One thing that deeply irritates me is the way some American leftists talk about U.S veterans and imperial violence, because beneath all the Marxist language there is often this unspoken assumption that the rest of the world is supposed to emotionally process American empire in a way that is convenient for Americans. It's specifically the discourse surrounding the tactical necessity of American military veterans and it represents a profound distortion of both historical Marxist theory and contemporary material realities.
This argument typically manifests as a defense of U.S. service members against the "unprincipled" or "moralistic" anger of Global South populations, who are frequently chastised for alienating a demographic that American leftists claim will provide vital "military expertise" when "the revolution" inevitably arrives.
The argument usually goes something like this:
1. Veterans are working class.
2. Lenin argued communists must organize among soldiers.
3. Therefore hostility toward U.S veterans is politically immature, “moralistic,” or anti-materialist and "un-marxist" because soldiers can become revolutionary subjects and their military expertise will be necessary “when the revolution comes.”
To legitimize this position, chauvinistic elements within the Western left frequently weaponize Vladimir Lenin’s writings on the radicalization of Tsarist soldiers during the Russian Revolution. However, this theoretical transposition collapses under rigorous analysis, relying on a false equivalence that ignores the vastly different class structures, material incentives, and geopolitical positions of the 20th-century Russian conscript versus the 21st-century American volunteer soldier.
When Lenin wrote about the necessity of agitating among Tsarist soldiers, he was analyzing a peasant army composed of millions of intensely exploited, involuntarily conscripted laborers who were being meat-grinded in a catastrophic imperialist war. For the Tsarist soldier, "peace, land, and bread" were immediate, existential class demands that aligned perfectly with the Bolshevik platform. The Tsarist soldier was not a beneficiary of empire; he was its victim, forced at gunpoint to die for a monarchy that denied his family basic agrarian rights.
This distinction matters enormously.
Lenin’s argument was not:
“soldiers are inherently progressive.”
“colonized people must suppress hostility toward occupying forces.”
“all criticism of soldiers alienates the masses.”
The Bolshevik position was that communist movements cannot afford to abandon armed sections of the population entirely to reactionary politics, especially during periods where state legitimacy is weakening.
In stark contrast, the contemporary U.S. military is a highly professionalized, all-volunteer force that functions as the enforcement arm of global capital. The American soldier is not a peasant conscript but a contractual employee of the imperial core. While the "poverty draft" is often cited to argue that enlistment is entirely coercive, this framing obscures the specific class character of the U.S. veteran. Enlistment in the U.S. military is fundamentally an investment in upward class mobility within the imperial system. It is a transaction where individuals trade a period of service to the empire in exchange for a highly coveted bundle of social democracy: guaranteed healthcare, fully funded higher education, housing subsidies, and preferential hiring in state apparatuses.
Consequently, the political consciousness of the American veteran class is not defined by revolutionary potential, but by a perpetual cycle of grievance rooted in unfulfilled imperial promises. The material reality of the veteran experience is a chronic struggle against the bureaucratic failures of the state; such as the inefficiencies of the Department of Veterans Affairs, rather than an awakening to the systemic evils of imperialism. Their radicalism, when it exists, is almost exclusively reactionary; it is an anger that the state has broken its contract with them, demanding the compensation they feel they rightfully earned by subjugating the Global South. This grievance-based politics does not threaten the capitalist state; it is entirely siphoned back into the existing political apparatus. The veteran class is ritualistically invoked every four years by both bourgeois political parties as a symbolic prop to legitimize American nationalism, promised reform, and then promptly discarded until the next election cycle. Their primary collective orientation is the preservation of their unique benefits, which are directly funded by the value extracted from the very Global South populations American leftists order them not to alienate.
Furthermore, the leftist claim that the domestic movement requires the "military expertise" of veterans for a looming revolution is a fantasy untethered from material conditions.
Where is this revolution supposed to occur?
Emerging from what mass base?
Against what degree of state legitimacy?
Following what economic rupture?
With what organizational infrastructure?
With what relationship to organized labor, racialized surplus populations, migrants, or the global south?
Under what conceivable circumstances is a synchronized, armed proletarian uprising manifesting within the heavily militarized, heavily surveilled heart of the global hegemon?
The United States lacks both the vanguard organization and the broad-based class consciousness required to orchestrate a structural overthrow of capital. By centering the veteran as an indispensable tactical asset, American leftists reveal a deeply romanticized, militaristic understanding of revolutionary change that prioritizes combat aesthetics over actual mass organizing.
The ultimate irony of this position lies in its profound historical and ongoing betrayal of internationalism. The very "military expertise" that Western leftists fetishize is a euphemism for the operational knowledge acquired by executing counter-insurgency warfare, drone strikes, and resource theft across the Global South. The American veteran class is expertly trained not to launch revolutions, but to systematically crush them wherever they emerge in the periphery. To demand that victims of U.S. imperialism suppress their rage under the guise of "Marxist discipline" so that Western leftists can hoard imperial managers for a hypothetical domestic uprising is a textbook display of social-chauvinism. It subordinates the real, material suffering of the global proletariat to the theoretical convenience of leftists residing safely within the metropole.
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