NOTES

1 It should be noted that in modern European thought Marxism is but one of the radical traditions that claim to be advancing the Enlightenment. There is a radical or left libertarian trend as well. Noam Chomsky is the best know exemplar of this position (see Barsky, 1997:chapter 3). Chomsky (1987:152) advances 17th and 18th century rationalism and liberalism, where the principle of individual freedom is primary. He says, “the principles of people like von Humboldt and Adam Smith and others were that people should be free.” And, again he says he looks forward to “a day when these various strands [of 17th and 18th century rationalism and liberalism] will be brought together within the framework of libertarian socialism , a social form that barely exists today though its elements can be perceived: in the guarantee of individual rights that has achieved it highest form-though still tragically flawed-in the Western democracies; the Israeli kibbutzim; in the experiments with workers councils in Yugoslavia; in the effort to awaken popular consciousness and create a new involvement in the social process which is a fundamental element in the Third World revolutions, coexisting uneasily with indefensible authoritarian practices.”
2 Donald Sassoon (1997:5) argues that popular or ‘vulgar Marxism’ was an interpretation that was designed to strongly appeal to trade union leaders of the working class movement. Marxism in its popular rendering was adapted to the needs of the European working class and explained its organization into larger units of production. Sassoon (ibid:8) suggests Class consciousness was constructed by political activists, just as nationalism was constructed by nationalists, feminism by feminist and racism by racist.”
3 In the article “Marxism and the History of Africa: Reading Walter Rodney”(1982) Munford critiques Rodney’s conceptualization of African history from the standpoint of orthodox Marxism. Munford argues, “As profound a thinker and as anti-imperialist as he was, Walter Rodney nonetheless made theoretical mistakes. Although he considered himself to be within the broad framework of the Marxist tradition, his conclusions were not always consistent with the science of historical materialism. In fact, some were anti-historical materialist (1982:124).” He would also say, “In principal Rodney agreed that social class has been the decisive element in the history of the world. But as a practicing historian, he vacillated as to whether class is the essential feature of African history (ibid:125).” Munford, as we will see, in Race and Reparations will also deny that class is “the essential feature of African history”.
4 I here use the concept Marxisms to denote the many trends within contemporary Marxism. For a discussion of the diversity of trends see Martin Jay (1984). The Western Marxist concept of totality and universality emerged from a fiercely Eurocentrist and Enlightenment paradigm.
5 See endnote 1 for an example of how this extreme Eurocentrism is articulated by a leading left liberal , or radical libertarian. Europe and European civilization, in this view, are in the vanguard of humanity. European values are the model for humanity and will in the end save humanity. Noam Chomsky’s radical libertarianism and Francis Fukuyama’s centrist liberalism carry similar, if not identical, ideas about the centrality and supremacy of European values and European history.
6 It is necessary to get beyond what is here an essentially functionalist conception of civilization. That is to argue from the standpoint of what civilization does, or how it functions. There must at some point be an explanation of the basic elements or mechanisms of civilization. Here I would suggest that language is the central and most basic mechanism of civilization. Language is more than and more profound then a mere system of communication; it is an indispensable internal civilizational dynamic, necessary to expressing and unleashing the spiritual and creative energies of civilizations. European civilization in its linguistic practices and structures reveal its profound racist essence. For instance, evil is black, virtue is white. Linguists have discovered many more examples.
7 Professor Robert Rhodes of the University of Ohio defines this as a new lumpentry system. A system, which includes the large populations of essentially racially oppressed peoples who live in deep poverty and long term or permanent unemployment. One third of Black people are considered part of this population. Some estimates are that 2 billion people on a global scale comprise this general lumpentry system. I prefer the notion general lumpentry system because it more accurately describes those populations that extend beyond the traditional lumpenproletariat or déclassé .It is also more than an aggregate of individuals thrown out of economic production and forced to beg, and live a life of crime. These are now the marginalized and ruined poor plus the lumpen. I reject the concept underclass because it carries with it the baggage of culture of poverty and blame the victim theories, when in fact what is described is actually a new social and class category emerging from the globalization of capitalism and the new technology. Jacqueline Jones has aptly referred to these as stranded populations.
8 French structuralism in its sociologistic and Marxian versions (as against its mentalist and anthropological versions) seeks to discover organizing principles of social life. Principles are viewed as the deep underlying and determining facts of social totalities. What Munford implies is a hierarchy of determinations starting with civilization as a set of deeply held, hard to change values and dispositions. These are what Althusser (1970) would term “structuring structures”. What Munford does, which is not present in Althusser, is to include deep structures as a component of historical transformation. Historicity is important for Munford’s paradigm because of the sense of crisis, revolutionary rupture and discontinuity and break within structures and systems and their transition to a new level of the whole, which he ultimately wishes to (indeed, has to) explain. Thus, while never explicitly stated, Munford’s procedure involves the diachronic sense of structures/levels, that is, viewing them in historical time; and equally a synchronic sense of structures, that is, viewing structures/levels like the civilizational, socio-economic and political/ideological interacting upon one another at the same time in time. However, it remains to be seen whether Munford’s paradigm can acknowledge multiple determinations interacting in non-hierarchical relations. While this is clearly not the time or place to expound upon methodological issues, it is worth noting that non-hierarchical relations are possible and, I would argue, can explain the complexities of revolutionary transition which Munford discusses. In particular I find Kontopoulos’s (1993:55) discussion of heterarchies helpful. Rather than single determinations ordered hierarchically (in Munford’s case from the bottom, or foundation, upward), we can speak of multiple or interacting determinations. Hence, as Kontopoulos puts it, “heterarchies involve multiple access, multiple linkages and multiple determinations.” This conceptualization of determinations, and what is dialectical complexity, will work better with Munford’s implicit sense of crisis and revolutionary rupture. Thus, a profound revolutionary crisis of the type Munford suggests is necessary to undermine the global white supremacist system, will involve a situation where, conceivably, civilizational events and levels conflict with political and ideological events; where economic events and civilizational events conflict. Here the moment is determined heterarchically, rather than hierarchically. Rather than single determinations, there are multiple determinations, where the movement of the system is determined not from a state of equilibrium, or balanced , but far from equilibrium; what has been referred to as chaotic dynamics.
9 Existentialism and now neo-pragmatism, a la Richard Rorty and Cornel West, are efforts to come to terms with this civilizational crisis. West, for instance, talks constantly of confronting the absurd and expresses a profound pessimism concerning black culture’s ability to overcome or work out of the crisis of civilization of the West. He sees a growing nihilism among, especially, young Blacks. On the other hand Francis Fukuyama (1992) views the end of the Cold War as having resolved the crisis of values and thus the civilizational crisis of the West. History and civilization return to their normal paths of evolution, according to him.
10 Samuel P. Huntington coming from a white supremacist direction also conceptualizes civilization as the essential category of social life in the wake of the end of the Cold War. He states, “In the post-Cold War world for the first time in history global politics has become multipolar and multicivilizational (1996:22) And, finally, “In this new world the most pervasive, important and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups, but between peoples belonging to different cultural entities (ibid:28).” It is apparent from the overall text that Huntington uses culture and civilization interchangeably. It is also clear that he would agree with Munford’s assessment that civilization trumps class struggle. What he does not do is to link these larger struggles to the struggle against white supremacy as a global system.
11 I have argued elsewhere that academic Afrocentrists have become more interested in tenure and scholarship within the framework of prestigious white universities. Its central aim has become multiculturalism, rather than radical social transformation. (see “A Short History of Propaganda”)

