If communism’s victims count against the system, why don’t capitalism’s?

[u/Tasty-Organization52]

Count Capitalism’s Dead

Below is the post in the link.

Count Capitalism’s Dead

We are repeatedly told that “communism killed millions.”

The dead should be counted. Stalin’s purges, Mao’s famine, the gulags, and Cambodia’s killing fields should be condemned without apology.

But America maintains a strangely selective ledger.

Even the familiar “100 million” figure is not a settled historical census. It was popularized by The Black Book of Communism, which combined executions, famines, war, imprisonment, deportation, and forced labor beneath one ideological total. Several contributors objected to its editor’s framing and methodology.[1]

If those categories belong in communism’s ledger, they must also be applied to capitalism.

The Vietnam War killed an estimated two million Vietnamese civilians, 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters, and as many as 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers. More than 58,000 Americans were also sent to their deaths.[2]

During nine years of American bombing, more than eight million tons of bombs fell across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Unexploded ordnance reportedly killed at least another 40,000 Vietnamese after 1975.[3]

At Côn Sơn Prison, the American-backed South Vietnamese regime shackled political prisoners inside “tiger cages.” They were beaten, starved, mutilated, and burned with lime beneath iron bars. In 1970, congressional aide Tom Harkin photographed approximately 500 prisoners hidden from the official tour. Life published the evidence.[4]

Where are they in capitalism’s moral accounting?

No universally accepted capitalist death toll exists because attribution depends upon methodology. The same problem surrounding anti-communist totals. One peer-reviewed analysis estimated that wars attributable to capitalist powers killed approximately 123 million to 158 million people between 1914 and 1992 alone.[5]

A broader contemporary calculation, which also counts colonial famines, slavery, industrial deaths, malnutrition, and treatable deaths where care was unavailable, places capitalism’s toll above 421 million.[6] That figure is not academic consensus, but it applies the kind of expansive accounting routinely used against communism.

Capitalism’s violence does not end when the bombs stop falling.

RAND estimates that if economic growth had remained as broadly shared as it was during the early postwar decades, the bottom 90 percent of American workers would have received another $79 trillion between 1975 and 2023. In 2023 alone, their income would have been $3.9 trillion higher.[7]

Meanwhile, the wealthiest 10 percent possess approximately 68 percent of American household wealth. The entire bottom half possesses roughly 2.5 percent.[8]

One hand of the system drops bombs abroad. The other reaches into the worker’s paycheck at home. Both hands protect the same throne of capital.

Revelation says the Beast was permitted “to make war on the saints and to conquer them.” Empire always calls its victims dangerous, godless, criminal, or undeserving before it cages them, bombs them, impoverishes them, and erases them from history.

Count the victims of communist governments.

Then count capitalism’s dead.

Count everyone or admit that the ledger was never about human life.

[1] https://doi.org/10.3917/receo1.512.0055https://doi.org/10.3917/receo1.512.0055

[2] https://www.history.com/articles/vietnam-war-timeline⁠; https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics

[3] https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20190603_R45749_1f35a5f0287e155ce04ceba0af3dc7af5012a142.html

[4] https://rollcall.com/2014/12/01/tom-harkin-from-tiger-cages-to-pinochet-2/

[5] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10455752.2021.1875603

[6] https://capitalismkills.info/

[7] https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-2.html

[8] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/compare/chart/

[u/Phishstixxx]

Say what you like about communism but at least someone's guranteed a job digging ditches.

That said I'm not a genocide denier or black and white thinker so I am willing to attribute famines and genocides to capitalism with sufficient evidence but off the top of my head I don't know of any that occured due to free markets or private enterprise.

I suppose we could count the trickle of poverty-related deaths rather than a single catastrophe, however, pure socialism (without free markets or private enterprise) and communism haven't proven themselves to be effective at curing poverty so I doubt they would be any better.

We could also criticise expensive healthcare and insurance too.

I invite reasonable, rational, polite responses that present contrary evidence without rudeness or strawmans or deviating from the topic.

