The go-to anticommunist argument that is used to invalidate everything about Marxism as a critique of capitalist economics, socialism as a replacement to capitalism, and communism as a society, is the simple phrase “communism killed 100 million people.” Backers of the phrase use it so blindly and flippantly, most are unaware that the effects of capitalism have killed far more than 100 million people, nor are they even aware of the claims’ original source. They arrive at 100 million by twisting and manipulating facts and events in obvious attempts to just pin the highest death toll possible on communism.

To reach this number, anti-communists take the largest estimate possible for any individual event (e.g., if the estimated death toll for some event is between 3 and 9 million, anti-communist scholars tend to pick 9 million and state it as fact). Second, they take any unnatural death that may have had a slight relation to a communist government, and blame it on communism as an ideology (e.g., if a person in China died due to a drought while Mao happened to be leader, his death is automatically the fault of communism).

If we were to use the rationale anti-communists use, then the death toll for capitalism is far over one billion. Even if we used more legitimate means of calculation, the number would still be over 1 billion. Just today, 30,000 to 60,000 people will starve to death in countries using capitalistic market economies. This means capitalism kills 100 to 200 million people every ten years by starvation alone. An additional 10 million children die annually due to preventable diseases in capitalist countries (and therefore 100 million every ten years). With these two statistics alone, we can use the anti-communist logic to claim that capitalism kills 200-300 million people every 10 years: up to triple what communism has been accused of killing in its entire 170-year existence.

Adding onto this are the indeterminable amount of victims of imperialism, war, or oppression capitalist states have engaged in. Just a short list includes: famines the British Empire caused in India, which killed more than 40 million people; 10 million Congolese were killed by Belgian colonialism; actions by capitalist countries killed 2 million civilians in the Korean war, about 3 million civilians in the Vietnam war, and 1 million in the Iraq war. The government of Indonesia killed 1-3 million people in an anti-communist genocide. During the Cold War, the governments of Latin America killed about half a million people in political repression, and South Korea killed hundreds of thousands of people suspected of being communist sympathizers. If observing the number of people “killed” by a socio-economic system is a legitimate method of invalidating it, then surely anti-communists must admit that capitalism is probably the most invalid and murderous system the world has ever seen.

The claim “communism killed 100 million people” arose out of estimates made in the Black Book of Communism, published in 1997. The book immediately captured the attention of anti-communists, as it introduced what looked like a simple criticism no communist could deny: their ideology killed 100 million people. Using the flawed methodology described earlier (2nd paragraph), the book claims that crimes of communists resulted in the following death tolls: China: 65 million, USSR: 20 million, Vietnam: 1 million, North Korea: 2 million, Cambodia: 2 million, Eastern Europe: 1 million, Latin America: 150,000, Africa: 1.7 million, Afghanistan: 1.5 million. Most shocking to me was the fact that, in the opening pages, the authors say that in writing the book they were not trying to create a “comparative system for crunching numbers,” possibly indicating that they know capitalism has killed more people, but simply don’t want to talk about systems other than communism.

Before the Chinese communists came to power in 1949, millions of people were dying of starvation and preventable diseases each year. Changes in the methods of food production and medical distribution resulted in this coming to an abrupt stop in the years following the communist revolution. Food was produced for the specific purpose of consumption by the populace rather than for profit or monetary gain by landlords, and food consumption rose dramatically. Similar increases in nutrition have occurred with other communist governments which inherited a people left impoverished by the precedent capitalist system. This forces us to notice the fact that starvation and deaths by disease in underdeveloped regions are systemic problems of capitalism, caused by its inability to distribute resources on the basis of human need, but on the basis of whatever makes the most profit. Therefore, it is far more legitimate to say anyone killed by starvation or disease under capitalism was killed by capitalism than to say the same for communism.

Let’s take a case study of this theory on China. The anti-communists say communism killed about 65 million people there. The bulk of the “65 million” were victims of the Great Chinese Famine which occurred under communist rule, in which 16 to 43 million died out of a population of about 650 million (of course, always preferring the higher estimate, anti-communists usually just say ~43 million died). The famine lasted for 3 years, between 1958 and 1961, and was the result of poor economic planning coincidentally occurring simultaneously with the worst floods and droughts China had seen in decades. It is entirely inappropriate to label this “genocide” by communists. Furthermore, this momentary famine in China’s communist history contrasts heavily to the continuous starvation China previously experienced under the capitalist regime, which lasted several decades and continued even under excellent weather conditions. Furthermore, the famine experienced under the communist government could have been prevented by simply not implementing the swift agricultural reforms that caused the majority of deaths. Capitalism on the other hand can’t help but let millions of people starve.

Related articles

A large part of the number “100 million” comes from atrocities Stalin supposedly committed. To get a more detailed analysis of how his era is misrepresented, click here.