Chainleft on Warpcast

0xen 🎩 pfp

public ledgers, open source, DAOs, CC0 are all far left coded ideals. curious how the more right leaning crypto space squares these bedrock concepts.

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Dan Romero pfp

Generate revenue.

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0xen 🎩 pfp

strange bedfellows innit

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Thumbs Up pfp

DAOs or user-owned networks are like cooperatives. Cooperatives can earn revenue. The distinction of capitalism’s versus socialism’s “revenue” is the profit incentive and who gets the profit. Especially because they also have the power over how the company is run (and in oligarchies, how the country is run) Don’t let anyone tell you that money, markets, or income has to be absent from leftist ideology; it’s a big tent. Leftist conception of these things, which as you mention is very much coded in line with the web3 we’re building, is about equitable distribution of surplus revenue and democratic control of the organizations. I don’t think people on the right understand the bogeyman they think they’re fighting. Red scare propaganda and garbage propaganda like “The Little Black Book of Communism” built a wall of bias that even Gorbachev couldn’t tear down.

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Dan Romero pfp

> Red scare propaganda and garbage propaganda like “The Little Black Book of Communism” built a wall of bias that even Gorbachev couldn’t tear down. It's not little. 100 million dead. Ask anyone who has actually lived in a communist country how great it is. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

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Chainleft pfp

With that book's logic of "preventable deaths under the government with ___ ideology's policies", you could say capitalism killed dozens of billions. It's just a weird way of accounting. If we really want to use that definition for one ideology, we should apply it everywhere. The book is considered academically hollow but it has been used quite commonly by far right ideologists and politicians of course.

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Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

You can say a lot of things but fact is that countless millions were killed, starved, and enslaved as a direct result of communist policies. It's an ideology that claims to be "humanitarian" but caused the most destruction to humanity in the 20th century (and has nothing to show for it)

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prmck.eth (w☮️/acc) pfp

prmck.eth (w☮️/acc)

Serious question: what are the numbers for how many millions have been killed, starved, or enslaved under capitalism?

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Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

Good question. Most likely nowhere near as many as under communism?

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prmck.eth (w☮️/acc) pfp

prmck.eth (w☮️/acc)

Hows that? If deaths happened under comminsm, then attributed to communism. Then If deaths happened under capitalism, then attributed to capitalism. Ergo, billions (basically every global death that wasn't "under communism") dead bc capitalism, right?

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Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

I didn't say "if it happened under communism." I said if it was as a direct result of the policies. But even with your interpretation, taking the 20th century as the benchmark, a lot more deaths happened in communist countries than anywhere else (including in the two world wars). Adjusting for population, probably even more so.

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Chainleft pfp

Who decides the convenient threshold for "direct result of policies"? Do 1 million Iraqis count as deaths due to capitalism? Do millions from civil wars in Middle East count because most tensions are due to the original decisions made by capitalists? India-Pakistan partition from the capitalist British decision? Laos bombing? Hundreds of millions from colonialism? Slavery? Climate change deaths? All of these are direct results of capitalist decisions.

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Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

I don't think changing the "thresholds" will affect the calculus much tbh. Also, not sure how Middle Eastern civil wars, in countries with largely socialist govts (and aligned with the Soviet Union) can be attributed to capitalism. For the record, my conservative estimate is that for every death attributable to capitalism there are 3 deaths attributable to communism. Ironically, "who decides" is exactly the problem with communism. It's a centralization problem

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Chainleft pfp

Since you gave a specific number, you must have calculated. Please share, let's talk data. The "three times" estimate sounds made up.

