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.
If 25% come from an area (not a household) with a median income of over $65K annually, doesn’t that mean that 75% – an overwhelming majority – come from areas that make less than that?
We can’t simultaneously say “the middle class has been hollowed out/the costs of a college education have skyrocketed/even once-professional jobs are being proletarianized” but then turn around and say that if your family makes more than $33K you can’t really claim to have been roped in to the military by your material conditions. Sure, the military isn’t primarily made up of the poorest among us. But we can’t say it’s mostly middle class either, because if you’re raising a family on $50K, you aren’t middle class in much of the country.
The other important point here is that a lot of troops are recruited as children, after being fed wall-to-wall lies about what the military actually does, all at the behest of the most pervasive propaganda machine ever created.
They’re not the poorest among us because they’re not homeless or part of the apartheid labor underclass of undocumented immigrants - or at least the vast majority are not.
But sure, on the scale within the imperial core, the military pulls from poorer families. However, this does not justify the murder of others, let alone doing so to advance the interests of capital exporters. Propaganda plays a very heavy role here and it’s one that makes them violent chauvinists, it’s how they get recruited, it’s how they justify their crimes, it’s how they rationalize themselves as a special class of “civilians” later, it’s why vets become cops and chuds so ridiculously often. Finally, materialists will understand that classes and other groupings of people are the product of their conditions. All of the classes and groupings. Academics, thieves, volunteers, Nazis. But it’s very important to separate an understanding of the genesis of these groups of people and sympathizing with them, or reminding oneself to do so for a heinous enemy group in particular.
Unrepentant vets must be treated like cops; you can only consider them assets for socialism if they reject the systems they supported as well as their part in doing so. And they are not ripe for the picking by default; they have a lot more shit to work through to end up a socialist than the average imperial core citizen.
Great points all around. Whatever someone’s background or the lies they’re exposed to growing up, there’s no justification or excuse for playing a role in the imperial death machine. However, these might be mitigating factors, and almost everyone should have a path back to society, even if they commit serious crimes. We really need to iron out the contradiction in how we talk about people who commit violence in a criminal context and people who commit violence in an imperial context. Assuming similar individual acts, I don’t think there’s a big difference between someone who joins a gang at 17 and someone who joins the Army at 17. So we can’t talk about rehabilitation and decarceration on one hand and then turn around and use “law and order” rhetoric on troops.
Unrepentant vets must be treated like cops; you can only consider them assets for socialism if they reject the systems they supported as well as their part in doing so. And they are not ripe for the picking by default; they have a lot more shit to work through to end up a socialist than the average imperial core citizen.
Also great points, although I’d add one thing to your last sentence (and least with respect to non-chud troops). They may have more of certain types of shit to work through to become a socialist, but a lot of them don’t glamorize the military the way even a lot of left-leaning libs do. They’ve seen the business end of imperialism, or are at least close enough to it to know the propaganda is bullshit. That can be useful, as can the narrow but vibrant tradition of “my buddies are alright, but everyone above us is corrupt/callous/out to lunch/ignorant.” This stuff isn’t a step directly towards socialism, but it’s a step outside political orthodoxy, which is at least headed in the right direction.
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
aha ok, it’s only a tenth, then fuck them
my point is that both groups exist
The only notably overrepresented group among recruits are Indigenous people
I know, I basically just use any opportunity to spread that article around to disabuse people (not you, just other readers) of the notion that soldiery is necessarily proletarian or that soldiers as a class have revolutionary potential. It has been a very popular framing, especially in the Bush years (which shaped the political minds of the generation currently vomiting their shit takes all over the pages of every paper of record).
