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.
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NR
I don’t understand what you mean here Ian, can you explain?
Ian Welsh
The early USSR did not hesitate to just kill people. They lacked a certain hypocrisy around the issue. Capitalists usually pretend it’s collateral damage or unintentional.
mago
Um, is it antisemitic of me to point out that the early USSR leadership/killers were Jewish? Ah, well. Color me pink.
Ian Welsh
Stalin was the worst of the bunch and he wasn’t Jewish.
NR
Oh okay, I understand. Thanks.
Eric Anderson
I said just the other day on Mastodon:
“A nation that caters to luxury, instead of necessity, will necessarily fail.”
Now, I’m sure I’m not the first to utter these words. It’s just too concise and axiomatic. It describes our present reality perfectly.
It’s a narrower corollary of this post, which can be boiled down to:
“A system that caters to luxury, instead of necessity, will necessarily kill more people than a system that caters to necessity.”
We live in a death cult that daily sacrifices the poor on shrine of the billionaire class.
Axiomatic.
different clue
I read somewhere that after Stalin had no more need for his Jewish sub-leadership, he had them all killed in their turn. Also, Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s much-feared head of KGB, was Armenian. Or so I have read. Also, Lenin himself was half-Chuvash and half-Russian.
j
Things like the Doctors’ plot certainly place Stalin as an antisemite, but it’s not like he liked other nations either. A nations worth was measured by him by the possibility of making them russian, and he didn’t think Jews would fit the bill, so they would certainly be low value trash to be gotten rid of… And while he didn’t like Jews, he absolutely hated Poles, and did his best to reduce their number on earth, so I dunno.
In the wider Russian and Soviet context before and after Stalin, it’s not like Jews were considered first class citizens either. Pogroms were not invented by Stalin, neither by Hitler for that matter. So he seems more like the main guard and not the vanguard in that regard.
On the top leadership level, we have to take into account that he was a paranoid bastard who saw enemies everywhere. And he definitely had them, too. In a power struggle that is based on blood, there are no rules. So if you have a lot of jews in your leadership, you are going to kill a lot of jews trying to stay alive, whether they had it coming or not. A notable one that survived was Kaganovich, sometimes called the Stalin’s Personal Jew, and he almost managed to outlive the Soviet Union itself. His personal claims to fame include the Holodomor, and being the man who unlike Mussolini actually made the trains run on time. The trick to the latter was that when a train was late, the driver, conductor, and station manager were never seen again.
Every one of those bastards had hundreds of thousands of lives on their hand. If my memory serves me correctly, only Khrushchev ended up with less than that, about 80 thousand. Sure Jews were overrepresented in those statistics, but they were not the main theme. None of this is to downplay or deny the Jewish plight, but everything about the J-word is also highly politicized these times and we might have to keep a more critical eye while reading about these things.
In any case, all I really wanted to talk about was that I really like the theory that Stalin was the son of Polish explorer Przewalski. They look alike, and he’s placed at about the right time staying in a mansion where Stalin’s mother worked as a maid, while Stalin’s father was what is called in Russia a ‘drinking person’… Certainly might explain Stalins hatred of Poles.
Feral Finster
It is my theory that just about any political/economic system can be made to work tolerably well, if and to the extent it is run by non-sociopaths.
The problem is that power is to sociopaths what catnip is to cats. No matter how sublime the founding principles of a system are, the moment it gets power, the sociopaths look at it and start licking their chops. If communism will give them power, they’ll be communists. When that no longer works, they’ll be something else. The overnight transformation of CPSU apparatchiks to free-marketeers is most instructive. If tomorrow, the North Koreans were to take over Wall Street, the bankers would be jockeying for Party membership and fighting over who got to wear the biggest Kim badges.
For that matter, the history of the medieval Catholic Church is most edifying, and this an institution that can trace its founding to Jesus Christ Himself. To the extent that the Catholic Church ever was able to reform, this came as a result of their steady loss of political power, beginning with the Reformation and the Italian Wars.
This is why, after 5,000 or so years or written human history, we can find temporarily successful examples of all kinds of systems, from anarcho-capitalism to Incan statism, hunter-gatherers and scandinavian socialists and religious communes and mercantile powers. All eventually fail, whether as a result of stronger forces or internal rot. This also explains the Rise Of The West, that their systems were better able to resist sociopath infiltration for a while (but now things like separation of powers and checks and balances make the sociopaths that much harder to root out, once they get in).
I suppose that this is the kernel of The Iron Law Of Oligarchy, as well as Alexander Tytler’s remarks about the 200 year lifespan of societies, going from spiritual faith to decadence.
Jan Wiklund
I have tried, without result, to search how many deaths that were a result of the Structural Adjustment programs the IMF ordered.
