From psychological warfare
to military mobilization

Liviu Poenaru, Feb. 20, 2025

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The economic and psychological warfare I describe in Tous soldats de la guerre psychologique (All Soldiers of Psychological Warfare; Poenaru, 2023) establishes a case for how these mechanisms serve as a prelude to full-scale military conflict. Unlike conventional warfare, which unfolds through direct armed confrontation, the total, fractal, and transversal war (la guerre totale-fractale-transversale) of cybercapitalism operates at a cognitive, affective, and economic level, transforming populations into both subjects and objects of war. This war is not waged between states in the traditional sense, but rather in, for, and against the population (Alien, Lazzarato, 2016) with the objective of manufacturing the economic unconscious and fabricating consumable-consumerist-productivist subjectivities that can be enrolled into an indefinite and infinite war system. This transformation is driven by cybercapitalist psychological operations (PSYOP), which manufacture a permanent state of crisis while conditioning individuals into submission, hyper-vigilance, and participation in warlike economic structures. As a result, the Western world is not merely at risk of entering a military war—it is actively being prepared for one.

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This preparation takes place through the militarization of subjectivity, the structural role of the military-industrial complex (Bonneuil, Pestre, 2015) in sustaining war economies, the engineering of cognitive and emotional responses through neuroculture, and the necessity of war as a mechanism of capitalist expansion. The key to understanding this process is that economic and psychological warfare does not simply pave the way for military war—it is already a form of total war.

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The cybercapitalist total war does not rely on direct military confrontation; rather, it conditions individuals at the deepest levels of their psyche to be engaged in war without even recognizing it as such. My research into the economic unconscious (Poenaru, 2023) reveals how subjectivities are structured for war through an economic and psychological system that forces individuals to become hyper-adapted to consumption, production, and competition, integrating them into a war-like system of economic accumulation and self-exploitation. In this paradigm, individuals are transformed into soldiers—not in the traditional sense of military service, but as combatants within an economic battlefield, where survival depends on perpetual engagement with capitalist demands.

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This process aligns with Alliez and Lazzarato’s (2016) description of capitalism as an ontological war machine, which generates conditions of domination and servitude that perpetuate themselves across multiple levels of existence. Unlike traditional military conflicts, which follow a logic of peace-crisis-war-solution, the war of cybercapitalism is infinite and indefinite, constantly regenerating new fronts of conflict—whether through class struggles, racial antagonisms, gender wars, informational warfare, or digital enclosures.

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Freud’s exchange with Einstein (1933) remains relevant in this context, particularly his warning that masses can be manipulated into self-sacrifice and psychotic states of annihilation under the right psychological conditions. The cybercapitalist war does not simply exploit existing fears—it manufactures them, keeping the population in a perpetual oscillation between crisis and submission, struggle and exhaustion, consumption and depletion. In such a context, military war becomes not a rupture but a logical and seamless extension of the existing economic and psychological battlefields.

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The modern war economy does not operate through distinct phases of peace and war; instead, it is structured around a state of permanent mobilization. The RAND Corporation (2023) and U.S. PSYOP strategies illustrate how psychological warfare extends beyond military contexts, embedding itself in civilian life, economic structures, and social media ecosystems. The goal is not merely to prepare the population for war but to ensure that they are permanently engaged in a war economy, whether they recognize it or not.

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As I argue, the academic-military-industrial complex extracts knowledge from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral sciences to perfect mechanisms of consent engineering and cognitive submission. This is achieved through behavioral conditioning, emotional manipulation, and algorithmic governance, ensuring that individuals remain docile, reactive, and primed for further escalation.

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The economic dimension of war is crucial: when capital accumulation stagnates, militarization serves as a release valve to sustain capitalist expansion (Beaud, 2021). War is not an accidental byproduct of capitalism—it is its structural necessity. If economic warfare reaches a limit where financial extraction is no longer sufficient, military conflict becomes inevitable as a means of maintaining systemic stability.