REFERENCES

Althusser, Louis. 1970. Reading ‘Capital’. London: New Left Books.

Barsky, Robert F. 1997. Noam Chomsky: A Life In Dissent. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 1987. The Chomsky Reader. New York: Pantheon Books.

Du Bois, W.E.B.. 1995 (1915). “The African Roots of the War” in W.E.B Du Bois : A Reader, David Levering Lewis (ed). New York: Henry Holt.

1992 (1925). “The Negro Mind Reaches Out”, in The New Negro, Alain Locke (ed). New York: Atheneum.

Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books.

Huntington, Samuel, P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Jay, Martin. 1984. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas. Berkeley CA.: University of California Press.

Kontopoulos, Kyriakos. 1993. The Logics of Social Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Monteiro, Anthony. June, 1997.”A Short History of Propaganda”. Real News. Philadelphia

Munford, Clarence, J. 1991. The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the French West Indies, 1625-1715, Volumes I,II,III. Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press.

1982. “Marxism and the History of Africa: Reading Walter Rodney”. Revolutionary World: An International Journal of Philosophy. 49/50: 97-133.

Plummer, Brenda, Gayle. 1996. Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960. Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press.

Sassoon, Donald. 1996. One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century. New York: The New Press.

Munford defines his philosophical outlook and methodology as “civilizational historicism,” which he says is “a system of thought, a philosophy, an explanatory model with a specific purpose-a worldview of use value to Black folk (2001:1).” Munford hopes, therefore, that what he has produced will be translated into practical programs and strategies. To the extent that this work engages epistemological and methodological issues it does so finally from the standpoint of praxis. A fascinating outcome is aimed for, a practical metaphysics and a metaphysics of practice.

