designs the Game arena. They’re discussing the “bonding importance” of the Games, how it’s “our tradition... the way we’ve been able to heal.” At first the Games were a reminder of the first rebellion and the “price the districts had to pay,” as enshrined in the country’s Treaty of Treason, but now apparently it’s “something that knits us all together.”

The Capitol audience, comfortable in their plush auditorium, applauds warmly. Caesar asks Seneca what describes his “personal signature” as Gamemaker. Cut to a horrifying scream and a bleak shot of District 12. It’s Prim, Katniss’s sister, waking up on the day of the reaping after a nightmare. What defines the Games, this year and every year, is not healing, but horror.

The story in the books is told only from Katniss’ point of view. This new scene added for the film emphasizes the political nature of the story, starting in the Capitol’s construction of a self-justifying national myth, its attempt to rationalize oppression and exploitation in the name of order and unity. But what we mostly see is how the system affects the young people existing in the shadow of the Games, the horror they experience in the arena, and the psychological trauma of trying to survive under the Capitol’s rule.

In place of the actual history of America/Panem, the Hunger Games is part of a national myth, told by self-serving elites.

This myth contains a threat, to never risk returning to war, to the dark days of division. Conflict and the question of what makes a ‘just war’ and a just revolution is a key question in the story. Panem’s myth is a defense against revolution, in spite of (or because of) the terrible conditions experienced by most of its subjects. But as we come to learn, the state is war, the source of all violence.

Panem is founded on a core conservative idea, one that still holds a powerful grip on today’s politics: that the state restrains us from all-out civil war. This was first set out by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), particularly in his most famous book Leviathan (1651). Hobbes was informed by the English Civil War or civil wars of 1642-46 and 1648-51 – he often uses the word ‘rebellion’ – that led to the execution of the king and the declaration of a republic.

At the time, England was divided, politically, economically, socially, religiously, then militarily. This was also an age of radical new movements, for example the Levellers called for much greater equality in wealth and political rights, while the Diggers fought for the abolition of wage labor. But these flourishing demands for justice and democracy were exactly what Hobbes warned against.

His argument was rooted in a deeply pessimistic view of human behavior, dressed up in some crude ‘science’ (as conservatives still do today). We are driven by greed and fear. Without an authoritarian state, we compete, often violently, to secure the necessities of life and seek reputation (“glory”), both for its own sake and for greater security. Hobbes’ state of nature is perpetual strife, endless dark days comprising a “war of all against all,” leavened only by temporary alliances to stave off graver threats and imminent perils. Hobbes thought that the inevitable condition of humankind was one in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” a relentless quest for power that “ceaseth only in death.”

In such bleakness, there is no alternative to strong central government. Even limiting its powers to seize the goods of its subjects without their consent undermines it. Our only ‘hope’ is all-powerful authority. People must surrender their power to the ultimate peacekeeper, the sovereign ruler. But in reality, this idea just normalizes the actions of some selfish, amoral people as ‘natural,’ and supports exploitation and right-wing authoritarianism, even fascism.

Far from being natural or necessary, this fundamentally authoritarian vision is as constructed as Panem, with its regimented districts and brutally competitive ‘reality’ TV show. A much more benign view of how we can and do act can lead us to envisage a very different kind of society, in which centralizing power is not the solution, it’s the problem. If this is the political journey that Katniss will go on, in another way, as we’ll see, she was there from the beginning.

The Games are only once a year, but they also reinforce the Hobbesian point that, however nasty and brutal they are, it’s better to contain our supposedly ‘natural’ violent and anti-social tendencies in the arena than for these forces to be unleashed. Proponents of capitalism make the same point: the market channels our ‘inherent’ greed and competitiveness in ‘safe’ ways, deliberately ignoring how it encourages them instead. Politics – democracy, collective deliberation, changing the game so that we can live by other values – are characterized by conservatives as ‘divisive,’ the route to all-out social conflict.

Another purpose of Hobbesian propaganda is that people will accept shortages, hardship, cruelty, misery and the curtailing of their freedom if you convince them they’re in a perpetual state of war, or would be without the powerful parental state. As we’ll see, even though many people in the districts don’t fall for it, this ideology helps to justify their privation.

Of course, not all of our societies suffer under authoritarian regimes, despite Hobbesian thinking still being prevalent. But environmental, economic and political collapse, and the fear and chaos they will bring – our coming hunger games – are likely to lead us toward our own version of Panem.

