Death Tolls For Western Imperialism, Colonialism and 3rd World Capitalism

Via Gideon Polya. In general, the figures are post-WW2. He also takes to task the "incompetent governance" in South Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, India and Pakistan) with massive deaths.

The Global Avoidable Mortality blog looks pretty interesting, and I have mucked around there a bit.

The part about 500 million dead Muslims post-1950 looks pretty interesting, but I haven't looked into that yet.

More Polya here.

Total excess mortality per year as of 2004:

Iraq        122,000

Afghanistan 359,000

India       2.2 million

Pakistan    478,000

Bangladesh  288,000

In Iraq and Afghanistan, those are the excess deaths that are probably occurring due to Coalition activities (especially in Iraq). In Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, the excess deaths are probably due to the lack of socialism.

Capitalism Starves 9 Million People Every Year

Updated December 18:

Every day in this world, capitalism kills 25,000 people either from hunger or diseases related to hunger. In other words, capitalism starves to death 25,000 people every day. In a year, capitalism kills 9.125 million people from hunger and hunger-related diseases alone.

Capitalism starves to death one kid every five seconds. But when it comes to killing kids, capitalism doesn't just use starvation. Like a murderous Felix the Cat, Killer Capitalism has plenty more deadly tools in its Bag of Tricks. All in all, capitalism kills 10 million kids every year.

Eat that, market fetishists.

Wow, if this is the successful system, I almost want to say, let me check out the failed system. instead. Or this failed system. Compared to being starved to death by the successful system, I think I'll go with the failed systems and see if I can get enough to eat at least?

It's clear that Communism and to a lesser extent socialism has some problems with production and running a rational and functioning economy. But what's more important, some macro economic growth bullshit or the question of life and death?

Chinese Communism: The Gift of Life and Health

The success of Chinese Communism, particularly in terms of health care:

Between 1952 and 1982 [with most of the change happening before 1976], China reduced the rate of infant mortality from 250 to 40 deaths per 1000 live births, decreased the prevalence of malaria from 5.5 percent to 0.3 percent of the population, and increased life expectancy from 35 to 68 years (Hsiao et al 1996).

In 1949, under the Nationalist Chinese so beloved by Americans, fully 20% (!) of all Chinese babies died in their first year of life, an incredible statistic (Sidel & Sidel 1973). By 1976, when Mao died, the rate was down to 46 out of 1000 (Yu and Sarri 1976). Infant mortality had plummeted by 77% in only 27 years, probably one of the fastest declines in world history.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao instituted the Barefoot Doctors program, serving the health care needs of 90% of the population (Hsiao et al 1996). It was hailed by the UN as one of the greatest public health programs of all time. Comparing the infant mortality rate of 1972 to the rate of 1949 shows that China under Mao was saving the lives of 3.9 million children every single year.

This is what I mean when I say that Mao was one of the world's greatest humanitarians.

Some argue that some progress in infant mortality would have occurred even without Maoism. Given the horrific record of the semi-feudal Nationalists, that seems dubious, but just for the record, let us compare India to China in this regard. India's infant mortality rate was an outrageous 139 per 1000 in 1972, and China's was 60.

India had been ruled since independence by a nominally socialist party which had written into India's Constitution that India was a socialist country. Surely, a rightwing India would have done far worse in this regard. Comparing India and China in 1972, we find that Maoism was saving the lives of 1.5 million babies a year compared to India.

The purpose of this simulation is to show that Maoism was saving the lives of millions of Chinese every single year.

It is possible that no system in human history ever saved so many lives so quickly as Maoism.

According to the US Census Bureau, by 1998, China's infant mortality rate was the same as in 1976 at 45. Over 22 years, there had been zero progress at reducing infant mortality. In 30 poorest counties studied, the infant mortality rate actually rose during the 1980's from 50 to 72 (Hsiao et al 1996). This is an example of the mass killing associated with China's move towards capitalism.

