Slavery is useful for early accumulation of capital, but it is too rigid for industrial development. Slaves had to be given crude non-breakable tools… - Walter Rodney

Undoubtedly, European capitalism achieved more and more a social character in its production. It integrated the whole world; and with colonial experience as an important stimulus, it integrated very closely every aspect of its own economy—from agriculture to banking. But distribution was not social in character. The fruits of human labor went to a given minority class, which was of the white race and resident in Europe and North America. This is the crux of the dialectical process of development and underdevelopment, as it evolved over the colonial period.

Political divisions in Africa were no evidence of innate inferiority or backwardness. That was the state in which the continent then found itself—a point along a long road that others had traversed and along which Africa was moving. Commercial impact of Europe slowed down the process of political amalgamation and expansion, in contrast to the way trade with Africa strengthened Europe’s nation-states. When European capitalism took the form of imperialism and started to subjugate Africa politically, the normal political conflicts of the pre-capitalist African situation were transformed into weakness which allowed the Europeans to set up their colonial domination.

The principal contradiction within capitalism from the outset was that between the capitalists and the workers. To keep their system going, the capitalists had constantly to step up the rate of exploitation of their workers. At the same time, European workers were gaining increasing mastery over the means of production in the factories and mines, and they were learning to work collectively in big enterprises and within their own trade union structures. If the bourgeoisie continued to deprive them of the major part of the fruits of their own labor and to oppress them socially and politically, then those two classes were set on a collision path. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, Marx had predicted class collision would come in the form of revolution in which workers would emerge victorious. The capitalists were terribly afraid of that possibility, knowing full well that they themselves had seized power from the feudal landlord class by means of revolution.