Cheaper than droids and easier to replace: Work, Labour, Automation and Organisation in Star Wars Andor

Christoffer Bagger

Star Wars: Andor in its first season of twelve episodes shows not a single lightsaber, has no one shooting lightning from their fingers, and nobody mastering their personal inhibitions by hearing the ghosts of deceased mentors. Instead, the protagonists of Andor are often reluctant working-class rebels, scrambling for resources, and as prone to sectarianism and in-fighting as any meme about the political left will have it. The showrunner Tony Gilroy has even gone on record as drawing on a biography of the Bolshevik revolutionary and dictator Joseph Stalin for inspiration.17 As quite a few commenters have pointed out, this means that Andor is ripe for left-wing and Marxist readings, locating the core of the Star Wars narrative in material and working-class struggles.

The series thus far ends up showing a very industrialized view of the potential for revolution. This is most clearly expressed through the pivotal Narkina Five prison arc episodes and in the final riot on Rix Road in the twelfth episode. In these settings, the oppressive fist of the Galactic Empire (which we are reminded is an industrial economy) finally becomes too much for its subjects, and they collectively revolt.

This contrasts with the other sites of “work” in the series, notably the Imperial bureaucracies, the Senatorial arena of diplomacy, and the back-door dealings of the rebel networks themselves. Here, Imperial officers Syril Karn and Dedra Meero, senator Mon Mothma and rebel fixer Luthen Rael experience isolation and atomization each in their own way.

As such, Andor would seem to locate the most potent forces for rebellion squarely within the area of industrial work. However, this is not to say that the series is unsympathetic towards alternative perspectives on oppression, including feminist Marxist perspectives and the oppression of Indigenous communities (see the extended arc on the colonized planet Aldhani in episodes three through six). What is more interesting is that the series arrived in a time where the organized creative labor force of Hollywood were on strike. 

On Program: The Narkina Five Arc as Thesis Statement

Critical scholars have long discussed the relationships between prisons and other forms of exploitation in capitalist societies. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that prisons are necessary for the maintenance of industrial capitalism itself.18 As such, prisoners are often integral to the maintenance of large technological infrastructures.19 Therefore, perhaps the choice to set the most memorable three-episode arc of Andor with the titular character incarcerated on a prison planet is no coincidence. This arc acts like something of a microcosm of the first season of Andor, exhibiting the largest scale of organizing within the series. At the same time, the arc is a critique of automation (or rather pseudo-automation) and dehumanization which sets the potential for popular uprising firmly within industrial labor.20

This contrasts with the atomization experienced in the other sites of work explicitly shown throughout the series: The bureaucratic world of the Imperial Bureau of Standards as briefly inhabited by foot-soldier-turned-office drone Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), the world of diplomacy as inhabited by senator (and secret subversive) Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), and the world of rebel dealings inhabited by the shadowy dealer Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) and insurrectionists such as Saw Gerrera (Forest Whittaker).  As I will return to, these portrayals of labor are also in stark contrast to the realities of organizing in both the current economy at large – and in stark contrast to the concurrent realities outside, which heavily involved workers’ disputes with Disney, the company behind Andor and the rest of Star Wars. 

In Andor’s prison arc, imprisoned laborers whir about in a setting not unlike the sterile science fiction of George Lucas’ earlier work THX 1138. Throughout these episodes we see the laborers collaborate (and compete) to construct machine parts at worktables, not knowing why. In a post-credit sequence after the first season’s final episode, we learn that what the imprisoned workers have been constructing are parts for the Death Star, the “technological terror” which was to ensure the Empire’s subjugation of the Galaxy, and eventually to the death of the titular Andor himself in Rogue One.

Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) induction into the prison factory on Narkina Five is almost a step-by-step walkthrough of what management theorists Fleming and Spicer summarize as the four faces of power – coercion, manipulation, domination and subjectification.21  Firstly, he is threatened with coercion by the prison guards. Here, the constant threat of deathly electric shocks is repeatedly established as the guards’ primary tool for keeping imprisoned people in line. The cinematography is replete with shots of bare feet pacing across steel floors, reminding the viewers of this constant threat. Secondly, Andor meets his fellow inmate and shop steward Kino Loy (Andy Serkis), who quickly introduces the acceptable and expected boundaries of behavior (“I’m sensing you understand me!”). This is the face of power which Fleming and Spicer call manipulation. Andor is also assured that the authority figure he should really be worried about is Loy, and not any of the guards, because “[they] won’t be back.”

As becomes apparent over the course of the episodes, Loy’s commitment to the system is based on internalization of the domination enacted by the prison system. By domination, Fleming and Spicer mean that the oppressive power structures are meant to be thought of as natural, beyond critique or refutation. Loy is insistent that he has “249 days left on [his] sentence” and he intends to spend them making the well-oiled machine of the prison run smoothly. 

Finally, Andor is introduced into his shop crew’s worktable and is in part made the object of subjectification, the final face of power. By subjectification, Fleming and Spicer mean the effort to “shape [the] sense of self, experiences, and emotions.” Loy instructs that Andor “keep it to [him]self” if he is “Losing hope [or his] mind”. Here, Andor is faced with the prospect of becoming another cog of the gears of production at Narkina Five and losing all sense of self. 

However, this is also where we get the first tiny hint that the prisoners themselves may also exercise a defiant, positive power, a foreshadowing of their final riot and escape. As one of Andor's fellow inmates insistently refers to him as “new guy,” another (Melshi) chimes in and insists that they refer to their new coworker by his name. Although small, this is a gesture which shows that the subjectification in the prison is not total, at least not to the point of completely erasing the identity of the prisoners.

It must of course be remarked that Andor spends his entire stint in prison under an assumed name (“Keef”), which is all his fellow inmates ever know him by. This is part of a longer pattern of Andor shifting his identity according to his surroundings. Among the heist crew on Aldhani, he was Clem, and on his beachside escape he was Keef Girgo, the name he was arrested under. Even his “real” name of Cassian Andor is an adaptation to his surroundings of Ferrix, as it paints over his Kenari name Kassa. Although not stated outright, the viewer is left to infer that Cassian is adept at shifting according to his environment, a skill perhaps learned due to the trauma of being forced from his home planet. Perhaps this is also why he is able to resist the dehumanization of the prison.  

During the prison arc, viewers follow (and likely empathize with) Andor’s frustrated attempts to convince the domineering Loy to help him rebel and escape the prison. He correctly identifies that Loy’s charisma among the prisoners as well as his intimate knowledge of the prison will be the key to a successful escape. However, Loy’s internalized domination by the prison system is simply too strong. As becomes apparent, Loy also feels manipulated and coerced into only acting in line with prison directives. As he notes, “productivity is encouraged, evaluation is constant.” This may be true on the shop floor he manages, where he describes himself as “play[ing]” against the other floors in a gamified competition of self-exploitation.

However, as Cassian Andor is convinced, outside of measuring productivity and disciplining slackers, surveillance at the prison is severely lackluster. In fact, he is convinced that actual surveillance is non-existent: “Why bother listening to us? We’re nothing to them.” They are simply valuable slave labor because they are, as Andor puts it, “cheaper than droids and easier to replace.”

You Need to Help Each Other: Solidarity and Rebellion

The escape from Narkina Five is perhaps the most extreme case of one of the central theses of the first season, as expressed by Luthen Rael: That the Empire can only be resisted if its subjects become completely aware of its oppressive force, even if that means that this oppression has to be increased. In a telling scene, he notes that “The Empire has been choking us so slowly, we're starting not to notice. The time has come to force their hand.” An incredulous Mon Mothma responds that “People will suffer,” and Luthen assures her “that’s the plan.”

