How many people died, in the USA, during the Great Depression?

[seventeethdecember2016]

I've heard claims that 7-12 million people died, however I lack proof. If anyone could verify this, or give proof of another number, I would be very grateful.

[Drosophila]

I've seen counts from hundreds to millions.

[Misocratist]

Bourgeois historians would say nobody was killed by the Great Depressions: some people may have died of their own inability to adapt their skills to a fluctuating job market, but that's their fault, not capitalism's. More seriously though, given the complexity of what we call "depression", it's hard to say who died of what exactly: starvation from unemployement? Starvation from underemployement? Suicide or alcoholism from not getting a job? How to distinguish that from unrelated suicide and mere alcoholism? Abnormal infant mortality from bad housing conditions? How to distinguish that from sporadic cholera and smallpox outbreaks? Shall we include the deaths from WW2, as the chaos and despair caused by the Great Depression is mostly what brought Hitler to power?

I do think it is sterile to compare ideologies by their death tolls. The inefficiency of ideologies cannot be induced necessarily (as in "not contigent") from its effects, as the application of an ideology is contigent on its context: it's not as if you could isolate "capitalism" from "the 1930's". Regardless of its context however, capitalism has intrinsic contradictions, ownership over the means of production is in-itself contrary to elementary ethics, and this is both necessary and sufficient to condemn capitalism.

Death tolls are good for populist propaganda (as in "communism has killed 100 million people, therefore it wrong"), but not for serious analysis.

[seventeethdecember2016]

Death tolls are good for populist propaganda (as in "communism has killed 100 million people, therefore it wrong"), but not for serious analysis.
I use this information to repel nonsense from capitalists who make the claims you've illustrated in your comment. It is immature to a degree, but I find it fun, to a certain extent, to recoil a fallacy of that magnitude right back at said idiot.

[Misocratist]

I use this information to repel nonsense from capitalists who make the claims you've illustrated in your comment. It is immature to a degree, but I find it fun, to a certain extent, to recoil a fallacy of that magnitude right back at said idiot.

Indeed. Also, even if such comparison were useful, which I think it isn't, can you really compare "x millions dead people from industrialized America" with "y millions dead people from barely-out-of-the-middle-ages China"? How many people lived in China and in America at that time? Should America be held more guilty given the means available to them to save those lives, compared to China's? Mere digits are meaningless.

[seventeethdecember2016]

Indeed. Also, even if such comparison were useful, which I think it isn't, can you really compare x dead people from industrialized America with y million dead people from barely-out-of-the-middle-ages China? How many people lived in China and in America at that time? Should America be held more guilty given the means available to them to save those lives, compared to China's? Mere digits are meaningless.
I often try to bring up Materialist arguments, but most people are too ignorant to understand and degrade themselves to their utter-nonsense. I sometimes compare Death rates in Imperialist colonies to those of China, or bring up that death rates, during most of Mao's leadership, were lower than those of the USA, which gives a type of buffer to get away from speculative nonsense to intellectual discussion.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Definitely wasn't in the tens of millions. If tens of millions of people were starving to death in the USA you'd definitely see at least some mention of it in the American press, including the communist press. Bodies being stacked like cordwood out in the west or major urban areas it would've been impossible to ignore, it would've been part of our collective national memory, but it's not, even though the Great Depression is remembered as a time of hunger/poverty generally speaking, it's definitely not remembered as a brutal USSR/PRC-style famine.

All this has been said in previous threads on this topic, though.

[Invader Zim]

An article for you, but I doubt that its findings will suit your cause.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2011/03/great-depression-had-little-effect-on-death-rates/