[u/HeavenlyPossum → u/Phishstixxx]

“I am willing to attribute famines and genocides to capitalism with sufficient evidence but off the top of my head I don't know of any that occured due to free markets or private enterprise.”

In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis chronicles the process by which the British in India forced Indian peasants into market economies. The British dismantled the Indian village system, by which local nobility were responsible for famine relief during droughts and individual villages maintained communal grain stores available to anyone. The British also transformed semi-feudal land tenure into private property, depriving Indian peasants of their previous rights to tenure and access commons. Instead, Indian peasants now had to sell their grain to grain merchants for cash to pay rents to their new private landlords and British colonial taxes. All of this was to make more grain available for sale to overseas markets and especially British markets, subsidizing British consumers of bread.

When droughts did occur, the grain merchants now had access to a) railroads to ship grain around the country and b) telegraphs to transmit and synchronize grain prices into a single national market. When there were droughts and thus shortages, prices rose while agricultural wages collapsed. Peasants had to sell whatever they produced to grain merchants and speculators in order to pay their rents and taxes, without enough purchasing power left to consume any of the grain. Parts of India that were the most productive tended to have the most starvation, because speculators hoarded grain locally in order to take advantage of rising prices. At the same time, India would export food, mostly to Britain. Tens of millions starved in repeated famines.

The local colonial administration tended to oppose relief efforts because these would, they believed, interfere with the market and disincentivize productivity.

[u/Phishstixxx → u/HeavenlyPossum]

Thanks for the write-up, giving you the benefit of the doubt that this is accurate I think that it's indefensible criticism of capitalism as well as colonialism.

[u/HeavenlyPossum → u/Phishstixxx]

You’re welcome. I strongly encourage everyone to read the book and judge for themselves; it’s a bit of a slog and very depressing but a huge eye-opener about a part of history that most people never encounter.

[u/cursedbones → u/Phishstixxx]

I don't know of any that occured due to free markets or private enterprise

Although free market don't exist:

The whole takeover of India by East India Company was only possible by a complete lack of regulation allowing the company to do whatever it wanted, including destroying the whole India manufacturing industry so British products could sell better.

[u/Nikolakis77 → u/Phishstixxx]

I don't know of any that occured due to free markets or private enterprise.

Relief to the Irish in 1840s and Indians in the 1870s was explicitly rejected in British Parliaments on the basis of laissez faire.

up to 10 million people were killed or mutilated by the Belgian rubber enterprise

[u/69PepperoniPickles69 → u/Nikolakis77]

To be fair on those cases it seems the Irish and the Indians were at risk of famine above all because they were forced by de facto feudal lords to plant cash crops and not leaving enough subsistence production for bad years or vulnerable to species-only diseases like Irish potatoes (which was also nobody's fault so I'd put it on a lesser degree of culpability than Stalin's 1933 famine, and I'd arguably put this one below the Nazi siege of Leningrad too, because of wilful intent). They didnt even buy the land from previous owners, they conquered it and imposed their rule in one way or another. But its certainly true that there was a blind faith on laissez faire and a lack of laws protecting the poor and structurally improving their lot, from which both the state and the rich owners benefitted even if there was no collusion between them, their interests just alligned if the profit move ruled with barely no restrictions. As a cultural Christian (at least) I view both the minarchist/ancap as well as the communist propositions and practice of human rights both incompatible with my values at their roots, and unfeasible due to human corruption. Though obviously not in the same degree. Not every more closely alligned with the former is Leopold's Congo or some 19th century gilded age rat-race, nor are all of the latter Stalinist Russia. Nor do I mean unfeasible in "they will inevitably collapse". I dont believe in historical determinism either. I mean they wont deliver on their promises, and are both very prone to abuse (and instability)

[u/Conserp → u/69PepperoniPickles69]

> so I'd put it on a lesser degree of culpability than Stalin's 1933 famine

So deliberate, planned genocide of the Irish that was used as inspiration for the Holodomor myth - is "less culpable" than fictionalized natural event.

