On the Revolutionary Potential of Amerikan Soldiers¶
Synthesizing the Truth from Erroneous Lines¶
Aaron Bushnell was a United States Airman who did something almost nobody guessed would happen: he martyred himself in support of Palestinian Liberation. This Airman, as a direct result of his experiences in uniform, came to question the overall justice of the mission. After doing some reflection and studying socialist theory, he answered the question “Am I really the bad guy here?” with a resounding “Yes, yes I am!” So in an act of selfless protest and proletarian internationalist solidarity with the Palestinian people, he lit himself on fire in front of the ‘israeli’ embassy in Washington, D.C.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say this whole ordeal didn’t hit close to home. Although I was a soldier in the Army, I nonetheless know exactly how Bushnell felt and what we was going through. The moral conflicts caused by the contradiction between the socialist values and theories he identified with and the pure, reactionary evil that the uniform he wore represented. It caused me to reflect yet again upon my own legacy of military service, to re-evaluate what it means to be a Communist and a veteran of the worlds most prominent anti-Communist force, and to challenge myself to live up to the legacy that Aaron Bushnell bravely created with his actions.
Bushnell’s martyrdom truly shook the world. Palestinian people themselves expressed their sympathies and gratitude to his sacrifice. The Yemeni people created banners, slogans, and held mass demonstrations with millions of people where they sung the praises of the martyr Aaron Bushnell, recognizing his sacrifice for Palestine’s cause. It’s very clear that in the eyes of the colonized, they have a strong solidarity with a man who served in the imperialist war machine that oppresses and slaughters them every day.
However, Aaron Bushnell is but one individual man. Not to downplay his significance or sacrifice, but as Marxists we are concerned not with individual men, but rather with the consciousness, attitudes, and actions of social classes. After all, it is class struggle and not individual moral contradictions that shape the movement of society. So, as a collective class[1] what is to be made of military personnel? What is their revolutionary potential?
This is a classic debate that rages from time to time among Communists. Before, the last set of empirical data we had on it was from Vietnam. But that was a much different time: the US military used conscription of the masses; we had to contend with great-power competition from the Soviet Union; anticommunism was a far more common public attitude; and GIs were organizing themselves as a part of a genuinely mass movement in opposition to the war.
In contrast, today’s military is 100% all volunteer[2]. Although China and Russia represent competitors to the US empire on the global stage, neither of them functions in the same way as the Soviet Union. The USSR was supplying the Vietnamese with weapons very openly, whereas China doesn’t support Palestine except in a very mild fashion[3]. GI resistance is practically non-existent. On the very rare occasion when it does happen it does happen, it occurs on a spontaneous and individual level.
Bushnell represents a new kind of development; a contemporary and modern data-point from which we can extrapolate some evidence about the revolutionary potential of Amerikan soldiers. And so in that spirit, I argue that by conducting an examination of the demographics, the class dynamics, and the Bushnell data point that there is now concrete and tangible evidence demonstrating that at least some portion of the US armed forces has a revolutionary potential.
The Two Schools of Thought¶
To take such an attitude is to seek truth from facts. “Facts” are all the things that exist objectively, “truth” means their internal relations, that is, the laws governing them, and “to seek,” means to study. We should proceed from the actual conditions inside and outside the country, the province, county or district, and derive from them, as our guide to action, laws that are inherent in them and not imaginary, that is, we should find the internal relations of the events occurring around us. And in order to do that we must rely not on subjective imagination, not on momentary enthusiasm, not on lifeless books, but on facts that exist objectively; we must appropriate the material in detail and, guided by the general principles of Marxism-Leninism, draw correct conclusions from it.
In terms of the contemporary Communist left within the US, there are two schools of thought that emerge. They are what I refer to as the “Poverty Draft” thesis and the “Legionnaire” thesis. In order to really dig down to the roots of this question and discover the truthful answer, we have to first analyze both schools of thought among contemporary US communists. This is because if we analyze both schools of thought by dividing one into two, we see that each camp contains kernels of the truth that we can extract. These kernels will guide us into forming a correct idea that can answer the question of whether or not the US military has any revolutionary potential.
