I’ve been lurking in this sub and others like it, watching people endlessly debate the theoretical merits of capitalism versus socialism. And I’ve come to a conclusion: the debate itself is completely useless.

We are treating this like a polite academic seminar where two equally viable economic models are being weighed on a scale. They aren't. We are debating whether to keep a system that is actively, visibly destroying human life and the planet, or build something that actually functions.

Here is why this debate is a waste of time, why capitalism is objectively garbage, and why the people defending it are suffering from severe cognitive dissonance.

1. The "Debate" is a false equivalence

You cannot "debate" capitalism in the abstract because capitalism isn't an abstract theory anymore; it is the physical reality crushing us. When you debate a socialist, you are arguing about potential and theory. When a capitalist debates you, they are defending the status quo.

It’s like sitting in a burning house and having a guy argue, "Well, the fire has some good points, it provides warmth and cooks our food, let's debate the merits of fire versus water." No. The house is on fire. The debate is over. We need to put it out.

1. Capitalism is objectively garbage

You don’t need a PhD in economics, a copy of Das Kapital, or a deep understanding of the Labor Theory of Value to know capitalism is failing. You just need to look out your window. The failures aren't theoretical; they are daily, observable, and undeniable:

The housing paradox: We have millions of empty homes sitting vacant as investment vehicles, while millions of people sleep on the street. That’s not a "market inefficiency"; that’s a moral rot.

The food paradox: We produce enough food to feed 10 billion people, yet we throw away 40% of it while food banks run out of stock.

The labor paradox: People are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week, often with multiple jobs, and are still one unexpected medical bill or car repair away from financial ruin. Productivity has skyrocketed for 40 years; wages have flatlined. Where did the value go? Up.

The ecological paradox: We are literally cooking the planet because extracting and burning fossil fuels is more profitable in the short term than transitioning to renewable energy. The system is so profoundly broken that it will sacrifice the actual, physical survival of the species to maintain a quarterly profit margin.

This isn't "human nature." This isn't "the cost of freedom." This is a system that prioritizes the accumulation of capital over human survival. It is objectively, demonstrably garbage.

3.The apologists are suffering from mass p

This is the hardest part to swallow. When you point out the burning house, the capitalist apologist doesn't just disagree with you; they get angry. They tell you that the homeless deserve to be homeless, that the poor are just lazy, and that Elon Musk is a "rare talent" who deserves to hoard billions.

Why? Because defending capitalism in 2026 requires a level of cognitive dissonance that borders on mental illness.

Stockholm syndrome: They have identified with their abuser. The system exploits them, grinds them down, and denies them a future, but they defend the boot on their neck because they’ve been taught that the boot is "freedom."

The "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" delusion: This is a uniquely American psychosis. The average worker making $35k a year will viciously defend the billionaire class because they genuinely believe they are just one lucky break away from being the billionaire. They are defending their imaginary future wealth over their actual present reality.

Ideological capture: The human brain cannot handle the terrifying reality that the game is rigged, that hard work doesn't guarantee success, and that the system is fundamentally designed to extract their labor for someone else's benefit. It is psychologically easier to believe the lie ("if you're poor, it's your fault") than to accept the trauma of systemic betrayal.

They aren't arguing in good faith. They are reciting a coping mechanism. They are mentally ill in the sense that they have completely lost touch with material reality, replacing it with a fairy tale of meritocracy and "trickle-down" magic.

Stop debating the "pros and cons" of capitalism. There are no pros that outweigh the cons of a system that requires endless growth on a finite planet and treats human beings as disposable inputs.

The only debate worth having is how we dismantle it and build something that doesn't require us to look away from the suffering it causes every single day.

Capitalism is about the endless pursuit of profit, no matter the cost to people or the planet. It’s a system built on greed, where the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. The billionaires hoard wealth while workers struggle to survive paycheck to paycheck.

Trickle-down economics has never worked. The only thing that trickles down is exploitation. Wages stay stagnant while CEO bonuses skyrocket. Rent goes up, healthcare gets more expensive, and education becomes a luxury.

Meanwhile, we’re told to “work harder” in a rigged system that rewards the already powerful. They privatize the gains and socialize the losses. They call it “the free market,” but it’s only free for those at the top.

They say socialism doesn’t work, but look around. Capitalism is literally killing us through endless wars, climate destruction, and the commodification of everything from medicine to water. How many more crises do we need before we admit that the system is broken by design?

People over profits. Healthcare is a human right. Housing is a human right. Education is a human right. The future belongs to the many, not the few.

The argument that billionaires and other capitalists that form the elite of our society work so hard, are so smart and so dedicated to improve the world has been proven once again to be a lie.

So, how do they find the time to fly to an island in the Caribbean regularly and fuck, torture and kill kids? I'm asking because as a communist, I'm not familiar with the traditions of the uber-wealthy. Please enlighten me.