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A key aspect of cybercapitalist psychological warfare is its ability to restructure neural and affective mechanisms so that individuals process reality through the lens of conflict and mobilization. This is the role of neuroculture—the systematic study and application of cognitive and emotional manipulations to control populations.

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Social media platforms, artificial intelligence, and digital infrastructures function as militarized cognitive environments, ensuring that polarization, resentment, and enemy construction become normalized emotional states. The algorithmic governance of emotions (Singer & Brooking, 2018) does not simply exploit existing divisions—it manufactures them, ensuring that individuals remain in a permanent state of hyper-vigilance and low-intensity war engagement.

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My research into autoimmune pathologies and self-destructive behaviors (Maté, 2022) further supports this argument. The rise in suicide rates, stress-induced disorders, and psychosomatic illnesses is not an accidental byproduct of modernity; rather, it is the direct result of an engineered war against the self. The same conditions that produce self-destruction in individuals also prepare them for external war: when the body and mind are trained to experience war internally, transitioning to external warfare becomes a natural and effortless progression.

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Western societies no longer follow the peace-crisis-war-solution cycle but have instead entered a phase of permanent crisis and indefinite mobilization. This shift is crucial for understanding why military conflict is not an anomaly but an inevitability within the cybercapitalist paradigm.

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Alliez and Lazzarato’s (2016) theory of fractal and transversal war explains how economic extraction, cognitive control, and military expansion are inseparably linked. Today’s conflicts are engineered to be permanent and diffuse, ensuring that war is not a phase but a structural reality. The militarization of social media, digital surveillance, and algorithmic governance (Zuboff, 2019) ensures that populations are constantly monitored, conditioned, and manipulated into accepting militarization as a given reality.

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When kinetic war inevitably emerges, it will not be perceived as an extraordinary event but as the logical next step in a continuous battlefield. The Western population, subjected to decades of psychological conditioning, economic precarity, and digital warfare, will not resist mobilization—it will see it as an extension of its conditioned struggles.

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Thus, the Western world is already engaged in a structural war against its own population through psychological, economic, and neurocognitive mechanisms. This is not merely a prelude to military conflict—it is military conflict in an obfuscated form. The transition from digital war to kinetic war is not a hypothetical—it is already in motion.

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As Freud (1933) warned Einstein, masses can be inflamed into frenzy and self-sacrifice under the right conditions. Today, those conditions are being scientifically engineered through cognitive warfare, economic distress, and algorithmic control. Thus, I do not simply argue that war is coming—I demonstrate that war is already happening, and that its military phase is an inevitable next step in the trajectory of cybercapitalist total war.

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REFERENCES

Alliez, É., Lazzarato, M. (2016). Guerre et Capital. Paris : Éditions Amsterdam.

Beaud, O. (2021). Le savoir en danger. Menaces sur la liberté académique. Paris : PUF.

Bonneuil, C., Pestre, D. (2015). Le siècle des technosciences (depuis 1914). In D. Pestre (ed.), Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, 3, Le siècle des technosciences, pp. 9-24. Paris : Seuil.

Einstein, A., Freud, S. (1933). Pourquoi la guerre ? In S. Freud, Œuvres complètes XIX, pp. 61-81. Paris: PUF (1995).

Page Wikipedia Psychological operations (United States) consulted on 07.20.2023: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(United_States)

RAND Corporation (2023) – Military-industrial influence on economic and geopolitical decision-making.

 

Chomsky & Herman (1988) – Propaganda, war economy, and manufactured consent.

Maté, G. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. London : Ebury Digital. 

Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Durham : Duke University Press.

Poenaru, L. (2023). Tous soldats de la guerre psychologique? In Analysis, revue transdisciplinaire de psychanalyse et sciences, 7 (3), 100389.

Poenaru, L. (2023). Inconscient économique. L'Harmattan.

Singer, P. W., Brooking E.T. (2018). LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.  Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York : Public Affairs. 

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