"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. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.... If money according to Augier, 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek', capital comes dripping from head to foot from every pore with blood and dirt."

-Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1

The brutality and viciousness of capitalism is well known to the oppressed and exploited of this world. Billions of people throughout the world spend their lives incessantly toiling to enrich the already wealthy, while throughout history any serious attempts to build alternatives to capitalism have been met with bombings, invasions, and blockades by imperialist nation states. Although the modern day ideologues of the mass media and of institutions such as the World Bank and IMF never cease to inveigh against scattered acts of violence perpetrated against their system, they always neglect to mention that the capitalist system they lord over was called into existence and has only been able to maintain itself by the sustained application of systematic violence. It should come as no surprise that this capitalist system, which we can only hope is now reaching the era of its final demise, was just as rapacious and vicious in its youth as it is now. The "rosy dawn" of capitalist production was inaugurated by the process of slavery and genocide in the western hemisphere, and this "primitive accumulation of capital" resulted in the largest systematic murder of human beings ever seen. However, the rulers of society have found that naked force is often most economically used in conjunction with ideologies of domination and control which provide a legitimizing explanation for the oppressive nature of society. Racism is such a construct and it came into being as a social relation which condoned and secured the initial genocidal processes of capitalist accumulation--the founding stones of contemporary bourgeois society.

While it is widely accepted that the embryonic capitalist class came to power in the great bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, what is comparatively less well known is the crucial role that chattel slavery and the plunder of the "New World" played in calling this class into being and providing the "primitive accumulation of capital" necessary to launch and sustain industrialization in Europe. The accidental "discovery" of the Western Hemisphere by the mass murderer Christopher Columbus in 1492 changed everything for the rival economic and political interests of the European states. The looting and pillaging of the "New World" destabilized the European social order, as Spain raised huge armies and built armadas with the unending streams of gold and silver coming from the "New World", the spending of which devalued the currency reserves of its rivals. The only way Portugal, England, Holland, and France could stay ahead in the regional power games of Europe was to embark on their own colonial ventures.

In addition to the extraction of precious minerals and the looting and pillaging of indigenous societies, European merchant-adventurers realized that substantial profits could also be made through the production of cash crops on the fertile lands surrounding the Caribbean sea. The only problem was that as the indigenous population either fled from enslavement or perished from the diseases and deprivations of the Europeans, there was no one left to raise the sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, and other tropical cash crops that were so profitable. A system of waged labour would not work for the simple reason that with plentiful land and easy means of subsistence surrounding them, colonists would naturally prefer small scale homesteading instead of labouring for their masters. As the planter Emanuel Downing of Massachusetts put it in 1645: "I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business, for our children's children will hardly see this great continent filled with people so that our servants will still desire freedom to plant for themselves, and not stay but for very great wages." Capitalistic social relations have always been based on compulsion, and they require as a precondition that workers possess nothing but their capacity to labour. The would-be developers of the wealth of the "New World" thus turned to forced labour in complete contradiction to all the theories of bourgeois economists because unfree labour was the only kind of labour applicable to the concrete situation in the Americas.

Although slavery is now, and has almost always been equated with unfree Black labour, it was not always, or even predominantly so. Capitalists looked first to their own societies in order to find the population to labour in servitude on the large-scale plantations necessary for tropical cash crop production. Eric Williams, in his groundbreaking work Capitalism and Slavery, noted that in the early stages of colonialism "white slavery was the historic base upon which Negro [sic] slavery was constructed." Between 1607 and 1783 over a quarter million "white" indentured servants arrived in the British colonies alone where they were set to work in the agricultural and industrial processes of the time. The shipping companies, ports, and trading routes established for the transport of the poor, "criminal", and lumpen elements of European society were to form the backbone of the future slave trade of Africans.