Research in UK for how many deaths the austerity programs since 2008 caused suggest some 120.000, about 40.000 with names and addresses, see https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/tory-austerity-deaths-study-report-people-die-social-care-government-policy-a8057306.html.
And UK is a rich country. So on a world scale they must be counted in tens of millions, perhaps hundreds.
I don’t think it is possible to blame “capitalism” for any particular death, because capitalism is permeats everything, and we don’t know what the world would be without it. You can thus blame every death on capitalism if you want to.
j
And since I’m getting the feeling that I might have worded this in an unclear way, by overrepresentation I mean it in the same way that black people are overrepresented in the US prison system. A small part of the general population, but a bigger part of the prison population.
Purple Library Guy
Luxury is an interesting concept. Even or maybe especially with billionaires, most of what gets considered luxury these days is created demand that doesn’t look like it’s even particularly enjoyable. I reject that stuff.
But I don’t reject stuff entirely. Living a completely austere life isn’t usually very enjoyable either. Maybe some people can have fun meditating on their plain rice; it’s not for me and I don’t think it’s for most people. But if you have sufficiency, security, and adequate time, it doesn’t take much more to have the kind of luxurious experience that actually is enjoyable. To have really good food you just need fairly adequate ingredients, good recipes and enough time. To get together with people you love or are fond of and enjoy yourself with that food, again, all you need is enough time.
Even what we would call consumer goods aren’t necessarily USELESS. What’s useless is a mindset of getting more and more of them without ever bothering to figure what we really want. I have a belt; it was made by a local craftsman for a moderate sum. It is made of very robust leather, impressed with celtic knotwork and dyed purple. There is no other belt in the world quite like it. It is my belt, it will last my lifetime, and I enjoy having it–it’s cool and it’s my personal taste. It is not a simple plain belt, and I appreciate that. But I’d argue that something like that is a distinct phenomenon from people who will buy different belts every month, none really to their taste, in part because they don’t know what their taste really even is . . . they’ll keep buying them because fashion is changing, because they can and they’ve been addicted to novelty, if they’re rich because it’s a prestigious brand and they’re showing off their wealth. And all their belts put together do not make them as happy as my cool belt I’ve had for maybe fifteen years still makes me. If anything, their endless goods probably just create a vague dissatisfaction that the next one and the next and the next never seem to really fill the place they’re supposed to be filling. There is a place in our lives for neat stuff, heck, hunter-gatherers make neat stuff. It just should be about quality and being suited to the individual, not about endless craving for more.
Purple Library Guy
Why the fuck are we talking about whether people are Jewish?!
Feral Finster
I said just the other day on Mastodon:
“A nation that caters to luxury, instead of necessity, will necessarily fail.”
By that logic, the former Yugoslavia would have lasted forever. It honestly wasn’t such a bad system, but the elites saw it as more valuable broken up and privatized than as a going concern.
Feral Finster
I thought Beria was Georgian?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria
KT Chong
On capitalism in America:
The second faster growing economic sector in America (in terms of GPD growth) is…
… Gambling.
(The first is AI data centers aka AI bubble.)
Breaking Points: Gambling NOW UNDERPINS ENTIRE US ECONOMY:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmCeYBawm88
NGG
Eric A. Great post. The younger generations are realizing that the US Capitalism is not working for them. I hope to live long enough to see a more equitable system. More wealth for the wealthy is not for answer.
mago
Because it matters, denizen of libraries.
Eric Anderson
Jan:
Right. I think they call what you’re experiencing “not seeing the forest for the trees.”
Purple Library Guy:
I was puzzling on the same jewish question. Glad you raised it.
KT Chong:
“Football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
— George Orwell, 1984.
Can we say “panem et circenses”??? I knew we could.
History doesn’t repeat itself. But, it sure does rhyme.
— Mark Twain
NGG:
Thank you. I’m pushed to the limits of my restraint these days.
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The younger generations are realizing that the US Capitalism is not working for them.
Hogwash. Capitalism is working great for them. They’re all online streaming content 24/7 and making a killing. The get your rage on fix business is booming. Life is good.
j
Well I talk about any topic x because the topic has been raised and I find it interesting. I also refuse to accept the idea that there are topics that should be taboo, or not talked about. Our sensitivity to our wounds past or present should not stop us from learning from them. In fact I believe that any such shying away actively makes things worse.
Like our current whole-Western-world inability to deal with the genocide.
Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and all that.
Everyone other than me, of course, is talking about jews because they are a nazi. In all seriousness, over time I have developed a sort of a spider sense to figure that in that particular persons heads they probably live rent-free. Where the limits of that sense are, I’m not too sure, neither am I completely sure whether I would pass someone else’s spider sense.
StewartM
Here’s my summary of deaths:
USSR: 10 million, 9 million under Stalin, which includes the Ukrainian Holodomor.
