On bloodthirsty economic systems:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I've seen bandied about by some sources that the century of Communist regimes following the Bolshevik Revolution killed 100-something million people. I've never been sure how they *reached* this total and lump statisticians in with liars and damned liars. But reading all that has prompted me to ask a kind of reversal of that question. If we take the entire gallery of Communist atrocities from 1917-2010 and make that representative of the whole movement as opposed to specific subsets and classes.......

Capitalism by one standard can be held responsible for its own death toll that rises over 100 million strong. For one thing the initial genocides in America and Australia were done by proprietor Colonies, what in today's terms would be Walmartstans. One can't fault those people for not being honest as regards their motivations-they were very clear that pursuit of individualist profit was if not the sole motivation equal to Christianization. A lot of the death tolls of the Communists were caused by a deep sense of callousness as opposed to explicit intention (which fits more with an ideology of worker's right). Capitalist societies, of course, had a tendency to overlook famines to the poorer and weaker societies (like say, the Irish or Indigenous peoples).

Communists forced their societies on others at gunpoint, and in fact that was pretty much the only way the fuckers got to power in Europe. But in the United States, bedrock of capitalism, the triumph of the industrial capitalist system resulted from four years of bloody warfare fought over an area as large as European Russia. And of course to make it stick men like Sherman, Sheridan, and Wilson were plenty willing to make Hell for enemy civilians. In our enlightened modern times groups such as the Contras, the Argentine Juntas, Pinochet's dictatorships, contemporary China, the Apartheid dictatorship, Pahlavi Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Manuel Uribe's dictatorship, and of course Haiti show it's perfectly possible to have free market dictatorships of equal savagery to their alternatives.

From my view it's not truly honest nor is it fair to evaluate the free market on the results of the Complete Monsters who have been willing often enough to enforce it regardless of whether the masses they rule like it or not. However to be honest I feel that should also apply with perfect consistency to the Marxists. After all, both Kerala and West Bengal show that it is perfectly possible for Communists to be both elected and govern peacefully, and Mossadeqh, Patrice Lumumba, and Salvador Allende show that Communists can in a lot of ways be less traumatic and damaging to their peoples than the guys who succeeded them who represented in all cases unpopular dictators who had access to the best repressive apparati US dollars could buy.

Since we're starting free market week I would prefer it if the discussions amount to something more than "Commies are evil baby rapers" and "Capitalists are evil baby eaters". Since the Hall of Death and Shame attributable to both is equivalent in death tolls and in the same kinds of tragedies.

Comments

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Capitalism by one standard can be held responsible for its own death toll that rises over 100 million strong. For one thing the initial genocides in America and Australia were done by proprietor Colonies, what in today's terms would be Walmartstans. One can't fault those people for not being honest as regards their motivations-they were very clear that pursuit of individualist profit was if not the sole motivation equal to Christianization. A lot of the death tolls of the Communists were caused by a deep sense of callousness as opposed to explicit intention (which fits more with an ideology of worker's right). Capitalist societies, of course, had a tendency to overlook famines to the poorer and weaker societies (like say, the Irish or Indigenous peoples).

I'm not following what this has to do with capitalism.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

So you don't see how colonies set up by the direct precursors of corporations for profit has to do with capitalism? Okay.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

No, I don't. That's like saying that someone's great-grandfather who owned land that now belongs to Target was a "precusor" to capitalism or something.

Colonialism and expansion is not necessarily capitalistic or socialistic or fitting for any specific economic ideology on its own. We can point quite clearly to the millions that Communists explicitly killed - if your response is that colonialism's battles equate to that, well...I think you're reaching.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I didn't think I had this bookmarked, but I do (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#RCW). This is a well-cited area of exactly what the consensus is for deaths that can be attributed directly to Communist ideology. I don't really take a lot of issue with what's being cited here, and 20m does seem like a fair estimate.

Meanwhile, every attempt I've seen for capitalism death counts seems to use your same idea - anything done by capitalistic countries regardless of intent. Thus, Iraq War? Deaths by capitalism! Vietnam? Deaths by capitalism! Etc etc.

