I was purely political in origin. There was the clash between Slav nationalism and Austro-Hungarian desire to hold together a ,multinational empire. A system of tight and almost automatic alliances turned what might have been an Austrian punitive expedition against Serbia into a general war. World War II was the handiwork not of any magnates of capitalism, but of a plebeian dictator, Adolf Hitler, pursuing aspirations of conquest and military glory that far antedate the modem capitalist system. The three countries that were best prepared for war were the communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union, the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, the authoritarian military regime in Japan.
Capitalism makes for free trade, free markets, limited governmental power, and peace.
And the principal war threat today comes from the expansionist urge of communist imperialism. The worker is cheated because the employer, instead of paying him the full value of his work, holds out on him profit, interest, and rent. The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people's unpaid labor. Perhaps the best refutation of Marx's rabble-rousing myth that surplus value is a peculiar dirty trick of capitalists, practiced against workers, is that the extraction of what might be called surplus value is practiced on a gigantic scale in the Soviet Union through the medium of a sales or turnover tax that often exceeds 100 per cent. It is amazing that, with such a demonstrable record of failure to understand either the world in which he was living or the direction in which that world was going, Marx should be hailed as an unerring prophet.