Christopher Columbus Lives On Today Through US Capitalism

Christopher Columbus Lives On Today Through US Capitalism

by Danny Haiphong

“The capitalist class concluded, as Columbus had, that only a mass genocide of indigenous peoples could serve its profit-seeking interests.”

Every second week of October, the Spanish merchant Christopher Columbus is remembered in the United States with his very own holiday. US President Franklin Roosevelt instated Columbus Day into federal law in 1937. At this time, the US capitalist system was experiencing its largest crisis to date, and class upheaval to transform the system was at a high point around the country. Roosevelt's administration was elected into office to save the capitalist system from permanent collapse. He did so through a series of reforms and federal expenditures that complimented an economic recovery based primarily on military industrial expansion. Columbus Day made sense for the ailing capitalist system, as it gave rebelling workers a day off from their exploitation and revived the colonial narrative necessary to take the US state into World War II.

The celebration of Columbus Day in 2015 has led to demonstrations in cities across the country in a bid to overturn the holiday and replace it with an "Indigenous Peoples Day." These demonstrations beg the question as to what makes Columbus so attractive to the US power structure in the first place. The US ruling circle sees Christopher Columbus as a "founding father" of the global imperialist system currently led by Washington. His leadership in the colonization of the Caribbean laid a genocidal blueprint for all future colonial invasions. The most important lesson the capitalist class learned from Columbus was that Native societies based on communal economic arrangements were incompatible with the capitalist system of private property and profit. The capitalist class concluded, as Columbus had, that only a mass genocide of indigenous peoples could serve its profit-seeking interests.

“The emerging capitalist class erected a nation-state based on the idea that Anglo-American settlers, or "white" people, were a superior race to their colonized victims.”

Capitalist development in North America took Columbus's model of indigenous genocide to a higher level. The colonial ruling class of what would become the United States amassed huge profits and built the most monopolized industrial capitalist base in the world from the enslavement of hundreds of millions of Africans and the mass murder of hundreds of millions of Native Americans. Profits from slavery and land theft subsidized imperial ventures abroad into Mexico, South America, and eventually the entire globe. And unlike their colonial predecessors, the emerging capitalist class erected a nation-state based on the idea that Anglo-American settlers, or "white" people, were a superior race to their colonized victims. White superiority, better known as white supremacy, became the fabric that justified US capitalism's policy of mass murder of Black and indigenous people.

Yet there are some who believe it is wrong to celebrate Columbus merely because of his own record of genocidal colonialism. While this sentiment is not without merit, it simplifies the problem. The problem is that Columbus's legacy exists in the very fabric of the US capitalist system from past to present. Not only do indigenous nations remain dispossessed of their original lands at the hands of the US state, capitalism's policy of mass murder has continued along with it. Native America and Black America are murdered by police everyday in the US and make up over half of the system's prison gulag. And both Native and Black America commonly experience death at an early age due to super exploitation in the form of mass unemployment, underemployment, and lack of access to food and healthcare fit for human beings.

“Columbus's legacy exists in the very fabric of the US capitalist system from past to present.”

US capitalism's global reach has ensured that Black Americans and Native Americans share the common experience of state-sponsored mass murder with much of the world's people. One can look to Africa, the land where Black Americans were stolen from, as a site of capitalism's global destruction. The US and its NATO allies bombed the state of Libya in 2011 as a climax to its policy of destabilization throughout the continent. Tens of thousands of mostly Black Libyans were killed in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi's Arab socialist state. Fifteen years before that, the Clinton Administration backed the neo-colonial governments of Rwanda and Uganda in their proxy invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo in search of minerals so precious to capitalist production and profit. Over six million Congolese have perished from the carnage ever since.

Indeed, whether it is the war on Syria and Iraq, or the scores of coups and dictatorships the US has supported in Latin and Central America, the legacy of Columbus lives on through US capitalism. When Christopher Columbus is rightfully denounced, it should be accompanied by a denunciation of the entire capitalist system his legacy represents. Vigorous study of US capitalism's vast imperial presence cannot help but encounter the numerous mass graves the system has produced. No one scholar has attempted to count all the lives that have died indirectly or directly at the hands of US capitalism's state apparatus. Since World War II, the estimated number of people killed by the US alone is around 20-30 million people.

“US wars abroad have exploded into murderous chaos.”

US capitalism's severe and persistent economic crisis has made it more desperate and more violent. Police murders of the Black, Native, and Latino poor have been on the rise for many years. These murders are part and parcel of a Mass Black Incarceration State and reflect the system's need for increased militarization to put out potential rebellions before they start. US wars abroad have exploded into murderous chaos. Instability and economic catastrophe threaten to destabilize much of the formerly colonized world. US capitalism's alliance of death, which includes NATO, the EU, Turkey, Qatar, and Israel, are motivating many nations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to form a military and economic partnership with Russia and China. This has only inflamed the impetus for US capitalism's alliance of death to escalate its dangerous military encirclement of Russia and China.

The colonial violence that shapes the legacy of Christopher Columbus has been a critical tool to, as Hillary said in the first Democratic Party debate of 2016, "save capitalism from itself." US capitalism would not have been able to consolidate into a global system without the use of the most malicious state violence grounded in white supremacy. Today, top officials in the Obama Administration have claimed banks are too big to fail because the system of capitalism is too big to maintain. The high cost of technology, war, and overproduction has forced the capitalist class to squeeze every bit of profit it can from the oppressed. This inevitably means the violence of the system will heighten as conditions for the oppressed worsen. The future of the struggle for liberation in the US will thus be dependent on whether we denounce the root of this period’s genocidal violence: US capitalism.

Danny Haiphong is a candidate for Workers World Party and member of Fight Imperialism Stand Together in Boston. He is also a regular contributor to Black Agenda Report. Danny can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com and FIST can be reached at bostonfist@gmail.com.

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