We need a "Black Book of Capitalism"
Jul. 31st, 2008 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” – attributed to Joseph Stalin
It’s hard to calculate death tolls, as various attempts to quantify the number of Iraqis murdered as a direct result of the American invasion have shown. Unlike the Nazis*, the Americans are piss-poor record-keepers. The advantage—for historians, of course, not for Holocaust victims—of Nazi atrocities is that they were all very intentional and straightforward; the people who died were killed by Nazis. There was one clear victimizer, and a whole lot of very clear victims. Accordingly, we wind up with a statistic: the oft-quoted 6 million. (Which by the way is completely inaccurate. The actual death toll is approximately 12.5 million. There are a lot of Holocaust-deniers out there who don’t even know that they’re Holocaust deniers.)
It’s a little harder when you try to come up with the number of people killed by Stalin. The usual statistic you hear is 20 million, which is often invoked to claim that the Left has been far more bloodthirsty than the Right, disregarding the fact that Hitler would have killed far more people than Stalin if he’d been allowed to continue for as long as Stalin did. The reason why I consider the 20-million figure problematic is not, contrary to popular belief, because I’m a crypto-Stalinist. It’s because many of those deaths are owing to incompetence rather than malice.
This site is intriguing because it breaks down statistics into gulag deaths, famine deaths, and so on. It details the reasons for some of the number discrepancies (rather snarkily):
Basically, when you’re calculating a death toll at such an astronomically large scale and from such a variety of causes, you need to look at how many people generally die, violently and otherwise, in a given period of time, and compare it to how many extra people did die during that time period. That’s the methodology used by the Lancet study in Iraq, anyway, which is fairly reasonable. Another complicating factor is famine cycles, which is why some of my Maoist friends argue that Mao’s death tolls are inflated.
Malice is very straightforward. You can roughly calculate the number of people killed in gulags, purges, concentration camps, and American air strikes. It’s incompetence that’s hard to prove. How can you distinguish between a famine that’s avoidable and one that isn’t? Direct consequences from indirect consequences? Either way, Stalin and Mao aren’t figures that future revolutionaries should emulate because of the malice portion of their respective death tolls, which is quite high. It is, however, the incompetence portion that we should examine more closely.
I just finished reading Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, which I highly recommend. It’s slow-going at the beginning, but worth slogging through. One has the sense, reading it, that she has recently become aware of the grotesque meanings behind commonly thrown-around economic language, and her greatest service is explaining these concepts to the layperson. At any rate, she has quite a bit of detail on Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism, portrayed in Western media as largely peaceful and entirely positive.
According to Klein, during the transitional period, Russia lost 10% of its population. Currently, Russia’s population is declining by somewhere between 0.3% and 1.3%. The Population Reference Bureau gives the cause as “more deaths than births,” which is deceptive. Why are people dying?
Oh. This article holds Russian policy-makers accountable for 3.4 million deaths from 1990-98. I guess that’s okay if you take the line that government is not in any way responsible for the welfare of its people, but then you’d be really cutting into Stalin’s 20 million, because a lot of those deaths were because of bad economic policy too.
What I’m trying to get at here is that we need to start keeping better records of how many people capitalism kills.** Klein doesn’t offer a tally, but she does describe the invisible deaths behind the apparently peaceful transitions from one sort of economy to another.
I’m not a pacifist; I believe that all social change is inherently violent, though said violence should be minimized wherever possible. What I think people don’t realize is that the present state of affairs, free-market capitalism, is violent now, was violent from the beginning. We just don’t count those deaths that are as a result of poor economic and poor social policy—well, not unless the government responsible is nominally Communist.
At some point I really ought to do a proper review of The Shock Doctrine, but since I managed to get sidetracked talking about Stalin instead, if you’ve read it, consider this post your chance to spout off.
* There you have it, people. A reverse Godwin.
** So many historical death tolls aren’t accounted for properly, though. Which is why I get annoyed any time people bring up Indian Independence as an example of peaceful political change.
It’s hard to calculate death tolls, as various attempts to quantify the number of Iraqis murdered as a direct result of the American invasion have shown. Unlike the Nazis*, the Americans are piss-poor record-keepers. The advantage—for historians, of course, not for Holocaust victims—of Nazi atrocities is that they were all very intentional and straightforward; the people who died were killed by Nazis. There was one clear victimizer, and a whole lot of very clear victims. Accordingly, we wind up with a statistic: the oft-quoted 6 million. (Which by the way is completely inaccurate. The actual death toll is approximately 12.5 million. There are a lot of Holocaust-deniers out there who don’t even know that they’re Holocaust deniers.)
