[cess11]

Deliberate starvation is more of a capitalist thing. It's not like China or communist parts of India have a big famine problem, while the US and their partners are causing famines in e.g. West Asia right now.

Left wing policies actually work pretty well, this is why the US has spent so much resources undermining movements and states trying to implement them, and this is why the Soviet needed nuclear weapons to survive for as long as it did.

[ben_w]

A better example of capitalism doing actual famine would be the Irish Potato Famine, which was concurrent with the writing of the actual Communist Manifesto.

Communism has also had famine, famously both the Holodomor in the USSR and the Great Leap Forward in China.

The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food.

[cess11]

How is it better?

It's kind of weird to attribute those famines, or e.g. the Kazakh famine contemporary with the holodomor which was arguably worse but is less well known, to communism. Quick industrialisation would be a much better, though partial, explanation. If it was a property of communist or socialist projects, why'd you need to reach almost a century back to find examples?

We're massively overproducing food now, and still have famines. Egalitarian distributive policies are key to ending hunger.

[ben_w]

> How is it better?

The Potato Famine is a good example because the UK government at that time considered Ireland to be "domestic" and was fully in charge of both the location and all responses, not only economic support but also with the capacity to change the laws, to raise taxes to perform emergency redirection of food from elsewhere, etc., and did not because laissez-faire capitalism (which specifically opposed food aid for famines occurring within the British Empire) was highly influential in the UK government at the time.

Your example wasn't such a strong one, because the current risk of famine in West Asia that the US can be blamed for, is not only extremely indirect (via starting a war which reduces fertiliser supply which screws over crop production but only if the conflict remains active for long enough) but also one of the few things about this conflict that is clear is that Trump did it despite plenty of advisors saying "don't do this, it is bad for the interests of the USA", for reasons including but not limited to the US dependence on oil which in turn is because president Trump also seems to think alternatives to oil are a conspiracy and keeps doing executive orders to make them go away.

The UK screwed up back then in a way that supported the rich. The US is screwing up right now in a way that doesn't. I don't think the victims care(d) in either case, but the former case can be blamed on capitalism more strongly than the latter case.

> We're massively overproducing food now, and still have famines.

Not within the capitalist nations. Or indeed the heavily industrialised nations, because your alternative hypothesis is perfectly sound as industrialisation is necessary (though not sufficient) for overproduction of food.

> Egalitarian distributive policies are key to ending hunger.

Only if they were global, though even then overproduction would still be necessary; sadly this is the exact opposite of what the USA voted for. Would you blame that more on capitalism or on democracy?

[g8oz]

Some more examples are covered in "Late Victorian Holocausts" by Mike Judge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts

[boxed]

> Communism has also had famine

The most enormous understatement. They had the biggest famines ever seen.

> The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food.

That's nonsense. There is no money that can "subsidize" anything if people are already starving because the country screwed up the agricultural system. Starvation is more powerful than monetary systems.

[applicative]

Famine ceased to be a major world issue after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which abetted infantilism of different types in most of the countries that originated after WW2.

In my childhood there were always children starving everywhere but the causes of this were finally throttled, by and large, in the 90s and 00s, with a bit of regression in the recent past. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

This is one of the most important features of the history of the last half century but goes completely unnoticed.

[cess11]

Yeah, because to the capitalist starvation is not a bug, it's a feature. It's how you manage to keep up profits under competition and automation, by pressuring the cost of labour with the threat of misery. Almost fifty million people in the US, of which some fourteen million are kids, are food insecure.

Deliberate famine and starvation campaigns is still a thing capitalist countries engage in, e.g. in Yemen, Cuba, Haiti and Palestine. Due to international support of RSF the ongoing crisis in Sudan could count as well.