this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Thoughts? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 2 days ago by Marat@lemmygrad.ml to c/genzedong@lemmygrad.ml
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Genuinely dont have anything to say. Not that I agree or disagree but I just wanna see everyone else's opinions first

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[–] MarxMadness@hexbear.net 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Spitballing here:

  • If a variety of people with various degrees of leftist credibility all raise a similar idea, it at least shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
  • How easy is it to fool someone who's 17 or 18?
  • "I was propagandized" is not an absolution from all personal responsibility, but when the vast majority of entertainment and cultural/political/religious leaders in the U.S. tell people joining the military is fine (or even noble), that carries some weight.
  • Education is a huge part of building a political movement, and education implies your audience doesn't have all the right answers to start.
  • It's really hard to think of revolutionary movements that did not have a lot of help from people who once worked for the enemy. Maybe Cuba?
  • It's really easy to think of examples of revolutionary movements that took revolutionary stances on how they treated even potential enemy turncoats. Mao: "Our policy towards prisoners captured from the Japanese, puppet or anti-Communist troops is to set them all free, except for those who have incurred the bitter hatred of the masses and must receive capital punishment and whose death sentence has been approved by the higher authorities."
  • There's a contradiction between identifying structural problems and attributing them to the capitalist class, but also insisting on harsh treatment of low-level individual servants of the capitalist class.
  • There's a contradiction between leftist views on criminal justice generally and an insistence on harsh treatment of those same low-level servants of capitalism.
  • Telling a bunch of guys with guns that they deserve to die and there's nothing they can do to change that will get them to continue to fight. The way to get them to quit is to tell them there's a way they can go home.
  • The gap between the harshest rhetoric and actually trying to build a real-world movement reminds me of this line from Parenti: "They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted."
[–] amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 1 day ago

It’s really hard to think of revolutionary movements that did not have a lot of help from people who once worked for the enemy. Maybe Cuba?

I can't help but wonder if some speak in a defeated way about the potential of western marxism in part because of the kind of dismal evaluation of the military combined with this kind of view. If the belief, for example, is that US military, active and veteran, are by and large voluntary and enthusiastic war criminals, then the prospects for revolution are going up against all of that, rather than recruiting help from "defectors" (because "how could a revolution trust war criminals to help with a liberation movement").

The general answer to this appears to be something like, "Recruit from the most oppressed groups", which sounds good on paper, but it still doesn't directly address how you go about dealing with how many have military experience and would be treated as off-limits for assistance because of their tainted association, and how many of those you could end up fighting instead of finding ways to get them to, at the very least, consider it not worth the risk.

[–] Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 9 points 2 days ago

It's really hard to think of revolutionary movements that did not have a lot of help from people who once worked for the enemy. Maybe Cuba?

Castro actively recruited defectors from the Cuban Army to build his own partisan army.