So the key question for our future is this: will we resist the Hobbesian argument, and try to respond differently to crises? Not led by fear, separation, division, segregation, exploitation, but, as the story of The Hunger Games ultimately also suggests, even in horrible circumstances, we can still choose to respond differently.

Another Panem is possible.

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:

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10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #5: “Look at the state they left us in”

The disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires... Panem is post-collapse. It’s also coming here

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.

It’s little commented on, but The Hunger Games is about civilizational collapse. In the books, before the reaping, the mayor of District 12 recounts the history of Panem: “...the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained” (the backstory of environmental disaster is not mentioned in the films). There’s also a later reference to “the destruction of the atmosphere.” Panem is post-collapse. It’s also our future.

The Hunger Games takes place at an unspecified future date, in the dystopian, post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, located in what is now the United States. The country is smaller than today, geographically and demographically. Apparently, large areas of land were made uninhabitable by rising sea levels and many people died (for example, the population of District 12 is said to be just 8,000 people).

As many reviewers have noted, Suzanne Collins is a very deliberate world builder, with lots of historical references and allusions. But the story really resonates because it looks forward. The future in the story isn’t really so futuristic, it’s fast oncoming social fact.

We don’t know exactly when, but we do know that the original trilogy is set more than a hundred years in the future. What it anticipates is our actual near future.

Remember the deceptive story that the Capitol tells about Panem’s history: “The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens.” In other words, the Capitol was strengthened by collapse. So it will be in our world.

Climate change and environmental destruction will lead to failing food production systems, widespread hunger, more conflict and refugees, greater social control and ultimately authoritarianism. Crisis will provide the opportunity for elites to establish new regimes built on segregation and exploitation. We’re already living in an early collapse politics which is increasingly divisive and autocratic. There’s much more to come.

In the world of The Hunger Games, environmental crisis destroyed the United States’ economy and agriculture. This resulted in a civil war over scarce food supplies, culminating in a totalitarian regime. But the districts rebelled against the Capitol. Hunger and conflict nearly killed off the whole of humankind, or at least the population of the former United States. The districts lost, leaving a highly segregated, autocratic society of poverty and backwardness for a majority, and extreme wealth and advanced technology for a protected few.

In our world, oncoming collapse also helps to explain young people’s trauma; they know (some of) what’s coming and have a sense of hopelessness, fear and frustration. The youngest generation have really only known early collapse: terror, war, economic crisis, social division, political instability and the rise of authoritarian populism. No one under 30 has known a stable climate. Not a single month in their lifetime has fallen within the temperature range, rain or storm activity that has governed the planet for the past 10,000 years. Successive generations will grow up into a world shaped entirely by collapse, forced to compete in a hunger games of their own.

If you’re young, you’re going to witness the destabilization of life on earth: massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, widespread flooding and hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat and permanent drought. Studies show that the fear of nuclear annihilation scarred children growing up in the Cold War. Gen Z is already scarred by their equivalent. Many young people think that they’ll die from climate change before they die of old age. It’s the reaping hanging over them.

At the same time, under capitalism, young people have been stripped of the possibility of change, even though they fear we face the end of civilization. Of course, many young people are fighting back, setting the stage for a generational war. Unfortunately, it’s one they’re likely to lose. We have no definitive guide to what will happen and when. But it’s inevitable, not a single problem we can avoid or engineer our way out of, but a civilizational predicament we’re locked into and which it’s too late to avoid. The roots of our crisis lie in an unfair, unequal, unsustainable, fossil fuel-dependent economic system, and the attempts to defend it which are using authoritarianism and populist politics as a distraction.

The Hunger Games isn’t really speculative science fiction, then. There’s no new technology here that we haven’t seen in many other future- set stories. The series is speculative political science, a warning that’s coming true. The future is already in our present. The world is catching fire.

We sometimes wonder how elites don’t see it. But they’re not in denial. For them, it isn’t capitalism that will collapse, it’s democracy, into full oligarchy. A Panem-like society isn’t the accidental outcome of this ideology, it’s the inevitable, and desired, endgame.

As the saying goes, it’s easier to envisage the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But for elites, the former doesn’t mean the latter. Power and wealth were all they really wanted anyway. Elites have signed a death warrant, effectively a Treaty of Treason (the Hunger Games’ founding document), for young people, the most vulnerable, the marginalized and disenfranchised. As collapse becomes unavoidable, the open secret of elites’ endgame becomes clear: a destroyed environment, fortress enclaves for the rich, segregated exploitation for the rest of us.

