Why the politics of Star Wars still matters (part 3): “The Death Star will be in range in five minutes”

This is a series of posts drawing on my forthcoming book Welcome to the Rebellion: A New Hope in Radical Politics (published in June 2020 by Zero Books).

The previous post considered how Star Wars dramatizes the ways in which authoritarians use inequality and injustice to manipulate their way to power. This post suggests that the saga contains an even darker metaphor in its depiction of empire, one that threatens our very existence.

From its first appearance, the Death Star lodged in our collective imagination as a symbol for epic destructive capability. As such, it’s a pretty good metaphor for an oppressive, exploitative, crisis-ridden globalized industrial capitalism that, left unchecked, seems destined to destroy us.

For the first time in human history, we have planetary scale systems, in energy, trade, and now in digital data – empires in our own world. The problem is, they’re unsustainable.

The greatest crisis we face is of course climate change and environmental destruction. In 2009, an international group of experts identified nine interconnected “planetary boundaries” that underpin the stability of the global ecosystem. Three boundaries have already been passed (climate change, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle) and two are coming close to being passed (ocean acidification and the phosphorus cycle). Worse, all of the trends are speeding up, a ‘great acceleration’ beyond known environmental limits.

To the Death Star of our current system of industrial capitalism, we are Alderaan. Or maybe Alderaan isn’t the best (Star Wars-based) analogy. More likely, we’re creating Tatooine – formerly a lush planet of forests and oceans, now a baking, barren, brutal desert.

We’ve crossed over a threshold into an age of systemic risk, in which population pressures, natural resources, climate, politics and the economy will interact in predictable and unpredictable ways to create global crises which feed on and magnify each other. It is a crisis of crises, what James Howard Kunstler has called the long emergency.

To take one example, the age of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is bringing conflict, humanitarian crisis and state failure. Mass migration and refugees will continue to increase. The climate crisis could lead to ten times more refugees from the Middle East than the 12 million who fled during the past few years of upheaval and turmoil. The hard right has skillfully manipulated and inflamed a backlash over this crisis. By denying climate change and blocking action, they’ll make mass forced migration more likely and then reap the benefits by whipping up hatred against the tide of human misery.

Star Wars wasn’t directly inspired by the emerging environmental movement. But as I argue in my book, the story did come out of the 1960s new left, alongside other cultural influences, and new left thinking was one strand of a growing global consciousness, ranging across the then still emerging environmental movement, Eastern philosophies, and critiques of Western materialism, colonialism and militarism (of course, a crucial inspiration for the saga was the war in Vietnam).

There are certainly elements of environmental critique in Star Wars. Witness the Empire’s attachment to technology for colonization and domination, and the way the story dramatizes how technology can become our master rather than our servant. Most obviously, there’s Darth Vader, who embodies an estrangement from any authentic self, an unearthly interface between a damaged humanity and technological life support. As Canaan Perry suggests, the Empire is subsumed by its own technological constructions, whereas the Rebels use and adapt technology but are not slaves to it.

Technology is set to dominate our lives in the future even more than it does now. Like the difference between the Empire and the Rebels, whether it enslaves or frees us depends on in whose interests it’s used. Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) could liberate us from work and provide a better standard of living for everybody. But in the hands of empire, they will mainly be used to benefit corporations and increase inequality.

As Nick Srnicek has described it, the fundamental foundations of the economy are rapidly being carved up among a small number of monopolistic digital platforms, dubbed ‘platform capitalism’. The Sarlaac Pits of this new economy are companies like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google, suitably known as the FAANGs. They’re imperial in their design, dependent on insatiable growth to seize and consolidate monopoly power.

Welcome to the age of ‘surveillance capitalism’. As Shoshana Zuboff describes it, this is the latest phase in capitalism’s evolution – from making products, to mass production, managerial capitalism, through services to financial capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the surveillance of users offered ‘free’ products. These corporations monopolize data science and dominate machine intelligence. They also have vast reserves of capital.

As Zuboff suggests, whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatized counterpart. Like any empirists, the first surveillance capitalists conquered by declaration: they simply declared our private lives to be theirs for the taking.

Star Wars also suggests what underlies such systems. We face many crises, but really, it’s just one crisis. At root it’s not economic or political but philosophical and psychological. It is empirism: the compulsion to dominate people, nature and thought. It’s the Sith’s individualistic ‘morality’ of acquisition.

As campaigner and activist Charles Derber (Welcome to the Revolution) puts it, in earlier centuries capitalism freed millions from ancient forms of bondage and want. Today’s capitalism creates and perpetuates isolation and insecurity, extreme inequality, corporate power, billionaire rule, militarism, repression, climate change, environmental destruction and exclusion.

But this is reaching its natural end. Limitless extraction and growth are not possible on a finite planet. As Yuval Harari notes, our profound dilemma is that: “[E]conomic growth will not save the global ecosystem – just the opposite, it is the cause of the ecological crisis. And economic growth will not save the technological disruption – it is predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive technologies.”

As I’ll discuss in the next post, Star Wars is about taking a stand. Being apolitical today, especially ignoring the Death Star that’s looming over our planet, has an even greater cost than when George Lucas was first developing his saga. The walls of the trash compactor are closing in and we’re all trapped inside. Yes, empire privileges some of us with comforts, but as Han Solo said (though he meant it a different way), “What good’s a reward if you ain’t around to use it?”

Welcome to the Rebellion: A New Hope in Radical Politics, will be published in June 2020 by Zero Books. You can pre-order your copy now at:

US: Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, Indiebound

UK: Amazon.co.uk, Zero Books, Waterstones, Foyles, Blackwells

Rest of the world: Chapters/Indigo, Booktopia, Book Depository, Goodreads

A FREE preview of the introduction to the book is available on Amazon.