A Note on Capitalist Organized Violence
Prompted by a reader’s excellent comment, I want to quickly sketch out an observation and a thought: one about the “strategy of denial”, let’s call it, and the other about the nature of current imperial violence.
On the “chokepoints” and infrastructure denial point:
There is a long paper trail. While there is no single master document called “The Chokepoint Strategy,” it is a (relatively new, since around the 2010s) doctrine spread across several strategic papers. I am currently working on Part II of the NATO 3.0 essay, as well as a standalone piece on energy policy, which will dive into this partly and the other one deeply, but here is a sample of that paper trail:
Brookings Institution (2014) – “Fueling a New Order?”: This paper discusses "mutually assured denial" regarding the U.S. and China. It outlines the U.S. strategy of sea blockades, noting that China is building naval capacity specifically so it "can’t be subject to an economic or energy blockade by sea," while the U.S. must recognize "China will develop enough naval capacity to stop the U.S. from blockading the sea lanes." Blocking energy by sea is an acknowledged U.S. Navy strategy.
CSIS (2025) – “No Safe Harbor”: In evaluating China's port projects in Latin America, this paper assumes infrastructure will be weaponized: "Control or deep involvement in port operations can enable intelligence collection... privileged access to maritime logistics data, and the ability to deny or delay access during a crisis."
Atlantic Council (2025) – “A US and allied strategy for Greenland”: This anchors the 2025 National Security Strategy to "deterrence by denial." The authors write: "To achieve its goals for the Arctic, the United States must work with its allies and partners to deny these adversaries the ability to dominate the region militarily and economically." This is about the denial of infrastructure among other things.
U.S. Navy–Marine Corps–Coast Guard (2020) – “Advantage at Sea”: This is perhaps the most explicit. It states: "Where adversaries must cross open water, sea denial robs them of the initiative... We control or deny the seas by destroying an adversary’s fleet... or by controlling sea lines of communication. In collaboration with allies and partners, we will be capable of controlling critical choke points, enabling us to safeguard joint forces flowing into theater and to impose military and economic costs on our adversaries." Furthermore, there are a myriad of lectures from the Energy Defense seminars of the US Naval Academy that openly discuss oil as a weapon (and its different variants) and chokepoint control dating back to at least 2016.
On Organized Violence in Capitalism
I am currently going back and forth and trying to understand what we are actually all observing here: Is the thesis drawn from Copeland and others that because the empire is "standing on its last legs," it is desperately lashing out, the apt one?
Or what we are mistaking for “lashing out” is actually more in line with Heide Gerstenberger’s thesis in the book Market and Violence. I am increasingly thinking that the extreme organized violence we see today is simply capitalism functioning as it is designed to when there are no brakes.
Historically, capitalist organized violence wasn't tamed by the system maturing or by free markets; it was only ever domesticated by organized, scaled resistance and the construction of alternative institutions. Today, where are those brakes? Where is the resistance organized at a systemic scale (institutions that are organized differently, and don’t just work reactively as shields set up because of creeping hybrid warfare)? Without a global counter-force imposing friction, the U.S.-led core might just be operating as a frictionless machine of capitalist violence (and yes, that includes cannibalizing its so-called allies).
This idea of what we are observing as unbraked violence or "desperate collapse" is something I’m trying to understand right now. I don’t think it is actually that obvious; maybe and somehow, it is a combination of the two.
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