But they never stand up and discuss how state capitalism is explicitly behind famines like the Great Irine Potato Famine and the numerous ones in Bengal - with this one postdating Holodomor.
In the Irish Potato Famine, 15% of the country perished — it was right next door to the English — and did so largely due to enforcing private property of landlords above human lives of Irish peasants and sharecroppers.
Whether it is a Raj government that got set up to protect the state capitalist “East India Company”, or whether it is “wartime communism”, requisitioning food from starving peasants to feed cityfolk is something only a powerful state apparatus can do at such a scale, and at such a scale it is entirely out of touch with the people on the ground. People have suffered under both economic systems, it is just in the USA it is fashionable to associate communism with the State while capitalism has come to be somehow associated the absence of one.