Embedded Suffering: The Long Arc of American Exploitation from Columbus to Bezos
The world as we know it is on the brink of collapse. The indications of this — massive species extinction, climate disaster, epidemic mental illness, spiralling political and economic instability — are hardly subtle. The causes of this “polycrisis”, as it has come to be termed, are multiple and complex, but ultimately can be traced back to centuries of exploitation of the natural and human worlds. Exploitation — the act of using someone or something unfairly or harmfully for one’s own benefit — is the defining characteristic of our civilization. It is inescapable and ubiquitous, so normalised as to be invisible. To take a trivial, random example, yesterday, for the grand sum of $30, I bought a small wicker table for my balcony. The box stated that the wicker was hand woven. I was struck by this. Given transport costs, retail markup, and the profit made by the manufacturer, I wondered, what could the workers who wove the wicker for that table possibly have been paid? What was the embedded suffering of my new acquisition?
The fact is I am addicted to products built on the suffering of others and the destruction of the natural world. My affluent western lifestyle depends on it, as does yours, dear reader. Slavery — that most egregious and obviously exploitative of American institutions — may have been outlawed in the nineteenth century, but the cultural mode of exploitation of which it was a part has not been banished, and the karmic costs of that are just now starting to hit.
Human beings in many cultures have exploited other humans and animals throughout recorded history and beyond. The indigenous tribes of North America may have been excellent stewards of the natural world, but they also routinely made slaves of those they vanquished in war. The wealth of the Ancient Greek city states was likewise founded on the labour of captured slaves, and there is depressingly little (read, no) evidence of anyone questioning the morality of this arrangement, for all the Athenian philosophers’ talk of virtue.
Yet if we wanted to trace the origins of the epidemic of exploitation that has brought nature to its knees and now threatens to engulf us all in catastrophe, it would be hard to find a more pivotal moment than the year 1492, when Columbus tried to open a trade route to Asia by sailing west, and instead stumbled on the Americas, in history’s luckiest failure. At this point in time, European civilization had largely calcified into a feudal hierarchy with kings at the apex and serfs at the base, and almost no room for individuals to change their economic circumstances. With every inch of the continent explored and cultivated for centuries, and technological innovation slow, there were few opportunities to seize easy wealth or territory. It took the French and English from 1337 to 1453 to settle the territorial dispute known as the Hundred Years War.
During the early fifteenth century the Portuguese had shown Europe the possibility of leveraging its technological supremacy to extort riches from the rest of the world. Yet it was Columbus’s voyage that fundamentally changed the balance of power in Europe and truly ushered in the colonial era.
The vicious, predatory behaviour of the Spanish in the Americas is more widely known today than it was a few decades ago, when the story was largely whitewashed in most history courses below university level, yet it is still vastly underestimated by most people. Bartolomé de las Casas — a priest who accompanied the conquistadors and became one of history’s first whistleblowers — published an account of the atrocities committed by the Spanish colonisers in 1552 titled “A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies”. It is a harrowing tale of greed and appalling savagery. One particularly horrifying account told of indigenous villagers being roasted alive on grills above small fires and only being dispatched with swords when a Spanish officer could not sleep because of the screaming. Natives were tortured and had extremities sliced off to force them to produce non-existent gold, or were simply impaled for the fun of it. Entire villages were slaughtered, man, woman and child. The Spanish colonisers were nothing but a state- and church-sponsored mafia, with no police to restrain them.
Another tale recounts how local communities would welcome the Spaniards with great friendliness and hospitality, only for their guests to turn on them, enslaving, torturing and murdering them en masse. Treachery of this sort remained their modus operandi. Perhaps the most famous example occurred after Francisco Pizarro’s capture of the Incan emperor Atahualpa in 1532. The Spanish demanded a ransom of a room full of gold, and two smaller rooms full of silver in return for his life. The room set aside for this gold was 22 feet long, 17 feet wide and 8 feet high. The Incans managed to fill this huge treasure chamber over several months, only for the Spanish to murder the emperor anyway after a show trial for such crimes as “idol worship”. After this, the Incan Empire rapidly collapsed.
