Portside

• The Hunger Games Are Real: We Are the Districts - Carl Gibson (Reader Supported News)
• Remember Who The Enemy Is - Mark Fisher (k-punk Abstract Dynamics)
• Ad Campaign (lip) Glosses Over 'Hunger Games' Message - Andrew Slack (Los Angeles Times)

The Hunger Games Are Real: We Are the Districts

By Carl Gibson

November 25, 2013
Reader Supported News 

The few rich men who control the Capitol have successfully managed to consolidate the majority of the nation's wealth into their hands. The Capitol has taken away food stamps from hungry families and given it to their rich benefactors in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, and other forms of corporate welfare. Career politicians are even smashing up the possessions of homeless people with a sledgehammer with impunity, while wearing designer clothes.

These rich men also control the news broadcasted on the Capitol's airwaves that brainwashes the impoverished masses into believing their suffering is their own fault, that they're only starving because they don't know how to work hard, and that those who control all the resources must somehow deserve it because their status makes them more worthy. However, the rich men still aren't satisfied. They're already trying to force through a trade deal kept secret from the public that would subvert what remains of democracy and install global corporate rule.

When the poor and oppressed dare to speak out against the injustice of the ruling class, the Capitol's peacekeeping forces suppress their protests with extraordinary brutality. When the people try to vote out their corrupt leaders in the electoral process, the ruling class simply drowns out the democratic process by dumping truckloads of money into incumbents' pockets. Meanwhile, the impoverished masses are constantly told to be thankful for their freedom, and are given mindless distractions to keep their minds off of what their real problems are.

I'm not talking about The Hunger Games. I'm talking about our present situation.

Laporshia Massey, a student at Bryant Elementary School in Philadelphia, died from an asthma attack, caused as a result by Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett's class war. Since 2010, Corbett has given out $2 billion in corporate tax breaks while cutting public schools by over $1 billion. As a result, schools like Bryant Elementary have had to cut budgets, meaning school nurses are only present on certain days. Unfortunately for her, Massey suffered an asthma attack on a day the nurse wasn't in, couldn't get medical attention until the end of the school day, and died as a result. Meanwhile, corporations like those given massive tax breaks by the Corbett administration are enjoying record profits on Wall Street, and not doing a damn thing about jobs.

Instead of creating jobs, these companies are using these tax breaks to buy back their own stock, like Walmart does to the tune of $7.6 billion per year. As the progressive think tank Demos discovered, Walmart could instead use the money dedicated to stock buybacks, which only enrich a small handful of corporate executives, to instead pay their hourly employees $14.89 an hour, without raising their prices by even a cent. This billion-dollar corporation even has the balls to tell the customers already buying their stuff that they should also donate food to Walmart employees who make poverty wages so they can have a Thanksgiving dinner.

McDonald's has gone even lower in their greedy quest for ever-increasing profits. Even though the fast food company makes $24 billion in annual revenue, which is enough money to be ranked as the world's 90th largest economy, they refuse to pay their employees a living wage, instead asking them to make outlandish sacrifices. McDonald's recently put up a website encouraging their employees to cut their food into smaller portions to make it last longer, sell their Christmas gifts online to have enough money to pay bills, and to quit complaining.

Tom Corbett and other right-wing governors across the United States, put in office through this flooding of corporate cash into elections, are obediently following their orders from their corporate benefactors. Their role is to streamline laws written by corporate lobbyists behind closed doors (ALEC), passed down an assembly line from posh resorts to statehouses. These laws are designed to systematically bilk the poor out of the remaining scraps they cling to and redistribute them upward to the ruling class. These laws are also designed to strip public resources of tax dollars while enriching corporations with hefty corporate welfare packages.

As Senator Bernie Sanders has said, 1 percent of the population in the US owns 38 percent of all wealth. At the same time, the bottom 60% of Americans owns just 2.3% of the wealth. And this small number of wealthy Americans have been allowed to purchase influence in government both through the lobbying process and through unlimited political contributions. The ruling class have bought the government of the United States, which is currently the greatest empire in the history of the world, occupying over 130 countries. Thus, the plutocracy not only controls the distribution of resources in our country, but all over the world.

Just 9 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, which is relatively proportional to the percentage of Americans who aren't living in poverty or one paycheck away from it. The United States ranks 4th out of all nations in income inequality. But the US isn't a poor country. Rather, its rich owners have amassed such a glacier of wealth and kept it to themselves that this wealth gap will only increase without interference from Congress. And because Congress is comprised mainly of millionaires, and merely running for Congress requires amassing millions of dollars, anyone who wants to get elected has to swear allegiance to the ruling class to even have a chance of winning.

