The audio for the Hunger Games panel I did in November is now available online. Thanks to Unity & Struggle and Insurgent Notes for hosting, my braniac fellow panelists for teaching me all kinds of things, and Mylo for hooking up the crisp recording! I hope these folks keep doing events like this. I'd love to come back ;)
I'm also pasting below the full text of my (nerd alert) prepared remarks for anyone interested. You can watch Aelita: Queen of Mars here, which I highly recommend.
Prepared Remarks for "The Hunger Games and Revolution"
Jarrod Shanahan
Jarrod Shanahan
The American revolutionary Ken
Lawrence writes: “Because popular culture is a reflection of the status of the
mass imagination – albeit shaped and distorted by the dominant ideas of the
rulers of society – measurable changes in the cultural interests and activities
of large numbers of ordinary people can provide an important index to the
development of a world view which has not yet emerged as a mass consciousness.”
Before I discuss the importance of
The Hunger Games to understanding the world view which has not yet emerged
as a mass consciousness, I’d like to briefly mention another science
fiction epic which took the box office by storm during uncertain political
times.
In 1924 working class filmgoers in the
newly formed Soviet Union flocked to Aelita Queen of Mars, one of cinema’s
earliest science fiction classics. In Aelita a Russian scientist escapes
the pressing problems of the workers’ revolution by imagining a visit to Mars,
where he and his colleague find a class society ruled by an exploitative
monarchy. The Soviet scientists immediately impress their revolutionary Bolshevik
ideals on the Martian workers, and naturally this ignites a workers’ rebellion
against the monarchy, and the formation of a Martian soviet. So far, a typical,
albeit creative exercise in Soviet propaganda at a time when Soviet filmmakers
Eisenstein and Dovzhenko were perfecting the art of political cinema.
But there’s a twist: once the
worker’s movement gains momentum, Aelita, the Queen of Mars, claims to have
broken from the monarchy and proclaims herself the leader of the workers’
rebellion. The workers are torn, and face a decisive political reckoning:
strong leadership, versus the abolition of leadership itself. Ultimately they
decide Aelita cannot be trusted, and along with the original struggle – against
the ruling class – they must now wage a second struggle, within the revolution
itself. They must bravely battle the forces within the revolution threatening to
return society to conditions of exploitation, wage labor, hierarchy, and state
power. Small wonder that this film was later banned by the Stalinists! Aelita
Queen of Mars stands today as a grim monument to the true revolutionary sentiment
which would take Josef Stalin over a decade to decisively defeat, using all manner
of manipulation, deceit, and atrocity, toward the reestablishment of class
society.
Ninety years later the revolutionary
fervor which characterized the early twenties is supposedly long gone. Conventional
wisdom says we have all accepted that there is no alternative to capitalism,
and that communism – which supposedly happened in Russia, and continues to
happen, miraculously, in the capitalist superpower of China – is a long discredited
bit of dangerous romanticism. Now, I would be more inclined to believe that
people have given up on revolution, if revolution wasn’t in the air everywhere
I look! Whether in the streets of Ferguson Missouri, East New York just last
night, or in the pages of a runaway young adult bestseller and box office
buster with a strong female lead, a collective intuition of the necessity of revolution
could scarcely be more present in the public imagination than it is today.
To be fair, some critics mockingly describe
the commercial genre of “Hollywood Marxism” as follows: there exists some
cartoonish class-based injustice, usually with innocent doe-eyed Disney damsels
oppressed by evil monstrous overlords, and with ample product placement on both
sides. Struggle is then made by one person, usually from the ruling class,
usually white. After some predictable action sequences, our hero delivers and the
wrongs of the world are righted once and for all. The audience goes home or the
reader closes their book with their own longing for revolution satisfied for a
while. And in an advanced capitalist society like ours, anti-capitalism itself might
be the ultimate commodity! Many such critics lump The Hunger Games into
this genre.
Now, if the series ended with Catching
Fire – when Katniss, mostly acting as an individual, takes decisive action,
destroys the game, and meets the revolution’s secret leaders who spirit her
away to the bright future ahead – I would agree. This would put the series in a
genre ranging from The Matrix to Ernest Goes to Camp. But what
sets The Hunger Games apart is what made Soviet censors ban one of their
countries greatest cinematic achievements: the struggle within the struggle. In
Mockingjay Katniss wrestles with the role of mascot for a revolution not
controlled by the people but managed from above by an expert class. She
criticizes the cult of “revolutionary leadership” that we continue to see on
America’s streets today. Katniss knows that an egalitarian society cannot be
built using hierarchy, an honest society cannot be built using deceit, and that
a revolution willing to sacrifice its very values in the name of victory will
be defeated whether it wins or loses. In her dealings with President Coin and the
revolutionary leadership of District 13, Katniss comes to recognize that the
revolution itself must be the site of struggle, just as much as the society
that produced it.
If we follow Ken Lawrence’s words,
the success of this series is just the latest reminder that revolution is never
far from the contemporary imagination, and that the struggles of the Arab
Spring, Burkina Faso, Mexico, Hong Kong, and right here in the United States are
only a taste of what’s to come. Further, Katniss’s experiences in The
Mockingjay, tell us that not only do millions of people know deep down that
revolution is the only way out of the present economic, political, and
environmental crises, but also that the struggle will be waged not only against
capitalism and the state, but against the elements within the revolution which
will try to prevent it from going all the way: whether charismatic politicians,
self-appointed social movement police, left-talking non-profit organizations, pro-capitalist
trade unions, famous Occupiers, or historical re-enacting revolutionary
parties.
In closing I’d invite you to imagine
ninety years into the future, when people will marvel at The Hunger Games as
we today marvel at Aelita Queen of Mars. Will they say, as we say of Aelita,
that The Hunger Games stands as a tragic monument to a mass revolutionary
sentiment which was defeated by counterrevolution shortly thereafter? Will the revolution
of our lifetime be waged without compromise toward the end of capitalism and
the state, the end of wage labor, the end of production for exchange, the
abolition of all forms of hierarchy, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and
an immediate stop to all practices destroying our planet? And will we build in
the place of today’s sick world a society based on production for need, radical
equality, and the full development of human creative capacities in a harmonious
balance with the planet and all of its sentient beings? Or will our struggle
succumb, as in the Soviet Union, to the would-be Aelitas, waiting in the wings
to seize power from us as soon as we assume it?