As we burn, they have no intention of burning with us.

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:

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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:

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10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #3: “District 12, where you can starve to death in safety”

How The Hunger Games reflects inequality and economic segregation 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.

Panem consists of the wealthy ruling Capitol city, located in the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by 12 (originally 13) poorer districts. Katniss’ District 12 is located in today’s Appalachia. The furthest from the Capitol, it specializes in coal mining.

The government is a dictatorship, a surveillance state in which the districts are forced into subservience to the Capitol, expected to provide goods in exchange for ‘protection,’ for peace and prosperity. But only the Capitol is lavishly rich and technologically advanced, while the districts survive in poverty and distress.

The Hunger Games, the first book, was released on 14 September 2008, the same day investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and the global financial crisis entered its most acute phase. This was an accident of timing but also, for a series that depicts a world of gross inequality and elite corruption, deliberately prescient. The crisis was in many ways the outcome of inequality; the only way ordinary people could afford a home was courtesy of fundamentally fake financial instruments, based on income they didn’t have and interest rates they couldn’t afford.

So why didn’t the crisis provoke a widespread revolt against the system? Supported by its propagandists, the Capitol was said to have ‘won’ the story regarding the causes of the crisis and its required consequences: that the rich need to be protected while the poor are punished. It was class war, by the rich, on the poor, as blatant as the cruel regime of the fictional Capitol.

The Hunger Games isn’t just the brutally honest name of the annual fight-to-the-death competition organized by the Capitol, the city that dominates Panem. It’s the way that its elite controls the districts. Starvation, scarcity and minimal rewards doled out to subservient districts; the Capitol uses hunger as a weapon against the masses. It’s also a powerful metaphor for the economic system we live under today, so much so that ‘the Hunger Games’ has now become shorthand for any especially brutally competitive environment or economy.

It might seem horribly honest for a regime to call its primary propaganda tool the ‘Hunger Games’. But it’s entirely deliberate. As Suzanne Collins has said, “The socio-political overtones of The Hunger Games were very intentionally created to characterize current and past world events, including the use of hunger as a weapon to control populations.”

The Games are a reminder, a threat and a demonstration of domination. Naming them is about power. It’s not meant to generate support for the system, but to crush any humane alternative. As Katniss recognizes, it’s the Capitol’s way of saying, “Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do.” You can’t even protest, let alone rebel.

The thing is, how the Capitol justifies its regime is really not so different from how some people promote capitalism in our world: how it disciplines us to work or starve, punishes the ‘indolent’ and rewards the ‘winners.’ If we think the Capitol is too honest, we forget how in our world apologists for capitalism also celebrate its cruel and controlling methods.

Immiseration and unemployment are a deliberate political strategy of capitalism. Scarcity induces fear, of not being able to survive, but also of each other. In survival, we put ourselves and our families over the possibility of solidarity and social change.

Katniss describes how starvation is normal in her district, but it’s never an official cause of death. We look away too, but in the richest country on earth, widespread hunger is real. Nearly 49 million Americans, including more than 16 million children, live in households that lack food. More children are hungry than adults: 1 in 5 go hungry at some point during any year.

In the United States, hunger was virtually eliminated in the 1970s. Now, after 40 years of a right-wing economic regime, it’s back. The number of people going hungry has grown dramatically. The present levels represent a fivefold rise since the late 1960s, with an increase of 57 percent since the late 1990s alone.

Hunger is particularly prevalent in the districts. A total of 15 percent of families living in rural areas experience food insecurity. People of color are also disproportionately affected. Black and Latino children experience hunger at double the rate of white children.

Conservatives attack such statistics, claiming that this can’t possibly be true in such a rich country. It probably feels that way from the full tables of the Capitol.

Katniss’s District 12 is in Appalachia, one of the most deprived regions in the US, and one of the most maligned. Suzanne Collins chose it for a reason: it’s looked down on as irredeemably poor and backward, ignorant and violent. The Hunger Games also illustrates how we shame the poor. Classism is the last acceptable form of discrimination. It normalizes poverty, because the poor are assumed to be lazy and irresponsible. In fact, their poverty is created by the Capitol, by its heavily policed economic system and class division, then they’re blamed for their ‘dysfunction’ when it’s the system that’s responsible.

