Genovese mis-frames slavery as precapitalist, distorting the world system

Evidence

The terms of his analysis were quite important to Du Bois. They were a part of his beginning of the transformation of the historiography of American civilization—the naming of things. In the changing of the names of things, he sought to provide the basis for a new conceptualization of their relationship. In the first three chapters of his work, Du Bois established the rules of his analysis. The institution of American slave labor could not be effectively conceptualized as a thing in and of itself. Rather, it was a particular historical development for world capitalism that expropriated the labor of African workers as primitive accumulation. American slavery was a subsystem of world capitalism. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 931 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: American slavery was a forewarning of how capitalism would exploit global labor; Marx presupposed a coherent racist and imperial ordering of world capitalism; Du Bois reconceptualized American slavery as a subsystem of world capitalism — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 931 (+1 more)

Related

• Du Bois reconceptualized American slavery as a subsystem of world capitalism (similarity 0.86)
• American slavery was a forewarning of how capitalism would exploit global labor (similarity 0.86)
• Slavery was systemic to modern capitalism, not an historical aberration. (similarity 0.83)
• Marx presupposed a coherent racist and imperial ordering of world capitalism (similarity 0.82)
• Slavery was central to capitalism, not a mere primitive precondition (similarity 0.82)
• Du Bois concluded slavery and capitalism were systemically linked and periphery drove revolution (similarity 0.81)
• Slavery was a critical foundation for early capitalism (similarity 0.80)
• American slavery’s nineteenth-century expansion foreshadowed global capitalist development. (similarity 0.80)
• European colonization employed slave labor as its foundational institution, not incidentally (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalist expansion pursued racial directions, not the rationalization Marx expected (similarity 0.80)
• European capitalist hegemony reduced African labor to pawning across the world system (similarity 0.80)
• Crises in capitalism do not inevitably dissolve pre-capitalist modes. (similarity 0.79)
• Slave labor was integral to modern capitalism, not a pre-capitalist stage (similarity 0.78)
• Capitalism conserving non-capitalist modes produces racial and colonial ideologies. (similarity 0.78)
• Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Du Bois reconceptualized American slavery as a subsystem of world capitalism #corroborates (0.70) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 931
• European capitalist hegemony reduced African labor to pawning across the world system #expands (0.60)
• Marx presupposed a coherent racist and imperial ordering of world capitalism #corroborates (0.55)