The Captain's Class: A Socialist at a Beverly Hills Table

A photograph has been circulating on social media these past days. An old man in a theatre foyer, in a trench coat, a paper cup in his hand, reading a newspaper. Beside it, a quotation:

"Being a socialist in America can sometimes cause small problems, but I used to enjoy that! There is nothing like sitting down to dinner in Beverly Hills with fancy guests and telling them that you are a socialist."

The man is Sir Patrick Stewart. Captain Jean-Luc Picard to one generation, Professor X to another. The photograph is being shared this widely because Stewart died on 28 October 2026, at the age of 86. After his death, even Stephen Miller, one of the harshest names in the White House, wrote a tribute. Wil Wheaton, who had acted on the same bridge as Stewart for years, answered in a single sentence: "He despised you and everything you stand for."

In this piece we will set three things side by side: Stewart's class origins and his stance, why the Star Trek he came to symbolise offers a more valuable vision of the future than Star Wars, and the climate that artists who criticise the system are passing through in America today.

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First, a Summary: Ten Theses

1. Stewart was a worker's child, and he did not forget it. His mother was a textile weaver, his father an unskilled labourer and a postman after the army. He left school at 15. After he was knighted, he went on defining himself as a "socialist".
2. His politics rested on class belonging. He tied the root of his politics to his father's trade unionism and to the principle of "justice and equality". We also have to see clearly the reformist limits of this stance, which stayed on the Labour Party's line.
3. The quotation in the image is right in substance. The original words come from an interview on American television: the pleasure of saying "I am a socialist" at a Beverly Hills table.
4. Star Trek imagined a future without money. In Picard's words: "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."
5. Star Wars is a myth built on bloodline. Chosen lineages, heroes appointed by fate, and a single saviour. In this world the people remain scenery.
6. Star Trek talks to science. A real physics paper was written on the warp drive. A prize was opened for the tricorder. An actor led NASA's recruitment of women and Black astronauts.
7. The later Star Wars is a retreat in scientific terms. Bombs that "fall" downwards in space, ships that slow down when the fuel runs out, beams seen instantly from light years away, and the "Holdo manoeuvre" that collapses the series' own logic. These are not script accidents. They are the product of a content production line.
8. Both series are in the hands of monopolies today. Star Wars belongs to Disney. Star Trek belongs to Paramount Skydance, run by the Ellison family, close to Trump. The story of a future without money has become the property of one of the greatest fortunes.
9. Dissident artists in America are under pressure. Colbert's programme was ended. Kimmel was taken off the air. De Niro was told to "get on a ship". Rosie O'Donnell was threatened with her citizenship. This picture recalls the blacklists of 1947.
10. Celebrities are not the ones who pay the real cost. The pressure on celebrities is a warning sign. The heaviest cost is paid by migrant workers, trade unionists and nameless people. The lesson to take from Stewart is this: personal courage is not enough. An organised conscience is required.

Now to the detail.

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I. From Mirfield to the Bridge: The Story of a Worker's Child

The house he was born in

Patrick Stewart was born on 13 July 1940 in Mirfield, a textile town in Yorkshire, in the north of England. His mother, Gladys, was a weaver and a textile worker. His father, Alfred, served as a sergeant major in the Parachute Regiment in the Second World War and lived through the Dunkirk evacuation. After the war he worked as an unskilled labourer and a postman.

The war entered this house too. His father came back with what was then called "shell shock", what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Stewart spent his childhood in the shadow of domestic violence. He told this with an open heart in his memoir Making It So (2023). In later years he became a patron of Refuge, which works with women subjected to violence, and a supporter of Combat Stress, which works with war veterans.

This detail does not remain a family tragedy. An imperialist war bills the working-class family twice: first at the front, then in the kitchen. Stewart carried that bill all his life and turned a personal pain into a public struggle.

The first "disobedience", at the age of five

There is a story Stewart often told. In the 1945 election the Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee, defeated Churchill, the victor of the war. Patrick, aged five, carried Labour Party posters. He called this "my first act of civil disobedience" and added: "I have been a leftist ever since."

Let us open 1945 a little. Workers coming back from the war refused to return to the old order. Out of that election came the National Health Service (NHS), the nationalisation of the railways and the coal mines, and public housing. These gains were concessions wrung from the bourgeoisie by the price the working class paid in the war and by the fear the October Revolution had created. Stewart's political memory was shaped by those concessions.

Leaving school, walking onto the stage

Stewart left school at 15. He worked as a reporter and an obituary writer on a local newspaper, then as a shop assistant in a furniture shop. The path to the stage was opened by his English teacher, Cecil Dormand. He entered the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School on a state grant.