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The Poverty Draft Thesis¶
The way these comrades look at problems is wrong. They do not look at the essential or main aspects but emphasize the non-essential or minor ones. It should be pointed out that these non-essential or minor aspects must not be overlooked and must be dealt with one by one. But they should not be taken as the essential or main aspects, or we will lose our bearings.
The argument of the Poverty Draft thesis goes something like this: American soldiers are hyper-exploited laborers and victims of capitalism. The DoD draws its ranks from among the poorest and most oppressed strata of society. Furthermore, because of our privatized education system, poor folks who want to improve their lot in life cannot access the education without throwing themselves into massive debt. Thus, the brutal nature of capitalism leaves these recruits – who are overwhelmingly poor – with no options to achieve a good life.
While there is a hint of truth to this argument, by and large it does not hold up to a careful scrutinizing of the facts. By the DoD’s own statistics, the top and bottom 20% of workers in terms of income, who join the military, are in fact under-represented; neither the wealthiest nor the poorest of the American people join the military. The middle three quintiles – what we can reasonably refer to as the “middle class“ – are similarly over-represented.
The statistics on non-prior service accessions, collected by DoD, back up this claim. 19.66% come from the bottom quintile, 16.63% come from the top quintile, and the remaining 63.71% come from the middle three quintiles. While no single group is extremely under-represented or over-represented (with the exception of the wealthiest and highest-income quintile), it does show that the military’s rank and file are not drawn from among the most poor and exploited in our country.
Another aspect of the Poverty Draft argument is that it denies individuals human agency. By painting an image of the average soldier as a poor victim, a plaything of circumstance and environment, it dehumanizes the people that this argument tries to get us to empathize with! Anyone, even those of us in the worst economic systems, always have a degree of human agency. It’s certainly true that for many veterans and soldiers – including myself – the economy and the boom-bust cycle of capitalism influences our decisions to enlist in a significant way. But it still is exactly that – a decision. A conscious choice we make!
The final error, and perhaps the most serious one made by the Poverty Draft argument, is that it erroneously assumes that military laborers are exactly the same as their civilian counterparts. While it is true that our military’s professionalization means there are a lot of analogs between military and civilian career paths, one must never forget that before they are a mechanic, a cook, a drill sergeant, an admin clerk or a communications operator; every soldier is an infantryman! All these jobs are furthermore applied towards a war effort. They exist inside of an institution which is highly illiberal and devoid of individualism. This hive-mind mentality is so strong that a soldiers own body is considered to be government property. I cannot think of a single civilian career where my manager would get in trouble with the CEO of the company if I went and got a DUI on a Saturday night. Can civilian jobs legally reprimand you for damaging their property because you got a sunburn on the weekend? Such is the nature of the military culture and workplace, and it does not at all translate into the civilian world in anything but the most superficial fashion.
The Legionnaire Thesis¶
Concrete analysis of concrete conditions, Lenin said, is ”the most essential thing in Marxism, the living soul of Marxism“. Lacking an analytical approach, many of our comrades do not want to go deeply into complex matters, to analyse and study them over and over again, but like to draw simple conclusions which are either absolutely affirmative or absolutely negative.... From now on we should remedy this state of affairs.
On the opposite side of the debate, we have what I refer to as the Legionnaires argument. Rather than make up my own summary, I will directly quote from the article called “Legionnaires: Defeating the ‘Soldiertariat’ Myth”. In the author’s own words:
The military has transitioned into a gun club for (sic) amerikkka’s wide-eyed middle class sons. The imperialist volunteer vengeance force that was raised to fight international ‘terrorism’ in the Muslim countries of Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as those who were trained to rain missiles down on a dozen more) were less and less the victims of a “poverty draft“ which had been imagined into existence by those who remembered the inequities of conscription and service in the 1960s.
Maoist Standard English spelling aside, this argument does get many facts correct. It is very true that people who join the military voluntarily agree to do so. They aren’t coerced into it by conscription. While many troops are subjected to economic pressures (see the previous section), this doesn’t mean they’re denied of all agency. Every other working-class person in the US, and even many petit-bourgeois, suffer from economic pressures. Yet only a small fraction of them voluntarily sign a contract to enlist.
