CAPITALISM’S BODY COUNT - 443 million since 1914

And that’s an undercount

If there is one thing anticommunists love to shout from the rooftops it’s communism’s alleged body count. The Wikipedia article on Communism has a section that discusses “Excess mortality in Communist states”, but the Wikipedia article on Capitalism has no such discussion. That’s typical of how capitalists easily disregard the mountain of corpses their ideology stands upon (and, directly linked to that, the wealth the most powerful capitalist states have stolen for centuries). A small group of capitalist states are responsible for colonialism (which involved numerous famines and acts of genocide and the transatlantic slave trade) as well as two world wars. So capitalist states obviously have a horrifying amount of  “excess mortality” on their hands.  

Using UNICEF's data for child mortality and annual child deaths, one can show that capitalism should be blamed for 225 million child deaths since 1990 alone. [1] A comparison of mortality rate rates in China and India alone supports an estimate of 136 million deaths that can be blamed on capitalism between 1961-1989.  Add to that the two world wars capitalist states caused in the last century - 16-22 million and 50 - 60 million deaths in WWI and WWII respectively - and we get a very incomplete body count for capitalist states of 427 - 443 million since 1914, the year World War I began.    

225 million child deaths since 1990

By 1990, Cuba had not only been a “communist state” that had been subjected to US economic and even military aggression for three decades, it was about to lose a key ally in the Soviet Union which led Washington to intensify its aggression.[2] Cuba is a small country that is not blessed with an exceptional amount of natural resource wealth, and it is regularly cited by anticommunists as proof that “communism has never worked”. It cannot be reasonably claimed by anyone who takes sources like the “Black Book of Communism” seriously that Cuba after 1990 sets too high a bar to use to judge capitalist states.  If you say “communism never worked” then you have no business complaining about a comparison with a country that’s been “communist” for over sixty years. 

In 1959, when Fidel Castro marched triumphantly into Havana, Cuba’s child mortality rate was above average for a developing country despite being eighty percent higher than the US rate. But by 1990, anticommunist assumptions would lead us to predict that Cuba would have dramatically lost ground relative to the rest of the developing world, and certainly relative to the US. The opposite happened. In fact, today, according to UNICEF, Cuba’s child mortality rate is lower than the USA’s. [3]

No, there is no mass migration to Cuba from the Latin American countries that Washington has terrorized for over a century. One of the main reasons people migrate is to get hard currency (remittances) to help their families back home. The capitalist countries that have been plundering the world for centuries are where you go for that. Top quality health care in Cuba cannot be monetized by patients to help relatives in other countries. Cuba remains a poor country thanks to the US blockade, but also, for that very reason, clearly exposes how much capitalism systematically slaughters people around the world. If most of the capitalist-run world was unable to equal or surpass Cuba in child mortality by 1990 it is because its governments have not wanted to - or been overthrown and viciously sabotaged by the leading capitalist states whenever they’ve dared to try.         

Cuba’s under-five child mortality rate in 1990 was 13.6 deaths per 1000 live births according to UNICEF while the world's that year was 93 deaths per 1000 live births. There were 12.8 million deaths of children under five years of age in 1990, says UNICEF. Subtract from that total all the child deaths that took place under the five states the Encyclopedia Britannica labels “communist” after the fall of the Soviet Union (China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea) and the total is 11.2 million. The assumption that capitalism is not at all responsible for deaths in the communist states is totally wrong, but my purpose here is to isolate the part of the world where capitalism rules.   

Let’s call the part of the world that doesn’t include those communist states the Capitalist Ruled World (CRW). The CRW’s child mortality rate was 104 deaths per 1000 live births in 1990. [4] Had it been equal to Cuba’s there would only have been 1.5 million child deaths in 1990. Hence, the excess mortality from capitalism was 9.7 million children in 1990. Repeat that calculation for every year from 1990 until 2021 then tally up the excess mortality for each year. The total from 1990 to 2021 is 225 million. 

Amartya Sen’s flawed but revealing India-China comparison 

How to account for the excess mortality capitalism is responsible for before 1990? 

I exclude Cuba from the analysis to avoid the objection that communism had not yet had time to ruin Cuba’s relatively good position among developing countries. In the book “Hunger and Public Action” liberal economist Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze accused Mao’s government in China of causing 16-30 million deaths based on “extra mortality” calculations for the years 1958-61. Indian economist Utsa Patnaik gave a very lucid rebuttal of that allegation showing that the maximum possible death toll from that famine was 11.5 million from a three year run of bad harvests.  

But Sen and Dreze also noted that “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame”. They compared the difference in China’s and India's death rates and calculated that there was “excess mortality” in India of about 3.9 million per year as of 1986. They should have said “every three years” rather than “every eight”, but, setting that aside, their analysis adds another 136 million to capitalism’s body count between 1961 to 1989.[5]

World Wars I and II

World War I boiled down to European capitalist states slaughtering each other over the wealth they plundered from colonies all over the world. The ruinous punishment of Germany by the capitalist states that won that war - and later the Great Depression which was also caused by the world's capitalist states - were the two main factors that brought Hitler to power. 

Anticommunists have gone to extreme lengths to absolve capitalism of responsibility for World War II - to the point of even downplaying Hitler’s crimes or claiming that he was actually “socialist” and  “egalitarian”. The Black Book of Communism, for example, absolved Hitler of 25-35 million of deaths by writing that there were only “25 million victims of the Nazis”. Former US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, ludicrously claimed that Hitler never killed “ethnic Germans”.  Given the gross dishonesty of capitalism's apologists, it’s worth reviewing some facts about Hitler.    