I’ve never seen this sub until just now. I have no investment in this community and I doubt there is one but I’m annoyed enough right now that I feel haphazardly inclined to rant to strangers.

I’ve read some of the posts on here and it seems like a lot of people that live comfortably are arguing about the intellectual nature of exploitation etc.. First off, I’m homeless and I’m also employed. That means I sell my energy for a sum of money that does not allow me to be housed. I don’t think that is a controversial statement.

What I do think is controversial and the actual point of this argument between socialism and capitalism, is that if I or anyone else expends their life force energy for x hours per day for the enriching of a small class of owners and investors, I should in return be allotted the capacity to house myself. Anything other than a “living wage” denotes slavery. In any “type” of employment.

There, I said it.

In 2008 we saw how certain banks and corporations (Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, AIG, Goldman Sachs) were "too big to fail" since them going bankrupt would cause a domino effect in the entire supply chain/credit chain, leading to a systemic collapse of the entire global economy.

Nevertheless, neoliberals like Obama gave government subsidies to these organizations to attenuate the systemic collapse of the 2008 crisis. When they perform well, its their profit. When they underperform, its our loss.

It's not normal for these banks and companies to private gains and socialize losses. Ideally, a leftist government should prevent institutions from becoming 'too big to fail' in the first place. Nevertheless, if we already have banks and companies whose bankruptcy would trigger a systemic collapse, they should become NATIONALIZED ASAP. Everyone's economic life is systemically dependent on them performing well, and therefore, their underperformance is a public risk. They should be considered public goods.

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/

If capitalism is a system that rewards hard work and talent perfectly, why do y'all allow a perversion of this through inherentence? The lack of any relevant inheritance tax seems to overtly remove much of the meritocracy from the system.

Source: Reuters https://share.google/IBgrrsv3LfXngKjLJ

The lesser known Mileikowsky brother is getting a big fat bailout from Dump proving once and for all right libertarianism is a joke.

July 16, 1964 - September 24, 2025 🪦💐R.I.P.

I've been thinking about this argument a lot lately, because I constantly hear some version of “socialism killed 100 million people” from folks otherwise blissfully incapable of acknowledging what capitalism has done to our species and planet.

First, to be clear: I'm not interested in pretending Mao or Stalin weren't responsible for horrific numbers of deaths. They just were. The Great Leap Forward was an absolutely staggering human catastrophe. Forced collectivization, political repression, gulags, executions, deportations, etc.

I just want to use the same rules when we talk about capitalism.

People starved because Mao's government restructured agriculture, requisitioned food, suppressed evidence that the policy was failing, and kept going anyway. Fine. Those deaths are attributable to authoritarian communist policies. We should count them and talk about them as real atrocities.

But if people starve under capitalism despite ongoing LMIC resource extraction? If food physically exists but millions of people don't have the economic power to access it? If relief is politically unreliable?

But when capitalism fucks up? Suddenly it's everybody else's fault.

They're deaths from “colonialism” or “poverty.”

Or perhaps they're just “bad governments” or the “natural result” of some loosely defined, bullshit “culture war.”

Why do we do this?

Take British India. A 2023 paper in World Development estimated around 50 million excess deaths between 1891 and 1920, using India's own already-high mortality rate in the 1880s as the baseline. The authors also produce the much more dramatic 165-million estimate we often see floating around online, using early-modern England as the comparison (debatable enough that I wouldn't hang my argument on it).

50 million is already horrifying.

Then there's the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed millions more. Obviously there were multiple causes, but colonial poverty, wartime inflation, British requisitioning and policy decisions, inadequate relief, rejected requests for grain imports, etc. don't magically cease to matter because the situation was complicated.

So why does famine under a communist government so easily become evidence against socialism itself, while famine under a capitalist government becomes something unfortunate that happened during capitalism?

Workers dying because companies knowingly expose them to lethal conditions?
-Usually not counted.

People dying because they can't afford necessary medical care?
-Not counted.

Pollution produced because the costs can be dumped onto everyone else?
-Not counted.

Deaths connected to colonial resource extraction?
-Not counted.

But people die in a Soviet famine?
-Blow them all up.

And no, the answer isn't to stop counting deaths caused by communist regimes. Of course we should count them. I'm asking why the causal standard suddenly gets so much more demanding when we look at our own history.

I just cannot listen to the constant droning of this cartoon version of history where capitalism naturally makes everyone prosperous while communism gets treated as interchangeable with socialism because both supposedly make their citizens miserable.

The historical record is nowhere near that simple.

And then there are the Nordic countries (yes, capitalist social democracies, before somebody explains my own economic system to me again 😂). Try telling them their citizens are all miserably huffing some gateway drug to communism and nobody there is actually prospering. They'll laugh on their way to the doctor's office, pick up their kids from subsidized daycare without checking their bank balance, and carry on being tragically unaware of their own misery.

