The Trade Federation: Or, Lets Explore Globalization Through the Star Wars Prequels
The Trade Federation is a comedy about Star Wars and capitalism. A young, avant-garde playwright pitches his screenplay for a new Star Wars film. The concept: A prequel to Episode One that fleshes out the economic and social implications of the Trade Federation, the mysterious intergalactic shipping conglomerate that sets the entire trilogy in motion. The problem: it’s far from your typical Star Wars movie — in fact, it’s a full-on activist rallying-cry, replacing the veiled references to colonialism from more recent films in the franchise with blatant political allegory.
The Trade Federation asks us to consider how we can use the grand narratives of late capitalism against capitalism itself. It weaponizes one the most successful film franchises of all time against the dead-end ideology of “capitalist realism,” which insists that history is over and that there is “no alternative” to the unfettered rule of the market. No, it counters, we can always fight back. Star Wars told us so.