Further, in the world of The Hunger Games, the meagre tesserae system of food rationing offered by the Capitol to starving families – which comes at the cost of a higher chance of being selected for the Hunger Games – echoes our own punitive welfare systems. Not only are such benefits often insufficient to live on, they also come at a cost, to punish the poor with time-wasting, bureaucratic requirements to find low paid, insecure work. Such punitive ‘welfare’ rests on an engineered division which dates back centuries between the deserving ‘respectable working class’ and the undeserving ‘underclass.’ We’ll ignore for the moment that the most feckless residents of Panem reside in its Capitol. But they are the subject of the next post.

Of course, in contrast to the Capitol’s propaganda, in The Hunger Games we’re presented with different personification of the underclass. Katniss is decent, strong, brave and kind. She’s an honest working-class woman who suffers incredible hardship but endures. She might seem passive and resigned, but she’s also decisive and acts swiftly.

And as we, and Katniss, will discover, she’s not alone.

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:

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10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #2: “They messed us up pretty good, didn’t they?”

How The Hunger Games resonates with alienated and anxious young people today

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.

The first post can be found here.

One of the major themes of The Hunger Games is trauma and coping, especially as experienced by young people. As well as enforced poverty (discussed in the next post), we’re presented with the corrosive effects of cruelty, terror and fear, powerlessness and passivity under a despotic regime.

Most obviously, we see how children from poor communities are forced to fight to the death in a gruesome reality TV show for the entertainment of the rich. On top of systemic poverty and inequality, this is intended to numb a pauperized populace. It seems to work – for a time.

The generation coming into adulthood now are often referred to as Gen Z (Generation Z). They’re typically understood to have been born between 1997 and 2012. The oldest of them might vaguely remember the end of the twentieth century. Some of them will live to see the twenty-second century. The Hunger Games is their story; they’re the tributes (the competitors in the cruel Hunger Games ‘competition’) of our world.

The oldest of them, perhaps their older sisters and brothers first, will have read Suzanne Collins’ series and then watched the films at the same time they were coming to their own comprehension of the state of the world. A society controlled by a corrupt elder elite, albeit heightened and dramatized. The story felt, and still feels, like it captures an essential truth.

In creating her fictional world, Collins reflects many of the prevailing anxieties of young people today. No wonder The Hunger Games speaks so strongly to them. It suggests, much more than most generational commentary and analysis, what’s really traumatizing the kids.

Katniss, the main protagonist in the story, epitomizes this trauma. Even before the Games, she’s desensitized. She describes the suffering of the districts, but there are no feelings attached. She’s continually repressing her emotions, shielding her vulnerability, wary of connections and anything that isn’t self-sufficiency. Katniss is always ready to help others, but doesn’t want to rely on anyone else. How could she, in her world?

Katniss is also surrounded by expectations about what she should be and how she should act. As we’ll explore, the reality TV show of the Hunger Games and state spying means that Katniss and her peers are often acting for the audience, a pressure felt by young people in our own age of social media surveillance. But this means that Katniss continually distrusts the motives of others. She even often doubts her own motivations.

There might then be something to the idea that The Hunger Games appeals because it embeds familiar teenage challenges in its dystopia: disappointment with adults; the pressure to be likable and attractive; a lack of privacy; the need to make alliances, and the difficulties in deciding who can be trusted.

But to stop here would be to ignore the more explicitly political themes of the story. In how young people are contained and punished, The Hunger Games also reflects adult fears of adolescence as a powerful destabilizing force. It isn’t a high school drama, not really, it’s a political coming-of-age story about class and conflict, for its characters, and for its audience.

And talk about great timing. The first book was published in the midst of a global financial crisis and an adult world run irresponsibly amok, from which the resulting austerity was inflicted mainly on the young, poor and minorities. Much of The Hunger Games’ generation has lived with a lack of opportunity and growing inequalities in generational wealth and power, alongside war and terror and reality-twisting politicians. For example, the actors and director of the films were aware of the clear connections between the story and the Occupy movement, among other protests, that were taking place while they were filming the first movie.

In the story, this plays out psychologically as well as politically. Katniss is alienated from herself, to the extent she’s internalized the Capitol’s hateful propaganda. She thinks she’s a fundamentally horrible person, unworthy of love. She doesn’t believe anyone else could love her either.

