Star Wars is one of those things that is applicable in nearly every area of life. I mean it doesn’t have much useful relationship advice, I’m afraid, but apart from that it’s pretty solidly on point. Now, I post a lot about politics and I post a lot about popular culture, and it’s always interesting to me when I can bring the two together.
As it happens, Star Wars is very much about economics. I realize it doesn’t seem that way, crazy movies about magic warriors with swords made of lasers and super weapons with embarrassing fatal flaws, of bickering robots and annoying-ass frog aliens who ruin your enjoyment of the prequels. But Star Wars was one of the first entertainment properties in my life that proved stories could keep on giving, almost indefinitely, when they were built properly.
I’m not alone in that. My generation is almost defined by our love of Star Wars. If you don’t believe me, ask Disney’s bankers. Hell, Kevin Smith has basically made a career out of being a fan. Remember this scene from Clerks?
It’s funny, but it’s also bullshit. I mean, that’s okay, it can be bullshit, it’s Randal. Randal’s hardly a bastion of reason and sanity. And Kevin Smith was making a comedy. Still, I always feel the need to tell anyone who will listen that there’s no such thing as independent contractors in the First Galactic Empire. The reason is simple economics.
Don’t believe me? Let’s begin with the Original Trilogy and try to understand, from clues in the films, what kind of economic structure the empire has.
In the first film, retroactively titled “Episode IV: A New Hope,” there are many clues about the structure of the empire. Let’s start with life on the desert world of Tattooine. Luke Skywalker lives with his uncle, Owen Lars, and aunt, Beru Lars (nee Whitesun). They’re farmers, in the middle of the desert. The landscape is dotted with these odd antenna-like structures called vaporators. The vaporators pull moisture, either from deep in the ground, or from the air, and use it to feed the crops.
Given Owen’s talk about hiring more hands the following year, and being unwilling to let Luke leave for the Imperial Academy until next season, it seems the Lars farm is rather large, so they’re probably commercial farmers. Seems all very familiar to our own reality, right? Given that Luke’s landspeeder (Star Wars for “car,”) is battered, scorched, and missing an engine cover; and given also that Uncle Owen buys his droids on the black market from scavenging Jawas who sell whatever useful stuff they find to farmers and frontiersmen they come into contact with, we may deduce that the money is tight, and that this is a backwater star system, far removed from the usual business of the Empire.
Additionally, we never see how goods move offworld, or the market where goods are bought and sold. So we don’t know for sure if the Empire controls it, or not. It’s actually fairly unclear if Tattooine is part of the Empire, or is an independent system. It’s referred to as being along the Outer Rim, meaning it’s a fairly remote part of the galaxy, not one of the core systems, and as far as we can tell in the movie, the only imperial presence there follows Princess Leia’s corvette, the Tantive IV, into the system during the opening moments of the film. It doesn’t look like the Empire would have much interest in a sun-scorched ball of sand, particularly one containing nothing but farmers, nomads and scavengers. Indeed, when Obi-Wan is trying to recruit Luke to his cause, Luke says, “it’s not that I like the Empire, I hate it, but…that’s all so far away from here.” Likewise, Obi-Wan, as we come to learn, was trying to hide from the Empire so it makes sense he’d go where the Empire is not.
In fact Tattooine is run by the Hutts, who are notorious gangsters. But the thing about gangsters, they have legitimate front companies to hide their illegal activities behind. Jabba, the Hutt who seems to be the boss on Tattooine, is into smuggling. We know this because we learn that Han Solo, captain of the Corellian light freighter Millennium Falcon, was employed by Jabba when he was detained by an Imperial starship and ditched his illicit cargo in order to avoid getting in trouble.
The best way to think about Han in this context is that he’s actually a truck driver; in fact he is what is known as an independent operator. He has his own freighter and he hauls what he wants to haul, when he wants to haul it. This leads me to believe that Jabba is probably responsible for the movement of goods to and from Tattooine. In this way he can also buy and sell things under the table and use his operators to move contraband in secret, in exchange for some extra, unreported income.
