While the world watches, horrified, the annual record of military spending - exceeding $2.24 trillion in 2022, according to SIPRI, with a real increase of 3.7% - what we see is the rawest face of capital in its terminal phase. Far from any legitimate need for defense, this warmongering escalation, accelerated by the war in Ukraine and the tensions in the Middle East, serves only to prop up a system in tatters. Militarization is not a response to external threats: it is the escape valve for crises of overaccumulation. Tanks, drones, and missiles are the most violent way to drain the excess capital that can no longer reproduce itself in the productive sphere, diverting the fury of the working class to imaginary enemies - while the real enemy, the corporate state, remains armed to the teeth.
Behind every billion-dollar contract for armored vehicles or anti-aircraft systems lies a web of blood and profit: the giants of the arms industry - Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, BAE Systems - saw their profits increase by more than 25% in the last year, while simultaneously cutting taxes and receiving state subsidies. The state, far from being a neutral arbiter, acts as the biggest manager of the death business, ensuring that "national security" is a euphemism for the assault on the public budget. While hospitals close, public housing is dilapidated, and hunger advances, the European Central Bank and the Pentagon find funds for aircraft carriers and warheads. This is not defense: it is the logic of capital vampirizing every cent of social labor to perpetuate its domination through institutionalized terror.
But global militarization doesn't just corrode our pockets - it rapes the very possibility of community life. Every soldier trained to kill is a comrade torn from their networks of affection; Each military base installed is territory stolen from peasant agriculture or biomes, as we see in NATO's expansion into nature reserves in Romania and Poland. The data is staggering: the military sector is responsible for about 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than civil aviation and maritime transport combined. Armies do not defend the planet: they prepare it for annihilation. The so-called "armed peace" is the biggest lie of the 21st century, because under the guise of deterrence, what is practiced is the normalization of violence as politics - and violence, as we well know, always falls first on the shoulders of the poorest, black, indigenous, and marginalized.
Faced with this, the anarchist response cannot be timid reform or an appeal to "negotiated demilitarization" within the chambers of power. The alternative is radical disobedience: refusal of military service, sabotage of the logistical chains of death, occupation of arms factories, and the construction of horizontal networks of popular self-defense. We no longer want participatory budgeting for police forces - we want the extinction of all armed hierarchy that presumes to protect us. Let neighborhood assemblies come, community workdays of mutual care, unarmed popular militias organized by affinity. While capital and the State dance the waltz of missiles, we will dig trenches in solidarity - because the only just war is the one that destroys, once and for all, the logic that life is measured by the capacity to kill.
A., an anarchist affiliated with FACA.
https://federacaocapixaba.noblogs.org/post/2026/06/16/o-recrudescimento-da-barbarie/
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