I’ve been seeing a bad line of thinking in leftist spaces and in myself and I feel the need to call it out.
The western left’s demonization of the class unconscious proletariat is a symptom of idealism that seems sadly acceptable in leftist social media spaces. Class consciousness is not an achievement to be proud of, you didn’t do it, it happened to you.
Labor aristocracy is not a “sin” of the western working class it is a weapon of the bourgeoisie. Unique material conditions are what lead each of us to class consciousness not some sort of moral/intellectual/educational supremacy. The limited class consciousness in the west’s working class is not an inherit flaw in the masses but a failure of the class conscious to conduct effective agitation. (the word “failure” is not a condemnation but recognition that we have been unable to succeed against the overwhelming power of the imperialist bourgeoisie.)
This extends to demonization of the troops. Yes members of the western armed forces actively benefit from imperialism and do horrific things supporting imperialism but they do this out of a response to their material conditions not because they are evil. That is not to say they are absolved of their crimes. It means many of them could be redeemable.
We have all had liberal and imperialist ideas that we now recognize are wrong. We must be willing to accept those who admit the faults of their past who are willing to fight for a better future. Anyone refusing to forgive comrades who admit to a flawed past is being dishonest about their own flaws. They are engaging in ideological moral supremacy. It is not a dialectical materialists position to refuse something changing into its opposite.
Again this is not a call to absolve the complicit but instead a call to remind us that we have all been complicit in some way and we are the proletariat not above them.
Not an American and I feel like the past few weeks have been an absurd fever dream with the constant imperial troop apologia going on around here.
Yes everyone can be theoretically reformed given enough time and resources. Even the einsatzkommandos who were burning soviet villages to the ground in 1942 were probably reformable but focusing on that while they were in the middle of enacting a genocide would be obviously extremely dehumanizing towards their victims. Puyi was reformed after he was put on trial for war crimes and was no longer a threat to anyone else. We can focus on reforming imperial troops after they have been disarmed and routed and are not an active threat to the majority of the world. Western leftists need to take a break and ask themselves why out of all possible battles they are picking this particular one at this time and consider how tone deaf it feels to everyone else.
Yes, people sign up due to their material conditions not out of some moral inadequacy. The material conditions in this case are the superprofits the imperial core sucks out of the rest of the world and the fact that they have enjoyed several decades of unrivaled military hegemony. Yes some imperial troops do get got but for most of them war has been a fun human safari where they get to call overwhelming firepower on poor brown people. And yes, troops are still net beneficiaries of imperial explioitation, I can’t believe we are actually debating this. The imperial war machine being defeated and driven out of its neocolonies and made unable to outsource the worst of the suffering required to keep capitalism running to the global south will change those material conditions so your support is better directed towards the axis of resistance.
I am begging americans to stop, take a deep breath, then make a serious effort at considering the perspective and struggles of the global south that is actively being bombed, starved and terrorized. Ask yourselves if writing paragraphs upon paragraphs about reforming the people actively engaged in dropping bombs is really the best you can do right now as communists who believe in international solidarity.