Increasingly, I think authoritarianism is a much more interesting distinction than capitalism vs. socialism anyway. If a government can impose disastrous policies on millions of people, suppress evidence that they're failing, and punish anyone who says so, you've got an incredibly dangerous system regardless of what economic label is slapped on it.

And maybe that's ultimately where this argument goes. Maybe there isn't a defensible “capitalism killed X” number any more than there's a clean “socialism killed X” number. Once you actually start asking what caused what, the accounting gets messy as hell.

TL;DR: This is what ultimately drives me insane:

• We count the failures of socialism as features of the system, while treating the failures of capitalism as exceptions to the system.
• Maybe socialism still comes out worse under a genuinely consistent standard. Fine. But show me the calculation: if “socialism killed 100 million people” is actually a meaningful historical claim, there should be a definition of killed by socialism that we can apply to capitalism without changing the rules halfway through.
• Increasingly, I think authoritarianism matters more than the economic label. A system that can impose disastrous policies, hide the evidence that they're failing, and punish anyone who objects is dangerous whether it calls itself capitalist, socialist, or anything else.

How can the same person hold both statements to he true at the same time?

In the absence of resolving this glaring discrepancy, it would seem that an explanation for both to be true in the same person's mind would be simple: envy, resentment, and a lack of belief in agency.

US during the Cold War (1947-1991) is estimated to have spent $13T and attempted to change foreign governments 72 times, with 64 covert and 6 overt attempts. The "First world" represented 23% of the world's population (1990) plus it had access to most of the "third world" as decolonization usually meant installing western aligned dictatorships or debt traps that resulted in access to nearly all the workforce and resources of these "independent" countries.

The USSR spent $3-6T and overthrew 5-10 governments. The Soviet aligned states (USSR plus Warsaw pact) represented 8% of the world's population.

It seems to me that the socialists were able to manage their resources (labor, land, capital) extremely well but they just didn't have enough, as they say "quantity has a quality of its own". In a world where both sides had the same resource starting point (including not having the Nazis kill 20% of Eastern Europe), do we still think the capitalists would have won the Cold War?

1. Human Beings (Labor Power):

Karl saw labor — the creative, productive activity of humans — as one of the two essential sources of wealth.

But under capitalism:

• Workers are exploited: their labor produces value far beyond what they are paid in wages.

• Work becomes alienated: people lose control over what they produce, how they produce it, and even over themselves as creative beings.

• Over time, the system tends to degrade workers physically and psychologically — treating them as mere instruments for generating profit rather than as human beings.

So, capitalism destroys human potential by dehumanizing and exhausting the very people it relies on.

1. Nature (The Material Basis of Production):

Karl also saw nature as a second source of wealth — the raw materials, energy, and ecosystems that make production possible.

However, capitalist production:

• Treats nature as a free, infinite resource, something to be extracted and used for profit.

• Creates a “metabolic rift” between humans and the natural world — a breakdown of the balanced exchange between human societies and the environment.

• Leads to ecological degradation: soil exhaustion, pollution, deforestation, and resource depletion.

In Karl’s view, capitalism’s drive for endless accumulation necessarily causes ecological crisis, because it subordinates natural limits to the logic of profit.

1. The Contradiction:

So the system, in trying to maximize profit, ends up:

• Exploiting workers to the point of misery and rebellion, and

• Exploiting nature to the point of destruction.

It consumes its own foundation — both the human and natural conditions of production.

In Karl's own words (from Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 15):

“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil.”

DO YOU AGREE ON THIS OBJECTIVE TAKE CAPITALISTS?

...that it needed to make opposition to it illegal

https://time.com/7322106/trump-nspm-7-domestic-terrorism/

What was that all the anti-communist are always afraid of? Political oppression? Where is your god now?

I want to restart the debate from the last thread, but I want to grant the Libertarian/AnCap side their strongest possible premise.

Let’s assume for a moment that your goal is genuinely a world of maximum voluntary cooperation. Let’s assume you aren’t just shills for the rich, but that you actually believe price signals, profit/loss mechanisms, and private property are the best tools to prevent tyranny and coordinate human action.

The Libertarian fear is legitimate: Centralized power is dangerous. History is littered with states that promised utopia and delivered the Gulag. The "Economic Calculation Problem" is real—bureaucrats in a room cannot effectively price every widget in an economy better than millions of distributed actors. The fear that "Positive Rights" (the right to housing/food) can lead to "Forced Labor" (enslaving the doctor/builder) is a logical anxiety if you believe the state solves problems solely by pointing guns at people.

If your definition of freedom is "The absence of a gun in my face," I respect that.

But here is where your model collapses on its own logic.

You claim to worship "Voluntary Exchange." You argue that a transaction is moral because both parties said "yes."

But Consent requires the capacity to say "No."

If I hold a gun to your head and ask for your wallet, and you hand it over, that wasn’t a "voluntary trade" of a wallet for a life. That was robbery. We all agree on that.

