Capitalism as a System is the title of the 1964 book by Oliver Cromwell Cox, one of the most original and overlooked thinkers of the Black radical tradition. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1901, Cox came to the United States as a young man and earned a law degree. After polio left him unable to walk, he turned to economics and sociology and earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago. Shut out of elite universities by racism and by his politics, he spent most of his career teaching at historically Black colleges, among them Wiley College, Tuskegee, and Lincoln University in Missouri.

In his 1948 work Caste, Class, and Race, Cox challenged the dominant view of his time that American racism was a kind of caste system rooted in custom and prejudice. He argued instead that modern racism was born with capitalism itself, developed to justify the exploitation of labor and the conquest of colonized peoples. In his trilogy The Foundations of Capitalism, Capitalism and American Leadership, and Capitalism as a System, he traced capitalism's origins to the trading cities of medieval Europe. He showed it as a world system from its beginning, built on unequal exchange between dominant centers and exploited peripheries, decades before world-systems theory made similar arguments famous.

Cox insisted that capitalism cannot be understood within the borders of a single nation. It is a global structure of domination, and racism, colonialism, and imperialism are part of how it works rather than accidents. For his ideas he was red-baited and pushed to the margins of his profession. He died in 1974. His work deserves to be reclaimed as a foundation of the Black radical tradition and a guide for understanding the system we must climb against and overcome.

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