A Tale of Miners and Prisoners: Class Composition and the Roots of Rebellion in Andor
RK Upadhya
What drives people to rebel? And what can revolutionaries do to facilitate this process? These are key questions that all would-be revolutionaries must ask themselves. And surprisingly, these questions are also at the center of Andor, helping make it one of the most interesting and politically-charged pieces of Star Wars media since George Lucas’s prequel trilogy, and their clumsy-but-creative critiques of the Bush administration and the War on Terror. Throughout the show, characters navigate individuals, factions, and communities whose loyalties and motivations are uncertain – but which must be won. The locations have a materiality to them which influences and shapes the politics of their residents; the main planet, Ferrix, is not defined by an arbitrary geographic feature (“snowy planet”, “salty planet”...), but rather by its position in the Empire’s productive and logistical apparatus as a major industrial salvage zone (see Dooley’s essay). In other words, Andor is a story that feels tailor-made for a Marxist analysis of production, labor, and class, and the changes that have taken place over the 20th and 21st centuries in the dynamics of capitalist exploitation, imperial violence, working-class struggle, and revolutionary strategy.
In the classical Marxist formulation, capitalism is a system that has unique feedback loops that enables it to develop industrial capacity with unprecedented scope and speed. This development relies on the ever-growing expansion of resource extraction, a labor force to carry out the work of mass production, and markets that can distribute produced commodities to a growing population of consumers. But in turn, the expansion – and disciplining – of industrial labor also creates the social force that can overcome capitalism and harness its productive capacities for actual human flourishing, rather than growth for growth’s sake.
Marx and Engels saw revolution right around the corner – a reasonable hope, given the massive upheavals that engulfed Europe and the US in the mid-19th century. But in fact, socialist revolution did not emerge within capitalism’s heartlands. Instead, the first successful working-class anti-capitalist revolution took place in 1917, in the Russian Empire and its underdeveloped and largely agrarian economy, where the predicted agent of revolutionary change – the industrial worker – was a small minority. Nonetheless, revolutionaries worldwide expected (and in the case of the Russians, desperately hoped) that this would be followed immediately by a revolution in Germany, a highly developed capitalist society. But several attempted uprisings ended in tragic and bloody failure, and Germany instead saw the rise of the most brutal regime in human history. The next significant anti-capitalist revolution took place in 1949 in China – and here too, the industrial proletariat took a backseat to peasants and other exploited classes, whom Mao Zedong identified as crucial social forces for revolutionary struggle in his classic 1926 analysis.150 Henceforth, a key project of the most dynamic currents of Marxism was to rethink class and revolutionary strategy. They moved away from the expectation that a particular kind of industrial worker would inherently lead socialist struggle, and instead re-examined and unveiled the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of capital and class, and searched for revolutionary subjectivity across the whole of society, in all its nooks and crannies.
This heterogeneity of class and radicalism is clearly visible in Andor. Broadly speaking, nearly all of the characters are ordinary, working-class people. But they occupy different positions with respect to the productive, logistical, and repressive apparatuses of the Empire, which in turn influences their political orientation and their capacity for different forms of resistance. There are what can be cast as prototypical industrial workers, but also indigenous communities, informal laborers, criminals, slaves, merchants, and bureaucrats – all of whom occupy different positions of importance in different schools of Marxist theory and practice.
Alquati on Ferrix…
In the West, some of the most dynamic efforts to reinvigorate Marxism were made under the umbrella of what is generally called Autonomism, which consisted of various currents that broke from official Communist Party orthodoxies in the decades that followed World War II. Of these, operaismo – Italian “workerism” – is of special interest.
The militants of Italian workerism, such as Mario Tronti and Romano Alquati, developed their praxis around “workers’ inquiry,” a framework and method for investigating the actual lived experiences of the working class, and for analyzing how these experiences differed across various sectors and changed in step with the massive structural transformations of postwar capitalism.151 This foundation on inquiry was based on an understanding that resistance and rebelliousness by workers would itself precipitate changes in the structure of capitalism, which in turn would lead to a reorganization of the working class, and new terrains for organizing resistance. Capitalism, in other words, was a fundamentally dynamic system that was dialectically locked with class struggle itself.
