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Boots Riley calculates the number of people who died during the Great Depression via the metrics used against China.

twitter.com Boots Riley on Twitter

Lets calculate victims of capitalist catastrophe in the US.US population increase:1920～1930: +17M1930～1940: +9M1940～1950: +19M1950～1960: 28M1930~1940 shuld b 18M increase. 9M mustve starved or died abnormally during Great Depression. Same way China famine calculated.— Boots Riley (@BootsRiley) April...

Fucking baaaaaaased. How the hell was he ever allowed to make a Hollywood movie???

46 comments

  • I've always wondered why there's been no serious academic investigation of this. I think about the Grapes of Wrath, one of the most famous works of Americana, which vividly describes the hunger and the violence of the Dust Bowl and yet I'm supposed to believe nobody starved to death? No malnourished children died? People didn't get in fights and die over resources? Apparently the Great Depression sucked but besides the banker that jumped off the fifth floor nobody died.

    • Nobody important died. Every suit out the window a tragedy.

    • I read up on it in a German encyclopedia and it was claimed that less than 10 people were confirmed dying due to the Great Depression. Which obviously is a bit odd.

    • Even aside from academia, there isn't much serious art about it either. Depression hobos are just taken as this whimsical character Ala O Brother Where Art Thou etc. Even media at the time leaned that way.

      • I guess I've reas autobiographies of people living through the time. Malcolm X's childhood as a black kid in a rural place still rang the same even if it was technically after by less than a decade, it wasn't ended overnight and certainly not if you were black. I think a big thing as well is that a lot of people who would have been of the age and in the places materially to write about the horrors of the depression, they either got killed in ww2 or those horrors kinda took over.

      • I don’t know if this is historically what happened, but it seems like Jack Kerouac contributed a lot to the whimsical way we see hobos. Maybe Harry Partch, too.

      • Okay, you gave me my next Historical Special Interest. I

      • there isn’t much serious art about it either.

        You need to go look again. There's vast amounts of art from the Great Depression and New Deal period. Maybe write to some large libraries and ask the librarians for help. I'm fairly certain that just the Civilian Conservation Corps hired artists to go out with other workers and paint and take photographs of the wilder parts of America. There were a bunch of programs to financially support culture and the arts in that period, too.

      • omg we had a big lesson on pelagra in eighth grade that we all freaked out about! We also talked about protein deficiencies if your only source of protein is rabbits.

      • During famines people flood in to cities. There were vast numbers of unemployed people in American cities at the time. There wasn't massive mortality because there wasn't the same kind of massive loss of agricultural production that you saw in, for instance, the 1932 Ukraine famine. The Soviets were trying to bootstrap the USSR's agriculture from medieval to modern, dealing with serious resistance from Kulaks and serious administrative and logistical problems, and then got hit with a drought that affected agricultural production across almost the entire USSR at that time.

        In the USA, on the other hand, agriculture was already employing modern technology, there wasn't an equivalent to the fight with the kulaks, and the US's vast agricultural regions and the localized nature of the dust bowl droughts relative to all agricultural land mean that the loss of agricultural production had a less severe impact.

        Roosevelt took power in 1933 and stayed in power until 1945 and that era is the closest the US has ever been to a centrally planned economy. The federal government undertook massive programs to employ people, distribute food and other relief, subsidize farms and industry, and so forth.

        There wasn't the kind of mass death you saw in European countries because the situation, the material circumstances if you will, were drastically different in the USA.

        The various New Deal programs kept reams and reams of records, you can probably look them all up if you call around to a few big city libraries and start asking questions.

    • If you don’t record the data, can’t have bad news.

    • I think you just haven't made a serious effort to look for academic investigation. There are vast, vast amounts of records and literature for the entire Great Depression and New Deal period. The US had relatively few deaths from outright starvation bc it's an enormous country with vast agricultural resources, and because Roosevelt came in to power in 33 and stayed in office until 45, instituting the "New Deal" policies

      The "New Deal" included an enormous array of employment programs, subsidies for farms and industry, and relief programs to distribute food and other necessaries. The low rate of recorded deaths is largely because the US leveraged it's vast resources and infrastructure, combined it with a lot of direct federal oversight, and became a sort of weak centrally planned socialist economy for a decade. And to no one's surprise socialism works.

      Keep in mind that the USA had vastly more industrial machinery than the USSR in the same period. I'm struggling to find credible numbers but it looks like in 1930 the USSR produced about 50k tractors, and had only recently opened most of it's tractor plants, while the USA produced like 200-250k, most from long established plants that had been producing for a decade or more.

    • 10s of thousands likely died from starvation, and millions within a decade from neglect, medical issues, etc. But as mentioned comparatively few actually completely starved rather than died from contracting consumption or dysentery in a refugee camp.

      The SU had less technology, fewer food reserves, no infrastructure to get grain to areas, and of course it started disasterously late because it thought it was a hoarding issue. But it did technically have the food to solve the crisis, it was a matter of getting it there fast enough in an Eastern European season that was devastating to both agriculture and roads.

      Finally, there was the fact that in the US famine people moved from the relatively undeveloped area of Kansas to the developed hubs of California, which could cope with the influx.

      Attempts by starving people to flee Ukraine to other areas hit the issue that aside from Moscow and St Petersburg, everywhere in Russia was less developed, and many areas were marginal in food production. The Soviets decided to block migration out of the famine regions to prevent a cascade failure of food resources, but were unable to get food in to the areas fast enough.

46 comments