That Maoism ruined the economy is a most peculiar statement. Industrial production grew at 10% per year all through the Mao years, even during the Cultural Revolution! Agricultural production expanded massively and grew at 3% per year. By the early 1970's, for the fist time in centuries, or possibly in recorded history, the problem of hunger in China had been solved.

One of Mao's greatest achievements was the reduction of the discrepancies, including life and death, between the cities and the countryside. This reduction was truly revolutionary in world historical terms. By 1979, rural infants were 70% more likely to die than urban infants. By 1993, they were 190% more likely to die (Liu et al 1999). The movement to capitalism has been a accompanied by a mountain of bodies.

Starting in the 1980's, the government cut back on health care, and clinics began demanding payment from patients. Only 25% of patients now have health insurance (Hsiao et al 1996). This was down from 71% in 1981 (Liu et al 1999). Many or most patients could not afford to go to the doctor, so they just never went.

A study found that 30% of villages had no doctor, 28% were avoiding going to the doctor when sick due to cost, and over 50% of those advised to go to the hospital for treatment were refusing due to cost (Hsiao et al 1996). Health care was privatized. Recall that the market fetishists insist that this is a wondrous thing - for profits, perhaps, but for public health, surely no.

At the same time, the rural collectives were often broken up and replaced with private farming. What this meant was that one could no longer afford to be a barefoot doctor, so the barefoot doctors program disintegrated as barefoot doctors returned to farming to survive.

The number of health care workers in the cities increased, and the number in the countryside decreased by 36% in the 1980's. During that decade, the number of clinics in the countryside declined by 14% (Liu et al 1999). Previously, the health care system had been organized around the rural collectives. That system collapsed.

In 1978, 85% of villages were in the program and in 1993, that number was down to 14%. Clinics were forced to pay their own bills, and shady health care emerged, including overpresciption of for-sale drugs and unnecessary treatment (Bloom 1998).

References

Bloom, Gerald. 1998. Primary Health Care Meets The Market In China And Vietnam. Health Policy 44: 233-52.

Hsiao, William C. L and Liu, Yuanli. 1996. Economic Reform and Health - Lessons from China. New England Journal of Medicine 335: 430-432.

Hsiao, W.C.; William, C. L. 1984. Transformation of Health Care in China. 310: 932-6;

Hsiao, W.C.; William, C. L. 1995. The Chinese Health Care System: Lessons For Other Nations. Social Science and Medicine 41: 1047-55.

Liu, Yuanli; Hsiao, William C. and Karen Eggleston. 1999. Equity in Health and Health Care: the Chinese Experience. Social Science and Medicine 49: 1349-1356.

Sidel, Victor W. and Sidel, Ruth. 1973. Serve the People; Observations on Medicine in the People's Republic of China. New York, NY: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation.

Yu, Mei-Yu and Sarri, Rosemary. 1997. Women's Health Status And Gender Inequality In China. Social Science and Medicine 45, Vol 12: 1885-1898.

Revealed Unemployment Versus Revealed Death

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Our very smart Leftist Brit commenter Lafayette Sennacherib notes in the comments section:

Among the buzzwords on the collapse of the Soviet bloc was 'revealed unemployment', meaning that communist industries were employing people to do nothing useful apart from living and breeding. The capitalists are bit by bit feeling their way to getting us to accept the idea of 'revealed death' i.e. the idea that it's ok for lots of people to starve to death because there wasn't really a place in the economy for them.

We already accept that the 3rd world are used to starving to death, and so it's no big deal for them; and I've even seen the starvation in Korea in the 90s (though there's some doubt about whether that actually happened - see Bruce Cummings) described as a 'leveling of the population to what is its natural optimum level (loosely)'; the next thing is to get Europeans and N. Americans to accept that 'we can't carry passengers, if we show too much compassion for the weak then they'll drag us down with them...etc'.

