Is there anything worthwhile to consider with the communism kills idea, or are we always talking about deaths that would’ve been avoided if capitalists left peacefully instead of fighting to maintain their power?
A lot of the count isn't even deaths, it's changes in birthrate. So the USSR industrializing, educating its populace, and reducing infant mortality gets spun as costing many millions of hypothetical lives in the form of fewer births, disregarding the fact that high birthrates in agrarian societies go along with and are to an extent fueled by high infant mortality.
I don’t know a lot about China
The worst catastrophe, the Great Leap Forwards, was a colossal policy failure but still happened for clear reasons: the commune models it pushed were ones that originated from rural communes in the first place, in places and at times where the material conditions meant they worked; China had a pressing strategic need to try to move its industrial bases west away from the vulnerable coasts and to decentralize them to make the sorts of strategic bombing campaigns they'd seen the US carry out in the Korean War impossible; and there was a driving need to increase industrial capability in general in order to mechanize the communes and increase agricultural output while freeing labor for more industrial work. This was further compounded by the relative autarky of the rural communes and how dysfunctional the overall logistics system was, leading to rampant problems of local officials reporting that grain production was higher than it was and that they were shipping more than they were because there were little to no checks to ensure that any of the reports were accurate and higher numbers went along with greater compensation and prestige.
A lot of the count isn't even deaths, it's changes in birthrate. So the USSR industrializing, educating its populace, and reducing infant mortality gets spun as costing many millions of hypothetical lives in the form of fewer births, disregarding the fact that high birthrates in agrarian societies go along with and are to an extent fueled by high infant mortality.
The worst catastrophe, the Great Leap Forwards, was a colossal policy failure but still happened for clear reasons: the commune models it pushed were ones that originated from rural communes in the first place, in places and at times where the material conditions meant they worked; China had a pressing strategic need to try to move its industrial bases west away from the vulnerable coasts and to decentralize them to make the sorts of strategic bombing campaigns they'd seen the US carry out in the Korean War impossible; and there was a driving need to increase industrial capability in general in order to mechanize the communes and increase agricultural output while freeing labor for more industrial work. This was further compounded by the relative autarky of the rural communes and how dysfunctional the overall logistics system was, leading to rampant problems of local officials reporting that grain production was higher than it was and that they were shipping more than they were because there were little to no checks to ensure that any of the reports were accurate and higher numbers went along with greater compensation and prestige.