The standard story of race and capitalism: capitalism developed in Europe as an economic system organized around wage labor, private property, and market exchange — functionally color-blind, concerned with capital and labor rather than the bodies carrying them. Then European powers expanded outward, encountered peoples they wanted to exploit, and developed racial ideology to justify that exploitation after the fact. Race was the cover story. The economic system was the engine. The two were, in principle, separable. The separability is the illusion.
Before Europeans built colonial empires, they had already built racial hierarchies inside Europe. Medieval and early modern European societies organized their internal populations through what we would recognize as proto-racial categories — Welsh, Irish, Slavic, Jewish — marked as distinct kinds of persons with distinct relationships to law, to land, to legitimate violence, to the category of the fully human. The word slave descends from Slav: eastern Europeans enslaved in large numbers before African slavery became the dominant form. The hierarchy wasn't imported from the colonies. It was the condition out of which capitalism developed.
In 1972 Walter Rodney published How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The argument begins with a sentence that reframes the entire conversation:
Africa was not underdeveloped. Africa was developed — into poverty. Not accidentally. Deliberately. By mechanisms that can be identified and traced.
The Atlantic slave trade removed an estimated twelve million people from Africa over roughly four centuries. The world those people came from — the cities and trade networks and governance structures, the craft knowledge fitted into walls without mortar, the political administrations governing millions — went with them. The demographic cost was larger than the number suggests: for every person transported, others died in raids, in coastal holding pens, in the crossing. In the regions most intensively exploited, population growth reversed for generations. The economic impact compounded the demographic — the trade restructured African political economies around slave-raiding rather than production, destroyed the social cooperation that sustained development, created dependencies on European trade goods that made African producers import-dependent. The trade didn't just remove people. It reorganized the continent around European demand.
Then formal colonization. By 1900, European powers controlled almost the entire continent. One detail stands for the structure: railways built to connect mines and plantations to ports, not to connect African cities to each other. Infrastructure oriented entirely outward — linking Africa to Europe rather than Africa to itself. The colonies were not economies. They were logistics networks for someone else's economy. Inscription on the continent itself — the spell written in steel.
The assimilation project that raised Fanon — the promise that civilization was achievable by anyone willing to adopt its forms, that the distance between the colonial subject and the metropolitan citizen could be crossed by education and cultivation — was conditional in ways it would never acknowledge. Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952, is the framework in its first form: a young Black intellectual analyzing, from inside, what it does to a person to be raised in a culture that names you inferior, to internalize that naming, to spend your life in the impossible project of proving it wrong to people whose recognition you do not need and cannot stop wanting.
Sylvia Wynter spent years trying to write the Caribbean into literary existence — not as backdrop for European stories but as the center of its own history, its own ways of being human. That practice — telling a story about what it means to be human from a position the existing category of the human had excluded — is where the theoretical argument came from. You cannot write Caribbean history seriously without noticing that the people in it have been systematically classified as less than fully human. You cannot notice that without asking who made the classification, when, and for what purpose. When you follow that question far enough, you arrive at the claim: the category of the human itself was constructed to produce the outside.
Medieval Christian Europe understood what human beings were through a theological framework — to be fully human was to be made in the image of God. The Renaissance shifted this. The figure that emerged at the center of European humanism was Man — a rational, self-determining agent, capable of mastering nature through reason. But Man was not a description of the human species. He was a portrait of a specific kind of person — educated, propertied, European, male — whose particular attributes were elevated into the definition of what it means to be fully human. Everyone else was measured against this standard and found deficient.
Wynter calls this overrepresentation: one civilization's self-portrait became the definition of the Human itself. Everyone else was measured against a mirror they didn't make.
There is a version of this argument running through the present moment. The large language model produces the statistical average of human expression — the most probable next word, synthesized from everything that has been written down. It is extraordinarily useful for many things. What it cannot produce is singularity: the specific, irreducible thing that a particular person or community knows that no averaging process can recover. The most important thing about any person is precisely what averaging cannot hold. Wynter's overrepresentation is not a medieval error that modernity corrected — it is a structural tendency that keeps finding new forms, because the systems we build keep reaching for a universal human to optimize against, and the universal human is always someone's self-portrait pretending to be a mirror.
In July 1936, Francisco Franco launched a fascist military coup against the Spanish Republic. In Catalonia and Aragon, workers and peasants didn't wait for a party directive.
In Barcelona, workers took over the trams and kept them running — under workers' control, with elected management committees, fares reduced to a flat rate anyone could afford. The precision engineering workshops that had made Barcelona one of Europe's industrial centers were collectivized and converted for war production. In the Aragon countryside, hundreds of villages collectivized their land — not under compulsion but by assembly, by the communities that had worked it deciding collectively how it would be governed. The CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist labor union with over a million members, provided the organizational framework.
Thomas Henry Huxley had argued in 1888 that nature was a "gladiatorial show" of mutual slaughter, that evolution rewarded the strong and eliminated the weak. This story was immediately adopted by everyone who needed it: industrialists whose accumulation became nature's verdict, colonial powers whose domination became biological necessity. The entire ideology now called Social Darwinism.
Kropotkin read Huxley from Siberia and found it inaccurate. Competition doesn't explain the patterns he observed. Cooperation does. The most successful species — the ones that survived the brutal Siberian winters — were not the most competitive. They were the most cooperative. Mutual aid was not the exception to the evolutionary record. It was the dominant strategy.
He spent the next twenty years building the evidence: insects, birds, mammals, human societies across every continent and historical period — the same pattern everywhere. Communities that developed mutual aid survived. Communities that didn't, didn't. The guilds of medieval Europe, self-governing and self-supporting for centuries. The village communes of Russia, managing shared land through collective governance without state or market. The rotating credit associations that immigrant communities built wherever they arrived, providing capital entirely outside the banking system. In one of the book's most striking passages, he describes Siberian horses during a blizzard: when the temperature drops past what they can survive alone, they form a tight circle, heads inward, taking turns at the exposed outer edge. No hierarchy. No leader. A distributed solution to a collective problem, arrived at without deliberation. It works because it has to.
Between roughly 1400 and 1700, between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed as witches across Europe and the American colonies — roughly half of the 100,000 or so brought to trial. About eighty percent of those killed were women. Most were over forty. Many were widows holding land or income of their own. Most were healers, herbalists, midwives — women whose knowledge of bodies and plants and birth made communities less dependent on the emerging market.
The body count understates the impact. The women killed were already the ones most likely to be holding what the new economy needed to take: communal knowledge, autonomous land tenure, the practical knowhow that let villages reproduce themselves without the wage. Two hundred years of trials systematically removed that demographic from the European landscape. The terror reached far beyond the executed: every woman watching learned what knowing too much, owning too much, or living too independently could cost.
The standard historical account treats this as mass hysteria overcome by Enlightenment.
Federici's argument: it was policy. Divination — naming what the surface concept had hidden.
Silvia Federici documented the same policy in fifteenth-century Europe: the healers, the midwives, the women who held the accumulated medical knowledge of their communities, executed as witches during the same decades that their knowledge was being systematically extracted and formalized by the institutions that would become modern medicine. Arundhati Roy documented the same policy in contemporary India: the adivasi communities whose knowledge of the forest was inseparable from their relationship to it, displaced so the resources could be extracted without the inconvenience of the people who had developed them.