Slaves and agrarian workers, not industrial workers, attacked capitalism
Evidence
In the turbulence of the American Civil War and a social revolution carried through by the mobilized slaves and the white agrarian workers, it had been the manufacturing and industrial working classes that had hesitated, drawn to counterrevolution by racism and a short-sighted perception of their class interest. The class struggle had been distorted and a proletarian revolutionary consciousness among nineteenth-century American workers had been effectively interdicted by the ideological power of racism and the seductiveness of the bourgeois myth of social mobility. It was the slaves (in truth an enslaved peasantry) and other agrarian workers who had mounted the attack on capitalism. It was, Du Bois observed, from the periphery and not the center that the most sustained threat to the American capitalist system had materialized. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1438
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Pays off the book’s recurring thesis that the periphery, not the center, generated revolutionary threat.
Related
- Du Bois concluded slavery and capitalism were systemically linked and periphery drove revolution (similarity 0.86)
- Slavery was systemic to modern capitalism, not an historical aberration. (similarity 0.86)
- Slavery was a critical foundation for early capitalism (similarity 0.84)
- Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance (similarity 0.83)
- European colonization employed slave labor as its foundational institution, not incidentally (similarity 0.83)
- Post-1877 racial division of labor was engineered to stabilize capitalist wealth (similarity 0.83)
- Capitalist interests that built the slave system later turned and destroyed it (similarity 0.82)
- Capitalism preserving unfree labor is a deviant historical case (similarity 0.82)
- Slave labor was integral to modern capitalism, not a pre-capitalist stage (similarity 0.82)
- Capitalists extracted Black labor while letting African social formations reproduce the supply (similarity 0.82)
- Slavery was central to capitalism, not a mere primitive precondition (similarity 0.82)
- Slave labor sustained the extra-European market that industrial capitalism built on (similarity 0.82)
- American slavery was a forewarning of how capitalism would exploit global labor (similarity 0.82)
- British capitalism ended West Indian slavery but thrived on American, Cuban, and Brazilian slavery (similarity 0.81)
- Du Bois reconceptualized American slavery as a subsystem of world capitalism (similarity 0.81)
Broader Connections
- Slave labor was integral to modern capitalism, not a pre-capitalist stage
#corroborates(0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 118 - Slavery was central to capitalism, not a mere primitive precondition
#corroborates(0.80) - Saint-Domingue’s revolution was driven by slaves, not slave owners
#exemplifies(0.80) - Slavery was a critical foundation for early capitalism
#corroborates(0.70) - Slave labor sustained the extra-European market that industrial capitalism built on
#corroborates(0.70) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 568 - Abolition of slavery coincided with capitalism’s reorganization toward new labor forms
#expands(0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1434 - Plantation slavery combined capitalist and non-capitalist modes in dominance
#expands(0.60) - American slavery was a forewarning of how capitalism would exploit global labor
#expands(0.60) - Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism
#corroborates(0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 556 - British capitalism ended West Indian slavery but thrived on American, Cuban, and Brazilian slavery
#expands(0.50) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 755