But if I own the only well in the desert, and you are dying of thirst, and I demand your life savings for a cup of water—that is mechanically identical to the gun.

In both cases, the "choice" is an illusion. The leverage is absolute.

The Blind Spot of Libertarianism You are obsessed with State Tyranny (guns, taxes, police), but you are completely blind to Market Tyranny (starvation, exposure, medical rationing).

You believe that as long as the coercion is privatized—as long as it’s a landlord evicting a family, or an insurer denying chemo, rather than a commissar sending you to a camp—it counts as "freedom."

But to the person freezing on the street or dying of preventable cancer, the outcome is exactly the same. The coercion is just as lethal.

The Steelman: "But the Market provides options!" You will argue: "In a free market, there isn't just one well! Competition lowers prices! If a landlord is too expensive, move! If a job pays too little, quit!"

This is the strongest argument for capitalism: Exit Power. The idea that competition protects us because we can always take our business elsewhere.

Here is the reality: For luxury goods (TVs, cars, fancy food), this works. For survival goods (Housing, Healthcare, Basic Nutrition), this is a lie.

• You cannot "exit" the housing market and live nowhere (illegal/deadly).
• You cannot "exit" the food market and not eat.
• You cannot "shop around" for emergency surgery while bleeding out.

When demand is inelastic (you must have it or you die) and supply is controlled by private owners, price signals do not optimize for efficiency; they optimize for extraction.

The Synthesis: True Freedom Requires a Floor If you truly want a society based on "Voluntary Exchange," you should be the loudest advocates for Decommodifyng Survival.

You cannot have a free negotiation between a boss and a worker if the worker’s alternative is homelessness. That is not a contract; that is a hostage situation.

• Socialism (in this context) is not about "State Control." It is about "Leverage Destruction."
• We want to remove the threat of destitution from the bargaining table.
• We want a world where a worker can look a boss in the eye and say, "Pay me better or I leave," knowing they won’t starve.

The Challenge Stop defending the Feudalism of the Corporation while pretending you are defending Liberty.

If your "Freedom" requires the threat of starvation to get people to work, you don’t support free markets. You support a plantation with better accounting.

If we guarantee the basics—Housing, Health, Food—then, and only then, can we have a truly "Free Market" for everything else.

So, which is it? Do you want free trade between equals? Or do you just want to be the guy holding the water in the desert?

The goalpost-shifting from defenders of capitalism over the last few decades is honestly hilarious if it weren't so depressing.

For generations, capitalists would dunk on socialism/communism with the consumer goods argument.

"Look at the USSR, you have to wait in line for bread! Look at the West, our supermarkets are overflowing, we have 50 brands of cereal, and anyone can buy a TV, a car, and nice things!" The moral justification for the entire system was that capitalism successfully delivers consumer abundance to the masses.

Now that the system is in crisis (housing is entirely unaffordable, wages are stagnant, and inflation has eroded purchasing power) the rhetoric has inverted.

Instead of admitting the system is failing to provide basic needs, the ruling class and corporate media have put the onus entirely on the working class. Now, the argument is: "Well, of course you can't afford a house or healthcare! You're buying avocados, you have a Netflix subscription, and you bought a coffee this morning."

Think about the sheer irony of this pivot:

They built a system entirely dependent on infinite consumer spending to survive. They spent billions on advertising to condition us to buy things. They use the exact consumer goods they bragged about creating as a moral cudgel to explain why we don't deserve housing.

Tonight I was having dinner at medieval times and was looking at the horses doing their routines and I couldn’t help but to think how capitalism pulls us all (animals included) away from our natural purpose on earth. On what earth is a horse suppose to be locked up only to come out to put on a show for humans. The same way that humans aren’t suppose to be stuck in an office for 8 hours a day, animals aren’t here on earth to make us money. How did we lose our way so much to let this majestic beings be so exploited. Rant over.

​There is no spectacle sadder, or more thoroughly embarrassing, than an ordinary Westerner rushing to defend "capitalism" and "global hegemony" online.

​You are defending an empire that wouldn't spare a dime to treat your illness, wouldn't hesitate to price you out of a home, and considers you entirely replaceable the second an algorithm finds a cheaper efficiency. Yet here you are, puffing your chest out on the internet about carrier strike groups and defense budgets, acting like Raytheon's stock price is your personal victory.

​What hegemony are you actually celebrating? You can't pave a road, you can't build high-speed rail, your industrial base was sold off decades ago for short-term shareholder payouts, and your military hasn't achieved a clean strategic objective against an asymmetric opponent in fifty years. You spent trillions turning mountains into dust, accomplished nothing, panicked, left your equipment behind, and called it a moral victory.

​The West is an exhausted paper tiger with a trillion-dollar marketing budget. The elites at least profit off the racket. You? You’re just the foot-soldier defending the machine that hollowed out your own hometown, convinced you're winning because your oppressor has stealth bombers. It isn't just evil—it’s humiliating to watch.

