British East India Company, one of the first publicly traded entities, commited a couple of genocides before Marx even shit his first nappie. So capitalism got a nice head start in.

[–] VikingHippie@lemmy.wtf 8 points 1 year ago

Including social murder? Several billions.

[–] EchoCT@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

Billions.

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's kind of a bullshit question in that it's easy to bullshit your way out of any possible legitimate challenge. The implication in the question is, of course, that capitalism never killed anyone, or at least a tiny fraction of those killed by communists. So, before we go any further, can I get an agreement that we're not going to trot out the tired old "but that's not really ~~communism~~ capitalism"? Because if we're not going to allow that argument for communism just because it wasn't the idealized, utopian version of it, then we ought not let imperfect capitalism slide.

Mind you, I'm a believer in free markets where they exist, but I also believe that it's important to be able to be critical of the things you believe in.

[–] voidMainVoid@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The implication in the question is, of course, that capitalism never killed anyone

LOL. That isn't what I was implying at all. I'm just saying that if you're going to trot out "Communism killed X number of people", then you should hold capitalism to the same standard. I've seen estimates that capitalism has killed orders of magnitude more people than communism.

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

Ah, we've had a misunderstanding, my dude. Nevermind me

[–] VikingHippie@lemmy.wtf 2 points 1 year ago

Billions.