This detail needs underlining. What let a weaver's son become one of the world's finest Shakespearean actors was a public grant. That is, the social state that 1945 had produced. From 1966 to 1982 he acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company. As arts education in England grows more expensive, this path is closing to workers' children. Stewart's career is not only a story of talent. It is also a story of public resources.

On the bridge of the Enterprise

In 1987, at 47, a bald Shakespearean actor from Yorkshire was put at the head of American television's biggest science-fiction series. The producers' first reaction was not especially warm. Star Trek: The Next Generation (known in Türkiye as Uzay Yolu: Yeni Nesil) ran for seven seasons (1987–1994). Then came the films, Professor X in the X-Men series, and Star Trek: Picard between 2020 and 2023. He was knighted in 2010.

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II. A Socialist's Political Map

What did he say?

Stewart's political statements follow a scattered but consistent line:

• Class origin: He tied the root of his politics to his father's trade unionism and openly defined himself as a socialist.
• Against austerity: In a 2012 interview with the New Statesman, he said of the Conservative–Liberal coalition's slogan "we are all in this together" that he felt nothing but contempt. He described the coalition's policies as "ordinary Tory policies dressed up as necessity". He stressed that cabinet members were not in the same position as the working people of Bermondsey, where he lived.
• The duty of art: In the same interview he said it was "a duty" of art to take up political subjects wherever it was fitting.
• War and liberties: He opposed the Iraq War. In 2008 he signed an open letter against holding terror suspects for 42 days without charge.
• Trump: In 2017 he described Trump as "a dangerous child in the White House" and said that "when America sneezes, the world catches a cold". He said he was considering applying for US citizenship so that he could vote against Trump, but he did not do it.

Where does the line in the image come from?

The original of the quotation in the shared image is what Stewart said on an American television programme where Pete Buttigieg was also a guest. There he explained that being a socialist in the US "sometimes causes small problems", but that he took pleasure in it, and added: "There is nothing like sitting at a dinner table in Beverly Hills with fancy guests and telling them that you are a socialist!" The text in the image is a lightly edited rendering of those words. The substance is the same.

The beauty of the line is in its irony. By then Stewart himself was sitting at the Beverly Hills table. Fame and wealth had carried him there. But he brought Mirfield to the table with him. Moving up in class does not have to mean breaking with one's class. This is an individual form of resistance to one of capital's strongest tools, its power to recruit those who rise into its own ranks.

A comradely criticism

We will not declare Stewart a saint. The principle we set out in From the Ugly King to Yol: Reading Yılmaz Güney Through Class holds here too: an artist should be seen as neither a saint nor a villain.

• Stewart's socialism stayed on the Labour Party's reformist line. It was a social democracy that aimed to soften injustice, not to transform property relations. In 2018 there were reports that he had left the party during the Corbyn years. He denied this, but in the Brexit argument he stood with the liberal "Remain" camp, not with the party centre.
• He accepted a knighthood. A socialist taking a title from the monarchy is a small but meaningful contradiction.
• His stance in America stayed mostly within the limits of Democratic Party liberalism.

But these limits teach us something. It is valuable that a worker's child did not forget his class even at the highest station. Personal conscience, though, does not take the place of an organised class politics. The greatest thing Stewart could do was to make the word "socialist" respectable and likeable in the eyes of millions. In a period when the Red Scare is being pumped up again in the US, that is not a contribution to be despised.

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III. Defending Star Trek Against Star Wars

This is not a fan quarrel. The two series carry two different world views to the masses. One tells the future as something to be built with science and collective labour. The other tells it through fate, bloodline and a single saviour.

A future without money

The Star Trek universe that Gene Roddenberry built designs an Earth in the 24th century where money has disappeared. In the film First Contact (1996), Picard explains it to someone who has come from the 21st century:

"The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

This is one of the best-known expressions in popular culture of what Marx called the passage "from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom". It is also, in the language of television, what Fromm called the passage from having to being. Replicators have abolished scarcity. People work not for a wage, but out of curiosity and for a social contribution.

Star Trek's criticism of capitalism does not stop there. The Ferengi are a caricature of capitalism: a civilisation that does everything according to the "Rules of Acquisition" and recognises no value besides profit. The series shows them not as primitive, but as the representatives of a stage that has been left behind.

