Let me be clear,
I mean non “natural” deaths, and am including stuff like the failure to counteract malaria due to lack of profit motive, etc etc etc.
Real question, is capitalism the deadliest human invention of all time?
this will probably come down to where you draw the line between capitalism and imperialism, but I’d argue they’ve been largely once unified force since at least the 1920s
Comes with the territory. You can’t be the dominant ideology that has the entire world by the balls and not be pretty much responsible for all non natural deaths. If you are the global ideology inaction is taking an action so a lot of preventable deaths from disease or malnutrition are because misallocation of resources to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
I’d also argue that it’s pretty much impossible to separate later imperialism from early capitalism because a lot of civil and international conflicts arose from the colonial or post colonial situations people found themselves in. And since those post colonial nations and peoples had only one choice of system to integrate with, capitalism, the pitfalls and hiccups of that integration can be blamed on capitalism.
So basically, yeah, and apologists like Stephen Pinker get the wall for being gloating shitheads who ignore all the death and misery created so that he can go on TV and say shit like “trillionaires existing is a good thing.”