Lately I have been seeing a fair bit of discourse on this site in regards to the messaging and tone that leftists are accused of using when addressing people who have joined the military. I've decided to write this wall of incoherent text to give my thoughts on the issue. The stances that I am addressing can be seen in posts like this: https://hexbear.net/post/50662
There are other examples of this discussion but I don't have all the threads saved, still if you've been here for a while you may have already seen a few of these struggle sessions already and know what I'm talking about.
The main critique that people seem to have of posts like this, i.e. posts that are critical of people who have joined the military in the imperial core, is that we shouldn't criticise individuals for joining the military as many of them simply join because their material conditions leave them with few other options for making a living. That we have to try and reach out to these people in a way that gets them on our side. After all in any kind of revolution or armed struggle that takes place we will need the support of members of the military, or at least some sympathetic personnel who are trained in combat.
Whilst I don't deny that material conditions are a key factor for many people that join the military and am in favour of getting more of these people to come to the left, I find this critique somewhat hollow for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's rather naive to think that most people join primarily due to material conditions. The military is often filled with reactionaries and this is no accident. The jingoistic and nationalistic rhetoric that drives recruitment propaganda ensures this, and this isn't unique to the USA. Take this story about soldiers in UK using pictures of Jeremy Corbyn for target practice: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-48868071. Many of these people have absolutely no sympathy for the left, and see it as a threat to their country. Any attempt to reach soldiers like this is going to be extremely difficult, if not next to impossible. For me the argument of converting them bears the same hallmarks of the argument that we should be converting members of the alt-right. Sure, it would be good to de-radicalise these people, but why should this be the left's priority when there are vastly more people whose very existence is threatened by them, and would be far more sympathetic and easier to reach out to?
The other argument I've seen is that it is not particularly useful to make critiques against individuals and we should instead be aiming to critique the system, and that harsh rhetoric against individuals is more about people on the left trying to claim some kind of privileged moral high ground and purity. Of course it's absolutely critical that our arguments should include how the imperialist system itself is fundamentally destructive, but should this really be in complete substitution to points made in the posts like the one linked above? I find it extraordinary that a community based on chapotraphouse would take such issue with an admittedly intentionally inflammatory post like this. The entire dirtbag left movement has been built around the idea of not mincing rhetoric, that bullying works. Is it not true that there is something quite morally bankrupt about a person who has joined the military for the financial incentives (be it as it may that their material conditions left them with few alternatives), knowing full well that they may have to directly or indirectly be a part of an imperialist war machine that has killed millions of innocents across the world? Is this not in some ways even more dubious than a person who joined the military with the genuine belief that they were defending their country from genuine threats? Uncompromising rhetoric and harsh criticism has been a key part of the dirtbag left, and I see no reason why this should stop. Bullying works. I know that for me personally I have been pushed further left because this attitude forced me to question my own reactionary thoughts and beliefs, and I am sure this is the case for many other people here.
It's all well and good to talk about how the military industrial complex puts soldiers through the meat grinder, leading to the lives of soldiers being wasted in pointless forever wars, but if this the main argument that we use to convince people that joining the military is wrong, it will simply lead to the same anti-war rhetoric that surrounded Vietnam and the Iraq War. It is fairly mainstream now to say that these wars were a waste of American lives, but to then go on to suggest that the wars themselves were not just a waste, but totally unjust and represent imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism does not seem to break through to the mainstream as much. This is perhaps less so the case with the Iraq War, as everyone agrees that the WMDs were BS now, but even if they were real would that have justified a war that was ultimately about furthering imperial interests? That is still a difficult argument to make in the present day. Chomsky (I know sorry) covers this well in the concept of controlled opposition.
In Lenin's what is to be done? He takes to task members of left organisations who could be thought of as Economists - people who thought the key to class consciousness was to speak to workers purely in terms of giving their Economic struggles a 'political character'. But if you only speak to workers in terms of their Economic woes, the likely result is that you won't create a movement of people conscious of the class struggle, but will instead look for reform through systems which are still part of the capitalist hegemony - Trade Unionism, going through Government to get temporary concessions etc. Or in the case of the military, “DAE think more PoC, Gay and Trans people in the military good actually?”I think a parallel can be drawn here with people who simply try to reach military personnel by telling them they had few other options because of their material conditions. They may very well agree with you, but if they are not given the full picture of how the military industrial complex is fully intertwined with capital, then there introspection will go no further than that and they will never be a part of a genuine leftist movement which seeks to overthrow capitalism altogether. And that's the entire point isn't it? We want former soldiers on the left as an armed struggles necessitates the involvement of people with the ability to actually take up arms.