It is also an indisputable fact that the US is the military powerhouse of the world. As a whole, the military is a rabidly anti-Communist institution of reactionary violence. The imperialist army invaded Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Honduras – to name only a few examples – in order to prevent communism. We spend more than the next ten nations combined on our military. In terms of manpower, the US ranks third in size of its army. Those troops are distributed among 750 different bases in 80 countries. Wherever a military installation rears its ugly head, so do the crimes of sex trafficking, drunk driving, domestic violence, drug use, and public intoxication. The article’s classification of the US military as an “imperialist volunteer vengeance force” is more or less accurate.
Most importantly, however, the American empire relies upon these modern-day centurions in order to function. **Without the willingness of the American soldier to kill, murder and maim on behalf of capital, there could be no imperialism. Therefore, raising the argument that it’s impossible to organize, agitate and propagandize among the US Freikorps and Wehrmacht is plausible and worth taking seriously (even if ultimately, it is incorrect).
Warning
However, there are a number of flaws in this line of this left-deviation argument which distort the truth and interpret it in the most opportunistic fashion.
In this article as well as the broader conversation, supporters of the Legionnaire Thesis inevitably cite one of two studies. They either cite the Heritage Foundation’s white paper *Who Serves In the US Military? The Demographics of Enlisted Troops and Officers* or they cite the Rand Corporation research report *Navigating Current and Emerging Army Recruiting Challenges*. While both papers are deceptive and their statistics do not tell the whole story, I first wish to address the sources themselves.
Note
First, I find it rather curious that a self-proclaimed Communist or socialist would uncritically parrot the propaganda of the Rand Corporation or the Heritage Foundation without caveat, consideration, or investigation. While it’s true that these studies are not entirely false and contain many truths, we must keep in mind that both of these sources have biased motivations.
They have both ideological and material reasons to portray the military as not exploitative. It is in their collective class interests to depict the troops as patriotic, red-blooded Americans.
Heritage is a self-identified conservative think-tank who believes – and wants us to believe as well – that America’s military is a global force for good. The Rand Corporation is a for-profit research institute whose revenues come from conducting national security research at the behest of the DoD. Although both institutes serve a distinct function, what they have in common is their incentive to portray the US military in a positive light. This means, among other things, creating propaganda to debunk narratives like the Poverty Draft thesis. While this fact alone doesn’t necessarily mean their statistics are bunk, it should give us pause to reflect upon them in a critical light.
Don’t just take my word for it though. The Heritage Foundation says exactly this in their own words! The authors of this study explicitly state that they wish to combat those who “belittle the personal sacrifices of those who serve out of love for their country”. While I cannot state with absolute certainty what the authors of the Legionnaires essay believe, I think it’s reasonable to assume that anyone who spells this country as AmeriKKKa or U$A probably doesn’t respect the troops very much. So why uncritically form such an alliance with individuals who, as the Maoists themselves say, they have an antagonistic contradiction with? Politics makes strange bedfellows, but I never imagined that Maoist Third-Worldists and the Heritage Foundation would be sharing the same mattress!
To get back to the subject of discussion, it is entirely possible that Heritage could have the correct facts even if they’re ideologically wrong. While that’s certainly a possibility, Heritage’s thesis doesn’t entirely hold up to further scrutiny.
Who Joins Combat Arms?¶
Why does the middle class seem over represented among recruits? Is it because people who enlist are the “vanguard of fascism“ and because they have an inherently “petit-bourgeois and fascistic consciousness”? No! The answer here is actually a very material one – the middle class is over represented because soldiers are paid a generous upper-middle class wage with free healthcare for the whole family. And the number one determinant of whether or not someone joins the military is not income level but rather familial service history. Your mother or father being a soldier is the single greatest predictor of whether you will be a soldier. And, since soldiers are all paid generous middle-class wages, it follows that the middle class will be over-represented!
