Fighting the Empire

From Andor to A New Hope

Jonathan Brown

September 23, 2025

doi.org/10.63478/WTAKLS4Z

For nearly fifty years, Star Wars has been America’s most enduring popular myth—a story of rebels and tyrants that captured the imagination of legions of fans, both young and old. But unlike most heroic narratives in US popular culture, the moral axis of Star Wars is inverted. Traditionally, Hollywood storytelling valorizes the guardians of order: heroes who defend the system pitted against subversive villains bent on destroying it.¹ Star Wars turns that script upside down, presenting the guardians of order—the Galactic Empire—as the villains, and the heroes as scrappy rebels who seek to overthrow the system.

This inversion has always given Star Wars a subversive shimmer, appealing to a sense of rebellion against tyranny. Yet therein lies the contradiction: the galaxy’s most famous rebels belong to the Walt Disney Company, the world’s most powerful entertainment empire.² What began in 1977 as a quasi-independent film has become a multibillion-dollar franchise spanning twelve films, multiple television series, video games, toys, t-shirts, and theme parks—a vast machinery of cultural production that generates profits for the corporate colossus of Disney. In short, Star Wars sells us rebellion as a commodity.

For years, the contradiction could be papered over because the franchise kept itself afloat on brand maintenance. After Disney’s sequel trilogy—and amid a surge of spin-offs including Rogue One (2016), Solo (2018), The Mandalorian (2019), The Book of Boba Fett (2021), and Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022)—many critics felt that the franchise was increasingly relying upon nostalgia and IP recycling.³ Amid that content flood, Andor (2022)—a slow-burn political drama about imperial occupation, labor exploitation, and the radicalization of ordinary people—marked a rupture. Andor has been hailed as the most sophisticated entry in the canon—a series with something approaching a truly revolutionary sensibility.⁴

But what does a conglomerate like Disney stand to gain from selling us such a sophisticated message of resistance? After all, if rebellion is a product, how do we reclaim its meaning? Of course, Andor isn’t the only such commodification of rebellion, but it does raise the question: how do we move through the contradiction of revolutionary stories that are sold to us by capitalist institutions?

This essay seeks to answer these questions by tracing the cultural history and political economy of Star Wars, from its origins in the post-Vietnam era to its current form as a serialized corporate product. I approach the franchise through the lens of Marxist literary criticism, which, as Terry Eagleton explains, “analyzes literature in terms of the historical conditions which produce it.”⁵ That means, first, examining the material conditions of Star Wars’ production, its emergence out of political crisis in the 1970s, and its later commodification into one of the world’s largest multimedia empires. Second, Marxist literary criticism involves analyzing the ideological content of the films themselves: the meaning of their stories, the vision of rebellion they narrate, and the limits of that vision. Finally, Marxist criticism demands a turn to praxis: what political lessons can be drawn from this cultural text and how might we move beyond passive consumption of revolutionary stories toward real-world political struggle?

With this framework in mind, the essay will argue that Star Wars has always been a reflection of rebellion born out of times of political crisis, and that this tendency has grown more explicit over time, culminating in Andor—a series that resonates powerfully with our own moment of late capitalist crisis. Yet, despite its radical narrative, Star Wars remains bound by the corporate logic of commodification. To resolve that contradiction, we must look beyond mass media alone and toward organized political action. In doing so, perhaps we may yet find a way to not only passively consume an understanding of the contradictions embedded in our culture, but a practical path to transcending them. To see how these dynamics first took shape, we need to turn to the original trilogy and its context in the political upheavals of the 1970s.

The History and Ideology of the Original Trilogy

The 1977 premiere of Star Wars came amid a profound crisis of faith in American institutions. The US defeat in Vietnam shattered the illusion of American invincibility, exposing the fragility of the liberal order and the brutality of US imperialism. Images of Saigon evacuations and revelations like the My Lai massacre seared themselves into public consciousness.⁶ For the first time in a generation, Americans confronted the possibility that their government was neither omnipotent nor inherently virtuous. That disillusionment deepened with the Watergate scandal. The spectacle of presidential corruption accelerated a broader legitimation crisis: across the spectrum, faith in the state collapsed.⁷

