Racial capitalism is the driving force of imperialist expansion- our modern day colonialism

Scholars who have written on the topic of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism in recent decades therefore generally have agreed with the premise of racial capitalism, whether or not they used this term. To invoke racial capitalism is to recognize the primal role of race in development and maintenance of capitalism. Although Cedric Robinson coined the term in Black Marxism (1983), W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction (1935) detailed decades earlier how the racial division of labor and racist violence served capitalism. Racial capitalism also devastated the Indigenous, deeming them unworthy of the land and waters that had given them sustenance since the beginning of recorded time. There were (and are) commonalities among those brutalized by racial capitalism, whether they were (and are) Asian, Pacific Islander, African, Latin American, Indigenous and/or Native. Du Bois saw that by the end of the nineteenth century, the twinned conditions of capitalism and colonialism made racism a global dilemma. “The problem of the twentieth century,” he famously wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”75 Scholars can argue whether or not capitalism began as a global system, but they should agree that racial capitalism certainly did: that it continued as a global system, continually expanding into new areas in order to create an endless supply of surplus for reinvestment in a continuous loop.76 It was through an imperialist infrastructure, a world-system, that racial capitalism was and has been able to feed its hunger for resources, labor, and markets. Rather than characterizing imperialism as the “highest stage of capitalism,” as his contemporary in Russia did, it is probably more useful to see, as Du Bois did, that the reverse was true: early modern and modern imperialism created the conditions for racial capitalism.77 As scholars like Gerald Horne have detailed, imperial violence and encroachment allowed racial capitalism to spawn and spread.78 This process, of course, took centuries. 1492 marked simply a beginning. The same with 1619. The patterns of global inequities that we see today were mostly set in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.79 As the discussion above suggests, capitalist empires relied on mixed methods of production, with both labor that was clearly capitalist (waged) and labor that some scholars characterize as non-capitalist (non-waged). Capitalist expropriation— again, the negation of the ability to live or build wealth outside of the market system—gave those that became capitalist earlier the ability to prevent or hamper others from retaining or building wealth. So, not only was the ladder kicked away, but it was used as a weapon to batter others down. To say capitalist imperialism with “capitalism” as the adjective modifying “imperialism” suits our purposes today better than the other way around as Lenin did. Lenin used “imperialism” as a modifier for “capitalism” for the narrow purpose of explaining the function of colonization to capitalist powers in his contemporary world. From about 1870, when Lenin was born, to 1916, when his essay came out, a great part of the world was under the colonial dominion of Europe, Japan, and the United States. Lenin was not considering pre-nineteenth century imperialism in his formulation. For a longer historical view, it is more useful to say capitalist imperialism because doing so acknowledges pre-nineteenth century imperialism, but also emphasizes capitalism as a rupture in the long world history of empires. The scale and scope of imperialism in the modern, capitalist era, as well as its intrusiveness in daily life distinguished it from earlier imperialisms such as those of the Roman, Greek, Mughal, Mongol, Han, Aztec, Songhai, premodern Caliphates, etc.80 Capitalist empires, distinct from pre-modern and early modern empires, both appropriate and expropriate. They seize tribute, wealth, and goods from subject peoples, and they take away wealth-making capacities of subject peoples by restructuring their labor and resources so that they are mostly (although not totally) oriented towards the market needs of the empire. So, to repeat the definition above: modern imperialism is when a stronger polity subjects a weaker one to its own economic preferences through the expropriation of resources and labor.