by Benny Schaft, published on Workers World, April 17, 2026
The news of automatic registration in the Selective Service System for young men between 18 and 26 years old shocked many. Since the news came as the U.S. was launching a major war with Iran, it felt like the military draft was about to be reinstated. Enlistment in the U.S. military would no longer be a career choice but an unpleasant and dangerous requirement.
The report — as of now — is that by December of 2026, any eligible men in the United States will be automatically registered for the draft. There has been no military draft, that is, conscription, in the U.S. for 53 years. The draft officially ended in January 1973, after most U.S. troops had been withdrawn from Vietnam.
The end of the draft was due largely to the revolutionary resistance carried out by the working-class youth who were a leading force in the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s, from rebellions on campus to resistance by troops in Vietnam. Troops organized actions that disrupted the war machine, anything from displaying symbolic messages against war to killing officers by rolling fragmentation grenades into their tents to joining the Vietnamese revolutionaries in their fight for liberation.
Revolutionary antiwar movements have been present in other wars. During World War I, the first imperialist world war, there was a surge in revolutionary action taken by people in the U.S. It included organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Socialist Party of America, whose leader Eugene Debs was infamously arrested in 1918 for telling the truth about the war.
In a speech in Canton, Ohio, on June 16, 1918, Debs said: “The master class has always declared the wars, the subject class has always fought the battles. The subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose, especially their lives.” (Zinn Education Project)
What the movements in 1918 and 1968 had in common was not only their opposition to the war but also their opposition to the draft. Both exposed what the military draft really is — a system to continue the exploitation of the people, to send them off to their deaths so that capitalism can survive and continue to exploit. It wasn’t the ruling class that ended the draft in 1973; it was the will and struggle of the people that forced them to end it.
And what replaced it, the volunteer system for a professional military, had its own predatory character. The new system allowed the ruling class to use the material needs of working-class youth for jobs and an income to push them into the military where they might have to kill or be killed. Some people called it an economic draft.
It’s a ruling-class policy
So now, with all of this said, you’re wondering how we make sense of the possible reinstatement of a military draft and what we do about it. The most important thing we must recognize is that the decision to bring back the draft and what’s going to happen in December is not merely a Trump policy or a Republican Party policy. It is a capitalist policy.
The draft will only be reinstated if a sector of the ruling class and its political and military representatives recognize that their system is in decline, and they are ready to take desperate military measures to restore their world dominance.
It’s why we’re seeing the MAGA regime take the mask off of U.S. imperialist domination and publicly embrace fascist tactics.
To stop the draft from being reinstated, we must organize and educate the people, because these two things are essential when dealing with a situation like this. We recognize that when it employs the military draft, it needs to keep the working class so disorganized and uneducated that they will believe the war propaganda.
If they succeed, it can make people believe that the war or other atrocities the capitalists are committing is somehow justifiable and in their best interest, when in reality it is to make the people willing to kill and die for the capitalists’ interests.
That’s why we must educate and organize ourselves and the people around us. We must break down every piece of what the draft means, if necessary. If it means taking to the streets in demonstration, even if the state attempts to intimidate us, then we must do it. Because we cannot allow ourselves, especially now, to be propagandized into turning weapons against our siblings in the Global South, who have already paid for their resistance to imperialism with their lives.