The Language of Economy in Panem,
The Hunger Games & Ideology
When reading young-adult fiction, it’s often important to ask: what worldview does it promote, and which does it denounce? An all the more important question to consider when reading dystopian or post-apocalyptic novel. It is precisely in these worlds where seemingly everything has gone wrong that we can locate a text’s agenda by determining which ideology it claims lead to the ‘fall.’
For the uninitiated, here’s a two sentence premise to The Hunger Games: in the nation of Panem, a bourgeois elite resides in the Capitol as the proletariat labours in the twelve remaining districts. After the districts rose up in violent revolt, the Uprising that the Capitol now calls “a painful part of our history,” the Hunger Games were created as a deterrent.
It only takes about 2 minutes into the film to understand that the world of The Hunger Games operates under a regime of communism. You’ll likely recognize this brand of communism from other texts: vilified for its fascist iconography and militarized bureaucracy, it’s just plain evil. Evidently, communism, “the system of social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state,” just doesn’t work, right? I mean, just look at these miners below.
My point is, The Hunger Games doesn’t try to elaborate upon the economic system that it so quickly claims is flawed. Really makes you think, why did the workers of Panem submit to 74 years of reaping before giving revolution another shot? Also, when Katniss and Gale are frolicking in a meadow beyond the district line, Gale wonders if they should run away together. “We wouldn’t make it five miles,” Katniss claims. This is a great example of how powerful ideology can be: you’re already outside the wall that imprisons you, and yet you still believe that you cannot escape.
The economic system opposite to communism is, of course, capitalism — the one that works, duh. By damning Marx’s economic model, The Hunger Games tacitly upholds capitalism as the ‘good’ ideology. Moreover, it suggests that capitalism is innate: it’s the very language we speak in, and the inevitable culmination of history.
As Peeta claims, “if I die, I still want to be me,” Katniss responds, “I just can’t afford to think like that.” After all, what is a life worth? And moreover, a child’s life? In the logic of The Hunger Games, the young subjects of capitalism-to-be are understood as pending investments. A tribute, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, is “a stated sum or other valuable consideration paid by one sovereign or state to another in acknowledgment of subjugation or as the price of peace, security, protection, or the like.” The moment Katniss volunteers as tribute sows her into the fabric of capital by way of language.
Katniss becomes part of a transaction — her life for her sister’s — that positions her as both participant and object of exchange. Such is her sacrifice, her legacy. To become an individual subject in the economy, to have power of purchase, is ultimately liberation.