Just as was described in The Hunger Games, the resistance here has been met with the cold boot heels of police, who only exist to protect and serve the 1 percent and their property. The chilling footage of the UC Davis Police pepper-spraying "Occupy UC Davis" student protesters sitting peacefully, UC Berkeley police clubbing Occupy protesters with batons, the NYPD violently assaulting and mass arresting protesters and credentialed journalists, and the Oakland police turning the streets into a war zone are clear evidence that the state does not tolerate dissent. Scott Olsen is living proof that even those who go overseas to fight the nation's wars are not immune from the state's violence against dissenters when they come home and participate in nonviolent protest.

Even though the banks who bilked our economy out of trillions of dollars and got bailed out escaped jail, our government has wasted no time throwing the book at political activists like Aaron Swartz, Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond. When the Reverend Billy Talen, an NYC-based environmental activist, staged a nonviolent action at a Chase Bank, he was threatened with a year in jail. But when Chase Bank rooked millions of Americans out of billions of dollars, they got away with paying a fine that cut mildly into their massive profits. To add lemon juice and salt to the wound, $7 billion of J.P. Morgan's $13 billion settlement will be paid by us, the taxpayers.

(SPOILER ALERT) In the Hunger Games books, the people take up arms and stage a bloody revolution against the ruling class, seizing power through bloodshed. The third book details how the leadership of the violent resistance effort becomes drunk on power and ends up being no better than its predecessors. When confronted with President Snow, leader of the Capitol, and Alma Coin, leader of District 13 at the end of the third book, foreseeing a new era of corrupt rule if Coin lives, protagonist Katniss Everdeen instead slays Coin while President Snow looks on in shock.

We can make change without taking up arms. When Boeing held the threat of relocating to another state over the head of Washington State's politicians, should their demands of taking away workers pensions not be met, one Seattle City Council member refused to blink. Kshama Sawant, of the Socialist Alternative Party, is urging Boeing workers to seize Boeing's factories, should the company succeed in its goal. Sawant won her local race practically by a hair, proving that each and every vote really does matter and that local elected officials can wield tremendous power over the ruling class.

There's no doubt we also need a revolution against our own Capitol to redistribute these resources fairly from the ruling class to the masses. But this revolt must be done nonviolently. The empire we're facing has proved they have a monopoly on violence, and will violently crush dissenters in the streets. We must build political power as a movement, and do it independently of the big corporations, banks, and property owners who fund the two mainstream corporate parties. Only by winning elections at the local level, the state level, and the Congressional level can we redistribute the wealth that the ruling class have unjustly stolen from those who worked to create it.

[Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at carl@rsnorg.org, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.]

Remember Who The Enemy Is

By Mark Fisher

November 25
k-punk Abstract Dynamics

The Hunting Games - Catching Fire

There's something so uncannily timely about The Hunger Games: Catching Fire that it's almost disturbing. In the UK over the past few weeks, there's been a palpable sense that the dominant reality system is juddering, that things are starting to give. There's an awakening from hedonic depressive slumber, and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire  is not merely in tune with that, it's amplifying it. Explosion in the heart of the commodity? Yes, and fire causes more fire ...

I over-use the word `delirium', but watching Catching Fire last week was a genuinely delirious experience. More than once I thought: How can I be watching this?  How can this be allowed? One of the services Suzanne Collins has performed is to reveal the poverty, narrowness, and decadence of the `freedoms' we enjoy in late, late capitalism. The mode of capture is hedonic conservatism. You can comment on anything (and your tweets may even be read out on TV), you can watch as much pornography as you like, but your ability to control your own life is minimal. Capital has insinuated itself everywhere, into our pleasures and our dreams as much as our work. You are kept hooked first with media circuses, then, if they fail, they send in the stormtrooper cops. The TV feed cuts out just before the cops start shooting.

Ideology is a story more than it is a set of ideas, and Suzanne Collins deserves immense credit for producing what is nothing less than a counter-narrative to capitalist realism. Many of the 21st century's analyses of late capitalist capture - The Wire, The Thick Of It, Capitalist Realism itself -  are in danger of offering a bad immanence, a realism about capitalist realism that can engender only a paralysing sense of the system's total closure. Collins gives us a way out, and someone to identify with/as - the revolutionary warrior-woman, Katniss.

Sell the kids for food

The scale of the success of the mythos is integral to its importance. Young Adult Dystopia is not so much a literary genre as a way of life for the generations cast adrift and sold out after 2008. Capital - now using nihiliberal rather than neoliberal modes of governance - doesn't have any solution except to load the young with debt and precarity. The rosy promises of neoliberalism are gone, but capitalist realism continues: there's no alternative, sorry. We had it but you can't, and that's just how things are, OK? The primary audience for Collins' novels was teenage and female, and instead of feeding them more boarding school Fantasy or Vampiary romance, Collins has been - quietly but in plain sight - training them to be revolutionaries.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about  the Hunger Games is the way it simply presupposes that revolution is necessary. The problems are logistical, not ethical, and the issue is simply how and when revolution can be made to happen, not if it should happen at all. Remember who the enemy is - a message, a hailing, an ethical demand that calls out through the screen to us .... that calls out to a collectivity that can only be built through class consciousness .... (And what has Collins achieved here if not an intersectional analysis and decoding of the way that class, gender, race and colonial power work together - not in the pious academic register of the Vampires' Castle, but in the mythographic core of popular culture - functioning not as a delibidinizing demand for more thinking, more guilt, but as an inciting call to build new collectivities.)

