War is the Health of the State

plus, some good reasons for living

Stateless societies, which have been the overwhelming majority of societies throughout human history, practiced a wide range of engagements with warfare and lethal force. Many were fully pacifist; many more would practice defensive but not offensive warfare. Plenty of stateless societies raided and skirmished with their neighbors. These skirmishes might be designed to have very low death rates, and in other cases they had high death rates, relative to the total population. Especially in extreme circumstances (like the arrival of more powerful invaders), a few—but not many—stateless societies carried out wars of conquest, expelling or absorbing the neighboring people they conquered.

Today, those Indigenous societies that are not fully conquered may practice non-lethal forms of resistance to the depredations of their statist neighbors or flee to remote zones where state power is all but non-existent, if the geography allows it. In many other cases, they practice armed resistance. I don’t know of any cases of stateless societies coexisting peacefully with neighboring states, because war is the health of the state.

[The quote is from Randolph Bourne, a progressive philosopher who spoke out against World War I, lambasted the justification that its purpose was to spread democracy, analyzed how states used warfare to increase its authority and resources, advocated for people with disabilities (himself included), and opposed the forced assimilation of immigrants into Anglo-Saxon culture.]

With the development and spread of states, war has become more systematized, more lethal, more devastating ecologically and socially, and more connected to genocide, the slaughter of noncombatants, and permanent territorial conquest or domination.

Not every state participates directly in warfare, but every documented system of interconnected societies that includes a state has prominently featured warfare, slavery, and/or violent internal repression. What I mean by “system” here is that it often makes more sense to understand things as a grouping of interdependent entities rather than to understand things as individual entities.

Take Switzerland. The state hasn’t directly engaged in warfare in centuries. So what? They are fully integrated into the economies of other European states that can’t go a decade without starting or participating in a war. The Swiss simultaneously did the banking for the Nazis and the Allies. Their military upholds the exclusive border regime of a highly white supremacist and classist society. In other words, rather than analyzing Switzerland as an individual entity, it is much more realistic to analyze Switzerland within the greater system of European states. And, increasingly over the last centuries, we can’t get an accurate sense of any society or state without understanding how they connect to the broader world system.

The US economy is dependent on military production, and because of the hidden web of loans and derivatives training, that means the world economy is dependent on military production. And that economic connection has been there for every modern state, going back hundreds of years.

States rely on warfare as one of their methods for producing, maintaining, and amassing power. They dedicate a huge amount of resources to build their armies and advance their techniques of warfare. Since the 18^th century if not earlier, it’s not inaccurate to say that the State’s need for warfare has been the primary motor of modern science.

States have a great deal of accumulated intelligence they can dedicate to the techniques and strategies of warfare, and the research that gets funding because it might enhance a state’s military will often spin off into other branches of science, just as the institutions that invest in research that might not originally be for military purposes are usually on the lookout for how any advances could have profitable military applications.

And yet, all the resources that go into military science and the strategies of social control don’t make the ruling class smarter. There are certain things that the leaders and technicians of the State can never admit or even perceive about the real world. And this applies to states of all stripes: monarchies, liberal democracies and social democracies, fascist regimes, military dictatorships, and communist states.

To believe in the State, to support a state, is to set yourself on a collision course with reality, with the needs and tendencies of the living world, because statism is always an act of faith: a belief in one’s entitlement to govern the chaos, entitlement to an enduring power that imagines it can rise above entropy, entitlement to order the world according to a simplistic hierarchy. And all hierarchies, in the end, are simplistic.

The Wars of the 20^th Century

The states that lay claim to the territory you live in, no matter where that is, are part of a system that has amassed power and resources through bloody warfare. Britain, France, Germany, Austria, the US, Canada, Russia, Turkey, and Italy murdered around 20 million people in World War I to try to improve their place in the pecking order and to drown growing anticapitalist movements and the liberation movements of occupied countries in blood. Russia, in its tsarist, communist, and autocratic phases, murdered tens of millions of internal enemies and neighboring peoples colonized by ethnic Russians. Britain, France, Italy, and Germany murdered tens of millions of people to hold onto or expand their colonies in Africa and Asia. Germany and Japan murdered tens of millions of people in neighboring countries during World War II.

The US murdered about 2 million people in Korea in the 1950s, 3-5 million people in Southeast Asia in its war against Vietnam, over a million people in an unending string of dirty wars in Latin America, from Mexico to Chile, and over a million people in Iraq, through brutal bombings, poisonous munitions, and deadly sanctions.

The only people in the military who should be celebrated are those who refuse to fight or who turn their guns on their officers, like all the US soldiers in Vietnam who “fragged” their COs, constituting one of the major reasons the US government pulled back its ground troops in the early ‘70s. If anyone thinks it was a pacifist antiwar movement that ended that war, what can I say – there’s a clear reason that’s the official history, rather than giving credit to the thousands of acts of sabotage in the US, the armed resistance of troops, and the armed resistance of the Vietnamese themselves.

The Wars Right Now

What are some of the hot wars going on right now?

Ukraine is defending itself against an unprovoked Russian invasion that has directly caused 4-500,000 deaths and another million serious injuries, most of them military (an AI search might incorrectly tell you the death toll is 400,000 to 1.5 million, but that’s the total casualty count, which includes deaths and injuries). The Ukrainian state’s interest is to not lose any territory and to get more support from Europe. The Russian state is acting out of a centuries-long colonial attitude towards Ukrainians, one which did not change under the USSR.

