Why so many corpses?

Marxist countries and movements have been most successful in producing corpses.

According to The Black Book of Communism published by Harvard University in 1999 the estimated body count was:

USSR: 20 million

China: 65 million

Vietnam: 1 million

North Korea: 2 million

Cambodia: 2 million

Eastern Europe: 1 million

Latin America: 150,000

Africa: 1.7 million

Afghanistan: 1.5 million

The International Communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about 10,000

Defenders of Marxism claim that Marxist theory has nothing to do with the deaths. Terry Eagletonwrote In Praise of Marx. From his essay:

The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition.

However, Eagleton doesn’t mention what was responsible for the deaths. Most people grant that the Holocaust was no accident. It was simply Nazi ideology in practice.

If one reads a basic Marxist document, The Communist Manifesto written by Engels and Marx, one can find a recipe for corpse making.

The Manifesto sets up a struggle between good and evil:

Bourgeois and Proletarians

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Humans have fought and cooperated in many forms as they worked together for common goals or competed for resources. To put all these actions in the context of class struggle is unjustified reductionism. However, the bourgeoisie becomes the enemy of the ‘noble’ proletariat. ‘Bourgeoisie’ in practice becomes an inclusive term. It embodies the ‘class enemy.’ The class enemy can be anyone who opposes either the Marxist state or communist domination. It can be a peasant who works harder and as a result accumulates more than the other peasants. Stalin called them kulaks and purged them. It can be a person who opens an auto or bicycle repair shop. Castro called such people cockroach capitalists. It could be a person whose father owned or managed a factory. Such a person could be condemned for ‘unsuitable class origins.’ It is an elastic category which gives the party or the state justification for persecution.

After a condemnation of bourgeois society the Manifesto specifies ten measures of a new society which may differ in different countries. Some follow:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

Home ownership is out. One has a residence at the sufferance of the state.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

Nothing can left to our children.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

I left the US to live in Australia.  I still get pensions and social security from the US. If the US had followed the Manifesto the price of leaving would be losing everything I have worked for.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

There goes free expression, a free press and even owning a bicycle.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

The main factor in the loss of biodiversity is habitat destruction.  The cultivation of waste lands would accelerate that process. Marx and Engels were probably not aware of ecological considerations.

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

The armies would probably be staffed by conscription. There goes the right to decide what one wants to do for a living and where one wants to work.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

Presumably the equable distribution would be effected by the state determining where people live. The individual would not have a choice.

The above points specify a powerful state. As it is we can go where we will and decide where we will live and what we will do for a living.

In our bourgeois democratic societies we have a number of protections against the power of the state. We can form political groups to forward an agenda which makes changes we think are desirable. We have the right to express our opinions and seek redress in law.

The Manifesto would deny these rights.

By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to "True" Socialism of confronting the political movement with the socialistic demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement.

The above would destroy the protections that we have against the arbitrary power of the state. These protections disappeared in the Marxist states, and nothing replaced them.

The Manifesto cited an enemy which would be defined at the pleasure of the state and party, specified an all-powerful state and removed all protections of the individual from state oppression. The Manifesto also specifies what should be done to these individuals:

You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

The corpses were a product of the recommendations of Marx and Engels. The Communist Manifesto is a manifesto for mass murder. Torture, gulags and the bullet in the head are all ways of sweeping people away and making them impossible.