[W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America is one of
the greatest modern studies of revolution and counterrevolution.
It’s also an extraordinary example of a materialist and class
analysis of race under capitalism. ]
[[link removed]]

W. E. B. DU BOIS’S BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IS ESSENTIAL READING  
[[link removed]]


 

Jeff Goodwin
September 21, 2022
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America is one of the
greatest modern studies of revolution and counterrevolution. It’s
also an extraordinary example of a materialist and class analysis of
race under capitalism. _

In Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois claims that
enslaved people freed themselves during the Civil War through an
extensive and prolonged “general strike.”, Corbis / Getty Images

 

W.E. B. Du Bois’s magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America,
1860–1880
[[link removed]],
published in 1935, is one of the greatest scholarly studies of
revolution and counterrevolution. It deserves a place on one’s
bookshelf next to other modern classics, including Leon
Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, C. L. R.
James’s The Black Jacobins, Georges Lefebvre’s The Coming of the
French Revolution, and Karl Marx’s _Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte_. Scholars of revolutions, unfortunately, have not usually
considered the US Civil War to be one of the great social revolutions
of the modern era, akin to the French, Russian, and Chinese
revolutions. Many readers, in fact, view Du Bois’s book much more
narrowly, as a response to white-supremacist histories of the
Reconstruction era (1865–1876) and, more particularly, a defense of
the role of African-American politicians — and the black voters who
elected them — in the Southern state governments of that time. Du
Bois does present such a defense, but Black Reconstruction offers
much, much more than this.

Black Reconstruction is not only a towering work of history but also
a work firmly embedded in the Marxist tradition. Du Bois reinterprets
the Civil War as a social and political revolution “from
below” — a workers’ revolution — that brought about the
overthrow of both slavery and the Confederate state, thereby opening a
door to interracial democracy in the South. The book then reinterprets
the subsequent overthrow of this democracy as a class-based
counterrevolution that destroyed the possibility of freedom for half
the Southern working class and imposed a “dictatorship of capital”
that brought about “an exploitation of labor unparalleled in modern
times.”

But why should one read Black Reconstruction in the twenty-first
century? In short, because Du Bois is writing about issues that remain
of tremendous political importance, including the nature of racial
oppression and the racism of white workers. Unlike most contemporary
analysts of race, moreover, Du Bois approaches these issues from the
perspective of political economy. He rejects an approach to racial
oppression that starts with prejudice, discrimination, or culture,
trying instead to dig beneath these and understand how they are rooted
in the material interests of different classes. Instead of insisting
on the separation of race from class, as so many liberals do, Du Bois
insists on their intimate connection
[[link removed]].

Black Reconstruction is rightly famous for stressing the collective
agency of enslaved people in winning their own freedom and for its
impassioned rebuttal of racist historiography. What has been less
emphasized is the way in which Du Bois very explicitly rejects
analyses of the Civil War and Reconstruction that emphasize race and
racism as the primary drivers of historical events. Racism certainly
played a hugely important role in that era, Du Bois argues, but it was
a product of — and usually disguised — another, more powerful
force: capitalism. More specifically, Du Bois argues in Black
Reconstruction that two characteristic features of capitalism —
capitalists’ competition for labor and workers’ competition for
jobs — are the root cause of conflicts that seem to be driven by
racism.

This perspective on Du Bois’s masterpiece runs counter to some
influential interpretations of his work. Not surprisingly, there is
resistance in some quarters to stating plainly that Black
Reconstruction is a work of Marxism. Many people who come to Black
Reconstruction for the first time are not expecting to read a Marxist
text. They have most likely read Du Bois’s earlier collection of
essays, The Souls of Black Folk
[[link removed]],
which precedes his turn to Marxism
[[link removed]] by
three decades. While a number
[[link removed]] of authors
[[link removed]] do recognize
[[link removed]] Du
Bois’s Marxism
[[link removed]], many
others deny that Black Reconstruction or his subsequent writings are
Marxist. In 1983, for example, Cedric Robinson described
[[link removed]] Du
Bois as a “sympathetic critic of Marxism.” Gerald Horne’s 1986
book [[link removed]] examines in great
detail Du Bois’s involvement in leftist (mainly Communist) causes
after World War II, but he never offers an opinion as to whether Du
Bois was a Marxist. (More recently, however, Horne has emphasized
[[link removed]] the
Marxist character of _Black Reconstruction_.) And Manning
Marable’s book
[[link removed]] on
Du Bois, published just a few months later, portrays him as a
“radical democrat” — although Marable later suggested
[[link removed]] that
Du Bois might usefully be viewed as part of the “Western Marxist”
tradition.

Black Reconstruction is not only a towering work of history but also
a work firmly embedded in the Marxist tradition.

More recently, a group of “Du Boisian” sociologists recognizes
that Du Bois integrates some elements of Marxist thinking into his
worldview. But according to these writers, not only is Du
Bois _not_ a Marxist but his ideas clearly transcend Marx’s. Marx
gave theoretical primacy to class, they say, whereas Du Bois grasped
the “intersectionality”
[[link removed]] of
class and race, emphasizing their connections while giving theoretical
primacy, by implication, to neither. According to these writers, this
theoretical move allowed Du Bois, unlike Marx and his followers, they
claim
[[link removed]],
to understand colonialism, the ways in which race “fractures”
class consciousness, and racial oppression generally.

In this essay, I argue that these “Du Boisians” and others who
deny Du Bois’s Marxism are wrong. Du Bois actually _does_ give
theoretical primacy to capitalism. In both Black Reconstruction and
his subsequent writings, Du Bois repeatedly emphasizes how racial
oppression is a product of capitalism. Time and again, furthermore, Du
Bois takes issue with what we would today call “race
reductionism,” that is, attempts to explain historical events
primarily in terms of race. His rejection of race reductionism only
deepened in the years after Black Reconstruction’s publication.

After 1935, in short, “Du Boisianism” is Marxism. Du Bois’s
failure lay not in the fact that he embraced a Marxist orientation but
that he came to uncritically support Soviet authoritarianism. This was
perhaps the greatest tragedy, in my view, of Du Bois’s long life.
But the main point of this essay is to show that, despite all efforts
to ignore or deny his Marxism, Black Reconstruction stands as a
brilliant work of class analysis.

Black Reconstruction in America

Du Bois’s turn toward Marxism occurred rather late in his life,
shortly before the publication of Black Reconstruction. His trip to
the Soviet Union in 1926, months before Joseph Stalin’s
consolidation of power, certainly pushed him in this direction.
“Never before in life,” writes
[[link removed]] his
biographer David Levering Lewis, “had he been as stirred as he would
be by two months in Russia.” Du Bois traveled more than two
thousand miles across the Soviet Union, “finding everywhere . . .
signs of a new egalitarian social order that until then he had only
dreamt might be possible.” “I may be partially deceived and
half-informed,” Du Bois wrote
[[link removed]] at
the time. “But if what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with
my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.” (Du Bois would
visit the Soviet Union again in 1936, 1949, and 1958.)