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Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

Can't say I'm a historian or anything of that sort or that I did scholarly work on this. The background to my estimate was an argument w a friend who said "100M people died under communism" and my argument was, ok, but it's not like no one died under capitalism. My methodology was to take known conflicts in the 20th century (see wiki), exclude those where both "sides" were involved. Then, take the average estimated death toll (for example range of famine due to Great Leap Forward is 15-55M, for Stalinist terror it's 8-20M. So I took 35M and 14M as estimates). Then compared the results. For civil wars, I attributed those to the "direction" of the war. So in Indonesia it was anti-communist (400K), but in Cuba was pro-Communist (5K) My estimates were about 25M deaths in the "capitalist" sphere and 80M in the "communist" sphere. https://warpcast.com/abundance/0xb8256903 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

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Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

Now it's hard to argue that wars of independence are really due to "capitalist policies," for example, nonetheless, if they were in the "capitalist" sphere that's where I included those.

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Chainleft pfp

Thanks. I think the flaws in this method are: - Including nonconflict governance deaths for communism but not for capitalism. For example, Indian famine alone (which started in 19th century but expanded into 20th too) caused 15m deaths. 1m from partition. - Many more nonconflict but governance-related deaths under capitalist influence countries such as Turkey, Philippines, LATAM countries. These deaths are more distributed to time (still 20th century) hence less "scandalous" for media, but 100% direct results of capitalist governments that didn't have the luxury of colonizing + US aid during the cold war. - Excluding deaths from the conflicts between the two sides when one side is communism defending and the other side capitalism invading. Vietnam being the biggest example.

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Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

No doubt there are many flaws in my estimates. As I said, this was not scholarly work but merely part of an debate I was having with a friend. I'd say the flaws go both ways tho; because for capitalism I used the period of 1900-2000, but communism in the Soviet Union was 1917-1990 and in Cambodia, China 1950s-90s. Also, I lumped all countries that were not explicitly in the communist sphere as "under capitalism" but didn't look at the degree of market liberalization in those countries. Regarding India, afaik the 15m figure is from the 19th century. I included both the partition of India, and later of Pakistan, in the capitalist sphere, but excluded the Bengal famine as I considered it to be part of WWII-related deaths.

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Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

Regarding Vietnam, yes, as I said I excluded wars where both sides were involved, but I also excluded the about 1.5m deaths related to the Soviet-Afghan war. And included the 1m deaths in post-withdrawal to the "capitalism" sphere. So I don't think I wasn't being fair in my estimates and do think the 1:3 death ratio is reasonable

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Chainleft pfp

I think the things you considered where you thought were being fair aren't necessarily fair. Example: Russian Empire between 1900-1917 killed 1m citizens as a capitalist empire. Secondly, I think you should include Soviet-Afghan war, but there are about 20x more US interventions compared to Soviet ones so I don't think this adjustment would work in your method's favor. Third, 10m Soviet deaths are academically accounted for (even Black Book of Communism, a widely criticized book for being a capitalism propaganda book accounts 20m). All I'm saying is, all these assumptions are not just flawed but they are so deeply flawed that you end up with a confidence interval that massively overlaps for both sides, and you (and I) end up with arguing for one that you're (and I'm) instinctively more comfortable with.

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Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

So a third of the world population, living in the communist sphere for 50 years produces 3X the number of deaths as the other two thirds in a hundred years (and where a lot of these "capitalist" societies are in fact feudal or socialist). So that's really a factor of 12X. I discounted it to 3X but you still think it's not fair.. to communism. I guess we have different views of fairness

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Chainleft pfp

Sorry but you're saying your assumption is the proof of your assumption. We've never reconciled on 3x deaths assumption you're still pushing (and it's reaching the territory of gaslighting, even if that's not your purpose). I think we have different views on accounting, not fairness.

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Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

My point is you have to compare apples to apples - to compare similar time frames, similar population sizes, level of economic development, etc. I already pointed out flaws w my methodology (which, as I said, was far from scientist or rigorous). You pointed out additional ones and I can accept these. I also don't have a dog in this race. I don't subscribe to either of these ideologies (and yes, they're both ideologies). I do however think one is exponentially worse than the other, and that with the meta crisis that the market economy produces, Marxist ideology offers nothing of value to fix itm Frankly I'm a lot more interested in a discussion of why that, and what systems can work better, over discussing if communism produces 2X or 20X more deaths.

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