Hollywood reflected these anxieties. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the rise of “New Hollywood,” a generation of young directors who wrestled with the cultural fallout of war, civil rights, and political corruption.⁸ Their films—The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Chinatown—rejected the moral certainties of the studio era. George Lucas emerged from this milieu but took a different path. While his peers leaned into gritty realism and moral ambiguity, Lucas tapped into mythology, aiming to create a modern fairy tale that could restore meaning in the wake of political collapse.⁹

To achieve this, Lucas fused eclectic influences: the science fiction adventure of 1930s pulp serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers; the visual grammar of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, such as The Hidden Fortress; and Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey, which framed Luke Skywalker as a universal archetype.¹⁰ These choices cloaked Star Wars in the aura of timeless legend.¹¹ However, the mythology Lucas crafted bore the imprint of its historical moment: a longing for moral clarity in an age of systemic doubt packaged in the language of rebellion, but stripped of truly revolutionary substance.

Lucas was not shy about his political inspirations. In interviews, he admitted the Rebel Alliance was modeled on the Vietcong, and the Galactic Empire on the United States—a republic turned empire through hubris and overreach.¹² He even praised the Soviet Union, remarking that Russian filmmakers not beholden to the profit motive enjoyed more artistic freedom than their American counterparts.¹³ And Lucas was able to produce a film that tapped into the rebellious zeitgeist of the time, valorizing the exploits of a plucky band of insurgent heroes at war with an imperialist power.

Although the Empire is presented as a betrayal of the ideals of the Galactic Republic, we can safely assume that the seeds of imperialism were already present within the Republic itself.

Visually, the trilogy reinforced this insurgent fantasy. Lucas rejected the sleek futurism of midcentury science fiction in favor of a “used future”: dented hulls, scorched metal, and grimy cockpits.¹⁴ This aesthetic gave the Rebel Alliance an artisanal authenticity, contrasting it with the Empire’s clean, sterile hypermodernity. Imperial war machines—Death Stars and Star Destroyers—embodied the nightmare of technocracy: vast, militarized, and dehumanizing.¹⁵ The parallels were explicit: stormtroopers borrowed their name from Nazi shock troops; Imperial officers wore black uniforms echoing the SS; even the throne room scenes staged rallies in Nuremberg-style architecture.¹⁶

Yet, from a Marxist perspective, the political vision of the original trilogy was riddled with three major limitations. First, the working-class appears to be nonexistent in this galaxy. Workers appear only as background noise: aside from the faceless grunts who make up the ranks of the stormtroopers, labor is entirely absent from the narrative. The Rebel Alliance does not appear to be rooted in the toiling masses, but rather in remnants of the feudal aristocracy and petty-bourgeois liberal reformers: Princess Leia is literal royalty; Han Solo, a petty-bourgeois smuggler; Luke Skywalker, a freeholding farmer’s son. Perhaps the best example of this are the Jedi, a priestly warrior caste modeled on samurai and medieval knights. Based on what we see in the films, the Jedi do not seem interested in organizing the masses, but rather exist as a secretive esoteric order dispensing mystical knowledge to “chosen ones.” The saga thus reproduces an elitist morality tale: salvation flows from noble bloodlines and mystical initiation, not the collective power of the people.

Second, the goal of the rebels is reformist, not revolutionary. Despite Lucas’s reference to the Vietcong, the Rebel Alliance is not fighting to end class exploitation; they seek to restore the Galactic Republic, a bourgeois-liberal order that once presided over the galaxy. In other words, the rebellion longs for a constitutional monarchy with better branding, not a systemic transformation of class society. Although the Empire is presented as a betrayal of the ideals of the Galactic Republic, we can safely assume that the seeds of imperialism were already present within the Republic itself. Indeed, years later Lucas would make this point explicit in his prequel trilogy.

