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I'd like to introduce you to two twin concepts, which ought to be far more widespread than they are.
One is the notions of human cost and excess deaths. These days, neoliberalism has popularized the ridiculous idea that politics should be apolitical and be just "good administrators". There's a very fallacious assumption there: it hides the human costs of policies and laws. And many policies and laws can have a human cost, even if we don't see it, but more on this later. Regardless, picture one of these Trump proposals defunding ACA, for example. It's undeniable fact that this will increase the number of fatalities. It's not a simple matter of Congress jabber and Presidential signature; that policy will have a human cost in the form of deaths that would not happen if funding stayed the same.
But this is a rather clear-cut case. Let's look at America's massive prison complex (whose average prison population rate, by the way, is already higher than Stalin's) built by numerous laws and policies that create the "school to prison" pipeline, the private prisons that have a direct profit motive to encarcerate innocents, or the fact that prison labor is mandatory according to the US Bureau of Prisons. All of these clearly have human costs, tho they're very difficult to frame in numbers as clear as excess deaths – that's one of the ways such horrid practices are hidden. And one can't even defend them on the basis that they will decrease crime; if anything, the social inequality they foster probably increases crimes and creates more hardened criminals. Again, all of it has human costs, yet for some reason only the far left seems to blame the system or the politicians. Everyone else sees them as anomalies to be corrected, implicitly accepting the system as immutable or even natural. Gulag deaths, on the other hand, are quickly attributed to both Stalin and communism. And no one sees the double standard here.
"Our" system, as in whatever system we happen to live under, is always considered the default; everything that happens in it is inevitable, and there's no culpability. Capitalism promises nothing, so even if it underdelivers, "we" just accept it as the way things are, human cost be damned. People don't even look for possible culprits because these catastrophes are seen as an inevitable part of life, and few people contest this. A famine in the third world caused by global market speculation? Shucks, but these things happen, mankind has always had famines, we can't really blame anyone, this was inevitable. A famine in the USSR caused by mismanagement during a failed crop? Deliberate extermination of peasants! Socialism's disregard for human life! Genocide!
But there's a particular type of human cost that's built right at the core of capitalism, it's reaped upon the vast majority of mankind to some degree, but again, only the far left seems to see it. I'm talking about labor exploitation. You probably know about miserable third world peasants growing food for us, and sweatshop workers building just about everything we buy but food. Legions of them are exploited all over the world, in conditions similar to that of those British proletarians of Marx's time, which puts to bed the idea that capitalism improved and don't mistreat workers anymore. Of course it does; it's just that overexploitation has been offshored. And even in countries that do manage to improve living standards, all the way up to first world countries that ended extreme poverty and overexploitation, there's still the explotation at the core of capitalism: surplus-value. Again, there's a cognitive gap here between the far left, who see it as exploitation, and everyone else, who see it as normal because it's always been like that, after all. Thus capitalism simply cannot exist without the continuous payment of the human cost of exploitation, to say nothing of the excess deaths I mentioned before.
