ABSTRACT
Lenin’s analysis of the American path of bourgeois development was based on generalizations drawn from the white settlement regions and especially from the homestead west. But the United States was not only a European settlement colony: the American South was a plantation or “exploitation” colony, according to the early Marxist taxonomy. Next to the Native Americans, the main victims of European settler colonialism in what is now the United States were the blacks kidnapped from Africa to be sold as slaves in America. In this chapter we will attempt to provide a materialist analysis of the evolution of the Southern mode of production and of its “superstructure” of segregation and white supremacy.
