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Scott had an interesting post a long time ago comparing the death tolls, and came up with vaguely similar ball park numbers.
I would find it interesting to see a post about the number of deaths caused by capitalism, i.e. private ownership of the means of production, and markets.
Many of the lists seem to just be a list of deaths caused by imperialism.
I like capitalism, but not imperialism.
Surely the interesting figure would be deaths per capita?
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You could make the symmetric point that many deaths attributed to communism are actually due to totalitarianism or some such. For example, if you believe holodomor was an intentional policy by Stalin to exercise political retribution on Ukrainians, then I wouldn't say that those deaths should be attributable to communism.
I would maybe be willing to walk down that road. But it would not be fair to label all political deaths under communism as simply totalitarianism.
Communism is a form of economic and political organization, and some people are not going to like the arrangement. If someone protests the economic structure of communism and they are killed by a totalitarian regime, I'd still blame that on communism. If someone protests that Joseph Stalin is in charge, and that there should just be someone else in charge of the apparatus of communist government, then I'd say its fair to attribute that death to totalitarianism.
The Holodomor is something I'd attribute to economic protest.
I haven't looked into the numbers on the victims of communism recently. If I remember correctly political deaths were not the largest cause of death. It was instead starvation.
Those starvation deaths seem clearly to be the fault of communism. In both Russia and China there was a working farm system for centuries that had been supplying the food needs of the nation. Famines might only be expected if there was a widespread crop disease or really bad drought.
The communist regimes reorganized and destroyed the working system of farming, and it led to a drastic under-production of food. That is fully the fault of communism.
I'm unsure of this. Let's say they had instead a super smart communist AI which predicted that speedily changing the farming system would kill millions, but still wanted to go ahead with the change due to its ideology, and so instead it invented better fertilizer and farming robots and actually increased production. Would that then be a success for communism or would it be a success for the super smart AI which happened to be communist?
Was the outcome foreseeable? And could it have been avoided while still following communism but in a smarter way? I think it could. Which would tend to suggest communism is not wholly responsible. On the other hand every ideology has to be of use in the world we have, not the one we want. If communism can only work if you have a super smart AI, then trying to push it when said AI does not yet exist, is an issue in and of itself.
And I do think that is part of the answer as to why people don't necessarily assign all those deaths to communism in the same way as to Nazism, that we do treat murder and criminally negligent homicide or manslaughter somewhat differently. Whether that makes sense scaled up to a national scale is a different question of course.
That is a large amount of slack created by the AI. Typically that much slack in resources can be used to do many things. Resources are transferable between economic sectors in the long term. I have no doubt that communism would escape any blame in this scenario, but yes I'd still say that is a massive failure of communism that basically destroyed resources on a massive scale.
The outcome was certainly foreseeable after the fifth or sixth attempt. Which is how many attempts singular countries racked up trying to do these farm reorganization schemes, or "land reformation". Less people died in the later attempts ... but there were also less people to feed.
The failure of communism in these cases was a failure of understanding base incentives. They had magical thinking that their reorganization scheme would work. They treated humans like chess pieces, and assumed they would just work themselves to the bone for no reward. If communism is not responsible for these starvation deaths, then there is no meaning to the word "responsible". I can't conceive of a line of thought that absolves communism of these deaths. You say there is one, but you'd have to lay it out for me very carefully for me to understand.
They are called death tolls, and not murder tolls. Some of the "holocaust deniers" use these same kinds of wheedling arguments. "they weren't outright murdered, they were just starving in this camp because there wasn't enough food for everyone". Why was there a food shortage in Europe ... because there was a war. Why was there a war ... because the Nazi's started one. Likewise with the communists, all roads lead back to fingers pointing at the communist government. At certain levels of power, casual indifference and outright hatred are equally effective at slaughtering millions of people.
And if you are a smart communist and realize this is not going to work? I think I can conceive of that. In a counter-factual world where they transitioned differently would that prove Communism right or good? I don't think it would. But the opposite of that means that transitioning badly, doesn't on its own prove communism wrong or evil either. (But repeated failures should be a clue!)
I think communism is pretty bad actually, but I do think if we look at say land-enclosure in England (which increased efficiency) but concentrated wealth in fewer hands, resulted in rural depopulation and emigration to America and cities to become labourers, is not seen as terrible simply because it increased wealth overall. (Comparisons to the Rust-belt are clear of course). If land-enclosure had been driven by communism (which it could have been, it was all about centralizing control in fewer hands) would its overall success be attributed to communism? Should it be?
So I am not saying communism should be absolved of deaths, just musing on how closely the motivation behind communism is tied to the methods of change employed versus how similar methods in different places at different times might be deemed "successful". I don't have a particular answer.
The problem with communists wasn't that they weren't smart. The problem was that they had an ideology tracing all of the world's problems to capitalism, capitalists, speculators, landlords and so on, and offered full proof scientific solutions in the shape of their economic system. If the latter didn't work, the former must have been to blame. What you're doing is like speculating about "smart scientologists" that didn't blame everything on thetans and suppressive persons, or... well, "smart Nazis" that didn't blame everything on the Jews.
But the specific issue was about with agricultural reforms. Even if they believed that X needed to happen, there are a number of different ways to achieve that. A smart Nazi might still think Jews were to blame, but might have preferred exile to death for them, perhaps because it might be safer for Germany.
Wasn't that exactly what the Nazis originally were trying to do? Wasn't it only after that didnt work our, and things started going worse for their country that they started coming up with "final solutions"?
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They are attributable to Communism if Communism lacks checks and balances against Dear Leader killing people.
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Communists view imperalism as the inevitable final form of capitalism. "I like capitalism, but not imperialism" sounds to them the way "we shouldn't punish anyone for refusing to work, but everyone should work to the best of their ability" sounds to capitalists.
I think the other arguments brought up here were good. Imperialism seems to be practiced by any government of sufficient size. Including communist governments.
The Lenin paper also assumes the exploitation hypothesis to prove that imperialism is the final form of communism. I think Marx and the other communists were totally wrong on the exploitation hypothesis, so of course their theoretical argument isn't going to be convincing in this area either.
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Nowadays it is hard to discuss with sincere communists as they are either deluded or stupid (we sadly tried communism, we know how well it works).
Noncommunists can be persuaded that imperialism is not unique at all to capitalism (see USSR and Roman Empire for start).
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This is a point that can be argued, and agreed with or disagreed with. However, to say "X people were killed by capitalism", when they were killed by imperialism, particularly if you know or should know that your conversational partner may not agree with the necessity of the association of capitalism and imperialism, is a way of making a strong point while skipping the work required to actually support it - in other words, the sentence makes sense to you, and it will make sense to your listener, but your listener will take a significantly different meaning from it than the one that you understand it to mean. That's why it's mottebuilding when charitable, and lying otherwise.
Of course we see imperialism in communism. We see imperialism in ancient societies. We see imperialism in feudal societies. If we see imperialism I’m pretty much every society assigning it to capitalism seems…odd
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