Third, the films exhibit a persistent technophobia.¹⁷ The Empire is evil because it is mechanized. Darth Vader’s monstrosity is linked to his prosthetics: “he’s more machine now than man,” Obi-Wan warns.¹⁸ The Death Star embodies this logic as well—an artificial world whose cold, mechanical power represents tyranny itself. This stands in stark contrast to the Marxist tradition, which has from the beginning embraced technology as a force capable of liberating humanity from conditions of scarcity and providing the material basis for a future socialist society. In his dissertation, Marx praised the mythological figure Prometheus, who defied the gods by giving fire to humanity, as an allegory for human creativity and technological progress.¹⁹ In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels exalt the revolutionary character of capitalism precisely because of its unprecedented technological advances:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?²⁰

They compare these achievements to the greatest works of antiquity, arguing that the capitalist mode of production had accomplished “wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.”²¹ For Marxists, then, technology is not inherently oppressive. The problem is that under capitalism it is harnessed for private profit, subordinating human labor to capital accumulation rather than the public good. Marx and Engels likened the capitalist-class to a “sorcerer” who cannot control the forces he has conjured.²² In socialist hands, those same technological forces could be wielded to abolish scarcity and create the conditions for human flourishing.²³

Lucas, however, seems to embrace a different view of technology. In Star Wars, technological machinery is often portrayed as cold and dehumanizing, contrasted with the organic vitality of nature. Luke destroys the Death Star not with computer targeting, but by “trusting the Force”—relying on intuition over instrumentation.²⁴ In Return of the Jedi, antitechnological romanticism triumphs outright, as Ewoks armed with logs and stones topple the technologically superior Imperial Army. The irony, of course, is that these very stories of technological suspicion required some of the most advanced special effects technology of their time to bring to life. It is this contradiction between technophobia onscreen and technological mastery behind the camera to which we now turn.

Production and Political Economy

Despite its ideological limitations, Star Wars struck a cultural nerve. Its simple moral binary—rebels versus empire, good triumphing over evil—resonated with audiences weary of cynicism and political disillusionment.²⁵ What Lucas pitched as a nostalgic space fantasy became a runaway success, grossing over $775 million worldwide.²⁶ But the story of its production reveals another contradiction: a film framed as an anti-imperial fable laid the foundations for an entertainment empire.

Unlike the vertically integrated studio system of old, Star Wars began as a quasi-independent project. Twentieth Century Fox financed and distributed the film, but Lucas negotiated a deal that seemed minor at the time: he would accept a lower salary in exchange for sequel rights and control over merchandising.²⁷ This proved revolutionary. By 1978, Star Wars toys outsold the film’s box office returns, generating a secondary market that dwarfed ticket revenue. Lucas reinvested those profits into building his own infrastructure—Lucasfilm, THX, and Industrial Light & Magic—effectively transforming himself from a dissident auteur into a media mogul.

Rather than holding firm, Disney retreated…What might have been a moment to break with myth gave way to appeasement, incoherence, and a return to brand security. In this sense, the fan backlash was less the root cause of narrative collapse than a symptom of Star Wars’ status as a corporate cultural empire—an institution that produces both the expectations of mythic repetition and the imperative to satisfy them in the name of profit.

This strategy did more than enrich its creator; it transformed the political economy of Hollywood. Star Wars pioneered the blockbuster-franchise model that now dominates global cinema: high-budget spectacles tied to merchandising empires, designed for endless serialization and cross-platform synergy.²⁸ Intellectual property became capital, while storytelling became a delivery system for licensing.²⁹ Today’s cinematic universe logic traces its lineage to the galaxy far, far away.

The dialectical irony could not be starker: a film imagined as an allegory of resistance against empire became the prototype for imperial cultural production. In Lucas’s hands, rebellion became not a political act but a marketing strategy, an aesthetic of insurgency that fueled one of the most profitable franchises in history.³⁰ What began as a critique of power would now serve as one of its most enduring cultural forms.

The Prequel Trilogy

More than a decade passed between Return of the Jedi (1983) and The Phantom Menace (1999). In that time, much had changed, both in the world and with George Lucas himself. The once-scrappy auteur of the “New Hollywood” era had become the king of his own multimedia empire. Flush with profits from Star Wars merchandising, Lucas’s ecosystem of independent production and cutting-edge digital technologies would define Hollywood blockbusters for decades to come. By the time Lucas returned to the director’s chair, he was no longer outside the system. He was the system.

Expectations were immense. The Star Wars prequels arrived with cultural fanfare and massive box office receipts, but also with sharp criticism. Fans derided the wooden dialogue, stilted performances, dense exposition, and overreliance on digital effects.³¹ But beneath the spectacle and the backlash, the prequels represented a shift. Lucas was attempting something more politically ambitious than in the original trilogy. Where the first films were mythic tales of good triumphing over evil, the prequels told a darker, more ambiguous story—the slow collapse of a democratic republic and the rise of a militarized empire.³² In short, the prequels were not about victory, but defeat.