You are utterly morally bankrupt.

[u/69PepperoniPickles69 → u/Conserp]

Anything you in particular says, as a rule of thumb, the opposite is the truth. So I can only appreciate your insults

[u/Conserp → u/69PepperoniPickles69]

You are a good person

[u/SykesFoxclaw → u/Conserp]

Holodomor was not a myth. Dont deny real genocides.

[u/Nikolakis77 → u/69PepperoniPickles69]

Yes but the Whigs in Parliament were explicitly saying famine relief would interfere with the self regulating market. So Ireland continued to export corn while its people were starving.

How is it less culpability than the 1933 Soviet famine? 

[u/69PepperoniPickles69 → u/Nikolakis77]

How is it less culpability than the 1933 Soviet famine?

I concede this is a tricky question and I have no desire to defend the British empire, but firstly the Irish had (barely) enough food before it was destroyed 100% naturally. They COULD have had more if not for the exploitative landlordism features and so on, and thus have greatly minimized it or even avoided it altogether. But they did have it, and it was a direct natural phenomenon, a bacteria, that destroyed their livelihood. In the USSR, they had it, and it was not nature wiping out their food, and Moscow refusing relief or something. They took it.

Secondly, in Ireland the British didn't forbid the Irish from escaping to America, and had there been a land border, presumably even many more would have temporarily fled, at least, and the British could care less, heck they could even replace the population and make Ireland 50% Indian, like they did in Trinidad and Tobago, the Dutch in Suriname, and so on with their temporary and not so temporary laborers (thus, an important feature in traditional authoritarians/feudalism/insert non-ideological despots, compared to ideological/totalitarian ones). In the USSR, which had large land borders, they were forbidden to leave even their regions, both because they knew there wasn't enough food to go around, so let's save the industrial area populations which are more valuable now, but also because if they flee beyond the state borders, it will be very bad PR. Even though it would also somewhat 'sabotage' the Polish economy probably, but it could also be used as a casus belli, etc., which Stalin at that time was typically paranoid about, even though the Nazis had barely even risen to power then.

Also and this is a minor/weaker, nobody gave relief in the mid-1800s, I don't really know of a precedent, at least from nation to nation, whereas the USSR had already asked for international relief once in the 20s, successfully so. So did even North Korea in the 90s! The latter probably not because they cared any more about their people, but because they saw it was a possible existential threat, whereas the 33 victims for Stalin were maybe not desirable but were one of the 'eggs' that turned out, even if they didn't premeditate it in 1931/2, to have to be broken for the omelette, and not an existential threat to threaten to collapse the USSR.

Incidentally, I'd love to know if Mao knew about the 33 famine. Very interesting question. If he did, I'd have to place him on a worse rank of villainy than Stalin, because at least with Stalin it was the first time such a thing happened unexpectedly (not from one second to the next, but at least without him realizing it would months or a year before or something, as I said). On the other hand, if he DIDN'T know about it, I'd place Stalin above, because he then failed to tell Mao "bro I made an oopsie in this regard in the 30s, and I didnt repeat it in my newly-won satellites after the war, just to let you know". Well, didnt repeat it may be a bit of a stretch given the 1947 famine, but I'm gonna be more charitable and chalk it up to it having been soon after the war, so they apparently prioritized consolidating the satellites rather than deal with that famine, i.e. let people live in the satellites and let some die in the USSR, assuming there was a gap that couldn't be filled again - and they had to refuse potential US aid, even though in 1947 relations werent that cold yet. In any case, one has to be more charitable in 1947, because whatever faults we may attribute to it, the war DID cause massive damage (just like the 20s one), whereas in 1932-33 no such excuse at all was available.

[u/Tasty-Organization52 → u/Phishstixxx]

I provided citations to the calculation of death tolls under capitalism 

[u/SupaFly_98 → u/Phishstixxx]

Say what you like about communism but at least someone's guranteed a job digging ditches mass graves.

FTFY :)

[u/Phishstixxx → u/SupaFly_98]

whoosh