The goal of workers’ inquiry was to understand class composition – the ways in which the working class was divided, organized, and socialized at a given point in history. Operaists divided this into two aspects: technical composition and political composition. Technical composition was the manner in which capital organized and managed workers, by means of the labor process, the technologies used, the types of skills required, and disciplinary techniques. Political composition was how workers struggled against capital and developed forms of self-organization on the shop floor – in other words, the methods of overt class struggle. Technical composition tends to inform political composition, but in a manner influenced by wider factors of culture and society outside of work.
This simple but effective framework re-established Marxism onto a firm material and empirical foundation, allowing for deeper analysis of various workplaces and labor forces – and most importantly their resistance to capital. Workers’ inquiry and class composition analysis has outlasted its founding movement; even today, Marxists continue to use its simple but effective tools to understand different job sites and class fractions, from tech workers to call center operators to gig workers.152 In Andor, both the industrial salvage yards of Ferrix and the totalitarian prison factory of Narkina 5 are readily analyzed via the workerist framework. Both of these settings are sites of rebellion that are internal to the Empire; that is, the rebels were subjects of the Empire and part of its productive apparatus. They were organized by the Empire for its own ends – but these same processes facilitated the workers’ autonomy and the means of their rebellion.
Ferrix, in particular, lends itself to an operaist interpretation. The salvage workers of Ferrix are cast as prototypical industrial workers, albeit ones who are not producing new commodities, but salvaging old ones. Their daily routine is one of dismantling various industrial systems in order to unearth the value still within – a regimen most akin to mining. Indeed, the images of them clocking in and out together, lugging along their hammers and hardhats, is evocative of miners in the coal fields of Appalachia, South Wales, or Shanxi. This specificity is important, because the nuances of the labor process illustrate how resistance fomented among their ranks and made particular tactics possible – aka, how the technical composition of the Ferrix workers influenced their emergent political composition. Even prior to overt rebellion, Ferrix appears to have a thriving black market, made possible by the large amount of industrial systems passing through the area and the high level of technical knowledge of its workers, who can recognize valuable systems, repair and restore devices, and smuggle illegal commodities. The title character himself, Cassian Andor, is not a formal worker but a bandit and a smuggler, whose livelihood depends on this black market and his various contacts and accomplices among the skilled salvage workers.
The specifics of skills and tools also plays a role when resistance heats up. When a corporate security team enters the town in their hunt for Cassian in Episode 3, they are met with immediate hostility that veers into a form of guerrilla violence. An existing decentralized alarm system is used to alert the town, sending everybody out of the streets and into their homes. There are no street signs, confounding the security team and undermining whatever tactical manoeuvers they had planned. A handful of workers use the close proximity of the security team’s landing ship to their industrial equipment to sabotage the vessel, tying it down to a piece of salvage and causing it to crash. Similarly, when tensions boil over in the season finale into a full-scale riot, the pivotal escalation occurs when a powerful bomb is thrown into the ranks of the security forces – an attack made possible by the workers’ access to, and knowledge of, explosive materials.
All of this underscores the similarity between the Ferrix salvage workers and real-world miners: the labor unrest that rocked mining colonies across the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, saw extensive use of mining tools being used against police, corporate security, and even the military.153 Dynamite in particular played a key role; normally used for brute-force excavation, American workers readily repurposed their stocks to blow up bridges, trains, police stations, warehouses, and even their own mining sites. These dynamics, whether in the salvage yards of Ferrix or the mining colonies of Colorado, are relatively simple – but are nonetheless representative of how the technical composition of a labor force can give them unique advantages and knowledge during confrontations with the forces of state and capital.
Equally important to technical composition, however, is social composition: the way in which culture and social ties form the basis to organize resistance.154 Ferrix’s society does not solely consist of workers, and the workers themselves are not only workers, but friends, family, and lovers, who have a life outside of their job, which reinforces feelings of trust, kinship, and camaraderie between the population – and a feeling of unity against meddlesome outsiders.
