liberalsarecool:

Capitalism needs Imperialism.

War makes money for lenders. The lenders create nothing. Their profits come from stoking conflicts.

Basic point taken, but be aware that there’s a long antisemitic history behind the idea that “the [money]lenders create nothing.” Throughout the middle ages, an Aristotelian argument that it is unnatural for barren metal to generate profit was used to denigrate the Jewish “usurers” who did lend money at interest because the Church forbade Christians to do so. But even while hating and despising them, Christians still made use of Jewish moneylenders – because sometimes they needed an infusion of cash to fund a project before it could start bringing in revenue, and it’s hard to convince someone to hand over their cash without the promise that there’s an eventual benefit in it for them. There’s only so far “Christian charity” can motivate people.

Please do not equate the system of capitalism – the profit motive as the (supposed) engine of societal prosperity, the exploitation of underpaid labor by the owners of enterprise – with the practice of lending money at interest. Yes, a lot of “financial services” seem to involve pointlessly moving money around in a way that profits no one but the bankers and a few very wealthy investors. Yes, there’s a lot of profit to be made in war – some for lending banks, who get to loan very large amounts of money to the government, an enormously wealthy and generally very reliable borrower, but mostly for manufacturers of military equipment. But big projects in art, science, medicine, and education – the construction of a museum, a lab, a hospital, a university – also require loans. Even if all enterprises were communally owned and the profits equitably shared among the workers, there would still need to be institutions that were willing to provide the initial influx of cash to pay for the materials and labor required to start the enterprise. Sometimes the lenders are ordinary citizens who buy government bonds; since there’s a return on the bonds, the people who buy them are still lending money at interest.

And no, it is no longer true that most of the people in the business of lending money for interest are Jewish. Nonetheless, the association persists in the popular imagination, and antisemitic conspiracy theories on both the Right and the Left still imagine that Jews control the international banking system as well as large swaths of the media and the political establishment, fomenting wars for their own profit. Warnings about the military-industrial complex are completely appropriate and need not provide any fuel to such conspiracy theories… but maybe don’t make it about moneylending in the first instance.