Du Bois later wrote
[[link removed]] that his trip
to the Soviet Union led him to question “our American Negro belief
that the right to vote would give us work and decent wage” or would
abolish illiteracy or “decrease our sickness and crime.” Only a
revolution, by implication, could attain these ends. Du Bois also now
believed that “letting a few of our capitalists share with whites in
the exploitation of our masses, would never be a solution of our
problem.” Black liberation was impossible, in sum, so long as the
United States remained a capitalist society, and “black
capitalism” was a dead end.

Du Bois had been broadly familiar with Marxist ideas since his
graduate student days at Harvard and in Berlin. But it was not until
1933, in the midst of the greatest crisis of capitalism in world
history, that Du Bois began conscientiously to study Marx, Friedrich
Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. He was then sixty-five years old. As Lewis
writes, Du Bois fell hard for Marxist analysis:

Like so many intellectuals in the thirties who broadcast Marxism as a
verifiable science of society, the Atlanta professor was mesmerized by
dialectical materialism. Calling Marx the “greatest figure in the
science of modern industry,” Du Bois seemed to rediscover with the
avidity of a gifted graduate student the thinker who Frank Taussing,
his Harvard economics professor, had smugly ignored. Marx made history
make sense — or more sense, Du Bois came to believe, than all other
analytical systems.

Du Bois was prodded to master Marxist theory by the rise of a group of
so-called Young Turks within the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the civil rights organization
he helped found. These young scholar-activists
[[link removed]],
including Abram Harris, Ralph Bunche, and E. Franklin Frazier
[[link removed]] (all
members or soon-to-be members of the Howard University faculty)
“were attempting to shift the Negro intelligentsia’s focus on race
to an analysis of the economics of class.” All were convinced that
a powerful interracial labor movement was necessary to smash racial
oppression, and they were critical of the NAACP for its lack of an
economic program. Members of this group would offer advice to Du Bois
about which texts were essential for him to read. Harris’s
book, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement
[[link removed]],
coauthored with Sterling Spero, proved particularly influential; it
was no coincidence that Du Bois titled the first chapter of Black
Reconstruction “The Black Worker.” (I discuss the precise
significance of this below.)

Although he would later grow close to the pro-Soviet Communist Party,
Du Bois’s guides to Marxist theory in the early 1930s also included
two anti-Stalinist leftists. One was Benjamin Stolberg, a journalist
who later served on the Dewey Commission (officially the Commission of
Inquiry Into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow
Trials), which was named after its chairman, the philosopher John
Dewey. The other was a young leftist by the name of Will Herberg.
Herberg was a Jewish Russian immigrant who flunked out of the City
College of New York, joined the Communist Party, and was expelled
along with others associated with Jay Lovestone for opposing
Stalin’s foreign policy at the time. The Lovestonites, however, were
ardent defenders of the Soviet Union. Herberg
[[link removed]] brought
Marx’s writings on the Civil War to Du Bois’s attention, as well
as Herberg’s own Marxist pamphlet on the Civil War and
Reconstruction, “The Heritage of the Civil War,” which Du Bois
would quote and cite in Black Reconstruction.

Du Bois takes up a great many issues in Black Reconstruction, but the
book mainly attempts to answer three broad questions: First, how did
the Civil War become a revolution that overthrew slavery and brought
democracy to the South? Second, what were the nature and main
achievements of the Reconstruction state governments in the South?
Finally, how are we to understand the counterrevolution that overthrew
democracy and brought about a kind of semislavery for Southern blacks?

The Civil War and the “General Strike”

The opening chapters of Black Reconstruction are not about
Reconstruction at all. They deal with the antebellum period, workers
(white and black), the nature of slavery, and the Civil War. These
chapters make many important arguments and claims, none more important
than the idea that enslaved people freed themselves during the Civil
War through an extensive and prolonged “general strike.” This
strike, like all strikes, was an instance of class struggle that
involved the withholding of labor by one class of people, the workers
or “direct producers,” from the owning or ruling class. As in
other great revolutions
[[link removed]],
the opportunity for this class struggle from below was created by
interelite conflicts that erupted into war
[[link removed]].

Du Bois insists that “slave workers” (as he calls them) should be
seen as an integral part of the interracial working class in America,
not as a group set apart by separate and distinct interests. It was
the tragic error of Northern workers and the Northern labor
movement — and an error of subsequent analysts who are blind to
class — not to comprehend this. Thus, Du Bois titles the first
chapter of his book “The Black Worker,” not “The Black Slave”
or “The Enslaved.” And the second chapter is called “The White
Worker.” Of course, Du Bois is keenly aware of the difference
between enslaved labor and free wage labor. “No matter how degraded
the factory hand,” he writes, “he is not real estate.” But Du
Bois wants to emphasize, in Marxian fashion, that these two groups of
workers, despite their different circumstances and despite their
racial difference, share the same basic material interests. This was
true, moreover, both before and after the Civil War.

But white workers failed to see their common interests with slave
workers. “White labor,” writes Du Bois, “while it attempted no
denial but even expressed faint sympathy, saw in [the] fugitive slave
and in the millions of slaves behind him, willing and eager to work
for less than current wage, competition for their own jobs.” It was
this competition for jobs that fueled white racism. However, “What
[the white workers] failed to comprehend,” writes Du Bois, “was
that the black man enslaved was an even more formidable and fatal
competitor than the black man free.”

There thus arose, Du Bois relates, not one but two labor movements in
antebellum America, one to free the slave workers of the South and the
other to improve the wages and working conditions of the mainly
immigrant working class in the North. The union of these two
movements, Du Bois points out, would have been “irresistible.” But
it was “almost impossible,” he writes, for white labor leaders to
understand this:

They had their particularistic grievances and one of these was the
competition of free Negro labor. Beyond this they could easily vision
a new and tremendous competition of black workers after all the slaves
became free. What they did not see nor understand was that this
competition was present and would continue and would be emphasized if
the Negro continued as a slave worker.

This explains why white workers kept their distance from the
abolitionist movement, which, for its part, failed to “realize the
plight of the white laborer, especially the semi-skilled and unskilled
worker.” This division within the US working class, of course,
weakened both labor movements.

The general strike during the Civil War took the form of slave workers
fleeing the plantations for the front lines and encampments of the
Union Army. Du Bois estimates that five hundred thousand of the
South’s four million enslaved blacks fled the plantations. These
families and individuals typically worked on behalf of the Union Army
as long as the war lasted; eventually, some two hundred thousand were
armed and fought for the Union against the Confederacy. The general
strike was thus a double blow to the South: the withdrawal of labor
disrupted and weakened the Southern economy and war effort — cotton
production in particular declined precipitously — and the labor
made available to the Union Army strengthened the North’s military
might. “Without the military help of the black freedmen,” Du Bois
argues, quoting no less an authority than Abraham Lincoln, “the war
against the South could not have been won.”

