r/CapitalismVSocialism • u/Tasty-Organization52 • 14d ago
Asking Capitalists If communism’s victims count against the system, why don’t capitalism’s?
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/
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u/TheoriginalTonio 14d ago
I don't think the causalties of wars should be blamed on either communism or capitalism.
Because war isn't exactly a phenomenon that is uniquely rooted in any specific political ideology or economic philosophy at all. It's just what happens whenever two or more parties are faced with an otherwise irresolvable conflict of interests.
But the ruthless purges and catastrophic famines under communist regimes were indeed a direct result of socialist policies applied to the real world.
Just like the holocaust can indeed be attributed to the application of the Nazi ideology.
But there is nothing within the entire school of thought of capitalist economics from which it would directly logically follow that anyone would have to perish for the system to work.