I EXAMINE THIS WORK PHILOSOPHICALLY and from a social theoretic perspective. Ideas of time, being and space will inform my approach.1 Indeed, it is African Being and Time in the historical space of European hegemony and African/African American resistance that is the context of this inquiry. I chose this angle of investigation in order to explore within the confines of Munford’s book, and for general social-theoretic and philosophical purposes connected to the project of African and African American liberation, questions of temporality and spatiality: and contrast Munford’s and my perspective to notions of progress as asserted in European thought since the Enlightenment. I therefore attempt to transgress, problematize, and invert the comfort zone of time as assumed in European-centered historiography and social theory.2 I argue that Munford is among those Africana historians striving to construct a new historiography of the African world. To do so, I suggest, requires a new understanding of Time, Being and Space; one which recognizes the malleability not just of Space and Being, but also of Time.

There are, on the other hand, the social structural levels, below the macro-historical level which Munford’s work investigates, where historical epochs are concretized; for instance, in the lives of individuals, small collectivities, such as tribal groups, rural communities; macro and meso level structures, such as socio-economic classes, as well as social fragments, such as the lumpen-proletariat, stranded populations, such as maroon communities, migrant populations and homeless communities, and further, in institutions, such as the racialized state, the Black Church, Negro colleges, political, cultural, business and economic institutions. These structural levels and their structuring modalities carry specific temporalities. Such angles of investigation are worked out in, among others, the theorizing of Franz Fanon, Kyriakos M. Kontopoulos, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Hortense Spillers and Lewis Gordon. It is possible to discover moments of compatibility and common practical proposals for these distinct levels of these critics’ theorizing and Munford’s robust macro-historicism. Moreover, discrete structural levels adhere to distinct time modalities and rhythms. Time, however, is a complicated measure of socio-historical movement. It is further complicated because it, conceivably, varies between groups based upon their place in the social system of domination and their status as oppressed or oppressors.

PROBLEMS OF THE PLASTICITY OF TIME can fit Munford’s project of periodizing historical time in epochs (the long wave study of history), and the rhythms and velocity of historical transformations. However, there is yet another investigative region that concerns logic. We might refer to this as the logic (or perhaps logics) of time and space. Here we enter into the problems understood within the realm of dialectical logic. When engaging levels of socio-historical being we confront distinct logics inherent to the structural level being investigated. We can, therefore, speak of dialectics within dialectics. Understanding the epistemology of this project is part of our engagement with dialectical reasoning; compelling a complexification of the project. In many instances turning and inverting it, and subjecting it to angles of observation not necessarily inherent to it. This essay attempts to begin that work.

Science figures prominently in this project. Munford’s effort embraces three commitments. First to truth as discoverable, secondly, to a materialist and objectivist concept of reality and thirdly, to a rationalist form of explanation. On all three counts Munford’s is a conventional approach to science. Side by side with this investment in scientific inquiry and explanation is the assertion of what he calls the deep structural level of explanation or what is in affect the historical a priori. This is that range of beliefs, values and structures that precede the moment to be investigated. They are what could be called structured structuring structures.3 The historical a priori is, for Munford, race. Race is the overarching or central dialectic in modern world history. Race is generative, or to use Munford’s designation, overdetermining, of other events and structures. At the level of explanation, race shapes explanation, and perception. Race as an explanatory category sets rules for the explanation of events. Race is, then, a structuring logic.4

MUNFORD’S EXPLANATORY MODALITY is a complicated mix of history, philosophy and science. It is composed of a three-level engagement with objective reality. First, Munford is committed to history as critical to social inquiry. In other words Time and temporality are critical to understanding the dynamics of socio-historical processes. Secondly, Munford’s philosophy of modern history is founded upon the assumption that history proceeds dialectically and that race and the conflict with white supremacy are central to its understanding. Thirdly, history can be a science; meaning patterns, laws and regularities and cause and affect in history are discoverable.”

MUNFORD’S MUSCULAR and globalist approach to history challenges modern trends in social explanation that are ahistorical or only mildly historical. Epistemologies such as Cornel West’s (1989) prophetic pragmatism, the discursive relativism of Molefi Asante (1998) and Lucious Outlaw (1996), the black existentialism of Lewis Gordon (1995) or the psychoanalysis of Hortense Spillers (2003) fall among those epistemologies that permit discourses on oppression without suggesting logics and praxes to change it. By contrast, Munford seeks to link theory to ideology and social transformation. He eschews methodological individualism, in forms as varied as existentialism, rational choice theory and psychoanalysis, and asserts the centrality of historically constituted collectivities. In social theoretic terms, Munford engages historically constituted totalities as the object and subject of history and historical transformation.