???

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

"But in the United States, bedrock of capitalism"

BEDROCK ???

Re: ???

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

If we go this route, considering the United States other than capitalist raises the question as to whether or not we should term the USSR and its allies/rivals Communist.....

No,

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

I was teched that capitalism emerged far before they'e got an overdose of tea at Boston.

Re: ???

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Yabba dabba doo baby.

Can you make

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

a "barking dog", son ?

[404.livejournal.com]

I don't know why you start the clock at 1917 for communism. It could easily go back to 1848.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

False. The Revolutions of 1848 were liberal revolutions. Organized Marxist violence didn't get started for another few years until Alexander II of Russia began to liberalize the system and let the Jackass Genie out of the Bottle.

Hmmm.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

As Russians got their comunist party only half a century later, in 1898, I find it hard to believe the "organised Marxist violence" was that quick.
Just thought you may want to know.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Why did you pick 1848? Because of the democracy demonstrations in Europe?

[http://users.livejournal.com/aviation_/]

"Overlooking famine," while a moral problem for sure, is not equivalent to murder. In the case of famine CAUSED by government it is murder.

I am not defending any actions of any government - capitalistic, communist, or otherwise - that have directly caused harm or death to their or other people. I believe this is an unfortunate result of the nature of politicians and power (and thusly universal) and can only be resolved by refusing power to the government. Here is a list from an openly biased source (http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html) of dictators and their death tolls. If you have a source that disproves any of these numbers (or adds others), I'm ready to listen because this site clearly has its own agenda. They do paint a certain picture. Because communism in practice gives more power to the central government (while claiming to give it to the people), I would say that the relationship here is that more power for the government brings about more genocides, and communism is by its nature more likely to have a big government or a dictator. I don't think the genocides are directly caused by communism or capitalism (though other problems might be) nor is a good argument against the political system as a whole.

West Bengal has all kinds of problems. Human Rights Watch (http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/04/09/india-end-harassment-west-bengal-activist) and Amnesty International (https://bangla.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/hrd-kirity-roy) has both reported on a recent incident.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

So with the British sitting on their asses with the repeated Indian Famines and using the Irish Potato Famine to boot out the Irish?

The simplest refutation is that in several cases it's transparently false. There was no Assyrian Genocide because those half-million Assyrians cited never existed to start with. The population transfers after WWI were concurrent with a Greek invasion of Turkey that attempt to exterminate the Turks.

It also *undercounts* deaths caused by Nazism which were really 22 million instead of 12. The Japanese death toll should be 30 million instead of five million (Good God, that's Critical Research Failure right there). It also drastically undercounts Lenin's death toll. In a civil war across the expanse of the Russian Empire, Europe's first ruler to invent the totalitarian system did not kill a mere 30,000. Ungern von Sternberg killed more than 30,000 at the head of his own crusade.

And that's also incorrect. Communist dictatorships arise at the head of devastated, gutted societies. They come from underground movements with strong martial traditions and acceptance of violence. Nobody should be surprised that kind of paranoid movement turns violent.

It's like all the "surprise" at what happened once the paramilitaries drove the US Army out following the Compromise of 1877.

[reflaxion.livejournal.com]

Since we're starting free market week I would prefer it if the discussions amount to something more than "Commies are evil baby rapers" and "Capitalists are evil baby eaters".

If we could have just agreed to rape and eat the babies, we'd have achieved world peace by now.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually I think that would merely create the Reavers, but your idea is good.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

I don't really see the point in such comparisons.

For one thing, few if any regimes have ever attempted to put communist ideas into practice. In almost every case, the revolutionary class simply turns around to exploit the workers in a new and often more totalitarian way. And to the extent that the means of production remain undemocratic and exploitative, they can not be considered "communist" in any meaningful sense.