At a first glance, this “forcing of the hand” is what happens to Andor himself throughout the prison arc. Although the character was never friendly towards the Empire, the imprisonment would seem to radicalize him enough to finally become a rebel. However, this is in fact not the case. After his escape, Andor learns that his mother Maarva has died, and that his adopted home planet of Ferrix is under increased Imperial occupation. He then returns to his home, not to start a riot, but to free the last person he cares about (his former fling and trade partner Bix) from Imperial torture. 

Luthen’s vision of rebellion lacks any sense of community among the people doing the rebelling. However, this is a central part of both the riot on Ferrix at the first season’s conclusion, and the prison escape itself. On Ferrix, the posthumous speech by Maarva Andor in the twelfth episode emphasizes that Ferrix had been able to ignore the Empire – the “wound that won’t heal at the center of the galaxy” – because the inhabitants “had each other.”

Like Maarva, Kino Loy emphasizes the cooperation necessary during the escape he leads: 

You need to help each other. You see someone who's confused […] you keep them moving until we put this place behind us. There are 5,000 of us. If we can fight half as hard as we've been working, we will be home in no time. One way out!

Crucially, this sense of solidarity is completely absent from the other sites of work presented in the series. It only manifests in the imprisoned conditions of Narkina Five and among workers, retirees, and crooks on Ferrix.

Narkina Five and the ensuing riot and prison break is framed as the result of an industrial system underpinning a fascist state. Notably, this is a fascist state which is heavily dependent upon industrial labour, such as the scrap industry on Ferrix and the factory of Narkina Five.

What is perhaps most striking is that the fascist Empire is as unconcerned with surveilling their enslaved workers as Cassian Andor believes them to be. There is, in fact, no one listening. This differs somewhat from the surveillance associated with imprisoned peoples on Earth.22

Contrast this with another worksite in the series: The Imperial Bureau of Standards, where one of the series antagonists and “resident Empire fanboy,”23 Syril Karn, gets assigned an office job. Where Narkina Five reflects the potentially dehumanizing nature of industrial labour, the Bureau of Standards reflects the potentially dehumanizing labor of white-collar and computer-supported work. Workers are sat in endless grey cubicles, like a futuristic version of something out of Office Space or a similar 90s movie about corporate alienation. Crucially, Syril Karn gets busted by the Imperial authorities for using his work computer for unauthorized business (showing his own rebellious streak). This is in stark contrast to the actual lack of surveillance in the prison. It does however reflect the reality of the surveillance of workers and their computer activities in the world of the viewers.24

The surveillance of Karn is overseen by the Imperial Security Bureau, an intelligence service personified most often by the ambitious Dedra Meero (Denise Gough). The scenes with the ISB often emphasize intra-office frictions and rivalries between intelligence officers. Meero herself has been argued as an exemplar of the ideology of “White feminism.”25 This is an ideology with a focus on individual accumulation, rather than addressing any structural conditions.26 Here, Meero is also atomized and individualized, surrounded only by enemies, superiors, and workplace rivals. In line with critiques of white feminism, she lacks the capability (and even interest) to mount any criticisms of the system which oppresses her, even as she uses it to oppress others.   

Another site of labor which the series explores in detail is that of international (or interstellar) diplomacy, in the storyline surrounding senator Mon Mothma. The senator is also under constant surveillance and cannot even confide in her husband or daughter if she wanted to. As scholars like the American sociologist Arlie Russel Hochschild have described in detail, the work of diplomats and ambassadors – and of their spouses in particular – relies on both overt and subtle means of communication.27 Here, Hochschild stresses the cooperative relationship between diplomats and their spouses as essential for doing the actual work of diplomacy. By contrast, Mon Mothma is isolated and atomized in her diplomatic endeavors. She is surrounded by politicians who are more than willing to ignore the Emperor’s transgressions (“[he] says what he means”), her own daughter disapproves of her, and her husband is useless in her diplomatic endeavors and completely ignorant of her rebel activities. Even her alliance with Luthen Rael is marred by hostility and distrust, rather than aided by open cooperation.  

