Andor is a masterpiece of anti-fascist media, but hear me out:
It pulls its punches in being explicitly anti-capitalist in a way that the old EU absolutely did not shy away from.
And this isn't to glaze the old EU - it was weird, none of the authors talked to each other to hash out continuity, and I'm not sure if any of the books would have passed the Bechtel Test.
But if I told you that Darth Plagueis had a secret private moon called Sojourn onto which he invited influential senators and planetary leaders to, where they could indulge in any vice, and he'd use that for blackmail later, you'd say ...
... that's just Epstein Island with the serial numbers filed off.
And then I'd say, not only that but Sojourn was where he indulged in his private hobbies of genetic manipulation and Sith alchemy, you'd say ...
... lol sounds like a cross between Jurassic Park and Bezos' vanity dick rocket
And then I'd say, and a big part of the plot was that the Sith were pulling the strings such that mega corporations like Trade Federation, the InterGalactic Banking Clan, the Corporate Alliance, and the Techno Union were granted official seats and voting privileges in the Galactic Senate, you'd say ...
... oh come on that's a little on the nose, Citizens United wasn't QUITE that bad
(It's not, but it's probably also a lot worse than you think it is unless you work in politics.)
This was written IN 2012 by the way before either Jeffrey Epstein or billionaire vanity projects had really entered the mainstream discourse. But Luceno asked himself: what does it look like when a billionaire has no moral guardrails, and his answer looks a whole lot like Epstein, Musk, and Bezos in a trenchcoat plus Bryan Johnson's obsession with immortality.
And that's not to say that Andor is pro-capitalism, but it clearly doesn't think it's as much of a threat as fascism or imperialism.
Look at how it handles the corporate cops (Pre-Mor) in the first arc. They are bumbling, incompetent mall cops. The Empire immediately sweeps in, nationalizes their sector, and replaces their corporate incompetence with state-sponsored fascist efficiency.
The transition is from corporate security theater to fascist state capacity.
And it works for the story Andor is telling.
But Andor treats the corporation as a stepping stone for the state. The EU understood that the state and the corporation were the exact same monster.
And the best example here isn't even Luceno but a Bantam Era deepcut: Stackpole's Bacta War in the X-Wing novels.
(Bacta of course is the healing stuff that Luke swims in ESB post-wampa attack.)
(The concept of the Bacta Cartel is basically an evil GFFA Monsanto, playing on extremely 90s fears about the terminator seed concept and biopiracy. It's hard to explain the mindset if you didn't live through it, but it's also relevant currently as a story about gatekeeping and weaponizing necessary medication and healthcare in the age of Big Pharm.)
But check out this terrifyingly brilliant piece of fascist economic world building:
The Scapegoat Shield (Plausible Deniability)
Palpatine understood that if the Empire outright owned the bacta supply, the Empire would be directly responsible for every shortage, price hike, and rationing crisis.
When parents can't get medicine for their dying kid, they start rebellions.
By keeping Zaltin and Xucphra technically independent, Palpatine created a permanent corporate meat-shield. If bacta prices skyrocketed 400% on the civilian market to subsidize the Imperial military, the public didn't blame the Emperorāthey blamed greedy pharmaceutical executives. The Empire got all the military benefits of a monopoly while outsourcing 100% of the public relations blowback.
Outsourcing the Atrocities
The Empire is built for conventional warfare, not agricultural labor management.
If Palpatine nationalizes Thyferra, he has to deploy legions of Stormtroopers to force billions of giant insectoids to harvest plants in a jungle. It would be a messy, expensive, unending guerrilla war.
By empowering the Cartel, Palpatine outsourced the human rights violations to private security. The corporations handled the dirty work of violently suppressing the Vratix strikes, and the Empire just signed the purchase orders.
Palpatine never allowed a *true* single monopoly. The Bacta Cartel was specifically structured as a duopoly between two bitter corporate rivals (Zaltin and Xucphra).
Because the Empire was their only real protection from anti-trust laws and native uprisings, the two corporations were forced to constantly compete for the Emperor's favor. They undercut each other to give the Imperial military the cheapest possible prices, while simultaneously gouging the civilian sector to make up the profit margins.
The point is: the Bacta Cartel isn't a victim of Palpatine.
Manipulated participants, certainly. Palpatine manipulates everyone. But they're still active collaborators pursuing their own interests.
"Corporation bad, Empire worse."
"Corporation and Empire have exactly the same interests, and that isn't you."
And that's a very different political argument.
The entire point is that capitalism, imperialism, and fascism aren't just on equal footing but are inexorably linked and braided together. They're different facets of the same thing.
Andor just doesn't make that argument.
(And I'm going to note without asserting anything in particular that Disney as a company is deeply invested in maintaining the image of good corporatism.)
Andor is willing to show corporate abuse. Pre-Mor is exploitative, negligent, and violent. But the narrative structure still places corporate power and Imperial power in sequence.
By stripping the actual economic machinery out of the lore, modern Star Wars has essentially reframed the Galactic Civil War as a pure, mystical Good vs. Evil fight.
But it completely hollows out the original warning: that fascism usually shows up wearing a nice suit, offering to fix your supply chain issues.
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