Political episodes

Stewart's Picard voiced some of the boldest political texts in the history of television:

• "The Measure of a Man" (1989): Is the android Data property, or a person? In a courtroom scene Picard opposes Data being dismantled and copied. In Guinan's words the argument is tied to "disposable people", that is, to slavery. Thirty-seven years ago this episode asked to whom labour and personhood belong in the age of artificial intelligence.
• "The Drumhead" (1991): A spy hunt in Starfleet turns into a witch hunt. In court Picard exposes the logic of McCarthyism and quotes these words: "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." Those words hold for today's America as well.
• "Chain of Command" (1992): Picard is taken prisoner and tortured. His torturer shows him four lights and tries to make him say he sees five. Picard's cry of "There are four lights!" is a salute to the "2+2=5" scene in Orwell's 1984. Stewart has said that, preparing for the role, he drew on Amnesty International's testimonies of torture.
• The "Past Tense" (1995) episodes of Deep Space Nine depicted an America of 2024 in which homeless people were confined to "sanctuary districts". The pressure on homeless encampments in the big cities of the US today recalls that fiction all too well.

Star Trek's stance in the 1960s has to be added. In the middle of the Cold War there was a Russian officer on the bridge (Chekov), a Black woman communications officer (Uhura) and a helmsman of Japanese descent (Sulu). One of the first interracial kisses on American television was broadcast in this series in 1968.

The bond with science

Star Trek built a serious relationship with science. It worked with scientific advisers and inspired real science:

• The warp drive: In 1994 the physicist Miguel Alcubierre, stating openly that he had been inspired by Star Trek, published a mathematical model for "faster-than-light travel" within general relativity. This "Alcubierre drive" is still discussed in theoretical physics.
• The tricorder: In 2012 Qualcomm, inspired by the device that performs medical scans in the series, opened the "Tricorder XPRIZE" competition. The aim was to develop a portable diagnostic device.
• The communicator: Martin Cooper, the inventor of the mobile phone, has said that he was influenced by the communicator in Star Trek.
• NASA and Nichelle Nichols: Nichols, who played Uhura, became the face of NASA's campaign to recruit women and minority astronauts from 1977. Sally Ride, Guion Bluford and Judith Resnik became astronauts as a result of that campaign. Mae Jemison, the first Black woman astronaut, later appeared in an episode of The Next Generation.
• Hawking and Krauss: In 1993 Stephen Hawking became the only person to play himself in the series. In the episode he played poker with Data, alongside Newton and Einstein. Lawrence Krauss's book The Physics of Star Trek (1995), with a foreword by Hawking, taught physics to a generation.

This relationship that Star Trek built with science is fed by the same vein as the idea of common labour we saw in Voyager's forty-nine-year journey: understanding the universe is a collective task, and knowledge belongs to everyone.

Star Wars: the gap between myth and science

Let us be fair here. George Lucas never designed Star Wars as science fiction. He built it as a space fable based on Joseph Campbell's hero's-journey schema. Sound in space, and explosions in the form of fireballs, have been known features of the series since 1977. The original trilogy was also, in Lucas's own words, a reference to Vietnam and to US imperialism: the Empire was a superpower defeated by a small people in the forest.

The problem began after Disney bought Lucasfilm for 4 billion dollars in 2012. The series ceased to be a narrative and became a content production line. Scientific absurdities thus stopped being the accepted rules of a fable and became errors that distort the viewer's physical intuition:

1. Bombs that "fall" in space: In the opening scene of The Last Jedi (2017), bombers "release" their bombs onto the ship below, and the bombs fall downwards as if there were gravity. In space there is no "down". A released bomb continues to drift with the bomber's velocity. This is a violation of Newton's first law.
2. Does a ship slow down when the fuel runs out? The main plot of the same film rests on the Resistance ship, its fuel exhausted, becoming unable to escape the enemy in pursuit. In a vacuum, though, a ship does not slow down when the engine is cut. It keeps its speed. The whole chase rests on a logic that does not recognise the law of inertia.
3. The beams of Starkiller Base: In The Force Awakens (2015) a weapon fired from a planet strikes planets light years away within seconds, and these beams are watched "live" from the sky of another planet. The speed of light has been exceeded. On top of that, a base the size of a planet "absorbs" the energy of a star. A star's mass is hundreds of thousands of times a planet's.
4. The Holdo manoeuvre: A ship destroying a whole fleet by ramming an enemy ship as it enters hyperspace is visually striking. But it collapses the series' internal logic. If this is possible, why was it never used for forty years? Why are whole wars not won with robot-piloted ships? That kinetic energy is destructive at relativistic speeds is correct as physics. This time the problem is inconsistency with the world's own rules.
5. "Somehow Palpatine returned": The Rise of Skywalker (2019) resurrected a dead emperor without explanation, brought thousands of star destroyers out from under a planet, and invented new rules such as "skipping" through hyperspace. This was the product of an unplanned trilogy, of changes of director, and of the box-office calendar.
6. The parsec question: Han Solo's 1977 line, "I made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs", used a unit of distance as if it were a unit of time. The 2018 film Solo did not correct the error. It canonised it, by saying that "he had in fact found a shorter route".

