ROTC, Military Recruiters Off Campus Now!
Not One Person, Not One Penny for the Imperialist Military!
Reprinted from Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard No. 846, 15 April 2005.
As the bloody U.S. colonial occupation of Iraq drags into its third year, and with the U.S. volunteer military facing predictable recruitment shortages, student activists around the country have taken to protesting military recruiters on campus. On January 20, the day of Bush's second imperial inauguration, some 300 students at Seattle Central Community College confronted and successfully drove out two military recruiters. On March 9, more than 100 students at San Francisco State University (SFSU) marched into an auditorium where Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers recruiters were handing out their literature and surrounded their tables for two hours, chanting and giving speeches (see "No Reprisals Against Anti-Military Recruitment Protesters!", page 8). Planned and impromptu protests and "counter-recruitment" activities have taken place on dozens of other campuses.
Military recruiters, ROTC and other similar agencies are direct appendages of the military machine that exists to defend the interests of the American imperialist ruling class. ROTC recruits university students to become the next generation of the elite officer corps whose job is to oversee U.S. imperialist slaughter in wars like those against Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, military recruiters use promised tuition assistance and job opportunities to lure working-class youth, including a disproportionate number of black and minority youth, into signing up to be the cannon fodder for these wars.
The SYC opposes the extension of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state onto college campuses and high schools. We fight against the use of the universities and schools as direct agents of U.S. imperialism and have actively organized for years against ROTC, military recruiters, military research, the CIA and cop training on campus. We say: ROTC, military recruiters off campus now!
With the U.S. military straining to maintain a large occupation force in Iraq and fighting a global "war on terror," the capitalist rulers have been on a drive to expand the presence of ROTC and military recruiters on campus. For several years high school activists have been campaigning against a provision in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 stipulating that high schools receiving federal funding must give military recruiters students' personal information and the "same access" to schools as college and job recruiters. The drive to return ROTC to campuses such as Columbia University continues. An ROTC student-faculty task force there is evenly split on the immediate return of ROTC, but has voted overwhelmingly for the return of ROTC if the military's anti-gay "don't ask, don't tell" policy were abolished.
Students protesting military recruiters have been met with victimization and repression by campus administrations and the cops. On March 9, three students at the City College of New York (CCNY) were detained and brutalized by the police for protesting against military recruiters during a career fair. The three students, along with a CCNY staff member who was arrested two days later, face charges of assault and have been suspended from the college. And at William Paterson University in New Jersey, student Thomas Keenan was arrested and charged with defiant trespass for the "crime" of handing out flyers opposing military recruiters on February 28. The SYC demands: Drop the charges now! No reprisals! Cops off campus!
Marxism and Bourgeois Militarism
The military's discrimination against gays has been central to the legal battle over the Solomon Amendment—a law stipulating that colleges and universities must allow military recruiters onto campus as a condition for federal funding. This law was ruled unconstitutional by the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals last November on the basis that it violated the free speech rights of schools to bar an organization which openly pursued a policy with which they disagreed. The Justice Department has obtained a stay of this ruling while it prepares a challenge to it at the U.S. Supreme Court level.
Racism and social bigotry are intrinsic to capitalist society and therefore find their reflection in institutions such as the armed forces. As opponents of all manifestations of racial and sexual oppression we say: Down with anti-gay discrimination in the military! Yet we also understand that no amount of reform will change the fundamental purpose of the military: to uphold the capitalist system. This necessarily means that for the fight against militarism to be successful, it must go beyond the boundaries of the schools and colleges, and become a part of the struggle to overthrow the entire capitalist system. The working class uniquely has both the power and material interest to end this system by expropriating the means of production and abolishing capitalist private property through socialist revolution.
