A new book details the human cost of capitalist crisis. "The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills" by economists David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu uses statistical analysis to discover the human effects of the recession. In a Guardian article, Stuckler describes the book as articulating “why austerity kills”.
In the U.S. five million people have lost access to healthcare because they have been made unemployed – and therefore lost their health insurance. In the UK, 10,000 families have been made homeless by the Tories' bedroom tax. The Sunday Mirror recently highlighted the case of a grandmother who committed suicide as she was faced with the cut to her housing benefit and losing her home of 18 years.
In Greece - the centre of the austerity experiment – suicides have shot up by 60 per cent in a country with an historically low rate. HIV infection has also spiraled by 200 per cent as prevention budgets have been slashed. Another newspaper article reports on a deadly new drug - cut with battery acid and shampoo – which has become popular among Athens' growing homeless population and young unemployed (youth unemployment now stands at 64 per cent). The Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh shows how the dark hand of capitalism reaches across continents, blighting lives the world over.
Stuckler and Basu come to reformist conclusions: they cite Iceland as an example of recovery without austerity. But, as has been pointed out elsewhere Iceland's recovery has been managed in the interest of capital, where living standards have fallen by 30-40 per cent and billions of Icelandic kronur were spent in bailing out big business. Similarly, Germany's status as a 'stable' economy has been bought at the expense of decades of wage restraint and labour market liberalisation.
Certainly the contradictions of world capitalism are being felt more sharply in some countries than others, but the answer is not some utopian "responsible" capitalism – which, even if it does "work" for a temporary period in Scandinavia and/or Germany, is not on the cards for the UK, Greece, Spain, Italy, the U.S., Bangladesh or the rest of the world. The statistics of Stuckler and Basu point to only one conclusion: that capitalism kills.
The only solution is a planned socialist economy based on human need not profit!
Source: Capitalism kills