No Capitalism? No Slavery - No Slavery? No Capitalism

"At the very time that, in Europe, Marx and Engels were developing their analysis of capitalism as the commodification of human labor, the slaves were reaching the same conclusion. The implication was revelatory: the American workers with the most advanced understanding of the alienation and commodification of capitalist exploitation were not the white wage earners of Northern factory towns but the enslaved African-Americans of Southern plantations."