En Passant

The pop cultural juggernaut that is Star Wars: The Force Awakens is built on a kind of monetized nostalgia, writes Nicole Colson in Socialist Worker US and republished here. There’s something obnoxious, not to mention elitist, in cantankerous Marxists looking down their noses at Star Wars fans and proclaiming that we need to “get a life” and stop wasting so much time and energy on debates about Sith lords and the properties of the Force. It’s even more obnoxious to castigate the movies for not being properly “political.” Capturing a certain truth about the approach of some on the left to culture in general and Star Wars in particular, the satire site “Worker’s Spatula” teased:

‘Not once in the entire Star Wars trilogy does any character make reference to Marxism-Leninism or dialectical materialism. When Luke’s master, Yoba, dies in the first film, while it is true that the Rebel Alliance hold their fists aloft and praise him as a great revolutionary who has become immortalized in their struggle against fascism, no reference to class is to be found in the Rebels’ ideology.’