Marx held slavery as central to capitalism’s primitive accumulation

Evidence

We have already noted Marx’s assessment in his letter to Annenkov in 1846, and his later treatment of the same issue in the first volume of Capital. For Marx, slavery had been “the chief momenta of primitive accumulation,” “an economic category of the highest importance.” First, African workers had been transmuted by the perverted canons of mercantile capitalism into property. Then, African labor power as slave labor was integrated into the organic composition of nineteenth-century manufacturing and industrial capitalism, thus sustaining the emergence of an extra-European world market within which the accumulation of capital was garnered for the further development of industrial production. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 568

With respect to the significance of African labor for the development of European-directed economies on both sides of the Atlantic, the literature again is substantial. We have already noted Marx’s assessment in his letter to Annenkov in 1846, and his later treatment of the same issue in the first volume of Capital. For Marx, slavery had been “the chief momenta of primitive accumulation,” “an economic category of the highest importance.” First, African workers had been transmuted by the perverted canons of mercantile capitalism into property. Then, African labor power as slave labor was integrated into the organic composition of nineteenth-century manufacturing and industrial capitalism, thus sustaining the emergence of an extra-European world market within which the accumulation of capital was garnered for the further development of industrial production. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 568

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the reader’s understanding of Marxism as both analytic frame and target in Robinson’s broader argument about the Black radical tradition’s relation to orthodox Marxism. — connects to: Capitalism was expanding before Marx as colonial extraction — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 41
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 568