Season two of the acclaimed Star Wars series Andor has begun. The first season of the franchise came amid backlash, critique, and frustration against Disney’s general handling of the galaxy’s most sought-after intellectual property, with major titles underperforming at the box office and other releases plagued by poor writing and underwhelming plots. Andor was a sudden flash of brilliance (a coruscation, if you will), which was surprising as it seemingly served as nothing more than background filler for the acclaimed (but underappreciated) Rogue One. Although it initially received lower viewership than other Star Wars titles, Andor season one was critically received and thoroughly enjoyed by new and old fans.
As Season two begins, it is worth asking: why was Andor season one (Andor from here) so monumental? The show featured no Jedi, Sith Lords, lightsabres, force-wielding family dynasties, nor Emperor Palpatine (somehow, he didn’t return). This piece argues that what made Andor so monumental was not only the far more grounded, relatable narrative (no space wizards), but the depiction of the autocratic and galactic Imperial Empire’s political economy. The Empire is the absolutist, galaxy-spanning regime personified in other Star Wars titles by Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, or objectified in the Death Star, and serves as the common antagonistic force that the Rebellion struggles against. However, Andor was the first to portray the banal, inner workings of the Empire’s complex and sprawling bureaucracy, politics, and economy. In this way, Andor is a tentative exploration of the political economy of fascism, not only galaxy-wide but at the level of the “everyday”. This blog also contends that this illustration gives an elucidating insight into the political problems plaguing our Earth-bound reality, as we see unimaginably destructive wars, shocking crimes against humanity, and the rapid sliding into authoritarianism by the global hegemon.
A Political Economy of Fascism?
Many definitions of the broader ideology of fascism exist, and without going into this debate, it is enough for our purposes to use Kershaw’s description from To Hell and Back: fascism, broadly speaking, typically contains a hyper-nationalistic emphasis on the unity of an integral nation alongside racial exclusiveness that is committed to the utter, violent destruction of political enemies, which also stresses discipline, ‘manliness’ and militarism together with a belief in authoritarian leadership. Several of these elements (at an intergalactic scale) are readily discernible in most depictions of the Empire across Star Wars media – such as the obliteration of planet Alderaan over an alleged rebel base (like other imperialist crimes, the Washington Post justified it), the enormous military might of the Empire, top regime personnel are almost exclusively men, and it appears that most staff are humanoid (no aliens). The aesthetics of classical fascist regimes are unmissable as well, with the Stormtroopers a stand-in for Nazi troops. The Empire from the original trilogy was also inspired by the United States’ fascistic actions in the Vietnam War, and the prequels were equally written with the United States’ War on Terror in mind.
Much scholarship has asserted that fascism lacks a properly developed political economy. If we take the concerns of political economy to (very) generally be the relationship between markets and states, the politics of trade, the distinctions of different capitals, or the role of labour, fascism’s own political economy has typically been described as either reflecting the desire of some fraction of the big bourgeoise or being subject to perverted political impulses. Even more elusive in the scholarship is an account of the everyday political economy of fascism. The analytical framework of an everyday political economy considers the quotidian, regular, and routine politico-economy practices that make existence possible and sustain broader social systems. These daily practices span intertwined production (i.e., waged work) and reproduction (i.e., non-waged work, such as household labour) activities in households, workspaces, or at the state level. While arguably under-explored in the literature, Andor provides an insight into these “macro” (inter-state/planetary) and “micro” (everyday) levels of political economy within the fascist Empire, which reflects fascistic tendencies observable in our current Earth-bound political economy.
Corporatism and Extractivism in Andor
The Empire in Andor appears to be organised, in part, by corporate sectors. The TV series starts on Morlana One, a planet dominated and governed by the Consolidated Holdings of Preox-Morlana Corporation (the Pre-Mor Corporation) that controlled the broader inter-planetary Free Trade Sector, including the working class planet of Ferrix – where the titular Cassian Andor grew up and where much of the drama is based. Within this Free Trade Sector, the Pre-Mor Corporation wields delegated authority from the Empire to govern and subjugate planets and peoples, presumably enforcing free trade and conditions suitable for corporate activity. It appears there is a closely intertwined relationship between the Empire and corporations – members of the Imperial Security Bureau (Empire Secret Service) in Andor comment on the necessity to manage ‘conflict sufficiently’ to restart mining. The Empire also abandoned Andor’s home planet of Kanari after a mining disaster and cleared out indigenous peoples on the planet of Aldhani to create ‘enterprise zones’.
