Marxist organizing in the U.S. military

By James Circello

Presentation at 'Capitalism Is Organized Crime' conference on socialism, April 19, 2009, in Washington D.C.

While organizing veterans and active-duty soldiers, many different struggles throughout history can be studied and learned from. Over the course of the last year, veterans and active-duty service members who were also seasoned activists and leaders in the anti-imperialist movement joined together to create March Forward!

March Forward! was formed because of the pressing issues facing veterans and service members. These include the forced participation in imperialist wars as well as the rampant sexism, racism and homophobia that service members face while in the military. We are also addressing the inadequate physical and mental health care that U.S. veterans receive, and a lack of access to resources both during and after military service.

Grassroots organizing and unified action

These issues can only be resolved through grassroots organizing and unified action by veterans and service members in alliance with other progressive forces across the country—including labor unions, civil rights and anti-war organizations, as well as student and youth activists. The issues that confront veterans and service members are the same issues that affect the working people in the United States who do not profit from the Pentagon's wars.

The Vietnam era was one of the greatest examples of GI resistance within the U.S. military. Literally thousands of soldiers—and even entire units—refused to kill their Vietnamese brothers and sisters. In that same spirit and tradition, many attempts have been made to organize service members today. But a great deal more remains to be done.

Today, there are millions of veterans no longer in the military and over two million service members within the active duty and reserve forces who are not being touched by any group or any strategy, either because these groups fail to represent their interests or because such individuals don't know about them.

In March Forward! we feel that we must make a broader plea to all veterans and service members, not to simply organize against this or that particular war but against all forms of imperialism. The fight against imperialism and injustice is the heart of our struggle.

We take a different approach to organizing veterans and service members. We view the rank-and-file enlisted servicemen and women as workers. Marxist theory holds that collective labor produces everything of value to society. Furthermore, we understand that the ability of workers to withhold their labor is what gives them their immense power.

If we apply, by analogy, this same theory to U.S. soldiers, we find that this product—imperialist war—is completely dependent on them. Labor gives the Pentagon and the military the capacity to fight its wars and to kill and destroy entire nations of peoples. Just as the workers' most valuable weapon is withholding their labor, the soldiers or marines also have that power when they refuse to aim their rifles.

And this is our goal—to empower those in the armed forces with the knowledge that they truly possess power. It is the rank-and-file enlisted soldiers who die in wars, who return home and can't find work or affordable housing, who are committing suicide at an alarming rate and have to fight the government just to be given the VA benefits that are rightfully theirs. Without these soldiers, the Pentagon's ability to wage war will come to a complete halt.

This is our perspective on organizing soldiers—we see it no differently than organizing workers in any other strata of society.

Our ultimate goal is to win over a large percentage of U.S. service members and empower them as workers—to develop their consciousness, class orientation, and revolutionary spirit. We aim to help workers in uniform understand that those who wage military and economic war against the peoples of the developing world do so against their own class interests.

There is already an enormous amount of mistrust and animosity towards the officer corps in the military, which is nothing more than the bourgeoisie in uniform. It is this class division that we aim to draw out to its logical conclusion. The enlisted men and women already understand such class divisions, but it is our responsibility to arm them with the revolutionary spirit needed to help them liberate themselves.

Class awareness within the military played a deciding factor in the Russian Revolution. As Leon Trotsky commented in "The History of the Russian Revolution," "The uprising of the Petrograd garrison took place not only without officers, but against them. In the critical hours the command simply hid its head."

We saw this again during the war on the Vietnamese people when U.S. soldiers began resisting in heroic ways. Resistance took shape in many forms, whether it was passing around underground newspapers, refusing to deploy, desertion, the burning of draft cards by students or willingly accepting being drafted with the sole intent to organize inside the military.

Others performed more militant resistance. This included the refusal by thousands of soldiers and sometimes by entire units to participate in missions, the sabotaging of U.S. war vehicles and equipment, and even "fraggings"—the deliberate killing of superior officers. Such actions were often accompanied by bounties that the enlisted placed on the heads of strict, unpopular and aggressive officers.

Soldiers of the Vietnam era demonstrated that a modern military can be defeated based on this Marxist concept of workers and the power that comes from the withholding of their labor.

Unfortunately, some in today's movement have turned to wrapping themselves in U.S. flags and yellow ribbons and spouting "Support the Troops" rhetoric. Peace signs and talk of pacifism are not necessarily incomprehensible to soldiers. But their lives are at risk every day while deployed in these criminal wars, and they need something more to grasp than these ideas.

Our 10-point program

Our founding document—which took the form of a 10-point program—unites us and clearly states our position on all elements of racism, sexism, LGBT bigotry and other divide-and-conquer tactics that are present in the military and society as a whole. This is something that soldiers can grasp—a revolutionary document that is meant to empower and raise consciousness of not only veterans but active-duty service members as well.

Among other things in the program, we demand, first and foremost, the right for service members to refuse illegal and immoral orders.

Those who are willing to set their rifles down face enormous pressures from society. Young men and women are called "traitors" or "cowards" because they refuse to kill working-class Iraqis or because they proclaim that any war on the people of Afghanistan is not being waged in their interest.

Soldiers are not given the right to question illegal and immoral wars, and in uniform they lose many rights that others take for granted. The soldiers who stand up and fight back are forced to take on these forms of rebellion, because there is no democratic outlet for soldiers to voice their opposition.

Those soldiers who do stand up and fight back are the soldiers that we recognize as models, and we embrace them.

We actively call for all soldiers to resist imperialist war and join us in the revolutionary struggle being led by U.S. soldiers, workers, and students who fight for a society that puts people's needs before the profits of those who make tanks and bombs.

Trotsky observed, "An army is always a copy of the society it serves—with this difference, that it gives social relations a concentrated character, carrying both their positive and negative features to an extreme."

In that spirit, March Forward! and our political program are appeals to all service members to demonstrate what a true military of the working class, much like the Red Army, can and should resemble—a military that is a copy of socialist society—the society we are fighting to build.

This is not our war!
http://www.MarchForward.org