Throughout the show, there is continual representation of strong local traditions; in the last arc, a key plot element is the practice of cremating the dead into bricks that are used for the town’s buildings, as well as the traditional funeral march with a full orchestral routine. The funeral ends up being used not only to honor a recently deceased elder, but to also engage in an act of protest, which quickly explodes into an insurrection. In the real world, this is evocative of how funerals can become politically charged, particularly in the Middle East, which has seen repeated cases of escalating protests, deaths, and funeral marches that turn into even larger protests – a powerful means of synthesizing the deeply emotional and spiritual dimensions of death and mourning, with political resistance.
The origins of the salvage yards of Ferrix and its culture are unclear – was there a pre-existing society that was then subsumed into the salvage industry, or were the workers brought in from other planets and cultures, and eventually formed their own tight-knit culture with their own traditions? Either way, this culture proves to be a crucial ingredient in facilitating the rebelliousness of the town – but importantly, is also mostly external to the productive process itself, and something that capital tends to seek to disrupt. Looking again to a real-life analogue, the mining towns of Appalachia had a similar close-knit and relatively egalitarian social structure, typically descending from the self-reliant mountain cultures of Scots-Irish settlers – and who, during the Civil War, tended to side with the anti-slavery Union against the lowland planter-slaver class and their rigid hierarchical society.
….and Newton, Too
Italian workerists, like other heterodox Marxists in Europe in the ‘60s and ‘70s, were largely concerned with analyzing the class composition of highly industrialized societies. But of course, capitalism does not only consist of high-tech industry, but encompasses all aspects and all levels of technology, development, and exploitation. Capitalism has also always been a global system, with divisions and hierarchies across regions and nations. Thus, concurrent to the workerism were other intellectual currents that dealt with the nature of imperialism, class, and politics at the periphery of capital accumulation. The insights of these frameworks, largely rooted in the Marxisms of the Third World and the Global South, can be synthesized with that of more core-focused Marxism, and develop an even more rigorous and complete analysis of Andor.
One important task is to nuance the analysis of class composition in Andor, and to properly situate the labor forces and worksites that are shown. Despite the overtly industrial character of Ferrix and Narkina 5, those sites and other terrains of struggle in fact take place at the margins of the Empire and its productive, logistical, and repressive apparatuses – with the notable exception of the storyline taking place on Coruscant, which centered the aristocratic classes. The salvage yards of Ferrix are not tightly controlled factories, but part of a “Free Trade Zone” where the workers appear to have a high amount of autonomy. The forced labor camps of Narkina 5 are on the other end of the spectrum, where workers have no autonomy whatsoever, and are squeezed for every drop of productivity they have, until death. Aldhani, a logistics hub and distribution center, is still in the middle of a colonization process, where the local indigenous population is undergoing dispossession and displacement into industrial work (see Bala’s essay in this issue). But throughout these spaces, one class fraction in particular is consistently prominent: the lumpenproletariat.
