Foreign aid, lacking profit’s disciplining motive, becomes pure politics.

Evidence

Private investments—“the activities of a thousand U.S. companies operating in a hundred foreign countries” and “concentrated in the most modern, the most strategic, the most rapidly growing sectors of the foreign economy”—create many political problems even if they are not protected by the power of the nation, but foreign aid, even if given for purely humanitarian reasons, is political by nature precisely because it is not motivated by the search for profit. … In other words, the profit motive, whose importance for imperialist policies was frequently overrated even in the past, has now completely disappeared; only very rich and very powerful countries can afford to take the huge losses involved in imperialism. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 29

Categorization

• XREF: Links to necropolitics discussions: humanitarian/military ‘aid’ as the contemporary form of sovereign power over distant populations.
• QUESTION: Arendt says humanitarian aid ‘is political by nature precisely because it is not motivated by the search for profit’ — worth chasing what mechanism makes the absence of profit a political (rather than merely neutral) quality.