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this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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Don’t confuse hatred of the institution with hatred of the people fed into it.
The U.S. military sells education, healthcare, housing, income, status, and stability in a country where those things are not guaranteed. That is not an accident; it is part of the recruiting bargain. A lot of people join because it is one of the few paths that looks structured and secure.
That does not make every service member personally responsible for U.S. foreign policy, defense contractors, or the political decisions that send people into wars. Criticize the machine. Don’t pretend every person inside it built the machine.
There is no draft, it is voluntary and some come from military families.
The draft does exist. Marketing/Advertising is the preferred tool. Military families are only one feed into the system, it's absolutist to think otherwise.
Joining it doesn't make you a fascist, especially if your baseline needs aren't being met it gives you choice. Systems this large have to be taken down from the inside.
That sounds a lot like "I was just following orders.... Because free healthcare and shit"
Look up Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Joining Military for free education and not being homeless doesn't mean you agree with or help the US. Most people leech resources intentionally and leave.
The US military is primarily comprised of middle class people who chose to participate in the subjugation of people infinitely poorer than them, in order to preserve their cut of the imperial spoils. Poor people who happen to join are also just vying to be allowed to enter the imperialist-peripheral class.
The machine and its components are part of the same process. To pretend otherwise is idealism, elevating some imagined internal essence of each indivual above the function they serve in material processes.
Even in your fantasy of an "innocent" génicodaire who only participates for economic privileges rather than because they personally believe in the fascist project, they're still selling out and killing their fellow workers for selfish benefit. The term for that is class traitor and they deserve no sympathy.
It's a fucking wild fantasy too. "Hey I was only a concentration camp guard because it financially benefited me, I'm not a fascist the machine I work at is fascist". Liberal nonsense
While anti-fascist extremism is not fascism, social-media extremism can accelerate fascist dynamics by normalizing the psychological and rhetorical habits fascist movements depend on: dehumanization, purity logic, collective guilt, and contempt for procedural restraint.
This is not materialism. It is moral flattening with Marxist language.
Yes, the U.S. military is an imperial institution, and service members are implicated in what it does. But treating an enlisted 19-year-old, a general, a defense contractor, and a senator as morally identical erases class pressure, hierarchy, coercion, and actual decision-making power.
People can be responsible without being equally responsible. Recruitment works because healthcare, education, housing, and stable work are inaccessible to many people. That does not make enlistment innocent, but it does make “they’re all just selfish class traitors” a lazy analysis.
The machine matters. So do the conditions that feed people into it.
You are dressing up moralism in Marxist language. Marxist materialism has fuck all to do with moral culpability, which is the topic at hand.
If you want to talk about the tactical utility of radicalizing current and former US soldiers, that is where a material analysis is useful. I'll toss whatever ethical considerations aside if it means advancing the liberation of the global working class.
But trying to use surface-level Marxist language to minimize the moral responsibility of fascist foot soldiers is equally hilarious and disgusting.
This still dodges the distinction.
If we’re talking moral culpability, then role, power, age, coercion, hierarchy, and decision-making authority matter. Treating a senator, a general, a defense executive, and a 19-year-old recruit as morally interchangeable is not materialism. It is flattening.
If we’re talking material analysis, then the recruitment bargain matters. The military offers healthcare, housing, education, income, status, and structure in a society where those are insecure for many people. That does not make enlistment innocent. It does mean the institution is reproducing itself through material dependency, not simply through millions of individually evil fascist choices.
“Implicated” does not mean “equally responsible.” That distinction is not liberal sentimentality. It is basic analytical precision.
You have no real argument so you're inventing shit to argue against, debate pervert.
You are the only one trying to quantify moral culpability, and you're the one trying to claim "materialism" in your "analysis" of the innocence of fascist foot soldiers. You're the one misusing baby's first Marxist terminology to try to morally whitewash the fascism inherent to every atom of the imperialist machine.
The imperialist machine reproducing itself through financial incentive isn't fucking insightful, it's basic Marxism 101 shit. It's also non-unique and fundamentally flattens moral considerations because everyone does what they do for reasons. And it's already been addressed why selling out your fellow workers for financial benefit isn't a defense.
Graduate from middle school and read more than half the Manifesto, I beg of you.
But it really is an indictment of the Western left that the sole purpose of your "material analysis" seems to be negotiating the minutiae of moral culpability of individuals in the fascist machine. Fully defanged bastardization of actual theory from people whose only exposure is memes and videos.
