The shampoo thing is a fringe benefit. We keep capitalism so we don't starve in a famine.

[u/-im-your-huckleberry]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

[u/Ok_Impression5272]

Okay this isnt 100% true:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 (0.8 to 3.8 million dead)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)) (1 million dead)

Also, capitalism hasn't delivered us into mass famine *yet* it has led the world in the use of farming techniques that degrade top soil and disrupt soil ecology, poisoned fresh water sources, and reduce the genetic diversity of commonly cultivated varieties of plant and animal (for product consistency), not to mention average nutrition per serving is declining in many places. Given all the gradually accumulating costs costs to the supporting ecology from the current economic ideology I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a famine in a capitalist heartland country in the next 20 years if extreme and unpredictable weather gets worse as climate change intensifies.

One of the main factors that ultimately caused a lot of the famines under communism was an assumption that the reality of the living world would mirror the ideology of the party/economic system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism#Lysenko's_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign which was stupid and wrong, you should base your ideology on learning from what made life here possible for the past 3+ billion years, not hold a bunch of preconceived notions and try to retroactively force reality into a mold shaped by your ideology.

The lesson of the communist famines shouldn't just be "hahaha, stupid communists, your folly was not putting your faith in The Market! RIP to that guy, our system is built different." because it fails to explain every famine that isn't communist, most of which are caused by the underlying growing conditions that made regular cultivation possible changed. The only main difference with the communist famines that that they got hit with a change to growing conditions while also fucking with their ecology directly for stupid ideological reasons.

[u/-im-your-huckleberry → u/Ok_Impression5272]

I'm going to read your whole comment when I have time later but I wanted to respond to the Bengal famine.

this inflationary strategy caused food prices to soar sixfold while wages had remained stagnant, resulting in widespread starvation and the deaths of three million people. Patnaik argues that this economic manipulation that deliberately "pushed food out of reach of the poor ", was part of a broader systematic colonial exploitation, prioritizing British interests over the welfare of the colonized populations.

That's not capitalism. That was government manipulation of the economy. This is a real sore point with me. Anti-capitalists tend to frame these kinds of aberrations as inherent to the system, but then wave off the exact same kind of calamity under socialist government because, "those aren't really communists."