Tag: Colonialism

  • Historical Nihilism and Canadian Capitalism

    Historical Nihilism and Canadian Capitalism

    The first thing to understand about Canada is that it is a company turned into a country.1 It is from this kernel that all else sprouted. First Nations across the country are the keystone to Canadian history. And the settlement of New France, with its importation of the seigneurial system along the St. Lawrence river, must be acknowledged. But the process of state formation in North America’s most expansive territory begins with a British-chartered monopoly, a fur trading outfit called the Hudson’s Bay Company.

    Crazy as it sounds, there was a time when beaver hats in Europe were so fashionable that it drove grizzled trappers deep into the boreal forest in search of pelts. Solitary months drifting in canoes, scavenging off the land, marrying into First Nations communities—everything to get in on the beaver trade.

    The Hudson’s Bay Company streamlined the pelt procurement process by establishing trading posts along the great Arctic gateway to the Atlantic. Métis and Indigenous trappers would trade pelts for Made Beavers, a unit of currency that could be exchanged for European goods at the post. These included axes, flintlock muskets, kettles and the iconic HBC point blanket. 

    Canada thus entered the global commodity market as a repository of raw materials to be shovelled into the global furnace of production in exchange for high-value finished products. The fur trade leveraged a claim to nearly four million square kilometres of land—Rupert’s Land—named after the Hudson’s Bay Company’s first governor, a man who never set foot on the territory. Of course, those who had occupied the land for thousands of years were never considered to have claim to it. That is because their traditional economy did not produce commodities and was therefore considered unproductive in Lockean terms. HBC’s claim was premised on their exclusive ability to monetize the land.

    When Canada became a country, it was as a British check on American expansion. Beaver money had to be converted into something more stately and Rupert’s Land had to be purchased from HBC’s British board of governors. Hudson’s Bay Company continued to own and operate trading posts on the land they occupied.

    Hudson’s Bay Company post in Aklavik, Northwest Territories, 1956. Image: Library and Archives Canada.

    The history of Hudson’s Bay is emblematic of the country that it kickstarted. Commodity production creates and destroys. Monopoly capital works like a zombie contagion, converting pristine nature into undead objects for sale and human bodies into lurching agents of accumulation. Beavers were turned into hats and Cree into commercial trappers. When the resource ran dry, nations of people lost their commercial utility and suddenly became barriers to novel means of settler commerce. 

    Reflecting the shift from the fur trade to settler commerce, HBC trading posts rapidly transitioned to general merchandise stores servicing the influx of European farmers, loggers and merchants. As cities grew and banks became more prominent, these merchandise shops became voguish department stores luxuriating in downtown Beaux-Arts constructs.

    The British company was only acquired by Canadian billionaire owners in 1979; coincidentally this was about the time that the national constitution was patriated from London. Throughout the 20th century, The Bay was the crown adorning Canada’s golden age of brick and mortar retail, and millions of HBC point blankets draped over Canadian beds are a visible legacy of this era.

    Sold to American financiers in 2006, The Bay abandoned any ambitions of serving a useful function in the age of Big Tech and financial oligopoly. By 2008, the company made its final transition from department store to “holding company that owns many billions of dollars of real estate.”2 Being taken over by financiers is always the harbinger of a “last stop” before liquidation, which occurred unceremoniously in 2025. 

    In Manitoba, the Southern Chiefs Organization was gifted Winnipeg’s flagship HBC department store and are right now transforming it into a mixed-use facility that includes a First Nations cultural centre, residential complex and independent shops. They have seized a limb of the once-zombifying monopoly and are turning it into an institution to support the living.

    Manitoba First Nations offered a roadmap for resolving historic colonial contradictions and seizing national identity from the clutches of foreign capital. Predictably, political leadership took nothing from this experience. They stood idle as The Bay’s 95 other locations shuttered and 355 years of history—4,400 artworks and artifacts—were auctioned off to the highest bidder.

    From Winnipeg. The Bay had flagships built in all major canadian downtowns. image: wikimedia commons.

    The enslaving logic of profit destroyed The Bay; it is destroying the country. Canada’s Big Six banks control 93% of banking assets. In unison, these same banks walked out on commitments to curb pollution almost the moment Donald Trump won the US presidency, irrespective of domestic opinion. The country is embroiled in a housing crisis culminating in $2.4 trillion worth of mortgages and the highest household debt in the G7. Manufacturing has been in decline since World War II, and tariffs pressure what’s left to move south of the border. Professional ice hockey was once a communitarian experience hosted by the public broadcaster in English, French and Punjabi. Since 2026, the national pastime has disappeared from public airwaves, stowed behind the paywall of a price-gouging telecom monopoly. 

