1492 Reframed: Capitalism’s racial blueprint in the U.S.

capitalism and – A new book review revisits the debate over how race and capitalism were built together—tracing key turning points from 1492 through the Atlantic slave trade and into the making of modern racial categories—while tying the argument to a long-running political di

Better to start the history of the United States in 1492 than in 1776.

The insistence isn’t a provocation for its own sake. It comes with a lived intellectual journey: the writer says they have grappled with the relationship between capitalism and race since becoming a leftist. beginning with an interest—later activism—in the Black Freedom movement. and then turning toward the thinking of Malcolm X after reading his autobiography at age 13 in the fall of 1967.

Both Malcolm X and later the Black Panther Party. the writer recalls. refuted the idea that “race” and capitalism developed as two separate processes. They also argued that racist and national oppression couldn’t be resolved without a direct confrontation with capitalism. But that still left a hard question hanging in the background: what would such an understanding demand strategically, in practice.

The writer traces that search to a formulation by George Padmore. a longtime communist and a leading member of the Communist International who later became a noncommunist Pan Africanist. In 1937, Padmore was asked by the socialist magazine Left Review to contribute to a symposium on the Spanish Civil War. He expressed solidarity with the Spanish Popular Front and the struggle against fascism. but he was frustrated that his Spanish comrades hadn’t treated what was then called the “national-colonial question” as central—particularly in relation to Spain’s colonization and racialization of parts of Africa.

Padmore pointed to the irony that Africans and other colonial peoples could be moved by the fight against fascist “barbarism” precisely because they hadn’t forgotten Abyssinia. referring to the Italian invasion of what is now Ethiopia under Mussolini. Yet Padmore said it was “so regrettable” that democratic Spain. by failing to make an anti-imperialist gesture to the Moors. played into Franco’s hands. He framed it as a reminder to European workers: “No people who oppress another people can themselves be free.”.

That quote—discovered years earlier and described as haunting—connects a recurring radical dilemma to a specific historical lesson: progressive forces. Padmore argued. couldn’t separate the struggle against fascism from the struggle against empire and colonialism. The writer reads the demand as a requirement to engage politics with both anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism. fighting for racial and national emancipation as well as emancipation from exploitation and dictatorship.

In that light. the writer says the stakes feel urgent in the United States and beyond because the debate over race and capitalism has never stayed theoretical. Within socialist and progressive movements. it keeps returning in “late-night bull sessions” and in white papers and policy programs. with questions that remain unresolved: whether unifying class politics can emancipate “all of the oppressed” without marginalizing race. national oppression. and sex; whether economic programs should be the priority or whether other injustices must come first; what to do with national liberation movements that uplift some groups in a region but not others; and how nation-state building fits with socialism’s internationalist ambitions.

The writer argues that. in the United States. the debate has existed “in effect” since the colonial era—while also being a persistent source of division around the world as republican and anti-colonial movements emerged. especially across the Southern Hemisphere. Behind it all is the theme that periodically sparks controversy in political history: the role the European conquest of the Americas and the slave trade in Africans played in developing capitalism as a global system.

The new book at the center of the review, Capital and Race: The History of a Modern Hydra, is by Silvie Laurent, with Ann Leroux translating. The writer’s main emphasis is on Laurent’s decision to build the story around the year 1492.

Laurent, the writer stresses, does not claim 1492 marked the beginning of capitalism. Capitalism, Laurent describes, unfolded over hundreds of years through agricultural, mercantile, and industrial stages. Still. the writer says Laurent shows dramatic changes in the scale and pace of capitalist development that could have happened only around the conquest of the Americas and the introduction of the African slave trade—linked to Spain’s victory in the Reconquista. the defeat of the Moors. the expulsion of the Jews. and the start of the invasion of the Western Hemisphere.

That timeline ties into a sharper disagreement the writer admits they have. Laurent. in the writer’s view. cautiously accepts the notion that the construction of race preceded the rise of capitalism—a point the writer says they disagree with. What Laurent does identify. the writer says. is an early expression of racialization in Europe through the persecution of populations such as Jews. who were racialized as “others” before the full development of capitalism with the enslavement of Africans and the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

Laurent. the writer adds. does not address whether similar racialization tendencies existed elsewhere in the world. or why they didn’t play a similar role in other contexts. But the book’s argument. as presented here. is that the post-1492 system of race and racism emerged in direct connection with capitalism’s development and empire’s expansion.

The writer lays out what that system required: the slow evolution of religious persecution of European Jews into racialization; the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the monarchy’s claim of purity of blood; and the enslavement of Africans alongside the genocidal destruction of Indigenous civilizations in the Americas. All of it. the writer says. functioned as a program of justification for oppression and the creation of systems of social control—meant to serve growth. expansion. and political stability for emerging capitalist states.

As European empires moved from conquest into slavery and the domination of North and South America. Laurent portrays the construction of race as intensifying. The writer connects those changes to what some have described—following Karl Marx—as “primitive accumulation. ” and what others call “war capitalism.” In the writer’s framing. echoing Eric Williams. the logic isn’t that slavery happened because of racism; instead. racism emerged as a direct result of slavery and of how it allowed profits from the labor and land of others. A critical point, the writer says, is that much of Spain and Portugal’s wealth didn’t remain at home. It went to banks in the Netherlands—called capitalism’s first real financial center—and then those proceeds were used elsewhere in Europe to finance capitalist development.

