r/FluentInFinance • u/AdFar3727 • 5d ago

People in this sub Discussion/ Debate

Why are there so many people who couldn’t get a C- in high school personal finance in a sub that is called fluent in finance?

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u/DuckTalesOohOoh 5d ago

Why did Communists have to kill so many people to try to make it work?

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u/VortexMagus 5d ago

This argument always made me laugh. Capitalism has killed way more people. WW1 was started by capitalist nations, against capitalist nations, and tens of millions died in the battlefield. The nazi party were right-wing capitalists who hated communism. They privatized a bunch of state industries and tossed millions of people into concentration camps.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's overall a better way to structure society than communism, but it's not because there's less blood. In fact there's almost definitely more blood.

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u/Vladtepesx3 5d ago

Not a single one of those things were because of capitalism. Thats like saying it was caused by drinking water because all of the parties involved drank water

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u/Lorn_Muunk 5d ago

Reducing the discussion on communism and capitalism to a body count contest is strange. Lumping the various factions involved in the start of WW1 under the same label of "capitalist" as well. The Austro-Hungarian Compromise, Serbia, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, Germany and France were not monolithic entities motivated primarily by the same capitalist greed. Gavrilo Princip was not exactly a stache twirling capitalist robber baron. Nationalism, monarchy, ethnicity and previous wars all played into it.

Just the origin story of communism, the Russian Revolution and civil war, killed twice as many people (~12 million) as the nazis exterminated in concentration camps. War communism, lysenkoism, collectivization and rapid industrialization were deliberately implemented in the name of communism. This caused the famine of 1921. Another 5 to 10 million dead. Then there was Stalin's famine of 1930-1933. ~4 million Ukrainians, ~3 million Russians, ~1 million Kazakhs. The Great Leap Forwards by Mao? ~36 million. About as much as all of the WW1 dead. Sergey Karaganov's delusions directly inspired Putin to annex Crimea and start the war in Ukraine. Conflating all these atrocities under a single label isn't an accurate representation of communism. The same goes for stating that capitalism caused WW1 and WW2. Labeling the nazi party as anti-communist and capitalist becomes difficult when you consider that Stalin supported and joined Hitler's invasion of Poland. 7 years of economic negotiation between the commies and the capitalists resulted in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. That doesn't mean communism caused WW2.

If we want to attribute an amount of lives to the economic system, we shouldn't stop at ze Germans. The system of public companies, stock trading, partial state-ownership, free trade for profit and government regulation is capitalism. The greedy, immoral pillaging of the planet for profit is still causing immense destruction, suffering and inequality. It also gave rise to the Enlightenment, the scientific method, the free exchange of new ideas, secular democracy and an incentive to innovate better than the competition. This directly resulted in sanitation, electric lights, optics, pest control, the germ theory of disease, genetics, vaccines, antibiotics, food supplements, insurance, surgical interventions, perinatal care, global technological cooperation, modified / enriched crops and the Haber-Bosch process. Does that mean capitalism saved billions of lives and is therefore less bloodthirsty than communism?

That Fritz Haber guy is a good example of how messy this always gets. It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber process. His work directly saved like 3 billion people. He also invented and advocated for the use of chemical weapons like chlorine gas during WW1. His work was used to develop Zyklon B, the pesticide with which millions of jews were exterminated in gas chambers. Haber himself was Jewish. Capitalist? Communist? Evil? Good? Who the fuck knows, all I know is it's never that simple.

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u/Dragonbearfly 4d ago

That’s a really well written comment

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u/DuckTalesOohOoh 4d ago

It is simple. Where is human progress today with freedom, democracy and capitalism vs no freedom, no democracy, and no capitalism?