A Los Angeles military collective, made up of veterans, high school students, and others recently met. In this collective, there are two high school students who are interested in joining the military to bring communist ideas and organize soldiers. Preparations in this critical task are essential for the success of any comrade.
Working class history teaches us that it is imperative to organize and win soldiers to have a successful communist revolution. The International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) has learned and continues to learn from the experiences of past and present comrades. These experiences will help the younger comrades to build on the overall work.
A veteran comrade reported about the work he did when he was in the US Army. He said that there would be plenty of opportunities that await young communists to not only bringing communist ideas to organize soldiers but also winning them to a communist vision. He affirmed that it is possible to reject the capitalists’ patriotic ideas and fight for communism.
From the outside, it seems intimidating to organize. But most soldiers are more like any other recently graduated working-class high school students. They have more similarities than differences. Most soldiers are forced into the military by the capitalist system because of lack of jobs or not having possibilities of going to the university. Once inside, they are put through excruciating circumstances and are forced to defend the capitalist system and its profits.
The Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam, among other places, have shown us that when soldiers are shown the truth of where they belong (with the international working class) combined with communist ideas they can be won to fight alongside industrial workers and peasants to destroy capitalism and build a new society.
The young comrades wanted to know more about how to do this type of work. We don’t have a step-by-step manual. But building good relations and strong friendships with soldiers are essential in taking the first steps. Getting to know how people think will help to determine how to approach each person or situation when presenting communist ideas. The opportunities to talk about politics and communism will abound given the current situation of the capitalist global crisis.
The military collective will continue meeting to further study, plan and develop the military work. We agreed that we should read about the current world situation, to understand and explain how the capitalist system works, its relation with the world crisis and how it’s affecting workers. We call on workers, students and soldiers all over the globe to build this critical work of the ICWP and encourage young people to join the military to prepare the ground work for communist revolution.
After the meeting, one of the high school students said, “As a comrade joining the armed services, I hope to create life long lasting bonds and meet trustworthy people. I know a communist world isn’t easy to build and won’t be a walk in the park. I, being enlisted, know there will be some patriots who will be willing to give their lives to defend the capitalists. I have to inspire people to turn the guns around on the capitalists and take back a world that always has been ours, a ‘workers world,’ one that belongs to the working class.”
Communist Soldiers and Sailors: Key To Bolshevik Revolution, Still Key Today
Heroes of the battleship Potemkin
During WWI, workers and soldiers organized the Russian Revolution. One of the most important victories for workers around the world, it was the first time workers led by communists took power in a country. The Bolshevik (Communist) Party, which organized and led the revolution, was founded in the early 20th century.
The Bolshevik leader Lenin saw the need to consolidate masses of workers, soldiers and their peasant allies into one revolutionary force that would concentrate its power and ideology in the fight to overthrow the tsar and capitalism. This would not be possible without winning the masses of industrial workers, soldiers and sailors to revolution. So how did they do it?
The Bolsheviks began their work in the armed forces in 1903 with limited distribution of communist literature to soldiers and sailors. With the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the resulting unemployment, starvation and chaos, discontent was increasing among angry workers and soldiers.
A mass rebellion by sailors on the battleship Potemkin in 1905, during the Russo-Japanese war, showed the tremendous revolutionary potential of masses of workers, peasants and sailors. Workers at the port of Odessa demonstrated in support of the sailor mutineers who took over the battleship.
When the tsar sent his Cossacks to quell the demonstration by killing many workers, the sailors pointed their gun turrets in defense of the workers.
As inspiring as this event is, sailors rebelled against the brass without sufficient Bolshevik leadership. The Bolsheviks realized that soldiers and sailors could and must be won as soon as possible to revolutionary ideas and the Bolshevik party. They created the Bolshevik Military Organization (BMO) in 1905 for this reason.
This collective organized leafleting and distribution of newspapers. It agitated and organized, and politicized soldiers for revolution. Communist soldiers led discussions and struggles in the barracks and trenches leading up to and during World War I.
Without this bold decision to organize massively in the military, the upcoming revolution of 1917 would not have been successful.
By 1917, a Russian general estimated that there were 2 million deserters. Soldiers left the German front in WWI to join with workers and peasants to collectively make the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution a success, responding massively to the call to turn the imperialist war into a revolution for workers’ rule. Within a year, the Red Army was created with the most class conscious and organized elements of the toiling class.
The Bolsheviks believed in the dictatorship of the working class, with a communist party mobilizing workers to build a socialist society where production benefited the whole working class, not the bosses’ profits. The Bolsheviks demonstrated that the masses of workers, soldiers and sailors can be won to revolutionary ideas, to making a revolution and taking power for the working class.
Their fatal error was their lack of confidence that workers and soldiers could understand the need to fight directly for communism, instead of socialism.
Today we know that soldiers, sailors and workers are capable of understanding communist ideas and fighting directly for communism. We are building an international party, to unite soldiers and workers of the world in one mass communist party.
This is an excerpt from our pamphlet, Soldiers, Sailors, Marines: Crucial to a Communist Workers’ Revolution
Pamphlet available here