You’re not avoiding moral culpability. You’re making a moral claim and then refusing any distinctions inside it.
Calling every participant a class traitor who deserves no sympathy is not material analysis. It is a culpability claim. My point is not that material incentives make enlistment innocent. My point is that agency, hierarchy, coercion, information access, and decision-making power change the kind and degree of responsibility.
“Everyone has reasons” is not a rebuttal. Some reasons are structurally produced, some roles are coerced, some roles command, some profit, some design policy, and some are recruited into executing it. If your framework cannot distinguish those positions, it is not more radical. It is just less precise.
Yes, I understand the point you keep mindlessly parroting because I actually read your comments before replying. I'll address it once again: analyzing marginal moral culpability is a fundamentally idealist notion at best so to try to involve rudimentary "materialist analysis" is laughable. The system recreates itself, people are influenced by material interests, great. Baby-level Marxism.
If you want to do actual material analysis, first you're gonna have to put some work in and study concrete material data, not some abstract fantasy of a ~~clean wehrmacht~~ impoverished US soldier forced to kill people cause they wanna go to fucking college. Then use that analysis to determine the class character of different segments of the people you're examining, so that you can then identify real praxis opportunities, weak points in the structure, organizing and radicalization potential.
Then you can go out and do shit instead of bloviating about the marginal moral purity of fascist footsoldiers and questioning whether non-bootlickers have ever experienced "real hardship" like these "poor" middle class settlers (then panicking when your adhom doesn't apply and falling back on freshman-level debate tactics)
You are trying to exit the moral argument after making one.
“Class traitor,” “deserves no sympathy,” and “selling out fellow workers” are moral culpability claims. If culpability analysis is useless idealism, stop making culpability claims. If culpability matters, then agency, hierarchy, coercion, role, and decision-making power matter.
And yes, a serious class analysis would require concrete data about different segments of the military: class background, recruitment pathway, role, incentives, command authority, and organizing potential. That supports my point. It means distinguishing segments inside the institution, not collapsing recruit, commander, contractor, policymaker, and profiteer into one condemned category.
That is the difference between analysis and category assignment.
Again again: morality and moral statements are not what I'm arguing against, I'm arguing against a bastardization of baby-level Marxism that conflates material analysis for moral analysis to try to justify marginal culpability. From a moral perspective, I don't care what self-benefit you and your settler friends got from the child-killing machine, you're morally monsters and deserve to rot in pain.
From a Marxist perspective, we can examine the systemic mechanisms that produce this human behavior so we can try to engage with it to achieve desired outcomes, e.g. the liberation of the global working class (not the moral absolution of the white imperial "working" class). But to use echoes of memes of Marxist theory for a moralist analysis like you keep pathetically attempting to do is an idealist perversion of Marxism.
I'll remind you of the dumbass "argument" you tried to start this with:
You've obviously never been poor. Choice is a luxury.
You're right, the poor soldiers had no choice but to go to another country and kill a bunch of people. What else were they supposed to do? The dead civilians are so entitled, do they not realize that choice is a luxury?
Joining military gives them baseline needs so they gain choice. Most soldiers never get deployed, and if they do they can use the gained choice to employ Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
And the innocent people they kill, where do they factor in this?
Most service members never even enter combat. You're making assumptions based on media.
I've literally been homeless dumbass
Fuck off with your fascist apologia
Describe your experience and why you think considering nuance in a situation means agreeing or disagreeing to a "side" rather than analyzing the gray of every situation.
Go command someone else around, fascist.
Ad hominem is logical fallacy
Terminal reddit brain
Read settlers
Even if you accept a Settlers-style critique of the U.S. working class, it still does not follow that all participants in an imperial institution have identical agency, power, or culpability.
No one claimed they are equally culpable, I'm not interested in examining the marginal culpability of settlers and fascists. You're inventing arguments to contend with because your understanding of theoretical concepts is shallow
“I’m not interested in examining distinctions” is not a rebuttal to being accused of flattening distinctions. It is a confession.
My argument is not that enlistment is innocent. It is that a material analysis should distinguish recruitment pressure, command hierarchy, profit extraction, and policy-making power. If your framework treats those as irrelevant because everyone falls under the same condemned category, then yes, that is moral flattening with theoretical vocabulary.
Projecting.