If Communism Killed Millions, How Many Did Capitalism Kill?

It goes around every few years. “Communism killed 100 million people!!” Let’s take it face value. How awful. So. What about capitalism? Let’s think about it together. And let me say at the outset that it’s not to score points — but so that we think carefully, and well, about what kind of people we want to be, and what kind of world we want. Me? I’m not a capitalist, a socialist, or any other kind of “ist.” I think when ideas become ideologies, we go blind — but I’ll come back to that.

Let’s start in an obvious place. 13 million slaves were sold to the “New World” — America, North and South. In the United States, by 1860, just 400,000 North American slaves had become 4 million new ones, born into slavery. That’s 17 million people, and we’ve barely begun — and it’s incomplete, because there are no statistics on how many people were born into slavery after their parents sold in South and Central America. Still, let’s leave that aside for now, because 17 million’s plenty to begin with.

Fast forward a century. A world war erupted — thanks, in large part, as historians agree, to a global depression. But what caused the Great Depression? Capitalism — the speculative frenzy and inequality of the rip-roaring 1920s. Capitalism poured the fuel of fascism all over the world, in nations like Germany and Italy, who were heavily indebted by that point, and it only took a handful of demagogues to set the world alight. How many people died in World War II? 25 million — just soldiers. 50 million — including civilians. 80 million — including famine, war crimes, and disease. We’re getting into some spectacular numbers, aren’t we? Let’s take the middle one, just for conservatism’s sake. We’re already at about 70 million.

After the great war, immediately, came a new one. The Cold War. But the Cold War wasn’t just the intrigue of spies, as we think of it today. It was real and lethal war — war by America, for a single purpose — to preserve and expand the frontiers of capitalism. No capitalism, no Cold War. Let’s start, then, with the Viet Nam war. How many died? Another 2.5 million, roughly. Before that, though we don’t discuss it much today, was the Chinese civil war, in which America and Soviet Russia fought by proxy. How many died? About 8 million. Just those two hard wars of the Cold War — and there were many more — add another ten million to our tally, making it 80 million.

In between World War II and the Cold War though, lies a period of history many of us have forgotten. The end of colonial empire. This, too, was capitalism — empires were built to obtain cheap labour and raw materials for mercantile capitalism. It wasn’t the kind of globalized, “free-market” capitalism we practice today — but it was very much self-interested, profit-maximizing, shareholder-capitalized companies engaged in commerce, just under different rules about who could trade what, where, how, and when.

How many people died in the course of colonial mercantile empire? We’ll never know — it’s astronomical. How big? In the Congo alone, 10 million died as a legacy of King Leopold of Belgium’s brutal rule. In India, conservatively, a million people died, as the nation fractured when colonialism ended — and a noted Indian parliamentarian has estimated 35 million died under colonial rule, through famines alone. And yet in many places, those wounds haven’t healed. Congo, still exploited for its natural resources by, wait for it, capitalism — rubber, diamonds, metals, some of which are probably in your smartphone — had another war, in the 21st century, which killed 5 million.

Where’s our number now? In that last round, we added another 50 million people, to 70 million. So now we’re at 120 million. And that’s still conservative — because there are many, many wars, proxy wars, colonial empires, and massacres that we haven’t counted. That exercise would take something like a volume of books. But we have more than enough to reach a simple conclusion.

If communism killed 100 million, capitalism easily killed as many — if not more. When we say blindly that “communism kills!”, it’s all to easy to think that capitalism is something like a religion — pure and pious, with no blood on its hands. But its hands are just as flawed and imperfect as any others. But the point isn’t point scoring. It’s to think well — which is to think critically — about these systems.

What do you think the above means? Here’s what I think.

None of the above is to invalidate socialism or capitalism — in fact, it indicts something greater than both of them. What does all the blood and gore say, for example, about my two favourite examples of capitalism? Tom Oberheim, the guy who made the synths that were the sound of Prince and Journey, and now is an old man making them, still, literally in his garage — and his once rival and now frenemy, Dave Smith, who has a slightly bigger, but still tiny boutique synth company, in San Francisco? That they’re going to go out and start massacres in the Congo? LOL. Of course not. What it tells us, in fact, is that capitalism is a necessary and noble art — but probably at that scale, with those ambitions, when it’s an exercise in passion and creation. But something is lost, as it grows and expands, to the point of countries, nations, and worlds. It becomes inhuman. It grows teeth and claws.

In the same way, what does “communism killed 50 million people!” say about my favourite example of bottom-up collectivism (of a sort) — Moog Music, an employee owned company, that isn’t focused on maximizing profits, just making awesome things? That they’re going to put people in gulags, if they don’t use their instruments? Of course not. What does it say about large-scale examples of socialism, like Britain’s NHS? That it’s an evil empire, whose doctors are out to get you? Of course not.

I’ve asked you, a little unfairly, a trick question. But I think you know it by now. The question isn’t — “which ideology killed more people?!” It’s “is there something funny going on in the fact that two great ideologies warred for control over the world, and killed millions of people, yet both called it ‘progress’”? You think you know it, I’m sure — but do you? — when ideas become ideologies, something goes badly wrong. But what, exactly? Ideologies replace our humanity. Our free will. Our freedom to think. Our curiousity. Our empathy and defiance and grace and burning need for meaning, purpose, and intimacy.

Ideology says: you can have all these things you need, as long as you don’t just obey — but believe. Without question. Then obedience follows naturally. But now you have given up all that is truest in you — yourself. And ideologues in that way, whether capitalists or communists or fundamentalists or eugencists, have only course left: to impose their system on everyone else. To create clones of themselves. That’s the only meaning, victory, or triumph that there really when ideas become ideology. No surprise, then, that the history of the modern world is the history of two ideologies, striving to clone themselves in every human mind across the globe, each one killing everyone it encountered that it couldn’t make a clone.

And in that way, any ideology, really, is a weapon of mass destruction. Christianity — great, timeless, noble teachings. Crusades and pogroms, too. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam. Science becoming eugenics. When an idea becomes an ideology — something rigid, a routine, a formula, a system, then something is lost. We’re no longer Tom Oberheim or Dave Smith or Moog, doing interesting and maybe beautiful things, in our little labs, workshops, libraries, studios, garages. We’re something more like crusaders now. We’ve become pawns and puppets of beliefs, which is also to say, captives of fate — not authors and explorers and masters of our own destinies.

When an idea becomes an ideology, and that ideology allows no room to breathe, think, rebel, dissent, what is it called? It’s called totalism. And if we really want to assign a cause to all the needless deaths in history, I’d lay that burden at the door of totalism. And yet totalism is still alive and well — the idea that an idea should become an ideology, which is the sole organizing principle of society. In America, capitalism has gone totalitarian — no dissent, thought, or competition from any other system is allowed, really. You can have this kind of capitalism, or that kind — but you can’t have something that’s not capitalism.

And that brings me full circle. Communism killed millions. Capitalism killed millions, too. It’s truer to say totalism kills through ideology — when freedom of thought, expression, moral action, primal emotion, becomes programmed, automated, conditioned, revoked. Then people become dehumanized — just as they did in Soviet Russia, just as they are in America today. And dehumanized people will do anything to fill up the empty well of bitter worthlessness and meaninglessness deep down in their souls — like dehumanizing little kids, by putting them in cages. And so in this day and age, what really strikes is me that we, human beings, still haven’t understood that what we have yet to slay is the dragon of ideology.

Umair
July 2018