CRITICISM TOWARDS REPRESSIVE CAPITALIST IDEOLOGIES AND CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY OF THE U.S. IN COLLINS’ THE HUNGER GAMES: A MARXIST ANALYSIS

This research aims to analyze (1) how Collins’ The Hunger Games criticizes repressive capitalist ideologies in the 21st century of the U.S., and (2) to identify the prominent capitalist culture in the 21st century of the U.S. that is criticized in Collins’ The Hunger Games. Therefore, the researcher applied Marxist literary criticism to analyse the ideologies and the prevailing culture in the novel. The research was a descriptive qualitative study with the researcher as the main instrument. The object of this research was Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. The data were phrases, clauses, and sentences related to the repressive capitalist ideologies and their flaws, along with the commodification as the corresponding culture of capitalism. In collecting the data, the researcher read and tried to interpret every sentence in the novel. Then, the data were categorized and analyzed based on each category of the repressive capitalist ideology and the commodity culture. To enhance the trustworthiness of the data in this study, the researcher applied triangulations by asking two friends to review and to check this research. The result of the research shows important points. First, Collins’ The Hunger Games criticizes the repressive capitalist ideologies through the revelation of (1) the degrading natures of rugged individualism and (2) self-reliance as a facade. The degrading natures of rugged individualism are (1) the acceptance to ignorance as a common virtue and (2) the notion of self against other. Meanwhile, self-reliance is revealed to be (1) heavily relied on socioeconomic conditions as its determining elements and (2) prolonging the status quo by prompting ego gratification to its adherents. Hence, those ideologies contain repressive agendas to sustain the relations of dominance and exploitation in the classist society. Second, the prominent culture of capitalism criticized in Collins’ The Hunger Games is commodification, which dehumanizes the main character in the book