(Higher figures like 40 or 60 million usually include war deaths; as one caustic critic put it, if you were a Soviet soldier or Wehrmacht soldiers dying in WWII you were both included as ‘victims of communism’.)
China: 2-5 million deliberate famine deaths, 0.5-2 million during the Cultural revolution, which makes a maximum of 7 million.
Cambodia; 2 million deaths, but proportionately and morally the worst.
Others: Ethiopia, Romania, Vietnam post-war, Yugoslavia–maybe a few million more, hard to pin these down. Deaths shortly after WWII are a problem due to deaths due to the destruction of wartime infrastructure plus the extra-judicial killings of actual and suspected Nazi collaborators. Many times these deaths are counted as “victims of communism” in the East but not in the West. Ditto, the Red Army is lambasted for rapes while rapes aren’t mention by Allied soldiers; this is despite the fact that the Red Army did prosecute rapists and indeed allowed officers to summarily execute any found (and in one case I know, this happened).
So a high estimate would be 25 million or so, spread out over 70 years.
To those who say “Stalin was worse than Hitler”, consider the following PARTIAL list:
Soviet citizens killed by acts of violence (mostly by German forces): 7.5 million
Soviet citizens dying of hunger: 8.5 million
(About half of this was due to deliberate starvation in German occupied territories, see “Hunger Plan”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan
Soviet civilians deported as workers in Germany and who were worked to death: a bit more than 2 million.
Add to this the 14 million Holocaust victims and other victims of deliberately killed, you get more than 30 million dead, and in a space of a few years, too.
Insofar as communist deaths are concerned, it seems that paradoxically you were more likely to be killed if you were communist or a sympathizer than if you were an outright opponent. First the SRs and Mensheviks disappeared, then a whole host of Old Bolsheviks in the 1930 plus army officers. Contrast this to the whining of a Solzhenitsyn, who not only lived through the Gulag (most did!) he got free medical treatment when he developed cancer and later was allowed to write and published. When he ran afoul of the authorities then, he was allowed to immigrate. All this despite the fact that he was in fact actually GUILTY of the crime he was originally accused of (yes, he had actually been corresponding to friend about replacing the Soviet regime with another, it wasn’t like he was simply insulting Stalin).
And of course likewise there was Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and in Cambodia wearing eyewear was considered a problem.
This seems to be a trait of leftist regimes and groups, they seem to hate each other more than they hate the oppressor. It’s almost like if Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”‘s parody is spot-on; the Palestinian resistance groups in the movie seem way more focused on fighting each other than they do the Romans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS-0Az7dgRY
j
Oh yes, the jolly days of yore of the Gulags, the happy songs and campfires…
And now that I think about it, many people came back alive from Auschwitz also?
If you feel the need to justify and downplay the millions of people killed by communist countries, or anyone for that matter, just because you identify with a vaguely associated group, or just because Hitler did more, you are on the wrong track, on a very wrong track. Once you get to power, you will end up doing the same! One step at a time you will get there sure as day; just as the soviets discovered, so will you, that no man, no problem. The first one is the weird one, after that it all just flies by.
Either communism is workable without killing millions of people, in which case you should figure out how to achieve that. Or communism is unworkable witout killing millions of people, in which case let’s put it in Trotsky’s words: “Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!”
Leftist infighting sure is a thing, especially since the word got to mean identity politics. But there are some things that are just never okay, and if there is a side advocating or defending these, well you have an actual real non-negotiable issue there. Either you accept them as part of you, in which case you will either join them or, you will get the menshevik fate that’s coming for you. Or you will not accept them as part of you, and figure out a way forward that includes them never getting anywhere.
In 1979 the spring flood on the Ob river washed open an NKVD mass grave. Thousands of people, men, women, children. Bullet holes in the heads… They had had a literal killing factory there.
Many of the bodies ended up in the river and started floating downsream. Too many to bury again, too many to sink into the river by tying scrap metal to them. Running them over with motorboats in the hopes of getting rid of them sure must have been some macabre fun, but it turned out the body parts didn’t sink either, and the view downstream got turned up to 11.
This kind of stuff is what the Soviet Union was. A giant monster of death underneath the good old times of the old ones who never saw the real face of it. With all the leftist tendencies in my heart, fuck that shit a thousand times.
Ian Welsh
Missed the entire point. If capitalism can’t be run without mass murder that dwarfs EVEN the worst Communist excesses, then it doesn’t deserve to exist.
And, of course, China was far less nasty and these days is better than the major Western powers.
Justification was not the point, they were obviously wrong. That said, the idea that Communism is uniquely evil because of of the USSR killing sprees is obviously bullshit if you don’t also fairly look at the deaths caused by Capitalist systems, which, as it turns out, are worse.
j
Ian are you replying to me or StewartM? Because I’m replying to him not you:) My call is that anything of mass murder does not deserve to exist.