There's a punk immanence about Catching Fire which I haven't seen in any cultural product for a long time - a contagious self-reflexivity that bleeds out from the film and corrodes the commodity culture that frames it. Adverts for the movie seem like they belong in the movie, and, rather than a case of empty self-referentiality, this has the effect of decoding dominant social reality. Suddenly, the dreary gloss of capital's promotional cyber-blitz becomes de-naturalised. If the movie calls out to us through the screen, we also pass over into its world, which turns out to be ours, seen clearer now some distracting scenery is removed. Here it is: a neo-Roman cybergothic  barbarism, with lurid cosmetics and costumery for the rich, hard labour for the poor. The poor get just enough high-tech to make sure that they are always connected to the Capitol's propaganda feed.   Reality TV as a form of social control - a distraction and a subjugatory spectacle that naturalises competition and forces the subordinate class fight it out to the death for the delectation of the ruling class. Sound familiar?

Part of the sophistication and pertinence of Collins' vision, though, is its awareness of the ambivalent role of mass media. Katniss is a totem not because she takes direct action against the Capitol - what form would that take, in these conditions? - but because her place in the media allows her to function as a means of connecting otherwise atomised populations. Her role is symbolic, but - since the capture system is itself symbolic in the first instance - this is what makes her such a catalyst. The girl on fire ... and fire spreads fire ... Her arrows must ultimately be aimed at the reality system, not at human individuals, all of whom are replaceable.

The removal of capitalist cyberspace from Collins's world clears away the distracting machinery of Web 2.0 (participation as an extension of spectacle into something more pervasive, total, rather than as its antidote) and shows how TV, or, better, what Alex Williams has called `the Universal Tabloid', is still productive of what counts as reality. (For all the horizontalist rhetoric about Web 2.0, just look at what typically trends on Twitter: TV programmes.) There's a role as hero or villain - or maybe a story about how we've gone from hero to villain - prepared for all of us in the Universal Tabloid. The scenes in which Plutarch Heavensbee gives a businesslike description of the carrot and stick nature of the Capitol's media-authoritarian power have a withering, mordant precision. "More beatings, what will her wedding be like, executions, wedding cake ..."

As Unemployed Negativity wrote of the first film: "It is not enough that the participants kill each other, but in doing so they must provide a compelling persona and narrative. Doing so guarantees them good standing in their odds and means that they will be provided with assistance by those who are betting on their victory. Before they enter the arena they are given makeovers and are interviewed like contenders on American Idol. Gaining the support of the audience is a matter of life in death." This is what keeps the Tributes sticking to their reality TV-defined meat puppet role. The only alternative is death.

But what if you choose death? This is the crux of the first film, and I turned to Bifo when I tried to write about it. "Suicide is the decisive political act of our times", Bifo wrote in Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-alpha Generation. (London: Minor Compositions, 2009, p55) Katniss and Peeta's threat of suicide is the only possible act of insubordination in the Hunger Games. And this is insubordination, NOT resistance. As the two most acute analysts of Control society, Burroughs and Foucault, both recognised, resistance is not a challenge to power; it is, on the contrary, that which power needs. No power without something to resist it. No power without a living being as its subject. When they kill us, they can no longer see us subjugated. A being reduced to whimpering - this is the limits of power. Beyond that lies death. So only if you act as if you are dead can you be free. This is Katniss's decisive step into becoming a revolutionary, and in choosing death, she wins back her life - or the possibility of a life no longer lived as a slave-subordinate, but as a free individual.

The emotional dimensions of all this are by no means ancillary, because Collins - and the films follow her novels very closely in most respects - understands how Control society operates through affective parasitism and emotional bondage. Katniss enters into the Hunger Games to save her sister, and fear for her family keeps her in line. Part of what makes the novels and the films so powerful is the way they move beyond the consentimental affective regime imposed by reality TV, lachrymose advertising and soap operas. The greatness of Jennifer Lawrence's performances as Katniss consist in part in her capacity to touch on feelings - rage, horror, grim resolve - that have a political, rather than a privatised, register.

The personal is political because there is no personal.

There is no private realm to retreat into.

Haymitch tells Katniss and Peeta that they will never get off the train - meaning that the reality TV parts they are required to play will continue until their deaths. It's all an act, but there's no offstage.

