Communism killed 100 million

The claim that communist regimes killed 100 million people (and that the Soviet Union killed 20 million) has many core issues. The accuracy of the claim itself is heavily criticized, even by other anti-communists, but more importantly there are severe issues with the actual argument itself.

These include:

The argument is pointlessly reductive
Counting the deaths enabled by governments and uncritically grouping them together by their proclaimed ideology is not useful in deciding which ideologies are humane, least harmful or most effective.


 * 1) Government isn't the only major socio-economic factor that leads to suffering and death. Private companies, for one example, have often directly caused avoidable, foreseen mass suffering and death in their intentional pursuit of profit. This includes price gouging life-saving medication  , causing mass chemical accidents by using known-defective equipment , knowingly denying health risks of products , intentionally causing mass dependency and hiring mercenaries or requesting governments to terrorize and kill  unionized workers.
 * 2) The biggest causes of deaths under communist government often aren't attributed to any inherent part of communist ideology, but rather on independent state policies (such as the Four Pests Campaign) or controversial individual leaders (such as Stalin). This suggests the issues which created the largest amount of deaths resulted from poor leadership rather than systematic problems and can be avoided in the future without compromising any communist values.

The argument is specific to only Stalin's ideology and its variants
In the statistics given by The Black Book of Communism and other popular estimates, regimes utilizing Stalin's 'Marxist–Leninist' ideology and its variants count for well over 90% of deaths, with the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union alone making up 90%. :4 The argument alone that communism is responsible for millions of deaths is irrelevant to most strains of socialist and communist ideology, including anarcho-communism and its many variants as well as all the non-communist strains of socialism. These are fundamentally distinct from Marxist–Leninist ideologies and historically have not replicated the policies of Stalin, Mao and other controversial leaders, nor are they likely to.

Death count is not a valid measure of suffering or failure
This argument tries to imply the number of deaths caused by regimes is a useful measure of their morality (e.g. suffering caused, 'evilness') or occasionally, of their successfulness.

Even if we ignore the obvious and major issues of scale (over 90% of the total death count is attributed to only two territories :4, both of which were within the top 4 most populous in the world for their entire existence ), even if we somehow had perfectly accurate and proportional statistics, the very premise of using death counts to measure these things is invalid.

The easiest to dismiss is the successfulness measure. Unlimited growth is not a primary goal of socialism or communism, or most ideologies. Better measures of their success might be metrics of private vs. public enterprise, GDP, decrease of extreme wealth inequality, and various 'quality of life' comparisons of before and after (as Tsarist Russia and Warlord Era China, both around the late 1910s, would not be helpful to compare to the relatively privileged Western Europe and USA). Death counts or even death rates are not a useful indicator of a state's success, especially when they frequently include people who fought against the country's success, such as civil war armies and active political enemies.

The morality-based arguments are harder to discuss as they are highly philosophical and subjective, so this paragraph will be kept brief. For a simple introduction to ethics of death, see the wide range of answers to the trolley problem and its variants. For claims of suffering, death count is highly inaccurate as suffering often exists independently. Is all suffering equal? If one believes in a god, are they similarly responsible for the billions of deaths caused by their rule? Would those make them evil? Is killing someone who will cause greater suffering to others evil? These basic examples illustrate how a mere numerical death statistic can't really be applied to decide if an ideology is good, evil or causes more suffering than another.

The argument often attempts to equivocate Nazism and communism deaths
The death count claim is regularly used in a context to suggest that communism is more dangerous than Nazism, since Nazi Germany is estimated to have killed less than 100.

The Holocaust alone, excluding political victims, is often estimated at around 17 million intentional deaths, however the 25 million attributed to Nazism by The Black Book of Communism editor Stéphane Courtois :15 is most often seen in this argument, paired with his original claim of 100 million deaths from communism. While the numbers vary, the argument is essentially the same.

Even before disputing the strange implication that all deaths are equal and should be numerically compared, the suggestion that Nazism is less deadly based on these numbers is incorrect.

Despite all these biasing factors towards lowering Nazi Germany's death count, the Holocaust alone still had a far higher death count than the entire Soviet Union (even the The Black Book of Communism co-authour Nicolas Werth proposed an upper limit of only 15 million deaths over its lifetime of 72 years) and far higher than all the non-China, non-Soviet Union regimes combined, and the Holocaust estimate doesn't even include other deaths such as years of pre-war repression nor German military/citizen deaths as a result of the Nazi invasions nor foreign military deaths from invaded countries. The only communist regime, out of dozens of them, to be even remotely numerically comparable is the total death count in China, the most populous country in the world by far which has been under communist rule for 6 times as long as Nazi Germany. Even taken at face value and with dubiously high estimates, the numbers if anything suggest that communism is typically far less dangerous and deadly than Nazism.
 * Firstly, Nazi Germany lasted only 12 years in total. Both the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China lasted over 70 years, more than 6 times as long.
 * Secondly, their population was only around half of the Soviet Union's, and a third of China's.
 * Thirdly, Adolf Hitler was directly handed power by the Chancellor, with no civil war nor invasion from Western countries. China and Russia were both subject to lengthy civil wars. However it should be noted this is not inherent to communism; territories such as Yugoslavia and Nepal achieved a communist government electorally.

While the reductive argument of uncritically blaming government-enabled deaths on ideology is not useful, the genocide of 'undesired' groups of people (or at least their forced mass deportation) is an inherent, intentional and unavoidable aspect of Nazism and neo-Nazism, and one widely embraced by its supporters.

Inadequate comparison to capitalist regimes
The claim that communist regimes killed many millions of people makes the implicit comparison to capitalism under liberal democracy [not to be confused with social liberalism], suggesting the regimes we live under have not killed many millions of people.

If we use a similar criteria to the typical claims of communist deaths (such as including economic crises and famines intensified by government policy, and political repression), then capitalist regimes would include examples such as British negligence in the Irish Great Famine, British denial policies and refusal of imports in the Bengal famine of 1943 , COINTELPRO repression of US civil rights activism including many high-profile assassinations, and international USA/NATO political repression (and direct promotion of fascist dictatorships) in Latin America and Europe , as well as the Indonesian mass killings of approximately a million citizens, supported by the US, UK and other allied nations.

It should again be emphasised that, with both capitalism and communism, this reductive argument of uncritically blaming government-preventable deaths on ideology is not useful. This point merely exists to demonstrate mass deaths, famines and repression are not limited to communist and fascist regimes, nor solved by capitalist democracy.

The Black Book of Communism (1997)
The claim of communism killing 100 million (and of the Soviet Union killing 20 million) is generally taken from The Black Book of Communism, where the introduction by editor Stéphane Courtois states that "based on unofficial estimates", "the total approaches 100 million people" :4 killed by Leninist and Marxist–Leninist Communist parties and movements worldwide.

This claim gives no sources for the numbers and is highly controversial, with even three main authours of the book publicly disassociating themselves from Courtois' statements in the introduction and criticising his editorial conduct.

Criticism by co-authours of the same book
Disputing the ‘approximations’, ‘contradictions’, and ‘clumsinesses that make sense’, Jean-Louis Margolin and Nicolas Werth reproach Stéphane Courtois for his "obsession to arrive at the hundred million deaths". Nicolas Werth thus counts fifteen million victims in the USSR, while Stéphane Courtois, in his introduction, adds five. Mr. Margolin explains that "he has never reported a million deaths in Vietnam".