Robin Blackburn and other radical of slavery draw on Cedric Robinson’s concept of ‘racial capitalism’, which can be used to balance or provide nuance and context to the Afro Pessimism claim that slaveness and Africanness are one and the same. In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson writes that racism was already present in Western civilization prior to the flourishing of Capitalism. So, capitalism and racism grew together from the old order to produce the ‘racial capitalism’ characteristic of the modern world. This new world system relied on slavery, violence, imperialism and genocide for its continued expansion. The value of Cedric Robinson’s work lies in Robinson’s ability to uncover the contingent relationship between slavery and Blackness: he argues that early European proletarians were racialised subjects from oppressed groups, such as the Jews, Irish, Roma or Slavs, who were all victims of dispossession, colonialism and slavery within Europe. With the dawn of the...
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