  The focus on the development of noncapitalist areas of the world gave Luxemburg a sensitivity to questions of race, ethnicity, and indigenous rights that was uncharacteristic for the Marxism of her time. Up to that point, several Marxists had more or less shared the teleological scheme defended by many Enlightenment philosophers that characterised the process of societal evolution as a transition through different stages of development. Starting with nomadic (hunter-gathering) forms of life, who were then supplanted by pastoral then agricultural relations, these conjectural histories usually culminated with commercial societies, often considered to be a superior form of social organisation. Luxemburg was one of the pioneers of a study of racism and cultural appropriation as distinctive yet integrated components of an analysis of capitalism where exploitation and racial subordination are mutually reinforcing. “The progress of the humanistic era of the Enlightenment”, she remarked sarcastically while commenting on German colonialism at the end of the 18th century, could be seen in how the captain of a ship transporting slaves from Guinea to Guyana in South America, “to alleviate their [the slaves] melancholy and to keep them from dying off, allowed them to dance on the ship’s deck with music and whip cracks every evening, something to which the more brutal Spanish traders had not resorted” (Luxemburg 1910 [CW: 209]).