"Marxism – from Marx’s early writings onward – always understood human freedom as a universal objective. Human slavery and the degradation of human beings into wage slavery awoke in Marx his prophetic indignation. One of Marx’s most famous passages in Capital (1867) pointed out that the ‘rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production’ should not be found in the antiseptic bank or factory. The origin of capitalism had to be found – among other processes – in ‘the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins’. Capitalism grew and was sustained by the degradation of humanity."

- Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over The Third World