In Marx’s time, the lumpenproletariat – the underclass, the most marginalized and oppressed, who subsisted outside of wage-labor and industrial production – were considered unstable, anti-social, dangerously amenable to reactionary ideologies, and unable to develop the consciousness and discipline necessary to fight for a socialist revolution. But Third World Marxists reconsidered this. The potential, and even the importance, of the lumpen to revolutionary struggle was first seriously articulated by the psychologist and anti-imperialist revolutionary Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, where he observed that the lumpen population was completely independent from the colonial system, consistently antagonistic with it (unlike intellectuals and even industrial workers), and thus willing to commit to the uncompromising and violent struggle needed for anti-colonial revolution.155
Fanon’s ideas were enthusiastically taken up and expanded upon in the US by the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. Similar to the work of the Italian operaists, this was based not on abstract theorization, but on careful observations of events, and through organic connections to the experiences and politics of working-class communities. Both the Party’s founders, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, had migrated to California in their childhoods as part of a massive wave of Black migration from the agricultural South to the industrial centers of the North and West. But by the ‘60s, Black communities found themselves warehoused in ghettos, with large swathes of the population excluded from industrial jobs and pushed to the periphery of the productive circuits of capital. Thus, Black youth formed an increasingly sizable and restive population of lumpenproletariat, subsisting off of black market economies and developing intense antagonism with police forces and capital and empire writ large. It was this population that the Black Panther Party based itself in.156
The title character of Andor is himself clearly part of a lumpen underclass. His homeworld, Kenari, appears to be almost entirely uninhabited; the planet was used for Imperial mining operations until a major industrial accident killed a large number of workers and critically undermined operations, leading to its permanent abandonment. Cassian was part of a community of adolescents and children whose parents were presumably workers killed in the accident, and who were then forced into a kind of lumpen-indigenous existence, subsisting through foraging and piracy. Later on, despite his adoption by Clem and Maarva, two salvage workers from Ferrix, Cassian remains embedded in a lumpen existence. Rather than enter into relatively stable employment on Ferrix, he continues a peripheral existence as a bandit and smuggler, travelling the frontier, pilfering valuable equipment from Imperial ships and bases, and doing the occasional stint in an Imperial prison. Notably, however, the skills required for this illicit economy are still tied up with licit labor; Cassian learned the skills required for illegal salvage and sales from his adoptive parents and other Ferrix proletariats, all of whom dabble to some degree in the black market. Andor’s extensive contacts among the Ferrix workforce, and their stalwart defense of him against security forces, highlight the blurred lines between legal and illegal, formal and informal, proletarian and lumpen.
The class composition of Ferrix reflects the experience of Black workers in the American North and West in the post-WW2 period, but also extends to the modern phenomena of slums and slum economies across the Global South, where globalization has proceeded lock-step with a general collapse of clear distinctions between formal and informal labor. In the mega-slums of Caracas, Delhi, and Lagos, workers – most of whom were displaced from the agrarian countryside, similar to Andor’s Aldhani – shift between different forms of worksites and juggle different jobs, sometimes simultaneously: from small workshops supplying parts to multinational auto companies, to platform work chauffeuring the middle class, to petty crime and drug trafficking. This form of stagnant and precarious labor has become so dominant across the world, that even non-Marxist journalists and academics are now considering the idea that global development efforts under capitalism have largely failed.157
Aside from Ferrix, the clearest examination of lumpenproletarian composition is on Narkina 5. As with Ferrix, class lines are blurred; the subjects are prisoners, many of whom were drawn from the galaxy’s underclass, but who are now violently disciplined into becoming forced industrial workers. The technical composition of the prison laborers of Narkina 5 is thus one of extreme discipline and rote, deskilled tasks. The Empire exercises near-total control, killing dissidents at whim, even while manipulating certain prisoners to be enforcers. Still, there are small gaps in the Empire’s system of repression, brought about by their own arrogance; as Cassian remarks to Kino in the sleeping quarters, in an effort to sow dissent: “Do you really think they care enough to listen?” Despite the brutal violence the Empire is willing to inflict on its prisoners, its ambivalence on the potential for more complicated schemes lets the germ of resistance and organization take root.
Nonetheless, unlike most other terrains of struggle, the technical composition of prison camps very nearly over-determines the political composition of prisoner resistance. Even though there is an opening for a small cell of rebels to form and spark a wider insurrection, ultimately the inability to communicate quickly and reliably between different floors, buildings, or even work groups in the same room, undermines any possibility of developing political and social structures like that of Ferrix. The only possible expression of politics can be a violent, localized, short-term rebellion.
