Slave revolts obeyed the same historical laws as the European factory proletariat

Evidence

While they had been content to locate the formation of the modern revolutionary proletariat at the core of capitalist industrial production, James was insisting that the sphere be broadened. “At the same time as the French [masses], the half-savage slaves of San Domingo were showing themselves subject to the same historical laws as the advanced workers of revolutionary Paris” (p. 243). Capitalism had produced its social and historical negations in both poles of its expropriation: capitalist accumulation gave birth to the proletariat at the manufacturing core; “primitive accumulation” deposited the social base for the revolutionary masses in the peripheries. But what distinguished the formations of these revolutionary classes was the source of their ideological and cultural developments. While the European proletariat had been formed through and by the ideas of the bourgeoisie (“the ruling ideas,” Marx and Engels had maintained, “were the ideas of the ruling class”), in Haiti and presumably elsewhere among slave populations, the Africans had constructed their own revolutionary culture: [O]ne does not need education or encouragement to cherish a dream of freedom. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1286

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the core claim of the Black radical tradition: peripheral slave masses formed a revolutionary class through their own culture, unlike Europeans formed by bourgeois ideas.
• QUESTION: James did not see the full implication that bourgeois ideology was irrelevant to Third World revolutionary consciousness — worth chasing how this develops.