Blood for Profit
Capitalist Wars, Working Class Graves
Morning Comrades.
Another weekend in what now is my 4th decade of the US’ ruling class, along with their European bootlicker vassal states, bombing and ultimately declaring war on a country for profit, thinly veiling their bloodthirsty racism, barely bothering to even try and “sell” these wars on moral grounds, this time the target being Iran. After brutally killing millions of people in our lifetime from Somalia, ex-Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Iran has been on Capital’s hit list since the 50s and irrespective of what puppet would have sat on their outward facing throne of death, it was going to happen at some point.
There’s a truth that’s been buried beneath the rubble of every bombed-out building, behind every television pundit praising “defence spending,” and under every flag-waving photo-op at a military base: wars are never for you. They’re not for your family. They’re not for your home. They are for someone else’s bank account, someone else’s yacht, someone else’s pipeline. Whenever the powerful start talking about “sacrifice,” “national interest,” or “stability,” what they really mean is that you are going to pay for their empire with your wallet, your sweat, or your life.
There’s a class instinct that tells millions of us already that the politicians and billionaires who start wars aren’t going to be the ones bleeding in them. That much is obvious. But what’s less talked about is that even if you’re not drafted, even if you never wear a uniform, these wars still take from you. Every war they fight is paid for by slashing the very things that could actually make your life better: healthcare, housing, wages, education, transport. War doesn’t just kill the body, it drains the future. Every bomb is a stolen school. Every missile launch is a foreclosure. Every tank is a closed hospital.
You don’t need to be an economist to know this. But the numbers make the case louder. The lie we’ve been sold is that war makes nations rich, that it stimulates the economy, that it “creates jobs.” In reality, the only thing war reliably creates is dead civilians, PTSD, and bigger profits for weapons manufacturers.
War is not a tragic accident of history, it’s the logical outcome of a system built on exploitation. It’s capitalism with its mask off. Every war, every invasion, every bombing campaign is just capital in motion: factories making bullets instead of bridges, workers making weapons instead of homes, and politicians turning human beings into profits for defence contractors. It’s not “mismanagement,” it’s policy. It’s not “human nature,” it’s capitalism’s nature. War is not just bad luck; it’s the organised, deliberate failure of a system that treats life itself as expendable. And if that system is producing wars, then that system must be confronted, resisted, sabotaged, and overthrown, by any means necessary. The world doesn’t need better negotiations between warlords in suits, it needs the absolute destruction of the machinery that makes war inevitable. Until we face that, the working class will keep dying for profits they will never see. Ending war means ending the system that creates it.
So why write this? Why argue further if we already know war is evil? Because saying “war is bad” is too easy for most of the comfortable people saying it from behind desks. The truth is sharper than that: war is theft. Not just theft of lives, but theft of your wages, your social safety net, your children’s future. The working class is looted both by the bullet and by the budget. This isn’t just about “peace” in the abstract, it’s about not getting robbed again. And again. And again.
If peace wasn’t reason enough because it’s morally right, let’s get clear: peace is cheaper. Not just in fiat currency, but in dignity. And that’s why, alongside standing against imperial war on every front, we should be just as angry about how war steals from workers, from the poor, from the people who build everything but own nothing.
What follows is the case, not just against war morally, but against war economically, politically, materially, and philosophically. This is about exposing the robbery in numbers, names, and facts. Peace doesn’t just save lives. It saves futures. And it’s about time we started demanding both.
Military Keynesianism and False Prosperity
Proponents of war economies often cite Keynesian economic theory to justify military buildup, arguing that government spending on war industries reduces unemployment and stimulates demand. While it is true that wartime production can temporarily create jobs, these jobs are precarious, tied to destruction rather than social value. Economists such as Seymour Melman documented how military production represents a dead-end economy, diverting resources from civilian industries like housing, healthcare, and education. Melman warned:
“The civilian economy is being starved, industrial productivity growth is impaired, and civilian employment is rendered precarious by the war economy.”¹
The opportunity cost of military spending is immense. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimated that the Iraq War alone cost the U.S. over $3 trillion,² resources that could have funded universal healthcare or free higher education. These diverted resources are paid for by working-class taxpayers, not the wealthy, who benefit from war industries through defence stock dividends and state contracts.
