A little tongue-in-cheek, yes, but we'll attempt to structure the discussion with the assumed veracity of this basic claim: that the explosive and expansive instability of Western capital - its overall "janky" quality as a governing platform - has played a large part in the perpetually unfolding catastrophes that have shaped and characterized our history, carving those deep, glacial grooves whose surfaces we still skate upon in the modern age.
No doubt about it, once you start to talk about the multitude of historical phenomena in such a broad and sprawling scheme, the scheme itself threatens to melt into some greater pattern in turn: the explosive and dynamic character of Western capital is a product of the many millennia of the rising and falling motions of empires, a greater pattern which could melt into far more profound movements on a geological scale. Though in want of an intelligible discussion within a reasonable amount of space, we'll maintain our focus on the limits of "The West," which besides is where I currently reside and have a participatory interest in criticizing.
The historical example I wanted to start with - and we should be able to fit in a couple more in the course of the discussion - is the US' battle for the Black Hills in the course of the Great Sioux War of 1876, which culminated in the Battle of the Little Bighorn and that related famed incident, Custer's Last Stand.
An incredible story in its own right, especially concerning the conduct of the Lakota and Cheyenne, but I'd like to focus on the background circumstances which helped to structure that sequence of events which is just as interesting, and as it happens, quite pertinent to our discussion. This will involve somewhat of a circuitous narrative pathway, but we'll eventually get there.
A decade before, the US Civil War had been wrapping up, itself the result of a titanic and catastrophic collision of two competing economic systems and their respective loci of geography and culture. This was a collision born out of the dramatic branching transformations undergone both in wage labor-based industrial capitalism and the slavery-based plantation system, with the latter playing a large part in the former's own development, whose rapid and global transformations altered sensibilities and global economics to an extent that was making the latter obsolete.
That collision produced its own series of catastrophic effects which punched huge craters in the body politic, some of which continue well into the present as bleeding ulcers, the perpetually brutal legacies of slavery among them. But to get back on track, the US government emerged from that conflict with a gaping hole in the national treasury, and a vast swathe of destroyed national resources like labor and infrastructure.
That didn't necessarily slow down the manic explosion of railroad investment and construction and settlement westward, especially on the part of the victors of the war, which was putting more and more pressure on an already beleaguered constellation of native tribes along those pathways, with settlers steadily eating into their natural resources, spaces, and corridors of migration, pushing tribes like the Lakota and Cheyenne further westward and into other tribes' territories like the Crow, who would ally with the US as a result.
The economic and financial Panic of 1873 would derail that wave of economic ebullience, which was also happening throughout Europe in a similar way: Germany and Austria-Hungary would also embark in a similar process of rapid and unsustainable industrialization after their victory and receipt of war reparations from France after the Franco-Prussian war, which would add to the general global contagion, all of which was disrupted through a series of financial scandals, massive urban fires, market dislocations caused by rapid industrialization (newly online Northern wheat production trashed global wheat prices for example, and the construction of the Suez canal caused maritime trade chaos in Britain as another example), Germany and the US' demonetization of silver, and so on.
The demonetization of silver was one of the salient points here, as everyone shifted to the gold standard, which in turn produced a voracious appetite for gold among the legions of desperate people trying to survive this long depression, which would be considered "the great depression," were it not for the actual Great Depression to unseat it. Are we seeing those growing oscillations in the pattern recognition yet?
At any rate, that huge hole in the national treasury persuaded a weakened US government to sympathize more with the waves of desperate settlers fighting their way through the depression, who were busy sniffing out rumors of gold in the Black Hills. After all, the US was bound by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 to leave the Black Hills for exclusive use by the Lakota and Cheyenne, which for them was not only a sacred region, but increasingly a lifeline of game, plantlife, and timber in the face of shrinking territory.
There was still some public and factional support for native sovereignty and dignity, but for certain more aggressive factions, it might be easier to break the treaty and enter the Black Hills for the gold if there was a steady trickle of settlers going in - who were more difficult to control - and who would cause confrontations with the local tribes, justifying heavier-handed efforts.
Which was exactly what happened. There was a survey expedition led by Custer, which officially was rationalized as route-finding and scouting out fort locations, while simultaneously and surreptitiously scouting for gold. Gold was found, and increasing settlers were coming in, which led to a series of military escalations and then full blown warfare.
Now, the Lakota and Cheyenne produced incredible and talented warriors through their culture, and through the course of the war achieved a series of spectacular victories, culminating in the defeat of Custer and the US Army in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, which coming on the heels of reunification after the drawing-down of the civil war, was registered among the US body politic as an intolerable humiliation.
Up to this point, the Grant Administration had resisted devoting too many resources to this war, partially because of the energy tied up in carrying out the Reconstruction in the South. The spectacular defeats of the US Army however threw into overdrive that latent racism coursing through the US body politic, mainstreaming genocidal calls for extermination and zero tolerance of the indigenous peoples, and so the US government devoted ever more resources to the conflict, while also shifting to an attritional mode of warfare in which strictly delimited reservations were more sharply enforced, and the rest of the free native peoples driven to flight and famine, much of them wiped out. Simultaneously too, Reconstruction efforts would falter and land redistribution and reparation would falter and the political economic state of affairs would regress to state-led segregation in the south and rentier exploitation and economic predation and ghettoizing in the north.
And so these catastrophic failures - their trajectories perhaps baked in, but then driven more forcefully towards and fulfilled more completely through this structural instability and its ensuing social, economic, and political accelerations - would tear massive scars into the socio-economic and political landscapes of the Western world, scars which persist and now fester to this day.