There are no woods to run into where the Capitol won't follow. If you escape, they can always get your family.

There are no temporary autonomous zones that they won't shut down. It's just a matter of time.

Everyone wants to be Katniss, except Katniss herself.

Bring me my bow, of burning gold

The only thing she can do - when the time is right - is take aim at the reality system.

Then you watch the artificial sky fall

Then you wake up

And

This is the revolution ....

Ad Campaign (lip) Glosses Over 'Hunger Games' Message

The disturbing marketing strategy by Lionsgate and CoverGirl turns an epic story about class inequality into a platform for the villains.

By Andrew Slack

November 25, 2013
Los Angeles Times

There has been a vast variety of marketing tie-ins with the "Hunger Games" movie franchise, including a Covergirl makeup line called the Capitol Collection.
credit - Los Angeles Times

Last spring, CoverGirl announced a makeup line called the Capitol Collection, a marketing tie-in with the "Hunger Games" film franchise, based on the novels by Suzanne Collins.

The makeup is supposed to draw its users closer to the world of Panem, where Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) must fight to the death against other teenagers who have been forced by the powerful Capitol to participate in the nation's annual blood sport.

Lionsgate, the studio responsible for the films, is promoting "Hunger Games: Catching Fire" and CoverGirl makeup with a website, Capitol Couture.

The site is a visually stunning, in-character spectacle, with contributors pretending to work for, and live in, the Capitol. Using quotes, products and photographs from real-world fashion designers further blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. This is perhaps the most creative and brilliant marketing campaign I've ever seen. It is also one of the most disturbing.

During the making of the first "Hunger Games" film, director Gary Ross (who did not direct the second film) explained his shooting philosophy. "If you shoot it like a slick glossy Hollywood movie - you lose the feeling of reality and urgency that you need all the way through - you're turning into the Capitol, you're not examining the Capitol anymore."

Has Lionsgate become the Capitol? Its marketing strategy is turning an anti-classist epic into a platform for the novels' villains.

At its core, "The Hunger Games" is about economic inequality. In the books, the country of Panem is a future version of the United States, after nuclear disaster wipes out most of the population. In Panem, the fraction of people living in the Capitol controls almost all of the wealth. In 12 outlying Districts, people work long hours in Capitol-approved industries at dangerous jobs with low pay. Starvation is a daily reality.

If the books are supposed to function as a cautionary tale against the real class divide in the U.S., we need not look far for evidence. The future of Panem is upon us: More than 20 million Americans can't find full-time jobs, 22% of children live in poverty and middle-class wages have been largely stagnant since 1974. Meanwhile, corporate profits are at an all-time high.

If the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist, the same can be said of systemic economic inequality. The pull of the American dream is still so strong that many believe the only reasonable explanation for poverty is that it's poor people's fault. We don't blame the system - and in Panem, you don't blame the Capitol.

Thus, the rhetoric of austerity does not touch the 1% who own 40% of our economy. Instead, the rest of us fight over which crucial (for us) but hardly costly program to cut: food stamps, health insurance, unemployment benefits, Head Start, domestic violence counseling, even education.

To its credit, Lionsgate and "Hunger Games" do have anti-poverty partners - Feeding America and the World Food Program. If the studio's marketing was even a fraction as creative in pushing those group's messages as it has been in crafting its orgy of conspicuous consumption, it might be achieving something true to the films' themes. But in our culture, even when you're making movies about the fight against structural class inequality, if there's a profit to be made, message be damned.

But even though Lionsgate has dropped the ball, a coalition of fan activists is taking up the cause. Since 2005, the Harry Potter Alliance has mobilized the fans of many popular books, movies and TV shows to advocate for important causes that relate to the stories they love. We've sent five cargo planes to Haiti, built libraries across the world and funded the protection of thousands of civilians in Darfur and Burma. We've supported marriage equality and the Dream Act.

Now with our Imagine Better Network, we are mobilizing fans of Superman on immigration reform (after all, Superman came to America without papers), "Star Trek" (on GMO labeling) and, of course, "The Hunger Games."

We can't produce our own multimillion-dollar marketing campaign, but we can hack Lionsgate's. Wherever the studio and its promotional partners post an advertisement for the movie, you'll see our members posting pictures of themselves doing the three-finger salute - the Districts' symbol for solidarity in the face of the Capitol. Instead of letting the studio's campaign silence or distort the film's message, activists will draw attention to the reality of economic inequality in America and to organizations that are working to end it.

In the first week, thousands participated.

Perhaps Lionsgate will embrace the simple but radical message of its blockbuster films: No one should have to go hungry in a nation of plenty. After all, fantasy is not an escape from our world but an invitation to go deeper into it.

And we will keep going deeper until the odds are in everyone's favor.

[Andrew Slack is the executive director of the Harry Potter Alliance and a Nathan Cummings Foundation fellow.]