Capitalism developed along essentially racial lines, not rational universalist ones

Evidence

Racism, I maintain, was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the “internal” relations of European peoples. As part of the inventory of Western civilization it would reverberate within and without, transferring its toll from the past to the present. In contradistinction to Marx’s and Engels’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term “racial capitalism” to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure as a historical agency. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 115

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and defines the book’s central coinage ‘racial capitalism.’
• XREF: Inverts and corrects Marx’s and Engels’s rationalization thesis — the load-bearing foil behind the entire study. — connects to: Racializations of South Asians, Arabs, and Muslims were intertwined from capitalism’s start