"The Black Book of Communism"

ORIGINALLY POSTED July 20, 2004.

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This book, published by French scholars in 1997, documents the death tolls attributable to communist regimes in different countries. The book is obviously premised on the thought that the fact that these were communist regimes is explanatory: clearly, one could produce similar books like "The Black Book of White Men" or or "The Black Book of Short Dictators" or "The Black Book of Blondes," listing the atrocities committed by regimes with the designated characteristics. But the undertaking would seem peculiar, since there is no reason to think that the highlighted attributes are explanatory.

The Black Book of Communism doesn't actually argue that allegiance to communism is explanatory; it takes it for granted. Someone writing The Black Book of Capitalism, in turn, might start counting corpses attributable to 19th-century European imperialism, Pinochet, Suhatro, Marcos, Somoza, etc. (Should we add Hitler, who on some accounts owes much to the support of the capitalist class, and whose rise to power was, uncontroversially, facilitated by the worldwide capitalist crisis of the late 1920s and 1930s?)

Would such an exercise illuminate anything about capitalism? It is an interesting question, and I do not know the answer. Still, in viewing the Black Book of Communism it is not unreasonable to raise the kinds of questions put--with characteristic Maoist hyperbole and apologetics--by this Maoist organization::

[I]t is an 856 page book and there are no statistical comparisons of premature deaths between capitalist and socialist countries anywhere in the book, just as MIM [Maoist International Movement] charged all along. The reason is simple: the Communists doubled the life expectancies of the people of the Soviet Union and China. That is the overall picture. It does not mean there were not civil wars or executions, including some unjust ones, but overall, the violence of communism is less than that of capitalism, by far.

The simple scientific link missing in the minds of our critics is the link between poverty under a system of private property and death. Poverty under capitalism causes death from lack of food, a decent environment and adequate health care.

Assuming one is a utilitarian about these matters--as the economists usually profess to be (though theirs is typically a sophomoric utilitarianism which equates well-being with preference-satisfaction)--then the only relevant question really is the causal nexus between different forms of socio-economic ordering and human well-being. And thus the Maoists are plainly correct to raise the question: how many lives were cut short by the catastrophe of the Great Depression? how many lives were lost to capitalist exploitation and terror in third world counctries? and so on.

It will not do, to refute the Maoists, to follow the lead of the silly Arnold Kling, and compare per capita life spans today to 100 or 200 years ago. No one was a more vigorous cheerleader for the productive power of capitalism, of course, than Karl Marx. The relevant question is whether that productive power might have been harnessed in ways that would have resulted in greater maximization of human well-being than actually resulted under existing socio-economic arrangements? And then, if we were to be serious about the question, we would have to line up the corpses and human misery (causally) attributable to the imperfections of capitalist forms of socio-economic organization next to those (causally) attributable to the communist societies, to see whose "Black Book" should be the fattest.

Now doctrinaire Marxists will presumably conclude, before the exercise even begins, that of course the ledger sheet of human misery will be longer on the side of the Chinese and the Soviets, since those nations were prematurely communist, and so deprived themselves of decades (or centuries) of development of their productive power which capitalism would have made possible. Such productive power, in turn, would have made possible, even within the pathologies of a capitalist system, improvements in human well-being, as those such as Dr. Kling like to point out.

Fortunately, doctrinaire Marxists are now in short supply! (Too bad the same is not true of doctrinaire libertarians, whose reasoning is not so different.) And so there is a genuine empirical issue here, for which The Black Book of Communism is only a partial contribution. (It focuses disproportionately on intentional killings, though it factors in some non-intentional ones as well, such as the Chinese famine. But it ignores precisely the critique of the Soviets and the Chinese that would be raised by the doctrinaire Marxist, noted above.) I will not be betting, to be sure, on Harvard University Press publishing installments looking at the other side of the ledger sheets, but perhaps other scholars will find other fora in which to address the issues.

At the same time, what is needed is not simply correlations, but some account of causal mechanisms, so that we understand the precise sense in which, e.g., "capitalism" (whatever that is) produces mass murderers like Suhatro, or "communism" (whatever that is) produces mass murderers like Stalin.

These are fascinating issues, of enormous human importance. Is there a pertinent scholarly (as distinct from a popular [e.g., the silly Arnold Kling] or polemical [e.g., the MIM, above]) literature?

UPDATE: My colleague Frank Cross calls my attention to an interesting, small-scale study of the effect of privatization of water rights on child mortality in Argentina.  ANOTHER UPDATE:  A different perspective on water privatization here.  AND ANOTHER:  Reader Tom Barker alerts me to the fact that there is, in French, a Black Book of Capitalism, though it may already be out of print.