A study released in October 2011 found that 78 percent of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan came from poor communities and 70 percent had no education past high school.
There is no mystery behind these statistics. With increasingly unaffordable college tuition and surging unemployment, there is only one sure place that is always offering a job with decent pay, full health care benefits, a place to live and a college scholarship: the U.S. military.
And the U.S. military makes no secret of this. In fact, it is written into their recruiting manuals to target low-income students—which is why you will find recruiters in every high school located in a poor community.
The U.S. capitalist class is determined to expand their reach to dominate every corner of the earth. When they are unable to do so through neoliberalism, predatory trade deals and loans, economic sanctions, CIA-backed coups and threats of destruction, they are left with the final option of taking control of new markets and resources by force.
But when the capitalist class chooses to go to war, they obviously will not be sending their neighbors and loved ones to fight. That is when they call up their army of working-class people—who were lured in with promises of a better life, and then inundated with racism and national chauvinism—to be used as cannon fodder instead. The saying has been true throughout history: “Wars for the rich are always fought with the blood of the poor.”
But capitalism’s compulsion to send working-class youth to die in Wall Street’s wars creates a contradiction that can help bring about the end of capitalism and imperialist war altogether.
While U.S. troops are sent to fight in the interests of the capitalists, they do not share the same interests. U.S. troops gain nothing from the imperialists’ adventures abroad—in fact, their lives are thrown into chaos, misery, death, broken families and physical and psychological trauma.
Because the U.S. government cares nothing about U.S. troops and sends them to be endlessly maimed and killed in unpopular wars, the conditions exist for organizing—and rebellion—on the basis of working-class interests within the military.
Unlike the police—who are dependent upon the capitalist state, who make it their life’s work to be tools of repression, who understand full well that their job description includes crushing people’s movements, and who have almost never taken the correct side during a revolutionary upsurge—the opposite is true of rank-and-file soldiers in an imperialist army.
Historically, soldiers of conscience have emerged in imperialist wars and either refused to fight or switched sides. But they have at times played a far more significant role. Politically conscious, radical upsurges in imperialist armies have been instrumental in peoples’ movements around the world.
Most notably, in the army of czarist Russia during World War I, there were over a dozen revolutionary soldiers’ organizations with a working-class program, with the view that soldiers were “workers in uniform.” They took advantage of the brazen contradictions of capitalism, which are most apparent during an imperialist war, and rallied thousands of soldiers to not only refuse to participate in the mass slaughter of other working-class people, but to join the revolutionary upsurge of workers and peasants and help overthrow the czarist regime.
This is not unprecedented in the U.S. military, either. During the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of U.S. troops engaged in rebellion, sabotage, civil disobedience and radical anti-war organizing, which was one of the reasons the U.S. government could no longer continue the war.
Today in the U.S. military, there is only one revolutionary soldiers’ organization with a working-class program, known as March Forward!. Like radical soldiers’ organizations of the past, March Forward! has drawn a line between the interests of Wall Street and the interests of soldiers and their families.
As the U.S. government continues to throw bodies into the quagmire in Afghanistan, act belligerently towards other countries and completely fail to care for the lives of U.S. service members, the conditions grow more ripe for anti-war—and even anti-capitalist—upsurges from within the military.
Like every member of the working class, rank-and-file members of the U.S. military have the same potential to become class-conscious revolutionaries against the system that has trampled their lives.
