Slavery was central to capitalism, not a mere primitive precondition

Evidence

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 82 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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: Slavery formed the demographic and economic backbone of precolonial West African states; Enslaved Africans carried their cultures and consciousness into slavery, contradicting primitive accumulation; Post-1877 capitalism used differential reward by race to stabilize wealth (+25 more)

Related

• Capitalists extracted Black labor while letting African social formations reproduce the supply (similarity 0.89)
• Capitalist accumulation was built on colonial conquest and enslavement. (similarity 0.89)
• Du Bois reconceptualized American slavery as a subsystem of world capitalism (similarity 0.88)
• American slavery was a forewarning of how capitalism would exploit global labor (similarity 0.88)
• Slavery was a critical foundation for early capitalism (similarity 0.88)
• Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance (similarity 0.87)
• Du Bois concluded slavery and capitalism were systemically linked and periphery drove revolution (similarity 0.87)
• Slavery was systemic to modern capitalism, not an historical aberration. (similarity 0.87)
• Slave labor was integral to modern capitalism, not a pre-capitalist stage (similarity 0.86)
• Madeira’s sugar plantations first institutionalized slave labor as capitalist commodity production (similarity 0.86)
• Capitalism preserving unfree labor is a deviant historical case (similarity 0.86)
• Crises in capitalism do not inevitably dissolve pre-capitalist modes. (similarity 0.86)
• European colonization employed slave labor as its foundational institution, not incidentally (similarity 0.85)
• Racism and nationalism predate capitalism and shaped its development. (similarity 0.85)
• Marx held slavery as central to capitalism’s primitive accumulation (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Capitalist accumulation was built on colonial conquest and enslavement. #corroborates (0.85) — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 82
• Du Bois reconceptualized American slavery as a subsystem of world capitalism #corroborates (0.75) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 931
• Capitalism preserving unfree labor is a deviant historical case #contradicts (0.70)
• Racism and nationalism predate capitalism and shaped its development. #expands (0.40) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 122
• The slave trade supplied the cause that turned racialism into the Negro #expands (0.35)