America has always been pretty close to that anyway, but Europe's heading that way with ample help from the capitalist propaganda machine - we can't afford welfare anymore etc. You know - capitalism works because we're all much better off than they used to be, but we'll all have to work harder and longer with fewer benefits because of globalisation... So are we better off or worse off?

Even supposed leftists like George Galloway come out with this stuff - " immigration is a good thing; that's why the US is the richest country in the world..." He really says that, while also arguing that the capitalists are screwing us harder and harder.

But I think there's room for hope; I get the feeling that even the most indoctrinated and unreflective among our poor are now finding the contradictions in the media bullshit just too blatant, and the hard realities just too hard to ignore.

It really is 'socialism or barbarism'; just because it hasn't worked perfectly so far is no reason to give up.

There just isn't enough discussion of this, anywhere; there is obviously the problem that under capitalism private accumulation of wealth makes excluding corruption impossible...Discussions of how an effective democracy could work should take up about 50% of the discourse on 'the left', but they take up effectively zero, though there are isolated academics and think-tanks, I occasionally hear of, who do some interesting work.

" I think the free market if galvanized by the government and the media, can solve problems like global warming far better than a soviet style socialist economy." huy

Come on, huy! What's the solution likely to be - the 'revealed deaths' of 4 to 5 billion people. The 'free market' will starve them, and the media will put a positive spin on it.

Anyway, there is no 'free market'; capitalism operates like a vacuum cleaner, sucking all wealth and power to the top - it is a mechanism, which is effectively self-perpetuating - mammon, money reified and deified, which can only create despots, slaves, death and destruction of the environment.

This was an excellent comment by LS, a very smart guy. Let me translate a bit:

Above, LS compares the revealed (hidden) unemployment in Communism to the revealed (hidden) death in capitalism. He also notes that conditions in the capitalist world are getting observably crappier and crappier for workers in recent years. The capitalists don't even deny it, but they say that things have to get worse due to globalization.

At the same time, capitalism is the best system on Earth and is making us better all the time. Except that we're getting worse. Or something. Or whatever.

LS notes the idiocy of a Leftist like George Galloway singing the praises of US super-capitalism, while attributing it's success to the very immigrant flood that has devastated US workers. This Leftist offers more of the same tidal wave for British workers.

"The US success model".

But the US is a rich country (not nearly the richest on Earth - check Luxembourg - kicking our ass for years now) on paper only. The bottom 80% has been getting screwed off and on for the last 30 years, just like everywhere on Earth radical neoliberalism has been implemented.

The immigrant hurricane surge will devastate British workers the same way it did America's.

Failure is success. Getting worse is getting better. The cognitive dissonance is Earth-shattering.

LS also notes that terrible corruption is always going to be a problem in any capitalist society due to wealth accumulation. In the 3rd World, it's nearly set in stone. Note the horrible corruption and mass theft that accompanied the moves from socialism to capitalism in Russia and China.

If capitalism is the greatest engine on Earth for making money - and maybe it is - it's also the greatest engine on Earth for theft from petty to grand. Wherever you find capitalism, you will find an orgy of thievery. It's nearly built into the system.

LS' last paragraph has some good points. Huy is a British social democrat who is much enamored of whatever snake oil New Labour is pushing these days. He thinks that the market can definitely fix global warming.

Clearly, the market alone is incapable of resolving the global warming problem. By standard market economics, it's economically rational to devastate the planet with global warming (with unknown consequences) and it's economically irrational to try to stop global warming with mass government intervention.

There's tons of money in global warming and tons of red ink in stopping it. Knowing that, the market is going to take the biggest write-off in history and fix this problem? Get real!

Yet the last 30 years of the rap song blasting, "Market! Market!" in our ears nonstop has mutated Americans. There can be no solutions to anything outside of the market.

The government, or state, is dead, except for blowing shit up, conquering tinpot dictators, putting cuffs on every other American and throwing millions in the hole. The state's for killing people and busting your ass. Soldiers and cops, and there's little else. No wonder Americans hate the government so much.