A final point and a bit of a personal one, but one that I hope will resonate with people who would call themselves allies. I am a Muslim and a PoC, born and raised in the imperial core. I am of an age where since I have been a child, all I have known is the demonization of Muslims and ethnic minorities as terrorists who threaten the west. The military is largely comprised of reactionaries who see my existence as nothing less than an aberration, a threat to their way of life. I am quite sure they would like nothing less than to be given the green light to purge people like me. Why the fuck should I be expected to try and engage with these people with any care or understanding? Those of you who think that leftists that harshly criticise soldiers are looking for some kind of superfluous moral higher ground and purity, I suggest you check your own privilege before coming at people like me. Because surprise surprise the people that take this tone are almost entirely white leftists who have the luxury of being able to engage with soldiers who don't automatically see them as subhuman. To all white leftists, by all means go ahead and engage with soldiers, if you can convert them I say job well done and thank you for your service. But do fuck off with this condescending tone that people like me are somehow not being good enough leftists if we're not trying to patiently and lovingly persuade soldiers in imperialist countries.
"We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror."
"who the fuck is scraeming "LOG OFF" at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never log off"
As a muslim from a nation that also received a healthy dose of "liberation" by the US and its consorts, have always had an attitude towards US soldiers that can be summarized as "I can't blame you for joining if you did it for the money, but you also can't blame me for wishing death upon all US soldiers and its military apparatus in general".
I can't see how that is not fair. If you're in get the fuck out as soon as you can unless you staying in is harmless or even destructive to a bloated military.
good post, hard agree. ive burned out my sympathy and patience for "difficult converts" long ago through constant veganism debates and I sure as shit don't owe an education to every imperialist I can't physically avoid. im poor too but you don't see me going to war about it.
I sure as shit don’t owe an education to every imperialist I can’t physically avoid
What's that Sankara quote about "we can never stop explaining?"
If we're serious about getting anything done, we need to be serious about persuading people to move left, and that means we do have to keep explaining the same things over and over until we get more people on our side.
The takeaway from the dirt bag left is not that bullying works (because it doesn't), but that visibly having fun works.
it's not that bullying is the only thing people should be doing, but rather that diluting anti-military rhetoric out of misplaced belief that it will convince them is particularly useful. And that it might be rather telling that when this dirtbrag attitude is applied to the military, there is a shift in the rhetoric of certain leftists.
misplaced belief that it will convince them
I'm not particularly convinced any beliefs on either side this have anything other than ad hoc descriptive justification.
Bullying works sometimes, but we do occasionally confuse that with "bullying is good and is the best way to persuade people in all scenarios."
DoD (1997) points out that “Many of the assertions about the class composition of the military have been based on impressions and anecdotes rather than on empirical data.” The widespread belief among the American public and law-makers that the poor bear a disproportionate burden in fighting America’s wars is probably derived from the fact that recruits were historically more likely to come from lower income households. Previous attempts to study the socioeconomic representativeness of the military have led to conflicting results, in part because of the imperfect nature of using geographic data to answer individual-level questions. Our individual-level analysis based on the recent NLSY97 dataset does not suffer from the bias and problems of previous studies based on geographic-level data; our findings suggest that, in recent years, the military has been recruiting principally from the middle-class rather than the poor (or the rich). We show that recent recruits tend to have higher than average socioeconomic background: they disproportionally come from the middle of the family income, family wealth, and tested skill distributions, with both tails under-represented. We also show that higher scores in cognitive skill tests increase the probability of joining the military for lower- and middle-class individuals, but decrease the enlistment likelihood of young men and women coming from the right tail of the income distribution. We also discussed related evidence that on a per capita basis non-Hispanic White casualties have been over-represented in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
We can only speculate about the causes of this historic shift toward higher socioeconomic background of recruits. One explanation is that a smaller and more technologically-advanced military has become more selective in admitting recruits since the late 1970s. It appears that military recruits have in recent years been positively selected in terms of background variables, including skills measured by the AFQT/ASVAB tests. Warner and Asch (2001) document that the average AFQT score increased from the 53rd percentile in 1978 to the 59th percentile in 1998. This has a number of implications not only for policy- and law-makers, but also for researchers and social scientists who want to understand how modern countries, and in particular the United States, fight wars.
First, if bearing the burden of military service and war fatalities is viewed as a “tax”, the tax is paid disproportionally by the middle class, with both the poor and the rich underrepresented.
https://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp965.pdf
We show that recent recruits tend to have higher than average socioeconomic background: they disproportionally come from the middle of the family income, family wealth, and tested skill distributions, with both tails under-represented.
