State dependence on soldiers’ bodies secured social bargaining power

Evidence

The sociologist Beverly Silver explains that in the model that prevailed up until the 1970s, the industrialization of warfare, combined with the importance of numbers and the central place of the working classes and the maintenance of mass conscription, put Western leaders in a position of close social dependency in the exercise of military power. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 596 (#expands, via linked claim)

What Hobbes did, La Boétie had tried to undo, and by the same means. After all, the master who oppresses you and “for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death … where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you?” Therein lay the fundamental material contradiction: if power is embodied solely by our bodies, we can always refuse to offer them. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 695 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Substituting capital for soldiers gives the state social autonomy; State power depends on borrowing the bodies of its subjects — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 695; State power depends materially on the bodies citizens lend it. (+13 more)

Related

• Substituting capital for soldiers gives the state social autonomy (similarity 0.91)
• State power depends materially on the bodies citizens lend it. (similarity 0.88)
• Mass conscription made leaders socially dependent on working classes for war. (similarity 0.88)
• State power depends on borrowing the bodies of its subjects (similarity 0.86)
• Capitalized warfare reverses workers’ and citizens’ bargaining power over states. (similarity 0.85)
• State power requires mobilized bodies and collapses without them (similarity 0.82)
• Dronization trades the state’s social branch for its armed branch. (similarity 0.81)
• State coercion works only because most citizens comply voluntarily (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• State power depends on borrowing the bodies of its subjects #corroborates (0.70) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 695
• State power depends materially on the bodies citizens lend it. #corroborates (0.70)
• Mass conscription made leaders socially dependent on working classes for war. #expands (0.70) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 596
• Substituting capital for soldiers gives the state social autonomy #qualifies (0.60)
• Capitalized warfare reverses workers’ and citizens’ bargaining power over states. #contradicts (0.60) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 600
• Combat carried fraternal relations out of ritual deference into shared authority #expands (0.50) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 370
• Protecting national lives in war increases those lives’ social precariousness #complicates (0.50)