War and Capitalism

Some have claimed that war is inevitable under capitalism or that it is capitalism that produces war. There were wars before capitalism and there have been stretches of peace between capitalist nations - such as The U.S. and Canada since the War of 1812. Europe's financeers feared the coming of World War One, because they knew the damage it would do to commerce. World War One sprang not from the heads of financeers - which is what capitalists are - but from the stupidities of Europe's emperors, primarily old Franz Joseph, who wanted to maintain his empire. Financeers encouraged and contributed to empire, but that makes capitalism the cause of the Great War only if you engage in erronious reductionism. Franz Joseph was part of a imperial tradition that predated capitalism. He was a devout Roman Catholic with the kind of distate for capitalism that had been a part of Church tradition, recently expressed by Pope Benedict. Franz Joseph, Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm of German did not give their approval for war with financeers whispering in their ear. Empire, chauvinism, Germany's fear and stupidity can be included among that which produced the first World War, along with the lack of fear of war by the Russians and Austrians, including Franz Joseph, that existed in 1914. If you want a simple answer regarding war in 1914, the evil was empire, not capitalism. And World War Two was a product of World War One - rather than rising from capitalism as that old fool Stalin believed.

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