Calling Andor the best Star Wars ever is like calling Anakin the best Jedi ever
It’s true
But
We’ll come back to that
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If Andor season 2 has one overwhelming message
it’s that *revolutionary* is a job fit only for lunatics
and egotists
as a career path revolution offers only long hours, great danger, shitty accommodation
and an almost certain death
after a long period of being tortured
Star Wars is the story of those mad enough and bad enough to join the rebellion. The lunatics, scoundrels and heroes who become revolutionaries.
And Andor is the story of what revolutions are really like. Sad, violent, desperate and doomed. A rebellion that the characters in Andor often seem to regret ever having joined.
Which raises the question
What are you rebelling against, Andor?
Watch the full video essay on YouTube
The obvious answer is – The Empire.
The Empire are…space fascists. Their whole vibe screams Nazi right down to the Hugo Boss style uniforms. With Emperor Palpatine as the fascist dictator Adolf Hitler and / or Benito Mussolini.
But Emperor Palpatine is also Darth Sidious, a Sith Lord who uses the dark side of the Force to subvert the good Republic and establish the evil Empire.
This mirrors the common understanding that fascists like Adolf Hitler used hypnotic powers of persuasion and oratory to sway people towards fascism.
But. This isn’t how fascism rose to power in reality
Star Wars is a fairy tale set in a galaxy far away and long ago
But Andor is Star Wars for grown-ups. Star Wars de-infantilized.
Star Wars made real.
To make Andor real Tony Gilroy stripped out all of the fantasy elements. Jedi. Gone. Lightsabers. AWOL. Darth Vader. In hiding. And even the Emperor is made to keep his distance.
In my two previous video essays on Andor we thought about how Tony Gilroy made Star Wars real,
and how he created the reality of revolution by basing Cassian Andor on the early life of Joseph Stalin
the BBC even ripped off my research to report this so it must be true
inspiring Andor to join the rebellion with Nemik’s revolutionary manifesto
and ending season 1 with an uprising of the workers
which gave Andor a vibe close to the revolutionary philosophy of Karl Marx
AKA Marxism
Which does come as a suprise in a streaming show from the corporate entertainment giant Disney
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But when we make space fascists real
We’re faced with some tough questions about the reality of fascism
Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary and the inspiration for Nemik’s manifesto in Andor season 1
described fascism as “the hammer capitalism uses to smash the workers”.
In the early 20th century worker lead socialist revolutions rippled around the world. In Russia, China, Eastern Europe and South East Asia socialist states arose.
In response capitalists in many nations including Italy and Germany funded fascist political movements to resist socialist revolutions.
Benito Mussolini was a newspaper editor and socialist activist, who turned against socialism and, with the backing of Italian industrialists and landowners, founded the Blackshirts to violently smash trade unions and workers movements, including the torture and murder of tens of thousands of socialists.
In Germany Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party never won more than a few percent of votes from workers, but was supported by the wealthy middle class and funded by some of Germany’s largest corporations. The first victims of the concentration camps were German socialists.
George Lucas hints at the real powers behind Palpatine in the prequel
trilogy, with his rise supported by the InterGalactic Banking Clan and the Seperatist Confederacy to stop the power of the Republic
The space Nazis of Star Wars, like the real Nazis of the world war
were funded by capitalism.
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Sigh. Now we have to talk about the “fascism is socialism” comment that someone right now is typing below this video.
Nope. There is a short essay on the Patreon.
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Capitalism has always been in the background of Star Wars
In the original trilogy we saw that Uncle Lars was a struggling moisture farmer, while Lando Calrisian was an… honest?…businessman
The prequels showed us trade federations, deal making and the political machinery of a capitalist galaxy
And the reboots went so far as to expose the military industrial complex selling weapons to both sides of this star war
It’s not like galaxy spanning scifi has to be capitalist. Contrast the capitalist galaxy of Star Wars to the anti-capitalist galaxy of Star Trek.
But in Andor, showrunner Tony Gilroy makes the decision to show us the gritty detail of the capitalist system that orders the Star Wars universe.
Season 1 of Andor showed us the vast factories of Ferrix, still manned by humans despite abundant droid labour, because Ferrix is a depiction of peak industrial capitalism.