What lies underneath this is deep grief. The cruelest crime committed by the Capitol, the ruling city that is the heart of the regime, is not the way it kidnaps children to participate in the Games, terrible as that is. It’s the way the entire system steals from children any sense of psychological safety.

Economist Noreena Hertz has called those born between 1995-2002 “Generation K,” after Katniss. This is a generation riddled with anxiety and distrustful of traditional institutions, but like their heroine also imbued with a strong sense of social justice. They look out on a world of terror and insecurity. Of course they’ve been shaped by technology and recession, but also by existential threat.

As Hertz says: “[U]nlike those currently aged between 20 and 30, the ‘Yes we can’ generation, who grew up believing the world was their oyster, for Generation K the world is less oyster, more Hobbesian nightmare.” (We’ll discuss this latter philosophy in a later post.) Hertz’s research with American and British teenagers suggests they’re defined by anxiety, loneliness and fear about their own futures as well as the world – but also by a distrust of corporations, a desire for connection and co-creation, and a commitment to equality and the environment.

Of course, The Hunger Games is a deliberately extreme story. But in these respects it reflects the feelings of young people today, one of the reasons for its resonance with them. While young people of every generation face challenges, today’s have been taught that resources, whether economic, educational or environmental, are limited and that they’ll have to fight for them, a mental hunger games they have internalized to the point of sickness.

Characterizations of young people as ‘overly sensitive snowflakes’ don’t then stem (just) from commentators being cranky olds. They serve as a distraction from an exploitative economic system, from austerity and insecurity, and ever-increasing psychological pressure for personal productivity and perfectionism generated by contemporary capitalism. And as we’ll see, from coming collapse.

So of course young people identify with Katniss, whose only markers of adulthood are accepting responsibility for her family’s survival and being thrown into a brutally competitive arena in which she’ll struggle to survive. But she will – just about, but not without suffering terrible damage first.

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:

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Books-A-Million

Barnes & Noble

Indiebound

Waterstones

Foyles

Hive

Book Depository

Indigo

Goodreads

10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #1: “Real or not real?”

It’s not a high school drama, it’s a political coming-of-age story, for its characters and its audience

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.

An uber-rich ruling class gorge themselves in a futuristic playground, while working people struggle to survive in exploited rural areas. The possibility of revolution is only a distant memory, a forgotten hope kept at bay by brutal policing, aching poverty and a rigidly segregated class system…

The Hunger Games could be seen as a critique of explicitly authoritarian states, and/or just an imagined future dystopia. But that wasn’t the series’ aim. Its setting is a post-collapse North America. It’s more both a warning about the near future and a cutting critique of the present-day United States – of reality TV politics, the demonization of the poor, state violence and oligarchy, and many more issues that we’ll discuss in this series of blog posts.

When The Hunger Games began in 2008 – it’s since become a defining story for a generation that’s grown up with economic crisis and never ending war – many commentators lumped it in with other young adult genre fiction such as Twilight and Divergent. But The Hunger Games is political. 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. 

It’s also 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. It’s a story about how regimes fall, but how the revolution against power and exploitation can never end.

And with the climate crisis and environmental disaster, it’s about a coming future of enforced scarcity and segregation, and an emerging form of authoritarian statism we’ll call ‘capitolism’. It’s the story of our times, and most likely of our near future as well. 

Despite, or because of, these themes, The Hunger Games struck a chord from the start. Suzanne Collins established her name in children’s literature with the Underland Chronicles fantasy series for middle-grade readers. She continued to explore themes of war and violence for a young adult audience with The Hunger Games. The first book in the series, published in 2008, was an instant bestseller, appealing both to teenage readers and adults. The book appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for over 260 consecutive weeks (more than 5 years), selling more than 100 million copies in 54 languages in 52 countries.

The New York Times Book Review thought that, “At its best the trilogy channels the political passion of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the memorable violence of A Clockwork Orange, the imaginative ambience of The Chronicles of Narnia and the detailed inventiveness of Harry Potter.” In 2012, the first of four films based on the novels was released (the final book was split into two films), starring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. The series has earned $3 billion at the worldwide box office. Clearly, the story has resonated with audiences, particularly young people. The question is why, and whether it means anything politically.

Some commentators assumed its appeal centered on the love triangle between Katniss, Gale and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta. But this isn’t the focus of the story, it’s a subplot to bigger political questions, notably how to survive under an authoritarian regime, the price people are prepared to pay to bring it down and whether this corrupts the post-regime society they long for.

