The book presents data (112 graphs) from the real experiment of socialism versus capitalism in Slovakia, the former socialist countries and in the world. From the data it presents evidence of the crimes of democracy, which are several times higher than the crimes of communism. It discusses the rules of global capitalistic democracy leading to high inequality, modern democratic serfdom and the crimes of democracy, which are based on the rules of the capitalistic democracy coupled with unlimited private property. It describes the costs of the transition from socialism to capitalism, from "totalitarianism" to democracy across the whole region, highlights the dramatic and widespread deterioration of human rights and security, where democracy is killing people several times more efficiently than Stalin's execution guards. It presents evidence of the astonishing power of recent totalitarian neo-liberal capitalistic democracy. It presents evidence that policies of some democratically elected governments produced significantly more criminal military interventions, significantly more innocent deaths and committed more severe crimes against humanity than totalitarian communism. That it is not possible, under the recent democratic rules, to punish democratically elected governments for well-known crimes against humanity and violation of international law. Democracy in the capitalistic system cannot work and is not working properly because the recent democracy is based on unlimited private property. The freedom of expression is incompatible with unlimited private property. Capitalistic democracy means that the owners of the unlimited property have power to govern through the democratically elected representatives over democracy.

This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.

A ten-count indictment on how socialism not only ruins countries and their economies, but also destroys civil societies while denying natural rights. After the fall of the Soviet Union and its global empire, most observers assumed that the seventy-year argument that socialism was superior to capitalism was over. Socialism in its various forms—Communism, Maoism, National Socialism, and more—had left such a legacy of tyranny, war, mass murder, and human misery, that few could imagine a world where young people would once again embrace the discredited ideas of Marx and his heirs. And yet, here we are in twenty-first-century America. Proponents of “Democratic Socialism” find themselves, inexplicably, darlings of the media and political classes. The People Versus Socialism is a powerful historical corrective—a reminder to those who have forgotten (or who never learned) the enormous toll socialism laid upon humanity throughout the twentieth century. This dangerous economic and social system left untold millions dead, billions mired in war and poverty, and the entire world under constant threat from ideologically driven tyrants and dictators. The indictment is clear—and the implications of ignoring history are frightening.

The twentieth century has left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radical social engineering, creating collective/individual guilt syndromes that were often specters haunting the process of democratization in the various societies that have emerged out of these profoundly de-structuring contexts, such as Germany, Romania, Russia and others.

One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.