By Musa T. Bey

In Part I, we began to unearth the critical blind spots in Karl Marx’s otherwise groundbreaking critique of capitalism. While his analysis remains indispensable for understanding how labor is exploited under capital, it is just as important to understand what he left out. Marx’s treatment of slavery, race, and colonialism—though not wholly absent—was ultimately insufficient. He acknowledged these systems as part of capital’s violent prehistory but failed to theorize them as enduring structures. And he certainly did not center them.

For Black people, race is not a tangent to class. It is the terrain on which class is lived. It is the structure that precedes wages, prefigures labor, and outlasts freedom. That is the fundamental truth that the Black radical tradition forces us to confront—and the one that Marx, in his Eurocentric framework, could not.

Let us go deeper.

The Plantation as the Original Factory

Marx believed that capitalism emerged when feudal peasants were “freed” from the land and forced into wage labor. But for Black people—especially those of us descended from Africans in the Western hemisphere—our introduction to capitalism wasn’t through a wage. It was through a chain.

The plantation system, not the factory floor, was our original site of production. The enslaved African wasn’t just a laborer—they were a commodity. Their very existence was a form of capital. And the wealth generated by their stolen labor did not merely support capitalism’s birth—it defined its DNA.

Yet, in Capital, Marx treats slavery as a kind of brutal but pre-capitalist prelude. He gives us Manchester, not Mississippi; the cotton mill, not the cotton field. What Marx failed to see—or refused to fully grasp—was that the plantation and the factory were part of the same global machinery. The factory in England was the refined extension of the violence already perfected in the Americas.

What Marx called “primitive accumulation”—the mass theft of land, bodies, and life—was not primitive at all. It was systematic. And it continued long after the first wage was paid. The slave ship was capitalism’s first assembly line. The auction block was its stock exchange. The plantation was its prototype.

White Labor, Black Exclusion: The Role of Unions in Racial Capitalism

If Marx’s analysis falters on the plantation, it collapses even more in the realm of the labor union.

Marx romanticized the worker as a universal subject. He believed that the unification of workers across nations and trades would usher in the death of capital. But he drastically underestimated how race would fracture this vision—and how white labor would often serve as the foot soldiers of capitalist racial order.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the American labor movement.

Rather than build cross-racial solidarity, many of the early trade unions actively excluded Black workers. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded in 1886, routinely barred Black workers from membership. Samuel Gompers—widely praised as a champion of labor—was a staunch segregationist who believed that Black labor threatened white wages and white jobs. He advocated for immigration restrictions and racially exclusive hiring practices, aligning himself with the logic of the very capitalists he claimed to oppose.

What Marx failed to grasp is that white labor did not simply suffer under capitalism—it often collaborated with it. Through exclusionary union practices, labor strikes that demanded the firing of Black workers, and support for racial segregation in housing and hiring, white workers built their own racial wage—a term later theorized by W.E.B. Du Bois. This “psychological wage” of whiteness gave poor white workers a sense of superiority even when their material conditions were only marginally better than those of the Black proletariat.

Du Bois, not Marx, diagnosed this contradiction best: “The white group of laborers… were led to support the theory of racial inferiority… which made them the dupes of their own economic competitors.” In short: white workers became junior partners in a racialized capitalism, and unions were the gatekeepers.

Black workers, despite their radical contributions—from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to Ben Fletcher and the IWW—were rarely allowed to speak for the movement as a whole. Instead, they were treated as a surplus labor force—first hired, last fired, and always policed.

If Marx truly believed in the power of the proletariat, he failed to ask: which proletariat? And at whose expense?

Colonialism Wasn’t Capitalism’s Past—It’s Still Its Present

In Capital, Marx acknowledged that colonial conquest played a role in the emergence of global markets. But again, he treated it as a prelude—“the pre-history of capital,” he called it. For Marx, the real drama unfolded in the industrial centers of Europe.

But for the colonized peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, colonialism wasn’t a pre-history. It was the current condition. It was a global system of extraction that drained wealth, bodies, and resources from the periphery to enrich the metropole.

He never accounted for the way race and empire operated as structural enforcers of capitalist logic. The colony was not an afterthought—it was a pillar.

He never accounted for how colonial police forces, racialized laws, and white settler violence weren’t just “superstructural” distractions. They were core instruments of capital discipline.

It took thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, and Claudia Jones to complete the analysis. They insisted that colonialism wasn’t an add-on—it was capitalism in racialized form. And the colonized weren’t waiting for European industrialization to catch up—they were already in the thick of struggle.

What the Black Radical Tradition Knew All Along

The Black radical tradition is not a footnote to Marxism—it is a corrective, a compass, and in many ways, a deeper truth.

Where Marx saw class, we saw caste.

Where he focused on capital’s logic, we saw its violence.

Where he imagined the industrial worker as the face of revolution, we remembered the slaves, the coolies, the domestic workers, the laundresses, and the porters.

We remember that Black people were never “just” workers—we were property, capital, and labor, all in one.

Our analysis must begin there.

Conclusion: Marx Gave the Blueprint—We Built the House

Marx gave us the theory of surplus value. We gave it blood.

Marx gave us capital. We gave it context.

Marx gave us a vision of class struggle. But we had to give that struggle skin, history, and memory.

He saw the contradiction between labor and capital. We saw the contradiction between Black life and white power.

So when we ask, “Did Marx ignore race?” the answer is yes—but not because he was uninterested. Because he was unequipped. Because he was a man of Europe, writing for a Europe that had never truly felt the whip.

But Black radicals, Third World Marxists, and freedom fighters across the diaspora have done the work of completing the story.

And we’re still writing