this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
1510 points (77.8% liked)
Memes
45727 readers
652 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes, I don't disagree, except far more people benefit from our form of capitalism, and you don't see the death numbers you do from the absolute rule that communism demands.
This isn't to say there isn't any death due to capitalism. Or any strife, just certainly not on the same scale. I would say out biggest death toll comes at the hands of our military-industrial-complex being capitolistic.
The problem is, there's nothing better yet.
Add up chattel slavery, Trail of Tears, proxy wars, not-so-proxy wars, the general condition of the M-I-C you've mentioned, the general plight of the Global South, etc etc etc, and get back to me. I'm not sure the advantage is so definitive as you assert. "Externalities", the economists call them.
It 100% does not even come close. Not saying those deaths weren't terrible or unavoidable, absolutely not.
But also, you can't blame a capitolistic society for trail of tears or any other mass genocide that came before that. We didn't become capitolistic until 10 years after Trail of Tears ended.
Edit to add: granted, that doesn't say much about how Native Americans were treated post TOT. Though, it's certainly through capitalism that Indian casinos have become so successful. 245 tribes own casinos today, all of which rake in the funds.
Firstly, I know you're not going to justify genocide by saying the survivors of that genocide get to have casinos. That's so outrageously, ghoulishly evil that you can't possibly have meant that and I must have misunderstood.
Secondly, where do you get the idea that capitalism started in America in 1860?
Thirdly, you ignored everything else I asked you to add up. You made no mention of slavery, or the Global South.
Fourthly, what's fundamentally different between the colonial exploitations of mercantilism and private exploitations of capitalism?
I call your arithmetical integrity, or more laughably your ability, into question.
Lol. You definitely misunderstood. I didn't say in my comment that TOT was okay because now they have cassinos. I'm not sure how you could possibly get that out of what I wrote. The claim I'm arguing against is that capitalism has caused more deaths than communism, which isn't the case. Especially since capitalism wasn't America's economic governing factor until - yup - the 1860. Capitalism wasn't the cause of the TOT, but it was the cause of the survivors ability to create wealth for their tribes.
Again, because you somehow twisted what I wrote into saying it's okay that all those people died because casinos, the TOT was horrific. It shouldn't have happened. Nothing can make up for that, even the wealth made by their survivors. But it wasn't caused by capitalism, which is the original claim.
And no, I wasn't ignoring everything else you pointed to in terms of deaths under capitalism, because slavery and other horrors certainly were due to capitalism here in America. Though, it has nothing against rhe numbers stacked under communist rule.
I also want to point out that there are going to be deaths under every form of economic governance, because that's just human nature. There will always be people that kill other people, for a variety of reasons. The goal, then, is to find the one governance that kills the least amount of people in total.
I'll also point out that it's not like capitalism was absent one day in America, and then suddenly it was governing the country. Capitalism, like most forms of economic rulings, was a slow creep. It happened in small stages until the 1860s, when it became the dominating force in America.
Let's see the numbers side by side then, since you're so confident