The aim of this presentation is to argue that the establishment of the colonial system of exploitation in Americas as a result of European colonial expansion in the 16th century gave birth to another kind of expropriated worker, distinct from the propertyless wage labourer, that is, the black African slave. In dialogue with Marx and Marxist scholars who have revisited the “so-called primitive accumulation” thesis as well as the scholars of the Global Labour History, I will explore the contributions of Brazilian historical social sciences to the thesis about the constitution of the totally expropriated labour, which was adequate and necessary for the reproduction of the colonial economic system of exploitation in Portuguese Americas, based on the absolute exploitation of land and labour and to feed the capital accumulation. The Brazilian historical sciences permit to maintain that modern slavery is a particular form that it assumed within the general movement of the private appropriation of the means of production and as such it is part of the general process of the social organization of labour in historical capitalism.
Krista Lillemets is a PhD candidate in Sociology and researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin, working on Marxist political economy of labour, peripheral social theory, Brazilian historiography of labour, coerced labour