Luthen’s own interactions with other rebels do not fare any better. He meets the rebel Saw Gerrara for a small cameo late in the series and suggests broad-scale cooperation between different rebel factions. But Gerrera has nothing but scorn for his fellow rebels, and derides them as “Separatist[s] […] neo-Republican[s] […] sectorists, Human cultists [and] galaxy partitionists”. Even among rebels, there is little solidarity to be found.  

The final act of popular uprising against the Empire is thus set on the deliberately industrial working-class planet Ferrix. Crucially, this is an uprising which comes about without the intervention of Mothma, Saw Gerrera, or even Andor himself. Even Luthen seems surprised and rattled at the development, despite his confidence that this would be the goal of his plans. “Oppression breeds rebellion” as he notes. In a striking monologue near the end of the series, Luthen admits to a co-conspirator (and perhaps to himself) that his shadow workings have forced him to give up all hints of “kindness, kinship [and] love.” A similar sentiment is echoed by co-rebel Cinta in her rejection of her lover Vel. The cause, she says, comes first and as a couple they must settle for whatever is left.

Perhaps this is why Luthen (and by extension Cinta) are unable to figure out the role community and kinship play in making the rebellion happen. As The Last Jedi, another Star Wars entry, reassures us: Victory is achieved by saving what one loves, not by destroying what one hates. 

This is also what makes Cassian’s fate at the end of the season at best bittersweet. After having saved Bix, and spirited his remaining found family off to parts unknown, he turns himself in to Luthen, and offers him a simple choice: “Kill me, or take me in.” The triumphant read of it is that his journey of radicalization has been completed. The more tragic read is that Andor has now also sacrificed (or scuttled) all hints of kindness, kinship and love. Only by considering himself as “already dead” (like Kino Loy before him), or at least dead to the people he loves, can he fully commit to the rebellion.

Cheaper than Droids and Easier to Replace? The War of the Stars on Earth

In the galaxy far far away, human labour – at least enslaved human labour - is still a vital component of making the technological power of the Empire material. In the galaxy of the viewer at the time of Andor’s release, there is plenty of discussion about the increasing irrelevance of human labour as automation and artificial intelligence increases. However, as scholars have repeatedly pointed out, myths of automation are often overblown, although the effects are often deeply felt.28

The purported effects of automation are not just felt in the world of manual labor. Automation through digital technologies has also proven to be a deciding factor in the creative industries in recent years, with the last couple of years especially seeing an increase in worries about generative technologies. At present, the worry for writers is not so much that they will be replaced or automated away, but that generative technologies will be used to worsen their conditions. As Adam Conover, one member of the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) has been quoted as saying, the fear is that studios are going to use a writer’s labour to augment generated materials, and “not going to pay you as a writer because you didn’t write it — ChatGPT wrote it.”29

For actors and other on-screen professionals, the fear of replacement might be present as well. As much as Andor lends itself handily to Marxist (or other subversive) readings, the fact remains that it is a product owned by the Walt Disney Corporation. This is not just to trivially point out that it is the product of a capitalist economy. The more interesting fact is that Andor (and Star Wars as such) sits in a portfolio of franchises, which are ultimately built upon creating characters and universes which can be boundless pools of stories.

In recent years, the company’s acquisition-heavy strategy under CEO Bob Iger has led it to be the custodian of several mainly live-action franchises such as Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. According to Iger himself, these were acquired as a “a trove of compelling characters and stories that would plug easily into our movie, television, theme-park, and consumer-products businesses.”30 What Iger here confirms is the strategy that individual film and television products can be the used to display “character assets,”31 and that the point then becomes using such characters continually in novel narrative constellations.32

The trouble then with such assets is that the characters portraying them may age, die, or demand better contracts, a problem which did not trouble Disney’s most well-known animated or illustrated characters.33

