Why the politics of Star Wars still matters (part 9): “That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate, but saving what we love”

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).

In the previous post I focused on the need for a broad, popular resistance to empire. But this can’t just be negative.

In Star Wars, we know what they were against, but what were the Rebels for? Their proper name was actually the Alliance to Restore the Republic. As their Formal Declaration of Rebellion suggests, the Rebellion is largely reactive, a list of grievances against the Emperor and his Empire. Albeit that these grievances contain the seeds of freedom and democracy, there’s no apparent plan to bring greater justice to the galaxy. Is this why the Rebellion seems to lack popular support?

The Alliance’s mission was to restore hope against an Empire that wants to crush dreams. Important though this is, our rebellion requires more. We need to tell a story about the corruption and crimes of empire, but also paint a picture about a better future, one that gives people hope.

Even if we wanted to, we can’t just promise a return to the republic we’ve lost. In contrast to 1990s’ talk of a coming ‘progressive century’, the decade since the global financial crisis has all but destroyed so-called centrism. Centre-left parties have suffered defeats in almost all Western democracies.

Forced to choose sides by the crisis, the centre-left struggled to tell a new story. Like the Jedi during the Separatist crisis (which eventually leads to Palpatine’s coup and the domination of the Empire), centre-left parties were seen by many voters as part of the self-interested elites who caused the crash. Right-wing authoritarian populists gladly seized their chance, with simple stories about immigration, jobs, elite corruption, the iniquities of globalization and the loss of control to phantom menaces such as the European Union or the United Nations.

The centre-left was vulnerable because it had embraced a technocratic liberalism which largely accepted the assumptions of the new right’s empire of markets. They said, we can manage the system, but in a fairer way. They didn’t seem to recognize the dark forces that were on the move: widening inequality, the increasing power of the hyper-rich and the fracturing of republics into winners and losers from globalization.

We need to offer a new republic. Our rebellion is for justice and freedom. Indeed, freedom has always been what radical democratic left politics has been about – from fighting against segregation and for women’s suffrage, to workplace representation, the minimum wage, social security and healthcare. These struggles have also been battles about the definition of freedom and who is granted it.

Now, the left needs to take freedom further, taking on concentrations of power such as monopolistic companies that seek to dominate the economy, degrade the environment and weaken the power of consumers, workers, voters and communities.

Fortunately, anti-empire rebellions are everywhere bubbling below the surface, and increasingly above it. The real impulse of resistance is coming from the anarchist, autonomist and anti-authoritarian left. Old-school communist revivalists suggest that these movements represent ‘revolt without revolution’, and criticize brave rebels as obstacles to a ‘proper confrontation’ with the ongoing crisis of our economic system. Instead, they argue that we should wait patiently for the Big Future Event, the cataclysmic act of upheaval that will give birth to the glorious new world. As K-2SO from Rogue One would say, “I find that answer vague and unconvincing.”

The ultimate freedom is the freedom to choose political alternatives, which empire has sought to deny. Rather than holding onto ancient lore about the coming socialist utopia, the best way to resist the lure of fascism is to live its opposite. Why would we want to replace one empire with another? To build a rebel alliance, the left needs to be expansionary and welcoming, continually extending rights and recognizing new voices. This isn’t a distraction from the rebellion, it is the rebellion.

At the same time, while we need to look forward, part of our story involves looking back. Not to some utopia that (equally) never existed, but to remind us what is possible – the old republic wasn’t all bad – and what empire has taken away.

In the first post in this series, I talked about the importance of storytelling in politics. One of the things I suggested is that the left can be bad at stories because, being forward-looking in wanting to build a better world, it can recoil from the notion of restoring balance that is so often essential to dramatic storytelling. The left is much more likely to argue (correctly) that the golden age never really existed, that many nations were founded in violence and exclusion, that there is no past to which we should want to return. The radical struggle has always been to include more people in society, not to re-establish rule by the few.

The influence of mythologist Joseph Campbell on Star Wars has been somewhat overstated, but his codification of world myths contains some useful insights for the stories we need to be telling. Campbell divided his monomyth into three main stages: Departure, Initiation and Return. Rebels are forced to ‘leave home’ to restore balance to the world. In Campbell’s terms, destroying the Death Star is the ‘world-restoring task’. But this doesn’t allow the hero to return to the past, since it doesn’t exist anymore. The world is renewed, but it has also changed irrevocably. And so, saving what we love isn’t backwards looking; it means accepting that a new world will be born.

For example, in Climate, A New Story, Charles Eisenstein proposes a change in the story used by the climate justice movement. Rather than focusing on rising carbon emissions or the economic value of ecosystems, Eisenstein suggests that environmentalists tell a much more emotional story about a love of nature, about protection and loss. Instead of impending catastrophe, we need to cultivate meaningful emotional and psychological connections which form the foundation for real, actionable steps to care for the planet.

The dark side longs for a past in which power was held by a few, and people and the environment could be plundered at will. The light side really is love – love for what was good in the past, for what can be saved, but also for what could be to come.

In the final post in this series, I’ll discuss the importance of hope.

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.