Across the Star Wars galaxy, this system appears like a compulsory sectoral organisation of limited numbers of hierarchical and functionally differentiated units, such as the Pre-Mor Corporation or the ‘Corporate Sector’ (30,000 star systems), recognised by the Empire and granted an exclusive monopoly in a region with political representation in the Galactic Senate – in other words, the political economy of corporativism that predominated in Mussolini’s Italy. Although common in the political economy of classical fascism, these corporativistic models are reappearing today in the fascistic fever dreams of Peter Thiel and other billionaires that yearn for city states and even small countries that are under a high-tech fiefdom, run by the elite with corporate dominance and containing select citizens – where class contradictions are smoothed over by corporatist syndicates between high-tech corporations, technocratic governing officials, and people in these utopias. However, these are not only the fantasies of the extreme right. The desire to be separated from the ‘sprawling masses’ and have the State intertwined with corporativist organisations that are free to extract, plunder, and profit have been the hallmark of neoliberal theorists since at least the 1950s (as explored by Quinn Slobodian in Globalists and Crack-Up Capitalism). The extreme rise in inequality and the perversely unequal political power wielded by elites on our planet, who are now openly dictating to governments (rather than secretly as is more usual), have been powered by neoliberalism since the 1970s, which fermented the fascistic techno-feudalist fantasies of our controlling oligarchs that somewhat mirror the Empire’s corporativism.
‘The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it…It’s easier to hide behind forty atrocities than a single incident’.
Throughout Andor, it is plainly obvious that the Empire is on a constant war footing that can be intensified at will, deploying a galaxy-wide war economy to generate, mobilise, and allocate resources to sustain permanent war. Since the fall of the Republic, the Empire sustains a galaxy-wide military-industrial complex, with entire industries taken control by galactic authoritarians to compel vertical integration of military technology manufacturing. Through these technologies and billions of enlisted troops, the Empire implements a “galactic police state” with omnipresent systems of mass social control, including an inter-galactic archipelago of prisons. The Empire frequently obliterates any opponents, ignoring the rules of war.
In Andor, following the Rebel’s heist of an imperial payroll from the planet Aldhani, the Empire implements galaxy-wide collective punishment for this ‘terror attack’ – including decreased tolerance for customs/traditions that ‘hide partisan activity’, the passing of laws that institute mandatory sentencing, and unrestricted ‘surveillance, search and seizure’ powers. Subsequently, the protagonist Cassian Andor is arbitrarily arrested on the street and given a mandatory sentence of six years hard labour in a high-security prison. Andor’s prison produces parts for the Death Star’s super laser dish; an orbital weapon that is eventually instrumental in enforcing the ‘Tarkin Doctrine’ galaxy-wide – overwhelming displays of force to institute fear, named after an Imperial General. As an illustrative example of the Empire’s militarized political economy, the Death Star is built by galaxy-spanning supply chains, with entire planets subjugated to its production.
On our own planet today, William Robinson has argued that we are seeing a global police state that institutes widespread repression, controls ‘surplus humanity’, and accumulates capital as part of a broader move towards 21st century fascism (echoing classical fascism). Police are becoming more militarized, using violence as the primary means to ‘confront’ racialized populations, and deploying to institute ‘states of exception’ where bodily and legal violations are permitted against anyone at will – this was, of course, a trend far before the rise of neo-fascist parties and politicians. Weapon companies are reaping record profits, as complex supply-chains across the world are supplying the most brutal wars of the twenty-first century. Forced penal labour also proliferates across the United States, while in Australia the use of off-shore gulags and mandatory sentencing are alarmingly common, both propping up the profits of private prisons.