How does this square with the observation that the "middle class" has been trending towards "working poor" for years now? That paper's from 2013, five years after the start of the Great Recession. Consider that the middle class is increasingly hollowed out and increasingly means "massive college debt, tightly-limited upward mobility, and at best a few grand in savings."
Is it not true that there is something quite morally bankrupt about a person who has joined the military for the financial incentives [...]
Morally-bankrupt people (thinking here of myself) becoming leftists is a problem why? What are you even going to do about it? Come and kick me out?
If people like that become leftists, that's entirely a separate thing.
The point here is more about recruitment: do we soften our stance/rhetoric and basically adopt an incorrect analysis to try to bring these people over, knowing that a lack of an anti-imperialist analysis is already a problem in the American left? Creating a pipeline is one thing, but should we be actively going out of our way to recruit people with bad anti-imperialistic analysis, without any attempt to educate them?
Adopt an incorrect analysis on imperialism? You mean like we all did for Bernie? Who has a correct anti-imperialist line? Probably only niche Maoist orgs.
Do they (hypothetical Real Leftists Who Are Correct) care if somebody joined the military and then saw the light? Depends on the org!
So then, soften our stance on what? On imperialism? We already did, unless you’re in one of those niche orgs and actually held fast to revolutionary Marxism-Leninism (lol I didn’t either) - so I think we’re actually talking about softening our stance on veterans, and this has nothing to do with imperialism.
If you joined the military that sucks, because the military inherently sucks. We can all try and make you feel bad, but you can still vote, you can still go out to protests, you can still join an org, you can even start your own org, and we literally cannot stop you.
There’s no point to any of this.
Any movement with people that don't have the right intentions or who are not constantly seeking to develop their understanding of the issues of capitalism today (including any reactionary views that may have been internalised) is susceptible to being diluted and compromised. As I said already I don't have a problem with people who were formerly reactionary genuinely renouncing there views and becoming leftists. It's a question of have they been genuinely educated and trying to make others on the left understand why not everyone here would be comfortable with being the ones to have to do it.
Have you decided on a materialist system of morality? I’m interested on which one you’ve picked, and whether it actually has predictive power on who will be a good leftist, and who is damned to be a parasite.
It would seem to me that what you really don’t want in your party is liberalism, and I doubt that purity testing based on things like military service will actually combat liberalism, but I’m open to being wrong - if building a successful vanguard is a matter of separating the virtuous from the wicked, I guess that’s that.
Let me know how many good and pure people you find in the Imperial Core - I hope it’s enough to have a revolution!
We live in the anthropocene.
I’d set my ambitions on finding the next meal, and give up completely any notions of leftist Utopianism and moralist naïveté
Yes, you are now fired from Antifa Inc. . Please turn in your communism card and your SorosBucks.
-hamouy
CEO of sex, shitposting and leader of Communism(tm) HR department
I would argue that all US Military personnel, such as soldiers in the Wehrmacht and in the Imperial Japanese Army, facilitate mass genocide and are war criminals by that definition.
Look keep bullying them, but if the bullying gets them to say ‘oh shit my bad’ and become communists, accept them.
There's a lot of tension between:
- Leftist ideas about criminality and prison,
- Leftist ideas about capitalism forcing you to work or starve, and
- Leftist ideas about the culpability of rank-and-file troops.
If you think we shouldn't be throwing teenagers in prison-- for almost anything -- for decades over mistakes they made when their brains were not yet fully developed, there's a contradiction if you turn around and say someone who enlisted at 17 should be written off forever. If you think we should be more focused on restorative justice than on imprisonment, there's a contradiction if you turn around and say the troops are all irredeemable war criminals. If you think the death penalty is barbaric and talk favorably about how Mao rehabilitated the last Qing emperor (in contrast with the Soviets executing the last tsar), there's a contradiction if you turn around and say the troops should get the wall. If you say that wage labor is really wage slavery, there's a contradiction if you turn around and say that troops -- who face criminal penalties for quitting -- are making fully voluntary choices at all times.
I don't see very many people in the "fuck the troops, every last one of them" crowd resolving those contradictions.
The entire dirtbag left movement has been built around the idea of not mincing rhetoric, that bullying works.
Nothing works at all times in all situations. Bullying undoubtedly works well in certain scenarios, but we should be figuring out where exactly it works well and where it works poorly. If we had the answer to that already, the left wouldn't be as small as it is.
You don't have to engage or accept anybody. That's your right as a human being. You can have the most righteous and just reasons or nothing more than " just because".
I sometimes wonder, as I try to read through these struggle sessions and skim the comments, if the division between the "all soldiers are bad" and "maybe some are okay" people is based around which group focuses on the "soldier" part and which focuses on the "person" part of the people being judged?
