On Loan-Capital vs. Productive Capital
“Where must the abolition of enslavement to interest begin? With loan-capital! Why? Because loan-capital, compared to all industrial big capital, is so overpowering that the great money-powers can only be fought effectively through the abolition of interest-slavery. 20:1 is the proportion of loan-capital to industrial big capital.”
“The insatiable interest-need of big loan-capital is the curse of all laboring humanity!”
“Interest, the effortless and endless influx of goods based on the mere ownership of money without any addition of labor, has caused the great money-powers to grow.”
“The curves of loan-capital show at first a quite gradually rising development; the development then goes faster until, ever wider and dragging everything with it, it raises itself far beyond human concepts and strives toward infinity. The curve of industrial capital by contrast remains in the finite!”
On the Fraudulence of Marxism
“It is now quite astonishing to see how the socialist idea-world of Marx and Engels, from the Communist Manifesto to the Erfurt Program (especially Kautsky), and even the current social leaders, spare the interests of loan-capital as if on command. The sanctity of interest is taboo; interest is the holy of holies; no one has yet dared to call it into question. While property, nobility, security of person and possessions, the laws of the Crown, privileges and religious convictions, honor of officers, fatherland, and freedom are more or less outlawed, interest is holy and unassailable.”
“Social-Democracy is doomed because it is based on Marxist ideology, which does not recognize the radical difference between industrial capital and loan capital.”
On Usury and War
“The idea of interest on loans is the diabolical invention of big loan-capital; it alone makes possible the lazy drone’s life of a minority of tycoons at the expense of the productive peoples and their work-potential; it has led to profound, irreconcilable differences, to class-hatred, from which war among citizens and brothers was born.”
“The big tycoons lurk indeed as the ultimate driving force behind world-encompassing Anglo-American imperialism; nothing else.”
On Usury in History
“In the Middle Ages short work was often made of usurers; the farmers or citizens having been bled dry got together and beat the profiteers to death.”
“It should be most emphatically stressed that precisely our contemporary culture, precisely the internationality of economic relations, make the interest-principle so murderous. The foregoing historical retrospective should also not be regarded as providing an analogy for the circumstances of today. When the Babylonians overcame the Assyrians, the Romans the Carthaginians, the Germans the Romans, there was no continuation of enslavement to interest; there were no international world-powers. The wars were also not financed through borrowing but with treasures accumulated during peace. David Hume gives a very nice overview of this in his Essay on Public Credit. Only the modern age with its continuity of ownership and its international law allows loan-capital to escalate into infinity.”
-Excerpts from MANIFESTO FOR THE ABOLITION OF ENSLAVEMENT TO INTEREST ON MONEY, available on Kindle
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