The military is an essential part of the capitalist state, the armed bodies of men—cops, courts and prison system— that exist to defend the capitalist rulers' "right" to exploit the working and oppressed masses. It defends capitalism not only through imperialist adventures and colonial plunder abroad, but also by violently repressing class and social struggle at home. From the slaughter of workers by federal troops in the historic Rail Strike of 1877 to the government's threats just over two years ago to have the military take over the ports if the West Coast longshore union dared strike, the military has been a key tool for strikebreaking. And from the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s to the 1992 L.A. upheaval in the wake of the acquittal of the cops who beat black motorist Rodney King, troops have been used to crush black protest. Student protesters against the Vietnam War also got a taste of this treatment, most infamously with the National Guard killing of four students at Kent State University in 1970.
Marxist opposition to bourgeois militarism is encapsulated in the call raised by heroic German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht during World War I: Not a man, not a penny for the imperialist military! An application of this is our opposition to signing up for the volunteer army. Correspondingly, revolutionaries oppose military conscription, which serves to turn the bulk of working-class youth into cannon fodder for imperialist wars. Since their humiliating military defeat in the Vietnam War, the U.S. rulers have been hesitant to reinstate the draft for fear of the opposition this would engender. Yet, sooner or later, the U.S. ruling class will be forced to reinstate the draft. The duty of revolutionaries, if drafted, is to go into the military with the mass of young workers and seek to win the working-class ranks to the fight for socialist revolution.
The Iraq War and the Left
Bourgeois militarism is an ideologically conservatizing force, serving to imbue workers and the oppressed with national chauvinism and unquestioning faith in "God and country." This is illustrated by the patriotic "support our troops" line pushed by both the Democrats and Republicans during the war and occupation, and echoed by much of the reformist left with their calls to "Bring the troops home now." Despite the working-class background of most of the rank and file, soldiers in the bourgeois army serve to defend the rule of the capitalist exploiters. For working people these are not "our" troops, but the troops of the U.S. imperialist butchers. Whatever the intention of the individual recruit, the reality of what it means to serve in the military can be seen starkly in Iraq today from the destruction and depopulation of Falluja to the Abu Ghraib den of torture.
The call to "Bring the troops home" is an accommodation to those who appeal to the U.S. rulers to get the American troops out of harm's way; this is what Lenin called social-patriotism—expressing concern primarily for the loss of American lives rather than for the victims of U.S. imperialist terror. This call serves to obscure the fact that working people in the U.S. should take a side militarily with the Iraqi peoples against the U.S. military occupiers. The blows directed against the U.S. imperialist occupiers and their Iraqi lackeys represent a just struggle by Iraqis against a neocolonial occupation. And responsibility for the deaths of American soldiers lies entirely with the U.S. ruling class. We say: Defend the peoples of Iraq against the occupation forces! All U.S. troops out of Iraq now! At the same time, we oppose the deadly communalist violence in Iraq against other ethnic, religious and national populations, which is often carried out by the very same forces fighting the occupation armies.
During the war we called for defense of neocolonial Iraq against the predatory U.S. imperialist attack without giving an iota of political support to the reactionary Saddam Hussein regime. While many reformist left groups such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and Workers World Party (WWP) today vicariously cheer the "Iraqi resistance," they rejected the call for defense of Iraq during the war. This was because it would have prevented them from uniting with bourgeois liberals who didn't want to take a side against U.S. imperialism and simply opposed the war because they didn't think it was the best way to advance the interests of American capitalism.
Behind many of the recent protests against military recruiters are coalitions and leftist organizations who organized the "antiwar movement" against the Iraq war. These include the ISO-dominated Campus Antiwar Network and its campus affiliates, the RCP's Not In Our Name coalition and the WWP youth group Fight Imperialism, Stand Together (FIST). The premise of the Iraq antiwar movement was that if the greatest number of people united in a broad movement, they could pressure the U.S. government to stop the war and occupation. The goal of the antiwar movement was, and continues to be, based on the fallacy that imperialism can be reformed and that the imperialist rulers can be pressured to make their system more humane, peaceful and democratic.
