“Less than 1% of Americans are willing and able to serve.”
—U.S. Major General Jeffrey Snow, the U.S. Army’s top recruiting boss (The Economist, 10/24/15).

The U.S. capitalist rulers are worried. U.S. imperialism still dominates the world, over the rival gangs of bosses ruling Russia and China. But in a relative sense, U.S. power is declining. The bosses see their options narrowing. To preserve their empire in the next big ground war, they know they’ll need to draft masses of U.S. workers to slaughter and be slaughtered. They’ll need workers to sacrifice their lives for the capitalists’ narrow interests.
On October 24, The Economist, a British magazine owned by the pro-U.S. Rothschild and Agnelli (Fiat-Chrysler) families, published “Who Will Fight the Next War?”
[T]he civil-military disconnect… concerns America’s future ability to mobilise for war….when the army next needs to surge, it will be for a war much bloodier than the recent ones…..America may be unable, within reasonable cost limits and without reinstituting the draft, to raise the much bigger army it might need for such wars.
U.S. Bosses in Disarray
The dominant, imperialist, finance capital wing of U.S. capitalism inevitably needs to confront its enemies with armed force. Russian and U.S. imperialists are already indirectly fighting one another by financing and arming warring factions in Syria’s bloody civil conflict. Top U.S. strategists see Syria, with its strategic location in the oil-rich Middle East, as just one of many hotspots bringing direct conflict closer. Neither the U.S. nor Russia can afford to cede control over that critical region without a fight.
But as it stands today, two obstacles block the U.S. bosses from fielding 500,000 troops anywhere. The first consists of U.S. capitalists at odds with the dominant, finance capital wing. The domestically oriented Koch brothers, lacking trillions of U.S. dollars invested in the Middle East, do not share the finance capital wing’s imperialist vision or needs. Koch-organized funding, amounting to $889 million (New York Times, 1/26/15), will play a major role in choosing the Republican Party’s presidential candidate for the 2016 election.
The influential Brookings Institution is an organization that helps formulate U.S. imperialist policy. It gets most of its funding from JPMorgan Chase, the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. government, and the government of Qatar, home to the U.S. Air Force’s main base in the Middle East. Brookings recently released a book titled The Future of Land War, the first installment in a series called “Order from Chaos.” Designed to guide presidential candidates as well as their capitalist backers, Land War explores the most likely flashpoints for clashes between major imperialist powers—the 21st-century Pearl Harbors. One is “a major [war] in the Middle East, perhaps in Syria.” Another is “a Russian invasion threat to the Baltic [countries].”
The history of fascist movements in Nazi Germany, Japan and Italy, before and during World War II, shows us that capitalist disorganization is temporary. As the global stakes become higher for the U.S. bosses, sooner or later the dominant finance capitalists will use their state power either to force their rivals to play along or to cut them out completely. One early sign of this development is the bosses’ recruitment of Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House of Representatives. His job is to keep the imperialist machinery running smoothly and bring the Tea Party right-wingers to heel.
The Bosses Need the Working Class…
But the bigger obstacle by far for the U.S. bosses is mass working-class opposition to imperialist war. This healthy attitude stems in part from the vast, militant, anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when the working class in Vietnam and large sections of students and workers in the U.S., led by Black workers, actively fought back.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party played the most politically significant role in this struggle. We led strikes and protests in factories and on campuses attacking U.S. war-makers. We exposed the fake “communist” North Vietnamese leaders as just another bunch of capitalists who wrapped themselves in the red flag.
…Workers Don’t Need Bosses
PLP fights to build a mass international party of millions that can turn imperialist war into a class war against capitalism and smash this rotten system once and for all. The bosses are right to be worried about a working class armed with revolutionary communist ideas!
During the Vietnam War, instead of encouraging students and workers to avoid the military draft, PL’ers led rebellions and anti-racist fightback inside the military. From Vietnam to bases across the U.S., PLP organized, joined, or supported anti-racist struggles to help build international working-class consciousness.
Mindful of Vietnam-era mutinies, the Brookings Institute envisions a compulsory U.S. troop building program. Land War proposes “[o]bligatory national service for the nation’s youth….[M]ilitary service should be just one option among many, with the armed forces themselves having a major say on whom they would accept.”
Fascist Terror Reveals Bosses’ Weakness
Amid the current economic misery and racist police terror, it’s no wonder that U.S. workers aren’t rushing to enlist. As their mad-dog police murder Black youth across the country and millions are permanently unemployed, the bosses can’t possibly inspire working-class loyalty.  They have only one alternative: the imposition of fascism.
Fascism is capitalism in crisis, the way the bosses rule when they are weak and desperate to keep control. Within the ruling class, it means bringing rivals like the Koch brothers into line—by force, if necessary. For the working class, it means more open state terror.
But this crisis of loyalty can also be an opportunity for communists and class-conscious workers around the world. Capitalism means perpetual imperialist war, with rival powers relying on the working class to do the fighting and dying. Communism, with the leadership of PLP, means arming the international working class with revolutionary ideas. It means fighting for a world without imperialism, capitalism, racism or sexism. We are open to all workers, students and soldiers. Join us!