    The economy is extractivist; it exports cheap natural resources and imports expensive finished goods. This has created a climate of persistent low wages and unbearably high costs on everything from basic foodstuffs to energy to housing. Over the last five years, homelessness and lethal drug addiction have created apocalyptic conditions in cities and towns alike. 28% of the country is at poverty-level. Owing to economic distress, 43% of people under 35 are outwardly in favour of American annexation.

    As these very serious crises mount, the latest brainwaves from Canada’s Goldman Sachs-trained prime minister include privatizing airports and putting hundreds of billions of dollars on the national credit card for obsolete weapons of war. A zombie corporation is defined as an unviable business that generates just enough cash flow to pay the interest on its debts and cover basic operating costs, but cannot pay back the principal debt or fund new growth. This now defines the entire country.

    With so much attention paid to American hegemonic decline, the sorry state of countries that uncritically hitched their wagons to the fortune of US power is often overlooked. The decades-long political and economic dependency of the American satellite states is now backfiring as the Trump administration attempts to vassalize allies.

    This should not have been an entirely unforeseen outcome, as accumulation by dispossession driven by finance capital has been in full swing across the world since at least the 1980s, economically ruining many countries en route.3 For Canada, Hudson’s Bay was only the canary in the coal mine, the acid test for the neoliberal crises that now surround us. Although there are proven socialist fixes to the economic trade wars and social decay confronting Canada, the capture of the national elite by private capital will doubtless prevent their implementation.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Paraphrasing Cody Caetano in Rollie Pemberton, “Is It Offensive to Wear the Hudson’s Bay Point Coat?” The Walrus, March 5, 2026. ↩︎

    2. Richard Baker quoted in Don Gillmor, “The End of Hudson’s Bay,” The Walrus, March 26, 2025. ↩︎

    3. One notable exception to this global trend is China. ↩︎
  • Capitalism

    Capitalism

    This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

    There is a claim that capitalism is defined by free trade and markets but this is an obscurity. Capitalism utilizes both markets and economic planning where beneficial, just like every other economic system has done—including hunter-gatherers, ancient Rome and feudal Japan. The definition of capitalism is actually very simple and specific: private ownership of production and wage labour. These characteristics may seem unimpressive from today’s vantage point but their fruition conceals a long and shady history.

    In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher points out the prevailing sentiment of 21st century disempowerment: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”1 As recent movies and television series indicate, there is a fascination with the apocalypse and barren moral landscapes that burn on our consciousness. Now that capitalism is concretized as the social reality in most of the world, the mind’s eye has tunnel vision regarding it. However, this anguish is not a distinct capitalist phenomena. Eschatology is an ancient subject. Generations of medieval peasants saw little change, despite the shifting boundaries of feudal fiefdoms and principalities. The Roman Empire and Ancient Egypt were supposed to last forever. And the Paleolithic era nearly did. For so many who lived and died in the past, it must have also been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of their own way of life.

    That would not be true of every single generation—after all, there are active periods of revolution where artifacts and norms are torn down within the lifetime of individuals. And if anything distinguishes capitalism from what has preceded it, it must be the fixed quality of hectic upheavals. Karl Marx observed: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all soil conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the [capitalist] epoch from all earlier ones.”2 And again: “Modern industry never views or treats the existing form of a productive process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative.”3 The nature of capitalism is therefore paradoxical—its end is unimaginable but so too is any status quo within it. Revolutionary change—in consumer goods, living costs, warfare, culture, nature and demographics—are always descending upon us under capitalism.

    Primitive communism, ancient slave societies and feudalism all arose gradually. The phase transitions triggered by natural human evolution, a warming Neolithic climate and the supplanting of Rome’s slave economy with feudalism all took place over centuries. Not so with capitalism. If capitalism is a spinning-hot mess of instability, conflict, technological invention and brutal exploitation, it’s because it was born in a frenzy of looting, genocidal violence, biological contagion and piracy. Feudal Europe was a pressure cooker of mounting debts, stifled trade routes, Catholic Inquisitions, bubonic plague and a bridled merchant class. Capitalism did not really emerge in the world—it exploded onto it the moment Columbus made landfall on Caribbean shores. Observing the golden adornments and timid nature of the Arawak people he encountered, Columbus salivated: “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

    In a short matter of decades the indigenous societies, mired in less-advanced modes of production like primitive communism and slave economies, were broken to the thunder of Old World disease, technology and thirst for lucre. Gold and silver deposits in the Americas were drained by indigenous labour toiling under the swords of conquistadors, oceans were mercilessly exploited, vast tracts of land were cleared for plantations of sugar, tobacco and cotton, the African slave trade was engaged.4 From the European perspective, wealth seemed to amass from thin air, as all debts were paid far from home in the form of blood and environmental ruination. In a preview of what would later become the stock market, expeditions dedicated to pillaging native kingdoms were funded by investors risking capital for shares on future spoils. It was the ransacking of the Americas, the mass-utilization of African slaves and gunboat diplomacy in Asia that marked capitalism’s primitive accumulation stage. To follow still was the Industrial Revolution and formal colonization of South Asia, the Middle East and continental Africa.

