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Commentaryism - The Death Toll of Capitalism


How many people have died because capitalism exists? How many would still be alive if it had never existed? Let's dig in!

We will take two approaches over the course of this blog post by looking at the the death tolls attributed to the word in its broad popular definition - everything socialists don't like - versus the toll that fits the definition offered previously on this blog.

By the same token I will not lay any outsized figures at any other mode of production's door except where that mode of production demonstrably caused the problem that killed people. It's political ideologies that really matter here, and this is where the first big problem with even trying to lay a specific body count before capitalism runs into problems - there is no political ideology called capitalism.

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Now then, Alfonso Gutierrez says in a comment thread that "capitalism and free-markets have murdered billions of people" which is a risky claim at the best of times considering Nazism only managed about 20 million.

First, what is the mechanism of injury by which a mode of production actually kills or injures or oppresses real human beings? It doesn't. So right away we can resolve this stupid argument and say that the death count attributable to capitalism the mode of production is zero.

But capitalism sits atop money and private property. Does the liberal political philosophy advocating for those institutions also leave the way open to democide? What about hungry people attempting to access fields that are owned privately by somebody else? What about unemployed non-land-owning persons today? And what about workers dying trapped in a burning textile mill in New York or Dhaka?

For now let's see what ideological Leftists have to say about their capitalism's death toll...

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Perhaps Gutierrez got his 'billions' stat from arch troll site Maoist Rebel News which lays a death count of 1.6 billion at capitalism's feet. If one reads down the MRN list, however, one discovers that it is completely un-sourced.

Maybe it shouldn't surprise me that someone else, this time flying Stalin's banner, says much the same about deaths from capitalism, including three million from the abandonment of the socialist venture by the Warsaw Pact countries. Apparently any lethal act by agents of any government that's not overtly socialist count as capitalism killing people. This is interesting but intellectually unpersuasive.

Which invites the question of where the figure comes from, and what capitalism is that it - not physical scarcity, not state regulation, not economic planning, not politically-motivated violence - might somehow lead to people's avoidable deaths. Maybe deaths from working conditions at a workplace that is run for profit can count but nothing else can.

How many deaths have taken place at for-profit workplaces over the 20th Century? How many of those were caused by such facts of capitalism as money, private property, and the requirement to perform well at one's job? Since all the stats I can find deal with state actions and economic policies the tot I've reached so far is zero. But I'll employ a method of my own device that fits capitalism as a mode of production later.

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The philosopher king Peter has blogged to the effect that the death toll from capitalism is huge - relying on structural violence as his justification - and that that of revolutionary state socialism (communism for short, after the name of the condition that the revolutionaries aspired to) has been grossly exaggerated.

How did he do this? By economic illiteracy. The aggregates from R.J Rummel that Peter takes issue with count all deaths by government policy, whether intentional or not. Peter's criticism ignores the fact that it was the collectivisation of agriculture in the Soviet Union, China & Ethiopia for example that led to the deaths by starvation of so many people. That is state socialism applied to agriculture and is the cause of more deaths than all the others attributed to all the wannabe Communist states with the possible exception of Cambodia.

Peter has a bit of fun playing with the word capitalism and defining it as basically the same class of government actions (control at home and imperialism abroad) as the Communist ones. Therefore the figures he offers are a mess of poverty (which capitalism has only ever decreased over time everywhere it's been allowed) and state actions, for which he pulls 205 million out of his arse.

Bear in mind that if poverty counts toward the capitalist tally anywhere that is not avowedly communist it must also count in communist countries, and since the communist countries massively retarded teir own economic development they sentenced millions more to death by poverty than would otherwise have been the case, for which see the contrast in economic development between capitalist Botswana and socialist Zimbabwe.

But this raises another silly problem with Peter's work; he relies on the notion of structural violence and assumes it only applies to 'capitalist' countries, which means, again, anywhere that doesn't go for full state socialism a la USSR, PRC, Ethiopia, Somalia, Poland, GDR, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Cuba, Grenada, Mongolia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Congo and Angola. No cigar. And anyway, what the Hell is structural violence?

Structural violence is the 'violence' imposed on a person by the social structures they interact with on a day-to-day basis, such as their landlord, employer, and so on. This kooky term could have been so nifty if it simply referred to actual violence that is unpunished for institutional reasons, but sadly that's not the accepted definition. According to an eponymous website it is part of the definition, but far from the whole story.

Basically being a person who does not own land or a lot of capital, or being of an unpopular caste, ethnicity or race makes one a victim of structural violence. This would include, per the above paragraph, interactions with landlords and employers, and poverty in general. We've addressed poverty itself, so what about those landlords and employers? Do folks choose to work for them? Of course. Are conditions often unpleasant in factories in poorer countries, even in 2015? Yes. Does that unpleasantness potentially include hazardous conditions as well? Indeed

Well, fait accompli! Except that no figures whatsoever are cited for deaths due to cruel or neglectful landlords or employers. Garment factories are notoriously fire-prone absent fire-safety measures, for which see the New York 1911 fire and that in Dhaka in 2012. In 2013 a factory in Dhaka collapsed, killing 1,129 people, so I guess its structural failure also qualifies as structural violence.

As for non-disaster conditions, that bastion of fair reporting The Huffington Post offers some frothy social justice platitudes on the matters of child labour, working hours, temperature and air quality of the workplace, and exhausting work schedule, while ignoring the fact that countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia are dirt poor and in no position to offer any better, as was the case in the UK and US in 1800.

This thing called economic growth is needed over decades for people to become wealthy enough to leave unhygienic sweatshops, subsistence-level wages and child labour behind. But in any case, those are the three examples I could find at short notice. You can probably tell that I am going to humour the structural violence definition and arbitrarily make up a figure for annual deaths due to cruel or neglectful landlords or employers.

Let's say that, extrapolating from the horrors of those three events 146 + 117 + 1,129 for 1392. Divide by 3 for 464 deaths per annum per country. Multiply by 200 for all the countries in the world for 92,800 deaths due to capitalism per year, or 9,280,000 for the 20th Century.

Obviously this is a massive overestimation as it assumes all countries are of the maximum danger level when many are unindustrialised and so scarcely engaging in capitalist production at all, while others have graduated into rich countries and are far safer places to be a worker.

A combo of Rummel and other sources are used in a blog post by Scott Manning to arrive at a 20th Century death toll for the socialist experiment of 149 million people killed by deliberate murder and by exposure or starvation due to collectivisation of agriculture.

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To Peter's credit he correctly points out some glaring inflation of figures by Rummel on killings by the Nazi's, but does not demonstrate similar irregularities with Rummel's figures on China. One glaring fault in the USSR figures concerns death by gulag, where the death count cited by Rummel is double that of the total number of people who ever went to the gulag at all, and 20 times the actual number of fatalities.

This opens up the possibility that Mao's policies only killed, what, 40 million people? That still exceeds even my grossly overstated capitalism figure, but anyway here we have them, side by side!

EDIT

Apologies, but I forgot when I posted this to double up the death stats, making it look to anybody who can't be bothered to read the text above like I uncritically accept Rummel's data. I don't, so a lower 'Communist' death count of 119 million is now included.

From 1900 to 1999;

State Socialism or 'Communism' - 149/119 million people killed.

Capitalism - 9.28 million/zero people killed.

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