Why the politics of Star Wars still matters (part 8): “It’s just… people”

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).

This series started in the argument that the left needs to own rebel stories if it’s going to win popular support and battle the authoritarian populists who have been in the ascendancy around the world.

As stated in The Rise of Skywalker, the way the Empire/First Order/Final Order wins is by convincing people that they’re alone, that they’re the ‘only’ ones who hate imperialism and exploitation and want real and radical change. For me, the best moment in the film is during the climactic space battle around Exegol. The small Rebel fleet is being decimated by the Final Order. The Rebels had previously called on the rest of the galaxy for help, but no-one came. However, at the last moment, thousands of ships appear. The galaxy has decided it’s sick of empire and is ready to fight back. The Order’s General Pryde asks for a report on the Rebel navy, but a junior officer replies, “That’s not a navy sir. It’s just… people.”

In general, Star Wars plays out the tension between the need for a so-called revolutionary vanguard and the importance of mass resistance, especially in its more recent films. For much of the saga, the Rebels seem more vanguardist. We follow a core group of heroes, and mostly only see a small Rebel Alliance. But that’s changed.

I noted in a previous post the much more political and divisive recent ‘debate’ over Star Wars, and how this really took-off with The Last Jedi. Perhaps the reason is that anti-elitism runs through that film, echoing the critiques of the previous films made by the science fiction writer David Brin and others, that the saga has been elitist in its focus on the special, ‘royal’ Skywalker lineage. Brin argues that from The Return of the Jedi onwards and especially the prequels, Star Wars reflects the great man theory of history, especially in the notion that (Jedi) elites have an inherent right to arbitrary rule.

But The Last Jedi challenges all this. Its anti-elitist theme and its democratizing of the Force suggest that rebellions against overwhelmingly more powerful forces can’t depend on the heroics of the few. Even then, at the end of the film, the depleted Resistance calls for help from the rest of the galaxy, but they’re ignored. Perhaps the Rebels are paying the price for their failure to build popular support – and to tell the right stories to generate that support. (It’s this scenario that’s repeated at the end of The Rise of Skywalker, but as noted, with a very different, much more hopeful outcome.)

What this reflects is that our assumptions about (radical) leadership are changing. The new awakening of youth-led protest groups and campaigners reject hierarchy, both in how they organize and in the world they want to see. Going back to stories, this reflects a broader shift reflected in popular culture. Jeff Gomez, a writer and transmedia producer in fantasy, science fiction and young adult genres, has written about how we are shifting from the hero’s journey to a collective journey, to ensemble-based narratives with multiple protagonists, missions and ways of succeeding.

In our deliberately depoliticizing society, many people find politics boring and divisive. But a collective journey story offers far more potential for engaging them. Collective stories (Gomez also uses The Last Jedi as an example) tell us that headstrong masculinity is over; contrast this with the right’s savior worship and some of the twentieth century’s most destructive ‘stories’, built as they were around the myth of the great leader. Our new stories are about communities, intersectional coalitions for action, struggling to achieve systemic change through the power of their differences but drawn together by universal values. Together, we must become our own salvation.

That requires new thinking. In The Last Jedi, a grizzled Luke Skywalker (hiding away like the hermits Ben Kenobi of A New Hope and Yoda of The Empire Strikes Back) denounces his old order: “[I]t’s time for the Jedi to end... the legacy of the Jedi is failure, hypocrisy, hubris.” As Toby Moses notes, the film subverts the series and hero stories generally by presenting a rebellion in which:

“[A]nybody can be a hero, so there’s no excuse not to get involved in the fight... If the original trilogy was about waiting for a hero to rescue the world from a tyrannical, authoritarian regime, and the prequels were an (albeit ham fisted) attempt to examine how democracy can easily mutate in to dictatorship... [Rian] Johnson’s entry has rooted the future of the series in a populist framework of how to defeat tyranny through community.”

Perhaps it was this that really provoked such ire among some fans and conservative commentators. The Last Jedi says we need to let yesterday die, kill it if we have to, in its challenges to saga lore and in the battle between the past and the future represented by its main protagonists Kylo Ren (angry heir to the Skywalker dynasty) and Rey (a “nobody” – or, it turns out in The Rise of Skywalker, not quite…). The hope that survives rests not in the individual hero’s journey, but in the collective, in the depleted but determined remnants of the Resistance, now the Rebellion. At one desperate moment, as Poe Dameron asks Lando Calrissian: “How did you do it? Defeat an empire with almost nothing?” Lando replies: “We had each other. That’s how we won.”

The right looks to strong leaders (“I AM the senate!” as Palpatine declares). In the rebellion, we look to us.

In the next post, I’ll discuss what the kinds of rebel stories we need to tell in order to build a broad, popular alliance against empire.

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.