The war has revealed major military deficiencies on the Russian side and led to a fast evolution of trench-and-drone warfare on both sides, limiting the importance of tanks and traditional artillery. In Russia, Putin staved off a possible coup attempt and has come out with a stronger grip on power, but a fragile basis for that power. In Ukraine, which had previously been a country in which Ukrainian and Russian were accepted languages (Lviv not Lvov, Kyiv or Kiev, and Kharkov not Kharkiv, to simplify) nationalism has hardened. Primarily it’s of the liberal variety. There are certainly many far Right nationalists trying to take advantage of the situation, but Russian influence on media and social media exaggerated their importance, leading, for example, to some antifascists from Madrid fighting (unknowingly) alongside Russian neo-Nazis in their glorious crusade against the Ukrainian nationalists. People from Madrid, white people from the UK or US, can loudly denounce the nationalism of historically occupied peoples while invisibilizing their own nationalisms. On the whole, beyond any doubt there are far more neo-Nazis on the Russian side. Russian society on the whole, since the days of the Soviet Union, has been extremely rightwing.

Two sets of facts are both real and relevant here, even though they seem contradictory.

1. Pretty much every anarchist I know from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, or Poland, and most of the ones I know from Czech Republic or Slovakia, support anarchist participation in the war against the Russian invasion. They support gaining as much autonomy in that fight as possible (and in many sectors there was a greater degree of autonomy in the earlier years of the war than is currently the case, especially as cutting edge drone innovation that anarchists were at the frontline of industrialized and accelerated). They see it as a fight for survival, not a revolutionary fight. They don’t think the Ukrainian state is good, but they know they are much less likely to be tortured, imprisoned, or murdered under the Ukrainian state than under the Russian state. For most of them, Russia taking over where they live would mean losing their home permanently.

2. The war is also happening as an extension of the longstanding war between Russia and the US/UK. Early on, the US and UK were not actively using Ukraine as a proxy, and both political wings in the US government have been divided on whether to extend NATO to include Ukraine. It was fully initiated by Russia against a Ukrainian government that at the time was not strongly connected to the NATO bloc, though within a context of recent NATO expansion into countries that Russia has believed for centuries belong to it. Since then, various NATO countries have used the war to expand their influence and try to build up Europe’s militaries. In this way, we can accurately see it as an imperialist conflict as long as we don’t make the mistake of erasing the local perspectives or falling into binary anti-imperialism (like those Madrid antifascists). As a Belarusian friend told me, in that part of the world, Russia has always been the main imperialist power threatening its neighbors.

And as various anarchists have said in different historical moments, revolution dies in war.

As soon as I can, I want to write a separate article to look at the ongoing or recent wars in Mali, Sudan, and other parts of the Sahel, to look at the various political and economic interests involved, how it’s a continuation of colonialism, and how it’s being exacerbated by the ecological crisis.

And in my next newsletter on Israel’s war against Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinians, I want to examine what so many other major countries are trying to get out of it, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Ukraine, Germany, Pakistan, India, China, and the US.

The most urgent part, though, is this: Israel is violating the ceasefire every single day, murdering people in Lebanon and Palestine. They are openly carrying out genocide, they are celebrating it, and the majority of Israeli citizens are actively supporting that genocide. They are currently stealing more land from neighboring countries and from Palestinians to achieve their white supremacist dream of “Greater Israel” and the Israeli government is openly acknowledging this on a weekly basis. Even if the bullets stop flying, it is still an active genocide as long as Palestinians are subjected to conditions of hunger and disease, forced into refugee camps or permanent exile.

At the same time, the Israeli state is trying to permanently alter the regional balance of powers to ensure their long-term dominance. Former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy described Israel’s strategy of “permanent war” that would result in only two other types of states in the region: ones that were fully dependent on Israeli economic and military power, or ones that were “too collapsed, failed and fragile to pose any challenge.”

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Recently, I got diagnosed with another medical problem that often leaves me exhausted, and it doesn’t help that my main wage job involves shoveling mulch or digging up weeds for 8-9 hour shifts, plus an hour commute on each end. I’ve been so desperate to work on my garden, a place where I could grow veggies in an ecological way that would also enrich the habitat and the soil. I’ve got the half of the garden that’s full of native wildflowers all set up and at this point it’s pretty much taking care of itself, but as far as vegetables went I had my seed starters and waist-high tomatoes still in pots, just raring to go!

It was going to take a lot of work, digging up the grass, breaking up the soil, mixing in the compost I’ve made over the last half year, planting, and then immediately building a deer-proof fence so the plants would have a chance of surviving their first night. It was exhausting just thinking about it!

So R and I decided to invite a bunch of people over for collective work. This is a tradition that builds bonds and turns labor into joy, in cultures all around the world. In Brazil it’s called mutirão, in parts of València a tornallom. Sometimes anarchists just call it mutual aid.

Around ten friends and neighbors came over, we got the work done easily and joyfully, including cooking some really healthy, nourishing food, and then we spent a good chunk of time eating together and talking.

The idea is that soon, one of them will put out the call and all of us who can will go to help out, and everyone’s lives will be easier, richer, and more liberating. Struggle is hard, a lot of times it means sacrifice, but liberation, real liberation, also brings pleasure, fulfillment, and happiness. And no matter what our life is like, we can always bring a little more anarchy into it.

The bonds we build will be there for us through thick and thin.

The future is so uncertain. There is a chance, if we make it so, that it will be beautiful.