Pasadena Community College Protest against Military Recruiters, 12- 3:00 PM April 28th

Does the PCC political awareness club still sponsor Prevailing Winds Research? I have two of their publications.

Very compelling pieces of cutting edge reporting in the issues.

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.

from http://www.icl-fi.org/ENGLISH/2005/ROTC-846.html