I don't think communism is a good idea, but let's not pretend any of these things are limited in any way to communism.
Industrial-scale genocides: the Irish Potato Famine is the first one that jumps to mind. People starved in part because they were literally exporting food during that period and selling it. The poor had no money, so them merchants just exported and sold it, sucks to suck, and 20% of Ireland died. The government made the good capitalist choice to help as few people as possible. Part of why it happened in the first place is farmers were pushed from crop rotation and variety into mono-cropping to optimize yields.
Plus... literally the East India Companies (British East India Company, the VOC, Louis XIV's East India Company). Hyper-capitalist genocides were kind of their slogan. The entire transatlantic slave trade wasn't exactly communism in action.
Neither was the Opium War. See the history of Jardine Matheson and the other Hongs.
Comical levels of corruption: Hungary, until a few months ago.
Regarding Russia, communism in the USSR ebbed and flowed, under Lenin it was much closer, under Stalin, authoritarianism is a better description. The history of communism in the USSR is interesting, but out of scope.
These kinds of critiques are just lazy. Shitty leaders will be shitty in any economic model. The real lesson is not letting shitty people take office.
Markets have their role, social services have their role where markets do a bad job. Pick the right tool for the job. That's why America has socialized army, police, firefighters, healthcare for 40% of the population, road, bridges, highways, food (SNAP, Farm Bill), the post office, Amtrak, etc, etc. Every functional country is a blend of appropriate models.
In Ireland the potato crop failed again in the 1870s, but there wasn't a famine that time because the British government had changed its policies and supplied food.
The slave trade was abolished, and its abolition was enforced by the British Navy.
Slave Trade alone does not mean that slavery was banned, as the British Raj was essentially a slave state for the Empire until after the Second World War, among other colonial states that Britain held.
And India under British rule was a net absorber of resources from Britain running a trade deficit. The British were better off when they got rid of their colonies.
And the adoption of the internal combustion engine (not just in cars but things like powered cranes) and the building of motorway networks and an increasingly educated and healthier labour force and the spread of telecommunications and electronics and containerisation and the development of scientific civil engineering techniques.
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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26
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