I know there was one in the USSR in 1932 and one in the PRC in 1958. I know that they’re a major talking point of the “communism killed 100 million people” myth. I’d like to be able to understand them better and extract valid criticisms out of them so I don’t end up looking ignorant or sycophantic while trying to explain why I support communist countries.
Some context to keep in mind:
- These famines happened soon after their revolutions.
- These were the last famines in each of these regions, both of which had suffered famines for centuries.
- Neighboring countries suffered famines at the same time.
In both cases there were serious droughts and I've heard that in China it was a terrible flood year for the Yangtze but I haven't looked in to it in detail.
And during those famines the overall life expectancy was still higher than the pre-revolution non-famine life expectancy (from birth, mind. I don't know how you would find, say, age 8+ life expectancy which would be perhaps a more useful metric in some ways)
These were the last famines in each of these regions, both of which had suffered famines for centuries
You can read more on this and famines in other countries under capitalist colonial domination in the book Late Victorian Holocausts. Untold millions died before and after the year 1900 as the brits abolished "inefficient" community grain stores and El Nino droughts destroyed lands that had been fertile for decades, while blind private market ideology kept any food aid from being disbursed so as to keep the "natural" price of rice and grain from being disrupted. Food was exported to the imperial core while millions starved.
All famines have some parameterization you can apply of how much fault was due to political decisions versus extraneous factors like climate. This is something that will be endlessly debated according to peoples' own particular beliefs.
Alternatively, and not to take away from your post, but why can I not find any information about the death toll of the Great Depression?
Not an expert, but, apparently the Great Depression, in the US at least, didn't really directly kill that many people. The US had (has?) a pretty robust agricultural industry that meant that even with so many people driven into poverty most people could still access enough food to at least stay alive.
It still probably killed people, less access to medical care, living in less sanitary housing and massive unplanned migration definitely caused some deaths but there wasn't really any huge famine like event. People just got poor as shit.
The Soviet famine basically came about because of several things: there was a bad growing season which led to farmers trying to back out of selling the grain to the state because they wanted to instead export it because that would be more profitable, and when the state moved to confiscate the grain many of them destroyed their supplies and killed their herds rather than just eat the financial loss for the year. That led to things like seed grain and personal food stores being confiscated from farmers who'd destroyed most of their harvest, a panicked crackdown on dissent to try to stop further sabotage (and it has to be remembered this was happening to a backdrop of ongoing counter-revolutionary violence from nationalists and landowners), and a rushed reorganization as farmland was seized to form communes overseen by urban party members who at best may have had some agricultural education but little to no practical experience (but who were trusted to not actively sabotage things, unlike the former landowners). This was further compounded by the Soviet logistics system of the time being an absolute shitshow with poor record keeping and communication that led to things like famine relief or farm supplies getting lost in warehouses at or near their intended destination.
The Great Leap Forward famine was completely different apart from a logistics system with bad communication and record keeping making it worse: at the time China's central planning and logistics was extremely overwhelmed by the sheer scale of what it was trying to manage and lacked any real oversight. This meant the rural communes were extremely autarkic and left to their own devices, with just a vague "so many tons of grain out, so much industrial equipment in" guidance and no real ability to ensure that what local officials were claiming they were putting into the system was actually true. That left local officials with an incentive to exaggerate harvests and fraudulently claim to be shipping more grain than they actually were. The policies of the Great Leap Forward themselves originated in rural communes that experimented with trying to industrialize themselves to cover for the inability of the urban industries to provide equipment etc in sufficient quantities, and after some apparent successes with those experiments were seized upon by the Chinese leadership as a solution to a whole bunch of serious material problems they were facing (it would address the rural/urban poverty divide, increase industrialization without cutting into the critical agriculture that supported the cities, and decentralize industry away from vulnerable coastal cities into the more sheltered inland areas) and they encouraged other communes to follow suit. Needless to say, it didn't work out: the move to industrialize the communes meant that people were pulled away from the fields, changing incentives further undermined the labor pool agriculture relied on, and while some areas managed anyways in some places grain production completely collapsed leading to lots of highly localized famines and an overall decrease in the flow of grain from rural communes to the cities. The logistics and communication systems were also in such a sorry state that it apparently took several years for the central government to learn of the scope of the problem and move to reverse the reforms and scramble to mitigate the famines.
If you go search the news comm we've got many pages discussing the '32 famine since the Holodomor narrative is so prevalent in the anglosphere.
The very short version is that due to a severe drought, kulak resistance to collectivization, and serious communications and logistics failure on the part of the Soviet Government several million people died of hunger across the USSR. There was never any intention to kill anyone or commit genocide. The government had the resources to mitigate the harm and failed to use those resources effectively and so bears culpability for failure to fulfill it's duties. Grounded historians describe it as being a state level act of manslaughter - not intentional, but it could have been mitigated with effective action.
How come it's never "manslaughter" when capitalism has one of its inevitable crises and the people have to starve until the economy stabilizes, if anything the capitalist version is closest to manslaughter since it's 100% intentional that the working class have to pay in order to cover the capitalist's ass
Assigning blame when the government does something and not when capitalists do something is a form of internalized liberalism
s, if anything the capitalist version is closest to manslaughter [...] 100% intentional
there's a whole law pervert thing i don't care enough to get into but typically manslaughter is unintentional so i think capitalist social murder isn't really an example of it.