We might be suspicious of Hollywood selling us ‘rebeltainment’, even clever meta-stories that critique how rebels use storytelling to sell their revolution. There must be a catch. But even if this were true, if Hollywood is the creative Capitol (the ruling elite city in the story), we can claim and subvert its stories. As we’ll see in these blog posts, Katniss (our main protagonist) introduces a new story to the Games, of defiance in place of deference, cooperation instead of competitive individualism, self-sacrifice rather than subservience. Once these seeds have been sown, it’s the Capitol that becomes terrified of their reaping. It scrambles to regain the initiative by attempting to assimilate Katniss and Peeta’s alliance (with, yes, some reality TV game playing on their part as well) into a sentimental story of “star-crossed lovers.” Neatly anticipating some of the misguided commentary on The Hunger Games as just a teen love triangle, the Capitol desperately tries to depoliticize them.

But as the late commentator Mark Fisher noted:

“The Hunger Games is irreducibly political in a way that the Potter and the Twilight films could never be. The film’s political charge depends upon the surprising intensity of its brutality. This brutality is affective rather than explicit; the amount of gore is actually quite low, and it is the prospect of pubescents murdering each other, not the sight of their doing it, which shocks. What makes The Hunger Games more than a workaday thriller is its disclosing of a world – a world that, as with all dystopias that connect, is a distorting mirror of our own.”

Hence the reason why The Hunger Games has been used in youth-led protests to this day. It reflects the unavoidability of the oligarchic, near-dystopian future that’s already here. 2019, when I started writing my new book, saw youth-led revolts in numerous regions and countries, 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.

In an important sense, The Hunger Games predicts how regimes around the world are likely to respond to increasing youth-led protests against their power – mainly with repression of course. The real hunger games are just beginning. That’s why we need to return to Panem.

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: 

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Books-A-Million

Barnes & Noble

Indiebound

Waterstones

Foyles

Hive

Book Depository

Indigo

Goodreads

Read a free chapter of Welcome to the Rebellion: "Rebellions are built on hope"

Here’s the second chapter of my new book Welcome to the Rebellion, available now in paperback, e-book and audiobook. If you enjoyed it, you can see where it’s available to buy here.

“There has been an awakening. Have you felt it?”

Given publishing timescales, Welcome to the Rebellion, my book about what today’s young rebels can learn from our favourite fictional fighters against Empire, was written well before the release of The Rise of Skywalker. As a study of how Star Wars reflects contemporary politics and vice versa, it doesn’t try to predict the conclusion to the Skywalker saga. Rather, what it does anticipate is the significance and prospects of youth-led movements like Black Lives Matter, the climate justice movement, the Never Again activists for gun control and many more, and how by reclaiming the rebel story these movements could represent a new resistance to empire in our own world. Hence the subtitle of a new hope in radical politics, and despite being written well before the events of this summer, what I also hope is a timely book to read right now.

This focus is one reason why I wasn’t looking for The Rise of Skywalker to somehow crown the saga. I’d already got what I wanted from Star Wars many years before, including politically. As well as being fun and thrilling and imaginative, the films had given me and many millions of people a story of heroism and hope in response to authoritarianism and an ideology of selfish acquisition. Three main things made me think that the politics of Star Wars were still relevant, perhaps more than ever, and led me to write the book.

The first of these is the rise of empire. George Lucas was once asked what one thing he hoped fans understood about his saga. He replied, “I only hope that those who have seen Star Wars recognize the Emperor when they see him.” In its own fantastical way, his story might have helped a mass audience to see what authoritarianism is and how it seizes power – its manipulations, fear-mongering, violence, annihilation of political opponents, its rampant self-interest and corrosive corruption.

This was most prominent in the prequel trilogy, which depicted the schemes of Senator Palpatine and the eventual revelation of his evil agenda. In turn this harks back to the concerns Lucas shared with his protesting peers about the American republic in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly its corruption by militarism and imperialism. One reason for the recent critical re-evaluation of the prequels has been the relevance of these themes once again. And while the sequel trilogy has been criticised for being less politically, or if you prefer, thematically, coherent than their predecessors, one respect in which they did resonate is in reflecting the resurgence of authoritarian populism in the form of the First Order (as The Rise of Skywalker reveals, they subsequently ally with the Final Order, an armada built by Palpatine, who has been secretly controlling the Order via his puppet ruler Snoke).