Narkina 5 is thus representative of the most extreme forms of prison systems – while also reminding us that even under such harrowing conditions, resistance is never unviable. In the neoliberal era, prisons in the US emerged as a form of managing the crisis of deindustrialization and surplus population, helping warehouse the rebellious and racialized urban poor who had driven the social unrest of the ‘60s and ‘70s and filled the ranks of revolutionary organizations like the Black Panther Party.158 But this merely displaced the crisis; the era of mass incarceration saw repeated prison riots and the emergence of numerous prison gangs, some even with a semblance of the radical politics of the earlier era. An even more extreme case of prisons is the Nazi concentration camp system, which were crucial for the Nazi war effort, and whose system of violent totalitarianism was even more cruel and sadistic than Narkina 5. But even here, resistance was a permanent feature. Uprisings in concentration camps typically faced the same end as the Narkina 5 rebellion – a violent re-establishment of order, with the majority of rebels re-captured and likely executed – but they nonetheless broke out over and over again.159
From Resistance to Revolution
The Narkina 5 rebellion highlights a key aspect of revolutionary Marxism: that regardless of how complete and total the domination of capital seems, there is always some form of resistance taking place. The workerist intellectual Romano Alquati called this the “invisible organization” that spontaneously emerges during the course of day-to-day resistance against the ever-changing structures of exploitation and repression.160 Such resistance is typically non-ideological, and mostly concerned with short-term and local concerns. At the microscopic level, it may seem trivial: a spontaneous slow-down of an assembly line in response to an overbearing foreman, calling in sick to sabotage an unpleasant food franchise owner, vandalizing a police surveillance camera. But these actions, often individualized, are precisely the beginnings of what can become an “invisible organization” of resistance, and the basis of popular solidarity and militant practices – in other words, a political composition.
In Andor, the leading revolutionary figure at first appears to be Luthen, who serves as the insurrectionary (or perhaps rather, focoist) archetype, coordinating acts of sabotage, robbery, and violence against different points of the Empire, hoping to spark a wider conflagration. But by the season’s end, it is clear that it is not Luthen, but Nemik – a young, idealistic cadre, who perishes during the course of the Aldhani heist – who has the clearest sense of how to think about rebellion. His manifesto contains what is essentially a slogan of operaismo: acknowledging that “there will be times when the struggle seems impossible….alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy”, he goes on to emphasize the constant – if unseen – presence of struggle:
Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause…the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere.
It is not clear whether Luthen ever read Nemik’s manifesto, but one can imagine these words reverberating in his mind as he watched the people of Ferrix riot against Imperial stormtroopers – a possibility that never entered into his grand schemes. And indeed, neither did the Narkina 5 rebellion. This is not to say that Luthen is irrelevant; on the contrary, his machinations were consciously designed to provoke such events in the first place. Rather, this underscores the fact that even for those whose entire life is devoted to revolution, major moments of unrest – let alone day-to-day acts of resistance – can come as a surprise, if they are even noticed in the first place.
What, then, is the task of a revolutionary? Nemik’s vision is ultimately that widespread and spontaneous acts of rebellion will eventually “flood the banks of the Empire’s authority” and that finally, “one single thing will break the siege.” This is perhaps too idealistic and optimistic. The entire decade of the 2010s saw unprecedented levels of mass protests and civil unrest across the world, largely driven by spontaneous outbursts of unorganized urban masses; but the typical result was the retrenchment of local regimes and global empires, rather than their end.161 In Andor, the two major acts of rebellion are both met with brutal, overwhelming force and the short-term defeat of the insurgents.
