This summer’s electoral wave gave the US socialist left a much larger audience than we’re used to. Not only did we gain an extraordinarily wide hearing for our political ideas, but we also spooked our ideological opponents, and as a result got a good look at their rhetorical arsenal.

Many of their arguments are familiar. For decades, one of the most popular methods of undermining socialists has been an appeal to the atrocities that occurred in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. Horrifying episodes like the Great Chinese Famine and the Soviet famine under Stalin are brandished as proof that socialism can never work and is too dangerous to attempt, so we’re better off with capitalism.

Mike Davis’s book Late Victorian Holocausts complicates that story significantly. Capitalism has an enormous death toll of its own. If famines are the yardstick we’re using to measure the suitability of a global economic system, then capitalists have a lot to answer for.