As members of the National Guard are deployed to U.S. cities amid a government shutdown as the capitalist class cannot even decide how to appropriate its own budget amid implementation of its aggressive regime of austerity necessary to preserve itself, members of the armed forces in the United States turn to relief organizations for emergency loans and line up at food banks to feed their families. The facade of military privilege crumbles and it becomes clear that the material interests of enlisted personnel do not coincide with those of the capitalist state they are paid to serve, but with those of the working class.

The current crisis makes this brutally clear. The increasing economic impoverishment faced by military personnel and their families is not dissimilar to that of any other sector of the proletariat, living from paycheck to paycheck amid increasingly expensive cost of living. Shielded as they may be from rising prices due to government subsidized programs, many of these face cuts from veterans healthcare, housing subsidies and even proposals floated by the Trump administration to privatize the military commissary system by an independent corporation which were only rejected after dissent. While soldiers in the United States become wards of the state, acting in a way as indentured servants bound to the state through the duration of their contract, as professional soldiers they are paid wages in order to be recruited and retained, which many of their families still rely upon to meet their daily consumption needs.

Yet as capital attacks workers wages, so too are the U.S. militaries professional soldiers quality of life stagnating or in decline, called to make sacrifices under the patriotic rhetoric of “service” and “honor,” not to fight and die in a battlefield but to take more off their plate to feed the capitalist class, just as healthcare workers were persuaded to give up decent wages and workplace protections during the Covid-19 pandemic, while the capitalist class reaped historic profit margins. Members of the armed forces received a 5.2% pay increase in 2024, which was lower than inflation, which had peaked at over 9% in 2022 and remained high at 8.7% in 2023: wages chase inflation, always lagging behind, never catching up.

Soldiers who enlist are led to believe that their risks and sacrifices are devoted to noble causes: protecting Americans, defending democracy, ensuring national security. To promote this fairy tale, in 1947 the US government renamed the “War Department” the Department of Defense. Now the illusion has vanished with the restoration of the original title of “Department of War”. The reality is finally acknowledged: soldiers sacrifice their lives in defense of the imperial interests of capitalists while their families struggle with poverty.

Today in the United States the military and National Guard are being deployed in cities across the country under the guise of fighting crime and narco-terrorism, but the real reason is to prepare the military to be used against proletarians in the event of war or the next economic crisis; however, this is nothing new and while the capitalist class arrogantly thinks this is a risk free approach for itself, history proves otherwise.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the first major national labor uprising in U.S. history, erupting in July 1877 after the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O) imposed a 10 percent wage cut, the second such reduction within a year, amid a deep economic depression. The strike began in Martinsburg, West Virginia, where rail workers seized trains and refused to allow freight to move until their pay was restored. When the state militia failed to disperse them, the governor called on federal troops, marking the first large-scale use of the U.S. Army in a labor dispute. The strike spread rapidly along major rail lines through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri, halting rail traffic in much of the nation. In Pittsburgh, militia units fired on unarmed demonstrators, killing over 20 people and triggering a mass uprising that destroyed more than 100 locomotives, 2,000 railcars, and railroad facilities worth an estimated $5 million. In Chicago, tens of thousands of workers joined the movement, paralyzing industry, while in Baltimore, troops and crowds fought running battles that left multiple dead. By the end of July, an estimated half a million to one million workers had participated nationwide, including miners, textile workers, and iron molders, marking an unprecedented eruption of working-class solidarity across racial and occupational lines.

At the same time, in St. Louis, the strike took on an explicitly political character under the leadership of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS), an organization that had evolved from the American section of the First International (International Workingmen’s Association) after the General Council was moved to New York in 1872. The Workingmen’s Party organized strike committees and mass meetings, proclaiming that “the workingmen have no country” and calling for workers’ control of production. In late July, the St. Louis strike committee effectively governed the city for several days halting commerce, rail transport, and industry in what the press dubbed the “St. Louis Commune.” Modeled consciously on the Paris Commune of 1871. The federal and local authorities swiftly repressed it with combined militia, police, and federal troops, killing dozens and arresting strike leaders.

