We often hear about “victims of communism”, but rarely about the colossal and continuous death toll imposed by capitalism.
The historic mortality crisis that capitalist restoration caused in Eastern Europe — unprecedented in peace time — tells a very different story.
After the fall of socialism, states across the Eastern Bloc experienced the largest mortality crisis outside of war or famine in human history.
Previous figures published in @TheLancet put the number at roughly seven million. But more recent research carried out by @jasonhickel and his colleagues identified 16.9 million excess deaths between 1991 and 2019.
The figures fundamentally reorient our understanding of 20th century political economy.
Rather than “rescuing” the people of Eastern Europe, capitalism systematically killed them. It caused more than twice as many deaths as the 1930s famine that swept Soviet Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan — a period often summoned in attempts to discredit the socialist horizon as a whole.
And it claimed almost as many casualties as the total WWII civilian death toll in Russia.
These deaths were not accidental.
They were the deliberate product of structural adjustment policies imposed under the guidance of the Harvard Boys and implemented — with no democratic mandate — at the behest of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
These policies decimated both economic sovereignty and the conditions for social reproduction.
They destroyed entire industries and the infrastructures that kept a large industrial workforce afloat — from daycare and healthcare to housing and leisure. This caused not only a spike in mortality, but also a collapse in fertility and a mass exodus of labor to the West.
The policies served a clear purpose: to reinsert these territories into the system of imperialist accumulation, transforming industrial economies into rent-seeking ones that siphoned resources upwards to a new and rapacious capitalist class, and outwards to Wall Street and the City of London.
Research published in The Lancet showed a direct connection between mortality and privatization. Across the region, rapid privatization caused a 13-21% spike in death rates. Countries that privatized more slowly — like Belarus — saw far fewer deaths.
One study observed that the “age distribution and the upstream role of stress, inability to cope with stress, and despair are comparable to the North American deaths of despair epidemic.”
The collapse of socialism brought the sicknesses of US capitalism to Eastern Europe.
This was combined with an unprecedented propaganda assault designed to entrench capitalist ideology, normalize the catastrophe, and undermine the socialist alternative.
After West Germany annexed the German Democratic Republic, for example, one of the first “transition measures” was the dissolution of every Marxist-Leninist institute and university department, expelling or reassigning their staff — a move justified as the “enforcement of freedom” and “de-ideologization.”
Across the Eastern Bloc, USAID-backed institutions, Soros foundations and other Western NGOs systematically reoriented universities toward Western liberalism, colonizing intellectual production.
The contrast is starkest when we look at countries that retained the socialist path. Despite the deep crisis following the USSR’s collapse, Cuban men saw life expectancy rise from 72.2 to 74.2 years, while Russia’s declined from 63.8 to 57.7 over roughly the same period.
Other countries were not so lucky. The collapse of the USSR, as a counterweight to imperialism, had a devastating impact on structures of accumulation globally. After 1991, wages fell, access to food declined, labor reserves exploded all around the world, and the forces of resistance faced a historic and multi-generational setback.
As I argue in ‘The Neoliberal Holocaust’, an essay for @plbmagazine, it is essential that we rescue the story of Eastern European socialism from the triumphalist, bourgeois framing in which it has been trapped. A sober look at the consequences of capitalist restoration in the region is one step in that direction.
Read more in “Peace, Land and Bread” Issue 6: https://www.iskrabooks.org/plb6
special place in hell for the people who killed the ussr
This is brutal but very necessary. We need more figures like this. The fact that capitalism stole 5 yrs of life expectancy from the russians is a short and great club to stop capitalist propaganda dead. We need figures like “on average, socialism means 5% less dead” or whatever. This is severely missed in nowadays’ conversations.
Agreed. When we talk about the victims of imperialism, we should not only count those who are directly killed by their or their proxies’ bombs and bullets, but also remind ourselves that every time that a socialist government was overthrown or prevented from coming to power, that was an act of mass murder too. Socialism demonstrably saves lives, so standing in the way of socialism is no different to blocking an ambulance trying to reach a person in urgent need of life saving treatment - it is murder. And the post-socialist neoliberal shock therapy was deliberate and premeditated murder.
Beautifully put. Especially in dumb germany, we need tons of resources for this.
Its not like people dont know about Treuhand or when the BRD invented essentially fake numbers to throw East German villages into massive debts or when they sold former castles for a 1 Euro each back to aristocrats or etc…
I didn’t know, but I’m not German.
I have talked to many, many germans about this. Nobody knows it save a handful.
I guarantee you the vast, vast majority of people in Germany have no clue about those things.
No I swear communism killed 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 people
While not directly related to impacts from the fall of the USSR, Endless Holocausts by David Michael Smith is an excellent and very thorough book detailing the massive amounts of deaths caused by the USA both internally and externally. It’s a great counter to the claim that communism kills millions of people, while capitalism doesn’t.
the inverse Cramer, but for China
Trvke but also em dash 😔
u2014 —
Tbh I’ve been using em-dash more since ChatGPT, typing with my own keyboard. I’ve seen IRL other people type out em-dashes too, I think AI has made more people remember it exists.
I use dashes in my writing too on occasion, but usually just the “-” because I don’t have the long ones on my keyboard. But technically the long dashes are the stylistically correct ones to use, you see them in any professionally formatted piece of writing, and they do look better.
Same I have a mobile keyboard that makes it super easy, but I admittedly never use it for long-form writing. If I need to do anything at length I use Transcribro
