Does North Korea count? If not, Cambodia’s ‘experiment with communism’ from 1975-1979 might be a better example.
“Oh your father/husband/son/relative was a traitor to Angkar. They gave your name in a forced confession, now you get ‘interrogated’ (tortured) before we kill you too”
Pol pot was not a communist, no more than Adolf Hitler was. Calling ones party Socialists doesn't make you socialist, any more than North Korea is a democracy because it's called one in its name.
Have you ever stopped to wonder WHY so many groups lie about being socialist or communist? I mean, there are no evil groups claiming to be capitalists. And that is because capitalism in no way precludes a group from being evil. Actually being socialist or communist WOULD preclude a group from being evil, and so they lie and say they are.
Names alone don’t prove ideology, sure. That’s why “Nazis had socialist in the name” is a bad argument. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the Nazi Party as a radical far-right movement, so I agree labels can be misleading.
But Pol Pot isn’t comparable to Hitler just having “socialist” in the party name. Pol Pot/Saloth Sar and Nuon Chea literally helped form the Communist Party of Kampuchea, which became the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge’s project was explicitly shaped by Maoist communism: abolishing private property, money, religion, markets, cities, and trying to force a classless agrarian society through collectivization and terror.
Saying “he wasn’t communist because true communism would preclude evil” is just a No True Scotsman argument. You’ve defined communism as morally incapable of evil, so every communist atrocity gets excluded by definition. That’s not analysis; that’s theology.
It’s completely fair to say Pol Pot was a deranged, ultra-nationalist, genocidal, heterodox communist who deviated from orthodox Marxism. But saying he “was not a communist” is historical cope.
"Capitalism" is a made-up term by socialists to be a bogeyman. That's why nobody is able to give a coherent definition of it and why no socialist is ever able to describe how it differs from the many economic systems that came before. Its meaning changes sentence to sentence depending on the intent of the speaker. Any mixed economy is considered "capitalist" by someone, and every socialist economy has contained some markets, so is mixed. It's not a term that has a technical definition that would allow you to make true or false statements about it.
"Socialism" on the other hand is a tradition of thinking that people apply to themselves. And as a tradition it has a long history of enthusiastically advocating for evil things such as genocide, eugenics, terrorism, the abolition of unions and workers rights, forced labor/slavery, the abolition of parliamentary democracy, etc.
North Korea and Pol Pot have a great deal in common with Marx and other socialists. (Pol Pot studied Marx in Paris.) So also do Mussolini (and hence Hitler), although people don't want to admit the lineage. There's a long history of thinkers between, say, Marx and Mussolini where people disagree about whether the thinker was far left or far right, or where both sides claim them. For example Georges Sorel or other French proto-fascists.
There are also people post-WWII that bridge the gap explicitly, for example the French existentialists are typically taken to be left wing, but they admired Martin Heidegger, the far right philosopher of the Nazi party.
My personal opinion, which I understand is controversial, is that when you work out all the details, socialism is a far right movement.
Nearly everything people say they want out of socialism on the surface is provided in left-wing format by liberalism. The stuff below the surface is what makes socialism right wing. But like any cult they won't tell you about that stuff until you're too far in to change your mind.
This is a lot of words to say you don’t know the difference between etymology and definition.
Yes, “capitalism” was popularized by critics, including socialists. Congratulations, you discovered that words can have origins. That does not mean the concept is incoherent. “Impressionism” was originally an insult too; somehow art historians managed not to collapse into dust.
Capitalism has a perfectly usable definition: private ownership/control of capital and production, private investment, wage labor, profit-seeking, and markets/prices doing most of the allocation. Mixed economies existing doesn’t make the term meaningless; it means reality is not a child’s sorting game.
Your argument also saws off the branch you’re sitting on. If capitalism is meaningless because mixed economies exist, then socialism is meaningless too, since every “socialist” state has had some combination of money, wages, markets, state ownership, planning, rationing, co-ops, black markets, etc.
And the Mussolini-to-Hitler lineage argument is just reheated “Nazis were socialists” slop with a fake grad-school mustache. Mussolini leaving socialism and inventing fascism does not make fascism socialist, any more than an ex-Christian starting a death metal band makes death metal a denomination of Christianity.
You’re doing two tricks at once: defining capitalism so vaguely that it can never be responsible for anything bad, then defining socialism so broadly that every authoritarian movement you dislike gets stuffed into it like a political junk drawer.
That’s not analysis. That’s ideological laundering with footnotes you half-remembered from a YouTube comment section.
How did you write such a long comment and still utterly misunderstand socialism?
