First, sorry if this isn’t the best community for this kind of thing, but I hope you will engage with me regardless. Now…
Warning: This post will be US-centric as far as specific information pieces like tax rates, but I am under the impression the underlying principle can apply to any nation in the West and those aligned alongside it (looking at you, Japan, South Korea, and NATO).
So, to survive in the Imperial core, you essentially have to hold a job if you aren’t a capitalist or landlord. You earn a wage, and use that wage to not starve and maybe have a roof overhead.
A portion of that income is taxed. In the US, the typical working class person gives roughly ~30% of their income to the nation-state as taxes. Here is where the crux lies:
Yes, some of that money does go toward worthy things like maintaining roads, funding medical care for some people, some social programs, etc., but…
Of the fiscal year 2023 federal budget, about ~37% goes toward military past (think interest on loans taken out in order to kill people) and current costs. This does not include all Department of Homeland Security and all State Department, though those are “partially” included in military.
So an average US based full time worker works about ~8 paid hours a day, plus or minus some depending on specifics, but ~8 is considered the standard.
About a third of that time is taken by the government in the form of taxes. And about a third of that time is used to fund military shit.
A third of 8 hours is about 2.6 repeating. A third of that is 0.8 repeating. So a little under an hour (roughly 53 minutes) each day is spent helping the military. A week that is about 4.4 repeating hours. Do the math and that time helping the military murder people adds up.
This makes every US worker an accomplice to murder, whether they like it or not. It doesn’t matter if you are a factory worker, barista, or paid anti-war activist for an NGO, everyone in the US paying income tax is helping kill poor people.
Now that I’ve established that, I have another point to make from a moral perspective: if you have the power to help people (or stop hurting people), it is your moral duty to do so.
If you are walking down the street and you see a child (or any person really, it isn’t the fact that it is a child making it imperative you save them) in a pond drowning, and you can swim, then you absolutely must stop, get in there, and save that child. It doesn’t matter if you’ll get your suit all muddy and wet and you have to present at some meeting soon, or whatever. You must go in there and save them.
And then obviously, if you don’t have the capacity to help people (or stop hurting them), then you can’t be expected to carry out that moral imperative.
So for the drowning child example, if you can’t swim, you can’t be expected to go out and save the kid. Or if you can’t reach the pond for whatever reason, like a physical barrier is blocking you, then you can’t be expected to save the child.
Now, this imperative extends to everything in life. For example, you have to buy a shirt because your other shirts are for whatever reason unusable as a shirt anymore. You are presented with two choices: a shirt made using slave labor and a shirt made voluntarily. It is you moral imperative to get the shirt using voluntary labor. It doesn’t matter if it is not as pretty. It doesn’t matter if you like the brand less. Those are of moral in-consequence. Using slave labor is bad.
Now, back to my original question: As long as material conditions are such that a revolution is impossible, if you have the capacity to leave the Imperial Core and stop paying taxes, you must do so. Staying would mean you are helping murder people. It does not matter that moving, especially abroad, is inconvenient. It does not matter that it might mean you need to learn about and get used to a new culture. It doesn’t even seem to matter (correct me if I’m wrong) that your extended family will be sad, if they aren’t dependent on you for their life or welfare (thus creating a moral barrier preventing you from being about to go), then it is your duty to stop aiding and abetting murder. It doesn’t even matter if emigrating might mean a noticeable drop in your standard of living, as long as you can meet all your human needs and expect to live a similar life expectancy then it is your duty to go.
Now, obviously I am assuming that such a person who takes these things into consideration should also behave respectfully when they arrive at their destination. They will treat locals with love, kindness, and respect. They will strive to do work that is fulfilling and aids society while meeting their needs. They will speak the local language to the best of their ability and be respectful of local traditions and customs. In a Marxist context, this person would also continue to build resiliency and community in their new home, aiding the working class by way of praxis.
I am also going under the assessment that a communist revolution will not happen in the relevant Imperial Core countries in a reasonable time to morally justify staying and continuing to pay into this war tax system in the meantime.
Also, obviously this moral imperative doesn’t apply to people who can’t leave. If you can’t afford to move, you can’t afford to move. If you can’t get permission from a qualifying non-imperialist nation state to legally enter, then you can’t go.
Comrades, am I missing something? Where is my argument flawed if it is flawed? Is there a justification to continue to pay into the war system when you have the option to stop?
Please note: These thoughts are influenced by Peter Singer’s 1972 paper titled “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” and then applied to my current understanding of material conditions in the US (and extended to some degree to the rest of the Imperial core based on what I hear from comrades, friends abroad, and media intake [both reliable and less reliable]). I am not aware of any Marxist literature which might cover these sorts of dilemmas, so if you have suggestions, I’m all ears eyes. Lastly, if you downvote, please say why so I (and maybe other comrades too) can learn and grow from it.
Get yourself educated in a field that will be useful where you intend to go, we’ve got enough people teaching English without formal training. Braindrain is a serious problem in the periphery, we lose many of the engineers and doctors we train down here to the core. Bring useful skills, be prepared to work for the benefit of the of people in the land you relocate to. Take out loans in the core and bring that money with you, consider not repaying said loans.
Be humble when you come. You’ll inevitably be frustrated by differences in ways things are done, don’t criticise untill you’ve spent at least five or more years and have some real understanding of why things are as they are. Learn the language.
Lets pretend for the sake of argument that morality isn’t a spook that should disregarded entirely. If everyone who wants to destroy imperialism moves out of the country, revolution isn’t going to happen. After all, who will be around to carry it out?
And even then, that is an extremely heavy “if”. There is a point in which you have to start wondering if the scenario you are suggesting has any realism at all.
Comrades, am I missing something? Where is my argument flawed if it is flawed? Is there a justification to continue to pay into the war system when you have the option to stop?
According to Vorlander, ‘The moment anyone started to talk to Marx about morality, he would roar with laughter’ (Vorlander, 1904, p. 22; Lukes, 1985, p. 26).
I apologize in advance, but I find that this was a rather bizarre read. Almost like reading a text from those early proto-socialists of hundreds of years ago, before Marx, that were able to identify a problem but in response came with rather strange solutions to it.
As them, you identify accurately that the workers of imperialist nations are funding with their labor the war machines that the bourgeoisie uses to carve up the global south and exploit them in their pursue for the accumulation of capital. However, you have come up with a moral answer to it, all while ignoring the most important thing: is it useful?
Sure, moving abroad will make you cease paying a small share of your income to the military, and you may feel good thinking about it. But do you truly believe that this will hinder imperialism in any way? Perhaps you could argue that could make a difference if a noticeably large abount of people joined you: do you expect then that to ever materialize as a real event? Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of your country’s citizens leaving en masse to the global south in an organized movement to stop imperialism to be something that could happen in the future? Or does that sound to you as a rather idealist solution to pursue in comparison to a worker’s revolution?
A communist’s solutions are not based on an abstract and idealistic sense of morals: they are strategic and based on the pursue of real results in a material world. This is the only way to stop imperialism (and thus, ironically, what you could consider to be the moral choice).
