I'm not a fan of communism, but that ideology produced two of the major world powers. Entire generations of illiterate peasants were educated, entire economies were completely reconstructed in a way that is pretty much unprecedented. There was immense repression, the human cost of Stalinism for example is uncountable. But capitalism has caused immense suffering as well.

It's better to simply speak plainly of the effects systems have had rather than trying to moralize away the good in order to emphasize the bad, in my opinion. Dogma makes for bad reasoning.

Just to be clear we are talking about the same world.

The Soviet Union felt because the people, from a few of the previous agricultural powerhouses of Europe and western Asia were starving. If that's what reconstructing an economy looks like, I'd rather we don't.

Yes, the communist countries had some good results on education. I'm not sure any of them is worth copying, but they are worth looking it. One would expect a completely different ideology to get some things better, and some worse; it's incredible how few things they managed to do better.

> rather than trying to moralize away the good in order to emphasize the bad

Sorry, the most salient accomplishments of collectivist mentality (whether it be the national socialism of Nazi Germany or the Communism of Russia & China, along with others) has been utterly depraved and unparalleled mass death and suffering. Something that's truly the worst of human history.

Pointing this out simply is not "moralizing away the good."

Communism killed in excess of 94 million people during the 20th Century through starvation, slaughter, and other forms of democide. Those are extremely conservative estimates, bordering on fraudulent. Far more than the 20 million listed at the link provided were culled during the Holodomor, for example.

Communism didn't educate people or bring science and technology forward. Credit for that goes to entrepreneurs and inventors. Don't promote Communism. Communism is nothing more than elitist oligarchy with slaves and catchy propaganda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#:~....

Dogma makes for good rhetoric, but it doesn't stand up to daylight. The Soviet Union advanced the technology of not just itself, but many of its vassal states such as Cuba. China has long since abandoned communism-in-practice, but it is still one of the most advanced nations in the world. If the success of those countries cannot be accounted to communism, then the success of the U.S. cannot be attributed to capitalism either..

And as far as death tolls, they're completely indefensible, that's why I am not a proponent of communism or other anti-democratic ideologies. But it is curious that the death tolls from fascism never get added to the death toll of capitalism. Each ideological wing generates human suffering at the far end of anti-democracy, which is what we need to avoid, whether it comes disguised as facism or communism, or whatever else.

94 million dead isn't dogma.

Note, also, that "communism" isn't the opposite of "democracy". "Authoritarianism" is.

Conflating the two is part of the propaganda we've been sold for nearly a century now.

Capitalism has killed many many more people than Communism; the black book is debunked.[0]

British colonialism killed upwards of 165M people in 40 years alone.[1]

Holodomor is Nazi propaganda.[2]

The matrix has you. lol [3]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClLKm8Q8Pns

[1] https://mronline.org/2022/12/14/british-empire-killed-165-mi...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA&list=LL&index=37

[3] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1608828315581976576

I know people with relatives that died in the Holodomor. Wow, just wow.

It was a real famine, just not caused on purpose by Stalin in order to genocide Ukrainians.

it's hard to give capitalism a lower death tole. India and Ireland under the British had entirely preventable famines also, and all the cia backed coups had quite high numbers of deaths themselves

Every year, 20 million people die from preventable causes like hunger or lack of vaccination under global capitalism. That's modern capitalism at work.

The history of capitalism is rife with famines that have killed millions to tens of millions each, and centuries of death and brutality under the rule of companies like the East India Company and capitalist regimes that bought and sold millions of human beings as assets at a global scale. Many of those "assets" suffered and died through just being traded, and when successfully sold, suffered through generations of brutality and subservience performing as capitalists' "property".

At one point we even had a prominent capitalist celebrate the amazing returns on investment they got from enslaving their slaves' children. That prominent capitalist was Thomas Jefferson:

> What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest.

Hell, capitalism under the Nazi regime alone is responsible tens of millions of deaths.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thom...

These tiresome ideological ping-pong battles, trading the death-counts and respective horrors attributable to simplistic labels of economic systems are useful only to remind less fanatical observers that said horrors are not innate or exclusive to any particular system or label, and that the primary issues are (a) scarcity of resources and (b) the brutality of nature, with everything else just being a case of humans trying desperately to cope with these grim realities.

Everyone can play the game of saying everything horrific in the past or today is directly attributable to the economic system that they oppose and that their opponents advocate, and we can even go further and play tricks like this: "Nazism was really a left-wing system in nature". See, it's great fun.

Ultimately it's pointless though; it doesn't persuade anyone to think differently about anything, and serves only to make the writer feel righteous, without needing to go to the effort of formulating and advocating something genuinely better and workable for the future.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're too predictable and repetitive and eventually turn nasty.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34192054.

It's not an ideological tangent! This is literally a thread about "wage inequality" (or income inequality), which is propaganda advocating that the State should control wages instead of the free market!

Am I supposed to pretend that "wage inequality" is some virtuous ideal that is beyond question? This place is getting ridiculous with the censorship.