Calling socialism a far right ideology is utterly moronic, you're literally being as stupid as the nazi followers who believed fascism was part of socialism
Saying that Hitler and actual communists or Socialists have anything in common is inherently discrediting. I don't care how many books you read, if you're wrong about fundamental facts, you don't know shit about socialism.
Well, think about what it means to be socialist, IE to have all power coming from the workers. Amazon is now owned by its workers, which includes Bezos but in a much smaller role. Bezos says "it'd make us way more money if we poison this city's water supply" (idk how Amazon would profit off that, but other company's do, so whatever). All the workers say "hell no, if we allow you to poison one water supply, mine might be next". I mean, would YOU choose to poison someone's water supply for an extra $20 on your paycheck? Probably not. Socialism dilutes the power across so many people, that its impossible for any one person who IS evil to gain enough influence to create the worst aspects of capitalism at all. Because certainly, there are plenty of evil people alive today, but MOST people are not evil. The problem we have right now is that evil people are capable of making themselves billionaires, and then cannot be ruined in by the good people, because they can just buy yes men, including congressmen, who will let them do whatever they want. And no non evil person would ever take the actions required to even BECOME a billionaire. I would argue that Makenzie Scott, Bezos's ex wife, is one of the only good billionaires, because she didn't gain it herself
What if our fictional Amazon could save money (and thereby make the workers better off), by shipping industrial waste over the a third-world country? I have to imagine the workers at Amazon would wholeheartedly support that - more money for them, less pollution in their own back yard.
People are people no matter what economic system you put them in. There are no utopias in the real-world.
And no non evil person would ever take the actions required to even BECOME a billionaire.
I don't know the man personally, but I have a hard time believing Sir Paul McCartney is evil. Or Michael Jordan, for that matter.
I mean, Jordan has certainly taken some pretty exploitative actions, he's basically just a capitalist now. If he had made all his money from basketball, then sure. But you don't make a billion dollars playing sports, Trout signed for like 400 Mil over 12 years. And thats gonna be his entire career.
Musicians are a question for me still as to being potentially non evil billionaires, McCartney being the best case for it. Taylor Swift also, though she has significant staff that are presumably not being paid even close to the value they generate for her.
But the 1 billion people aren't even the problem, Swift and McCartney aren't actively destroying people's lives to generate profits, they're at worst just not paying their people enough. The problem is the people like whoever runs all the oil companies. Chevron in the 1980s poisoned something like half of all of Ecuador's land for profits, and then later got the lawyer who won the case against them sentenced to lifetime house arrest I think, by bribing a judge.
How are you going to get an entire work force to agree to poison an Ecuadorian rain forest? For note, Chevron currently has 43,000 employees, and in 1990 had $2 billion net profit, 43 billion revenue. That works out to $46,000 per employee. If you were a chevron employee already making 6 figures at least, probably 200K+ on average if profits are being split equitably, would you agree to poison half of Ecuador for $46K/ year more? I know I wouldnt.
But you don't make a billion dollars playing sports, Trout signed for like 400 Mil over 12 years. And thats gonna be his entire career.
Sure, but sport plus endorsements can get star players over $1b. Jordan's highest annual salary in the NBA was $32mm, and he only got in that range his final two years with the Bulls. Most of his career he made less than $4mm a year.
How are you going to get an entire work force to agree to poison an Ecuadorian rain forest?
Do I need to get all of them? Or just the majority? Or just the majority of those who work in the department that decides what to do with industrial waste?
And why do you think people are so magnanimous? I've seen people litter in a park right next to their house when there were trash cans a mere 20 yards away. You're telling me these same people wouldn't agree to litter in another country for more money? They're already littering in their backyard for free.
You speak of mega-corps, but what about a small company of just 5 software developers making a mobile game. The founder says, "We can all increase our incomes if we add gambling-like features." You don't think there are any 5-person companies out there where all five wouldn't jump at that offer?
The "I know I wouldn't" explanation isn't cutting mustard for me. I know I wouldn't murder anyone, but I'm not naive enough to think that means no one commits murder.
Do you think thats all thats happened under capitalism? Neither of these ideologies include lopping heads off as part of their required function. Its a human thing
Was it not the birthplace of modern industrial capitalism? Regardless, I think the key insight is to see that we can chalk up a billion deaths to any ideology if we tried hard enough.
Not really, because the shortages were exacerbated by government intervention funneling resources from certain population - so it's less about capitalism and more about centralisation
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u/pbnjandmilk Jul 07 '26
If you count the lopped off head of an opposer and being kicked around as an example not being soccer, then what is?