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