Ian Welsh
J. I didn’t realize that. Oops.
Hardly a country in the world deserves to exist based on that metric, though for a lot of us the mass murder is now generations in the past. Still, the number of nations built on mass murder is VERY high.
We just tend to make a distinction between murdering one’s own citizens (like the USSR) and massacring non-citizens.
This is at the heart of Israel’s defense of their genocide. “You all did it back in the 19th century, why can’t we do it now?”
j
Yeah I’ve thought about that a lot. If we look back far enough, everything is based on murder. We come from the animal kingdom after all. Much more chimps that bonobos we are.
And the idea that killing is bad is rather novel in that timeframe. Takes time to sink in, I guess.
Killing everyone seems to have been quite the popular method of solving future problems everywhere. Somewhere I read that all men in Spain were killed about 3000 years ago I think. Only rather recently the new country US was built on a genocide. We have multiple of those going on right now, too.
And of course the good old “Five Ways to Kill a Man”…
We are spending our time solving mostly animal problems, food, shelter, sex, and rarely any human problems, well my call is that we’re still basically animals.
But then – when is it a good time to change our ways and start to do better? How about now.
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Hardly a country in the world deserves to exist based on that metric, though for a lot of us the mass murder is now generations in the past.
Not so. It’s not in the past. The past is the present is the future. The actions taken by industrial society and now post industrial society have mass murder in the pipeline waiting to be delivered any day now. Think of the billions that are going to perish, and perish horribly, as a result of the ravaging of the biosphere. Hell, it’s already started. The decisions made by those in power, the decisions that are still being made that ensure growth in perpetuity as if that is even remotely possible, assured this deferred mass murder to come — mass murder that will put all previous mass murder to shame. It was hardly a democratic, egalitarian process no matter what ideology has been in power.
For those of you with high IQ’s, please feel free to skip my commentary as is your wont. I still have the last laugh because no matter how smart you all think you are, a dumbass boob, meaning DJT, holds your fate in his narcissistic hands so … so much for being smart and haughty.
StewartM
J
Oh yes, the jolly days of yore of the Gulags, the happy songs and campfires…
And now that I think about it, many people came back alive from Auschwitz also?
For your metaphor to actually work, it would have to have had the Nazis releasing the inmates of Auschwitz, no? Did that happen?
It was the Communists themselves who released the inmates of the Gulag, without someone else having to invade and liberate them. The Soviet archives say that the vast majority of Gulag inmates survived the Gulag and were released after serving their time.
Moreover, if you say that the Gulag was still unjustified, which I might agree, then I would ask you about the US incarceration system, the largest in the world and very nearly the same size. Oh and yes, a lot of those US inmates do daily work that benefits the rich and not them.
Leftist infighting sure is a thing, especially since the word got to mean identity politics.
I know that “identity politics” is your demon of the day, but identity politics has nothing to do with any of the left-killing-left. The usual reason why Marxists kill other Marxists or similar is that they accuse each other of not being “proletariat” enough, of not having the proper working-class stiff attitude. That was the reason behind both the killings in the Cultural Revolution and in Cambodia’s Killing Fields: “You aren’t proletarian enough, you wear eyewear and must be corrupted by ‘bourgeois’ notions like maybe it’s “best for engineers to be doing, say, engineering work?”
They do this even though a look at the leadership of Marxist countries show that essentially none of them were actually working-class stiffs. Lenin? Trotsky? Bukharin? Kamenev? Zinoviev? Stalin?–none of these guys were working class. Mao had a peasant background, yet his was a fairly wealthy peasant family who bought and sold land. In Stalin’s USSR, Nao might have been Gulag’ed as a “Kulak”.
The assumption that working class types will have the ‘right attitudes’ is a real problem in Marxism. If you want working-class attitudes, listen to any country music song and you’ll see what you get–pretty much a mostly-uncritical acceptance of everything society has told you is true, coupled with a self-loathing and self-blaming for failing to live up to those “truths”. No, to want a change for the better requires an education that working-class people don’t get.
I had a technician working with me, who hailed from a very Trumpy town which was also dirt-poor, and he said “Those people think that Bernie Sanders voters are just loafers lying around wanting handouts—and then I come here (in a R&D facility) and I see that the Bernie voters are better-educated, reasonably successful, but are willing to pay higher taxes for a better world not only for them, but for everyone else too.” A socialist mindset correlates generally with education plus a particular temperament. Che Guevara was medical student, who could have said “F–k this all, I’ll become a doctor and get mine” but who (no matter what you think of his choices) sacrificed his life to try to create a better society for everyone.
StewartM
J
Much more chimps that bonobos we are.
We’re far more like bonobos; there’s simply no question (do we have mating seasons like common chimps? really?) We are made into chimps by our cultures. Despite all the talk about humans being “killer apes” it takes quite a lot of desensitization and brutalization of young males to turn them into hardened killers. And even that comes at a cost.