In Marx workers are free, free in the specific sense that they can sell their labour power to any capitalist they choose. Moreover, workers are separate from the means of production.
Neither of these priors apply in a plantation context. The slave is a slave. That is to say, the slave cannot choose who s/he sells her labour power to. And the slave is not separate from the means of production. On the plantation, the slave IS the commodity! Not only is s/he the commodity, s/he is also the means of production. Had Marx seen this, my guess is that he would have theorised racial differentiation as something constitutive of capital and not an add on. Race would not have been a superstructural element.
Cedric Robinson makes it clear that Marx inherited a racialised European civilisational framework. Accordingly, he was conditioned to see the European proletariat as the historical subject. Black, Brown and other non-white people were seen as pre-political, a backdrop, objects rather than the agents of world history. Racial capitalism is capitalism’s actual form. He argues that Marx misread this. A plantation-centred starting point would have produced Robinson’s conclusion as the premise.
Marx ignored an important feature in historical sequencing because he didn’t see plantation slaves because in his analysis slave labour on the plantation was subordinate to the primary revolutionary agent – the proletariat.
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The factory as the centre of Marx’s model is powerful. An entire theory of exploitation in the European industrial core follows. But what about the rest of the world in which the plantation predominated? What happened to the rest of us? What happened to the global majority? I think the answer is a simple one, the proletariat were the primary revolutionary agents. Everyone else was secondary. Primacy was assumed to be in the western core. That’s what a Eurocentric lens does – it limits, it distorts.