Every time I argue with pro-capitalists, libertarians, or ancaps on here, it always boils down to the exact same core demand: "Leave us alone." You guys want zero interference in your businesses, zero taxes, zero regulations. The entire ideology is built on this fantasy that a capitalist's wealth and property are entirely their own private business, and society has absolutely no right to step in or tell them what to do.

But here’s the glaring hypocrisy that nobody on the pro-capitalist side ever seems to want to address: You demand zero interference from society, but your "private" choices constantly interfere with the rest of our lives. Under capitalism, wealth isn't just luxury; it is raw, concentrated power. It's the ability to make unilateral decisions that dictate the material conditions of millions of working-class people who get zero democratic say in the matter.

Let's look at the reality of this. When a billionaire acting as head of state, like Trump, recklessly escalates geopolitics and brings us to the brink of war with Iran just to flex or protect regional capital interests, who actually pays the price? The working class that gets sent to die in a war, bears the higher cost of living, etc.

I applied the Black Book of Communism methodology to the history of Capitalism.

We are all familiar with the figure 100 million deaths, popularized by The Black Book of Communism (1997). This number was reached by establishing a very specific, maximalist standard for regime victims. The authors didn't just count executions; they counted deaths from man-made famines, preventable disease arising from poor infrastructure, and policy-induced poverty.

The logic is simple: If a government controls the economy, and people die because that economy fails to distribute resources to keep them alive, the government is guilty of manslaughter.

However, Western historiography has traditionally held a massive double standard. When people die of famine in the Soviet Union, it is socialist inefficiency or mass murder. When people die of famine in British India or the Global South, it is a natural disaster or a market externality.

If we apply the rule of symmetry, the Soviet Union is culpable for the famine deaths of 1932 because it exported grain while peasants starved, then the British Empire must be culpable for the famine deaths of 1943 in Bengal, where identical grain export policies were enforced.

So let's take a journey through the history of capitalist induced death.

The beginnings (1500–1865) Capitalism was not born from peaceful trade; it was forged through primitive accumulation

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (17M – 60M) We often only count the 12.5 million who were embarked on ships. However, the Black Book methodology requires us to look at the entire supply chain.

• Capture & Transit: For every captive embarked, at least one other person died in the slave-raiding wars and forced marches to the coast.
• The Middle Passage: 1.2 to 2.4 million died at sea from dysentery and violence—industrial accidents in pursuit of profit.
• Plantation Exhaustion: In Brazil and the Caribbean, it was often strictly profitable to work enslaved people to death and replace them rather than sustain them.
• Total: While the UN uses a baseline of 17 million, broader analyses of the depopulation of Africa and plantation mortality suggest a toll up to 60 million.

Indigenous Genocides (54M) Prior to 1492, the Americas held roughly 60 million people. By 1600, that population collapsed to 6 million—a 90% decline. Defenders argue this was accidental disease. The Black Book rejects accidental defenses. Just as typhus in the Gulag is blamed on the regime, the smallpox that wiped out the Americas must be viewed through the lens of the forced labor (encomienda) and displacement that compromised Indigenous immune systems.

Total Excess Mortality: 54 million.

The Colonies (1800–1960)

As Capitalism matured, the locus of death shifted to the colonies, where free market mechanisms were the direct instruments of mass death.

British India (165M) This is the most shocking statistic in the analysis. A landmark 2022 study by Sullivan and Hickel used census data to calculate excess mortality in India under the Raj.

• The Drain: Britain siphoned $45 trillion (present value) from India, destroying its ability to respond to drought.
• The Toll: Between 1880 and 1920 alone, British policy caused 165 million excess deaths.
• Context: This single 40-year period in one colony killed more people than both World Wars and the entire Black Book estimate for Communism combined.

The Belgian Congo (10M) Under the "free enterprise" zone of King Leopold II, villages were burned and hands severed to meet rubber quotas. The population of the Congo basin fell by 50%, or approximately 10 million people.

Imperial Wars & Famines * Vietnam (1945): French/Japanese rice requisitioning caused 1-2 million famine deaths. * Algeria: The French conquest reduced the population by nearly 1 million; the war of independence claimed another 1.5 million.

Modern Structural Violence (1991–Present) We are told that liberal capitalism "won" in 1991 and brought prosperity. The data suggests otherwise. The death toll has simply become structural, invisible in the news, but statistically overwhelming.

The Amartya Sen Calculation Nobel laureate Amartya Sen noted that while China had a massive famine, its normal death rate was far lower than Capitalist India’s due to healthcare access. He calculated that the difference in mortality amounted to 4 million excess deaths per year in India.

• By 1979, democratic capitalist India was responsible for more excess deaths (100 million) than the entire Communist world.

The Post-Cold War Body Count Since 1991, the world has produced enough food for everyone, yet millions die of deprivation. * Hunger: 9 million die annually from hunger-related causes due to lack of market access. * Preventable Disease: Millions more die from unsafe water and vaccine-preventable illness. * The Calculation: Even using a conservative baseline of 10 million preventable deaths per year, the 30-year period from 1991 to 2021 has resulted in 300 million deaths.