Inflation and Resource Scarcity
Wars consistently fuel inflationary pressures. The First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, and recent conflicts in the Middle East all corresponded with dramatic rises in inflation in the countries involved, driven by shortages of food, fuel, and basic goods. For example, U.S. consumer prices rose by over 11% during the Vietnam War period.³ Inflation disproportionately hurts wage labourers, as wages typically lag behind price increases.
Capitalist War Profiteering
War operates as primitive accumulation, in the Marxist sense, by forcibly seizing resources, whether oil, land, or labour for capitalist elites. Modern examples include U.S. military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, where companies such as Halliburton and Lockheed Martin extracted billions in profits.⁴ This process is not accidental, but inherent to capitalist militarism. Karl Marx described war in capitalist societies as:
“A continuation of the policy of violence in order to accumulate by dispossession.”⁵
This dispossession often takes the form of privatising what was once common property. Wars dismantle public infrastructure, creating opportunities for corporate reconstruction contracts, often funded by working-class taxes or international debt. For the working classes in the Global South, war often combines with imperialist extraction. In his Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire emphasised that wars, especially imperialist wars, enrich European and U.S. capital at the expense of colonised peoples, reducing entire regions to supplier zones for Western consumption.⁶ Working-class people in the Global South are conscripted or displaced, their economies shattered to facilitate resource flows to Western corporations.
Ethical Critique of Bourgeois Democracy and Militarism
War’s impoverishment of the working class also exposes the moral bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy. As Herbert Marcuse argued, parliamentary democracies in capitalist systems provide the illusion of representation while ensuring that the machinery of war remains beyond democratic control.⁷ The working class is thus made to vote on domestic issues while foreign policy is dictated by elite interests, culminating in endless war cycles.
From a materialist philosophical standpoint, war represents the alienation of human labour. Instead of labour producing goods for communal benefit, it produces weapons for mutual destruction. War is regression into barbarism, paid for by the working poor with their bodies, lives, and futures.
Scientific Data and Modern Examples
U.S. military spending in 2023 exceeded $877 billion, over half of discretionary federal spending.⁹ Meanwhile, over 37 million Americans live in poverty.¹⁰
In Yemen, the U.N. estimates over 17 million people face acute hunger as a result of war fueled by arms supplied by Western nations.¹¹
The cost of post-9/11 U.S. wars has surpassed $8 trillion, with more than 900,000 people killed globally, most of them civilians.¹²
War is not simply a geopolitical contest or an accidental consequence of competing national interests, it is a class project. It enriches the few and impoverishes the many. It redirects the fruits of human labour into destruction instead of care. Its costs, economic, political, and moral are overwhelmingly borne by workers, while its benefits accrue to weapons manufacturers, oil corporations, and global capitalists. Jean-Paul Sartre’s indictment of colonial war applies equally to modern imperial conflict:
“When the native hears a speech about Western culture, he pulls out his knife.”¹³
The working class must recognise that anti-war struggle is class struggle. Only by abolishing capitalism itself can the world be freed from the permanent theft of labour and wealth that war represents.
As always, thank you for your time and attention,
Yours warmly,
V.
References
Seymour Melman, The Permanent War Economy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 23.
Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), xi.
Bureau of Labor Statistics, Historical Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, accessed June 2025.
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 298–305.
Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 873.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 32–33.
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 105.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet (1916), available via Marxists Internet Archive.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Military Expenditure Database, accessed June 2025.
U.S. Census Bureau, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2023, accessed June 2025.
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Yemen Humanitarian Needs Overview, 2024.
Costs of War Project, Brown University, Human and Budgetary Costs of Post-9/11 Wars, 2023.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 21.