The seedy corporate controlled world of Morlana One, the prison factory of Narkina 5, and the strip mining of Cassian Andor’s homeworld. Andor is obsessed with showing the bleak capitalist reality of the Star Wars galaxy.
Because to make Andor real, Tony Gilroy has to make Andor capitalist.
To depict the reality of revolution Gilroy draws heavily on the life of real revolutionary Joseph Stalin. And on the words of Leon Trotsky, and the politics of Vladimir Lenin for Luthen.
And all of these revolutionaries were revolutionary
against capitalism.
It’s perhaps the most ballsy decision in a scifi tv show
since they killed the entire crew of Blake’s Seven
to base season 2 of Andor on a state lead conspiracy
to commit genocide
The aesthetics of the meeting are clearly based on the Wansee Conference, a meeting of fifteen officials from branches of the German state and military to coordinate the Final Solution, the last stage of the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people
And it’s clear that the Empire is willing to commit absolute genocide against the population of Gorman
because that’s what fascists do…right?
well…not only fascists
IMPERIALISM
But in fact the Empire’s aim is more directly Imperialist. The Empire wants to exert its power over a semi-autonomous region. It’s plan is similar to schemes of the British and Russian Empires during the “Great Game” of the 19th century.
The full list of famines, massacres and genocides conducted by the British and colonial empires in our 200 years as global hegemony would occupy most of this essay. As an example, the concentration camp was invented by the British for the Boer war.
As a tool of Imperial power.
CAPITALISM
Under the Imperial powerplay, however, is a bluntly capitalist motivation. Ghorman has essential minerals that must be extracted. Everything else is just a pretext for that aim.
On this level the Ghorman plot resembles such CIA backed plots against “Banana Republics” as the 1954 Guatemalan coup, overthrowing the elected government on behalf of United Fruit to protect the power of capital.
As the Ministry of Enlightenment outlines its propaganda plan against Ghorman, it’s likely that we the audience have been exposed to exactly this kind of propaganda against foreign states when their resources were needed by capital.
Dedra’s plan to encourage a rebellion that can be relied on to “do the wrong thing” echoes any number of contemporary acts of terrorism that may, or may not, have been staged for political advantage.
This is how Tony Gilroy and his team like to do political allegory – with universals rather than specifics. Even when we see the Ghormans speaking with heavy French accents, the Ghorman resistance is a universal symbol of many resistance movements, including but not limited to Nazi occupied France.
In this one sequence Andor gives us what Star Wars has never given us before
The political realities of power in the galactic Empire
Power fundamentally driven by the logic of capitalism
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Star Wars is about a rebellion against an Empire
But which empire? And which rebellion?
In interviews Star Wars creator George Lucas cites two real life revolutions as inspiration.
One of these rebellions looks much like the American revolution of the Founding Fathers against the British Empire.
Imperial Star Destroyers are much like the British gunboats that enforced its power worldwide
The Imperial officer core all speak in clipped English, while the Emperor has a gentle Scottish bur, accents of the British Empire
And the rebellion is fought for the Republic, the form of government that America adopted after defeating the Empire
But let’s remember that the British were the first and foremost capitalist power for over two centuries
Britain’s “empire” was actually built by capitalist corporations like the East India Company.
The term “British Empire” was only officially adopted in 1877, over 200 years into its history, with the crowning of Queen Victoria as Empress.
If a global capitalist empire that doesn’t call itself an empire and rules through corporations sounds familiar, it’s because we Brits invented the capitalist imperial system you Yanks inherited after world war 2
The American war was less a revolution than a power struggle over who would control the global empire of capitalism
George Lucas has also stated multiple times that he had another revolution in mind when making Star Wars
The brutal Death Star is like a spherical Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, from which F4 Phantoms flew like TIE Fighters
The Imperial Stormtroopers are shock troops like the US Marine Corps who flew in Hueys over South East Asian jungles
And the Rebel Alliance are like the revolutionary forces who fought for the freedom of Vietnam from capitalist imperialism.
George Lucas has said again and again that Star Wars was inspired by the Viet Cong
Cong means communist. The Viet Cong were communist revolutionaries.
