In the depth of power relations between ruling institutions, every armed conflict is more than a confrontation between two equal forces; it is a complex display of the reproduction and consolidation of dominance. Each state, as a self-sustaining and self-protecting entity, has an internal mechanism that allows it to declare victory not by completely destroying its rivals, but by redefining the boundaries of its claim. A world power can at any moment say that a chain of its tactical objectives (from disrupting supply networks to reducing deterrence) has been achieved without the need for land occupation or total annihilation. An ideological system, as long as the central core of its rule (i.e. the apparatus of suppression and distribution of resources) remains intact, it interprets every external attack as a failure of the enemy and places itself as a symbol of resistance. And a government based on expansion and occupation, by counting the destruction of the opponent’s military and industrial bases, can claim to have broken the cycle of threat and restored its security. These narratives are not accidental but integral to the government’s internal logic. A logic that justifies its existence on the monopoly of violence and the claim to represent the masses.
But these justifications, when we get to the root, show that war is not a means of resolving the dispute, but an inherent process for maintaining and expanding the very structure that gave birth to it. All governments, of all colors and ideologies, are inherently antithetical to collective life because they have to throw real costs outside the circle of power in order to survive. These costs never fall on the shoulders of those who are the central decision-makers; not on the command rooms, not on the behind-the-scenes apparatus, not on the layer that profits from war: the arms industry, financial networks, and ideological elites. The cost is always on the shoulders of the masses, who have no control over resources and decisions: people who are not present at war meetings, are not shareholders in death factories, and are not fed by national slogans. They are only interchangeable parts of the machine of domination: the labor force, the consumer, and ultimately the vulnerable bodies that must bear the burden.
Especially when the vital foundations of life are targeted (not munitions workshops or military bases, but warehouses that house the chain of medicines for chronic patients, special treatments for terminal pain, and basic baby food), this is no longer collateral damage, but the pure expression of state logic. States in war do not see life as a goal, but as a lever of domination. By cutting off access to life-saving drugs for those dependent on their own diseases, or by burning up infant nutrition reserves, they directly attack the molecular and social bonds. This attack turns the human body into a battlefield: the unmedicated, dying patient is not a simple soldier, but a paralyzing knot of networks of family care and local solidarity. A baby without adequate food is not only an individual victim, but also a sign of cutting off a future generation that could have grown without dependence on power. This is where the radical anarchist view comes in: war shows that the state, as an institution, always works against social self-organization. Self-organization (local networks of production and distribution of resources without the mediation of bureaucracy or the military) is a direct threat to the government’s monopoly on survival.
From the anarchist point of view, this pattern is not limited to a region or an ideology, but it’s global and structural. Every government, regardless of its flag or slogan, becomes the same machine in the moment of war: a machine that defines security by creating insecurity for the masses. Great powers with their proxies, local regimes with the claim of sacred defense, and occupying governments with the story of prevention; All converge on one point: maintaining the boundaries of their power by destroying the boundaries of people’s daily lives. The radical analysis here is decisive: as long as the state form exists (that is, as long as a central body claims a monopoly on legitimate violence and control over resources), this cycle can neither be reformed nor ended. The victory of one always means the continuation of domination over the other, and the loser is not a nation, but the very concept of a free society. People, as a set of horizontal and autonomous relations, always remain outside the account of these zero-sum equations; They are not actors, they are playgrounds.
Looking more deeply, these wars reveal that the state is not a temporary tool for conflict resolution but a parasitic entity that needs constant conflict to survive. Without external or internal threats, the government must justify its administrative, military, and ideological expenditures, and war provides precisely this justification. When food and medicine stockpiles burn, governments not only strike militarily, but also create a new dependency: dependency on post-war aid, on rebuilding under their own supervision, and on new stories of nation-building. This dependence is rooted in the same logic that holds that every government must pull society out of self-sufficiency to maintain itself. The decisive conclusion is that the solution is not in selecting worse or less bad governments, not in the hope of dialogue or system change, but in the fundamental denial of the legitimacy of any form of governance. Only when power structures (from command centers to borders) are completely dismantled and replaced by horizontal networks of local production, distribution, and defense will this pattern of life destruction stop. Until then, every declared victory is just a new chapter in the same book of domination, and every victim, whether in the drug chain or the food chain, is just a cost to continue the same book.
This text is not an emotional call, but an unusual analytical conclusion: war is an inherent product of the state, and only by completely erasing the state (not reforming it, not replacing it with a seemingly better version) can the chain of social life be saved from this cycle. Every moment a government shouts victory, it is, in fact, an implicit admission that it has paid its price in the bodies and lives of those who never had a say in the decision. This fact, deep and undeniable, is the basis of any radical anarchist analysis of power.