Anticipating the more sustained expositions of Eric Williams and Oliver Cox, Du Bois became convinced that capitalism and slavery were related systemically; that monopoly capitalism had extended rather than arrested that relationship; and that the forces implicated in the dissolution of capitalism could emerge from the contradictions of that relationship. History provided his evidence. In the turbulence of the American Civil War and a social revolution carried through by the mobilized slaves and the white agrarian workers, it had been the manufacturing and industrial working classes that had hesitated, drawn to counterrevolution by racism and a short-sighted perception of their class interest. The class struggle had been distorted and a proletarian revolutionary consciousness among nineteenth-century American workers had been effectively interdicted by the ideological power of racism and the seductiveness of the bourgeois myth of social mobility. It was the slaves (in truth an enslaved peasantry) and other agrarian workers who had mounted the attack on capitalism. It was, Du Bois observed, from the periphery and not the center that the most sustained threat to the American capitalist system had materialized.

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making o…, loc. 1467