Last Jedi stuff - part 3

Spoilers

Even as it complicates the Star Wars universe in some ways, the sequel trilogy clings close to the old liberalism vs. fascism dichotomy that dominated the politics of the original trilogy and prequel trilogy, and which dominates fantasy narratives generally. The First Order’s politics is essentially contentless. They hate the Republic because they do. Because they wear black and grey uniforms, and have red and black banners, and rallies, and they’re therefore fascists, and the fascists hate liberal democracy because they just do. This dichotomy, which is pervasive throughout stories of this kind (look at Harry Potter for instance) tells us something about the permissible horizons of ideology in the capitalist culture industries. It is this which gives rise to the syndrome I identified in my villains essay, in which I point out (amongst other things) that villains are usually the only people in stories like this who are trying to fundamentally change the world. 

Actually, the original trilogy scores slightly better on this than many other such narratives. It is set in a period when the fascists have already won, and the people trying to change the world are the good guys. While it set the fascism/liberalism dichotomy template for a generation of fantasy narratives, Star Wars actually had a marginally better version to offer. The odd thing is that, while consciously more ‘right on’ in many ways, the sequel trilogy is actually retrograde in this respect, because – at least in Force Awakens – the First Order is more like a challenger to the reign of the New Republic, a splinter group, a secessionist movement. 

I noted in this essay how much the First Order looks like the Confederacy. This is the spin that Force Awakens put on the old dichotomy, and it’s valuable – except that it once again positions the bad guys as the only people trying to change things, the only people challenging liberal democracy. And that’s a shame because liberal democracy needs challenging. It’s better than fascism, but that’s a low bar. The Union was better than the Confederacy, and the Civil War was worth fighting (to push for the freedom of the slaves, etc) but it’s also true that the Union was capitalist and imperialist, and that imperialism was built into its actual motives for fighting the Civil War. The Union went on to build its further expansion on imperialism, invasion, slaughter, warmongering, oppression, genocide, etc. 

In the fascism/liberalism dichotomy, the baddies are almost always the only people challenging such systems. They often get to point out the hypocrisy of liberal democracy, before being proved wrong and crushed. The ideological utility of such moves doesn’t take much parsing. You eternally consign challenges to the status quo to the category of villainy and fanaticism, and to doom.

There is something to be said for storytelling, in the late teens of the twenty-first century, that is open and unambiguous about fascism being a bad thing that needs to be stopped. It’s sad that we still need to say this, but apparently we do. And for my money Rogue One manages to be smart and inspirational on this issue. Even so, there are big problems with how fascism is conceptualised in Star Wars. I realise I may be criticising the texts for failing on an aesthetic level they weren’t actually shooting for, but hey – doing so could be interesting.

Fascism is seen as extrinsic, alien, aberrant to liberal democracy, whereas it actually tends to emerge from liberal democracy, and the ideology of fascism is actually related to the ideology of classical liberalism. Moreover, fascism is a form of counter-revolution against the working class. Working class challenges to bourgeois power do not exist in Star Wars, except as individual actions (not yet anyway… Last Jedi leaves intriguing possibilities open). Fascism is also a political form of capitalism. It is the political form capitalism favours when liberal democracy (or whatever) seems to dangerous, too vulnerable to challenges from below. And fascism is a variant on the kind of rule that Western liberal democracies imposed on their colonial subjects, relocated to the Western world in times of crisis. The colonial subjects of many a European country were intrigued to hear the citizens of those countries complaining about the evils of a political form not unlike that which those same European countries had imposed on their colonial possessions. Indeed, there is little if anything to distinguish – in terms of pure savagery – the Belgian colonial rule in Congo, or the French rule in Algeria, or the British rule in many places, from the German rule in the slabs of Europe they conquered in the mid 20th century. So clearly, in terms of real world politics, the fascism/democracy dichotomy (or empire/republic) is untenable. It never has been. The Americans revolted against the British empire to create their own republic, yet that republic was founded and expanded on the basis of imperialism. The Roman republic fell to the imperial system of the caesars, yet it had conquered and enslaved since before Julius Caesar was born. The republican or democratic freedom that is supposedly lost when the empire (or fascism) arises is the domestic freedom of the peoples of states that were themselves imperial. 

I always like to remember what Aime Cesaire – and also Fanon – said about fascism: that it is the imperialist principle relocated to Europe and inflicted on white people. And for similar reasons. Modern imperialism is ultimately about capital accumulation, about acquiring resources and helots for capitalist states. Fascism too is about ensuring the hegemony of the capitalist system, about suppressing workers’ struggles and unions, etc… and its no accident that almost all fascisms have been expansionist by nature. ‘Lebensraum’ wasn’t just a crazy notion Hitler dreamed up. It was rooted in 19th century German nationalist ideology, and ultimately came from the need for German capitalism to build itself by acquiring resources, and markets into which it could expand. It needed to do this to catch up with the other big European capitalist-imperialist powers. Germany had unified late and had never really had a bourgeois revolution which decisively broke the back of feudalism. But the reason it needed to catch up was because the other big capitalist countries – Britain and France – had already carved the world up between them… which they did because they had to, because capitalism generates empire through its needs. 