This narrative ambition created something of a contradiction. Lucas wanted to explore the political fragility of liberal democracy, but did so through films that often resembled elaborate tech demos.³³ The textured, practical aesthetic of the original trilogy was replaced by digital slickness: gleaming cities, choreographed battles, and entire characters rendered in CGI. The result was a tonal clash. A story about institutional decay and creeping authoritarianism was told through the visual language of a children’s video game.³⁴ The deeper contradiction, however, was structural. Lucas wanted to warn us about empire while also running one. His political allegory competed with his commercial empire of toys, t-shirts, and licensing deals. He created the clone army, and sold us the action figures.³⁵

Still, the story being told was complex, and in many ways a self-critique. The prequels deliberately dismantle the mythology of the Jedi. In the original trilogy, the Jedi were an ancient, mystical order—wise monks in exile. In the prequels, we see them in their prime and find them deeply compromised. Far from being guardians of peace and justice, they are portrayed as bureaucratic, dogmatic, and blind to their own corruption.³⁶ They serve the Republic, but fail to see that the Republic itself is already imperial in form, waging wars on the galaxy’s outer rim and approving the creation of a clone army. That army—an expendable force of genetically engineered soldiers—becomes the vehicle of the Republic’s transformation into an empire. And the Jedi, tasked with upholding peace, are instrumental in normalizing war.³⁷

Photo of People in Stormtrooper Costumes. Photo Credit: Sami Abdullah via Pexels — Photo of People in Stormtrooper Costumes.
Photo Credit: Sami Abdullah via Pexels

Lucas thus deconstructed his own myth. The Jedi fall not simply because of Darth Sidious, but because of their own hubris and ideological rigidity. In the most famous line of the trilogy, Padmé Amidala observes, “So this is how liberty dies…with thunderous applause.”³⁸ The collapse of the Republic is not a dramatic coup, but a slow bureaucratic drift into empire, met with public approval, justified by fear, and cloaked in legality.

As with the original trilogy, Lucas drew on historical allegories: the fall of the Roman Republic, the rise of Nazism in Germany, and, more directly, the post-9/11 War on Terror. The prequels reflect anxieties about surveillance, militarization, and abuse of executive power.³⁹ In the figure of Chancellor Palpatine, who consolidates power through manufactured crises, we find an unsubtle warning about fascism. Lucas was keenly aware that liberal democracy was fragile and that US empire, like the Galactic Republic, could cloak itself in the rhetoric of freedom while deepening its pursuit of domination.⁴⁰

Despite their many flaws, the prequels must be understood not only by their narrative missteps or technical experiments, but as an expression of contradiction. They represent Lucas at war with himself: the artist who wanted to tell a serious political story against the mogul whose means of telling that story was the empire of mass entertainment he had built. The prequels reflect both of these impulses. However, the most striking thing about the prequel trilogy is that Lucas, for all his faults, was at least trying to expand the mythology. He was never content to merely recreate the original trilogy or pander to nostalgia. He took risks. He tried to tell a new story, in a new style, with different political stakes.⁴¹ But that would all quickly change once Lucas left the franchise.

Franchise Empire: Star Wars Under Disney

In 2012, George Lucas sold Star Wars to the Walt Disney Company for over $4 billion.⁴² This was obviously a painful decision for Lucas, as he would later remark that he had sold his creation to “the white slavers.”⁴³ Though Lucas would walk back the comment under pressure, the phrase revealed Lucas’ discomfort with the fact that the myth of rebellion he had nurtured for decades was now the property of a corporate empire.

To his credit, Lucas had always balanced commercial ambition with some semblance of artistic control. Even as he built a vast merchandising machine, he continued to write and direct films that reflected his own political concerns, however unevenly realized. But with the Disney acquisition, Star Wars no longer belonged to its creator; it belonged to a brand management team.

