By Benny Schaft
April 22, 2026
From ‘Stop the Draft Week’ in 1967 to protests against registration in the early 1980s, youth in the U.S. have resisted forced conscription.
Two weeks ago, the ruling class made a decision against the will of the people, taking the first steps toward reinstituting the draft by passing automatic registration targeting males between the ages of 18 and 26. In other words, they intended to send working-class youth to their deaths as they have done for centuries.
None of this is new. The capitalist class has always exploited every tool at its disposal to push young people into the military, to carry out the violence of the state against our comrades in the Global South. One of the most powerful of these tools has always been nationalism, convincing working-class youth that it is their patriotic duty to enlist and “spread democracy,” which is nothing more than a dog whistle for U.S. imperialism.
This justification has been recycled through war after war. It was used during the Spanish American War and the more than 61 year occupation of Cuba before the 1959 revolution. It was used to justify repeated interference in Haiti, interference that continues to this day against the will of the Haitian people.
It was used to justify the occupation of the Philippines, where the U.S. military committed crimes against the Filipino people, abandoned them to face imperial Japan and has continued meddling in that country ever since. Today we hear those same arguments directed at Iran, dressed up as concern for liberation, when the real goal is to install a pro-Western government and protect capitalist interests at any cost.
That is what this has always been about. Keeping a dying capitalist system alive, even if it means sending our generation to die in the process.
Beyond nationalism, the ruling class has another weapon: the economic draft. Rather than forcing enlistment outright, they manufacture the conditions that make the military feel like the only viable option. We see it clearly in the high school recruiters who specifically target working-class communities, making promises of stability, benefits and college tuition to young people already crushed beneath the weight of capitalism. This wasn’t really a choice; it was engineered.
The U.S. conflict in Vietnam made this impossible to deny. Over 300,000 Black troops were sent, alongside 170,000 Latine troops and between 35,000 to 42,000 Asian and Indigenous soldiers. The ruling class understood exactly what they were doing. They targeted these communities because they faced the harshest material conditions and were therefore the most vulnerable to exploitation.
What they did not anticipate was the response. Those same communities became the backbone of the revolutionary movement of the 1960s and 70s, the Black Power Movement, the Chicano Power Movement, the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the antiwar movement as a whole. Organizations like the Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets and AIM all called out the same hypocrisy — the U.S government sending youth of color to wage war against other youth of color abroad while treating those same people as less than human at home. That hypocrisy has not gone anywhere.
So why must we fight this draft registration? Because history has already given us the answer. It will target us, prey on our economic vulnerability and demand that we fight and die so the capitalist class can extract more profit while a collapsing system buys itself more time. We would be digging our own graves.
Like our comrades across the Global South who have sacrificed beyond imagination in their own struggles, we must draw a line and say simply: “Hell no, we won’t go!”
To even take one role in this war machine makes us complicit. If fighting back means organizing and educating our communities on what draft registration truly represents, then so be it. If it means teach-ins and study sessions on every campus in the country, then so be it. If it means bringing the encampments back, then so be that too.
We are living in a defining moment, a fight between a world where working people are truly liberated and a world where we are sent off to die while the capitalists make profit. We know which side we’re on.
