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No revolution has ever been successful without military members switching sides and becoming revolutionaries. Name one, you can't.

This take serves only to divide the left from the people that absolutely must switch sides for any win to occur. Will they be a core part of what starts it all? Probably not. Does that mean that the left should be taught to reject reaching out to them? Fuck off, no.

Think about what is mechanistically important here. Telling the left not to reach out and that it will never ever happen is not useful, it serves no purpose that takes any step towards the goal and, in future at the correct time, it may itself become a barrier if it propagates.

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People are not products of their material conditions. Anyone who joined the AmeriKKKan military is inherently bad. Therefore, we should do everything possible to alienate the people who have practical knowledge of fighting guerrilla warfare.
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Ask yourself why does answering this question matter? Are you going out talking to veterans and soldiers and trying to organize them - if yes sure then you need to decide if this is worth your time. Are you trying to decide if commie soldiers should be allowed to join your left wing grp or DSA chapter or whatever. If not then what is the point in arguing about this?

I would think that if we find soldiers who seem sympathetic to our cause we should not turn them away and if they think that there is some hope in working in this sphere we should look into it. Especially if the class character of the lower ranks of military is representative of poorer/disadvantaged folks.

How about listening to the experience of actual commie soldiers? (They are not super optimistic but maybe this will be more enlightening to people here). They do talk about a left wing veteran group they are a part of which is super encouraging. https://cosmopod.libsyn.com/socialism-the-us-military-w-ellie-bryant

omg is this is the fabled maoist AmeriKKKan u$a writing style

rofl, this is the most terminally online take ive seen in a minute

e: i legit can not discern if this is satire or not

This article in question is 6 years old. Also, it seems that some of the links are broken. :sadness-abysmal:

the military has transitioned into a gun club for amerikkka’s wide-eyed middle class sons...

Very few of the enlisted people that I was in the military with would have been considered "middle class."

The first foot note listed:

https://www.heritage.org/static/reportimages/360142B8859DD8EDA9D80F008077F3B5.gif

Results in a 404 page.

Also, its the right wing Heritage Foundation... so... I'm having a hard time thinking that source is going to be reliable. Anyways, I think I found the article from the Heritage foundation website that the anti-imperalist.org site was trying to link to.

From the Heritage article.

Income. According to the 2000 Census, national median income for all U.S. households was $41,994 in 1999 (all figures use 1999 dollars), compared to a mean household income of $41,141 for homes of recruits of that year. We calculate recruit income by using the median household income of the five-digit ZIP code of the recruit's home of record. Because more recruits came from high-income neighbor­hoods in 2003, the mean income rose to $42,822. There were proportionately fewer recruits (18.0 per­cent) from the poorest quintile of ZIP codes in 1999, as well as fewer from the richest quintile (18.6 per­cent). The income distribution of new recruits after September 11, 2001, is remarkably different. In 2003, only 14.6 percent of military recruits came from the poorest quintile, while the wealthiest quin­tile provided 22.0 percent.

That's an amazing bit of twistedness.

So from what I can understand from this paragraph, they took as "eveil imperalist babie kllr" zip code at the time of enlistment. Then found the average incomes from those zip codes. Then found the average lowest income zip codes nationally. Then compared the zip codes. So, if I was a poor kid living in a zip code where the average income was higher than what my family made, I would be added to the pile of zip codes in a "higher" income group.

From the Legionairs article:

This has been documented by the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation in their study on the recruitment demographics of the united $tates military, which found that only about 10-11% of the united $tates military recruits come from the poorest quintile (defined as making less than $33,000 annually), with a fourth of the military coming from areas whose median income is more than $65,000 annually.

This misrepresents the Heritage article. The Heritage article just took a zipcode, found the average income for that zipcode, assumed that the average income for that zipcode would have been the income for an enlistee, and created the income quintile breakdowns that way. I literally just spent two hours digging up potatoes, I should not be smarter than an internet anti-imperalist leftist in understanding a source.

The Boise article link was broken, found a working link.

They do, in fact, outline their criticism of the Heritage Foundation article. There is another study from some place called the National Priorities Project that used a similar method of using zip codes but came to the conclusion opposite of the Heritage Foundation. Specifically:

Heritage obtained different results by "comparing these wartime recruits (2003–2005) to the resident population ages 18–24" in each ZIP code (as opposed to the overall population, all ages included).