The rupture was immediate. Disney discarded Lucas’ story outlines for a sequel trilogy and replaced them with a series of films driven by market research, brand synergy, and nostalgic replication.⁴⁴ Crucially, the studio never established a coherent, trilogy-wide plan; each installment was effectively treated as a self-contained project led by a different director and creative team.⁴⁵ The result was a disjointed series marked from film to film by tonal whiplash and self-contradictory plot turns. The Force Awakens (2015) offered little more than a beat-for-beat remake of A New Hope, infused with corporate liberalism—gender and racial diversity in casting, but without any substantive political or narrative vision.⁴⁶ While celebrated in mainstream media as progress, these casting choices also provoked a racist and reactionary backlash from segments of the fan base, highlighting how the franchise’s own cultivated audience could bristle at even minimal gestures toward multiculturalism.⁴⁷ It introduced new protagonists such as Rey, framed as a plucky heroine from nowhere, while also relying heavily on the return of legacy characters like Han Solo, Leia, and Luke to anchor the nostalgia.

The second film in the sequel trilogy, The Last Jedi (2017), made some gestures toward undermining the mythology of the Jedi and the Skywalker lineage: Luke Skywalker was portrayed as a disillusioned hermit who questioned the very foundations of the Jedi Order, Rey’s origins were initially framed as insignificant (“no one from nowhere”), and the film closed with an image of stable boys on Canto Bight—suggesting that the future of rebellion might lie in ordinary people rather than chosen bloodlines.⁴⁸ These were radical possibilities by Star Wars standards, faintly echoing the demystification of the Jedi in the prequel trilogy.⁴⁹

Yet The Last Jedi provoked a polarized reception. Segments of the fan base rejected its challenges to the established mythos, clinging to the nostalgic expectations that the franchise itself had cultivated over decades.⁵⁰ Rather than holding firm, Disney retreated in The Rise of Skywalker (2019), which hastily reversed course by restoring Rey’s aristocratic lineage, resurrecting Emperor Palpatine, and reasserting the primacy of the Skywalker saga.⁵¹ What might have been a moment to break with myth gave way to appeasement, incoherence, and a return to brand security. In this sense, the fan backlash was less the root cause of narrative collapse than a symptom of Star Wars’ status as a corporate cultural empire—an institution that produces both the expectations of mythic repetition and the imperative to satisfy them in the name of profit.

If the Disney era has been marked by stagnation and commodification, Rogue One and Andor suggest the possibility, however brief or constrained, of something different: the return of politics and the emergence of class struggle in a galaxy far, far away.

Where Lucas’s films were shaped by long development cycles and singular vision, Disney adopted the content factory model. Rather than spacing out releases, the studio flooded the market with side films (Rogue One, Solo), streaming series (The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett), animated spin-offs, and endless merchandise. Quantity triumphed over vision. Narrative consistency gave way to corporate synergy. The result was cultural exhaustion.⁵²

And yet, within this empire of content, a few cracks appeared. A handful of projects deviated from the formula, not by expanding the lore of the Jedi or Skywalker bloodline, but by rejecting it altogether. These stories turned their gaze downward, away from the chosen ones and toward the foot soldiers, saboteurs, exploited laborers, and collateral damage. These works—most notably Rogue One (2016) and Andor (2022)—began to explore the Star Wars universe from below. They did not follow royalty, prophecy, or elite warriors. Instead, they asked a different question: what does the galactic empire look like from the perspective of ordinary people? What does rebellion mean when it is no longer mythic, but material?

In the next section, we turn to these exceptions. If the Disney era has been marked by stagnation and commodification, Rogue One and Andor suggest the possibility, however brief or constrained, of something different: the return of politics and the emergence of class struggle in a galaxy far, far away.

Rogue One (2016): the Return of Politics

By the time Rogue One premiered in 2016, neoliberal hegemony was fracturing amid rising inequality, disillusionment with imperialism, and mass uprisings against police brutality. The failures of the Iraq War and the refugee crisis further eroded faith in liberal democracy. Authoritarian politics, surveillance, and endless war had become ordinary features of American life. In this context, Rogue One stood out as a startling anomaly in the Disney-era Star Wars machine.⁵³ The film abandoned the mythic trappings of the Jedi, the Chosen One, and the Skywalker bloodline. There were no prophecies, no mystical training montages, and no royal families. Instead, Rogue One focused on something long neglected within the franchise films—the foot soldiers.⁵⁴ It told the story of spies, saboteurs, defectors, and laborers—characters with no special lineage or destiny. Cassian Andor, Bodhi Rook, Jyn Erso, and the others were not born to save the galaxy; they were pulled into struggle by circumstance, conviction, or desperation.