Du Bois points out that this general strike “was followed by the
disaffection of the poor whites,” who saw “with anger that the big
slaveholders were escaping military service; that it was a ‘rich
man’s war and the poor man’s fight.’” The exemption from
military service of men who owned twenty or more slave workers was
galling, “and the wholesale withdrawal of the slaveholding class
from actual fighting which this rule made possible, gave rise to
intense and growing dissatisfaction.” Du Bois also notes the poor
whites’ “fear and jealousy of Negroes” in the advancing Northern
army: “If the Negro was to be free where would the poor white be?
Why should he fight against the blacks and his victorious friends? The
poor white not only began to desert and run away; but thousands
followed the Negro into the Northern camps.” In 1864 alone,
according to Du Bois, one hundred thousand poor whites deserted the
Confederate Army.

The general strike during the Civil War took the form of slave workers
fleeing the plantations for the front lines and encampments of the
Union Army.

Where does racism fit into Du Bois’s analysis of slavery? His
discussion of racism in the antebellum period is classically
materialist: racism did not produce slavery; slavery produced, and
continuously reproduced, racism. The planters’ need for cheap
labor — and the extraordinary wealth it produced — was its root
cause. Slaveowners could not increase the productivity of their
plantations by giving more resources to slave workers, or educating
them, or teaching them skills, as this would undermine the very
institution. Due to competition with other planters, moreover, the
slaveowner “was forced, unless willing to take lower profits,
continually to beat down the cost of his slave labor.” In this
context, racism was “found, invented and proved” in order to
justify the horrors (and inefficiencies) of slavery. This is how Du
Bois puts it:

If the leaders of the South, while keeping the consumer in mind, had
turned more thoughtfully to the problem of the American producer, and
had guided the production of cotton and food so as to take every
advantage of new machinery and modern methods in agriculture, they
might have moved forward with manufacture and been able to secure an
approximately large amount of profit. . . . But in order to maintain
its income without sacrifice or exertion, the South fell back on a
doctrine of racial differences which it asserted made higher
intelligence and increased efficiency impossible for Negro labor.
Wishing such an excuse for lazy indulgence, the planter easily found,
invented and proved it. His subservient religious leaders reverted to
the “Curse of Canaan”; his pseudo-scientists gathered and
supplemented all available doctrines of race inferiority; his
scattered schools and pedantic periodicals repeated these legends,
until for the average planter born after 1840 it was impossible not to
believe that all valid laws in psychology, economics and politics
stopped with the Negro race.

“The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority by the South,”
Du Bois concludes, “was primarily because of economic motives and
the interconnected political urge necessary to support slave
industry.” (Du Bois has more to say about the racism of white
workers, which I examine below.)

Du Bois’s explanation of the Union’s victory in the Civil War also
highlights the efforts of English workers to prevent their government
from recognizing the Confederacy and entering the war against the
Union. “Monster meetings” of workers in London and Manchester in
1863 had a real impact, in Du Bois’s estimation. “Karl Marx,” he
writes, “testified that this meeting [in St. James’ Hall, London,
in March 1863] . . . kept Lord Palmerston [the prime minister] from
declaring war against the United States.” Du Bois quotes the text
of a speech, written by Marx, which was read at a subsequent
demonstration in London, a text addressed and sent to President
Lincoln
[[link removed]]:

Sir: We who offer this address are Englishmen and workingmen. We prize
as our dearest inheritance, bought for us by the blood of our fathers,
the liberty we enjoy — the liberty of free labor on a free soil. . .
. We rejoiced, sir, in your election to the Presidency, as a splendid
proof that the principles of universal freedom and equality were
rising to the ascendant. We regarded with abhorrence the conspiracy
and rebellion by which it was sought at once to overthrow the
supremacy of a government based upon the most popular suffrage in the
world, and to perpetuate the hateful inequalities of race.

These English workers embraced just the type of interracial
working-class solidarity that Du Bois would come to see, seventy years
later, as essential for the eradication of racial oppression and for
the liberation of workers of all colors.

The slave workers’ general strike destroyed slavery directly but
also indirectly, by inducing Lincoln to issue the Emancipation
Proclamation on January 1, 1863. It also proved decisive for the Union
defeat of the Confederacy. The result was thus a social as well as a
political revolution. With the eradication of personal servitude,
democracy became, for the first time, a real possibility in the South.
Along with Du Bois, accordingly, we have every right to consider the
Civil War truly epochal: “Its issue has vitally affected the course
of human progress. To the student of history it ranks along with the
conquests of Alexander; the incursions of the Barbarians; the
Crusades; the discovery of America, and the American
Revolution.” For Du Bois, “the emancipation of the laboring class
in half the nation [is] a revolution comparable to the upheavals in
France in the past, and in Russia, Spain, India and China today.”

Reconstruction: An “Extraordinary Marxist Experiment”

For a dozen years following the Civil War, the Union Army occupied the
South, and African-American men could vote and run for political
office. During these years, African Americans elected a large number
of black and progressive white representatives to state governments
across the South. Sixteen African Americans also served in the US
Congress during these years, including two senators. For white elites,
the Reconstruction era was a disaster. They would eventually create
and distribute an image and historiography of Reconstruction that
vilified both black representatives and black voters as ignorant,
greedy, corrupt, and vengeful, truly unworthy of suffrage or indeed of
any rights that whites were bound to respect.

The truth, as Du Bois shows in several chapters in Black
Reconstruction, was quite different from this narrative. He believed
that democracy, defended by federal troops, had allowed the working
class to come to power in the South — fifty years before the
Russian Revolution. Du Bois was tempted to describe this as a
“dictatorship of the proletariat,” although he eventually decided
to use the phrase “dictatorship of labor”:

Among Negroes, and particularly in the South, there was being put into
force one of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the
world, before the Russian revolution, had seen. That is, backed by the
military power of the United States, a dictatorship of labor was to be
attempted and those who were leading the Negro race in this vast
experiment were emphasizing the necessity of the political power and
organization backed by protective military power.

Several interlocutors dissuaded Du Bois from using the term
“dictatorship of the proletariat
[[link removed]].”
As he explained at the start of a chapter titled “The Black
Proletariat in South Carolina”:

I first called this chapter “The Dictatorship of the Black
Proletariat in South Carolina,” but it has been brought to my
attention that this would not be correct since universal suffrage does
not lead to a real dictatorship until workers use their votes
consciously to rid themselves of the dominion of private capital.

According to Du Bois, there were some indications of this intent among
blacks in South Carolina, “but it was always coupled with the idea
of that day, that the only real escape for a laborer was himself to
own capital.” Indeed, most of the former slave workers wanted land
of their own to work. Du Bois presumably used the phrase
“dictatorship of labor” to signal that the Reconstruction
governments were elected and supported by propertyless blacks and some
poor whites — and that the officials so elected represented the
interests of these workers.

Du Bois insists that Reconstruction cannot be understood in
race-centered terms — that is, as a struggle between the black and
white races, fueled by racism. Rather, Reconstruction was a conflict
among classes that were struggling to find new ways of surviving after
the demise of the slave economy. “Reconstruction,” as Du Bois puts
it,

was not simply a fight between the white and black races in the South
or between master and ex-slave. It was much more subtle; it involved
more than this. There have been repeated and continued attempts to
paint this era as an interlude of petty politics or nightmare of race
hate instead of viewing it slowly and broadly as a tremendous series
of efforts to earn a living in new and untried ways, to achieve
economic security and to restore fatal losses of capital and
investment.

