Message from "Andor" to socialists: We're the galaxy. Let's start disgusting people!

The "Star Wars" character played by Stellan Skarsgård speaks to the anticapitalist in all of us

Stellan Skarsgård won a prestigious Peabody Award in 2023 for his performance as Luthen Rael in the first season of “Andor.” If there is any justice in the world, Skarsgård will pick up even more awards for his masterclass acting in the second season.

Luthen is more than the three-dimensional hero the “Star Wars” universe needs. He is also the strongest analogue to real-life three-dimensional hero Vladimir Lenin found in contemporary American pop culture.

Warning: Spoilers — and socialism — follows.

This is not to say the Luthen-Lenin parallel works precisely. While Luthen spends most of “Andor” secretly working against Emperor Palpatine’s regime, Lenin was quite bold and open when opposing the Russian Tsars. More tragically for Luthen, the aesthetically-inclined businessman never rose to power in the galaxy he sought to liberate. Lenin, though just as intellectual as Luthen (the man’s prolific and sharp writing holds up well more than a century after his death), achieved that rarest of fates for cerebral men; he actually rose to ultimate power, in his case by leading the Soviet Union from the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917 until his incapacitation by a series of strokes in 1922.

Philosophically, however, Luthen and Lenin are so similar, it is shocking Disney allowed this coded Marxist to appear in one of their mainstream works. Like Lenin, Luthen deplores the greed and abuses of power seen everywhere in the Empire. He also astutely draws a direct link between the Empire’s moral corruption, seen everywhere on an individual level, and its imperial activities.

Take Luthen’s memorable final words, uttered shortly before he attempts suicide to protect his rebellion’s most precious secrets.

"You're too late,” Luthen says. “The rebellion isn't here anymore. It's flown away. It's everywhere now. There's a whole galaxy out there waiting to disgust you."

Now compare this to Lenin’s famous condemnation of both capitalism and imperialism in his book “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” published one year before the Russian Revolution.

"Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries,” Lenin wrote.

One does not have to scratch beneath the surface very hard to find proof of the “disgust” that capitalism and imperialism cause in their beneficiaries toward their victims. Just listen to capitalists talk about how they are wealthy because they’re the best and brightest, while those who are poor deserve their fate. Pay attention to how President Donald Trump denigrates Canada, Denmark and Panama as he talks about taking some or all of their land from them; one could be forgiven for mistaking him for 19th century American imperialists talking about “manifest destiny” or “the white man’s burden.”

Three years earlier, in an essay called “Critical Remarks on the National Question,” Lenin applied this same logic to deconstructing racism. Just as the capitalist leaders of nations cultivate “disgust” toward foreigners in order to justify wars, so too Lenin noted did white supremacists in the Jim Crow South instigate “disgust” toward non-whites.

“In the United States of America the division of the States into the Northern and Southern holds to this day in all departments of life; the former possess the greatest traditions of freedom and of struggle against the slave-owners; the latter possess the greatest traditions of slave-ownership, survivals of persecution of the Negroes, who are economically oppressed and culturally backward (44 percent of Negroes are illiterate, and 6 percent of whites), and so forth. In the Northern States Negro children attend the same schools as white children do,” Lenin wrote. “In the South there are separate ‘national,’ or racial, whichever you please, schools for Negro children. I think this is the sole instance of actual ‘nationalization’ of schools.”

Perhaps most poignantly, Luthen and Lenin made great personal sacrifices to further their causes. Unlike his sadistic successor Joseph Stalin, Lenin never took any joy in ordering killing to advance the Soviet cause. Quite to the contrary, he was often wracked with doubt about the morally correct way to handle the myriad problems he faced through his career, first as a revolutionary and then as a world leader. (To learn more about this, I highly recommend journalist Victor Sebestyen’s 2017 biography “Lenin: The Man, the Dictator and the Master of Terror.”)

Compare this, now, to Luthen’s famous monologue in Season One, a soliloquy no doubt responsible at least in part for his Peabody win.

"I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them,” Luthen snaps at an obtuse comrade. “I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything!"

Why does Luthen make these sacrifices? Perhaps because he is painfully aware of the alternative; living in a world where everyone’s future is shaped by the disgust that the powerful teach themselves to feel for the powerless, to justify their depravities.

To close with a fitting Lenin quote:

"The development of capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still “reigns” and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation.”

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Back Seat Socialism

Column by Matthew Rozsa who is a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently he is writing a book for Beacon Press, "Neurosocialism," which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.

Twitter (X) @MatthewWRozsa