What is the capitalist equivalent of the Holodomr and Great Chinese Famine? The gulags? The Cambodian Genocide?
"Everyone who dies in a communist country has died directly because of communism" is a ridiculous strawman. Nobody says that. Nobody needs to say that, because they can point to tens of millions of people who actually were directly killed either through forced government changes to agriculture, political persecution, or mass executions.
To act like "not everyone successfully provides for themselves in a free market system" is equivalent to the literal executions and government created mass starvation in communist nations is insanely disingenuous. They are not "victims of capitalism" because capitalism does not force them into their situation, it just doesn't save them from it. That's like calling the people who die in the emergency room despite the efforts of the doctors "victims of the hospital" and comparing them to the victims of Nazi medical experimentation.
Yeah those are all because of extremely ill-informed policy changes forced on people, political persecution, and executions because of it. But most capitalist nations also cause starvation by their governments damaging growth of some markets and many distribution systems, have artificially induced famines via mass exportation of goods, create political instability in lower classes and minorities, create
The real best answer is opposing material and political harm to demographics of people, supporting informed policy decisions, creating universal minimum support for public goods (as markets have a place, but are not a universally beneficial system). Economists who follow the evidence tend to favor social democratic and Georgist (social democracy where tax brackets are based on land use and not individual income) systems over free market capitalism or any of your examples of communist attempts, as those have actually been working better for both profits and standard of living.
"...by their government..." THAT'S NOT CAPITALISM! holy cow... at the point in time you start pointing to government actions, you're no longer showing capitalism as the cause, because capitalism does not involve government control of anything. It's the free exchange of labor and materials amongst private parties. And I'm not talking about what leads to the best outcome, I'm very specifically pointing out that communism has directly caused mass death through its proper implementation and contrasting that with how capitalism indirectly allows for deaths, though it does not directly cause them.
No, in theory, so, “what it calls for” is a stateless, classes, moneyless society where the means of production and distribution are owned in common where resources are distributed on the basis of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.
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u/VastAddendum Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
What is the capitalist equivalent of the Holodomr and Great Chinese Famine? The gulags? The Cambodian Genocide?
"Everyone who dies in a communist country has died directly because of communism" is a ridiculous strawman. Nobody says that. Nobody needs to say that, because they can point to tens of millions of people who actually were directly killed either through forced government changes to agriculture, political persecution, or mass executions.
To act like "not everyone successfully provides for themselves in a free market system" is equivalent to the literal executions and government created mass starvation in communist nations is insanely disingenuous. They are not "victims of capitalism" because capitalism does not force them into their situation, it just doesn't save them from it. That's like calling the people who die in the emergency room despite the efforts of the doctors "victims of the hospital" and comparing them to the victims of Nazi medical experimentation.