The astute reader might say “Oh Justin, I see your point, but this actually proves the Legionnaires thesis correct! IF family is the best predictor of enlisting, then that proves a conscious ideological decision to enlist!“ This is true, but again – we have to look at the specific career paths of those who join as part of a family legacy to see the whole picture.
I don’t have any statistics here, but as someone who served in the US Army for 7 years, I feel I have enough lived experience to speak with confidence on this matter – certainly more so than someone who’s never interacted face-to-face with a soldier, much less shared a meal with one or slept in the same tent for months on end with one. I can confidently state that recruits from military bloodlines overwhelmingly enlist in a ‘prestigious’ career field such as the infantry. This is a cultural thing. While it’s absolutely true that the Warrior Caste exists in America, it’s also true that those who belong to this caste are not enlisting as generator mechanics, cooks, fuellers or human resource clerks. They go into the combat arms jobs: tanker, cavalry scout, infantry, etc.
Important
Furthermore, although I disagree with the overall thesis of the Legionnaire argument, I do agree that these dynastic soldiers who concentrate in the combat arms are not chock-full of revolutionary potential. They are reactionary in both word and deed! While not every infantryman is an Eddie Gallagher war criminal, on the whole they’re steeped enough in the jingoistic white supremacist ideology that trying to win them over would be a fruitless endeavor.
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Who Should We Target?¶
Who, then, are the ideal recruits? Those who would be subject to the poverty draft! While the bottom 20% of the income spectrum is under-represented, they still consist of about 19% of the total membership of the armed forces. The Legionnaire’s are correct in that these aren’t the primary people who enlist, but the Poverty Draft thesis is correct in the sense that such people absolutely do exist. They’re just not the majority! I myself am one of them. Therefore, we should therefore investigate what kind of jobs and career fields these people go into.
The Center for Naval Analyses – a research arm of the DoD – put out a study called An Investigation of FY10 and FY11 Enlisted Accessions’ Socioeconomic Characteristics. In this study Diana Lien, Kletus Lawler and Robert Shuford show exactly what career fields each income quartile tends to go into.
When we investigate this data, two insightful patterns emerge:
Note
Pattern 1: There is a direct correlation between one’s income quartile and their probability to enlist within the combat arms. In other words – the more money you make, the more likely it is that you enlist as infantry. The converse is also true – the poorer you are when you enlist, the less likely it is you enlist in the combat arms.
Note
**Pattern 2: Within the bottom 20% of income earners among recruits, they disproportionately enlist in the skilled trades, administrative and clerical work, and logistical work (truck driver, supply specialist, warehouse foreman, etc).
This offers us, in my opinion, the greatest insight into who we need to target.
A famous adage of military science is that, “amateurs talk about strategy, while professionals talk about logistics.” In my experience as a soldier, this is very much the case! And it’s also a universal truth of communism that we recruit from among the most oppressed, downtrodden, and poorest people in our society. The bottom quintile of the income band is the textbook definition of this kind of person – the word for such a person is proletariat! And the bottom quintile of proletarian recruits overwhelmingly happen to enlist in the fields related to logistics.
Important
While an American infantryman is certainly a fearsome specimen of warrior, it’s also true that the infantry cannot fight without bullets, nor can they survive on the battlefield without food or water. They depend upon the vast and interconnected supply chains that make up the American military’s logistics. Without that supply chain, the entire imperialist enterprise would collapse within a week. It just so happens that the poorest strata of workers are the ones manning this logistics supply chain. Imagine what could happen if they became class conscious!
Other Demographics to Consider¶
Additionally, there are other demographics within the military who would be ripe for agitation. As a caveat, I want to explicitly state that it is absurd to paint the American soldier as the true victim of imperialism. Those who suffer the most under the brunt of Empire are currently, and always will be, the overwhelmingly Black and Brown people on the receiving end of our military arsenal. But with that said, it’s also its own form of chauvinism to assume that American troops don’t also suffer, sometimes in incredibly brutal and life-altering ways!