Though it isn’t canon, as far as I know, it has been suggested in various peripheral materials that the shipment Han dumped was Spice. What “Spice” is, in Star Wars, is never explained, though it’s generally understood to be something like the Spice from Dune. However at the very beginning of the movie, as C-3PO and R2-D2 are dodging blaster fire during the arrival of the Imperial boarding party on the Tantive IV, Threepio muses that they’ll be “sent to the Spice mines of Kessel, smashed into who-knows-what!”
When Obi-Wan and Luke talk to Han and Chewie in the cantina on Tattooine, Han boasts that Millennium Falcon is “the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs.” As a parsec is a unit of distance and not time, this claim is nonsense, unless the ship folded space in some way, but what is clear from this is that Han probably has hauled spice. What is also clear, from Threepio’s remarks, is that the Empire actively mines spice, and uses labor camps as punishment for miscreants.
This would seem to point to the Empire controlling production of goods and services within its own borders, and probably explains why they detained Solo, as they would probably do routine stops of freighters along trade routes. We have scales for trucks; no doubt they have something analogous to “weighing stations” for starships, even if it’s only boarding and physically inspecting at a chosen port, like you’d do for a seagoing freighter.
Where we do see the Empire, we learn some very important things. First, we learn that Princess Leia is an Imperial Senator who is secretly a member of what the Empire calls the Rebel Alliance (they call themselves The Alliance to Restore the Republic). We also learn that the commander of the Death Star, Wilhuff Tarkin, is referred to alternately by his rank of Grand Moff, or the less formal title, “Governor.” We are also present in the briefing room as Tarkin sweeps in and announces “the Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us; I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved that council permanently. The last remnants of the old Republic have been swept away.”
When General Tagge presses the issue, asking how the Emperor will maintain control without the bureaucracy, Tarkin says something else very telling: “The regional governors will now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.”
It isn’t just that the Empire governs with an iron fist; it’s that Tarkin is a regional governor, as in the Roman Empire. He wears a uniform, he is a military officer, but he is also a regional governor who will rule over his section of the Empire and report only to Emperor Palpatine. In other words, what was probably sort of a communist oligarchy is now for certain a military dictatorship. The last pretense of democracy is gone.
You will also notice visual cues within the Empire. The interior of the Death Star, and the capital ships, are all grey and austere, bare metal, fluorescent lighting, exposed conduits and open maintenance pits. On the bridge of the destroyers, the officers stride around on catwalks while the crewmen at their consoles sit in pits below them, forced to look up as a slave to a master. TIE fighters are simple and geometric, no hyperdrive, no shields; they’re disposable, and so therefore must their pilots also be. Stormtroopers wear buckets that hide their entire face. Protection, to be sure, but also dehumanizing, faceless goons with numbers like TK-421 as their identifiers, rather than names. As we would learn in the prequel trilogy, these are clones, human beings grown for the express purpose of being used as cannon fodder. Serfs. Slaves. This is the way of the First Galactic Empire. Even the symbol of the Empire is a cog wheel. Think about that a minute.
Meanwhile the Alliance has rickety starfighters scorched with blaster marks, patched with mismatched sheet metal, paint jobs not maintained; but the ships have shields and hyperdrives. The pilots are few, they have names and faces, and their lives are precious.
The only new economic information we get in Empire comes when Han, Leia, Chewie, and Threepio, aboard a crippled Millennium Falcon, come limping into port at Lando Calrissian’s tibanna gas mining colony, Cloud City, hovering in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant called Bespin, in the Anoat system. Anoat, like Tattooine, is a backwater system and Calrissian’s mining colony is shiny and bright, a veneer of respectability across the place.
Han refers to Calrissian as his friend, but makes it clear to Leia and Chewie that he doesn’t trust Lando, “but he’s got no love for the Empire, I can tell you that.” Almost immediately upon arrival we learn that Millennium Falcon used to belong to Calrissian, apparently put up as collateral and lost, in a card game with Solo. This seems to still be a point of some contention for Lando, and the two have a tense reunion where all of the humor seems forced and neither man ever seems quite relaxed. This is at least partially due to something we learn later, which is that the Empire arrived before the Falcon did – after all, the Empire has functioning hyperdrive – and Lando wanted to warn Han off if he could. The escort shooting at the Falcon, and Lando’s line, “you know seeing you sure brings back a few things,” are subtle hints.