These reformist leftists would have you believe that the antiwar movement failed in its goals because they just didn't get enough people on board to pressure the government hard enough. The ISO lays out this reformist strategy explicitly: "To influence Congress, our most effective tool is not compromise, but a confident, coherent and growing opposition to the Iraq occupation. We should exploit every division at the top, even between Republicans, but this can only be done effectively by wielding a clear ideological counterweight, backed up by mass forces" (Socialist Worker, 18 February). The ISO also blames supposedly nefarious liberals, like their coalition partners in the leadership of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), for somehow sidetracking antiwar activists into campaigning for the Democratic candidate in the presidential election. Don't buy any of this!
The antiwar movement failed because you can't stop the imperialist rulers from going to war through pressure politics. Wars against neocolonial countries by imperialist nations, as well as wars between imperialist nations, are inevitable under capitalism. While the capitalist rulers may differ among themselves over tactics, imperialism is not a "policy" that the capitalist rulers can choose to carry out or not depending on their "conscience" or the will of the populace; it is a system based on cutthroat economic competition between nation-states over markets and spheres of influence. This competition is fought out ultimately in the military arena. This will always be the case until the working class destroys the capitalist system and replaces it with a society in which production is for the needs of all humanity, not the profit of a tiny minority.
Flowing from this is the understanding that a successful fight against imperialist war requires attacking the economic and social roots of war, not begging the capitalist rulers to make their system more humane. The only successful antiwar movement is the working class vying for power—like the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. As then-Trotskyist James Burnham stated in War and the Workers (1936):
"Since the victory of socialism, and this alone, will defeat war, every step on the path to socialism is a blow at war. In the struggle against war, properly understood, every militant workers' demonstration, every broad mass labor defense fight, every well-led strike, and in general every advance of the workers toward power, is worth a thousand ‘Peace Leagues.'"
War exposes the true nature of capitalism, concentrating the everyday, seemingly random violence of life under capitalism into one geographical area over a compressed period of time. In response to this, youth and workers often draw a pacifist conclusion. But this visceral reaction against the horrors of imperialist war must be turned into an understanding that it requires a class war against capitalism to put an end to war once and for all. The program of pacifism, on the other hand, is based on the false premise that peace can be achieved without overturning capitalism. In this sense pacifism is of great service to the capitalist rulers because it helps them channel discontent with war into an impotent movement crying out "Stop the War!" This is why a handful of capitalist "peace dove" politicians typically come out against the war (while, of course, "supporting the troops")—they appear on the platforms of liberal antiwar protests to keep the "movement" safe for capitalism.
Helping the imperialists keep the opposition to the Iraq war and occupation safe for capitalism are groups that claim to be revolutionary and anti-imperialist—ISO, WWP, RCP—who built the pacifist antiwar movement. Their call for the "broadest possible unity" meant eagerly seeking the participation of capitalist politicians, welcoming with open arms capitalist Democratic Party politicians like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich. From day one, pro-Democratic Party "Anybody but Bush" politics predominated in the antiwar coalitions and demonstrations these reformist leftists organized. Of course, after their vaunted movement dissipated, they complained that the liberals derailed the movement into voting for Kerry! And such complaints hardly deterred them from raising the call "Beat Back the Bush Attack" and bringing out their usual roster of "antiwar" Democrats at the recent March 19 protests against the occupation.
Illusions in the reformability of capitalism and in the Democratic Party as a supposed "lesser evil" are the key obstacles to the kind of working-class struggle that is so badly needed. We say: Break with the Democratic Party of racism and war! For a revolutionary workers party!
New Campaign, Same Reformist Program
The reformist left is now working overtime to dress up the same tired, old liberal-pacifist program that the antiwar movement was based on in new, militant, "grassroots" garb. Groups like the ISO are seizing on campus "counter-recruitment" and soldiers' resistance as the new vanguard in the fight against the occupation of Iraq. The argument that if you could just stop enough people from signing up for the military and get enough soldiers to refuse to serve, then the U.S. would have to end the occupation does have its appeal to youth who've never seen a serious mobilization of the social power of the working class. These youth have been sold the myth that the Vietnam War was ended through a mass pacifist movement of antiwar protesters and draft resisters.