And Star Wars is and always has been, from George Lucas and the Viet Cong, to Tony Gilroy and the life of Stalin, the story of socialist revolution
against capitalism
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In our reality, the modern era has been bookended by two kinds of revolution.
The Dutch Revolt concluding in 1648, the English Civil War and then Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolutionary War ending in 1783 and the French Revolution of 1789 to 99.
Were revolutions against the material system of feudalal monarchies, in which lords owned the land and everyone else served them as serfs, that had dominated the world for a thousand years.
These revolutions replaced feudal monarchies with capitalist republics. Except in England where we only managed a “constitutional monarchy”. If English people still look like oppressed commoners…that’s because we literally and legally are.
A new class of capitalists now owned the means of production, and most people were employed, no longer serfs, but as wage labour.
It might not feel like it while you’re on shift in McDonald’s or an Amazon Fulfillment Centre, but being wage labour is a substantial step-up from being a serf.
Kind of. Unless you’re forced into urban slums to work in factories until you die of cholera. Which was the condition for most of the new working class in the industrial revolution.
Which is why in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds a second wave of revolutions began.
The Russian revolution of 1917, the Chinese communist revolution of 1927 to 1949, the Spanish revolution of 1936, the Vietnam war of 1955 to 1975 and dozens more brought socialist governments to power in over half the world
or were crushed by fascist counter-revolutions
backed by capitalists
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As we watch Luthen and Saw Gerrera, a character deliberately named and styled on Che Guevarra, we learn that both are conflicted revolutionaries
SAW CLIP NEW REPUBLICANS CONFUSED
Mon Mothma and her kind are wealthy capitalists seeking the restoration of their capitalist republic against the threat of regression back into feudal monarchy
They and the Rebel Alliance we see in the movie are more like a government in exile following a coup d’etat
But Saw, Luthen and Cassian dream of a galaxy of the kind described in Nemik’s manifesto
These men are true revolutionaries
Against capitalism
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Cassian Andor is an indigenous person from a world colonised and strip-mined for its resources.
One inspiration for Cassian’s character is the revolutionary life of Jospeh Stalin, including his bank robberies and imprisonment.
But arguablly Cassian Andor, searching for a sister forced into sex work after the displacement of their tribe, is even more influenced by Latin American revolutionaries of the South and Central Americas.
There’s an obvious visual resemblance, again, between Cassian Andor and Che Guevara, iconic from the red and black poster that has hung on the wall of so many students bedsits.
Guevarra fought in Fidel Castro’s revolution to take Cuba back from capitalist domination aaaaand….the American mafia.
Revolutions against the capitalist exploitation of natural resources raged across Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador into the late 1980s.
And lets not again. Cassians homeworld was not strip mined by the Empire. This capitalist resource extraction was clearly standard practice under the Republic.
Andor season 2 shows the fate of displaced native peoples. Bix Caleen and her friends are now refugees, employed as agricultural labour, facing persecution by Imperial Customs Enforcement.
As Andor season 2 screened millions of immigrant workers in the United States were facing the same kind of hypocrisy and persecution. In the words of Andor season 2…
And to confirm Andor season 2’s overt political intentions, the term “undocumented” is emphasised in the dialogue.
Actress Adriana Arjuna’s Puerto Rican / Guatemalan heritage echoes the origins in the global South of so many of the world’s immigrant workers, routinely persecuted in our capitalist system.
We will never know how many young female immigrant workers experience the sexual abuse depicted in Andor season 2. We do know it’s a common violation.
And too much for some Star Wars fans.
When a Star Wars fan channel with 3 million followers complains about Star Wars being too real it tells you something.
Seeing Adriana Arjuna as an undocumented worker defending herself from being sexually assaulted by the immigration police was too much for Star Wars Theory.
But it’s not violence that fans can’t stomach. A New Hope has amputated limbs, burned bodies and Princess Leia being tortured by her own dad.
What average consumers like Star Wars Theory can’t handle is seeing depictions of the real political events happening in their own country that they are happier ignoring.
Because Andor makes Star Wars again what it has not been for a long time.
