>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?