These may look like a fan's obsessions. But the visual language through which millions of children learn space is a serious matter. In a period when the public resources of science education are being cut, the most powerful "teacher" is the entertainment monopolies. A viewer who has repeatedly seen a bomb fall downwards in space then has to "unlearn" it in a physics lesson.

The real difference: who makes history?

Scientific errors are the surface of the matter. The real difference is in the two series' understanding of history.

In Star Wars, history is made by bloodline. The Force flows in the Skywalker and Palpatine lineages. In 1999, with the concept of "midi-chlorians", the Force was turned into a biological privilege. The sequel trilogy even made Rey, presented as "a nobody's daughter", the emperor's granddaughter in the end. The people are either extras or victims. This is the aristocracy's fable: the world changes through the quarrel of noble families.

In Star Trek, history is made by the crew. Picard is a strong leader. But he takes decisions by arguing, by listening to his specialists, and by accepting that he can be wrong. Everyone on the bridge has a job, and the ship makes way only when they all work together. This is the narrative of collective labour.

The exception proves the rule: Andor (2022–2025), which came out of the Star Wars universe, is a work that breaks this general picture. In Tony Gilroy's series the empire enters ordinary people's lives as factory, prison and police. On the Narkina 5 prison, prisoners are put to forced labour, and their revolt is organised with the slogan "One way out!" In Ferrix, a workers' town resists. But Andor reached this depth by deliberately moving away from the mythology of Star Wars, that is, by leaving the Jedi and the chosen lineages outside.

A comparison

	Star Trek	Star Wars
Genre	Science fiction: it tries to think the future with science	A space fable: Campbell's mythic schema
The subject of history	The crew, institutions, argument	Chosen lineages, fate, a single hero
Economy	A moneyless, post-scarcity society. Capitalism (the Ferengi) is a stage left behind	The economy is almost invisible. Smugglers and slave markets are scenery
Relation to science	Science advisers. Alcubierre, the Tricorder XPRIZE, NASA	Visual excitement comes first. Basic violations of physics in the later period
Political courage	Episodes on slavery, torture, witch hunts, homelessness	A general fight of good against evil. A striking exception: Andor
Representation	A multinational, multiracial bridge in 1966	White male heroes for a long time
Vision of the future	Humanity can develop, society can change	The past repeats in a cyclical war of good and evil
Whose property today	Paramount Skydance (the Ellison family)	Disney

Star Trek has its limits too

Let us not idealise Star Trek while defending it:

• A utopia without a revolution: The series explains how a post-scarcity society was reached not by class struggle, but by a world war, "first contact" with the Vulcans, and technological discoveries. This is an approach that believes technology will bring liberation of its own accord. Yet capitalism will not leave of its own accord. The question of who will control the replicator is a question of property.
• Military hierarchy: Starfleet is presented as a peaceful institution of exploration, but it is a military hierarchy. The Federation at times resembles a liberal imperial order.
• The darkening of the later period: Stewart himself explained the Federation's turning, in Picard, into a structure that turns its back on refugees as "my response to the world of Brexit and Trump", and he asked: "Why didn't Starfleet change? Maybe they are not as reliable as we all thought."
• The irony of property: The story of a future without money belongs today to Paramount Skydance. The company is run by David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and a close ally of Trump. The copyright of the utopia is held by billionaires. This contradiction shows that we are living in a period when even the imagination of the future is being fenced.

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IV. The Cost of Being a Socialist in America: Yesterday and Today

When Stewart said he had "small problems" in America, he was being modest. What artists who criticised the system have lived through in US history was far from "small".

1947: The blacklists

In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began a communist hunt in Hollywood. Ten screenwriters and directors who refused to testify (the "Hollywood Ten") went to prison. Hundreds of artists were blacklisted.

• Dalton Trumbo wrote under pseudonyms for years. The Oscar he won for Roman Holiday was taken in someone else's name.
• Charlie Chaplin's permission to re-enter the US was cancelled in 1952, while he was on his way to London. Chaplin was in effect sent into exile.
• The singer, actor and trade unionist Paul Robeson was left without a passport between 1950 and 1958. In his testimony to HUAC he told the committee, "you are the real un-Americans".

In that period stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had founded the Committee for the First Amendment against the blacklists. Under pressure, the committee dissolved within a short time.

2025–2026: The same music, new instruments

What is happening in America today recalls that period. The methods are different. In place of the blacklist there are corporate mergers, broadcast licences and threats to citizenship.