There are many capitalists who despise this criticism, viewing it as an excuse, but they are usually hesitant to offer actual reasons for why it is invalid. They are equally hesitant to include under the umbrella of "capitalism" the deeds performed by any right-wing dictatorship or banana republic claiming to be democratic and free-market, regardless of how corrupt or unfree those societies might be; this is hypocrisy. If a "communist" state needs only to be communist in name, with no actual reference to the ideas or principles of communism, then the same must apply to the way we evaluate societies based on private property as well.

But the second reason I find this kind of comparison to be less-than-compelling is that the numbers are kind of meaningless. Even if an "ideology" could be held directly responsible for a set of deaths, the point isn't that an ideology that has killed 200 million is inferior to one that has only killed 100 million, but rather that they are both historical abominations which deserve our condemnation, assuming that the gross neglect for human life and suffering is not an area where a "lesser of two evils" approach is morally sensible (though it may still be prudentially sensible).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

A few counter-arguments against this:

First, most Communist movements saw the repressive side of the state and/or triumphed in a civil war (Maoism and Leninism). This creates perfect seedbeds for paranoia and radicalism.

Second, most Communist movements took over Agrarian states without real workforces to justify the name.

Third, that's kind of the point my OP was making.

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

If you're interested in finding out how the 100 million figure was reached, check the Black Book of Communism. It does a pretty good job of documenting this number. You can certainly disagree with some of the logic in the book, but it is pretty clear about how this figure was computed.

What separates the 100 million deaths that are attributed to communism from some similar toll caused by capitalism is that these were citizens who were killed by their own government, either by malice or by incompetence. Sure right wing dictatorships killed their citizens by the tens of thousands, but aside from fascist countries, there wasn't a similar death toll in the last century. Not to excuse their brutality, but the countries in the US sphere of influence fell a few orders of magnitude short in this regard.

Adding in deaths caused by colonialism really muddles the issue. Societies had been warring with each other, sometimes to the point of genocide, since we've had societies. Rulers tended to spend their time either trying to expand their territory or fending off others from taking their territory throughout history. This isn't what the 100 million figure was about.

The remarkable attribute of the 20th century was the numbers of citizens who were killed by their own governments. The communists were the winners of this contest, followed by the fascists, the capitalists were a distant third.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I've read the Black Book of Communism and a lot of that *still* makes no sense to me.

But you see adding colonialism on its own by virtue of the American continent having 1/5 the human race in 1491 puts Capitalism right up with Communism in a single century.

And while the Communists are winners in that dubious contest by sheer number when the Fascists started mass killings they got over 20 million in three years.....

[reality-hammer.livejournal.com]

This.

Not to mention the difference between democracies and monarchies.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

One can no more separate capitalism from imperialism than one can separate Marxist central planning from the Gulag.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

Capitalism, on its own, is only about a free market, not wiping out natives.

That is debatable. Capitalism does not rest only on an understanding of market forces but on modern relations of private property, which were arguably instrumental in the process of colonial conquest. Let us not forget that buying and owning land for the sake of generating a profit -- a process which was completely foreign to the native populations of the Americas -- was a rather instrumental pretext in the process of having them evicted from their lands.

Furthermore, the process of colonization is historically integrated with the development of capitalism. The enclosure movement and the transfer of political and economic power from feudal landowners to capitalist "gentlemen-farmers" was well underway by the 17th century. So too were speculative bubbles and join stock seen in the 17th century.

So I don't think it makes very much sense to say that the colonization was not capitalistic simply because it lacked the most advanced elements of free trade theory. And indeed, most historians do not appear to view it this way, either; they (http://books.google.com/books?id=tdXszpYKlmsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=merchant+capitalism&hl=en&ei=iXxhTIXzBMOAlAf-3LmfCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false) refer (http://books.google.com/books?id=G7GhMKoRgvAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=merchant+capitalism&hl=en&ei=iXxhTIXzBMOAlAf-3LmfCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false) to the period as "merchant capitalism" (http://books.google.com/books?id=4evJf4fk4qwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Money+and+finance+in+the+age+of+merchant+capitalism&source=bl&ots=2BR_7gJDXJ&sig=Ag1fYThNnv13frZeYvxkg3U6QnU&hl=en&ei=4nthTIDKMcKblge2mMjVCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false).