Even Mother Jones, a "liberal" US magazine, stated in a recent issue on global warming that any solution would have to be a market solution. Why? Because that's just the way it is nowadays. The state is dead, the market rules. The libertarians won the Culture of Economics War.

Yet the market is incapable of fixing global warming because there's no money it and it involves massive losses. So the magic hand is essentially on track to blow up the fucking planet, using weather and Mother Nature as the thermonuclear device.

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Problems of Leftwing Democracy

In the comments section, astute commenter huy remarks on the conundrum of socialist democracy when capitalists retain control over the media and culture::

The only problem is that a socialist revolution would probably require a dictatorship and repression.

This is because without dictatorship and repression, rich capitalists would be able to prevent significant social services and state planning in a democracy via their control of the media and peoples' thoughts.

I'm not for socialism as a long term thing, but only as a way to quickly develop a country's infrastructure and economy, before gradual privatization of suitable sectors.

I respond:

huy, you are correct as far as your first two sentences go. I will deal with the third sentence at the end.

This conundrum is why Communists opted for the dictatorship of the proletariat, not because they are lovers of repression and haters of freedom.

The rich capitalists, through their media control and also their cultural construction and fertilization creating Gramscian cultural hegemonies (what you referred to as "control over people's thoughts"), are typically able to prevent social services and state planning in a democracy.

This is why Communists say that you never really have a democracy in capitalism. You always have a dictatorship of capital. Be that as it may, most folks nowadays do not seem to want to live under a dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the roadblocks in the way of socialist democracy present a a serious problem.

Not only are the capitalists able to thwart significant progressive change via media and cultural control, but the same capitalists, via control over the economy, are able to stage lockouts and capital strikes, to send their capital out of the country, to artificially create shortages, and to send wealthy housewives out into the streets beating pots and pans in a middle and upper class strike, etc.

These housewife pot-banging strikes occurred in Chile under Allende, Venezuela under Chavez, and just recently occurred again in Argentina when President Kirchner tried to tax booming agricultural exports.

The big ag producers in Argentina responded by trying to starve the cities by staging ag strikes and refusing to ship produce to the cities so the people would have nothing to eat.

What is ominous about this is that these same rich housewife pot-banging demos and a latifundista (large landowner elite) strike presaged the coup that brought the death squads into power in Argentina in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

The generals stayed in power for several years, during which they murdered 30,000 leftwing Argentines, the vast majority of whom were just idealistic young people working with the poor and had not taken up arms at all.

The capitalists will usually try to stage a coup through their control over the military too. That is why Hugo Chavez is correct in cleansing the corrupt bosses' oil workers' union, in cleansing the officer corps of the military of reactionary elements, and putting in some state media.

The corrupt state oil workers union was a white collar union of well to do managers who had been operating the state oil company as a personal ATM for decades. They were behind the owners' lockout strike that followed the coup, and after Chavez fired those who had been behind the lockout and sabotage, they destroyed much of the records and paperwork of the oil company before they left. Clearly they had to go.

In the previous coup attempt, the middle and upper-class officer corps supported the coup, but the enlisted men, who came from the poor, did not. The poor rank and file military refused their officers' orders and the officers backed down. Hence, cleansing the officer corps of coup supporters was a must.

Getting a foot in the door of the Right's media monopoly was also important. Previously, the rich had all of the papers, magazines and especially TV stations and they used these to wage continuous lying propaganda war against Chavez.

Furthermore, the entire rightwing media not only supported the coup attempt against Chavez but were actively complicit in it. For that treason, Chavez is perfectly within his rights to shut down the entire rightwing media. He only does not do this because of the international outcry it would arouse.

The Right did the same thing with their media control during the Allende regime in Chile, printing wild lies about Cuban armies offshore and hiding in Chilean bases ready to invade Chile and impose Communism at gunpoint.