• Stephen Colbert: In July 2025 CBS announced that The Late Show would end in May 2026. The reason given was "financial". But the timing was striking. Paramount had paid a 16 million dollar settlement in the 60 Minutes lawsuit Trump had filed. Colbert had criticised this on air. Paramount's merger with Skydance was also waiting for federal approval. After the merger the company belonged to the Ellison family. That is, to Star Trek's new owner.
• Jimmy Kimmel: In September 2025, after pressure from Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), he was taken off the air by ABC. He returned within a week, after public reaction and calls for a boycott. This is an important example of social pressure working. Kimmel later announced that, because of the Trump administration, he had taken Italian citizenship.
• Rosie O'Donnell: In July 2025 Trump threatened to strip O'Donnell, who was born in the US, of her citizenship. O'Donnell lives in Ireland today.
• Robert De Niro: On 26 February 2026, in response to De Niro's criticisms, Trump called him "sick and demented" and wrote that he, together with Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, should "get on a ship". De Niro was born in New York.
• Mark Hamill: Luke Skywalker of Star Wars said he had considered leaving the country because of Trump, but that he would not be driven out by that man. Let us not despise the other hero of this piece without cause. Whatever the series, its actors are passing through this test too.
• Artists in the street: In the autumn of 2025 Jane Fonda refounded the Committee for the First Amendment of 1947. At the "No Kings" actions of 28 March 2026, De Niro, Springsteen, Fonda, Joan Baez and Tom Morello took the platform. Springsteen named Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who had been killed in federal operations in Minneapolis.

This picture should be read together with the rebuilding of the labour regime in the US through migrant workers and with ABD Ara Seçimleri, Tekno-Sermaye ve Algoritmik Siyaset. Media mergers, FCC licence threats and algorithmic visibility are parts of the same apparatus.

Seizing even death

What happened after Stewart's death is instructive too. A name such as Stephen Miller, an architect of anti-migrant policy, commemorated Stewart as "one of the most influential actors in the history of film, television and theatre". Wil Wheaton's response refused that appropriation.

This is not a new pattern. The ruling class tries, once an artist it fought while he was alive has died, to turn him into a "national value" and to strip the political content out. There are many examples, from the songs of Víctor Jara to the poems of Nazım. Our task, while claiming an artist's legacy, is to protect the political content of that legacy as well.

A class note: whose "hard time"?

The pressures lived by the celebrities named in this section are real. But they should not be exaggerated. Kimmel can take Italian citizenship. O'Donnell can move to Ireland. The real cost is paid by those who have no chance of changing citizenship. Migrant workers who are deported, trade unionists who are fired, students who are detained. Attacks on celebrities are a boundary marker of how far the system can reach. A power that can do this to celebrities also shows what it can do to a nameless worker.

Stewart knew this too. As the son of a weaver mother and a traumatised soldier, he knew that the heaviest pressure is lived not by the famous but by the nameless.

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Concrete Tasks

1. Watch, and argue: Watch "The Measure of a Man", "The Drumhead" and "Chain of Command" together, and hold discussion meetings on artificial intelligence, surveillance and torture. Add the Narkina 5 episodes of Andor.
2. Take science back from popular culture: After a film night, organise small science conversations around the question "What does physics say about this scene?" Newton's laws, the speed of light and the parsec are learnt far more lastingly through a film scene.
3. Stay alert against appropriations: Against the stripping of political content from progressive artists who have died, build open archives that record their words and their stances.
4. Do not forget the examples in Türkiye: Follow, and record, the prosecution, banning and blacklisting of our own artists within the same frame.
5. Solidarity with cultural workers: Support the union organising of actors, screenwriters, and dubbing and set workers. Personal courage is valuable, but the organised artist is stronger.
6. Do not leave the future to the monopolies: Those who fence the sky are also fencing the stories that tell the future. Contribute to science fiction under free licences, to collective writing, and to open culture projects.

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Dear Young Comrades,

Patrick Stewart was not a revolutionary. He was a worker's child, and he played both Shakespeare and Picard with the memory of that childhood. Saying "I am a socialist" at a Beverly Hills table was a joke for him. But the joke recalled the thing the people at that table feared most: the labour that sets the table may one day ask for the floor.

The future Star Trek told us will not come of its own accord. Neither a replicator, nor a warp drive, nor an artificial intelligence will carry us by itself to a world without money. We can reach that bridge only by arguing, by organising, and by working all together. In Picard's words: "To better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

With the first link, the chain is forged. But the way to break the chain also begins at the first link: with the first objection, the first solidarity, and the first organising.

Salute to the captain. Our course is clear.

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