Political.
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Star Wars has never really been political.
In fact Star Wars has always been radically de-politicised.
Sure, George Lucas was a maker of intensely political indie movies, who smuggled an anti-capitalist allegory for the Vietnam war with the American empire into a scifi blockbuster.
But.
George Lucas became a victim of his own success. The politics of A New Hope are so obscured under layers of mystification and fantasy that they ere effectively obliterated.
If the original Star Wars is political…then…what are its politics? It’s against authoritarian government? Ok…so what are the Jedi theocracy who dish out extrajudicial executions by laser sword about?
Far from politicising the culture, by inventing the Scifi Blockbuster, George Lucas initiated the tidal wave of meaninglesa cinematic spectacle that washed away the highly political science fiction cinema of the 60s and 70s.
The Disney era Star Wars is….sigh…mostly just lowest common denominator corpoatte entertainment product, with occasional bits of culture war virtue signalling scattered over the top at random.
Does it make any sense for a fleet admiral to be wearing a cocktail outfit? None. But it really angered the Republidorks, which was the only real point.
Culture wars and fantasy spectacle are both there to distract you from political reality. They’re effect is to de-politicise mass culture.
Then along came Andor, to make Star Wars real, with a real political critique of
do I really need to say it again?
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As youtube’s most popular reactionary movie reviewer, The Critical Drinker’s response to Andor season 2’s first story arc missed a trick
Andor’s theft of an experimental TIE fighter begins with Cassian calming an Imperial traitor. Cassian knows this young, naive woman has almost certainly destroyed her life.
But he can’t afford to let her panic. So he gives her an inspiring emotional call to action, that he himself cannot possibly believe.
Andor season 2 is where we start to see the corrosive cost of fighting the Empire for a true revolutionary.
Anyone who has spent time among Leftist activist groups will recognise the Maya Pei Brigade, who are the People’s Front of Judea, not the Judean People’s Front, a crew of lunatics and losers, who are the best the rebellion can get.
Capitalism extracts value from anyone competent. It sets up endless games, hierarchies, status structures and ranking systems to keep you running the rate race.
Dedra and Syril are alienated humanity entirely dominated by the system of capitalism. Desperate for any meaning, Syril finds it in dead bureaucracy
Dedra is Andor’s most pitiful victim. She has lived her entire life in the system, and now serves the security agency who arrested and almost certainly tortured then killed her parents.
Dedra and Syril are not lovers. As Herbert Marcuse argued in Eros and Civilization, the relentless competition of capitalist life makes love impossible. Instead their relationship is of dominance and submission, the political logic of capitalism colonising the personal.
And, right, yes. No. The Critical Drinker gets none of this. Andor season 2 goes so far over Will Jordan’s head you might as well ask a Daschund to comment on Goethe.
But even if the Drinker had understood anything that was happening in Andor Season 2, he can’t say any of it to most of his audience.
Most people don’t want to critique the reality they live in. They want escapism and fantasy. And listening to some Scottish twat blame all your problems on blue haired Wokesters
Is about as fantastical as it gets.
So all Will can say about Andor season 2 is that…it’s a bit slow.
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Apparently the 3 day wedding to join the clans of Mothma and Sculdun was also “slow”
Serving excellent drama like Andor after decades of Disney Star Wars is like serving real food at McDonalds. Without the constant stimulation of space battles and light saber fights a lot of people can’t taste the more subtles flavours presented.
I mean…showing the social elite literally married to the local mob boss
Seems like a pretty clear way of symbolising how the capitalist system inevitably ends up being run by
gangsters
Tay Kolma’s turn against Mon Mothma isn’t motivated by ideology or belief. Tay is a capitalist who has lost his capital after his investments failed.
Unlike “old money” like Mothma, the “new money” capitalists are always unstable and at risk. Capitalism is even unstable for capitalists, driving the systems endless exploitation.
Mothma ends the wedding dancing her brains out, quite literally, to escape the emotional fallout of her own rebellion. She has lost her daughters trust after marrying her to the mob, and Luthen has berated her for leaving him with the dirty work.
Senator Mon Motha is a liberal politician who believes in the system and wants to protect it from the rise of a fascist Empire.
