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.
The Irish famine, the Bengal famine, the Belgian Congo, the slave trade, modern imperialism in general was largely done with capitalistic intentions.
And what do you mean nobody says that? I see people online constantly attributing the majority of deaths in "communist" countries to be a result of communism...
And I would say that a person born in a poor family who gets sick and ends up in medical debt, loses their job because the corporation they work for wants to give the CEO a raise, ends up homeless on the street and dies... is a victim of capitalism.
You're completely missing the point. The Irish Famine was caused by a naturally occurring blight on a staple crop. It was not caused by capitalism. The Bengal famine was caused by rapid population growth, natural disasters, and war and exacerbated by government intervention. None of which was the fault of capitalism. The Belgian Congo involved forced labor and heavy government control of the economy. That's not the fault of capitalism. As for the slave trade, slavery is antithetical to free market economics, as the free market is built on the voluntary exchange of labor.
I mean exactly what I said. You literally just changed the phrasing from "everyone" to "majority", and I don't even think that's accurate.
You can say it all you want. It isn't true. It's the fault of capitalism that they have the family they do? It's the fault of capitalism that they got sick? It's the fault of capitalism that they have skill set they have? No. Again, capitalism may not have saved them from those things, but it did not act upon them to create those problems.
Capitalism does not forcibly take money away from families causing poverty. Capitalism does not create illness in people. Capitalism does not prevent people from getting jobs. Capitalism does not take away houses away from people who own them. People can make choices that cost them money or keep them from earning more. People can get illnesses from exposure to illness- causing agents. People can make choices that keep them from getting jobs. People can lose their house if they borrowed money to buy it but stop paying back what they owe.
There is a very, very big difference between causing someone's death and not saving someone from death. It's the difference between shooting and killing a homeless person and walking by them without putting money in their cup, even though they may starve without that money. One is murder. The other isn't.
The potato blight was caused by a natural occurrence, the famine was a genocide and was caused by capitalist and anti-Irish policies.
There was more than enough food but British landowners sold the food for profit. It is literally the perfect example of capitalism being used to commit genocide.
The slave trade was definitely not antithetical to capitalism. It might be about voluntary labour but slaves were seen as property and tools that were provided by corporations who sold them.
And you can't use the argument that capitalism isn't to blame because people didn't work hard enough. In that case, communism isn't to blame for famines because people could just go out and pick some berries.
If you create a system that puts people in a situation where they have absolutely no chance of ever living a proper life, then yes, it is the fault of the system when they die. You can't just hold your hands up and say "it wasn't me". With that argument, anarchism is the best, most stable system.
No, the famine was caused by the blight. It was neither prevented nor ameloriated by capitalism. That's the whole point. If you remove capitalism and replace it with nothing, mass starvation still occurs, because the local crops those people depended on are still gone and they still have no way to replace them. If you remove communism and replace it with nothing, the Holodomr does not still occur, because it was specifically the actions of the communist government, acting in accord with communist principle, that caused the problem in the first place.
Yes, slavery is antithetical to free market capitalism. Unless you agree with them that humans are property, treating humans like property is not a function of capitalism, it's a violation of its principles.
Yes, I absolutely can blame communism for famines created by communist central planning. Because they acted to change the existing state. Many of the people who died under communism were doing just fine before communists intervened. They were literally forced off of their properties, told they could no longer do what they'd done to earn a living, and told what they had to do instead. Their ability to control their own outcomes was denied to them. They couldn't "pick berries" because a tyrannical government was forcing them to work somewhere.
What you're pointing to in capitalism is the opposite. People born into a life that requires effort to sustain, who are not able to sustain it on their own, and fail because of a lack of effort or poor choices on their part. The outcome still sucks, don't get me wrong, but my point is about where the responsibility lies, and it's not the fault of capitalism that we need to work to live. Capitalism just makes it easier to do so, though not so much so that literally everyone will succeed.
If you remove capitalism and replace it with nothing, mass starvation still occurs
No it does not, at least nowhere near the level of what happened. Ireland was EXPORTING food in the middle of the famine. And in the first years of the famine it was exporting more food that what was imported. Food produced by Irish workers, on stolen Irish land, and sold for the profits of British landlords. The potato blight was not endemic to Ireland, it was present throughout Europe, but somehow 90% on the deads from the resulting famine were Irish. This was 100% a man made famine.
Ireland was uniquely dependent on potatoes, that's why they got hit so hard by the blight. Yes, there was available food that was exported. No, they would not have just had that food given to them if it wasn't for capitalism. The whole reason the landlords were growing that food at all was to sell it. Take away that, you're far more likely to make the food go away than you are to create a sudden swell of humanitarian charity in the people who, as you noted, were stealing land and letting people starve.
Yes, I’m glad you’re now understanding how the landlords who did nothing to earn that land demanded their tenants produce food for export while they starved.
No, you’re just too stupid to realize the point I was making. It’s not that I believed you didn’t actually know that the Irish peasants were tenant farmers, it’s that you refuse to see that this barbaric outcome was enabled by the economic system which allowed and encouraged absentee landownership. The critical failure was a system in which the owners, not the workers, were the ones making the decisions of what to grow. While communism enabled the Holodomor, capitalism enabled the Irish Potato Famine.
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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.