Munford, finally, does not merely navigate the terrain of historical facts and events, but he is concerned with their organization, interpretation and critique. His epistemology is restless and located on the margins of mainstream and hegemonic discourses. He grapples with the problem of making epistemology practical and anchoring it to actual worlds of Africans. It centers itself in African Being and Time.1′ Civilizational historicism (Munford’s philosophical and methodological apparatus) is used to organize the field of investigation. This lens situates the investigator in the historical situation of black oppression and seeks to link the researcher to a historical body of ideas and methods of investigation that opposes black oppression. W.E.B. Du Bois is, for Munford, the critical predecessor to civilizational historicism. Munford’s robust commitment to science is Du Boisian, especially as it is encountered in such works as The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896) and Black Reconstruction (1935). And, like Du Bois, Munford is a foundational thinker. Which is to say he proceeds from stated assumptions, a discrete worldview, and a stated ideological stance. At the same time Munford constructs a multilayered approach to knowledge, attempting to capture the multiple determinations of the concrete realities of Africans.7

MUNFORD DEFINES THE EPISTEMIC MOMENT as one of inter-civilizational crisis, which is:

…brewing, maturing in the womb of the current international balance of power, in the belly of the global relations between races, as it were, a crisis destined to shatter the precarious “New World Order.” For Black folk, diasporan as well as African, the crux of the matter is global white supremacy. Over the next hundred years this emergency will, I predict, wrack the entire Earth. It will create wars, fuel the battle of ideas, rend traditional customs and tear at mores that, as the old usages, embody baseline moral values. The conflagration should most likely peak somewhere around the middle of the twenty-first century, culminating during its latter half.

WHILE ACKNOWLEDGING an intra-civlilizational crisis within Western, or white civilization, the main aspect of the 21st century will be a maturing contradiction between Western civilization and the civilizations of the non-Western world-the majority of humanity. The historical trajectory, which Munford’s dialectical analysis foresees is a change of epochs; from the epoch of white supremacy and European hegemony to one of global social justice generally, and black liberation particularly. While Munford’s concern is the dialectics of the “black-white” contradiction, he asserts there are “huge cultural, social psychological, philosophical, ideological, mass emotional, and even sexual morality chasms between white Western and Chinese and South Asian civilizations, for all the talk of economic cooperation and interdependence” (3). Japan, he says, is the most glaring example of the clash of cultures, in spite of imperialist framed designations of Japan as “deputy-Aryan.” We should add, only after World War II and only conditioned upon Japan’s ruling elite playing within the framework of Western economic, political and military interests did this occur. This overarching determination of the epoch by the issue of race fits the Du Boisian thesis concerning the problem of the epoch as the color line. As such, and here Munford falls completely within the Du Boisian framework, all other contradictions and “problems” of this epoch are connected to the problem of “the color line.”8 Indeed, even the trajectories of class and socio-economic modes of production will be shaped within the fold of this over determining set of contradictions.9

MUNFORD ARGUES that much of the Western ideological and philosophical heritage is unusable to Africans because of the overarching influence of white supremacy. On the other hand, “valuable precursory ideas are imbedded in early African and Asian worldviews.” He asserts:

Not only are the roots of modern ideology and mythology to he found there, but indispensable concepts including law-bound necessity, sequential determination, development by means of contentions engagement between opposites, and the historicity of all social, economic, scientific and technological phenomena. The building blocks of civilizational historicism go bark to the Kemetic Egyptians, and to India and China.

Munford’s point is that civilizational historicism does not prioritize the “West,” or European ideas, in evaluating ideas. There are longer, and for him, more productive and profound traditions outside of Europe. He proposes therefore, a new interpretation of the history of ideas in away that prioritizes the past, present and future contributions of Africa and Asia. This part of Munford’s project is noteworthy on two levels. First, it suggests that the European intellectual project should not be considered on its own terms, from within its own framework, and thus it raises the possibility of evaluating European ideas from the vantage point of non-European ideologies and philosophies. secondly, it seeks to appropriate to contemporary black intellectual and political projects the rich, non-racist, heritages of Africa and Asia. And thus to appropriate for a black liberationist project, non-European knowledge. In this respect, Munford is suggesting that the ideological struggle with white supremacy is an aspect of the larger civilizational struggle with the West.’” Munford proposes what is an epistemic revolution, rooted in a rejection Western ideology. And by examining the world through the highly developed lenses of Africa and Asia, he argues, a different civilizational dimension could be imparted to knowledge.