Still, the fact that Calrissian used to own the Falcon suggests that he was once a smuggler, too, and it begs the question, is he still? Solo pokes him a little, teasing him for being responsible. Calrissian shrugs it off, sort of noncommittal: “yeah, I’m responsible these days. It’s the price you pay for being successful.” Like much of what Lando says in these scenes, this could easily have a double-meaning, since he’s going to sell out his friend before he’ll destroy his business. But suppose Lando has become successful in another sense, too, having moved on from hauling contraband, to managing it?
Down in the bowels of Cloud City, there’s a facility called the carbon-freezing chamber. Here, the tibanna gas is frozen in carbonite slabs for easy transport aboard freighters. When Darth Vader and his minions arrive, having been summoned by bounty hunter Boba Fett who tracked Millennium Falcon to port, Vader begins making arrangements to lure Skywalker there as well, in order to freeze him in a carbonite slab and transport him, without fuss or muss, to the Emperor. Of course he plans to test the process on Solo, in case it doesn’t work he doesn’t want to kill Skywalker.
Well, if you can freeze people safely in carbonite, you can do it with damn near anything, and if one were a former smuggler, say, with underworld contacts and a lust for profit, one might see opportunity. After all, a lot of contraband could be easily frozen inside these slabs and moved across the galaxy with no one the wiser. When Lando sells out his friend Solo, he says he’s “just made a deal that will keep the Empire out of here forever.” But when that doesn’t work out for him, he makes a play to free Solo, and fails, then escapes offworld with Leia, Chewie, Luke, and the droids.
The implications are twofold. First, the Empire will take over Calrissian’s operation. It’s just what they do. If there’s usefuless in this mining colony, they want it to be their own. But, given Vader’s thought for using the carbonite to transport his prisoners, it’s just possible he suspected that Lando was up to no good, whether or not he actually was (of course he was, it’s Lando…). In either, or both, of these contexts, it makes sense that Lando would want to keep the Empire out, and would flee when he realized that he could not.
In Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, we revisit Tattooine, and this time get acquainted with Jabba. Depending on your preferred cut of the films, we either only know him by reputation, or have met him only briefly in Docking Bay 94 in the Mos Eisley Spaceport way back in Episode IV. In either case, here we see his palace, a kind of science-fiction harem with alien slave girls, cruel droids, and an assortment of thieves, thugs, bounty hunters, and smugglers as hangers-on as the band bangs out a few jazzy numbers and Jabba’s girls dance for his pleasure. Then there’s Jabba himself, a huge, corpulent slug of a thing, sucking on a hookah and swallowing frogs. He’s done quite well for himself, and all of this begs the question: what kind of an economy creates such an overwhelming market for smuggling? The answer is, “the kind that’s been over-regulated all to hell.”
The simplest lesson in economics is that he who controls the flow of money, has all the political power; and he who has all the political power, controls the flow of money. That’s why the free market is a good thing, because the ability of the private citizen to control his or her own money, is that citizen’s power, and freedom. You choose to support what you believe in, and not support the things you don’t. That’s your voice. Nobody should be able to make you buy anything you don’t want.
One of the things the movie “Rogue One” did so well, was it had Mads Mikkelsen’s Galen Erso, a scientist, having turned away from his work because he turned away from the Empire. He was living as a subsistence farmer on a distant world until the Empire came and found him, and threatened him until he agreed to go back to work for them. He isn’t hired, he isn’t offered a contract. He is simply taken, and kept by the Empire, provided with work, lodgings, food, uniform. It also showed us his daughter, Jyn Erso, as an inmate in an Imperial Labor Camp. This is exactly what the Empire is in the original trilogy.
Remember, slaves don’t own property, and don’t get paid except in food and lodging. When the state controls production and distribution of goods and services, and the people work for a share of said goods and services, that is the exact definition of slavery. The lack of freedom leads to desperation; and when the government is hindering the people, the people will cast off the law and do for themselves according to what they know is right and good.
Well, that’s it for Part One. In Part Two we’ll explore the Prequel Trilogy, and see if my understanding of the nature of the Empire, and the economic nightmare that is the galaxy far, far away, is corroborated by the story of how the Empire came to be.
Continue to Part Two by clicking this link.
