>I share you trepidation about this to some extent. Nonetheless, it cannot be gainsaid >that the practice of institutions is not always identical with the principles that they are >founded upon.   

I don't want to minimise the difficulty of making comparisons for precisely reasons of that kind.  But it seems important to me that comparisons are made and this is what historians, sociologists and economists do all the time.

>[Blunderov1] I think there are grave problems in undertaking such an enquiry. Does one >include road traffic deaths in the toll for instance? (The more the capitalism, the greater the >carnage seems to be.)


I  agree that comparisons  of this kind are markedly more difficult  than comparisons of different political structures alone (the 20 million figure for Stalin presumably doesn't include industrial accidents or the like) i.e. whether outcomes are directly attributable to a single party from the starvation that followed farm collectivisation or the gulags on the one hand or the mass deaths of Irish navvies in constructing the British railway system, the crimes of the East India company (or Enron and the report amnesty international filed against it) or the atrocities in the Congo.

But that example leads me to wonder if you're not actually comparing degrees of economic development. After all, it's not as if cars or road traffic deaths are tied to capitalism; the Soviet bloc did manufacture cars. The difference was that under capitalism no-one had to wait six years to get their Lada, so it does seem somewhat unfair to blame capitalism for being more economically efficient.

>What about the toll from the diseases of affluence?  Or for that matter, from the diseases >of poverty?  Slavery; how is that to be reckoned?


But we do reckon all of these. We do have a good idea of how economic productivity or standard of living changed for differing classes in the former Soviet Union and historians do compare it with comparable rates in the West. Government are compiling data on shortened life expectancy as a result of obesity and slavery's economic toll can be tabulated with sufficient accuracy to form the basis of reparations claims (though I would point out that slavery is no more specific to capitalism than the automobile). We have to reckon all of these; it's really not optional.