MUNFORD IS CERTAINLY CORRECT in associating the black liberationist ideological struggle within the larger civilizational struggle with white supremacy. His ideology contains this critical genealogical dimension: to take from European ideas what is their “rational kernel,” their scientific, rational discoveries, and dispense with their racist shell. All the same, one must also answer the questions, where do European ideas begin and where do they intersect with or are foreshadowed by Afro-Asiatic ones. There is no clear demarcation. For instance, Aristotle is a part of the Afro-Asiatic civilizational and ideological developments of the 4th century BG. Aristotle could be read from the standpoint of the influences of Kemetic ideas upon ancient Greece. In a profound sense ancient and Hellenistic Greece was European in the sense of being proto-European. But it was actually connected to the Afro-Asian civilizational complex of the ancient world.

Furthermore, the European Renaissance and Enlightenment draw upon African and Arab civilizational interventions into ancient ideas; especially the Muslim appropriation of early thinkers like Aristotle and Aquinas. Nor can we be unmindful of the African American tradition, which has, at its best, appropriated and reconfigured bourgeois liberal, radical, socialist and communist ideas in ways that advance them beyond what their European framers initially conceived.

In a larger and yet largely unexplored sense, what is historically specific to European intellectual history should not be universalized; nor should we designate and thus confuse, the historically unique (i.e., European social and intellectual development) with the historically inevitable. The sequence of experiences that shape this path should not be confused with the only possible, or the sole significant path of development. The longer African and Asian historical trajectories should, as Munford suggests, be mined for their usefulness to contemporary struggles. I would go further, and assert that we are in a position to do two things at once, to both discover the rational and progressive kernels of European thought and mine the histories of African and Asian thought, leading to what must be a new synthesis, superseding both sides dialectically, and prefiguring humanity’s possible future ideological trajectories.

In this synthesis, different ideological paths become actual possibilities. In the most fundamental sense, the ideological relationships between human beings can be actualized differently, as other thinkable worlds become possible. However, these possibilities become concrete realities conditioned upon a fundamental rupture with the global system of white supremacy.

THIS ORIENTATION away from a dependence upon Eurocentric modalities of thinking affects three critical areas of social scientific analysis: political economy, political or state theory and the theory of class conflict. In all three areas, traditional European scholarship assumes as normal, white hegemony and Western civilization. In each instance, therefore, the racial and civilizational dimensions of capital accumulation, state formation and class conflict are Western and white. It is this “normal social science” that Munford challenges. Take for instance political economy. Capital accumulation and wealth creation assume the centrality of the white proletariat and white capital. Moreover, Munford views the capitalist system itself, when understood as a system, as a consequence of a series of actions and intentions of white people. Munford would insist that the material and ideological conditions for the emergences of capital, the European and white American proletariat and thus the capitalist system itself was the basis of the conflict with Africans in the struggle to capture, enslave and colonize them and later to colonize much of Asia. That the capitalist socio-economic formation was forged in the conflict with Africans over enslavement and the appropriation of African labor power as profit, suggests a different historical account of the rise of Europe and America than the traditional European-centered ones. And while certainly there are multiple factors determining the realities of modern capitalism, its form and content, even in the current moment of globalization, are inconceivable without the decisive role of African labor.11 Europeans enter Africa with a worldview and certain civilizational predispositions; predisposing them to accumulate capital in the most genocidal manner, committing crimes against humanity never before seen.12 For Munford, then, capitalist accumulation is a racianated or racialized system of accumulation. Capitalism is therefore not merely a system of exploitation, but most profoundly a system of racianated exploitation. It is a mode of production that has benefited, albeit in stratified and differentiated fashion, white people and the system of white supremacy generally and exploited Africans and other peoples of color. It is in essence a racianated mode of production.13 It is folded into a discrete civilization and conditioned by discrete worldviews and ideologies. Its civilizational predispositions, Munford argues, separate Western civilization in the manner of the development of human relationships from the rest of humanity. Thus the class conflict, for Munford, is a secondary part of the larger conflict against Western or white civilization and the modes of production constructed to uphold it. According to Munford, the logics of 21st-century history are therefore determined by the struggles to overturn the system of white supremacy and its accompanying racialized systems of production.

ULTIMATELY, Munford’s project stands or falls on the strength of its philosophical, especially its epistemological, foundations. The core philosophical issue is whether the central problem for the organization and evaluation of knowledge is race. And whether race, understood as physical race or as a social construction, is the overdetermining structure of modernity. Munford answers in the affirmative. Claims concerning macro-historical truth in his construal are overdetermined by race. This because race, especially as it organizes and is organized by the system of global white supremacy and its structures and mechanisms, is the generative structure of the modern epoch.

