The economic draft is the enforcement mechanism of the broader system of colonial capitalism. The economic draft is the silent mechanism of Christian Colonial Capitalist Violence (CCV) that weaponizes the existential necessity of survival to compel labor for the military. Unlike the legislative conscription of the 20th century, which used legal mandates and the threat of prison, this contemporary draft leverages economic conditions to force participation in extractive and militaristic industries. The New Conscientious Objector (NewCO) is the response to this entrapment, that refuses participation in the entire fused architecture of systemic violence.
The Overarching System: Colonial Capitalism
The economic draft functions through a three part strategy of coercion:
- The Poverty Draft: Captures the disenfranchised by concentrating recruitment in low-income areas where the military is the only viable path to basic needs like healthcare and education.
- Job Lock: Secures the working class by tying healthcare to employment, preventing individuals from responding to NewCO vocations that lack corporate benefits.
- Indentured Servitude: Conscripts the educated class through the $1.7 trillion student debt burden, which acts as a disciplining force to divert intellectual capital into high-paying corporate or defense sectors.
The NewCO response integrates the pillars of LANDBACK, Mutual Aid, and Abolition to make these coercive systems obsolete.
- Mutual Aid provides the necessary “rations”—unconditional food and care—that allow a person to “desert” the economic draft without facing starvation.
- Abolition removes the carceral enforcers who protect the property relations of the draft through evictions and the criminalization of poverty.
- Finally, LANDBACK provides the foundation for a Social Solidarity Economy (SSE) that functions outside the logic of the market, addressing the original theft that enabled market dependency.
