ABSTRACT
In American Civilization, in 1950, C.L.R. James is advancing the earlier idea of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America in 1935 into a more general theory of the role of the racial wage in capitalist labor. James was a poet of sorts, a social and political theorist, an historian, and a visionary as to the structural morbidity of global capitalism. In the European colonies the colonizers remained a presence by creating a more continuous racial order—in part through inbreeding, but more through the imposition of social gradations by which Blacks could aspire to a position of relative privilege in the dominating capitalist societies. Walter Rodney makes the compelling distinction that whatever the parallels between the slave system in the West Indies and in the United States, what was different was the manner in which the European colonial system made West Indian racism unique.
