Systemic Violence And Deaths Due To Capitalism

Capitalism is predicated on private property and reliance on markets for distribution of goods and services.

A consequence of it? Goods get rationed to those who have property. Those who don’t have any starve or die.

Let’s be concrete here. The world today produces surplus food which is more than enough for every inhabitant of the world to consume. And this surplus, incidentally, is NOT due to capitalism. Its due to government investment in R&D and heavily subsidized farming.

Want to know capitalism’s contribution? See the distribution of this surplus, rationed by capitalist norms of property.

At least 9 million people die of starvation each year inspite of global food surplus according to the World Food Programme. This is just deaths due to starvation. When we count people who starve but somehow manage to live, we come at a figure of 820 million people experiencing chronic hunger each year. This was the figure before Covid happened.

WHO publication from 2017 tells us that 3.5 million people die each year due to lack of access to clean water. This includes everything that goes along with it. Infections, disease caused by lack of sanitation, etc.

1.5 million people die each year from vaccine preventable diseases.

If we look at just the last 30 years, the global death toll due to capitalism was at least 420 million! [Assuming deaths in preceding years were not more, but nearly the same.]

This is a very conservative estimate which leaves out deaths due to lack of medical facilities and due to imperial aggression intrinsic to capitalism.

These deaths were all easily preventable. It wouldn’t have taken much expenditure to put an end to all this. But we have been living in the era of neo-liberal onslaulght, that tells us that violating the consent of the rich is too much of the cost to bear. And that freebies make people lazy. That we should teach self-reliance without violating the sacred right to property. How all of this is somehow connected some perverted sense of freedom.

The death toll due to capitalism is largely ignored because its invisible. You cannot point fingers at any particular individual responsible for it. Its systemic violence that people have been brainwashed into thinking as a law of nature.