logoalt Hacker News

nwsmtoday at 2:34 PM2 repliesview on HN

Do we have an estimate on the number of people capitalism has killed? Serious question.

Include deaths due to poverty and lack of affordable healthcare under capitalism, overworking and dangerous working conditions, and all wars and counter-insurgency waged on alternative economic systems globally.


Replies

thesuitonymtoday at 2:53 PM

No, people who die as a direct result of capitalist economics are not counted because that would be inconvenient and wouldn't fit the CIA's narrative.

carefree-bobtoday at 2:54 PM

You'd need a definition of capitalism first. Since for most people, it's just the default mode of living -- e.g. the very term "capital" comes from "head", as in "head of an ox", as early cattle culture practiced capitalism, so it predates the agricultural revolution and was practiced by nomadic groups.

A lot of the language, for example "interest" comes from cattle culture. If you think about it, a cow produces other cows, so it bears interest. You can eat the cow (consume capital) or let the cow produce a stream of milk. Ownership of cows gave you great power.

So asking "the number of people killed by capitalism" is like asking "how many people were killed by everything that's not communism", which is pretty inane, since the point of communism is that it is an ideology, and mass killing for an ideology (that's not religion) is a part of the modern world, not the traditional world of cows and capital. The first ideological genocide was the slaughter of the Vendee peasants by the French revolutionaries, but it was merely the first of many times that urban ideologues slaughtered rural farmers.