It’s a little harder when you try to come up with the number of people killed by Stalin. The usual statistic you hear is 20 million, which is often invoked to claim that the Left has been far more bloodthirsty than the Right, disregarding the fact that Hitler would have killed far more people than Stalin if he’d been allowed to continue for as long as Stalin did. The reason why I consider the 20-million figure problematic is not, contrary to popular belief, because I’m a crypto-Stalinist. It’s because many of those deaths are owing to incompetence rather than malice.
This site is intriguing because it breaks down statistics into gulag deaths, famine deaths, and so on. It details the reasons for some of the number discrepancies (rather snarkily):
There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to the number who died at Stalin's hands. There's the "Why doesn't anyone realize that communism is the absolutely worst thing ever to hit the human race, without exception, even worse than both world wars, the slave trade and bubonic plague all put together?" school, and there's the "Come on, stop exaggerating. The truth is horrifying enough without you pulling numbers out of thin air" school. The two schools are generally associated with the right and left wings of the political spectrum, and they often accuse each other of being blinded by prejudice, stubbornly refusing to admit the truth, and maybe even having a hidden agenda. Also, both sides claim that recent access to former Soviet archives has proven that their side is right.
Basically, when you’re calculating a death toll at such an astronomically large scale and from such a variety of causes, you need to look at how many people generally die, violently and otherwise, in a given period of time, and compare it to how many extra people did die during that time period. That’s the methodology used by the Lancet study in Iraq, anyway, which is fairly reasonable. Another complicating factor is famine cycles, which is why some of my Maoist friends argue that Mao’s death tolls are inflated.
Malice is very straightforward. You can roughly calculate the number of people killed in gulags, purges, concentration camps, and American air strikes. It’s incompetence that’s hard to prove. How can you distinguish between a famine that’s avoidable and one that isn’t? Direct consequences from indirect consequences? Either way, Stalin and Mao aren’t figures that future revolutionaries should emulate because of the malice portion of their respective death tolls, which is quite high. It is, however, the incompetence portion that we should examine more closely.
I just finished reading Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, which I highly recommend. It’s slow-going at the beginning, but worth slogging through. One has the sense, reading it, that she has recently become aware of the grotesque meanings behind commonly thrown-around economic language, and her greatest service is explaining these concepts to the layperson. At any rate, she has quite a bit of detail on Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism, portrayed in Western media as largely peaceful and entirely positive.
According to Klein, during the transitional period, Russia lost 10% of its population. Currently, Russia’s population is declining by somewhere between 0.3% and 1.3%. The Population Reference Bureau gives the cause as “more deaths than births,” which is deceptive. Why are people dying?
Russia is the only major industrial nation that is losing population. Its people are succumbing to one of the world's fastest-growing AIDS epidemics, resurgent tuberculosis, rampant cardiovascular disease, alcohol and drug abuse, smoking, suicide, and the lethal effects of unchecked industrial pollution.
Oh. This article holds Russian policy-makers accountable for 3.4 million deaths from 1990-98. I guess that’s okay if you take the line that government is not in any way responsible for the welfare of its people, but then you’d be really cutting into Stalin’s 20 million, because a lot of those deaths were because of bad economic policy too.
What I’m trying to get at here is that we need to start keeping better records of how many people capitalism kills.** Klein doesn’t offer a tally, but she does describe the invisible deaths behind the apparently peaceful transitions from one sort of economy to another.
I’m not a pacifist; I believe that all social change is inherently violent, though said violence should be minimized wherever possible. What I think people don’t realize is that the present state of affairs, free-market capitalism, is violent now, was violent from the beginning. We just don’t count those deaths that are as a result of poor economic and poor social policy—well, not unless the government responsible is nominally Communist.
At some point I really ought to do a proper review of The Shock Doctrine, but since I managed to get sidetracked talking about Stalin instead, if you’ve read it, consider this post your chance to spout off.
* There you have it, people. A reverse Godwin.
** So many historical death tolls aren’t accounted for properly, though. Which is why I get annoyed any time people bring up Indian Independence as an example of peaceful political change.
