Colonial famines only explain the starting point. The real explanation is that the Global South largely stayed locked into capitalist extraction chains. Core economies required cheap labor and raw materials from the periphery. That structural position kept mortality high and blocked independent development. Socialist states broke that dependency. They redirected surplus into public health, housing, and food security. The outcomes of this are obvious, life expectancy doubled in a generation, infant mortality collapsed. The material basis improved because production answered human needs instead of profit margins. The idea of post soviet governments simply being confused and not knowing better is a nice fantasy but is completely detached from reality. The mortality spike was not administrative error. It was policy. Shock therapy dismantled central planning. State enterprises were liquidated. Housing guarantees were revoked. Social services were defunded. Mass unemployment followed overnight.
The new governments knew exactly what they were building. They replaced planned distribution with market extraction. The human toll was accepted as transition cost. Capitalism does not stumble into crisis. It manufactures crisis through deliberate dispossession.




Have a source for this that isn’t organisers puffing themselves up?
Edit: people crying about HK specifically being pro 2019 riots just shows they have very little understanding beyond a hate for China (and most likely Chinese people). A man (Chan Tong-kai) murdered his pregnant girlfriend (Amber Poon Hiu-wing) in Taipei. Returned to HK and admitted to it to the authorities but because of a loophole in the law could only be charged with money laundering for stealing her stuff after he murdered her. The government then went to fix the loophole as any government should which the colonial brained “democratic alliances” seized upon. If you are pro leaving gaping holes in the law for murders to get away without any consequences you are a bastard even if you pretend it’s all for the greater good (in your mind) of a recolonised HK.