The Star Wars franchise itself is certainly no stranger to trying to reconfigure or displace human labor with new technologies. This even extends to the labor of actors, whom one might be forgiven for thinking were exempt from such automation. The massive production powers surrounding Lucasfilm and Disney have made the films and television series set in the galaxy far, far away ground zero for ground-breaking digital technologies. Famously, this includes the posthumous usage of actor Peter Cushing’s likeness to revive the character of Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the film to which Andor is a direct prequel.34 Not even living actors have been spared digital replacement, as the voices and likenesses for Star Wars alumni such as Mark Hamill and James Earl Jones had been digitally recreated in recent Star Wars television appearances.35 36 “More machine now than man,” as Obi-Wan Kenobi might have put it.

There perhaps is an unintentional layer of irony in the shop-steward-turned-riot-leader Kino Loy being played by Andy Serkis, who is famed for his performance capture roles, where the physical body of the actor is mixed or overlaid with a digital double, in such films as King Kong (2005), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and even as Supreme Leader Snoke within Star Wars itself. Controversially, Serkis was once disqualified for an Academy Award nod for his star-making role as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy due to that performance being not produced via motion-captured performance, but also tweaked by digital artists. It was this latter point which disqualified him in the eyes of the Motion Picture Association.37 The groundwork is certainly laid to discredit the work of digitally augmented (or replaced) actors in the future. 

On Earth, at time of writing, one of the largest industrial disputes in entertainment history seems to have reached a point of agreement. As many outside observers are often surprised to learn, Hollywood remains quite the union town. These unions were born out of conflict in the 1930s Depression and have seen many disputes such as the Blacklisting and Red Scare of the 1950s and the burgeoning of streaming, digital and new media in the 2010s.38

The most recent dispute was between the WGA and SAG-AFTRA unions on the one side, and entertainment studios and streamers (often arms of large technology corporations) on the other. One of the largest bones of contention in the strike was the “high-tech exploitation” done using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital tools to replace the work of writers, actors, and other creative professionals. For actors, this might take the form of studios trying to own their likeness “in perpetuity.”39 If such efforts were successful, then droids might become very cheap indeed.    

The long-term impact of this industrial action is too soon to tell at time of writing. However, the visual and narrative identity of the strike at the time has certainly been one of famous actors joining picket lines and writers speaking about a “culture of solidarity” in Hollywood.40 While this is far from the revolutionary actions undertaken by the nascent rebellion in Andor, it is a reminder that the themes discussed in that series certainly have real-life resonances.

Andor itself was one of the series which halted production during the strike, although the second and final season is now ostensibly underway. The cast list of Andor certainly boasts some members who have been vocal about the political economy of cinema, and about the strike in particular. This goes back to at least Stellan Skarsgård’s nearly viral response about the role of franchises and monopolisation in the market development of cinema at the 2020 Gothenburg film festival: “The problem is that we have for decades believed that the market should rule everything, that the rich should get richer [and] that is the root of it all.”41  Diego Luna himself, who serves as executive producer as well as lead actor of the series, has also spoken explicitly about how the themes of Andor resonated with the strike: “[The series is] about regular people doing extraordinary things when they understand that it’s about working together [...] yes, of course it’s pertinent.”42 Only time will tell whether such themes will become more pertinent in the coming episodes of the series.  

In A New Hope, Darth Vader cautions his fellow imperials against being too proud of the (prison-produced) “technological terror” of the Death Star. It is nothing compared to the power of the Force, as Vader would have it. What Andor makes clear is that this technological terror of the Death Star is not just a tool for the subjugation of the galaxy by force, it is itself the result of the subjugation of another force: The labour Force.

