>1. Soldiers. First, under most circumstances people choose to join the
>army, even in countries that have conscription, let alone in the US that
>depends entirely on a mercenary force. Even in conscription countries, you
>can become a conscientious objector -- which may not be convenient for you
>but is not life threatening either. It is quite obvious that most soldiers
>choose the "military glory" - some for pecuniary reasosn (career, college
>tuition), others for macho status, still other for the need of discipline
>or other quasi sexual motivation.
Are you positing an 'all-nature' explanation for choices, then? Hardly anyone will agree with you if you do. Societies 'stack the deck' to force certain choices. Military service for men is one of those choices. Imagine a country today that treated its soldiers much as did the Roman Empire: food, clothing, shelter, *long* enlistments, no benefits afterward apart from the freehold of a tiny farm out in the subjugated boonies. Imagine, too, that violence for any reason were strongly deprecated, such that anyone going into the army would get a status rather like the public hangman -- shunned socially.
How many volunteers would there be? Not too many, I bet!
Societies constrain choices and then call them free. Let's not kid ourselves that it's ever otherwise.
>
>BTW, soldiers are not "working class" - since class is not an ascribed
>status or cultural identity, but the status that results form the relations
>to the means of production. Soldiers and policemen, while they do not own
>the means of production and sell their labor for wages, they are
>nonetheless agents of the state whose main responsibility is to uphold the
>existing property relations. While the selling-their-labor part may
>qualify them as a 'working class in itself' - the second part essentially
>precludes (or at least makes it extremely unlikely) them from gaining class
>consciousness, hence becoming a class in itself.
By your definition, then, there exists no working class at all! That doesn't seem a fruitful way to look at things, to me, so I'll carry on using the usual definition instead: the working class is composed of those folk who must live on what they can get for their personal labor.
>
>That leads to a more general point that working class status is not
>automatically a noble thing - parts of what technically qualifies as
>working class can be reactionary (c.f policemen and soldiers - or even so
>called 'labor aristocracy' in the developed countries that benefit form
>exploitation of labor in the developed world.
Of course it's not automatically a noble thing! Me, I'm on the side of those who behave well toward other people. Someone's socioeconomic ranking matters much less to me than their behavior. But, to the extent that I must act on a larger granularity, I'm all in favor of the working folk because they have less power to oppress.
>2. Milgram. As to Milgram's experiments - I think they were more publicity
>stunts than real experiments ...
> We simply do not know how those Ss would have reacted had they been given
>orders to actually kill a person (rather than going through a set of rather
>abstract motions that may or may not be interpreted as so doing).
>...perhaps because the issue has been
>framed by the researcher in such a way that Rs or Ss do not find it
>relevant at all, but they do not feel like taking the effort of
>deconstructing it, they find easier to simply get over the whole situation
>as quickly as possible and in the easiest possible way, and then go back to
>their own business.
Sorry, Wojtek, but you're wrong. You should read the literature that came out of the series. I would suggest Milgram's summary work 'Obedience to Authority'. It's a classic, and in print still. (Actually, you're so egregiously wrong that I find it hard to take you seriously, here)