Jeffrey B. Perry

Capitalist (Not Racial Capitalist) Relations of Production in the Virginia Colony in 1618. --
Allen describes capitalist relations of production in Jamestown in the period before Africans arrived in the pattern-setting Virginia colony and before the establishment (later in the century) of a system of racial oppression and "the invention of the white race." He writes that "at the close of the 1610–1618 period ... It was to be a capitalist farming system in Virginia."
This point is important because, if we understand the Virginia plantations as agricultural capitalism, and the plantation owners as capitalists, then we are better able to understand enslaved Black laborers as proletarians (as both Hubert Harrison and W. E. B. Du Bois would later do). This enables us to tear the covers off "white" labor's betrayals of Black labor; to learn many important lessons of "labor history;" and to understand the origin of the invention of the "white race" – all of which have great importance for today.  See HERE