ABSTRACT
In the colonies the capitalist regime “constantly comes up against the obstacle presented by the producer, who, as owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself instead of the capitalist.” The excesses committed by Spanish “conquistadors,” so well exploited later on by England and France to take over the colonial power enjoyed by Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had its own criticism among Spanish missionaries as well. During the European Renaissance people around the world were mainly located in space, not in time. Christianity did not link “the infidels” with beings less developed or behind in time. It was during the eighteenth century and the European Enlightenment that people outside of Europe began to be located in time. The secular idea of “primitives” replaced that of the “infidels.” The modern/colonial world was founded and sustained through a geopolitical organization of the world that, in the last analysis, consisted of an ethnoracial foundation.