But even as she’s exposed to the true gangsterism and exploitation of the system she seeks protect, she’s unwilling to take on the real costs of revolution against that system.
That cost will be paid by the socialist revolutionaries.
As the liberals enjoy their dance party.
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Is Cassian Andor a rebel?
Or a terrorist?
As we watch the CIA…oops…ISB… manufacture a rebel and / or terrorist movement on Ghorman that they can later use to justify the planetary resource extraction and genocide
It’s probably only Star Wars Theory and the Critical Drinker NOT thinking about the decades long “War on Terror”, that has now been swept back under the carpet, as the vital resources needed for capitalism to continue are now in other locations
that require different strategies
Because the difference between a rebel and a terrorist is which side you are on
When director Krennic throws this distinction at his political oopponent Mon Mothma, we instantly know that the acts of Cassian Andor are being described as
“terrorism”
in the same propganda we see used against Ghorman, and repeated by Syril’s mother, and other the citizens of the Imperial core
no doubt Luke Skywalker will also be denounced as a terrorist for his heinous attack on patriotic military personnel doing their duty on the Death Star.
The Tarkin tragedy? Of course the freak malfunction of a tracking system is a regrettable incident, but a senior Imperial officer would never deliberately harm civilians
And we can imagine the public outrage about a terrorist strike against medical personnel on Coruscant itself. If we dug into the story we might even be able to discover the unit was developing advanced interrogation techniques.
Then watch the sneering denial that such ideas are nothing but conspiracy theories.
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The fight against galactic capitalism in its late stage as fascist Imperialism is as dangerous as it gets
so the revolutionary has to be more ruthless than the system he fights
But watching the relationship between Cassian and Luthen unfold through Andor season 2
we have the same hard decision to make as Andor himself
is Luthen Rael the ruthless but dedicated leader of a true revolution?
or is he the kind of egotist and sociopath so often drawn to revoltionary movements as a cover for their own thirst for power?
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As the massacre and genocide of Gorman unfolds
As we watch newscasters shaping our hatred against the victims
As we see the staged “provication” usednyo justify what follows
As we see that even the Imperial commander is destroyed by the Empire
We can see two overlapping stories
One is the story of an evil space Emperor, finally made actually evil in the fantasy of Star Wars
The other is, whether you choose to call it fascism, Imperialism, or capitalism
Is the real evil in our own empire
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Calling Andor the best Star Wars is like calling Anakin the best Jedi
Because, sure, Anakin IS the best Jedi
If it wasn’t for that pesky differential in ground heights, and having the Red Pilled psychology of a 4Chan shitposter, Anakin would have totally ended up NOT a frazzled Sith in a cyber-support gimp suit.
Anakin was The One who came to save the Jedi.
But in the end it was the best Jedi who destroyed the Jedi
Star Wars was a child’s make believe scifi fantasy of space Nazis vs space wizards with starships imagined from pizza slices and bow ties
By making Star Wars real Tony Gilroy has made the best Star Wars
But Andor also raises one difficult question after another about the real world that created Star Wars
Is capitalism freedom, or just new kinds of exploitation?
Is fascism an evil Sith like force? Or is it just capitalism when times get tough?
Are revolutionaries against capitalism the rebel alliance, or criminal terrorists?
Is the United States a force for good, or just another evil empire?
When you take a fairy tale of Good vs Evil and make it real…it’s natural to ask…who is good? And who is evil?
There are no easy answers for these questions. And that’s the problem.
Because these are all the questions that average consumers of Star Wars consume Star Wars to not think about.
Star Wars is a corporate entertainment franchise produced by the largest entertainment corporation of them all.
And neither consumers or corporations want to think about the reality of capitalism.
Which is likely why Andor, the best Star Wars, is only getting one rushed second season in place of four.
If Star Wars is the entertainment franchise the Empire streams to its faithful citizens, Andor is a pirate broadcast coming in from the rebel alliance
Will even average consumers of Star Wars be happy to go back to corporate approved slop?
Andor is not The One to save Star Wars
Andor is the One to destroy Star Wars
Damien Walter 
Your generosity is appreciated.
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