The strike also exposed the deep unreliability of state militias, many of which were drawn from the same working-class communities as the strikers. In several instances, militia units refused orders to fire on protesters, or openly sided with them. In Reading, Pennsylvania, members of the local militia joined the strike, while in Baltimore and Chicago, troops hesitated or mutinied rather than attack fellow workers. These acts of sympathy alarmed state and business leaders, who realized their traditional, volunteer-based militias were politically unreliable for suppressing labor unrest. In the years following 1877, state governments undertook sweeping reforms to reorganize, professionalize, and centralize their militias laying the groundwork for the modern National Guard. New legislation in states such as Pennsylvania (1878) and New York (1881) increased state funding, standardized training and discipline, and mandated construction of urban armories to ensure rapid deployment in future disturbances. These armories, many still standing today in major cities, symbolized a new, permanent apparatus of state military power aimed at domestic control, built in direct response to the upheaval of 1877.

The federal government also redefined its legal relationship to domestic deployment of troops. In 1878, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of federal army forces for domestic law enforcement without congressional approval, a reaction both to military overreach during Reconstruction and the federal troop interventions in the 1877 strike. However, this limitation was balanced by the Insurrection Act of 1807, which allows presidents to deploy the military or federalize the National Guard in times of “insurrection” or when state governments cannot enforce the law. This act has been invoked repeatedly to suppress labor unrest and civil uprisings, including during the Pullman Strike of 1894, the West Virginia mine wars, and various race riots in the 20th century. More recently, the Trump administration discussed expanding presidential authority under the Insurrection Act to override Posse Comitatus restrictions during domestic protests in 2020, reflecting a recurring tension between civil liberties and the use of military force in maintaining internal order, a tension that traces directly back to the lessons of the 1877 railroad strike.

In Russia, as World War I dragged on and casualties mounted, and soldiers faced hunger and cold in the trenches while the aristocracy and bourgeoisie lived in luxury, ordinary soldiers began to recognize their common cause with striking workers and rebellious peasants. When, in February 1917, regiments were ordered to fire on demonstrating workers, the soldiers instead joined them, turning their guns on the officers who ordered them to kill their class brothers and sisters. Soldiers’ councils emerged as political organs of revolutionary power: coordinating with workers’ and peasants’ councils, they first overthrew the power of the tsar, then that of the bourgeois provisional government.

In Germany in 1918, the mutiny of sailors in the Imperial Navy stationed in Kiel began when they refused orders to fight a suicidal battle against the British fleet: the officers sought a final “honorable” confrontation; the sailors refused to go to their deaths. The mutiny sparked councils of soldiers and sailors throughout Germany, leading to the fall of the Kaiser, but not to the establishment of proletarian power.

The role assigned to soldiers contradicts their immediate interests. They are trained and deployed to suppress workers’ strikes, quell protests, occupy foreign territories, and protect the interests of capital on a global scale. Yet their material needs, housing, food, security for their families, are the same as those of the working class. The capitalist state would fire them just as it gets rid of factory workers when profits demand it. Their pay is only slightly higher than that of a full-time minimum wage worker, but they face the prospect of deployment to the front lines, separation from their families, and obedience to orders that could cost them their lives.

When Russian soldiers in the early 1900s faced similar conditions, exhaustion, deprivation, being used as cannon fodder while their families starved, they understood that the enemy was not in the opposing trenches but in the palaces and officers’ quarters. When German sailors were ordered to die needlessly, they refused and sparked a revolutionary wave. Your refusal to serve as an instrument of capital’s violence will have a similar result tomorrow.

In revolutionary times, soldiers with the help of the active intervention of the communist party through its propaganda and agitation, will come to understand that their interests coincide with those of the international working class, with the exploited proletariat. This will lead to the organization of troops to defend themselves and refuse the role assigned to them as instruments of capitalist violence. When ordered to repress striking workers, occupy foreign lands, or defend corporate property, under the leadership of the International Communist Party, they will refuse and, together with all workers, overthrow the regime that oppresses them.

Historical experience shows that when soldiers identified with the communist line and rejected their assigned role as instruments of bourgeois violence, revolutionary transformation became possible. The Russian and German soldiers’ councils in 1917-1919 expressed this potential. It was certainly not an easy path, but one imposed by the very course of history.