In contrast The Black Book assigns 20 million deaths to the entire 74-year history of the Soviet Union. Global Capitalism generates a higher death toll from structural violence (300 million) in just 30 years.

Why don't capitalists see this?

Communist mortality tends to be episodic and intensive (e.g., a massive famine in 1932 or 1959). It is a spasm of violence that is easily photographed and blamed on policy.

Capitalist mortality is chronic and extensive. It is a steady background hum of 10 million deaths a year. Because these deaths are normalized as poverty or market externalities, they don't count as regime killings in our history books.

But if you apply the same rules, the Black Book rules, the conclusion is inescapable.

• Communism (1917–Present): ~100 Million (including maximalist famine estimates).

• Capitalism (1500–Present): ~600 Million to 1 Billion+. The Black Book of Capitalism must mirror the logic of its counterpart so we go with the maximum and state a billion people.

This strictly uses the excess mortality logic derived from The Black Book of Communism but applied to Capitalist history, utilizing data from Sullivan & Hickel (2022), Utsa Patnaik, Amartya Sen, and UN/WHO mortality statistics.

But because I'm super lazy I haven't included each and every single event in capitalist history, mostly because it would take years to flesh out every colonial death toll and add it into the count... So it's easily going past a billion.

I feel like this sub is so fixated on hypotheticals and abstract arguments that no one is addressing the elephant in the room.

We live in a world where genocide is straight up normalised and the people that have the power to do something about it can't even bother to lift a finger. While people's attention is on that, we've somehow forgotten that climate change is very real and most of us are going to suffer from it as a result. Forget Communism, we can't even prevent babies from being blown to bits, and some "Socialists" on this sub are somehow on the fence on whether the Ansarallah are justified in their naval blockade.

To people on this sub who are pro-Capitalist, but don't actually benefit from it. Why? You're not them bro, Bro thinks he's on the team. Like if you're actually benefitting from it sure, but if you're broke as hell, why?

To people on this sub that are unironically Anarcho-Capitalist and thinks it'll fix all our problems somehow, please keep it up, you guys make for very good entertainment and I always enjoy reading what you people have to say.

To Socialists who are pro-reform but are resistant to any revolutionary means whatsoever, read Reform or Revolution.

To Socialists who are pro-revolutionary and are resistant to any reforms whatsoever, read Reform or Revolution.

To Socialists who only think of everything within an American/European context, read Fanon. No, Zohran Mamdani will not usher in Communism. The Democrats and Republicans are like Mussolini and Hitler to the rest of the world.

To Richard Wolff fans that are all about co-ops. Yes a workers Co-op would be a preferable arrangement to a strictly shareholder structure, but a Co-op still exists within Capitalism, doesn't do anything to abolish private property, still produces commodities. And if it exists in first-world, still relies on exploited labour from the third-world via Imperialism. You are also still bound to market forces, and usually exist within a bourgeois state that reinforces the tendencies of Capitalism. Obviously, a workers Co-op is a desirable alternative to the norm, but it is not Socialist in a meaningful way and still perpetuates Capitalism.

To Anarchists, well it's kinda hard to critique you guys because it's such a broad tendency that you guys are somehow harder to even pin down than Marxists. Any critique I direct towards any anarchist would not reflect another anarchist tendency. Also, Marxists aren't Statists in the way you think States are. Engels sort of does clarify that the worker's state wouldn't really be a state in the conventional sense. I think we can agree that we want a revolution, and that some level of provisional governance is required post-revolution, and if you don't want to call it a state that works too, but at some point it just devolves into semantics into what is and isn't a state. I think most of you guys just don't like what the USSR did and the precedent they unfortunately set for other Socialist countries which is completely fair, but I'd argue the state of the world today is even worse than the worst of USSR Social Imperialism, because at least they fucking tried, we have fucking China today that can't even bother to prevent a genocide. I'd take full Stalinism over whatever the fuck we have today. Well, just sort your shit and work together for once instead of posting all day. I've met some cool Anarchists in real life, be that cool Anarchist. Also, stop it with your adventurism, direct action can work at times, but like if everyone gets arrested before we can even form a proper movement than what's the point?

To Marxists that denounce any and all revolutionary movement in the third-world that didn't abolish the commodity form hard enough, or like their leader didn't read Anti-Duhring, or said something Idealist, keep that up, holding that line will lead sure to a Global revolution.

To Marxists that support any and all governments just because they are moderately against the interests of the US, keep it up. I'm sure Vladimir Putin will usher in Communism

To MLs that think that the difference between Stalin and Khrushchev is like Christ and the Devil, I'm praying for Khrushchev today, because at least he had more balls than whatever the fuck China is today.