This narrative shift brought class to the surface. Cassian is a professional insurgent, a man whose hands are already dirty. Bodhi is an Imperial cargo pilot, a worker who switches sides after witnessing the system’s cruelty. Even K-2SO, a reprogrammed security droid, suggests the theme of labor against its masters. The rebellion, once portrayed as morally pure, is shown here as fractured, messy, and composed of disposable people. These are not mythic heroes—they are pawns who choose to act, knowing they will die. It is, in many ways, the most radical Star Wars story yet.⁵⁵

And yet, Rogue One is also a product of the Disney machine.⁵⁶ The film’s original script was reportedly far darker and its politics more explicit.⁵⁷ Disney executives oversaw major rewrites and reshoots, concerned that the tone was too bleak and the ending too radical. We may never know what was lost in the editing room, but even the sanitized final cut retains surprising subversive energy. The characters still die. The rebellion is still ambiguous. Empire is not just a one-dimensional villain—it is a system.⁵⁸ The rebellious class politics hinted at in Rogue One would become more explicit with the television series Andor (2022). The foot soldier Cassian Andor would return, not as a side character, but as the center of a story that pushed the politics of class, labor, incarceration, and imperialism further than Star Wars had ever dared.

Andor: Proletarian Revolution in an Age of Decline

By Andor’s arrival in 2022, the United States was in the grip of a deep political crisis over the COVID-19 pandemic and mass protests against racial violence that had exposed the brutality and fragility of global capitalism. From the beginning, the new series felt different from previous installments in the Star Wars franchise.⁵⁹ There were no Jedi, no lightsabers, And no Chosen One. There wasn’t even a mention of the Force.⁶⁰ Instead, the series opened on Ferrix, a working-class planet under imperial occupation. Its people live under constant surveillance, monitored by security firms and imperial subcontractors. They repair machines, operate salvage yards, and steal imperial parts to survive. This was no longer a story of prophecy; it was a story of class struggle.⁶¹

At the center is Cassian Andor, first introduced in Rogue One. But here he is not yet a revolutionary. He’s a petty thief, a drifter trying to survive on the edges of empire. His transformation into a committed rebel is not driven by destiny or bloodline, but by experience: arrest, imprisonment, labor, solidarity, loss. This character arc was reportedly based on the rebellious early life of a young Joseph Stalin.⁶²

The show’s most devastating turn comes with Narkina 5, a prison complex masquerading as a factory.⁶³ Here, Cassian is sentenced without trial and thrown into a brutal regime of forced labor and psychological discipline. The floors are electrified at night. The workers are pitted against one another for survival. They competitively build unknown machinery—purposeless, alienated, and unending labor. It is the clearest Marxist allegory in Star Wars history: a story of labor estranged from meaning, organized for imperial profit by a regime imposed through carceral violence. This allegorically functions as a critique of mass incarceration: anonymous, racialized, brutal, and industrial.⁶⁴

Andor reflects the times precisely because it must. To be successful, art under capitalism must respond to real contradictions, but it can only do so within the limits that keep the system intact. Our task is to identify those limits and find ways to go beyond them.

Yet Andor does not only critique; it offers moments of rupture. Kino Loy, the reluctant floor manager played by Andy Serkis, becomes a symbol of political awakening. His slow transformation from collaborator to organizer culminates in a prison uprising powered by nothing more than a shared chant: “One way out!” The breakout is raw, unsentimental, and entirely human. No myth. No Force. Just solidarity.⁶⁵

Back on Ferrix, the politics are equally grounded. We see a society mourning under occupation, pushed past its limits. When the people rise up at Maarva Andor’s funeral, the explosion is spontaneous but rooted in years of repression. It is not a rebellion launched by a secret council or elite warrior class, but by workers, shopkeepers, droids, and children. The insurrection feels earned, marking Andor as the most politically radical Star Wars text ever produced.⁶⁶