But we also know that in the Star Wars universe itself, a formal revolutionary organization eventually coalesces: the Rebel Alliance. The next step, then – and what will presumably be the subject of the second season of Andor – will be the process of building this organization out of the raw materials of resistance, the disparate terrains of struggle, and the various class compositions that were portrayed in the first season. One powerful way to think about this is via the framework of “articulation,” a process by which revolutionaries help connect different compositions who are engaging in dissent, struggle, and rebellion, and thus broadening their horizons, sharing skills and knowledge, and coordinating their attacks. As theorized by Salar Mohandesi:
If composition refers to the way that individuals come together as social forces, articulation refers to the ways that social forces combine into forms of unity. And if composition is a daunting process, articulation poses an even greater challenge. Harmonizing a multitude of interests, experiences, backgrounds, and objectives over a sustained period, building unity while taking into account real differences is incredibly difficult work, which is why articulation of this kind is quite rare, and doesn’t often last for long. But when it happens, the articulated unity substantially increases its capacity to realize transformational change.162
A more empirical version of this framework, and one that draws back on the legacy of revolutionary anti-imperialism, can be found in the trajectory of the Black Panther Party and Huey Newton’s theory of “intercommunalism.” The Panthers originally started as a Black nationalist organization and sought to compose a movement rooted in the Black lumpenproletariat that would fight for national liberation. But very quickly, they realized that a Black nation alone could not face off against the American empire – only an international movement, one that articulated all the different compositions of anti-imperialist movements and nations into a single front, could defeat imperialism. This underpinned the Panthers’ efforts to not only forge connections with revolutionary movements across the world, but also with the organizations and networks of other oppressed communities within the US as well – a veritable Rebel Alliance of the 1970s.163
This is also the concluding point at the climax of Andor, made by Maarva in her posthumous speech at her funeral: that the insularity of the people of Ferrix, and the comfort they found in their traditions and with each other, meant that they had allowed the Empire to grow and swallow up other societies, until it finally came for them. As mentioned earlier, the social composition of Ferrix was a key determinant of their ability to resist – but to truly rebel, the next step must be to push beyond the limits of their own composition, and to articulate a wider movement along with other compositions of other societies, planets, and class fractions.
What is to be done, then, is for revolutionaries to facilitate a process of connecting different groupings of rebels and renegades, to help synthesize different class compositions, and enable them to form a powerful, coordinated whole that will be capable of fully overcoming capital and empire. By season’s end, Cassian Andor has developed the Star Wars version of class consciousness, buoyed by the courageous acts of defiance and rebellion of his friends, family, and comrades. Now, his mission shall be to connect the different outbursts of anti-Imperial rage, and articulate the Rebel Alliance. May the Force – and Marx, Alquati, and Newton – be with him.
150. Mao Zedong, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society”, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Marxists Internet Archive, 1926: marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_1.htm.
151. Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi, “Workers’ Inquiry: A Genealogy”, Viewpoint Magazine, 2013: viewpointmag.com/2013/09/27/workers-inquiry-a-genealogy.
152. Tech Workers Coalition, “Tech workers, platform workers, and workers’ inquiry”, Notes From Below, 2018; Jamie Woodcock, “Smile Down the Phone: An Attempt at Workers’ Inquiry in a Call Center”, Viewpoint Magazine, 2013; Callum Cant, “The warehouse without walls: A workers’ inquiry at Deliveroo”, ephemera journal, 20.4 (2020), pp 131-161.
153. Arvind Dilawar and Charles B. Keeney, “A Century Ago, West Virginia Miners Took Up Arms Against King Coal”, Jacobin Magazine, 2018: jacobin.com/2021/06/battle-of-blair-mountain-red-necks-labor-uprising-west-virginia-charles-b-keeney-interview.
154. Notes From Below, “The Workers’ Inquiry and Social Composition”, 2018: notesfrombelow.org/article/workers-inquiry-and-social-composition.
155. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 2001 [1961]).
156. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016).
157. David Oks and Henry Williams, “The Long, Slow Death of Global Development”, American Affairs, 6.4 (2022): americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/the-long-slow-death-of-global-development.
158. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).
159. Serafinski, Blessed is the Flame: An Introduction to Concentration Camp Resistance and Anarcho-Nihilism (Regina, SK: Little Black Cart, 2016).
160. Evan Calder Williams, “Invisible Organization: Reading Romano Alquati”, Viewpoint Magazine, 2013.
161. Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2023).
162. Salar Mohandesi, “Party As Articulator”, Viewpoint Magazine, 2020.
163. Delio Vasquez, “Intercommunalism: The Late Theorizations of Huey P. Newton, ‘Chief Theoretician’ of the Black Panther Party”, Viewpoint Magazine, 2018.