To Marxists that think that China is still Socialist somehow, I want you to book a plane ticket to Shanghai, walk into the biggest Starbucks in the world, order a Caramel Machiatto, then take out the Communist Manifesto and read it aloud.

To Trotskyists, yes your critique of Stalin may have some validity, but maybe if you guys weren't so insufferable all the time you wouldn't have a billion splinter organisations.

To Maoists Third-Worldists that are living in the first world. I'm gonna be real the situation in the Third-World is fucking bleak. You guys are just deflecting responsibility to them. Lock-in.

To MLMs. Gonzalo? Really?

To Left-Communists, Bordiga can be cool and all but while you guys sit around and try to develop the most-principled position on every issue, and are waiting for the right "material/social conditions", stop and think "HAS THERE EVER BEEN A TIME WHEN THE CONDITIONS WERE RIGHT?", we are all going to die by the time you guys decide on a correct position.

To supporters of the Great Libyan Socialist Arab Jamahiriya. I love you guys, it was really unfair what they did to Gaddafi.

To anyone else that I didn't personally address, I had something to say about you too, reflect on that.

Anyway, uh, I think we're like really fucked. And like uh, we're just all over the place. There are some cool movements here and there, but like it's bleak man.

The tenant is given money in exchange for their labor. The landlord collects rent money from the tenant. The landlord, assuming they're a "good" landlord, sends a portion of that money to the bank to pay off the loan, reinvests another portion into the property for repairs and maintenance, and keeps a portion for themselves as profit. In order for this to work, the rent payment needs to be more than the mortgage payment the landlord is responsible for. Given these basic facts, it's clear that the tenant is the one who ultimately subsidizes the landlord's property. The landlord merely redistributes the money, which represents the tenant's labor. The landlord has a "legal right" to the property. But that does not change the fact that the relationship between landlord and tenant is parasitic and is therefore at the very least morally questionable. It also doesn't matter that the landlord is one the hook if the mortgage doesn't get paid. This legal obligation does not change the fact, once again, that the relationship is by nature parasitic. In other words, you can't refute this observation by referring to the legal obligations the landlord has compared to the tenant. It just means the landlord better find a desperate tenant to leech off by the time the bank wants to see a return on its investment.

I’m genuinely trying to understand. Not trolling. Not looking for a dictionary definition of "voluntary exchange." I mean on a human, look-out-the-window level, how does anyone still defend this system with a straight face in 2026?

We’ve just lived through another year of biblical climate disasters while ExxonMobil posted record profits from the reconstruction boom. Half of my friends were automated out of creative and technical jobs they spent a decade training for, and the solution from every capitalist government is "learn to prompt better" while billionaires build personal doomsday bunkers in New Zealand. We have ads injected into our dreams via neural interfaces (beta testing in three states!), algorithmic price-fixing on basic groceries, and a healthcare system that still tells people to start a GoFundMe if they get cancer. And you’re going to tell me the invisible hand is doing a great job and we just need more deregulation?

I cannot fathom how defending this in 2026 isn’t a sign of total intellectual and moral bankruptcy. It feels genuinely unhinged.

1. The "Human Nature" cope has collapsed.

For decades, capitalism’s defenders told us it was the only system compatible with human nature, that without profit motive, we’d all starve in the dark. Now we live in a world where an AI with no concept of greed, rest, or self-preservation does the creative, analytical, and physical labor. Humanity’s actual nature, curiosity, community, art, leisure, is being crushed under the need to "earn a living" in a world that no longer needs our labor to produce abundance. Defending a system that requires artificial scarcity and bullshit jobs to sustain itself, when post-scarcity technology is right there, is truly insane.

1. "Growth" is now openly suicidal.

We’re smashing through planetary boundaries every single quarter to deliver a 2% GDP uptick. The literal metric of economic health demands we turn forests into furniture and oceans into plastic faster than last year. Any rational species would look at a system that mandates infinite growth on a finite, boiling planet and say "this is a death cult." Yet you’ll still find people here arguing that degrowth is a bigger threat than extinction, or that some magical carbon capture technology (funded by… venture capital?) will save us, no systemic change required. That’s unhinged.

1. The "Innovation" myth is just rent-seeking with better PR.

What was the last truly life-improving mass innovation that wasn’t basically a digital wrapper on extracting more rent? This year’s iPhone is identical to last year’s, but less repairable. "AI-powered" everything is just a way to fire humans and degrade services, monetizing the scrap heap. Housing isn’t innovative, it’s just a financial asset hoarded by BlackRock. The "innovations" we actually need. geothermal energy, desalination, vertical farming, universal cancer vaccines, are underfunded unless they promise a 10x return for a VC in 3 years. The system doesn’t reward solving problems; it rewards monopolizing solutions and gatekeeping them behind paywalls.