For Du Bois, the key actors of the Reconstruction era were workers
(still divided by race, as before the war, into separate movements)
and capitalists (divided into two main fractions). Reconstruction
encompassed, first of all,

a vast labor movement of ignorant, earnest, and bewildered black men
whose faces had been ground in the mud by their three awful centuries
of degradation and who now staggered forward blindly in blood and
tears amid petty division, hate and hurt, and surrounded by every
disaster of war and industrial upheaval.

Second,

Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled and
bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and
fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of
poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to
manhood.

Third,

Reconstruction was the turn of white Northern migration southward to
new and sudden economic opportunity which followed the disaster and
dislocation of war, and an attempt to organize capital and labor on a
new pattern and build a new economy.

Du Bois is here referring to the Northern capitalists, both large and
petty, who moved to the South in search of riches after the war —
the “carpetbagger capitalists,” as he calls them. “Finally,”
writes Du Bois,

Reconstruction was a desperate effort of a dislodged, maimed,
impoverished and ruined oligarchy and monopoly to restore an
anachronism in economic organization by force, fraud and slander, in
defiance of law and order, and in the face of a great labor movement
of white and black, and in bitter strife with a new capitalism and a
new political framework.

This, of course, is the formerly slave-owning planter class. Du Bois
attributes the turmoil, corruption, and violence of the Reconstruction
era to the “fierce fight” among these classes and class fractions
for control over the “capitalist state.”

What were the key achievements of the “dictatorships of labor” in
the South while they lasted? The fact that African Americans enjoyed a
modicum of civil and political rights during this era is of course
tremendously important. For the first time in its history, universal
manhood suffrage prevailed in the United States. For Du Bois, perhaps
the most important achievements of Reconstruction were the public
schools and black colleges that were founded in this era. (Du Bois
himself attended one of these colleges, Fisk, a mere decade after
Reconstruction.) He devotes an entire chapter (“Founding the Public
School”) to this development, arguing that these schools were
nothing less than “the salvation of the South and the Negro.”

For Du Bois, interestingly, these schools played an important
moderating role. “Without them,” he writes, “there can be no
doubt that the Negro would have rushed into revolt and vengeance and
played into the hands of those determined to crush him.” Du Bois
also praises the new schools (and the black church) for creating “a
little group of trained leadership.” He credits these leaders, and
their political moderation, with preventing the reestablishment of
chattel slavery after Reconstruction:

Had it not been for the Negro school and college, the Negro would, to
all intents and purposes, have been driven back to slavery. His
economic foothold in land and capital was too slight in ten years of
turmoil to effect any defense or stability. His reconstruction
leadership had come from Negroes educated in the North, and white
politicians, capitalists and philanthropic teachers. The
counterrevolution of 1876 drove most of these, save the teachers,
away. But already, through establishing public schools and private
colleges, and by organizing the Negro church, the Negro had acquired
enough leadership and knowledge to thwart the worst designs of the new
slave drivers.

These leaders, Du Bois suggests, “avoided the mistake of trying to
meet force by force.” He praises their resilience and patience in
the face of violent provocation: “They bent to the storm of beating,
lynching and murder, and kept their souls in spite of public and
private insult of every description.”

Nevertheless, Du Bois emphasizes that the main economic demand of the
freedmen was never attained during Reconstruction: the extensive
redistribution of land, including the big plantations, to the formerly
enslaved. The typical freedman, according to Du Bois, had “but one
clear economic ideal and that was his demand for land, his demand that
the great plantations be subdivided and given to him as his right.”
Du Bois writes that this demand was “perfectly fair and natural”
and “ought to have been an integral part of Emancipation.” He
points out that French, German, and Russian serfs and peasants were,
“on emancipation,” given “definite rights in the land.”
“Only the American Negro slave was emancipated without such rights
and in the end this spelled for him the continuation of
slavery.” More specifically, the absence of land reform in the
South opened the door to a counterrevolution that would transform the
propertyless freedmen into semislaves — indebted sharecroppers,
convict laborers, and the like.

Du Bois casts some blame for the absence of land reform upon the same
black leaders whose moderation he otherwise praises. “The Negro’s
own black leadership was naturally of many sorts,” according to Du
Bois:

Some, like the whites, were petty bourgeois, seeking to climb to
wealth; others were educated men, helping to develop a new nation
without regard to mere race lines, while a third group were idealists,
trying to uplift the Negro race and put them on a par with the whites.
But how was this to be accomplished? In the minds of very few of them
was there any clear and distinct plan for the development of a
laboring class into a position of power and mastery over the modern
industrial state. And in this lack of vision, they were not singular
in America.

Du Bois seems to be suggesting here that the weakness of socialist
ideology among black leaders and Americans generally is responsible
for “this lack of vision.” That said, the petty-bourgeois
background of so many black leaders raises serious doubts about Du
Bois’s characterization of the Reconstruction governments as
“dictatorships of labor.” In fact, as Eric Foner points out
[[link removed]],
most black politicians during Reconstruction were conservative or
silent on the issue of land redistribution. On this particular issue,
Du Bois’s analysis should have been more materialist than it was.

The Counterrevolution of Property

Du Bois was arguably even more concerned in Black
Reconstruction with explaining the counterrevolution that overthrew
Reconstruction than he was with celebrating its achievements. Hundreds
of pages of the book discuss this issue, including two of the book’s
final chapters, namely, “Counter-revolution of Property” (chapter
14) and “Back Toward Slavery” (chapter 16). One of the key themes
of these chapters is that this counterrevolution was brought about by
a class (the planters) for economic reasons, not by a race (whites)
for reasons of racial animus or racial ideology. This was truly, Du
Bois emphasizes, a counterrevolution of _property_.

Du Bois writes that “the overthrow of Reconstruction was in essence
a revolution inspired by property, and not a race war.” Elsewhere
he adds, “It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the
South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its kind,
and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its
own.” This was a _bourgeois_ counterrevolution against the
“dictatorships of labor.” This is how Du Bois summarizes this
counterrevolution, otherwise known as the Compromise of 1876, which
included the withdrawal of federal troops from the South:

The bargain of 1876 was essentially an understanding by which the
Federal Government ceased to sustain the right to vote of half of the
laboring population of the South, and left capital as represented by
the old planter class, the new Northern capitalist, and the capitalist
that began to rise out of the poor whites, with a control of labor
greater than in any modern industrial state in civilized lands. Out of
that there has arisen in the South an exploitation of labor
unparalleled in modern times, with a government in which all pretense
at party alignment or regard for universal suffrage is given up. The
methods of government have gone uncriticized, and elections are by
secret understanding and manipulation; the dictatorship of capital in
the South is complete.

“The dictatorship of capital in the South is complete” — not a
dictatorship of an undifferentiated white race. In fact, Du Bois
argues,

The new dictatorship became a manipulation of the white labor vote
which followed the lines of similar control in the North, while it
proceeded to deprive the black voter by violence and force of any vote
at all. The rivalry of these two classes of labor and their
competition neutralized the labor vote in the South.