So what this means, is that not only did the Heritage Foundation do the thing of using average income per zip code and assuming that as an enlistee's income, they then removed all income from their average that wasn't from an 18~24 year old person. Now I don't know about you, but my parent's were far older than 18~24 years old when I was 18 and enlisting. It seems like we'd want to know about where an enlistee came from, so their parent's income would be the target to look for when trying to make an estimation of the wealth level/income group an enlistee should be assigned to. Which feels odd, cause I would imagine that parents would make more money than their kids, and I'm going to show my ass and assume that more enlistee's are barely adults. Seems to me this would have helped the Heritage Foundation's case.

Not pleased that the Boise article doesn't give a name for the National Priorities Project data/research that the article is talking about. But here's the NPP website..

The "uneducated" claims are weird, but probably have to do with secondary education or vocational training, than high school grads. Though, if you have high enough ASVAB scores, I have no reason to believe that recruiters will pretty much hand hold you through a GED program to get their recruitment quota.

From the Legion's article:

Even more interestingly, this article assumes that those who do not finish college or do not attend must automatically be poor and forced into the military for that reason

Sure buddy. College is free in the USA, buddy. Quitting college means you don't have to pay back your bills, buddy. ( I actually knew a guy who took out college loans, realized that he didn't want to go to college, panicked, and that led him to a recruiters office.)

This claim is put in further jeopardy by the fact that as a whole, veterans are half as likely to live in “poverty” by u.$. standards, and in fact have consistently higher incomes than non-veterans.

So, the author of the Legionaires article is saying that, yes, if you don't want to live in poverty you join the military. I ... I don't think that was the own, they intended that to be.

The Legionaires article linked to this RT article. Some quotes below.

In 2013, data from the Pentagon's Joint Advertising and Market Research Studies program found that only 40 percent of the DoD's target market thought the military offered "an attractive lifestyle," down from 63 percent in 2004. The youth unemployment rate fell to 12.8 percent in April, according to the the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. The youth unemployment rate in the United States averaged 12.32 percent from 1955 until 2014, reaching an all-time high of 19.6 percent in April 2010.

**A weak economy in recent years, coupled with the talented and adequately resourced recruiting force produced the highest quality recruits ** in Air Force history," Brig. Gen. Gina Grosso, the director of force management policy for the Air Force, told the House Armed Services Committee in January. "However, we recognize this trend will be unsustainable as the economy continues to improve and competition to draw recruits from the small, qualified talent pool, who are alarmingly less inclined to choose military service as a career, increases dramatically."

Now the military is competing with the civilian sector for quality candidates, and they are forced to use the recruiting budgets they never needed to before - right as Congress seeks to cut those budgets.

So basically when the economy is good enough that people can find stable employment, the are less likely to join the military. When jobs are hard to come by, they enlist.

So far, the first section of that Legionaires piece should have just been deleted. The rest so far is pretty okay.

HAHAHA... the article was written by Amber. :amber-snacking:

We are about to witness an imperial humiliation leaving several generations of soldiers wondering what that was for with Afghanistan. You are suggesting we ignore those people when we have the answers. The left needs people who can fight. Ignoring them will just leave them in the hands of fascists. I don't expect forgiveness from every victim of US imperialism, but this take is bad.

Anyone who isn't dead in theory can be redeemed. This isn't saying people innately are good or bad (silly dichotomy), they are productions of conditions as others here have written and you can interact with them, manufacture conditions to a degree if you will. Yes, have to be extra wary with the openly reactionary types but that doesn't mean you can't engage and attempt to defuse them. Don't be foolish and assume they're friendly with 0 agitation and defusing ofc, even with a touch of this its dangerous, there are very few safe groups in the imperialist core you are fighting current condition benefit compounded with centuries of propaganda.

As conditions change what benefits lumpen and paid lapdogs etc will change, to plant the ideas of paths other than neoliberalism ultimately fascism is still critical work even if it can't be appreciated and taken into action now. Anyway, every revo group eventually comes to the point of needing to defend itself physically, so if you've totally alienated and cast off all of a group as simply 'bad', especially one with fighting experience, you've just fucked yourself over.

the military is half black and hispanic. with other groups included, the military is made mostly from smaller ethnic groups. these groups have historically supported progressive ideas and socialist policies.

let's assume america goes fascist and starts killing minority groups indiscriminately. america immediately loses a bit over half of their military.

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I am pretty sure the people making "my recruiter was a lying asshole" tik toks are alright

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