Knowledge is a matter of which side of the ideology of white supremacy one sits. Hence, truth for white supremacy is different than for anti-white supremacists. There are few if any universal social truths therefore. Knowledge, for Munford, is dynamic and emergent, rather than static and universal. Its dynamic and emergentist qualities are connected to the fact that humans, in making themselves, create truth and knowledge, as well as the contexts of knowledge. In this respect Munford’s thinking is dialectical. It is here that his thinking converges with Marxism in its Leninist form.14 Munford, however, ventures a bold relativism, one that renders a severe critique of European-centeredness and Europe’s claim to universality. In this regard Munford’s philosophical approach is centered upon epistemological concerns-what do we know and how do we come to know what we know?-yet with the condition that a praxis of resistance informs the discovery and presentation of truth and determines the subjective location of the investigator. However, the active intervention of the subject of knowledge, or the knower, is constantly reshaping the objects of knowledge. Knowing is therefore a process. However, Munford sees ideology as a central part of epistemology. We know the world, in this construal, not as pure thinkers or scientists, but as ideologically conditioned and determined agents. This dialectic between epistemology and ideology suggests that knowledge be viewed as an active part of the world transformative project.15 For Munford an African-centered philosophy must acknowledge its roots in the anti-white supremacist struggle. And must differentiate itself from the complex of white worldviews, which he variously identifies as white civilization and white supremacy. While Munford’s epistemology is dialectical and materialist and his ideology is anti-white supremacist and black liberationist his methodology is civilizational historicism.

METHODOLOGY is the central organizing dynamic of Munford’s work. Civilizational historicism, he insists, is secular and anti-fundamentalist and anti-dogmatic. Methodology is on one hand the mode of acquiring truth. On the other is the explanatory framework for evaluating and interpreting knowledge. Historical change and historical events and human behavior are explained through civilizational historicism. While Munford asserts that civilizational historicism is a political philosophy, I believe, after a close reading of the text, that it is a methodology for explaining large patterns of human behavior. First Munford acknowledges that history “has always been an invention.” And “is never an exact reconstruction of events.” And, finally “[h]istory is a project, but never a neutral colorblind project. In the American context it is always race conscious” (6). As a macro-historical project, civilizational historicism seeks to periodize African history and “pinpoint turning points.” And lastly, civilizational historicism “unfolds in conformity with objective regularities, rooted in the relationship of one group to another” and “history’s patterns are the large and long-range manifestations of human action” (9).

From a methodological standpoint Munford is compelled to engage two distinct yet interconnected and mutually dependent levels. First is the historical a priori-that is, civilization and second, history itself. The historical a priori is all those things that shape human action, the intentional and unintentional, the conscious and subconscious, the real and the magical or surreal. History is the narrative of those events. Thus the historical a priori is the structural side of the methodology and the historical narrative is the presentation of the concrete forms and processes inherent to a particular epoch.16

THIS LEADS US TO A DISCUSSION of historical ontology. I consider civilizational historicism to be a form of historical ontology.17 Historical ontology is a way of speaking about and understanding social phenomena, as they exist in historical time. Civilizational historicism is a way of understanding African historical Being understood in African historical time. It seems that Munford’s method works best in this robust relativist manner, especially as it links Time and Being to the unique and specified historical space occupied by Africans in the epoch beginning with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. However, the historical a priori, i.e., the civilizational dimension, would insist upon pinpointing those beliefs, values, modes of production, culture, etc. that precede the African holocaust of slavery and colonialism.

In modern history European cultures and peoples have congealed as a white civilization that stands apart from the rest of humanity. The racialization of civilizations (not just peoples) is the decisive outcome of the socio-historical processes associated with modernity. Therefore, white civilization, and the civilizational commitment to and predisposition among the majority of the world’s white people to white supremacy, overdetermine the modern epoch. Civilization in practical methodological terms is the totality of those things that are the historical a priori; it is what is considered the deep structure. The historical object to be understood is the specific dialectics of African Time and Being conditioned by African civilization and by its negation, white supremacy and European capitalism.

Civilizational historicism tries to avoid the pitfalls of essentialism so often associated with certain forms of Afro-centrism, while preserving the category of essentiality as a part of the understanding of reality and the working up of knowledge. More importantly, what Munford seeks to capture in the historical a priori, are those conditions that determine the historical moment, or the historical epoch. The historical a priori of white or European civilization for Munford is white supremacy, on one side, and African civilization on the other. In other words, white civilization exists as a dialectical relationship between white supremacy and African civilization.18

