TIK has a very interesting video about HItler’s Socialism:

I’m only about 1 hour into this nearly 5 hour video, and it covers (as you might imagine) a wide range of topics, but something TIK mentioned almost casually as an aside really struck me: the reason for the revolutions after World War 1 was that the nations that took part in it took an enormous amount of wealth from its people and destroyed it. This immense destruction of wealth impoverished the people, who grew sick of it and revolted.

Something very important to understand about war is that it is bad for business. There are some select businesses that it is good for; gun makers and canon makers and the like benefit from war, though in practice only so much because they have a tendency to get very squeezed for profits since making a profit during a war is generally seen as unpatriotic, and the governments buying the weapons have far more negotiating power than the weapon-makers do, since only one gets to send the police to put the other in prison.

Apart from these extremely limited cases, most business suffers greatly from war. Raw materials get diverted from industrial uses to war-time uses, labor gets taken away, demand for goods shrinks because heavy taxation removes the money with which people would buy products, and in the 1900s there was like a 90% chance that goods would be rationed so people can’t buy as many of your products as they want to even if they had the money and weren’t off fighting in a war.

Worse for the economy, this isn’t even a temporary re-allocation of resources than can be shifted back afterwards. Tanks and battleships and the like can be scrapped for iron, but it’s a difficult and costly process and they have no value other than as scrap (or as museum pieces). Bombs and bullets simply blow up when they’re used, so they get expended in use and all of the resources and labor that went into making them literally goes up in a puff of smoke. Going to war is taking a nation’s resources and burning them (in many cases literally).

And all of this assumes that the war isn’t on your soil, so that your factories are getting demolished in the fighting. If that’s happening, it’s even more economically destructive.

War is always a waste of labor and resources (even a just war; it may simply be a necessary waste), but World War 1 was an especially wasteful war, and moreover was perceived to be an especially wasteful war. Enormous amounts of men and materiel were ground up in order to do basically nothing. For everyone but France and Germany, this largely consisted of taking one’s men and resources and sending them to far away lands to be ground up to accomplish nothing for other people.

This really helps to explain why the Russian Revolution happened. I had always wondered why a mostly agriculatural society would undergo a marxist revolution. Marxist revolutions never make sense, but they didn’t have the mass of factory workers necessary to have a worker’s revolution. And farmers don’t revolt, for the most part, unless you try to heavily tax them.

Well, there’s my answer.

You pay for wars with taxes. You pay for big wars with heavy taxes. And heavy taxes that aren’t perceived to bring massive benefits tend to produce revolutions.

Obviously this is painting the cause of a complex historical event with a ludicrously broad brush, and I’m not describing it very well. But this does make a lot more sense of the Russian Revolution than I had understood up til now.