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> his work is still an extreme pro-communist screed Marx, for all intents and purposes, created what we today would consider "communism". That is, from a acade
by herbstein 6y ago
> his work is still an extreme pro-communist screed
Marx, for all intents and purposes, created what we today would consider "communism". That is, from a academic perspective, and not whatever goes as "communism" in American pop culture.
> the damage is not yet over, as some idiot somewhere will always be tempted to live off somebody else's money
The above is a terribly ironic criticism, considering how Ayn Rand lived out her life living off of the dime of the government.
> His work, in fact, led directly to tens of millions of deaths in 20th century
If we presuppose that any death, as a result of the actions of a state claiming to be using a given economic system, is attributed to said economic system we should be counting honestly. Every death caused by Capitalist countries, both domestically and abroad, should also be counted.
Every person that has ever starved to death under capitalism should be counted. Whether there's a direct shortage of food, or the person can't afford the food available, doesn't really matter. A person isn't receiving food when acting inside the system and thus died.
Then consider the imperialism carried out by these capitalist states. Millions upon millions of native inhabitants of Africa, South-East Asia, Southern America, and North America have been all but wiped out by capitalism.
What about WWII? Because in the of-cited number of "100 million killed by Communism" several wars are counted. In WWII a major contributor was the failure of the capitalistic system in Europe after WWI.
I could go on, but I think the point has been made.
- m0zg 6y ago> Every person that has ever starved to death under capitalism should be counted You can count, but I can tell you right now, you wouldn't like the comparison. :-)
- jahaja 6y agoIf the same measurement stick would be used against Capitalism it would be so vile* that capitalists are usually very careful to not accept the same measurement stick. * Just to take a single point: 72k/deaths per year in just the US because of lack of access to health care.
- RhysU 6y agoTake the lowball 6 million deaths under Stalin from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Sovi... and divide by 72K/year. That's 83 years worth of the cited death statistic in the US.
- m0zg 6y agoAnd that does not count the deaths _due to_ access to what passed for "healthcare" in the Soviet Union. And that's just Stalin. You gotta count Lenin as well, an austere scholar of Marx so fiery but mostly peaceful, he invented the Red Terror (according to which most of the people on this site would be executed without trial, along with their families, as belonging to the "wrong" class) and set up concentration camps and GULAG to get rid of the counterrevolutionary element (AKA basically everyone he didn't like).
- jahaja 6y agoThat was a very poor country ravaged by wars and totalitarianism. This is a figure from a country well within its means to provide universal health care but choose not due to Capitalist ideology.
- RhysU 6y agoThe country does not own the means. It is arguably within the citizen's means. The capitalist ideology only says that we shouldn't confuse those two pocketbooks.
- jahaja 6y agoLet's keep our feet on the ground and realize that all countries collect taxes and decide through their particular version of politics how these are spent. The US are responsible for the outcome of their politics.