Slavery became an exclusively Black institution due to the dynamics of class struggle as repeated multi-ethnic rebellions of African slaves and indentured European servants led the slaveholders to seek strategies to divide and conquer. The fact that an African slave could be purchased for life with the same amount of money that it would cost to buy an indentured servant for 10 years, and that the African's skin color would function as an instrument of social control by making it easier to track down runaway slaves in a land where all whites were free wage labourers and all Black people slaves, provided further incentives for this system of racial classification. In the colonies where there was an insufficient free white population to provide a counterbalance to potential slave insurgencies, such as on the Caribbean islands, an elaborate hierarchy of racial privilege was built up, with the lighter skinned "mulattos" admitted to the ranks of free men where they often owned slaves themselves. The concept of a "white race" never really existed before the economic systems of early capitalism made it a necessary social construct to aid in the repression of enslaved Africans. Xenophobia and hostility towards those who were different than one's own immediate family, clan, or tribe were certainly evident, and discrimination based on religious status was also widespread but the development of modern "scientific" racism with its view that there are physically distinct "races" within humanity, with distinct attributes and characteristics is peculiar to the conquest of the Americas, the rise of slavery, and the imperialist domination of the entire world.

Racism provided a convenient way to explain the subordinate position of Africans and other victims of Euro-colonialism, while at the same time providing an apparatus upon which to structure the granting of special privileges to sectors of the working class admitted as members of the "white race". As David McNally has noted, one of the key component of modern racism was its utility in resolving the contradiction as to how the modern European societies in which the bourgeoisie had come to power through promising "freedom" and "equality" were so reliant on slave labour and murderous, yet highly profitable colonial adventures. The development of a concept like racism allowed whole sections of the world's population to be "excommunicated" from humankind, and then be murdered or worked to death with a clear conscience for the profit of the capitalist class.

To get a sense of the scale of slavery and its economic importance, and thus an understanding of the material incentives for the creation of ideological constructs such as "race", a few statistics regarding the English slave trade from Eric Williams' book Capitalism and Slavery help to put things in context. The Royal African Company, a monopolistic crown corporation, transported an average of 5 000 slaves a year between 1680 and 1686. When the ability to engage in the free trade of slaves was recognized as a "fundamental and natural right" of the Englishman, one port city alone, Bristol, shipped 160 950 slaves from 1698-1707. In 1760, 146 slave ships with a capacity for 36 000 slaves sailed from British ports, while in 1771 that number had increased to 190 ships with a capacity for 47 000 slaves. Between 1700 and 1786 over 610 000 slaves were imported to Jamaica alone, and conservative estimates for the total import of slaves into all British colonies between 1680 and 1786 are put at over two million. All told, many historians place the total number of Africans displaced by the Atlantic slave trade as being between twelve and thirty million people--a massive historical event and forced migration of unprecedented proportions.

These large numbers of slaves and the success of the slave trade as jump starter for capitalist industrialization came from what has been called the "triangular trade"--an intensely profitable economic relationship which built up European industry while systematically deforming and underdeveloping the other economic regions involved. The Europeans would produce manufactured goods that would then be traded to ruling elites in the various African kingdoms. They in turn would use the firearms and trading goods of the Europeans to enrich themselves by capturing members of rival tribes, or the less fortunate of their own society, to sell them as slaves to the European merchants who would fill their now empty ships with slaves destined to work in the colonial plantations. On the plantations, the slaves would toil to produce expensive cash crops that could not be grown in Europe. These raw materials were then refined and sold at fantastic profit in Europe. In 1697, the tiny island of Barbados with its 166 square miles, was worth more to British capitalism than New England, New York, and Pennsylvania combined, while by 1798, the income accruing to the British from the West Indian plantations alone was four million pounds a year, as opposed to one million pounds from the whole rest of the world. Capitalist economists of the day recognized the super profitability of slavery by noting the ease of making 100% profit on the trade, and by noting that one African slave was as profitable as seven workers in the mainland. Even more importantly, the profits of the slave trade were plowed back into further economic growth. Capital from the slave trade financed James Watt and the invention and production of the steam engine, while the shipping, insurance, banking, mining, and textile industries were all thoroughly integrated into the slave trade.

What an analysis of the origins of modern capitalism shows is just how far the capitalist class will go to make a profit. The development of a pernicious racist ideology, spread to justify the uprooting and enslavement of millions of people to transport them across the world to fill a land whose indigenous population was massacred or worked to death, represents the beginnings of the system that George W. Bush defends as "our way of life". For revolutionaries today who seek to understand and transform capitalism and the racism encoded into its very being, it is essential to understand how and why these systems of domination and exploitation came into being before we can hope to successfully overthrow them.

Some useful sources for further analysis of the questions raised in this article can be found in the following books:
David McNally. "Chapter 4: The Colour of Money" in Another World is Possible.
Eric Williams. Capitalism and Slavery.
Karl Marx. Capital Vol. 1.
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.