When I see the DC elites engineering endless wars that are exacerbating our inflation crisis; and renegade elements within the empire’s own military increasingly coming to resist these wars; I think of Hegel’s analysis on how one stage in a society’s development produces the next stage. How one given era in a society’s history makes possible the emergence of more advanced eras. Hegel observed about his own time’s developmental stage, that being the post-feudal one: “Our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation.”
We’re now in the moment where capitalism, after progressing to its imperialist stage, has decayed so much that the need for a transition beyond the present system is apparent to many of the same individuals who’ve gone through the imperialist military. In these recent posts from the retired colonel Douglas MacGregor, we see an example of this phenomenon, where the elements which the old system produced can turn on that system:
Our debt servicing payment is over a trillion dollars a year. This is insane, we cannot afford this. This is against the backdrop of stupidity in Ukraine. We provoked Russia!! Russia was not the evil one as cast in this phony political drama in Washington. The Ukraine regime, with our backing had been killing Russians in eastern Ukraine for 8 years, over 14,000 of them.
FACT: Right now our Army is smaller than it has ever been. Most of it’s combat power is pointless deployed in Poland, Romania and Baltic States, where it’s posed to defend against Russia who has no intention whatsoever of attacking Eastern Europe. Most of It’s air power is not what it was 30 years ago. This is not 1991, we cannot put 5,000 fighters in the air and hundreds of bombers.
There is this obsession with the annihilation of Iran. Now seems to be the moment that the neocons and globalists have chosen to attack Iran. They are all in a full court press. Why? American must stop the endless wars. Complaining solves nothing, the time to act is now. We do not want your money, we want people who are ready to effect change.
I view these statements as signs that former or present military personnel are capable of coming towards anti-imperialist ideas not in spite of their having undergone the U.S. empire’s ideological training, but because of it; because somebody who’s intimately familiar with the ideology of the imperial state can come to recognize this ideology’s contradictions all the better. That MacGregor and those in his political project have sought right-wing solutions to these problems (namely ones involving immigration enforcement and school-related culture war issues) doesn’t mean this project doesn’t represent a trend; a trend which threatens to undo the U.S. empire, making the empire’s own tools for projecting armed force backfire on the elites.
Through their global warfare campaigns, the DC elites cultivated the U.S. military as we know it; they made it into the world’s second largest collection of armed forces personnel, next only to China’s. And they brought about the destruction of civil liberties, decline in U.S. living standards, and international crises that are increasingly giving these armed service members a reason to break from the war machine. It’s the contrast between what the USA proclaims to represent, and what our government is actually doing, that’s made certain elements of military members prone to becoming passionately opposed to the system; when they start looking beyond the military’s propaganda, they get a sense of betrayal.
They see how the values they’ve believed to be fighting for get disregarded by the DC elites at every opportunity; how the politicians view military members as nothing more than disposable tools, to be sacrificed whenever these politicians want more corporate donations. Those who were recruited from working-class backgrounds are naturally most prone towards such epiphanies; but theoretically, someone from any class status besides that of the DC elites themselves is capable of becoming revolutionary. As in China’s revolution, there will be people who aren’t working class but still split from the old system; MacGregor, as well as the more radical Scott Ritter, are examples of this phenomenon when it comes to former military officials.
The tendency for former armed service members to become among the most passionate opponents of the war machine is due not just to their experience of becoming disillusioned; but due to the illiberal nature of how a military is designed to influence a person. There’s such a contradiction between the nihilistic, apathetic, and selfishly individualistic cultural paradigm that our ruling elites engineer; and the passion-filled, collectivist dynamic that a military seeks to cultivate within its ranks. Whereas military recruits are taught to believe in something, the politicians who these recruits work for believe in nothing. And when a military’s members find that their earnest, idealistic efforts have been used to advance the designs of a corrupt power elite that’s selling out the country’s people, the outcome is a rift between these illiberal and liberal forces. The illiberal armed service members turn against the liberal elites, no longer wanting to help the liberals instigate wars and destroy our society for the sake of profit.
How to turn this development towards the advantage of the class struggle? How to turn this contradiction between liberalism and illiberalism within our ruling institutions into something that can defeat the imperial state? The only way we’ll become seen as credible sources of leadership by the disillusioned armed service members, or by the people more broadly, is if we build the institutional presence required for having a serious impact. Until we’ve demonstrated ourselves to be capable of delivering the changes that the war machine’s opponents seek, whatever arguments we make for our socialist program won’t be compelling to those outside our own circle.
The most immediate part of this task is mass work; we must educate and mobilize great amounts of people, working to fill the people’s needs while fighting the imperial state’s narratives. The longer-term part is internally focused, where we make our cadres into structures that match the discipline, training levels, and functionality of a military. This is how democratic centralism, the model where all of an organization’s members are required to adhere to what the majority has voted upon, is going to increase in its value as the struggle intensifies: the more the state intensifies its war against the revolutionary forces, the more these forces must adopt the characteristics of a military in order to prevail.
Thereby, Hegel’s analysis is again demonstrated in a broader sense; the same systems of military force that the empire created have potential to bring about the empire’s destruction. Those who the empire has funneled into its armed services largely come to see the true nature of the cause they were fighting for, defecting towards the revolutionary side; and the revolutionary organizations progressively adopt a military way of operating, taking advantage of our society’s abundant means for acquiring and training with weapons. Should we sufficiently do the work required of us, we’ll provide an avenue for anti-imperialist revolt to the military members who seek one; and they’ll provide us with indispensable assistance in the class war.
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