The dictatorship of capital, in sum, brought about the oppression and
disenfranchisement of black workers, in part to win the support of
white workers. But while white workers kept the right to vote, they
had little more political power than blacks. The outcome of the
counterrevolution of 1876 was thus the racial oppression of black
workers; the destruction of democracy; a divided working class; and
the “unparalleled” exploitation of labor, black and white. Indeed,
capital in the South enjoyed, in Du Bois’s words, “a control of
labor greater than in any modern industrial state in civilized
lands.” Without civil and political rights, moreover, many black
workers were eventually reduced to the status of semislaves, tied to
planters by debt and violence. The planters would remain the
politically dominant class in the South until their power was finally
broken by the civil rights movement
[[link removed]].

This brings us to the question of white working-class racism. Why did
white workers support the dictatorship of capital and the oppression
of black workers? Du Bois viewed such racism as extremely powerful and
extensive, so much so that he sometimes doubted whether working-class
solidarity and socialism were in any way realistic in the United
States. In fact, Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction during a period
when he was unusually pessimistic about the possibility of interracial
solidarity. The year before Black Reconstruction was published, Du
Bois penned an infamous editorial in the Crisis, the magazine he long
edited, which called for the voluntary self-segregation of African
Americans.60
[[link removed]] The
editorial stirred up a firestorm of criticism within the strongly
integrationist (and interracial) NAACP.

But self-segregation was never a principle or ultimate end for Du
Bois. It was a tactic — and one he gradually abandoned during the
1940s. Similarly, Du Bois never concluded in Black Reconstruction, or
in any of his subsequent writings, that interracial working-class
solidarity was impossible. It was just, at specific times and for
specific reasons, very difficult to achieve. For Du Bois, white
working-class racism was above all a puzzle that needed to be solved,
not a permanent state of affairs. It troubled him because he was
convinced that neither capitalism nor the racial oppression it
produced could be overthrown if racism prevented the unification of
white and black workers. And Du Bois was clear in Black
Reconstruction that his ultimate goal was to unify “slaves black,
brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the
proletariat.” There was no other road, as he saw it, to either the
emancipation of labor or the overthrow of racial oppression.

As it happened, white workers in the South generally supported the
overthrow of Reconstruction and the oppression of blacks. They
generally supported, that is, the bourgeois counterrevolution of
property that established a dictatorship of capital. What explains
this paradox? Why would a group of workers who would have been
stronger had they united with another group of workers instead support
their exploiters in the oppression of that other group?
Throughout Black Reconstruction, Du Bois emphasizes that white
working-class animosity toward blacks stems from competition over
jobs. Capitalism everywhere pits workers against one another, such
that workers view others as competitors, even enemies. Capitalism
creates a kind of war of all against all as workers scramble to find
jobs and keep them. Of course, this war allows capitalists to keep
wages low. For Du Bois, white working-class racism evolved out of
their fear that capitalists would replace them with black workers,
including newly emancipated workers, who were willing to work for
lower wages. It was this same fear of competition, Du Bois argued,
that had led to the formation of two labor movements in the antebellum
period.

The fear of unemployment, according to Du Bois, was particularly
strong before the creation of the modern welfare state. And so white
workers used what power they had to exclude blacks from the labor
market. Hence white demands that blacks be banished from certain
occupations or workplaces; hence the exclusion of blacks from craft
unions; hence white violence against black coworkers and
strikebreakers. Racism could be “found, invented and proved” in
order to justify these practices, in the same way that slaveowners had
earlier “found, invented and proved” racism to justify theirs.
Here is Du Bois explaining the violence of whites against African
Americans:

Total depravity, human hate and _Schadenfreude_, do not explain fully
the mob spirit in America. Before the wide eyes of the mob is ever the
Shape of Fear. Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who
break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake, is a knot, large
or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are
desperately afraid of something. Of what? Of many things, but usually
of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually
disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their
children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime. And of all
this, most ubiquitous in modern industrial society is that fear of
unemployment.

White workers, in short, believed that it was better to be exploited
than not to be exploited (i.e., unemployed). They feared unemployment,
which meant no wages, more than they feared low wages. And so white
workers sided with people who were offering jobs and looked like them
instead of with darker people who shared their plight. This was an
understandable decision but an error nonetheless. White workers as
well as black suffered — and continue to suffer — from their
lack of solidarity.

Du Bois also emphasizes that the planter class was ever prepared to
encourage and aggravate the animosity between white and black workers.
“They lied about the Negroes,” he writes, and “accused them of
theft, crime, moral enormities and laughable grotesqueries.” The
planters’ purpose was to forestall “the danger of a united
Southern labor movement by appealing to the fear and hate of white
labor and offering them alliance and leisure.” The planters, Du
Bois writes, encouraged white workers “to ridicule Negroes and beat
them, kill and burn their bodies” and “even gave the poor whites
their daughters in marriage, and raised a new oligarchy on the
tottering, depleted foundations of the old.”

The dictatorship of capital brought about the oppression and
disenfranchisement of black workers, in part to win the support of
white workers.

Du Bois very briefly presents another explanation for white
working-class racism — in the post-Reconstruction era — that has
become the focus of much attention. His discussion of this spans only
a few paragraphs, but it is sometimes discussed as if it were the very
core of Black Reconstruction. And it is the source of the most
popular catchphrase of the book — although Du Bois himself never
used the phrase — namely, “the wages of whiteness
[[link removed]].”

Du Bois suggests that white workers in the South — but not
blacks — received “a sort of public and psychological wage” as
a supplement to the low wages paid by their employers. Of what did
this wage consist? Du Bois points out that white workers could enter
public parks, send their children to “the best schools,” and apply
for jobs in police departments. Blacks could do none of these things.
White workers could also walk public streets without being accosted or
assaulted; blacks could not. In addition, white workers had the right
to vote, and while this did not result in any real political power,
the courts treated them with leniency because they were dependent on
white votes. Blacks could not vote, so the courts treated them
harshly.

Du Bois is mainly alluding here to the civil and political rights of
white workers, and to the exercise of those rights. Calling these
rights a “psychological” wage, however, is confusing: these rights
were real and enforceable; they did not just exist in the heads or
minds of white workers. In any event, “the wages of whiteness”
turn out to consist primarily of the civil and political rights
enjoyed by white workers but denied to blacks following
Reconstruction. White workers had certain rights in addition to low
wages; black workers had no rights and even lower wages. This is a
useful shorthand description of the Jim Crow era.

Du Bois also includes “public deference and titles of courtesy” in
the extra “wage” that white workers but not black were given.
White workers had a certain status (at least among other whites) that
blacks did not. And Du Bois notes that newspapers flattered the poor
whites while ignoring or ridiculing blacks. Here again, these things
were not just in the minds of white workers, so calling them
“psychological” is odd. “The wages of whiteness” refers to the
rights and status enjoyed by white workers in addition to their low
wages.

