Socialism and Democracy in W.E.B. Du Bois's Life, Thought, and Legacy

Edward Carson, Gerald Horne, Phillip Luke Sinitiere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000088205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Commemorating the 150th anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois's birth, the chapters in this book reflect on the local, national, and international significance of his remarkable life and legacy in relation to his specific commitments to socialism and democracy.

Written with contemporary conditions in mind, such as the current political period of economic inequality, the debilitating reality of exploitative economic conditions, an expansive and invasive surveillance state, the grotesque injustice of the prison industrial complex, the ongoing crisis of police violence and the militarization of law enforcement, and a White House unashamedly spewing white supremacist, nationalist rhetoric in word and deed, this book collectively ponders how Du Bois's radicalism can shape and re-texture historical understanding and underscore a reflective urgency about the future.

In this volume, scholars and activists undertake thoughtful and analytical explorations with regards to how Du Bois' commitments to socialism and democracy can inform current methodology and praxis.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy.

The Abolitionist Tradition in the Making of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Marxism and Anti-Imperialism

Jesse Olsavsky

Introduction

At every moment of his life, W.E.B. Du Bois remained of and in “the abolitionist tradition,” that is, the political and intellectual tradition arising out of the struggles of slaves and their allies to overthrow America’s despotic chattel empire. Abolitionist thinking helped educate Du Bois as a young scholar. As both academic and as “master of propaganda,” Du Bois likely wrote more on antislavery fighters, and the system they stood up against, than on any other subject. He meditated upon the significance of abolition for world history. As an activist, Du Bois took up the unfinished tasks of abolitionism, criticizing that movement’s limitations, but always looking up in reverential awe to the antislavery apostles, from John Brown to generations of slave rebels across the Americas. Just as importantly, the deeds and ideas of abolitionists, which Du Bois studied, absorbed, and never rejected, provided the very foundations for his mature Marxist and anti-imperialist convictions. Du Bois’s creative sense of class struggle, his Leninist understanding of imperialism and its global color line—all evolved out of his reflections on abolitionists’ battle for the uplift of the black worker in an era of consolidating imperialism.

The profound role of abolitionism in the making of twentieth-century black revolutionary traditions has been little explored, sometimes misunderstood. Scholars have appropriated Du Bois’s term “abolition-democracy” to articulate a vision for interracial democracy in the United States, of the kind that briefly flickered during the Radical phase of Reconstruction. However, this tendency often separates the idea of “abolition-democracy” from the concrete history of abolitionism, which produced it, and from later socialist and anti-colonial revolutions, which were its heirs. It makes “abolition-democracy” into a purely American affair, downplaying the global significance of abolition and the global meanings “democracy” took on for Du Bois.¹ “Democracy” meant freedom from want, freedom from oppression, freedom from imperialism (socialism and self-determination). On the other hand, theorists of the black radical tradition rightly unearth the deep continuities between slave resistance and later anti-colonial movements, yet often uncouple organized, interracial abolitionism from that revolutionary history.² Du Bois refused to see a divide between the creative resistance of slaves and the organizational work of abolitionists. Abolitionists and slaves learned from one another, thought widely about the imperialist world around them, and crafted nascent critiques of slavery, racism, patriarchy, and colonialism.

Du Bois was deeply attuned to abolitionist perspectives on the world and made them into the foundations for his own anti-imperialist thinking. This essay will trace three vectors of abolitionism in Du Bois’s thinking. First, it will show the centrality of abolitionism to Du Bois’s education and in the formation of his moral sensibilities—his sense of justice, of art, of how to lead and how to learn. Second, this essay will show how abolitionism shaped Du Bois’s thinking on slave revolts, class struggle, women’s emancipation, movement organization, and the relations between them. Finally, it will discuss the anti-imperialist dimensions to abolitionism, its tragic relations with imperialism’s rise, and how, in seeing these things, Du Bois theorized and historicized the global color line. Throughout, this essay suggests that the abolitionist tradition resonated well into the twentieth century, offering Du Bois and many other revolutionaries hints for renewed visions of democracy, anti-imperialism, and socialism. As black intellectuals turned their thoughts and deeds towards revolutionary anti-imperialism, they did not turn away from the old abolitionist tradition, supposedly steeped in liberal reformism, but re-affirmed its most radical vectors.

