There’s a black book of Communism, which essentially claims that every death caused by a Communist government is the fault of communism.
A while back some people decided to put up an article on the death toll of Capitalism in Wikipedia, very carefully sourced. It was deleted.
Anyway, there is zero question that Capitalism has killed more people than Communism, no matter what number you use for Communism. It’s absurd to pretend all deaths caused by the Great Depression weren’t capitalist deaths and without the Great Depression (which, by the way, did not effect the USSR) there is no World War II, so you can add in all those deaths. Not to mention all the Imperialist wars and native genocides, which were definitely part of capitalism.
But even recently capitalism is a death machine:
I’d say that almost all deaths by hunger in the world are caused by capitalism, as are those from lack of shelter. After all, with very few exceptions the world is run on capitalist principles. Since there is more food produced than needed to feed everyone, and since capitalist markets the primary distribution method for food this is entirely reasonable.
Capitalism as an ideology is, in any case doomed. Climate denialism idiocy aside, as climate change and environmental collapse accelerates it and “democracy” will be blamed, as they should be, since almost all the damage occurred under their watch and what’s more they knew and not only did nothing but accelerated the process. We knew in the 70s, I remember the debates and the response wasn’t to do a big renewables push or try and seriously systematically reduce hydrocarbon use, it was to try and figure out how to pump more oil.
Obama famously bragged that he was responsible for the fracking boom and Trump is pro-coal, pro-oil and anti-renewables, while gutting EPA rules on environmental contamination.
Not to speak of over-fishing, destroying our soil, the collapse of insect populations and so on.
A system of production and distribution which runs on planned obsolesence cannot be good for the environment and is obviously stupid. “Let’s make things break quickly so we can make more” is insanity. It’s what capitalist markets require and if you don’t understand how moronic it is I don’t even know how to explain it.
(Aside: Related to the America’s fall I note that sanctions are the main reason the US is going to lose dollar hegemony so soon, it could have been kept for a few decades yet if it hadn’t been abused.)
Anyway, when it comes to mass murder the problem that Communists had is a combination of a weird sort of honest “just kill them” and getting blamed for things like famines that somehow capitalism isn’t responsible for.
No system in world history, no ideology will be near to capitalism’s final death tool. Not by at least an order of magnitude, and likely two orders of magnitude.
This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.