this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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‘In the report, the scholars estimated that India suffered 165 million excess deaths due to British colonialism between 1880 and 1920. “This figure is larger than the combined number of deaths from both World Wars, including the Nazi holocaust,” they noted.’
https://mronline.org/2022/12/14/british-empire-killed-165-million-indians-in-40-years/
That’s just the British in India for a forty-year period. Do you want to talk about how many people the USA has killed since 9/11?
No, Feudal China is not relevant to a discussion on the relative violence and oppression done by capitalist and socialist states, because it is neither.
The point other people are making though is that you're selectively emphasizing stories of brutality from socialist countries while discounting the brutality that exists under capitalism in order to draw a false equivalence between the two systems; an equivalence that needs to exist in order to justify your position that it doesn't matter whether a state is socialist or capitalist.
The fact is that the violence done by capitalist states is far greater than that done by socialist states. In any time frame. The violence of colonialism belongs to capitalism, the violence of fascism belongs to capitalism, the violence of gunboat diplomacy - of wars fought by private contractors for the bottom line of arms manufactures and mineral exploitation companies - is the violence of capitalism. This doesn't even cover the internal, inherent violence of capitalism. To dispose of food while people starve, because feeding them is not profitable, is violence. To deny lifesaving medical treatment, because it cannot be supplied at a profit, that is violence. To spill poison into drinking water to save money, then when people protest, to lock them away and force them to labour, that is violence. Strike-breakers, Pinkertons, McCarthyism, police killings of activists, funding of right-wing militia to coup socialist governments, embargos denying medicine and food to socialist countries. All of this is violence, done by capitalists, to protect the rights of capital.
You are told that these things are not capitalist violence, they are just society functioning as normal. However you are flooded with rumour, conspiracy theories and propaganda about the violence in socialist countries, so you come to the conclusion that both are bad and that it isn't worth understanding the difference.
You know what really benefits capitalists, taking over the state, and you know what makes that easy, having lots of capital
In other words a systemic incentive for capitalism to degard into capitalist oppression because of an inherent feature specific to capitalism
You literally dont know what capitalism is or how power manifests in the world
Yeah dumb fuck that's definitely what I said lmao
You're like a child who still thinks Santa is real, you welded some half-baked Tolkienian conception of power onto your brain, where power is some nebulous metaphysical, all-consuming entity that corrupts everything it touches, instead of what it really is which is a series of social relationships meditated thru the dominant mode of production and its environs
The first step in forming coherent political beliefs is recognizing you severely miseducated yourself with mass media and literary tropes, there's a real world out there, and you should engage with it instead of shooting your mouth about concepts you don't comprehend
Capitalism is what causes that power imbalance, how anyone can sit there and pretend the mode of production that reproduces all human civilization doesn't effect the balance of power is beyond brain broken, you are literally arguing with reality dumbass
Keep coping
No power imbalance caused by the accumulation of capital, yes you dumb fuck, how is this difficult for you to grasp?
Well, there necessarily is still a power imbalance on an individual or per-capita basis, but that's what the DotP is meant to counteract on an absolute basis.
There is not.
of similar scale? there absolutely isn't, especially when you get off your own head and realize your country (meaning the main tool of your dominant classes) doesn't exist in isolation. and the fact you're talking about "socialist or communist" societies really shows you have no idea what you're talking about, despite all your unwarranted certainty
lmao what a stupid and irrelevant comment, you literally think like a 5 year old
lmao holy shit you're a dumbass, you're comment and the haphazard comparison you were trying to make is irrelevant because we don't live under feudalism, we live under capitalism, try to keep up