THERE ARE SOME who have found Munford’s turn to a sharper focus upon race as the central dynamic in modern world history to be a retreat from his views found in such works as Production Relations and Black Liberation. I am sure that Munford views his work, starting with Black Ordeal and Race and Reparations and the current volume, to be further developments of his understanding of history and the evolution of historiography. Race and Civilization does not retreat on matters of a materialist historiography, the uses of political economic categories and analysis, or on his ideological commitments to black liberation. What we have is an evolution of a project that started when Munford was a graduate student in the former German Democratic Republic. At the same time theories and methodologies can mutate and change. This is reflected in the history of individual and collective human thought. These variations and mutations, the processes of ideational evolutions, occur within historical contexts, and are advanced as thinkers with specific race, class and national locations mature. The scientific and intellectual maturation of thinkers is a necessary part of innovation within research programs. If nothing else, the logic of the notion of the centrality of black liberation to world history compels a scientific flexibility and innovation. Moreover, all theories should be regularly be subjected to critique and reexamination.

FURTHERMORE, the objects of race inquiry themselves are constantly evolving and mutating. Races, as Du Bois understood, are dynamic historically constituted social and cultural groups. Races are subject to mutations, sometimes quite dramatic ones. Just as races mutate, so do racial identities. Methodologies must similarly evolve and mutate to account for this. The idea of absolute and unchanged epistemologies and methodologies goes against the grain of scientific and philosophical inquiry. Thomas Kuhn drew attention to this, capturing the mutability and changes of paradigms, including at times the emergence of revolutionary and subversive paradigms. Imre Lakatos spoke of the evolutionary processes whereby research programs and the research landscape experience challenges that lead them to new revolutionary research programs and new possibilities for thought and research. Munford’s work seems to be part of the evolutionary process of changing the ways we think and do research on Africans.

MOST OFTEN, historical research and historical writing proceeds quite conventionally. It is then quite simply a narrative, often without explicitly stating its philosophical or ideological commitments. In this respect the historical object and historian are unified, and reified together. There has been recently a trend to a more existential historical narrative. This modality proceeds often through biography. There is a surrealistic turn where history is a type of narrative about dreams and visions. Some construct black history and being as encounters with absurdity as a way of explaining black consciousness in its encounters with white supremacy. Marxist historiography, historical materialism, is more often seen in its influence upon conventional and existential narratives of black history than as a full-blown project. Each of these stances, the absurdist existentialist and the Marxist, at its best, suggests a moment in the attempt to capture the historical object/subject-African and African American resistance. In certain senses each manifests a political moment. In the current situation of scientific and scholarly efforts to explain race and black oppression the angles of observation have been multiplied. However, the richness of academic discourse is often limited by the convention of seeking to stand above ideology and deep commitments. This is especially the case for black thinkers who are more closely policed by the academic gatekeepers and thought police in the elite white academy. This desire not to appear to be “one-sided” lends itself to reification and solipsism. A good part of this goes under the banner of post-structuralism and postmodernism. However, each suspends concerns with the object of history and turns to a single-minded engagement with its subject. They possess a concern with the subject in ways that suggest the only verifiable reality is subjective. Munford’s materialist historiography and his insistence upon the crucial role of political economy in macro social explanation is his way of countering this trend.19

AMONG MORE RECENT black academic philosophers none has been so committed to existentialism or phenomenological inquiry as has Lewis Gordon [see especially his Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995)]. By placing Gordon’s historiography along side Munford’s it is possible to explore the revolutionary possibilities of both. Munford’s project is a radical one, rooted in political economy, historical materialism and structuralism. Munford seeks to provide through the philosophy and methodology of civilizational historicism a way to investigate global white supremacy and black liberation. For Munford the critical dialectic is between white supremacy and black liberation. Munford deploys structuralism in two ways. First to designate what is in effect the historical a priori, white supremacy, and secondly to pinpoint white supremacy as the generative mechanism of the modern world. To restate, the historical a priori is that set of conditions, what Munford designates civilization, which precedes and determines the current historical epoch. The historical a priori is itself historically constituted, and congeals as that set of generative structures that are determinative of the present moment in history. This moment for Munford is defined as the epoch of global white supremacy. Its foundation is white civilization. In the West the decisive dialectic is between white supremacy and black liberation. Blacks include Africans, Caribbean, Central and South Americans and European blacks. Globally there is an unresolved dialectic contradiction between white supremacy and peoples of color generally. The maturing of this contradiction defines the revolutionary process itself and the future of humanity. It is apparent that Munford’s work draws upon Marxism and at the same time supersedes it.20 Munford reconfigures Marxism and structuralism to produce a new social science he designates civilizational historicism. A social science that is ideologically partisan to the cause of black liberation.

