The death toll from imperialism is one of many statistics that are vital in our day-to-day work of building public opinion. It is important for the vanguard to provide access to the best death toll statistics available in a way that clearly demonstrates the violence inherent in the current economic system. This resolution is to help guide us in this task.
a. We must be diligent in our statistical method so as not to promote inflated numbers based on bad logic as the imperialists have done in their backwards attempts to discredit socialism (for example http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/agitation/blackbook/index.html). When using broad estimates from outside sources we will cite our sources and include any question we may have about their methods as has been general practice in the past.
We must define what makes up the death toll from imperialism. It does not serve us well to make blanket calculations attributing every death in the 20th century in an imperialist dominated land to the death toll caused by imperialism. The strength of our statistics are based in the illustrations they make about how the system works. Therefore the following guidelines will be used to decide what is included in a death toll and how we report deaths.
b. We will include every murder and assassination by the imperialist military, government officials or hired guns and their counterparts in lackey governments around the world.
c. We will include every death among the oppressed nations that would have been statistically less likely if that person were a member of the oppressor nation. This will account for a larger proportion of the death toll than deaths from war and assassination as most deaths caused by imperialism are in the form of health problems from inadequate nutrition and medical care that is widely available in other parts of the world.
e. Our official death toll from imperialism will not include deaths among the oppressor nation from its own decadence. EXAMPLE: A landslide in a shanty town outside Lima, Peru will kill many people because economic forces have caused them to settle there without proper infrastructure. A landslide in the California hills will kill much fewer people, but any deaths will be due to humyn arrogance in choosing a location to build a home, not to any lack of infrastructure due to poverty. This does not preclude us from discussing oppressor nation decadence as a health risk to its own people, such as from fast food and sedentary lifestyles. Nor does it prevent us from mentioning deaths related to such decadence. But we will not consider these deaths as part of the imperialist death toll.
f. In cases of deaths during national liberation struggles against imperialism we will count all deaths as part of the death toll from imperialism until the point when the state is seized by the oppressed nation and imperialism is no longer the main holder of power. A slave cannot be held accountable for murdering her master. Once communists take state power we are happy to take responsibility for the deaths that occur, as we have in the Soviet Union and China, even though those deaths are mostly a result of hangovers from previous economic systems.
g. We will attribute all deaths resultant from inter-imperialist war to the death toll from imperialism, even when a socialist state is involved in such war as in the case of World War II. Imperialism creates such wars thru rivalries over the rights to exploitation. In the case of World War II, aggression against the Soviet Union had to do with socialism threatening imperialist access to markets, labor and resources to exploit. The soviet people had no real choice but to fight fascism to preserve socialism. This is parallel to a war of national liberation in that the resultant deaths are the responsibility of the aggressor.