In "The Utopia of Rules," the late David Graeber described how neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we'd get under communism. Thanks to monopolies, all the stores were the same and they all sold the same goods. Thanks to the dismantling of labor protection and unions, no one had enough money to get by.
-Cory Doctorow.
People sometimes respond to my criticism of some thing or person X by accusing me of "hate" for X, and I can be confident that is usually false, the emotion I am feeling about X is not hate, because I know what hate feels like from other times when I am feeling it.
Right now, for example, I hate Doctorow. I want him punished. I want him censored. I want him humiliated. I want him hurt.
My first reason for hatred is that Doctorow appears to think the quoted nonsense is a reasonable claim.
The Soviets had millions of deaths from famine in a single year, repeatedly, under communism. They lost over a percent of the population to starvation in a single year, repeatedly, subject to error bars on historian estimates because large famines tend to screw up recordkeeping too.
The United States has nothing of the sort, it has an obesity crisis though, and starvation-related organizations in the US have pivoted to screwing around with definitions of "food insecurity" (you are food insecure if you missed at least one meal in the past month) to pad their numbers of how many people are """starving""".
Death from starvation numbers for contemporary America are hard to find, because my searches keep turning up redirects and rephrasings of what turns out to be deaths from malnutrition, which is different:
One risk factor in particular is evident: “Americans 85 or older die of malnutrition at around 60 times the rate of the rest of the population, and such deaths are rising about twice as fast among that group.”
This is arguably to the credit of the US for solving so many other causes of death that millions of people reach 85+ in the first place, an age at which worn-out bodies often start having troubles with many kinds of miscellaneous condition including but not limited to difficulty absorbing nutrients. Physiological decay is different from starving due to not having enough money to get by!
Malnutrition in this broad sense, according to the CDC WONDER database of causes of death, searching for codes E40-E46 (kwashiorkor, marasmus, etcetera), killed about 25 000 people in the US in 2024. Maybe slightly more undocumented. So, assuming a very broad definition of "starvation", America has brought it down to a one-in-ten-thousand problem.
If one wants to tighten the definition a little, a starting point is that WONDER offers a breakdown by age group:
Classifying the 85+ as "age decay" rather than "starvation" already halves the rate at which malnutrition can be considered a general problem, and one might squint and make some judgement calls about lower brackets.
For a lower bound estimate of starvation in a strict central sense in America, one can look at deaths filed with code X53, lack of food. According to the CDC WONDER database, that was 22 people in 2024, and the age groups would be hidden for being personally identifiable data (only one person in some age bands!) so I'll instead show you a longer year-by-year overview:
Less than one in a million.
No doubt Doctorow could say that's not what he meant and try to weasel out of his ambiguously-phrased motte-and-bailey statement, but I think this is enough to puncture a reasonable man's central interpretation of statements like "neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we'd get under communism" and "no one had enough money to get by". The communist state saw more than one-in-hundred people starving to death in a year. The so-called neoliberal deregulation state has this problem somewhere between one-in-ten-thousand and one-in-ten-million rates, depending on how you count. (His claim about the stores also smells of bullshit but is even less specific, trying to rebut it would be like punching smoke.)
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My second reason for hatred is that Graeber doesn't say that.
As I see it, Doctorow the left-totalitarian made it up to steal the cred of a left-anarchist who can't fight back since he's dead. Reposting Doctorow's claim to have it at hand:
In "The Utopia of Rules," the late David Graeber described how neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we'd get under communism. Thanks to monopolies, all the stores were the same and they all sold the same goods. Thanks to the dismantling of labor protection and unions, no one had enough money to get by.
Thanks to PDF books and Ctrl-F, it is very easy to for me to check that the phrase "neoliberal deregulation" appears nowhere in my copy of The Utopia of Rules. The words "communist" or "communism" appear in three contexts: in quotes from other people, in a discussion of the Space Race, and in a discussion of Star Trek. For example:
Nowhere in the book does Graeber say "labor protection". (Nor "labour protection", I checked alternate spellings.) Nowhere in the book does Graeber say "dismantling" nor "dismantle". The single time Graeber writes "warned" is in this sentence:
one physicist has recently warned students pondering a career in the sciences
There is one chapter in which Graeber talks about "deregulation", where he's arguing that the word is misused:
So what are people actually referring to when they talk about “deregulation”? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean “changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like.” In practice this can refer to almost anything. In the case of airlines or telecommunications in the seventies and eighties, it meant changing the system of regulation from one that encouraged a few large firms to one that fostered carefully supervised competition between midsize firms. In the case of banking, “deregulation” has usually meant exactly the opposite: moving away from a situation of managed competition between midsized firms to one where a handful of financial conglomerates are allowed to completely dominate the market. This is what makes the term so handy.
That chapter is not about neoliberalism, warnings about communism, the dismantling of labor unions, or anything of sort. It is Graeber explaining why he's coining "bureaucratization" to be more specific about regulations and paperwork and managerialism and buzzwords. He's also philosophically objecting to the idea of "deregulation" with arguments like this:
There’s no such thing as an “unregulated” bank. Nor could there be. Banks are institutions to which the government has granted the power to create money—or, to be slightly more technical about it, the right to issue IOUs that the government will recognize as legal tender, and, therefore, accept in payment of taxes and to discharge other debts within its own national territory. Obviously no government is about to grant anyone—least of all a profit-seeking firm—the power to create as much money as they like under any circumstances. That would be insane. The power to create money is one that, by definition, governments can only grant under carefully circumscribed (read: regulated) conditions.
This is not what Doctorow claimed that Graeber was describing.
Perhaps Doctorow's been reading a different edition?