J. J. Abrams, the director of the first and last of the sequels, said the concept for the First Order “came out of conversations about what would have happened if the Nazis all went to Argentina but then started working together again.” In our world, would-be emperors stoke popular anger and turn it into rage to distract and disorientate people, blame the marginalized and vulnerable, erode political liberties and entrench themselves in power. They turn politics to the dark side. We’re living in a version of the prequels – but also perhaps the rise of the resistance, as we’ll note in a moment.

The second theme for the continued relevance of the politics of Star Wars is recognition, the moment when we see things for how they are, realise what empire is, and begin to accept what our role needs to be in resisting it. As I write in the book:

“Awakening is about taking responsibility, a key theme in Star Wars. Luke moves from “I can’t get involved” hopelessness to a heroic maturity. Han Solo moves from “I’m only in it for the money” cynicism to helping his comrades. All of the main characters in A New Hope make a journey from resignation to rebellion: princess to rebel leader, farm boy to fighter pilot, smuggler to freedom fighter, aged hermit to militant martyr. The necessity of resistance and the slim possibility of victory bring them to life; it is life. …And here is where we need to diverge from fantasy and science fiction, since history teaches us that defeating the system is not just about throwing one Emperor off a balcony into a canyon of steel…”

Of course, it turns out in The Rise of Skywalker that this wasn’t the end of the Emperor either, but anyway… Some people bitterly reject the idea that it’s political at all, but it’s this awakening that represents, I think, the rebel heart of Star Wars:

“As a fantasy, it connects with what is arguably the most real thing of all, even if we try to ignore it: the need to stand against domination and to fight for a better world. It’s about how we find ourselves when we’re confronted by what we must face down and defeat. That’s the way we become the heroes of our lives, by being part of something much bigger, and sometimes much scarier. It’s how we find camaraderie and fellowship and love as well. The force in ourselves, and the hope in each other.”

The third theme, consequently, is the necessity of rebellion. As I write:

“The real subversiveness of Star Wars lies in dramatizing for a mass audience how a nation whose defining myths are anti-imperialism, freedom and self-determination is corrupted into becoming what it criticized – and further, how the only response is revolution.”

Star Wars has never really been interested in the mechanics of revolution, or how for example revolutions can be corrupted. Instead, as noted, its focus is the call to action and the hero’s journey to fighting (space) fascism. That’s why in the book I’ve emphasized the 1960s new left roots of George Lucas’ vision, of a small band of overmatched rebels struggling against authoritarianism, corruption, brutality and militarism, and how despite setbacks and defeats, you can see the same driving hope and humanity in today’s protest movements. This is at the heart of the book, and, I think, the continuing relevance of the politics of the saga:

“Rebellion is proliferating. Trump and his fellow authoritarians are creating new political activists, ordinary people who for the first time find themselves protesting, participating, organizing, running for office, making connections. This has been happening for some time. Naturally, it ebbs and flows… [but now] a whole series of books couldn’t do justice to all of the individuals, groups, communities and campaigns that are rising up. The new new left, the young left (does it matter whether we label them as “the left” or not?) aren’t listening to the pessimism and passivity of some of their elders. Nor do they fall for the lies of empire. To paraphrase Emma González, one of the leaders of the #NeverAgain movement, this is a “no BS” generation of activists and campaigners.”

There are many ways to connect these diverse movements: as mass mobilizations against violence and oppression, in their recognition of the systemic nature of what we’re up against and by their refusal to accept so-called pragmatism and political realities. They’re also about freedom, real freedom – from the exploitation of land and environment, police brutality and institutional injustice, to being afraid at school and the coming climate chaos. Just like our favourite fictional rebellion, they fight for freedom because doing so is necessary for survival.

Storytelling is crucial to these struggles, which is why Welcome to the Rebellion draws on arguably our most popular modern myth. In our world, authoritarianism now presents a more virulent threat to peace and justice than at any time since its defeat at the end of the Second World War. But authoritarianism in its various forms is also, in one sense, a story, one that needs to be fought with better stories. Authoritarians exploit the universal desire to be part of a meaningful quest. The answer to authoritarianism is more democracy, returning prosperity, security and power to ordinary people, and fundamentally, engaging millions of people in a collective meaningful quest, a rebellion that restores peace, justice and real security to the world:

“As the stories told by elites crumble, these movements are contesting the old common sense and creating new ones. Telling a different story is vital to winning change and recruiting new rebels. The previous forms of solidarity on the left, most obviously trade unions, have been significantly eroded, deliberately so by the forces of the right. In the era of globalization, the absence of structures of solidarity leaves those left out susceptible to the exclusionary identities and false solidarity of right-wing populist appeals, or even worse. We need to build a better, more appealing common identity for change. We need a rebel alliance.”