Middle class and upper class capital strikes can be devastating to the economy, and most folks, no matter how revolutionary, just get tired of the economic pain after a while and vote to put the reactionaries back in power.

Sanctions work the same way. The US and UK and sometimes France and Canada (when those two latter states are in an imperialist mood) usually slap sanctions on democratic Left states as soon as possible.

Recent examples are Nicaragua, Haiti and Zimbabwe (at first democratic, now increasingly dictatorial), and this alone is enough to devastate the economy and cause the people to vote out the Left and put reactionaries back in power.

What happens is that in an effort to get some control of the country back and fight back against all of this US plots, the Left regime often starts becoming more authoritarian and less democratic. Then the US says it's a dictatorship and needs to be overthrown on that basis.

If that doesn't work, the US forms a reactionary contra counterrevolutionary army that goes around killing any civilian that is pro-Left, murdering teachers and health care workers, burning down schools, ag cooperatives and health care facilities and just making the place ungovernable. In order to fend off contras and coups, Chavez has built up his military and even armed the population.

One more thing the US does is to flood money into the democratic Left country to buy the election of the reactionaries via all sorts of fake civil society groups. A good way to stop this is to ban all money coming to political groups from outside the country, but that is easier said than done. The money seems to find its way in anyway.

The US and its reactionary allies also stage bombings, shootings, riots, etc, against democratic Left states, and then often blames them on the Left. This is what they did in Chavez' Venezuela, Aristide's Haiti and Mossadegh's Iran.

If worse comes to worse and none of the above works, the Left regime is overthrown by a coup and replacement by a reactionary dictatorship. This dictatorship typically then institutes a reign of terror in which anywhere from 100's to 1 million progressives are killed all over the land. This is what happened in Indonesia in 1965, when 1 million Leftists were killed in a CIA coup.

What is even creepier is that while the Left is in power, the CIA is usually running around the country making up lists of leftwingers. As soon as the coup comes, the CIA hands over the lists to the death squad Right now in power, and they use these lists to hunt down progressives and murder them.

So if a Left regime is in power, there is always the terror of a future coup followed by a murder spree against anyone politically active in the regime. This is enough to make people afraid to get politically active.

The reign of terror itself so so terrorizes the population that most people are afraid to get involved in progressive politics for years or even decades afterwards. Why get involved? Who is to say when the death squads will come back in power and try to kill you for being politically active in Left politics.

All of this makes socialist democracy or even social democracy in backwards states almost impossible to achieve.

On the other hand, lots of leftwingers are trying to figure out a way to have some sort of socialist or even Marxist democracy, despite all the challenges. The Sandinistas had a democratic socialist revolution and Hugo Chavez is having one too. The Nepalese Maoists support 100% democracy. There's new thinking with a lot of Communists nowadays that socialism is not really possible without total democracy.

When I look at Cuba and I think about a few dissidents getting thrown in prison, is that really worse than masses of people dying early from preventable death or not having enough food to eat, or living in shantytown hovels, or prostituting themselves, or homeless kids sniffing glue, turning into criminals and getting killed by cops as happens all over Latin America?

Third World capitalist nightmare states punish an awful lot of innocent people too. Doesn't Cuba punish a lot fewer innocent people by clapping a few dissidents in prison than are harmed in these failing 3rd world capitalist states?

In India, capitalism is killing 4 million people a year. That's a five-alarm fire right there. If we had a socialist revolution there even with a dictatorship and saved 4 million lives a year, would it be worth it for a few folks slapped in prison?

I do think that the new way of Chavez, the Sandinistas, the FMLN of El Salvador and the Nepalese Maoists is the better way to go. Nothing wrong with democracy. If the people reject socialism at the polls and go back to capitalism and lots of them go hungry, go homeless, drink sewage water, get sick, get crippled and start dying, I guess we can say that they made a choice to have that happen to themselves.