As Ben Ehrenreich argues, Gaza has acted as an opening for even further globally repressive practices, as Aldhani did for the Empire – also mirroring the story of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui; fittingly for Andor, a show that has several moving Brechtian monologues. In the United States and Germany, arguing that human rights law should be respected, or otherwise criticising Israel’s potential genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, puts you at risk of being snatched off the street. In Australia, censorship has been rolling out quickly to clamp down on critiques of Israeli state practices. The political economy of Israel itself, perpetually on a war-footing amid a heavily militarised society, is also reflective of trends highlighted in Andor. The Israeli military’s ‘Dahiya Doctrine’, a strategy of large-scale destruction of civilian areas to mass-produce fear, has been implemented in Gaza and Lebanon over the last eighteen months and is eerily similar to the Tarkin Doctrine. Indeed, Gaza has been mandated as a ‘state of exception’ for the Israeli military to pursue ill-defined war goals, while ignoring international law and rulings by international courts, and dispense catastrophic, collective violence on an occupied population. Israel, ideologically underpinned by settler colonialism, has long been recognised as a case of ‘peripheral fascism’ that has intensified under an extremist regime, which has equally catalysed global fascistic tendencies in allied governments to protect Israel’s right to commit atrocities across the Palestinian Occupied Territories.
‘Where are the returns on my investment?’ – Everyday political economy of fascism
One of the most fascinating aspects about Andor is the glimpse into the everyday political economy of fascism. This is depicted in the scenes within the Imperial Security Bureau, with large chunks of the narrative focused on petty infighting within the bureaucracy, daily power plays, and the mundane, dull matters of administering a galactically repressive apparatus. Particularly interesting is the gendered, everyday political economy that Andor illustrates in the interaction between Syril Karn (Deputy Inspector for the Pre-Mor corporation, and one of Cassian Andor’s antagonists) and his mother. Syril is fired for his botched investigation into the killing of two corporate security guards by Cassian Andor. He returns home to Coruscant (a core planet of the Empire), where he lives with his mother. Immediately, his mother taunts him – she tells him directly that she is disappointed in him, criticises his posture, and says he has no prospects. Syril’s mother then lists the reproductive tasks that she has done for him over her lifetime, such as child rearing, housework, and other care labour, and demands ‘where is the return on my investment?’ Seemingly to indebt him further, she offers to use family connections to get him a low-rung job at the Imperial Bureau of Statistics. This accounting depicted in inter-familial relations within fascistic, Empire households in Andor, demonstrates how inter-familial transactional demands for prestige (which is what Syril’s mum is demanding) replace collective demands based on social reproduction.
The relational, everyday connection between family members, friends, and the broader community was supremely political in fascist Italy. This is where the ‘microphysics of power’ played out in fascist households, which was catalysed by not only the intrusion of the state but also family members who sought to mediate the household with fascistic normative and material expectations. Family members socialised other members of the household to fascist rule and norms, and acted as ‘mediators between other members of their family or circle, and local representatives of the Fascist state’. These micro, everyday political economies that catalyse fascistic behaviour are not a thing of the past, however. Even in 1977, Michel Foucault noted the ‘fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’ as the strategic adversary. More recently, Gabor Maté has echoed similar sentiments, warning that many of us harbour the seeds for hatred and fear, which reciprocally feeds, at an everyday level, the broader rise of political 21st century fascism – what we can arguably glimpse within an Empire household in Andor.
‘Surprise from above is never as shocking as one from below.’
The contention of this blog was that the brilliance of Andor’s season one was in part the exploration of the political economy of fascism, which has often been ignored even on our own planet – though the fictional examples of the Empire are eerily repeated here on Earth. More scholarly work on the everyday and broader political economy of fascism in our own time is vital, as new fascistic threats continue to multiply globally. Star Wars has always been political, and Andor season one perhaps gives us some hope; after all, it is fundamentally a tale of revolution, or even a Marxist story, about common people overthrowing tyrannical oppressors. Season two, appearing at a darker and more violent time in our own galaxy, has even more urgent shoes to fill.
Comments