It wasn’t gold, however, that truly made Spain rich. It was silver. In 1545, an enormous deposit of the precious metal was discovered in a part of Peru that now belongs to Bolivia. The vast quantities of silver that flowed from the Cerro Rico (“Rich Hill”) in Potosí enriched the Spanish crown for over a century. Around 40% of all the silver that circulated in Europe during the sixteenth century came from this one mine, ultimately resulting in an inflation crisis. The “embedded suffering” of this silver was enormous. Some historians have estimated that up to eight million slaves died in the Potosí mines during the Spanish colonial period from a combination of mercury and arsenic poisoning, accidents, malnutrition, disease and exhaustion. I visited the mines in 2011 and, while the silver is all but gone, cooperatives of miners still labour there under terrible conditions, working 13 hour shifts chipping tin, zinc and other metals out of the rock with hand held picks. They are down there as you read this.
As Spain extended its dominance, the encomienda system was established to extract the continent’s wealth. This allowed hidalgos — petty nobles — to claim regions of South and Central America, enslaving their indigenous inhabitants and forcing them to pay tribute in the form of gold, silver or agricultural products, a portion of which wealth was sent home to fill Spanish coffers. In return, the local encomendero was supposed to “protect” the natives under his control and provide for their religious “education” (read, indoctrination and forced conversion). This is not ancient history. Analyses have shown that regions subject to the encomienda system in colonial times remain significantly poorer than neighbouring areas even to this day. This is not to speak of the deep intergenerational trauma.
When, in 1620, the Mayflower arrived in what is now Massachusetts with a hold full of English settlers, their intention was to repeat the Spanish exploits. No doubt they would have done so had there been any precious metals to find, had they been better prepared and equipped, and had the local indigenous tribes been as easy to subjugate as the Aztecs and Incans were. But the local alliance of tribes in the area — the Powhatten Confederacy — had already had dealings with the Spanish, and were not cowed by the English or their technology.
In the end, however, the failure to replicate the Spanish success In North America turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since it forced the settlers into cultivating the land instead of merely plundering it. To survive, the upper class settlers needed to rely on the labour of the agriculturally skilled working class members of the expedition, who gained considerable political power as a result of this leverage. Many ended up becoming wealthy landowners, enriched through the cultivation of tobacco. The type of hierarchical, extractive regime that had taken hold in South America simply could not fly under these conditions, and North American society began to evolve in a very different manner from the way it had in Latin America. A culture of self-sufficiency, hard work, enterprise and resistance to authority became the hallmarks of American society. It is to these cultural and political differences that the enormous disparity in wealth between North and South America can ultimately be traced.
Yet the fact that English colonial governments in North America were less blatantly extractive than that of the Spanish colonies — especially towards their own white subjects — does not mean they were not fundamentally exploitative. The rush for precious metals in the South became a land grab in the North, with Native American peoples forced off their ancestral lands and displaced further and further west, then onto ever shrinking reservations. Treaties which promised indigenous tribes free use of their new lands in perpetuity were agreed again and again, only for whites to tear up these agreements and expropriate the land again the moment it suited them. And none of this is to speak of the history of slavery in North America, a story too well known to need repeating here.
The reason why exploitation became the American mode lies in these origins. The Americas represented an unprecedented wealth bonanza for European states, leading to a massive grab for land and gold. In the South, Spain’s unbridled rapacity ended up crippling its colonies there, ultimately leading to the stereotype of South America as a continent of poverty, corruption, drug lords and dictators. All of this flowed directly from the conquistadors of the sixteenth century.
In North America, things unfolded differently. The power and wealth that working class settlers were able to amass ultimately led to a far more egalitarian society and laid the foundations for the American constitution, a high minded document intended to enshrine the rights of the people and check the powers of government. Yet for all the noble-sounding verbiage, the true founding principle of America was the promise that land and wealth were there for the taking. This is the “American Dream” after all. The true aim of the constitution was to ensure the kind of government that would not get in the way of people enriching themselves.
The dominance of America during the twentieth century meant that this ethos became globalised, reaching its apogee in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, when political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history”. Liberal democracies had triumphed, and, according to Fukuyama at least, civilization had reached its telos. No further political progress was either necessary or possible.