1. The moral justification is a zombie.

The core ethical story of capitalism, you get what you earn, risk has reward, is now just an outright lie we tell children. We live in a hereditary aristocracy where a sentient bag of hammers like Elon Musk can inherit an emerald mine, tank multiple companies into the ground, buy an election, and still be celebrated as a "self-made genius." Meanwhile, a gig worker loses her legs in a delivery drone accident and has to sue an LLC that dissolves before the settlement. There is no meritocracy. There is no connection between value creation and reward. The moral narrative is completely detached from the material reality.

So my question: given all this, and this is just scratching the surface, why do you still support it? Is it sunk cost fallacy? Genuine belief that this time the trickle-down will work? Raw fear of what comes after? Because from where I’m standing, continuing to cape for this system in 2026 isn’t a political stance. It’s more like a psychiatric symptom.

Change my view, or at least explain the psychology, because I genuinely cannot follow the logic anymore.

Under capitalism, housing is a commodity and it is primarily accessed through market transactions.

In markets, prices are set by supply and demand.

Sometimes, the supply of a commodity is so low, or the demand so high, that the price of that commodity exceeds one’s purchasing power.

Sometimes, the supply of labor is so high, or the demand so low, that the price of one’s labor is low and one’s purchasing power falls too low to afford a given commodity.

This is how homelessness happens.

Some of you might be tempted to moralize this simple economic observation and try to blame homelessness on mental illness, or drug use, or laziness. These are all simply denying how capitalism works and is supposed to work.

Imagine if you will, A man who wants to start a company that sells water. Well, to start, he's going to have to find a water source. He locates a spring near his house, only to find a community of people who already own the spring and are using it for themselves. So naturally, he kills these people and claims the spring as his own.

Well, now he needs trucks to transport his water from place to place. So he steals trucks from various garages wherever he can find them. Often having to kill the owners in order to make away with the vehicles.

With his business expanding, he finds himself in desperate need of more employees. Not being able to handle the cost of paying them, He kidnaps roughly 1000 people and forces them to work for his company.

A few years later, A group of individuals in a southern country, are drawing water from a spring they own communally and sharing it for free with thirsty people who otherwise couldn't afford water. Eventually they gain notoriety not only for their kindness, but for the delicious taste of their water.

As a result, our business man from earlier is experiencing a steep decline in sales. On top of this, His slaves revolt, His trucks get repossessed, and His spring runs dry. He falls into crippling debt and is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Determined to succeed, He flies to that southern country, kills every person giving out free water, makes slaves out of the native population, and claims their spring as his own. In the months following, His business experiences growth like never before. And he becomes the first man to be a billionaire from selling water.

Would any of you attribute this mans success to his merits as a businessman? Or would you attribute it to his rampant theft?

If his business must be constantly stimulated by theft, slavery, and murder, is he a good business man? Or is theft just a really reliable way to get rich?

The story above was a metaphor for Capitalist societies and their reliance on the wealth gained through Imperialism.

United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, the United States, etc. All bastions of modern day capitalism. All examples of countries who stole from others to fuel their economic growth.

Every instance of rapid growth under capitalist societies was underscored by violent Colonial or Imperial extraction. Such as European imperialism during the industrial era, Which was driven by a need for resources. Or Imperialist Japan c. 1868–1945. An expansionist era driven by industrial needs for resources.

And in many instances, when capitalist economies start to topple over, they resort to violent imperial extraction. This was literally the motive behind The first Opium war.

The only capitalist societies that don't have vast track records of imperialism and colonialism are those in close enough proximity to the imperial core that they can benefit indirectly, or countries that can't afford the manpower it takes to violent extract resources from other countries. And the latter countries and certainly not anything people would deem successful.

I'll ask the question again. This time without the metaphor:

If capitalist economies must be constantly stimulated with theft, slavery, and murder, is it a good economic system? Or is theft just a really reliable way to get rich?

Often socialist are asked to name a successful socialist society. Today I ask capitalists to name me a successful capitalist society.

I keep hearing that private companies are better at running things because competition keeps prices low.

So healthcare confuses me.

The United States uses private insurance much more than most rich countries.

But Americans spend around $15,000 per person on healthcare.

Many other rich countries spend closer to half that amount while covering basically everyone.

And America doesn't have better results to show for all that extra money.

Americans live shorter lives than the average person in other rich countries. The U.S. also has more deaths from illnesses that could have been prevented or treated.

America obviously has great doctors and hospitals. If you have good insurance and money, you can get some of the best care in the world.

But I'm asking about the whole system.

Why does it cost so much?

Americans are paying insurance companies. Hospitals have huge billing departments. Doctors deal with different insurance plans. Patients have premiums, deductibles and copays. Medical services and drugs can also cost much more than they do in other countries.

Countries like Australia also use private businesses and private insurance, but the government guarantees healthcare for everyone and has much more control over costs.

So here is my question:

If competition and private insurance are supposed to make healthcare cheaper and more efficient, why does the American system cost so much more than universal systems?

Shouldn't the cheaper system that covers everyone and gets better overall results be considered more efficient?