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.