Marx is unarguably one of our best guides for the understanding of capitalism. He also had a few things to say about slavery, and these can be extremely useful pre- cisely because of his analysis of capital. His considerations on the relationship between capitalism and slavery, however, were made in different contexts and with different analytical goals, paving the way for diverse and frequently conflicting interpretations that continue to shape debates to this day. Frequently, his discus- sions of slavery appeared as a counterpoint to capitalism, in a strategy to highlight what he saw as the key dynamics of the system. At the same time, as Pepijn Brandon (2018) has recently argued, slavery at times was used by Marx as a way to distinguish his interpretation of ‘free’ labour from that of classical political economy. This could be seen as a variation of the first strategy, but instead of emphasizing differences, his discussion blurred the lines between the two catego- ries. He also referred to the connections between slavery and capitalism in more systemic fashion, outlining mutual conditionings and influences, as in the famous section on so-called primitive accumulation at the end of Capital. In his description of the creation of the industrial capitalist, Marx (1990: 915) included the famous passage on the ‘idyllic proceedings’ of primitive accumulation, which were based on the extraction of riches from overseas territories with the coerced labour of native Americans, Africans, and Asians. Marx also did not have any problems in occasionally referring to US slaveholders in the antebellum South as capitalists, indicating the possibility of looking at specific slave enterprises or societies as capi- talist. This position, however, came with important qualifications: in plantations, 14 Slavery and Capitalism Leonardo Marques