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For what it's worth in the article he brings up Soviet atrocities as well. No place on the political spectrum has the monopoly on being righteous, nor committin

• crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  What many forget are the dead bodies of capitalism. That isn't mentioned normally, not is it in this first hand account. Capitalism has its roots in the idea that only those who produce get resources. If you are unable/unwilling, you do not deserve anything. And that anything includes: a home, food, water, bathroom, medicine, surgery, dentistry, or all the other essentials needed to live. Along with that, our unique US capitalism also allows for slavery when charged with a crime. We call the Russian and Chinese detention centers "gulags" - we have enshrined their usage in our Constitution. Mao and Stalin killed X millions. I'll accept that without research. How many people has the US killed with lack of health care? How many union strikers were murdered by the National Guard? How many African Americans were killed under lynching and 'police discretion'? How many people were killed because they didn't make enough money to matter? How many communities were poisoned with lead and other environmental pollutants because their community was impoverished? In the end, Capitalists can crow one solid phrase to absolve their 'sins'. And that is, "They brought their suffering and death upon themselves by not choosing better". Am I advocating communism or socialism? No. They have been shown to not work in the previous incarnations around the world. Capitalism works, until people slip through the cracks... And those cracks day by day get ever so larger. I don't know the name of the thing I think of. Maybe its a mashup between socialism and capitalism, so that we all grow together, and that nobody is left behind.
  • int_19h 8y ago
    Capitalism has its roots in one idea: private ownership of the means of production. It doesn't say anything about who does or does not deserve something; it's just completely orthogonal to the ideology, such as it is. People still suffer as a result of those economic policies, when they're not unchecked - but it is not the intent, and you can absolutely have capitalism without any of that stuff. Statist hard left ideologies (such as Stalinism, or Maoism, or even late Soviet socialism), on the other hand, have an ideological dogma that suppressing dissent by violence, even extreme violence, is perfectly okay, and even a revolutionary duty - the ends justify the means. There are other political ideologies that incorporate capitalism (or parts of it) as an economic program, but pile other stuff on top of that to justify violent oppression of the opposition - like most right-wing dictatorships - and those would be legitimate targets for comparison with Stalinism etc. But people dying from lack of healthcare in US are not "victims of capitalism". They're victims of a specific oligopoly, that other capitalist countries don't even have.
    • noobermin 8y ago
      One of the things about living in any society is the violence that is enacted on people is often invisible to you unless you are the target of such violence. You can say capitalism does not include in its tenants that certain people are victims or targets of violence but people are. For example, people who steal are threatened by violence for violating property rights, people who do not pay taxes are threatened by violence to pay such taxes. People who murder are threatened with violence so that they not murder. Violence is wielded by the state in liberal capitalism and one of the most important objects of that violence is to uphold the rights of property holders as well as general personal rights like right to life in the case of murder. You can claim that "it's not violence" but it is. I won't put words in your mouth, but I imagine the first thought you might have is "well, I wouldn't call that violence because imprisoning a person against their wishes for murdering another is justified." Well, in authoritarian left ideologies, beheading the ruling class was justified because they oppressed the working class, so for them, it is justified within their systems logic. Finally, in addition to those who are expressly the target of violence under capitalism there are people who by the final result of the ideology, become victims of violence, such as those in prison working extremely low wages as the other poster pointed at. You can claim "it isn't the intent" but that argument is very similar to the argument that the intent of pre-Stalin revolutionary Russia wasn't the statist regime that it became. "It's not actual capitalism" is akin to "it's not actual socialism" which is an argument leftists make today.
      • int_19h 8y ago
        I didn't claim that it's not violence. But yes, you're absolutely right, it's justifiable violence. And the kind of stuff that e.g. the Bolsheviks did is not justifiable violence by our metrics - and why would we care about theirs? I don't believe in objective morality, but I'm not a moral relativist either, and I'm not going to give someone a pass on the basis that they believe that they're doing the right thing. I'm going to judge the rightness of that thing on my own. And of the things that you have listed, the only one that is fundamental to capitalism is protection of property rights. And it has a direct equivalent in statist socialism - enforcement of the lack of property rights and prohibition of "economic exploitation" (e.g. when USSR banned most private trade, even between consenting parties, as "speculation", and banned hiring other people as workers). I would dare say that the latter is at least as violent as the former - but then on top of that you have to add all the stuff about violently suppressing political opposition, which is not an ideological requirement of capitalism. > that argument is very similar to the argument that the intent of pre-Stalin revolutionary Russia wasn't the statist regime that it became That argument is trivially refuted by looking at the arrangements in pre-Stalin revolutionary Russia, though. For example, the first Soviet constitution that explicitly drew the voting districts such that cities (where workers live) got 5x votes of rural areas (where peasants live) per capita, and anyone deemed bourgeois had no right to vote at all. That's "dictatorship of the proletariat" in action, right there. But the other thing about that argument is that to be convincing, it requires counter-examples. And that's something that's severely lacking - we can talk about how statist socialism can be democratic and non-authoritarian in principle, but somehow none of the socialist nations that lasted for any noticeable amount of time were. This strongly implies that there's something about the ideology itself that, if not embracing authoritarianism explicitly, encourages it in practice. With capitalism, OTOH, you get plenty of really nasty examples, but you also get examples of working democracy, rule of law, social welfare etc. Which implies that capitalism is not inherently opposed to any of those things as a matter of ideology. But ultimately, the reason is simple: capitalism is strictly an economic system, while socialism is a economic and political system. Different strains of socialism have different political prescriptions - from totalitarianism to anarchism - but they all have some. Capitalism has none - you have to fill the missing pieces in from elsewhere (again, with a very broad spectrum, from humanism to fascism) to make a complete picture. And when you assign blame in the resulting picture, it's important to understand which of those bits contributed to it - and in many cases, it's not the economics.
  • taway_1212 8y ago
    There’s a huge difference between actually killing someome like the Soviets did (by a bullet to the head or by enslaving and working someone to death) and “killing” (like you call it) by not sharing resources (health care) with someone. The latter is actually at worst a lack of compassion, not murder.