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  • Honest question: where does the 1,6 billion figure come from?

    • Every death by Dutch capitalism (death from the slave trade, Colonialism/Colonial wars (Oceania, Africa, ...), ...)

      plus

      Every death by British empire's capitalism (Irish genocide, Bengal famine, Slave trade, Colonialism/Colonial wars (India, Africa, North America, South east Asia, Oceania, Middle east, ...) , Opium wars, Massacres against independence movements (India, ...), ...)

      plus

      Every death by French capitalism (Colonialism/colonial wars (North America, Caribbeans, Africa, South east Asia, ...), Slave trade, Massacres against independence movements (Algeria, Haiti, ...), ...)

      plus

      Every death by Belgian capitalism (Colonialism/Colonial wars (Congo, ...), Slave trade, Massacres against independence movements, ...)

      plus

      Every death by United States' capitalism (Colonialism/Colonial wars (Cuba, Hawaii, Philipines, North America, ...), Massacres against independence movements (South east Asia, Oceania, Cuba, ...), Slave trade, ...)

      plus

      Every death by German capitalism (Nama and Herero genocide, Holocaust, Slave trade, ...)

      plus

      Every death caused by preventable starvation, lack of access to water, healthcare.

      List very much non-exhaustive.

      If you add it all up you easily get over 1 Billion.

  • I’m getting a bit tired of seeing the communism/capitalism dichotomy. Guys let’s be pluralistic or at least see these two as a scale. There are a lot of solutions in between. Government failures exist just as much as market failures. Let’s focus on the actual root causes of our problems: externalities, rent seeking, private land ownership, too long patents, public good provision, overly complex legal system, information asymmetries in labor markets. We need unions, free health care, cheaper education, carbon taxes, land value taxes, simplified legal system that can’t be taken advantage of. Stop this capitalism vs communism bullshit. That’s not the cause of all this. Your real enemy is “rentier capitalism”.

    • I think you're quite dramatically misinterpreting what the solutions put forward by Communists are, or at least Marxists. Marxists are not believers that there is some perfect form of society we can implement today that will also be perfect 100 years from now. Rather, the Marxist assertion is that different forms are best suited in different conditions and different levels of development.

      China is a good example. The PRC is headed by a Communist party over a Socialist economy, one that has public ownership as the principle aspect, but nonetheless heavily relies on markets. This is because the CPC believes this to be the best form of society right now, and that as markets coalesce into fewer firms, they can be more efficiently publicly owned and planned. The long term belief is that eventually abolishing the value form will be possible and necessary, but we aren't there yet.

      I think that because you haven't engaged with what Communists are actually trying to do, you've ended up inventing a strawman to argue against, even though you'd likely agree with us. Marxism is a scientific approach to economic development. There isn't an "in-between" of Communism vs Capitalism, because we are either taking control over Capital, or it has control over us.

      • Public vs private ownership of companies is a case by case basis. Many “capitalist” countries have many publicly owned companies. We used to have even more before Thatcher and Reagan. Now we have moved into a more public private partnership idea, which is a compromise.

        Monopolies are able to extract monopoly rents through market power. This is one of the problems of rentier capitalism. That is why we have antitrust laws. We also need a system that prevents political rents from lobbyism for example by making it illegal for politicians to have stocks or to take campaign money from donors. We also have land rents from private land ownership. Singapore has a public land lease model, but a land value tax would achieve the exact same outcome.

        In economics you talk about natural monopolies which is when initial investment costs are too high for competitors to exist or when physics or other constraints prevent competition (think of a railway line between two cities). There are many ways to argue that these types of companies should be publicly owned within a capitalist framework.

        So yes, there is an in-between. And it depends exactly how much business is left to the government and how much is left to companies. This balance is defined by politics.

    • Yeah. Historic communism has the same problem as capitalism. People in unchecked power at the top. Doesn't matter what ideology we follow if we refuse to fix root problems.

      It's also a problem that people love to gather around either worshipping or hating a certain individual, party or political direction. I wish people would focus more on the politics beneath, facts, statistics and causality

      • I don't think that's an accurate assessment of Socialism as it exists in the real world, or Capitalism as it exists in the real world. Further, I think the idea that Communists don't focus on the politics beneath, alongside facts, statistics, and causality to be extremely far outside the norm. If anything, ask any Communist for a source, and they likely keep a laundry list of books and links for you to check out, a flood of information. That has been more true in my experience, and is part of what led me to Communism.

105 comments