Contrary to popular left mythology, what ended the Vietnam War was the military defeat of the U.S. imperialists by the revolutionary workers and peasants of Vietnam who carried out a social revolution that overturned capitalism. Not only did we call for victory to the Vietnamese revolutionaries at the time, but to this day we continue to stand for the unconditional military defense of Vietnam, China, North Korea and Cuba as countries where capitalism has been overturned. Unlike pacifists and anti-Communists like the ISO and RCP, we defend the right of these workers states, albeit deformed by Stalinism, to defend themselves against the imperialists, including through the acquisition of nuclear weapons. ROTC was successfully driven off hundreds of campuses in the late 1960s and 1970s not because of a mass pacifist movement, but because the U.S. was waging a losing war in Vietnam while facing massive social and class struggle in the U.S.
Scratch the "Revolutionary" Surface—Reformists Underneath
In contrast to the more explicit reformists of the ISO, RCP and WWP, the Progressive Labor Party (PL) couches its fight against military recruiters in high schools in revolutionary phrases: "We don't welcome the bosses' wars and we want military recruiters out of the schools. But we also know that opening the eyes of youth in and out of uniform to the need for, and possibility of, communist revolution lays the foundation for a red army of workers and youth to smash imperialist war for good" (Challenge, 17 November 2004). While the rhetoric may sound good, PL refused to take a side with Iraq against the U.S., writing on the eve of the war that the working class must "oppose both U.S. and Iraqi bosses" (Challenge, 5 February 2003).
PL clearly swam with the reformist stream as did all the other groups that refused to call for the defense of Iraq during the war, but to cover this up, they grotesquely distort Lenin. Today, in reference to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, PL writes: "Only Rebelling Soldiers Can ‘Bring The Troops Home' From All Imperialist War" (Challenge, 19 January). In this article PL falsely applies Lenin's program on interimperialist wars to Iraq today. Lenin's program for wars between imperialist nations was that workers have no side in such a war and that soldiers of all the belligerent countries should "turn the guns around," turning the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war against the capitalists. What PL hides is that Lenin made it quite clear that in the case of a war between an imperialist power and a country subjugated by imperialism, the duty of revolutionaries was to militarily side with the latter and favor the defeat of the imperialists. As Lenin wrote in Socialism and War (1915): "If tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia, and so on, these would be ‘just,' and ‘defensive' wars, irrespective of who would be the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory ‘Great' Powers."
Another group that touts its fight against military recruiters, the League for the Revolutionary Party, opposes the slogan "No to the Draft!" and promotes the "virtues" of a conscript army! In this they march in lockstep with bourgeois liberals like black Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel, who has introduced legislation for the reinstatement of the draft because "if policymakers in Washington knew that their kids would be placed in harm's way, their foreign policy of invading and bombing countries would cease and desist" (New York Amsterdam News, February 24-March 2). As was clear with student deferments during the Vietnam War and schemes like those George W. Bush took advantage of, the ruling class always finds a way for its sons to avoid being drafted into combat. Rangel's scheme is nothing other than a gross attempt to refurbish the credentials of racist U.S. imperialism in the eyes of black people and minorities by promising "democratization" of the armed forces.
Those who oppose the rapacious wars of U.S. imperialism abroad must also oppose the war drive at home. This means opposing the draconian assaults on civil liberties like the USA-Patriot Act, opposing the witchhunts in the universities against pro-Palestinian and leftist professors, as well as opposing recruiters for the armed forces. By failing to put opposition to military recruiters and ROTC in the context of the fight to abolish bourgeois militarism and imperialism, the reformist left's campaigns promote illusions in a reformed bourgeois military and a "democratic" imperialism. The SYC participates in struggles against military recruiters on campus, seeking to link these struggles to the social power of the working class, and to win youth to the understanding that only a revolutionary, proletarian fight against imperialism and bourgeois militarism can succeed. Join us!