They told you capitalism came first. Then racism came along to justify it. You could almost imagine a world where capitalism developed without it.
Cedric Robinson spent his life proving that’s a lie.
Capitalism wasn’t color-blind and then stained by racism. It was built on race. Race was baked into the machinery from day one. Not as a later excuse for exploitation — as the thing that made exploitation invisible.
Before the colonies
The standard story: capitalism developed in Europe as a relatively race-neutral economic system, and then European powers brought racist ideology with them to justify the slave trade and colonial conquest. Race was an excuse — a post-hoc rationalization for exploitation that was really about profit.
Robinson’s argument is that this story starts too late. Before Europeans built colonial empires, they had already developed racial hierarchies at home. Medieval and early modern Europe organized its internal populations by what we would recognize as proto-racial categories — Welsh, Irish, Slavs, Jews — marked as different kinds of people with different capacities and different relationships to law, land, and legitimate violence. The word “slave” itself comes from “Slav” — eastern Europeans who were enslaved in large numbers before African slavery became the dominant form.
When European capitalism developed out of this feudal order, it didn’t leave those hierarchies behind. It incorporated them into its basic architecture. Certain bodies were available for certain kinds of use. Certain labor was compensated and certain labor was expropriated. The racial classification system didn’t justify exploitation after the fact — it made exploitation legible as not-exploitation. You cannot steal from someone who is not recognized as having the kind of self that can own things.
What the plantation actually was
On the plantation, a human being is classified as property. Every hour of work goes to the owner. Reproduction happens at no cost to the system — the enslaved person’s body does it. Risk is externalized completely. There is no legal recourse, no counter-power that labor could build. This is capitalism’s ideal form — the complete externalization of reproduction costs, the complete suppression of any counter-power that labor might organize. And it was only possible because racial classification made the violence invisible as violence.
W.E.B. Du Bois extended this analysis in Black Reconstruction in America (1935). White workers in the post-Civil War United States accepted lower material wages in exchange for what he called the “wages of whiteness” — the psychological and social benefits of racial classification that set them above Black workers. This is a devastating analysis of why working-class solidarity across racial lines has been so difficult to build in the United States. It’s not that white workers are uniquely racist. It’s that the system is structured so that racial solidarity offers white workers a concrete benefit — access to the category of the fully human, the legally protected, the politically visible — that class solidarity does not automatically provide. Capitalism uses racial hierarchy to fragment the class that might otherwise challenge it.
The Black radical tradition as commons
The second half of Robinson’s book does something unexpected. Having established racial capitalism as a structural condition, he turns to the question of how Black people under slavery and colonialism responded — not just politically, but philosophically and culturally.
What he finds is a tradition of thought and practice that developed in the conditions of its own suppression: in slave ships, plantations, maroon communities, churches, informal economies, music, storytelling, and organized resistance. He calls this the Black radical tradition.
The maroon communities of Jamaica, Suriname, and the American South are commons in Ostrom’s sense: bounded, self-governing, with their own rules, their own dispute resolution, their own productive organization. They weren’t built from abundance. They were built from the margins of extraction, with whatever could be taken from or refused to the plantation economy.
The Black church. The mutual aid societies of free Black communities in the antebellum North. The networks of the Underground Railroad. The organizational infrastructure of the civil rights movement. These are all commons — shared resources governed by the communities that depend on them, maintained through collective effort, without private ownership or state management.
The people capitalism classified as outside the human built the most durable commons traditions we have. Built them under conditions explicitly designed to prevent that. Built them anyway.
That is not resilience in the face of oppression. That is the proof that commons-making is fundamental to what people do when they’re free to choose how to live together. The next piece shows how that tradition looks from the global south — in Rodney’s account of underdevelopment as a verb..