This exchange reads to me like one commenter saying "not a true communist!" and one commenter saying "not a true capitalist."
I won't call it either way, because I've seen this argument play out many many times and it never seems to be satisfactorily settled.
That’s a facile and shallow response, and buys into a popular Marxist trope. You could fairly say that if we were talking about whether healthcare in the US is a “free market.” It’s not a gray area like that. You have one example that flows directly from the central principles of Marxism (the failure of centrally planned agriculture) and one example that contradicts the basic principles of free market capitalism (slavery and colonialism). You can’t have a “free” market with forced labor, or where a colony is forced to sell raw materials to the colonizer and forced to buy finished goods from the colonizer. Pinning colonialism and slavery to capitalism is like criticizing filesystem performance in microkernels based on the Linux kernel as an example. Whatever shades of gray may exist in the definition of microkernel, Linux’s filesystem access does not fall into that debatable area.
Re:How ‘big law’ makes big money
by jessaustin on Thursday February 06, 2020 @12:41PM
(#22258206)
You're against colonial extraction of raw materials? Congratulations on your keen insight! Have you considered USA's recent misadventures in Latin America? A CIA-backed coup with this very purpose has so far succeeded in Bolivia. [0] Fortunately the one in Venezuela has up until now just embarrassed us. [1] Where will we try this next? Stay tuned!
[0] https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/11/bolivia-coup-fascist-fore...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/opinion/international-wor...
Slavery and colonialism, are completely different. They were bad things that were perpetuated by putatively capitalist states, but have nothing otherwise to do with capitalism. There are many definitions of capitalism, but extracting unpaid labor using violence doesn’t fit any of them. And as to colonialism, capitalism actually explains why colonialism had negative effects that have lasted long after the colonizers left. Colonialism robbed countries of their capital. Robbing other countries of capital through violence is not capitalism in any form. Same for U.S.-installed dictatorships. It’s not like the Soviet Union didn’t have an elaborate network of puppet states. That’s orthogonal to capitalism versus communism.
As to environmental issues, that’s perhaps a fair point of capitalism. But socialism has an even worse record in that regard. The Soviet Union was enormously resource inefficient. Even today, the US generates six times the GDP per capita with just 30% more CO2 emission per capita.