Military Sexual Assault¶
Consider the issue of military sexual assault. It’s no secret that there is a sexual assault epidemic within the US Armed Forces. Military rape is a form of fratricide which affects everyone – men and women alike. While the overwhelming number of assaults are targeted against women, it’s also true that military men are assaulted at a rate three times higher than their male civilian counterparts. This is because rape is a crime of power and domination, and the military of the American empire is the pinnacle and apex of domination and power. It breeds, promotes, and encourages this mentality among its rank and file. Those who can make the cut and demonstrate the values of dominance, aggression, violence, and unconditional loyalty are promoted and rewarded for this behavior.
Important
Given that the military exploits and violates its own sisters and brothers in arms in a fashion that’s extremely cruel, I think such people are primed more than even most civilians to come to realize the brutality of the empire. Who better to understand the barbaric and bloodthirsty nature of imperialism than a soldier who was violated by its loyal executors?
Even if, at one point, they were a loyal servant of capitalism, why wouldn’t we offer solidarity, sympathy, and compassion to those who are raped in uniform by their chain of command – the same solidarity we would to any survivor of sexual violence? And furthermore, I would argue it doesn’t take a whole lot to help these survivors connect the dots between their own treatment by the imperialist military and the treatment of third-world women by that very same empire.
As an aside, I have a question for those who would argue the Legionnaire thesis: would you ever tell a woman veteran who was sexually harassed or raped by her commander, that she deserved it because she‘s an imperialist swine? Do the so-called lapdogs and gangsters for Empire deserve this to happen to them? I can’t speak for everyone, but I am firmly of the belief that no one deserves to be raped.
Structural Racism in the UCMJ¶
The military is a microcosm of society, and any problems that exist within that society also manifest themselves in its military. Racism is no exception. Myriad studies show that service members of color are prosecuted at disproportionate rates for crimes than their white counterparts. Furthermore, the punishments for those disciplinary infractions are orders of magnitude more severe than the punishments administered to white troops. A white soldier might get two weeks of extra duty for underage drinking, while a Black troop faces a court martial for committing the same offense.
Note
A veteran who gets a less-than-honorable discharge because of a racist commander is someone who I believe absolutely would be receptive to the anti-racist ideology of communism, if only it were worded right and if the communists could see them as humans suffering from an injustice of a cruel system rather than as barbaric demons tainted irredeemably as imperialist lap dogs.
Historical Precedent¶
Another potent source of evidence for my claims lies in history itself. How have other communist movements – particularly the successful ones – addressed the issue of what to make of reactionary regime soldiers? What did previous generations do? What worked, and what did not? Although America’s military is unique and unparalleled, we’re also not the first nation to have a reactionary military institution.
Lenin on Agitating Among Troops¶
Let us look to Vladimir Lenin, and see what he had to say on the topic. In his 1906 essay The Army and the People, Lenin writes:
Try to regard the soldiers who risk being shot for ‘insubordination‘ as human beings who have their own, independent interests, as part of the people, as men who are expressing the urgent needs of certain classes in our society. You will see that these soldiers – who stand closest to the politically least developed peasantry, who are drilled, downtrodden, and browbeaten by the officers – that these “dumb brutes” are going immeasurably further in their demands than the Cadet programmes! Our duty is … to support, expand, and develop it in the spirt of genuine, consistent, determined and militant democracy.
—Vladimir Lenin, The Army and the People (1906)
Firstly, it is worth noting that this essay was published in 1906: after the failed attempt at a revolution called Bloody Sunday. I mention this because, if anyone had a tangible and legitimate grudge to hold against Tsarist troops, it would be Lenin himself who saw hundreds of his comrades slaughtered at the hand of the white army. Yet, despite this fact, he was still able to see revolutionary potential within the ranks!
There are also some historical discrepancies between Lenin‘s time and our own. American soldiers are nowhere even remotely close to forming soviets, making their own demands, and openly defying their chain of command. As discussed above, many are also too far deep into the reactionary military ideology to buy into this. In effect, some sections of our own military share more in common with the Black Hundreds than the Bolsheviks.
