Black Book of Capitalism? (RE: The 20th Century - The Economist

[Alexandre Fenelon]

At 03:39 17/09/99 -0400, you wrote:
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> >On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Alexandre Fenelon wrote:
>> >
>> >>Well, the black book of Communism gives us the following estimates
>> >>1-China: 55 millions
>> >>2-USSR: 15 millions
>> >>3-North Korea: 1 million
>> >>4-Vietnam: 1 million
>
>To return to this thread-
>
>How about a Black Book of Capitalism and Colonialism count?
>
>I just got a copy of Adam Hochschild's KING LEOPOL'S GHOST which argues for
>10 million deaths due to colonial murder and terror in the Congo alone.  I
>remember reading about tens of millions killed in China in the late 19th
>century hegemony by the European powers.
>
>Now, if the Right counts governments refusing food to certain regions and
>thereby inducing famine as part of the body count, does the Black Book of
>Capitalism count the refusal of patented medicines to the third world as
>part of its body count?
>
>Or is the game that only officially state-centralized governments get famine
>and disease attributed to deliberate policy, while capitalism would get a
>"shit happens" in the marketplace excuse?
>
>Are there any useful compilations of mass death under the
>capitalist/colonialist states that use similar expansive methodologies of
>murder attributed to those states?
>
>--Nathan Newman
>

 I agree with you that the colonialism and capitalism imperialism killed
millions of persons. I also believe that counting casualties is very
difficult. I think that if you apply the same criteria to calculate
the deaths due to capitalism and stalinist communism in 20th century
you will probably reach to something like 80-100 millions for each system
(depending on how you count NAZI casualties). But I've quote the Black
Book of Communism in a different context. I was trying to say that a well
done research on the casualties in USSR will reach something like 15-20
million (even De Long agrees about this).

 These number are still very high but there is no comparison with
NAZI atrocities. We must also consider that many of deaths caused
by capitalism happened during centuries XVIII and XIX (slaves traffic,
Ireland famine, deaths during the industrialization). This process of
primitive accumulation was exactly what happened in USSR from 1929-40.
If you read the history of English industrialization in the first
half of XIX century, you will find many similarities with Stalinism.
But the English were able to transfer suffering to their colonies
while Stalin had only the Soviet people to exploit. See Eric Hobsbawn's
"Age of Revolutions" and we learn that the worst places for a peasant live
in 1800-48 were Ireland, India, England and Belgium. The same probably was
true for the USSR in the 30's. A Black book of the capitalism would also
be a whorty adition to those who studies Democides (to quote Rummel) 

                                        Alexandre