    The concept of phase transition is also described as “the transformation of quantity into quality.” The pillaging of the Americas illustrates this, as a massive rupture to the feudal mode of production burst open once the natural and social wealth of two continents was exposed to those with armaments and the backing of mercantile investors. European land—the primary source of life and wealth through the feudal age—diminished in its preciousness, and the fortunes of the landed aristocracy diminished along with it. The massive surplus of inputs—precious metals, sugar, cotton, forced labour, etc.—was absorbed by the relatively small population of western Europe and forced a phase transition from a relatively closed and stable feudal system into a rabidly expansionary global capitalism.

    As land in Europe lost its importance in a rapidly evolving mode of production, pressure was applied to agriculture to squeeze more out of the lands. New rotation methods were implemented, new American crops like potatoes and corn were planted, new ploughs were deployed, peasants that had worked lands for generations were evicted by force. The separation of peasants from their livelihood on the land is how wage labour emerged. The collision between the masses of peasants dispossessed of their ancestral lands and a new class of capital owners is what gave birth to the modern system: 

    The historical conditions of [capitalism] are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It can spring to life only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with the free labourer selling his labour-power. And this one historical condition comprises a world’s history. Capitalism, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production.5

    Feudalism was being negated fast, especially in Britain where the Industrial Revolution began. The overwhelming amounts of resources flooding Europe spurred productive innovation in order to process it all. New forms of capital were merged into a fledgling factory system, such as steam power, milling machines, blast furnaces and power looms. But now the capital owner was faced with a unique problem posed by this new web of economic relations: overproduction. Too many goods could be produced for the domestic market to possibly absorb at a profit.

    Typical in the history of capitalism, the solution was found at the end of a gun. Leveraging their technological advantages, European states in the service of financial capital laid siege to India and China, the great powers of Asia. China became a dumping ground for opium and the Indian domestic economy collapsed as their market was flooded with cheap European textiles and manufactures. Much of South Asia and Africa were formally colonized, transformed into outlets for excess European production and becoming sites of resource extraction under systems of forced labour.

    It was these three broad motions that resulted in a world under capitalist domination. First, the pillaging of North and South America and genocidal exploitation of enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples. Second, the creation of a mass of wage labourers drawn from the European peasantry through enclosures that separated them from their land. Finally, the establishment of extractive colonies across almost the entirety of Asia and Africa. While these processes have continued to evolve rapidly over the 20th century to the present, the mechanism whereby one class extracts profit at the expense of another has not changed—it is baked into the logic of capitalism. The geographer, David Harvey, sums up capitalist history thus: 

    The transformation of labour, land and money into commodities rested on violence, cheating robbery, swindling and the like. The common lands were enclosed, divided and put up for sale as private property. The gold and silver that formed the initial money commodities were stolen from the Americas. The labour was forced off the land into the status of a “free” wage labourer who could be freely exploited by capital when not outright enslaved or indentured. Such forms of dispossession were foundational to the creation of capital. But even more importantly, they never disappeared.6

    It is difficult not to recognize capitalism as a zero-sum game when considering its history and present-day unfolding. Over a billion people in less-developed capitalist countries live in slums—a number projected to double by 2050. Over 700 “dead zones” without oxygen have formed in the ocean as a byproduct of heavy shipping traffic, plastic waste, overfishing and the acidification of waters by carbon emissions. Over 187 million people have died from wars involving capitalist competition over resources since the last century—and that number is climbing. Even in the core capitalist countries of the West, an increasing number of crises and epidemics are building—the mental health crisis, climate crisis, housing crisis, inflation crisis, drug epidemic, refugee crisis—with more to come. While its productive capacity is unquestionable, an enormous surplus is amassed by a small number of elite capital owners—close to 0.1% of the population—and arrives by a process of destabilizing exploitation, including international military coercion, imbalanced trade treaties and unmitigated pollution of the biosphere.

    It is the contention of classical Marxist philosophy that a positive-sum economy working for all is only possible along the lines of a democratic, classless economy that puts wealth creation and scientific discovery at the disposal of the working class. On progress under capitalism, Marx states:

    When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the markets of the world and the modern powers of production and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.7

    Further Reading:

    Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India.”

    ———–


    1. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), 17. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎

    3. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (Ancient Wisdom Publishing, 2019), 318. ↩︎

    4. Ian Angus, “The Fishing Revolution and the Origins of Capitalism,” Monthly Review, Vol. 74, No. 10. ↩︎

    5. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (Ancient Wisdom Publishing, 2019), 120. ↩︎

    6. David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014), 57. ↩︎

    7. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” in Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007), 125. ↩︎