Most socialist countries did go socialist for a while (usually decades) to develop the economy and then go towards capitalism after they were pretty well developed.

People have no idea how much of China's economic growth is based on the foundations laid by decades of Maoism. At any rate, most do not realize China is still a very socialist country in many ways.

The Communists in Russia built that place up from nothing. Without the USSR, Russia would probably be like India or Afghanistan. The Vietnamese and Laotian Communists are also putting in a lot of capitalism, and North Korea now has joint partnerships for foreign investors. I support Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela in their experiments at mixed economy. I also really like social market of Belarus.

Really what we ought to look at is does the system give us the outcomes that we want? If it does, it doesn't matter what mixtures of socialist, collective and private ownership it has.

There are also all sorts of ways of enterprise ownership.

We can have nonprofits, labor collectives, families, single owners, neighborhoods, towns, cities, states and nations. All of these forms of ownership are operating all over the world as you read this.

The cooperative sector in particular is a great way to go, and most do not realize it is a non-capitalist economic system. Worker-owned firms compete with each other, and there is no exploitation of labor as in capitalism.

One of the best examples of that is the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque Country. Most Cuban agriculture is now run by cooperatives. In the cooperative model, you get away from the management-labor conflict you see in capitalism.

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Capitalism Kills 10 Million Kids a Year

I've had it up to here with this "100 million killed by Communism", "Stalin and Mao, the biggest murderers of all time". No Communist except Pol Pot ever held a candle to what capitalist serial killers and mass murderers do year in and out without fail.

As you can see, 200 million kids around the world don't have access to any kind of basic health care (I would argue that that figure is way too low), which kills 10 million of them (5%) a year due to completely preventable diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea.

And if you are going to start bitching about overpopulation?

Number 1, why are you are capitalist? Capitalism mandates and demands an endlessly expanding population. Capitalism says a declining or even steady population is going to be a catastrophe for the capitalist economy.

Number 2, if the world is overpopulated and 10 million dead kids is great news, maybe it's time to shut up about "Commie mass murderers". Can't have it both ways.

I would like to point out that capitalism has absolutely no project whatsoever to do anything about this situation, a tragedy that has been ongoing for decades.

Anyone in the Third World who comes into power and tries to do something about this mass murder gets called a Communist and the CIA tries to take them out, or they get country-destroying sanctions put them, or the US invades their country, or the IMF - World Bank - Wall Street declare war on them, or the US starts up a reactionary Contra terrorist army to go around burning schools and health clinics to the ground and murdering the doctors and teachers.

Further, the entire world media - at least the US branch - including TV, radio, newspaper and newsmagazines, is 100% against anyone trying to fix this situation in any way, and launches a never-ending propaganda war against them if they list a finger.

Anyone trying to remedy this situation is said be implementing a "failed solution" = socialism. Well, if trying to save 10 million kids a year ends up saving even a few of them, I don't care what the model is, it doesn't sound like a failure to me.

I would like to point out that just about every corporation on Earth and every national business sector would fight to the teeth anyone trying to save these kids' lives.

Some might say that 10 million dead kids means that there is not enough capitalism in some places, or there is too much cronyism, or we need different ways of doing capitalism, or "it's not capitalism - it's greed", or this or that dodge. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Capitalism is working perfectly as designed. 10 million dead kids a year is the way capitalism unrestrained by socialism is supposed to work.

This is where I'm actually with the Maoists sometimes. For instance, capitalism is killing a good 4 million people a year in India minimum. Well, that's a five-alarm fire right there, say the Maoists, and we don't care if it's a democracy or dictatorship killing all those people. We need to take up arms right now to stop the killing, they say. In some places, they've actually got a point, sorry to say.

You guys wonder why I hate capitalism so much. Read my lips. 10 million dead kids, no end in sight.

Update: This post actually got linked with positive feedback by the Democratic Underground. Unbelievable!

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