Mark, thanks. I think we have narrowed it usefully, so let me take the two things you actually pressed and leave the rest where it stands.
First, the all-volunteer force. You are right that 1973 was a deliberate move to stop depending on a conscripted cross-section of the working class and that this cuts against any "conscription gives us better agitational access" framing. Good, because that was never my argument. It was yours. My objection to the pro-draft proposal was precisely that it locates the brake on imperialism inside the state's recruitment apparatus rather than in independent class action. You have now supplied the historical proof: when the state found a conscript army inconvenient, it abolished the draft and bought professionals with our taxes. That is exactly why I do not want our program to rest on which staffing model the state happens to choose. The state controls that lever; we do not. An anti-militarist program that depends on the state keeping conscription is a program the state can defeat by signing one executive order, which is what happened. On the PMP I think we are actually close. You call the 1940 resolution a relic but say the foundational concept survives: to organize the class, you have to be where the class is. I agree with that as a sociological truism. The disagreement is whether "be where they are" entails fighting for proletarian control of military training as a transitional demand, which is what made the PMP the PMP rather than just good organizing sense. If Europe conscripts like 1935 and we organize among conscripts, that is not the PMP; it is what defeatists have always done inside mass armies. The PMP added a specific positive demand on the bourgeois military, and that is the part the third-camp critique rejects and the part Cannon's WWII drift exposed. So "we may choose the PMP" smuggles in more than "we may organize among conscripts." Keep the second; I am with you. The first is the thing in dispute. Now the real hinge: "what you read as support I read as subversion." This is the sentence that matters, so let me be exact about why I do not think it dissolves the objection. Subversion of an army is a tactic the third camp fully endorses: fraternization, encouraging desertion and mutiny, breaking discipline from below, and turning the guns around. None of that requires a comparative ranking of states, and none of it grants political support to any government. You can subvert the German army and the British army in the same war, symmetrically, with no claim that either state is the lesser evil. That is the whole point of the symmetrical reading. What I called support in Pröbsting is something else. It is the move from "the US is the greater power" to "therefore, the semi-colonial or sub-imperialist belligerent's war effort gets our political backing." " That is not subversion of an army. It is endorsement of a state's war aims on the basis of a ranking. The two are not the same operation, and collapsing them is how "subversion" ends up laundering campism. So the question I would put back to you is simple: is your "subversion" symmetrical across both belligerents, or does it attach to one side because of where that side sits in the imperialist hierarchy? If the former, we agree, and the word "support" was never warranted. If the latter, then it is support after all, and we are back at point 7, because the comparative ranking is again doing the work. Which is the thread through all of it. The PMP, the draft proposal, and "subversion" all share one structure: each tries to find an anti-imperialist lever somewhere other than the independent action of the working class. The PMP looks for it in a demand on the state's army; the draft proposal looks for it in the state's recruitment model; the campist reading looks for it in the ranking of states. The third-camp answer is the same in all three cases. The lever is the class, acting on its own account, against its own ruling class first, and refusing to be conscripted into anyone else's state project, recruiter, or enemy. I look forward to your specific comments. In solidarity, Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42220): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42220 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119987077/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
