Variation on a Bumper Sticker

There’s a bumper sticker I’ve seen floating around out there. It says: “Socialism: A great idea… ’til you run out of other people’s money!”

The quote is thought to be adapted from a statement made by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It is everything a bumper sticker should be: pithy, funny, overly confident.

I’m not setting out to defend Socialism here, necessarily. I’m just out to give Capitalism some time of its own in the bumper sticker shit-light.

Some Roots of Capitalism

Anthropologist Jack Weatherford, in an intriguing book called Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the World, discusses one vital way in which the American continent facilitated the invention of capitalism:

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith discussed at great length the impact of American silver in causing worldwide inflation. He wrote that within a generation of the opening of the mines of Potosi, the silver from them started an inflation that lasted for approximately a century and caused silver to fall to its lowest value in history. The new wealth in the hands of Europeans eroded the wealth of all the other countries in the world and allowed Europe to expand into an international market system.

Without the natural resource wealth of the Americas, Europe and its colonial populations (including the present-Untied States of America) could not have become the dominant economic force they are today.

And without the natural resource wealth of the Americas, we (probably) wouldn’t even have a Capitalism to make reactive bumper stickers about, anyway.

Some Tendrils of Capitalism

This political and corporate expansion has continued well into the present day. The wealth of natural resources and cheap labor from the Global South continue to fuel the economic expansion of Capitalist economies, as cobalt miners in the Congo are still all too aware.

It’s easy to forget now that every acre of this continent (the Americas) was once in the possession of non-European peoples. Or, as the Europeans saw it, that it was ‘up for grabs‘.

One such example, close to my heart and home, is the story of the Central Idaho region and its former inhabitants, the Nez Perce. In 1855, they agreed to give up, by U.S.-Congress-ratified treaty, over 7.5 million acres of tribal land. They were to retain the rest of their traditional homeland as treaty-ratified reservation land.

But in 1860, gold was discovered near Weippe Prairie, and miners came tumbling in. Rather than defend its own treaty obligations, the U.S. Congress sneakily drafted a new treaty in 1863, reducing their reservation a further 90%. The value of the gold and the land itself outweighed, in the settlers’ and government’s minds, the rights of the first inhabitants of the land.

All other indigenous groups have similar stories.

And all for the sake of expansion of wealth (read: natural resource exploitation).

What I’m Not Saying

Again, I’m not claiming that capitalism is a necessary condition for conquering. People have been conquering and plundering each other from time immemorial.

But since Capitalism is among the most recent (and most ardent?) impulses towards conquering, it deserves to get made fun of in bumper stickers, too.