Ann Fitzpatrick

On Militarized Vocabulary (Continued) As I see it, these geopolitical developments (e.g., the militarized vocabulary & analysis) don’t seem like an either-or question. More and more intensified organized violence is driven by both crisis and unbraking. And there is a distinction between the two: On the one hand, there is a crisis of capital’s own unmaking: Because the fall of the Soviet bloc removed the historical brakes on capital, the transatlantic ruling class spent thirty years cannibalizing its own productive base through financialization and deindustrialization. That self-inflicted hollowing-out produced a Gramscian crisis of authority. According to Gramsci, this leads to more coercion and less consent. On the other hand, there is a cost-calculus of coercion vs. consent: These transatlantic elites do not lose sleep over a "crisis of moral authority" the way we might imagine. For such a ruling class, hegemony is a balance sheet where they ask themselves: is consent or coercion cheaper right now? During the Cold War, buying working-class consent through welfare states, high wages, and public goods was an existential necessity to prevent socialism, so they paid the price. Today, with organized counterpower fragmented, coercion and low-consent management are cheaper than rebuilding the welfare state. Furthermore, genocide is not an anomaly by any stretch of the imagination within the capitalist system. Seen through Heide Gerstenberger and Domenico Losurdo, genocide, colonial erasure, and organized violence are the historical baseline and normalcy of capitalism whenever external restraints are removed. Furthermore, this violence is an active strategy for adapting and hindering the consolidation of any autonomous counter-order. On the topic of all information contributing to understanding: Of course. I wouldn’t argue to exclude military analyses. But I ask myself: who actually uses this kind of information on military developments to offer a sociological or historical-materialist study of military procurement, conscription, or defense innovation, and to uncover the underlying social forces, class compromises, and state-society relations? They are in the minority. Instead, military curiosity treats missile trajectories, kill ratios, and map changes as self-contained, almost fetish objects. So, it is not about military information and analyses being excluded. But militarized language and analysis have become the hegemonic “common sense.” The problem is that, as Marx and Gramsci remind us, the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, and today, the imperial security apparatus's militarized lens has become the global common sense. When the public sphere defaults to analyzing the world through kinetic victory and defeat, "carefulness" unfortunately disappears, and the imperial ruling class's security grammar replaces social analysis altogether.