Cedric Robinson laid out the concept in his 1983 book Black Marxism. He argued that European capitalism did not erase earlier racial and ethnic divisions but built on them. Race became a way to sort who could be enslaved, underpaid or dispossessed, and who would profit.
The US offers clear examples. Enslaved people were bought, sold, mortgaged and insured as property, and their forced labor produced cotton, the country's leading export before the Civil War. Northern banks and insurers profited alongside Southern planters. After emancipation, sharecropping and convict leasing kept Black labor cheap. In the 20th century, redlining and exclusion from some New Deal protections, such as early Social Security coverage for farm and domestic workers, shaped who could build wealth.
Scholars use the framework today to explain patterns like the racial wealth gap and the concentration of low-wage, high-risk jobs among workers of color. It is also used to analyze predatory lending, which targeted Black borrowers before the 2008 crisis. ARD uses the term to describe how racial inequality is built into economic design.