To some, this might sound fantastical. But then, as this summer has shown, in dark times there are suddenly moments when resistance breaks out, empire is challenged, and new hope springs forth. There has been an awakening, and we’ve all felt it.

Welcome to the Rebellion is out now, in paperback, e-book and audiobook.

Why did the idea of Star Wars take hold of so many people?

From my forthcoming book Welcome to the Rebellion, chapter two:

It’s a little strange, as Will Brooker notes in his BFI Film Classics appraisal, that cinema scholarship seems to be embarrassed by Star Wars, to the extent that it mainly discusses the film in relation to its audiences, special effects, merchandising and impact on the studio system, rather than its themes, story and characters. This goes back to some of the first reviews, for example Pauline Kael on A New Hope:

“[I]t’s a film that’s totally uninterested in anything that doesn’t connect with the mass audience...It’s enjoyable on its own terms, but it’s exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus...The excitement of those who call it the film of the year goes way past nostalgia to the feeling that now is the time to return to childhood.”

It’s true that Star Wars was meant for kids, but this is partly what makes it subversive. It was meant to introduce a new generation to folklore, which George Lucas felt they were missing. The classic myth is the tale of someone, typically a young person, taking their first steps into a larger world and learning to give themselves to something bigger. Drawing on story archetypes, Star Wars is a modern fairy tale. Moreover, as we’ll see, it was steeped in a worldview that the world has been corrupted and needs to be challenged through radical action led by a new generation.

Denis Wood made an important observation about this accusation of childishness. In the context of a bourgeois society, both popular stories and folktales “have been relegated to the nursery.” In the nineteenth century, storytelling became mainly an entertainment of the poor. The middle classes professed to prefer “rational thinking” and modern mass media to community-based narrative oral entertainment involving archetypal characters. Calling something “childish” is a way for the bourgeois to distance themselves from stories, from the masses and crucially, as we’ll note, from taking action to change society.

But imagine an alternative universe in which A New Hope wasn’t a success. There having been no sequels, it’s periodically re-discovered as a radical kids movie, a strange little ’70s hippie experiment that never found an audience. That’s not how it turned out, of course. More than just a hit movie, Star Wars became “a celebration, a social affair, a collective dream.”

So was born the cliché of a young experimental filmmaker who went to the dark side, corrupted by an empire of plastic. Lucas has acknowledged that Star Wars became so successful that it took over his life. Speaking before the prequels, Francis Ford Coppola lamented of his friend and former business partner that: “The great success of Star Wars didn’t lead to the independence and personal filmmaking. George never made another film after that...And instead we have a kind of enormous industrial marketing complex.”

Star Wars has certainly been used to shovel a lot of crap, but the merchandise is a function of its massive popularity. Young and old want to spend time in its universe. The toys allow kids to play out their own stories of rebellion on rainy days and during long hot summers. Meanwhile, adult fans avidly consume different corners of the saga.

Some “just” find comedy, camaraderie and inspiration in it. But geeks’ engagement can also be a form of creative rebellion. As Jase Short has noted, what defines a geek is their hostility to passive consumption: “For one, there are few if any committed fans who aren’t aware of the various forms of capitalist intellectual property constraints that dominate the cultural products in question.” Nonetheless, many do re-engineer these products, for example the huge number of fan edits of the much-maligned prequels that can be found online. The toys were the old means of creating your own Star Wars story. Now you can effectively reshoot the saga.

In a widely-discussed piece called The Complex and Terrifying Reality of Star Wars Fandom, Andrey Summers captures it like this:

“To be a Star Wars fan, one must possess the ability to see a million different failures and downfalls, and then somehow assemble them into a greater picture of perfection. Every true Star Wars fan is a Luke Skywalker, looking at his twisted, evil father, and somehow seeing good...[The fans] hate everything about Star Wars. But the idea of Star Wars...the idea we love.”

So for the moment we need to ask: what is this idea that has taken a hold of so many people?

…which is what I discuss in the book, and why Star Wars continues to mean so much to so many people today.

Welcome to the Rebellion is available for pre-order now.