There is much theoretical debate in Marxism about the relationship of slavery to capitalist accumulation. This is often formulated as a debate about stagist theories of history, modernizationist/developmentalist theories, and/or theories of modes of production. Drawing upon a range of our readings, this paper takes up these debates and particularly how they present and configure the problem of value realization in its relationship to the development of global capital in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Scholarship on this subject is divided on key elements, viz., (1) the rigidity of race and racial identity, (2) whether race is a site for political articulation (and affirmation, i.e., “self-determination”) or an imposed and limiting social division that undermines political agency, and lastly, (3) how race (and a racial political imagination) is an embedded feature of the history of American politics.