By Jock Mulligan
Andor is a fine piece of work, a real look at the grim reality of the whole damn thing. It’s not your usual space opera with a few lads waving light-sticks; this is the story of how the working-class and the oppressed had enough of the boot on their neck. It’s got a revolutionary heart, and that’s what makes it ring true.
The Material Conditions of Rebellion
What the series does correctly is focus on the material conditions of the common people. On a planet like Ferrix, you see the Imperial machine slowly grinding down every aspect of life—the jobs, the scrap metal, the very way people make a living. It’s a slow, suffocating squeeze that forces men like Cassian to move from just surviving to resisting. It’s exactly as old Karl Marx put it, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” The Empire’s brutality and its economic domination are what create the Rebel Alliance, not some grand idea cooked up in a fancy orbital office. The Star Wars we see in this series is grounded in the economic base, and that’s the truth of any real-world uprising.
The slow, painstaking effort to build a resistance cell is a wonder to watch. It’s not spontaneous; it’s organized. You see the sparks of class consciousness igniting, especially with Kino Loy on the prison planet. He’s a foreman, a collaborator almost, until the Imperial system is turned on him and his workers. He realizes who the real enemy is, and then he organises them all. That’s the work of a proper revolutionary. We had the same spirit in the early trade unionists in Dublin, the lads following James Connolly, who understood that national liberation and the liberation of the working class were two sides of the same shilling. It wasn’t just about a flag; it was about who owned the means of production, whether it was the British gentry or the Imperial bureaucracy. The resistance comes from the place where the people hurt the most.
The Vanguard and Permanent Revolution
It shows the need for the vanguard, those who have the awareness to lead. Mon Mothma and Luthen Rael are the political leaders, the ones who understand the wider system that needs smashing. They’re the ones bringing the ideology, because, as Lenin said: “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” They are trying to move the masses past mere “outbursts of desperation” and into a directed, political struggle.
And the struggle itself, the way it has to keep growing, is a testament to the idea of a constant fight. It’s not a one-and-done affair. They have a successful heist, and the Empire just digs its heels in harder. It’s an ongoing, *internationalist* (interplanetary) struggle across the galaxy, which brings to mind Trotsky’s idea of Permanent Revolution—that the revolution doesn’t stop with a single victory but must keep expanding and evolving until the old order is completely gone. It’s all about keeping the pressure on the ruling class, right up until the final, great upheaval. Just like in Ireland, where one rebellion led to another—from the United Irishmen, the Fenian Uprising, Land War to the Easter Rising—the fight kept on escalating because the basic condition of oppression hadn’t been resolved. The forces of change were continually driving forward.
The cinematic treatment of Andor is what makes it so great. It’s a grounded, grimy, political thriller that serves as a prequel. I’d love to see the same treatment for the Terminator franchise. Forget the time-travel nonsense and give us a series that shows us the >political< and military events leading up to Judgment Day, from the rise of Skynet’s corporate influence in the Pentagon to the first skirmishes of the resistance. Give us the workers and the soldiers who saw the threat before it was too late. Show us the world falling apart, not just the explosion.
The Hulu series, Alien Earth, is a real disappointment for any political animal. They say the Earth is run by a “Corpocracy” of five mega-corporations, but they skip the whole damn process! They show you the result but not the struggle. Where is the political decay? The deregulation? The bought politicians? We get a bit of AI and some acid-spitting beasties, but the real monster is the unchecked power of capital, and they wave that away like a bit of smoke! And where’s the resistance? The workers’ uprisings, the strikes against the company bosses, the underground movements? You can’t just have a corporate-fascist dystopia without the years of political action and the resistance that fought against it. They skirt over the class war that must have happened for the corporations to take over the government in the first place, and that’s a failure to understand history and drama, – both.
