rote Caste, Class and Race (1948). The main argument of Cox was that race and class were historically bound together, and stated that capitalism was a global expansionist project. This is substantiated by a view posited by Karl Marx who stated that the multiplicitous and abundant nature of capitals gave the emergent system of capitalism a dynamism and ability for continuous growth (Sayer, 1991, p.29). This results in these variously accumulated capitals breaking free from the boundaries of their European states out into the world and in search of more raw material and property, therefore the capitalists who were the executors of the system, were required to police and rationalise the exploitation of workers (Cox, 1948). Initially, Cox argued that racism was a byproduct of chattel slavery, rather than the trade in African slaves developing and growing as a result of racism. Going so far as stating that “if white workers were available in sufficient numbers, they would have been substituted” (Cox, 1970, p.332). However, as Cox continued to expand his theory on racism as being a systemic formation, he divorced himself from the previously heavily Marx-influenced position, critiquing it as being too “rigid…concerning the role of industrial workers in modern revolutionary movements” (Cox, 1964, p.218). Instead of this overly deterministic position which only applied to industrial capitalism but not the earlier mercantile capitalism, Cox posited that racism therefore must have predated the emergence of capitalism, and was simply taken up and accelerated to an extremely nefarious level in the construction of the ‘Negro’ subject, or non-subject. The main contradiction at the centre of industrial capitalism is the fact that the human was reconciled as atomised individuals who interacted with each other through contractual agreements. However, due to the demands of capitalism, this was not a right that was given to enslaved African people, which required a justification by the slaveholders. Robinson (2000, p.100) explains this dynamic by stating:

For the Negro to come into being all what was now required was an immediate cause, a specific purpose. The trade in African slaves, coming as it did as an extension of capitalism and racial arrogance, supplied both a powerful motive and a readily received object.

This creates a link between the creation of the ‘Negro’ as inferior to their counterparts of European descent to the spread of slavery, which was the extension of capitalism that dealt with trade of enslaved African subjects, thus highlighting why I believe that it is not possible to understand capitalism