By contrast, the fascism of the Empire/First Order seems almost entirely based on a kind of loathing for the Republic, and for its values. What we get, then, is an account of the values and virtues of liberal democracy, showing us those values and virtues reflected in the Empire’s glass darkly, which allows liberal democracy to boast its own case for itself, to trumpet its own propaganda. The liberal democracy of the Republic is good because of all the freedom. We know that because the enemies of freedom go around muttering darkly about decadence from under their cowls, or General Hux screams hate at his massed ranks of fascists. But whose freedom? 

The prequels actually come closer than any other part of the series to complicating all this. There are slaves on Tattooine, and the Jedi do nothing about it. But this is really never picked up on. By the time of the last film, the evil of those who wish to destroy the Republic has been allowed to throw any possible criticisms of the Republic into the silent background. The only way we can insist upon the complication is by an act of will, by deciding to concentrate upon muffled elements of connected texts that the one we’re watching has consciously chosen to discard. And that’s fine, we can do that… but we need to admit that’s what we’re doing.

The telltale sign that the muted criticisms of the Republic (i.e. liberal democracy) are to be forgotten is that they are not only dwarfed by the far worse and more urgent crimes of the Empire. (And yes, on the one hand fascism is worse than liberal democracy… but that depends on your position. Churchill – the great champion of liberal democracy - fought fascism in Europe, having helped engineer a genocidal famine in Bengal, and toppled democracy in Iran, etc.) But more than this. The crimes of the Republic are actually tacitly absorbed by the Empire. The Empire is made to take the blame for all of them. 

The Last Jedi actually gives us a very good example of this very phenomenon at work. There is the trip made by Rose and Finn to the evil casino planet, full of evil rich people. The scene has garnered a lot of hostility from sectors of the audience. It’s another of those supposed objective mistakes that is actually an instance of the film making a statement. It is being called a pointless diversion that slows down the action and leads nowhere, etc. The people who whinge about it being SJW propaganda are being more honest. But that’s not what I want to get at here. 

Suffice to say: as a critique of capitalism it’s pretty weaksauce. It’s basically a swipe at conspicuous consumption, at the luxury lifestyles of the one per cent. And it’s moralistic. The rich are bad because they dress up and drink and have fun? No, that’s not it. There’s a long tradition of this kind of thing. Moralistic critiques that attack human proclivities, or weakness and foibles, and because it’s the foibles of rich people being attacked, the story can kid itself its being radical or satirical. For instance, the attacks on plastic surgery to be found in, say Brazil and RTD’s ‘The End of the World’. Both are gendered too. But people like that aren’t horrible because they use their money to have too much plastic surgery, they’re horrible because they have that kind of money in the first place… and, more broadly, because they’re the products of a horrible world in which that kind of inequality can exist. But then swiping at inequality isn’t particularly cutting either. Capitalism can level wealth out a bit. It has done so in the past. It may do again (if pressed). Again, the problem isn’t inequality per se (either as a moral issue or an economic one, once you get into the nitty gritty of it). The problem is far deeper than that. Inequality is a by product – and an addressable one, in principle – of the innate structural problems with capitalism: its exploitativeness, its drive to oppression and war, etc. None of that is to be seen. 

At most, the casino sequence is an indictment of the bad taste of the wealthy. I know, it’s trying to use the aesthetics of opulence to generate disgust as callousness, complacence, etc. It’s being tactically vague in an attempt to let its implied valence be as wide as possible… trouble is, it then ruins this by getting specific. And the specifics narrow the critique back down into milquetoast nullity. The moralistic critique is suddenly expanded to tell us about how those people – all of them? – got rich from the arms trade. So only ‘bad’ industries make the rich reprehensible? And an industry is only bad if it is directly involved in weaponry? 

But, as Finn is informed, it’s more complicated than that. They sell weapons to both sides. But what are we meant to conclude from this? That the Resistance is somehow morally implicated in the evil casino-attendance of rich people? If so, so what? Does that undermine their moral case? If so, the rest of the film gives precious little indication that the Resistance rests on a less than firm moral foundation. Or are we supposed to conclude that the rich arms dealers aren’t that bad? Surely not. Again, the film gives no indication of this. This little moment just sits there doing nothing, saying nothing, having no implications either moral or political. It just seems to be there to look profound and challenging and complex without actually being any of those things. 

But the real problem here is that the rich people in the casino are said to be creatures of the First Order’s regime. This isn’t quite said explicitly, but it nearly is. But both sides had weapons in Force Awakens, before the First Order took over the galaxy. So the arms dealers were already there and doing a roaring trade before the Republic fell (again). It’d be tempting to say that this is a wrinkle in the otherwise perfect depiction of the Republic… except that it is clearly glossed over. It’s not meant to be something we think about. As with thinking about the slaves of Tattooine when Padme says “so this is how freedom dies”, it’s something we can choose to do, but in doing so we are deliberately reading the text against its own grain. But even more fundamentally… Rose gets her lines about the depradations underlying the casino being First Order crimes. The capture and mistreatment of the racing animals, the child slaves in the stables… these are things done by the First Order, as were the crimes committed against Rose’s people. All the unpleasant things about real republics, about liberal democracy, are being acknowledged only so that they can then be displaced onto the empire, the fascists, etc. 

The truth is that, in modernity, the horror and the progress always go hand in hand.

But there is actually a weird way that Star Wars knows this….

To Be Continued