While this is true, that‘s also not who I am talking about. Much like Lenin, I am talking about those soldiers who “are drilled, downtrodden, and browbeaten by the officers.“ While the military offers tangible material benefits to many soldiers, American troops face deplorable conditions on par with what their Russian counterparts endured in 1906:
They are literally raped by their chain of command
They live in mold-infested barracks
The government takes money out of their paychecks for food which is moldy, raw and unfit to be consumed by a dog
Single soldiers living in the barracks might as well live in a low-security prison; military regulations explicitly state that Sergeants are required to intrude upon soldier quarters unannounced
The chain of command has the right to rifle through their belongings, and generally treat them more like inmates than supposedly free women and men
There is no Fourth Amendment in the barracks
Many soldiers turn to habits such as alcoholism and drug abuse to cope. They develop depression, PTSD, and other psychiatric illnesses due to these squalid conditions. In the most extreme of cases, troops will commit suicide to escape the misery. Remember that they can’t quit their job unless they want a felony arrest warrant to follow them around for the rest of their lives. If those don’t qualify as “downtrodden and browbeaten”, then I would be curious to know what you think does qualify!
Mao on Treating Enemy Soldiers¶
Mao Zedong had similar ideas on the treatment of enemy soldiers. In On Guerilla Warfare, he writes:
We further our mission of destroying the enemy by propagandizing his troops, by treating his captured soldiers with consideration, and by caring for those of his wounded who fall into our hands. If we fail in these respects, we strengthen the solidarity of our enemy.
—Mao Zedong, On Guerilla Warfare
While we are not (yet) at the point of a civil war where Communists have to engage in combat with the US military, the general principle still applies here. Agitation and propaganda among our own enemy troops (make no mistake – they are our enemies so long as they wear that uniform!) is a wise course of action. We know it is wise, because there has literally never been a single Communist revolution which succeeded where agitating among the regime’s soldiers wasn’t a political line of work.
Conclusion¶
In conclusion, by digging into the facts a couple things become clear:
Important
Who to target: Although the distribution of income among military recruits is weighted more heavily among the ‘middle-class’, 19% of military recruits still come from the ranks of the lowest 20% of income brackets. Furthermore, accession statistics show that among the poorest 20% of recruits, they overwhelmingly concentrate in the logistical career fields making them ripe targets for agitation and propaganda. They are ripe not only in the fact that they come from a proletarian background, but because the fields they go into are operationally significant.
Warning
Who NOT to target: We also know that the wealthier and petit-bourgeois recruits overwhelmingly go into fields such as military intelligence and combat arms. These individuals are not worth reaching out to. If one of them is genuinely repentant and wants to prove their worth to us, then let us judge on a case-by-case basis. If they’re truly determined, they’ll find a way to come to us. But we don’t need to waste our time, personnel, and resources reaching out retired career officers and veterans of the infantry.
Material Benefits vs. Material Conditions¶
Thirdly, we know that although military service brings with it a myriad of material benefits – the GI bill, 0 down payment VA home loans, security clearances, pensions, and TRICARE to name a few. But we also know that there are many horrendous crimes and living conditions which soldiers suffer from. Examples include military sexual assaults, mold-infested barracks, structural racism in the UCMJ, prison-like barracks, and abusive chains of command. We also know from the historical examples of Mao and Lenin that it is not only possible, but in fact a necessity, to agitate around these issues.
I would say from my own experience that only a fool would believe that they can convert every Joe Snuffy in the military into a Maoist guerilla commander who upholds the shining sword of Marxism-Leninism against their revisionist chain of command. But we also do not need that to happen! All we need is to convince those who currently wear the uniform that their material interests lie more in taking off that uniform than it does in continuing to serve. Lucky for us, the institution itself makes it too easy to persuade people to do precisely that! And in that same spirit, we need to reach out to the youth who are considering joining, and educate them that the only things they’ll get out of a military career are a PTSD diagnosis and a lifetime of regret.
See Also¶
The Labor Aristocracy: Is This Theory Bananas? – The class dynamics underlying imperial complicity
The Three Types of Police in Amerika – Intelligence policing and counterinsurgency
Functional Illiteracy and Political Education – Barriers to political education