17. Brian Hiatt. “How ‘Andor’ Drew from... Joseph Stalin?”, Rolling Stone, 2022: rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/andor-explained-season-1-finale-season-2-preview-1234626573.
18. See, for example Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).
19. Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt, Prison Media: Incarceration and the Infrastructures of Work and Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023).
20. It should be noted that while many critical authors stress the racialized nature of carceral systems all over the world, the imprisoned population of Narkina Five is decidedly racially diverse, although seemingly all-male.
21. Peter Fleming and André Spicer, “Power in management and organization science”, Academy of Management Annals, 8.1 (2014), p. 237-298.
22. Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2023.
23. Brady Langmann, “Kyle Soller Really Is *That* Guy,” Esquire, 2022: esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a42038544/kyle-soller-andor-star-wars.
24. Elizabeth Anderson, Private government: How employers rule our lives (and why we don't talk about it) (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017).
25. Andres Alvarez, “Imperial Insights: Dedra Meero and White Feminism,” Cinelinx, 2023: cinelinx.com/movie-news/movie-stuff/imperial-insights-dedra-meero-and-white-feminism .
26. Koa Beck, White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind (Miami: Atria Books, 2021), p. xviii.
27. Arlie Hochschild, “The role of the ambassador's wife: An exploratory study”, Journal of Marriage and the Family (1969), p. 73-87.
28. Luke Munn, Automation is a Myth (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2022).
29. Michael Cavna and Samantha Chery, “Could AI Help Script a Sitcom? Some Striking Writers Fear So”, The Washington Post, 2023: washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/05/06/ai-writers-strike.
30. Robert Iger, The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons in Creative Leadership from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company (London: Random House, 2019), p. 151, emphasis added.
31. Matthias Stork, “Assembling the avengers: Reframing the superhero movie through Marvel’s cinematic universe”, in James N. Gilmore and Matthias Stork, Superhero synergies: Comic book characters go digital (Washington DC: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 78. Emphasis in original.
32. Christoffer Bagger, “Superheroes or Group of Heroes?: The Avengers as Multiple Protagonist Superhero Cinema”, Academic Quarter | Akademisk kvarter (2020), p. 37-60.
33. For the perhaps most well-known Marxist reading of this, see Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck (New York: International General, 1975).
34. Matt Goldberg, “Rogue One: The Problem with That CGI Character”, Collider, 2016: collider.com/rogue-one-cgi-grand-moff-tarkin.
35. Jazz Tangcay, “How Ukrainian Company Respeecher De-Aged Mark Hamill’s Voice for ‘Boba Fett’ and ‘The Mandalorian’”, Variety, 2022: variety.com/2022/artisans/news/respeecher-deaged-mark-hamills-voice-for-boba-fett-and-the-mandalorian-1235211405.
36. Anthony Breznican, “Darth Vader’s Voice Emanated From War-Torn Ukraine”, Vanity Fair, 2022: vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/09/darth-vaders-voice-emanated-from-war-torn-ukraine.
37. Matt Delbridge, “Why Motion Capture Performance Deserves an Oscar”, The Independent, 2016: independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/motion-capture-performances-andy-serkis-oscars-animated-films-a7370331.html.
38. Jonathan Handel, Hollywood on strike!: An industry at war in the Internet age. (Jonathan Handel, 2011).
39. Charles Pulliam-Moore, “SAG-AFTRA Won’t Budge as Studios Push to Own Actors’ Likenesses in Perpetuity”, The Verge, 2023,theverge.com/2023/11/7/23950491/sag-aftra-amptp-ai-negotiations-strike-actor-likeness.
40. Alex O’Keefe, et al. “Striking Writer Alex O’Keefe: ‘A Culture of Solidarity Has Swept Hollywood’”, Jacobin, 2023: jacobin.com/2023/09/alex-okeefe-the-bear-wga-strike-solidarity-union-movement-building-hollywood.
41. Göteborg Film Festival, “Actors Talk: Stellan Skarsgård - Göteborg Film Festival 2020”, YouTube, 2020: youtu.be/fEuZQ0OZVHA.
42. Ben Wasserman, “Diego Luna Compares Andor’s Themes to SAG-AFTRA Strike’s Goals”, CBR, 2023: cbr.com/diego-luna-compares-andors-themes-to-sag-aftra-strikes-goals.