The question is: How do these “wages” explain racism?
They _describe_ a racist society, but how do they _produce_ racial
hatred or violence? Du Bois does not say much about this, but he
implies that white workers felt compelled to resist any effort to
extend to black workers the same rights and deference they received:

[White] laborers . . . would rather have low wages upon which they
could eke out an existence than see colored labor with a decent wage.
White labor saw in every advance of Negroes a threat to their racial
prerogatives, so that in many districts Negroes were afraid to build
decent homes or dress well, or own carriages, bicycles or automobiles,
because of possible retaliation on the part of the whites. Thus every
problem of labor advance in the South was skillfully turned by
demagogues into a matter of inter-racial jealousy.

If blacks enjoyed the same rights and social esteem as white workers,
Du Bois seems to say, white workers could no longer claim to be
superior to them or to anyone else in society — and that, by
implication, was presumably intolerable to whites, even if it meant
“eking out an existence.”

Du Bois thus presents two explanations for the racism of white
workers: white workers become racists to justify their efforts to
prevent black workers from replacing them at work, and they become
racists to justify their efforts to prevent blacks from enjoying the
same rights and status they enjoy. There is undoubtedly some truth to
both these arguments. But it is also obvious to Du Bois that neither
adequately explains why white workers could not or would not come to
see that a united front with black workers against capitalists would
result in higher wages, greater rights, and a higher status for
themselves as well as for black workers. This failure of vision, Du
Bois understood, is not inevitable.

In fact, Du Bois clearly did not believe that his two explanations
worked in all times and places. As noted earlier, Du Bois held out
hope in Black Reconstruction for the emancipation of “slaves
black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the
proletariat.” As we shall see, he would later praise certain trade
unions for building interracial solidarity, and he would advise
radical black youth that the liberation of both blacks and whites
depended upon their mutual cooperation and friendship. Du Bois never
developed a simple formula or technique for bringing about
working-class solidarity. Of course, no such formula or technique
exists. But Black Reconstruction reminds us why workers’
solidarity is so important, and Du Bois would preach the gospel of
interracial solidarity for the rest of his days. He later wrote
[[link removed]] that Black
Reconstruction marks a break with his earlier “provincial
racialism” and was an attempt “to envisage the broader problems of
work and income as affecting all men regardless of color or
nationality.”

After Black Reconstruction

Du Bois would remain a committed socialist and Marxist until his death
in 1963. Black Reconstruction, in other words, was just one part —
the most extraordinary part, no doubt — of a larger body of Marxist
work written by Du Bois. Unfortunately, Du Bois also became a
Stalinist, and he would articulate a view of socialism that was deeply
problematic. A brief review of some of Du Bois’s key writings after
1935 demonstrates that Black Reconstruction was by no means a unique
or unusual foray into Marxist theory.

In 1940, Du Bois published an autobiography, Dusk of Dawn
[[link removed]]. He
was then seventy-two years old. (A second autobiography was published
posthumously in the United States in 1968.) Near the end of this
volume, Du Bois presents a “Basic American Negro Creed” that he
originally wrote in 1936, as an appendix to an essay in which, among
other things, he declared his belief in Marxism. “We believe,”
the creed states, “in the ultimate triumph of some form of Socialism
the world over; that is, common ownership and control of the means of
production and equality of income.” Toward this end, the creed
advocates that “Negro workers should join the labor movement and
affiliate with such trade unions as welcome them and treat them
fairly. We believe that workers’ Councils organized by Negroes for
interracial understanding should strive to fight race prejudice in the
working class.” And the creed calls “for vesting the ultimate
power of the state in the hands of the workers.” Working-class
solidarity, interracial unionism, the fight against racism, common
ownership of the means of production, and workers’ control of the
state — this is Du Bois’s program for black workers and, indeed,
for working people around the globe.

Several years later, during World War II, Du Bois would become
preoccupied, and not for the first time, with the question of
colonialism. A longtime advocate of pan-Africanism, Du Bois rightly
worried that colonialism would endure long after World War II, despite
the high-minded phrases and promises of European leaders during the
war. Shortly after presiding at the Fifth Pan-African Conference in
Manchester, England, Du Bois summarized his views about the capitalist
basis of colonialism and the color line in his book Color and
Democracy
[[link removed]].
“Not until we face the fact,” writes Du Bois, “that colonies are
a method of investment yielding unusual [i.e., large] returns, or
expected to do so, will we realize that the colonial system is part of
the battle between capital and labor in the modern economy.”

Du Bois goes on to criticize the race-centered view of imperialism
when he presents his own alternative perspective:

It happens, not for biological or historical reasons, that most of the
inhabitants of colonies today have colored skins. This does not make
them one group or race or even allied biological groups or races. In
fact these colored people vary vastly in physique, history, and
cultural experience. The one thing that unites them today in the
world’s thought is their poverty, ignorance, and disease, which
renders them all, in different degrees, unresisting victims of modern
capitalistic exploitation. On this foundation the modern “Color
Line” has been built, with all its superstitions and pseudo-science.
And it is this complex today which more than anything else excuses the
suppression of democracy, not only in Asia and Africa, but in Europe
and the Americas. Hitler seized on “negroid” characteristics to
accuse the French of inferiority. Britain points to miscegenation with
colored races to prove democracy impossible in South America. But it
is left to the greatest modern democracy, the United States, to defend
human slavery and caste, and even defeat democratic government in its
own boundaries, ostensibly because of an inferior race, but really in
order to make profits out of cheap labor, both black and white.

Racism, in other words, is the “ostensible” motivation behind —
and a justification for — slavery, caste, and colonialism. But this
is a fig leaf — or “camouflage,” as Du Bois wrote in Black
Reconstruction. The actual motivation is the accumulation of profits
by means of cheap labor. Herein, for Du Bois, is the secret of
“white supremacy”: the capitalist imperative to exploit labor is
achieved by creating a color line that oppresses workers of color and
deceives white workers into believing they are superior to them,
thereby dividing and cheapening _all _labor.

Following World War II, Du Bois entered into the orbit of the
pro-Soviet Communist Party of the United States, a group from which he
had long kept his distance for a variety of reasons, despite his
enthusiasm for the Soviet Union. In October 1946, Du Bois was invited
to speak in Columbia, South Carolina, to delegates of the Southern
Negro Youth Congress, a group founded by the Communist Party. (Paul
Robeson and the novelist Howard Fast spoke to the group the night
before Du Bois’s speech.) In his address, “Behold the Land
[[link removed]],”
Du Bois advises the delegates:

Slowly but surely the working people of the South, white and black,
must come to remember that their emancipation depends upon their
mutual cooperation; upon their acquaintanceship with each other; upon
their friendship; upon their social intermingling. Unless this happens
each is going to be made the football to break the heads and hearts of
the other.

Du Bois goes on to say:

The oil and sulphur; the coal and iron; the cotton and corn; the
lumber and cattle belong to you the workers, black and white, and not
to the thieves who hold them and use them to enslave you. They can be
rescued and restored to the people if you have the guts to strive for
the real right to vote, the right to real education, the right to
happiness and health and the total abolition of the father of these
scourges of mankind, poverty.