But the show also complicates its own radicalism. It lingers on the difficulties of organizing, the moral compromises of underground struggle, and the personal costs of revolutionary commitment. Luthen Rael embodies this contradiction: a leader willing to sacrifice lives, manipulate comrades, and embrace secrecy for the sake of the larger movement. His famous monologue—“I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see”—captures the tragic self-abnegation of the professional revolutionary.⁶⁷ Mon Mothma represents another dimension: a bourgeois politician forced into clandestine financing and even the possibility of arranging her daughter’s marriage to secure support for the rebellion.⁶⁸ Saw Gerrera, by contrast, embodies the dangers of fragmentation, unwilling to trust allies or unite disparate cells. Cassian Andor himself is caught between these poles: he learns solidarity through Ferrix and Narkina 5, but his growth is also marked by betrayal, suspicion, and the painful realization that revolution demands permanent risk. Around them, the omnipresent ISB and Dedra Meero’s methodical surveillance remind us that every act of dissent is precarious. In all of these arcs, Andor portrays rebellion not as a simple triumph but as an arduous and agonizing process of trial, error, and compromise—a realism rarely seen in mass culture.⁶⁹

And yet, the irony remains: Andor was made by Disney. Despite its radical political narrative, it was greenlit, budgeted, and released by the world’s largest media conglomerate. And it’s here that the contradiction emerges most clearly. How did Disney, a corporate behemoth, allow this to exist?

The answer lies in the nature of capitalism’s cultural logic. Corporations have a long history of absorbing and commodifying their own critiques. Rebellion, like anything else, can be branded. In a time of crisis—when rebellion is in the air and the social fabric is deteriorating—Disney knows that selling rebellion is good business. The audience wants resistance. And so Disney gives us the image of class struggle, provided it remains within the confines of serialized entertainment. Andor reflects the times precisely because it must. To be successful, art under capitalism must respond to real contradictions, but it can only do so within the limits that keep the system intact. Our task is to identify those limits and find ways to go beyond them.

This is the tension of Andor. It speaks more truth than anything else in the franchise, showing the genesis of revolutionary subjectivity, the psychology of organizing, and the contradictions of clandestine struggle—and yet it cannot liberate us on its own. Its power lies in resonance, not in transformation. Culture under capitalism is never wholly captured, but its emancipatory potential is limited by the system that produces it. To move beyond those limits requires something more. Rebellion cannot just be a science-fiction story. The politics of Andor cannot become real unless we carry them into real life by organizing, building parties, seizing institutions, and confronting power—not just streaming rebellion, but making it.

Conclusion

From its earliest conception, Star Wars has always been a story of rebellion against empire, first imagined in the shadow of Vietnam, Nixon, and the collapse of postwar liberalism. George Lucas envisioned the saga as a critique of fascism, war, and the corruption of democracy. But even in its most radical moments, the mythology remained bound to two contradictions. First, the conditions of its production: a rebellion narrated through films financed and distributed as mass commodities, culminating in its capture by the Disney empire. Second, the limits of its ideology: revolution imagined through prophecy, aristocracy, and elite warrior-priests rather than the collective power of the working-class. The forces of history that actually make revolutions occur—the proletariat—were absent.

On the narrative level, Andor marks a rupture. For the first time, Star Wars centers the lives of ordinary people—workers, prisoners, and defectors—whose radicalization is rooted not in destiny but in shared oppression. Its politics are explicit, resonating with the crises of our own time: incarceration, surveillance, occupation, and labor exploitation. It is, in many ways, a Marxian intervention at the level of ideas inside a franchise that had long avoided class politics altogether.

And yet, the contradiction behind Star Wars’ production process remains. This is rebellion produced by alienated labor and sold to us by a monopoly. It is revolutionary sentiment packaged for consumption and political awakening as streaming content. It is an example of capitalism commodifying its own negation. Andor moves us because it reflects reality, and Disney profits from selling that recognition back to us. Despite how revolutionary the story of Andor feels for us as viewers, we must remember that consumption is not the same as revolution. To resolve the contradictions of Star Wars, and of our own world, we must move beyond myth. The stories can inspire us, but they cannot free us. That task requires more than passive consumption. It requires organizing, building power, confronting imperialism not in a galaxy far, far away, but right here. This is the lesson of praxis.

With Andor, Star Wars gave us an image of rebellion. The question now is what we do with it.

Fighting the Empire

From Andor to A New Hope

Jonathan Brown

The History and Ideology of the Original Trilogy

Production and Political Economy

The Prequel Trilogy

Franchise Empire: Star Wars Under Disney

Rogue One (2016): the Return of Politics

Andor: Proletarian Revolution in an Age of Decline

Conclusion

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