Abolitionist Sensibility in the Education of Dr. Du Bois

The antislavery movement was a central fact in the early life of W.E.B. Du Bois. His grandfather lived in liberated Haiti in the 1820s, but returned to America a decade later, perhaps participating in the radical phase of the antislavery movement, initiated after Nat Turner’s slave rebellion (1831).³ Du Bois himself was born three years after emancipation, in 1868, “the year in which the freedmen of the South were enfranchised, and for the first time as a mass took part in government.”⁴ Du Bois’s youth coincided with the counterrevolution against this “extraordinary experiment” in “abolition-democracy.” Du Bois grew up on the northern edge of the Appalachian Mountains, whose “mystic, awful voice,” he later wrote, beckoned John Brown to dream “his terrible dream” of guerrilla revolution within their verdant depths.⁵ In 1886, Du Bois delivered a high-school commencement speech on Wendell Phillips, the fiery antislavery, women’s rights, and labor agitator. By studying Phillips’s speeches, Du Bois later reminisced, he took “a long step toward a wider conception of what I was going to do” (similarly, Paul Robeson, as a high-schooler, educated himself in politics and oratory by reading Phillips’s speeches).⁶ Du Bois studied at Fisk University, one of the young colleges for newly-freed people, “born of the faith and sacrifice of the abolitionists.”⁷ He then moved to Harvard, where one of his teachers was famed abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell.⁸ He did doctoral work in history and the emerging field of “sociology,” writing a dissertation titled the Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1896). Such nearness to antislavery gave grounding to Du Bois’s later studies and sensibilities.

Du Bois’s early work and outlook as a sociologist had underpinnings in abolitionism. Already as a young academic, Du Bois found in the histories of racism, slavery, and antislavery subjects of “peculiar interest to the sociologist.”⁹ His early study of the abolition of the slave trade showed the inabilities of ruling classes to initiate humane reforms, unless compelled to. Even in this early work, Du Bois acknowledged that revolution—in this case, the Haitian Revolution—could be a profound driver of progressive social change.¹⁰ His work The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was a pioneering empirical study of how a black community, though besieged by racism, toiled, struggled, survived, and helped organize both radical abolitionism and the Underground Railroad.¹¹ Both of these early monographs relied heavily on the knowledge produced by abolitionists, “the uncounted millions of antislavery tracts, pamphlets, journals, and addresses of the entire period of agitation.”¹² Such a vast corpus of movement literature provided one foundation for Du Bois’s own knowledge of the world.

The very discipline of sociology in America, as practiced by Du Bois, was the outgrowth of abolitionist-driven social conflict. Sociology had been invented by reactionary European thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century to criticize the social upheavals of the age, particularly class-based revolutionary movements and communist ideologies.¹³ In the 1850s, proslavery apologist George Fitzhugh first imported “the word sociology” into America in his notorious work, Sociology for the South (1854). Sociology, for Fitzhugh, meant the critique of abolitionist-led disorder, which undermined stable hierarchies—based upon racial slavery, patriarchy, and class power—and paved the way for “communism.”¹⁴ To counter such ideological conceptualizations of social and racial order, abolitionists became scientific; they used facts, research, statistics, and first-hand accounts (slave narratives) to make their case against the sociology and pseudo-science of the slaves power.¹⁵ They created their own movement counter-sociology, so to speak. By relying on abolitionist sources for facts, by writing sympathetically about abolitionist movements, and by writing against racist social theory, Du Bois’s own social science inherited the counter-sociology created by abolitionists. In fact, in his most profound critique of social science, the conclusion of Black Reconstruction, Du Bois denounces racist academics for their untruthful exclusion of abolitionist truth telling—i.e. the “slave biographies, like those of Charles Ball, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass; the careful observations Olmsted and the indictment of Hinton Helper.”¹⁶

Du Boi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: “If we neglect to mark this history, it may be distorted or forgotten”: Socialism and Democracy in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Life, Thought, and Legacy
• 1 The Abolitionist Tradition in the Making of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Marxism and Anti-Imperialism
• 2 “Glances Curiously and Walks On” – Racializing Visibility and Double Consciousness
• 3 What Happens to a Dream Deferred? W.E.B. Du Bois and the Radical Black Enlightenment/Endarkenment
• 4 Darkwater’s Existentialist Socialism
• 5 Du Bois’s “A World Search for Democracy”: The Democratic Roots of Socialism
• 6 From Philanthropic Black Capitalism to Socialism: Cooperativism in Du Bois’s Economic Thought
• 7 “Listen to the Blood”: 1 Du Bois, Cultural Memory, and the Black Radical Tradition in Education
• 8 Enlightening the Working Class: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Jefferson School of Social Science
• 9 W.E.B. Du Bois in the Tradition of Radical Blackness: Radicalism, Repression, and Mutual Comradeship, 1930–1960
• 10 “There must be no idle mourning”: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Legacy as a Black Radical Intellectual
• Poems
• Dialogues
• Index