From that, the writer says, Laurent argues capitalism should be understood as a global system, rather than something that simply began with Britain’s factories.

One of Laurent’s major claims. according to the review. is that race and racism weren’t only cultural ideas; they were political and economic projects with two linked purposes: justifying oppression and dispossession. and controlling the labor and produce of the oppressed. The plunder that enriched Europe—and later North America—created an ongoing need for racial differentiation. with examples ranging from persecution of Jews (as anti-Jewish racism by the 19th century) to the “othering” and racialization of different ethnic populations.

Under capitalism, the writer says Laurent describes, “race” becomes defined categories with a qualitatively different function: sentencing entire populations to permanent subordination and “incompatibility” with the dominating race, with no route to freedom outside collective struggle.

Laurent also points, the review says, to how the colonial oppressors held contradictory views even while building the system. Spain and Portugal debated whether they had the right to enslave Indigenous peoples in the Americas while not debating the legitimacy of seizing their land and riches. Yet, the writer notes, there was no debate about enslaving Africans.

The review then draws a distinction about how racism works across populations. The writer says antisemitism that became anti-Jewish racism in the 19th century differed from anti-Black racism. Frantz Fanon is cited by Laurent to mark one difference: European Jews. Fanon says. could conceal themselves among non-Jewish Europeans. while concealment for people of African descent was “virtually impossible.” The writer adds that the ability to conceal became part of the racist and capitalist myth of the all-powerful and manipulative Jew.

From there, the writer says Laurent’s central argument has implications that reach current political debates. South African revolutionary movements developed the notion of “racial capitalism” to designate the convergence of racism. colonialism. and capitalism found in South Africa. But Laurent. as reflected in the review. argues it’s inaccurate to suggest there was ever a capitalism that wasn’t also racial. The question isn’t whether a variant of capitalism is racial; it’s “how it is racial”—what the racial characteristics are of the capitalist social formation being discussed.

The review offers examples Laurent uses to widen the lens. It says Laurent notes Northern Ireland. where racism and capitalism emerged under circumstances remarkably similar to those faced by African Americans. even if the form of racial. national. and capitalist oppression experienced by Irish people did not rely on skin color and had a different origin. The history of how Irish Catholics were characterized and caricatured. along with the systemic or institutional structures used to enforce racial and national oppression against them over centuries. is described as showing “analogous” oppression to that experienced by African Americans—while still not identical. because no two systems are exactly the same.

On both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century, the review says, commonality became apparent. It points to the Colored Convention Movement’s repeated support for the Irish freedom struggle and the reciprocation by many in the Irish struggle.

Still, the review keeps the differences close. Indigenous struggles against dispossession are described as a fight against European-imposed property rights. For those of African descent, the emancipatory fight took a different shape. In North America. the creation of the category “Black” is described as intended to signal both African ancestry and the legality of enslavement and labor exploitation without wages or payment. In North America, the review says, racism and capitalism also appeared in how European settlers viewed Indigenous populations. In South America, it says, racist and national oppression emerged as well, but in other ways. In Latin America. the review adds. the categories of racial differentiation worked differently: being “Black” did not simply mean African ancestry. Depending on other “blood” they carried. people of African descent could be found across a range of social categories because of differences in Spanish and Portuguese settlement patterns and colonial demographics.

All of that feeds back into the strategic implication the writer says returns to Padmore’s words. If race and the “national-colonial question” are intrinsically linked to capitalism’s development rather than an accessory. then the left and all progressives have to understand how racist and national oppression shape consciousness. identity. and practices of subaltern classes. and how central they are to capitalism’s making and persistence.

Padmore’s 1937 warning. as the review recounts it. was that Spain’s Popular Front shouldn’t have traded silence on Spanish colonialism in Morocco and the Western Sahara for a wider unity against fascists. The quote offered in the review turns imperialism into a test of principle and practice: “Liberal” imperialism and colonialism are still imperialism and colonialism.

The review concludes with the argument that progressive movements have repeatedly watched their efforts at broader unity undermined when racism and empire are not addressed directly. It also argues that addressing racist oppression and the oppression of colonized peoples requires a broader notion of “the oppressed” than the left often assumes. And it treats the failure of the Spanish Popular Front to see colonized peoples in Morocco and the Western Sahara as part of the population necessary to win democracy as more than a moral misstep—calling it “a fatal mistake” that led to a fatal political blind spot. including the notion of anti-fascism as an exclusively domestic matter.

The writer ends with a warning aimed at the present: with the rise of right-wing authoritarianism and neofascist movements across the world seeking to preserve and redirect global capitalism, they say progressives “cannot afford” to repeat the same mistake.

The review, however, is also a kind of mirror held up to U.S. politics. It is hard to read the argument about 1492 and the post-1492 development of capitalism without thinking about how the United States inherited and transformed those systems—legal categories. labor structures. and ideas about who belongs—into its own durable racial order. In the writer’s telling. the choice for progressives isn’t whether race and capitalism are connected. but whether politics can act on that connection without treating colonialism and racial oppression as add-ons to the main event.

United States politics capitalism race 1492 colonialism anti-colonialism Spanish Popular Front George Padmore Malcolm X Black Freedom movement Black Panther Party Frantz Fanon Irish Catholics Northern Ireland apartheid racial capitalism