In Mein Kampf, eight years before he first became Chancellor of Germany, Hitler made clear that he intended to build a German superstate over top of parts of western Europe but primarily over top of the Soviet Union which he said was “ripe for dissolution”. Mein Kampf conveyed Hitler’s admiration for the British Empire and the genocidal exploits of the United States. The book showed that Hitler’s fanatical anticommunism was inseparable from his antisemitism. But Hitler also believed the working class would have to be won away from Marxism through deception. He was delighted when his “bourgeois” rivals on the right accused him of being a communist: “We used to roar with laughter at these silly faint-hearted bourgeois and their efforts to puzzle out our origin, our intentions and our aims.” Hitler had no interest in even trying to form right wing (i.e fake) unions before he came to power. He conveniently dismissed the idea as hopeless. 

But wasn’t Hitler “egalitarian” as far as white people were concerned (setting aside that he saw everyone else as less than human)? No, Hitler regarded the majority of “Aryans” as quite stupid. In Mein Kampf he said that education should be dumbed down to produce “real men” who’d be soldiers and women whose function would be to give birth to soldiers. It’s true that in Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that white workers shoud have some basic rights so that employers woud not undermine racial solidarity, but he regarded the idea that “nations and individuals [my emphasis] are equal to one another” as evil and part of a jewish plot. Once in power, his mild pro-worker stances were basically discarded - partly because Hitler’s vast personal fortune stemmed from allowing capitalists to squeeze greater profits from workers.  Moreover, every real-world capitalist state, even the incredibly barbaric one that Karl Marx studied in nineteenth century Britain, has made some concessions (however meager) to workers as one way to limit instability and unrest. That does not make a capitalist state into a “socialist” one. [6]      

Stalin’s last minute non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany ensured that the expansionism Hitler outlined in Mein Kampf impacted western europe before it did the Soviet Union. The pact came after years of Soviet failure to build anti-Nazi alliance with the likes of Britain - whose collaboration with the Nazis has been falsely labeled ”appeasement”. As Michael Parenti observed - British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s pact with Hitler in Munich is never described as the “Chamberlain-Hitler pact” or the “Britain-Nazi pact” and is “antiseptically”  referred to as “Munich”. [7]

Without resorting to a brazen falsification of history, there is simply no way to absolve capitalism for World War II. Additionally, it was primarily the Soviet Union that destroyed Nazi Germany’s military.

Conclusion

The estimate of 427 - 443 million killed by capitalism since 1914, as horrific as it is, includes only child deaths after 1990, excludes whole continents like Africa and Latin America from the 1961-1989 tally, and excludes people killed by capitalism in the period between the world wars.

A full body count for capitalism and western imperialism would also go much further back than 1914. British Imperialism in India killed 100 million people between 1880 and 1920. The genocide perpetrated by Eurpoean powers in the Americas alone since 1492 could increase the body count for western imperialism by about 100 million. But capitalism has killed hundreds of millions of people since 1914 alone. It will either kill us all eventually or be defeated.   

NOTES

[1] I am not citing UNICEF figures as gospel. I have written before about how UNICEF and other UN agencies that supposedly dispense objective data and assessments have shown bias in support of US imperialism. However, the bias will not lead them to overestimate capitalism’s body count.

[2] Officially, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, but Gorbachev’s ruinous financial policies during the late 1980s - specifically dismantling the Stalin-era system based on the beznal, a strictly controlled currency that circulated only within state enterprises  - had already brought the USSR completely under the thumb of the US and western Europe. See “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” by Vladislav Zubok 

[3] Communism can be defined as an ideal state of classlessness that all socialist countries strive to achieve. Capitalism openly glorifies private sector tyrannies, inequality and elitism. But for the purposes of this piece I’ll call China, Cuba etc. “communist” the way anticommunists do - to distinguish them from capitalist states that are very complicit with the crimes of western imperialism but still get tagged by some as “socialist” of “democratic socialist”: Sweden, Norway, Denmark (and sometimes even Canada). 

[3] UNICEF says Cuba’s child mortality rate was 56 in 1959; the USA’s, 31. The unweighted average value for all countries for which UNICEF lists figures for that year is 162. 

It does not list data for China until 1969 ,and lists a value of 119. The first entry for Vietnam is for 1964, a value of 87. The first entry for Laos is 1978: a value of 218. The first entry for North Korea is for 1985: a value of 35

For 2021, UNICEF lists a value of 5 for Cuba and 6 for the USA.

[4] The number of live births in any country in any year was calculated using UNICEF’s data for mortality rates and deaths. After the number of live births in the CRW was determined for each year since 1990, the mortality rates were calculated. As expected the mortality rates for the CRW was higher than for the entire world because China’s value brought the world’s average down.

[5] All calculations done for India and China using figures the World Bank has on its website. It is very important to note that India and China had very similar demographics from 1961-1989: the percentage of people over 65 years of age in each country never differed by more than one percentage point during any year in that period, and for about 10 years during that period was virtually identical. By 2022 there was a seven point difference: 14% over 65 years of age in China compared to only 7% in India.

[6] On Hitler’s dependence on capitalists once in power see Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds” Chapter one, sub-section entitled “Whom Did the Fascists Support?” 

On concessions to workers in nineteenth century UK, see Marx’s “Das Kapital” Chapter 10 , section 6 that describes in detail a vicious manufacturers’ revolt against labor legislation: “They broke out in open revolt not only against the Ten Hours' Act, but against the whole of the legislation that since 1833 had aimed at restricting in some measure the ‘free’ exploitation of labour-power”

[7] For more detail on British and US collaboration with Nazis before World War II see the Twitter thread I did on the book “Human Smoke” by Nicholson Baker. For details on Operation Gladio - NATO’s use of former Nazis after World War II to combat communism, see the discussion between Ben Nortion and Asa Winstanley.