Du Bois then speaks of the white workers, the “poor whites,” of
the South. He has become much less pessimistic about the possibility
of interracial solidarity than he was a decade earlier:

It may seem like a failing fight when the newspapers ignore you; when
every effort is made by white people in the South to count you out of
citizenship and to act as though you did not exist as human beings
while all the time they are profiting by your labor, gleaning wealth
from your sacrifices and trying to build a nation and a civilization
upon your degradation. You must remember that despite all this, you
have allies, and allies even in the white South. First and greatest of
these possible allies are the white working classes about you, the
poor whites whom you have been taught to despise and who in turn have
learned to fear and hate you. This must not deter you from efforts to
make them understand, because in the past, in their ignorance and
suffering, they have been led foolishly to look upon you as the cause
of most of their distress.

This attitude, Du Bois suggests, “has been deliberately cultivated
ever since emancipation.” He insists that the color line between
black and white workers must be broken, a division deliberately
fostered by capitalists and their political servants. This was an idea
to which Du Bois returned again and again during his final decades, an
idea that goes back at least to his 1920 essay “On Work and Wealth
[[link removed]].”

As we have seen, Du Bois encouraged black workers to join trade unions
in his 1936 “creed.” In the following years, Du Bois continued to
see trade unions, especially the industrial unions of the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO), as the best hope for creating
interracial working-class solidarity in the United States. In a 1948
essay [[link removed]], Du Bois writes,
“Probably the greatest and most effective effort toward interracial
understanding among the working masses has come about through the
trade unions.” The CIO’s efforts had brought about “an
astonishing spread of interracial tolerance and understanding.
Probably no movement in the last 30 years,” he wrote, “has been so
successful in softening race prejudice among the masses.”

In this same 1948 text, Du Bois reiterates his belief that racism and
imperialism — and wars of liberation — are primarily generated
by capitalists and their pursuit of profits:

[T]he American Negro is part of a world situation. Negroes are in a
quasi-colonial status. They belong to the lower classes of the world.
These classes are, have been, and are going to be for a long time
exploited by the more powerful groups and nations in the world for the
benefit of those groups. The real problem before the United States is
whether we are really beginning to reason about this world-wide
feeling of class dominance with its resultant wars: wars for rivalry
for the sharing of the spoils of exploitation, and wars against
exploitation.

It is telling that Du Bois describes imperialism and colonialism here
in terms of exploitation and class dominance and not in terms of
national or racial oppression. Of course, Du Bois fully understands
that colonialism entails national and racial oppression, but its
primary cause is the capitalist’s search for cheap labor.

At the height of McCarthyism in the United States, in 1950, Du Bois
drafted a book-length manuscript
[[link removed]] called
“Russia and America: An Interpretation.” His publisher refused to
print it because it was too pro-Soviet and too critical of the United
States. Incredibly, it has still not been published. One important
section of this book — the whole of which is too long to adequately
summarize here — argues that the Soviet Union is more democratic
than the United States because Soviet citizens are able to discuss,
debate, and decide “matters of vital interest to the people, that
is, work and wage and living conditions — matters not simply of
interest, but of personal knowledge and experience.” For Du Bois,
clearly, this is the core meaning of socialist democracy:

Everybody wants to talk about these matters; everyone attends meetings
twice or three times a week; they discuss the local industries; the
water supply, the schools and the man or woman best fitted to
represent their thought and decision in the county meetings. If the
delegate selected does not act and vote as they wish, they recall him
and substitute another.

“It is a mistake,” Du Bois concludes, “to think democracy has
been throttled in the Soviet Republics.” He likens local soviets to
New England town meetings, a venue in which ordinary people “come
together to talk, propose, argue, and to decide; to elect a delegate
to a higher Soviet which in turn elects to one still higher and so on
to the Supreme Soviet. Here is pure and effective democracy,” Du
Bois suggests, “such as has almost disappeared from the United
States.” In the United States, in fact, “our election of the
president, appointment of judges, representation in the Senate and
inequality of electoral districts show the legal restraints on
democracy; while extralegally but by common consent are
disfranchisement of Negroes and the poor, the use of money in
elections, and the well-paid lobbyists of Big Business in our
legislatures, not to mention the press and periodical monopoly.” Du
Bois concludes,

It is with the greatest difficulty that the American electorate gets a
chance to express its mind or receive the truth upon which to make up
its mind; or secure sanctions by which it may make its legislators
carry out the popular will. In both Great Britain and France, and in
pre-war Germany and Italy, and certainly in the United States, the
will of the people has long been thwarted by wealth, privilege, and
ignorance.

In 1952, Du Bois began teaching at the interracial Jefferson School of
Social Science in Manhattan, which was devoted to workers’
education. The school was established by the Communist Party to
educate working-class people and to train class-conscious militants.
Du Bois taught courses on imperialism, the slave trade, Africa,
pan-Africanism, and Reconstruction. (The writer Lorraine Hansberry was
in his first class.) The course on Reconstruction
[[link removed]] argued
that the socialist revolution requires interracial solidarity against
capitalists. Du Bois taught at the Jefferson School until 1956, when
it was forced to close.

The capitalist imperative to exploit labor is achieved by creating a
color line that oppresses workers of color, thereby dividing and
cheapening _all_ labor.

Du Bois’s politics were never closer to the Communist Party’s
during these years, and, as we have seen, his enthusiasm for the
Soviet Union continued unabated. In 1953, Du Bois penned a paean to
Stalin
[[link removed]] —
with the obligatory insults to Trotsky — following the death of the
Soviet leader. Du Bois justified the Soviet dictatorship as necessary
until such time as Soviet workers were “more intelligent, more
experienced and in less danger from interference from without.” It
was just such alleged interference, moreover, that led Du Bois to
support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Not surprisingly, he
vehemently denied that socialism must be democratic, although that was
certainly his ideal.

Du Bois’s vision of socialism is problematic, to say the least. It
was based in part on his long-standing belief that smarter and better
educated people — the “talented tenth,” as he called them —
had a responsibility to lead “ignorant” and uneducated people, who
were not capable of governing themselves. Du Bois saw Stalin (and
later Mao Zedong) as educated and experienced leaders who were
selflessly pulling — or perhaps dragging — masses of ignorant
peasants into the twentieth century. Their noble ends allegedly
justified their often-brutal methods. This kind of elitism erupts,
incidentally, in a little-noted passage in Black Reconstruction in
which Du Bois states that it would have been “best” (even if
politically impractical) if there had been a property qualification
[[link removed]] for
voting after the Civil War and only a “gradual enfranchisement” of
black workers, pending the establishment of public schools throughout
the South.

Du Bois drafted a second autobiography in 1958–59 and slightly
revised it in 1960. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois was edited
by his friend Herbert Aptheker, a longtime Communist Party activist
whom Du Bois had befriended after the war and whom he would appoint as
his literary executor. Shortened versions of the Autobiography were
published in the Soviet Union in 1962 and shortly later, posthumously,
in China and East Germany. It was finally published in the United
States in 1968. In this text, Du Bois again expresses his Marxist
beliefs and distances himself from his earlier “racialism” or
race-centered views. “I believe in the dictum of Karl Marx,” he
writes, “that the economic foundation of a nation is widely decisive
for its politics, its art and its culture.” Du Bois adds that as a
young man, “What I wanted was the same economic opportunities that
white Americans had. Beyond this I was not thinking”:

I . . . did not realize what wretched exploitation white Americans and
white workers of all sorts faced and had faced in the past, and would
face in years to come. Although a student of social progress, I did
not know the labor development in the United States. I was bitter at
lynching, but not moved by the treatment of white miners in Colorado
or Montana. I never sang the songs of Joe Hill, and the terrible
strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, did not stir me, because I knew
that factory strikers like these would not let a Negro work beside
them or live in the same town. It was hard for me to outgrow this
mental isolation, and to see that the plight of the white workers was
fundamentally the same as that of the black, _even if the white
worker helped enslave the black_.