History, of course, had other ideas. The fall of the twin towers in 2001 could hardly have been a more potent symbol and dire warning of what was to come in the century ahead. Exploitation is the dark side of the kind of liberalism that the United States stood for and spread throughout the globe. Freedom and individual rights — core values of liberal democracy — if not tempered either by protective laws or shared social values, can simply mean that the powerful are “free” to exploit the vulnerable and voiceless.
As long as resources remained plentiful, it was the natural world and “out groups” — Native and African Americans and people in poorer countries — who bore the brunt of this exploitative dynamic. Yet as free resources have dwindled, the exploitation has turned increasingly inwards. It is no longer possible to “go west, young man”. There is no more west. The world’s capacity to render up more easy wealth has been exhausted. The oil wells are running dry, the vast rolling fields of middle America have all been turned to corn fields or parking lots. So now the culture, unable to realise or accept that the conditions that gave rise to it have long since passed, has begun to eat itself.
The evidence of this is everywhere. American culture, and global culture to the extent that it has ingested the American ethos, is now frantically trying to recreate the original American bonanza through artificial means. The Credit Default Swaps of the aughties became cryptocurrencies and NFTs, Ponzi schemes dressed up as technological innovation. A desperate hunger for obscene wealth grips America like a fever. I experienced first-hand the greed-driven culture of modern Vulture Capital, sorry Venture Capital, while working for a small medical start-up. Despite the excellent product, the steady growth and strong fundamentals, no VC would touch us. Why? Because VCs are only interested in funding companies that will offer a hundred times their investment or more in five years. The notion of a “solid investment” has disappeared, replaced by blind avarice, a fantasy of getting filthy rich for no effort. Consequently excellent businesses wither on the vine for lack of funding, while startup founders increasingly distort, lie and inflate their prospects in the hope of exploiting the exploiters.
Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are the criminal faces of this dynamic. But they were just the ones who played the game badly and lost. How many times a day does a message land on your phone from someone trying to exploit you? Scams are proliferating like plastic waste in the ocean. Not only illegal scams, but legal ones like U.S. student debt, or the apps you buy for a few bucks that turn out to be completely fake and useless, or the services you subscribe to that are so difficult to quit that they manage to suck a hundred bucks out of your account before you can figure out how to cancel (Adobe, we’re looking at you, and so is the U.S. regulator).
Capital is being sucked out of the middle and lower class into a kind of wealth singularity. The major services that we rely on for modern life have largely turned into global monopolies or duopolies — Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tinder, Uber, Apple, Samsung. Nobody who is not a billionaire can even think of playing in these spaces any more, and anyone innovative enough to come up with a genuinely competitive concept will find themselves quickly killed with money, through being copied, undercut or acquired. A whole economic stratum of small and medium sized providers is vanishing, its wealth drawn upwards into the digital super-corridor to line the pockets of the likes of Bezos.
At the same time, these very services have started to cannibalise themselves, in a process which Cory Doctorow has termed enshittification. Since the tech crunch of 2022, large internet services have started to take back value from customers and appropriate it, first for their business customers and then for their own shareholders. Google, Facebook, Twitter (fuck you, Elon, I’m not saying it) and Amazon are all well advanced along their enshittifying trajectories. But this depressing degenerative disorder is merely a part of the same autophagic process that is consuming the world as the West’s hunger is turned on itself.
The embedded suffering on which the West has long built its affluence is now finally starting to spread into the host. It is leaking out, in pervasive anxiety and depression, economic insecurity, climate chaos, political strife, war, and generalised instability. Our world has become enormously economically top heavy while the social strata within which 99.99% of people live grow ever more stressed and brittle, and the foundations of individual wellbeing are eaten away by exploitation. Like a termite-ridden tree, this is a world primed for collapse.
How should the individual respond to these circumstances? It is impossible to completely avoid participation in exploitative systems without withdrawing entirely from society, far too radical a step for most of us, and not necessarily even the most helpful response. A disengaged person may do no harm, but also cannot change the systems that do. We can only inform ourselves about the supply chains that bring us the products we use and consume, and lean away from exploitation. We can educate ourselves about the embedded suffering in the goods and services we buy, and prefer those with less whenever we can afford to. We can learn to re-see the exploitation that society has made invisible through normalisation. The world, like a river stone carved by water, is shaped through small choices made again and again. It’s not much; it may not be enough, but it’s all we’ve got.