A group of workers who would have been empowered by uniting with
another group of workers instead helped to oppress that other group.
This is the tragedy — and the puzzle — of the American labor
movement of Du Bois’s time. But Du Bois’s earlier racialism, he
implies, not only blinded him to the exploitation of workers of all
races but thereby prevented him from understanding the true nature of
the racial oppression of blacks.

Du Bois also speaks in the Autobiography about the type of society
he desires: “I believe in communism,” he writes. “I mean by
communism, a planned way of life in the production of wealth and work
designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of
its people and not merely the profit of a part.” Du Bois adds that
“all men should be employed according to their ability and that
wealth and services should be distributed according to need. Once I
thought that these ends could be attained under capitalism,” Du Bois
notes, but “After earnest observation I now believe that private
ownership of capital and free enterprise are leading the world to
disaster.” Du Bois adds that democratic government in the United
States “has almost ceased to function,” noting that one-quarter of
adults are disenfranchised and half do not vote. “We are ruled by
those who control wealth and who by that power buy or coerce public
opinion.”

Du Bois settled in Ghana in 1961 to work on a projected
multivolume Encyclopedia Africana. He died there in 1963 at the age
of ninety-five. Before he left the United States, Du Bois applied for
membership in the Communist Party of the United States, to which he
had been close since World War II. Du Bois’s last major speech in
the United States addressed, not surprisingly, the topic of
“Socialism and the American Negro.” It was delivered in May 1960
at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Folkways Records produced
a vinyl recording
[[link removed]] of
the speech that same year.

In this speech, Du Bois reiterated his belief that “there is no
doubt that the world of the twenty-first century will be
overwhelmingly communistic.” He also offered some interesting
critical reflections, from a Marxist perspective, on the civil rights
movement, which was by then in full swing. (The student sit-in
movement began in February 1960 and spread across the South in a
matter of weeks.) Du Bois’s thoughts are worth quoting at length:

The legal fight led by the NAACP has been an astonishing success. But
its very success shows the limitations of law, and law enforcement,
unless it has an economic program; unless the mass of Negro people
have not simply legal rights, but have such rights to work and wage
that enable them to live decently. Here in the United States we have
had a stirring, in the Negro population, which emphasized these facts.
. . . The experience in Montgomery, the extraordinary uprising of
students, all over the south and beginning in the north, shows an
awareness of our situation which is most encouraging. But it still
does not reach the center of the problem. _And that center is not
simply the right of Americans to spend their money as they wish and
according to law, but the chance for American Negroes to have money to
spend, because of employment in which they can make a decent wage_.
What then is the next step? It is for American Negroes in increasing
numbers, and more and more widely, to insist upon the legal rights
which are already theirs, and to add to that increasingly a
socialistic form of government, an insistence upon the welfare state,
which denies the further carrying out of industry for the profit of
those corporations which monopolize wealth and power.

Martin Luther King Jr — who also became a socialist, like Du
Bois — would say much the same thing about the necessity of decent
wages for blacks just a few years later, demanding
[[link removed]],
among other things, a guaranteed income for all. And like Du Bois,
King became a strong advocate of multiracial trade unionism and
working-class solidarity as the best means to end poverty and racism.

Conclusion

Du Bois’s turn to socialism and Marxism did not entail any lessening
of his interest in or disgust with racism and the color line. Du Bois
was committed to destroying racial oppression _before_ he became a
Marxist, and he remained just as committed to destroying racial
oppression _after_ he became a Marxist. Du Bois became an
unapologetic Marxist and a committed socialist, in fact, not in spite
of his hatred of racial oppression, but precisely because of that
hatred. He was driven and attracted to Marxism and socialism by his
quest to understand racial oppression and the best strategy to destroy
it. Of course, his understanding of both racism and how we might
subvert it changed radically once he became a Marxist and a socialist.
This change is missed by scholars who assume that Du Bois’s ideas
were essentially fixed around the time he wrote The Souls of Black
Folk.

Du Bois came to believe that the exploitation of the labor of black,
brown, and “yellow” workers was the main foundation of and
motivation for racial oppression around the globe and that the
liberation of people of color, accordingly — _all _people of
color, and not just workers — required the elimination of this
exploitation, that is, socialism. Du Bois also looked at the “color
line” differently after he became a Marxist. For the socialist Du
Bois, the color line was problematic because it divided workers as
well as races and thereby rendered working-class solidarity and
socialist revolution — and the eradication of racial oppression as
he now understood it — more difficult.

Du Bois deserves to be remembered as an eloquent critic of capitalism
and its ineluctable consequences: racial oppression, colonialism,
imperialism, war, poverty, and gross inequality, political as well as
economic. Du Bois saw a clear relationship between capitalism and
racial oppression, namely, cause and effect. He ranks among the most
astute Marxists who have addressed the question of racial oppression,
an incredibly rich tradition that includes such luminaries as Hubert
Harrison, Claude McKay, José Carlos Mariátegui, Max Shachtman, C. L.
R. James, Eric Williams, Harry Haywood, Herbert Aptheker, Oliver
Cromwell Cox, Claudia Jones, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Harold
Wolpe, Neville Alexander, Angela Davis, Manning Marable, Stuart Hall,
Adolph Reed, and Barbara Fields, among many others. We need to
recognize and credit not only the Marxist Du Bois but this entire
pantheon of Marxist theorists of race. Du Bois did not transcend this
tradition, as some have implied. He was at the heart of it.

At his best, Du Bois could also be an eloquent advocate for democratic
socialism — for multiracial working-class solidarity, for
workers’ control of the state and economy, and for an economy based
on human needs. It is true that Du Bois’s elitist vision of
socialism was deeply flawed, and his apologetics for Stalin’s
dictatorship and authoritarian socialism are indefensible and detract
from his legacy. Yet many of his contemporary acolytes deny the
Marxist Du Bois, portraying him as a race-centered theorist or an
“intersectionalist.” He was neither. Black Reconstruction in
America, I have shown, is a brilliant Marxist study that explains
racial oppression and racism as products of capitalism. Denying Du
Bois’s Marxism results in a distorted view of Du Bois’s life and
ideas, including, ironically, his analysis of racial oppression and
how we might destroy it.

_JEFF GOODWIN teaches sociology at New York University._

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month._

_If you like this article, PLEASE SUBSCRIBE
[[link removed]] OR DONATE
[[link removed]].TO JACOBIN_

* W.E.B. DuBois
[[link removed]]
* Black History
[[link removed]]
* U.S. history
[[link removed]]
* Reconstruction
[[link removed]]
* Marxism
[[link removed]]
* slavery
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]