GORDON CONFIGURES social science as a science of the human being. Gordon appropriates an existential reading of Marxism from Sartre and Fanon. Phenomenology is Gordon’s method of investigation. Gordon wishes to study the human being in the current epoch, that is, before she/he is fully human. Indeed, Gordon’s project is historical to the extent it is concerned with the historical a priori, which for Gordon is the individual under conditions of limited possibilities, or in conditions of racial subordination and domination. Gordon’s ideological commitments are to humanity, i.e., human liberation, which can occur as a consequence of the revolutionary transformation of the conditions of human existence. However, this process must begin with the transformation of human consciousness. In the first instance this demands the undermining of bad faith as the principle condition of white consciousness. To the extent that Gordon’s project engages history it is as micro history, biography or the history of consciousness. This is Fanonian and Foucaultian at the same time.

“WHITE CIVILIZATION and European culture” insists Frantz Fanon, “have forced an existential deviation on the Negro.” W.E.B Du Bois argues that from within the folds of this Fanonian “existential deviation” the Negro invents himself through resistance. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction should be read as a study of how this resistance determined, or indeed, overdetermined, the geography of American history, where the conflict is triangular at the level of political events (the North, the South, and the Negro). As this conflict exemplifies, the ongoing dialectic of race and white supremacy, of white oppression and black liberation, is at its core. For both Du Bois and Fanon, the issue is the epistemology of African Being. Du Bois sees African American Being as historically constituted in the vortex of resistance and race conflict and Fanon observes the psychological and identity problems created by white supremacy for Africans. Each is an instance of explaining African Being; each asserts an epistemology of Black Being. Munford draws on each, but uses methods of analysis associated with Du Bois’s historicism. What we end with is the understanding that African reality is complex, demanding complex theories and methods, requiring multiple angles of observation. African reality is the result of multiple determinations, some specific to the African world and African consciousness, others to global realities.

THESE DETERMINATIONS, however, rather than being static, are fluid and changing. There is a dynamic and complex interaction of forces, processes and events that determine African Time and Being. What Munford does is to insist that through historical and political economic analysis, anchored in an ideological commitment to black liberation a new movement for liberation is possible. “Multiple determinativeness” expresses the existence of multiple possibilities within the framework of dialectical complexity. “Dialectical complexity” denotes a heterarchical or multiple, rather than a hierarchical, system of determinations and causation. In a moment of acute and dynamic dialectical complexity (what Stephen Jay Gould calls punctuated equilibrium) the situation tends to instability and fluidity, yielding conditions for revolutionary ruptures within the global social system.21 In an earlier review of Munford’s work I stated:

Thus a profound revolutionary crisis, of the type Munford suggests is necessary to undermine the global white supremacist system, will involve a situation where, conceivably, civilizational events and levels conflict with political and ideological events; where economic events and civilizational events conflict. Here the moment is determined heterarchically, rather than hierarchically. Rather than single determinations, there are multiple determinations, where the movement of the system is determined not from its equilibrium state, or balance, but far from equilibrium; by what has been referred to as chaotic dynamics.

In the end this is what civilizational historicism seeks to understand and explain.

Endnotes

1. There are several significant bodies of philosophy that can be appropriated to this project. Among them are classical works within the field of existentialist philosophy. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness are valuable because of their explorations of the time and being dialectic at the level of the individual’s engagement with the moment, or the epoch. However, at the level at which Munford operates, Hegel’s Logic is unavoidable. Munford is well aware of Hegel’s profound impact upon historiography, especially as it concerns history as a dialectical process. But then there is Fanon whose “sociogeny” (1967:11) or sociogenetic analysis is acutely attuned to time. Writing in Black Skin While Mash, he says, “The architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time” (12). Ian Hacking’s uses of Foucault are a helpful intervention into our understanding of micro-historical processes, location and situating the observer. Molefi Asante’s Afrocentrism is a postmodern situational or location theory. Centrism in his understanding is a way for the observer to locate for her/himself the appropriate angle for engaging the objects of analysis.

2. As I have noted in endnote 1 there are important existential interrogations of the modern European concept of time and progress. However, the natural sciences, from relativity theory and quantum mechanics, to evolutionary biology and population genetics, interrogate time. A very significant contribution to this is Stephen Jay Gould’s work, especially his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002). What I suggest about the particularity of space-time realities as they are encountered in socio-historical time and sociostructural time, Gould calls “time tiering” (see especially pp. 1320-1332 and the section “The Paradox of the First Tier: Towards A General Theory of Tiers of Time”). He insists that from a theoretical standpoint such a recognition allows for both macro-structural and phenomenological levels of investigation. His point is that not only does time express itself differently dependent upon the structural level, but that we encounter distinct modalities of time in the course of scientific investigation. Time tiering is necessary in understanding stratified social structures and how social classes, races, nations and other social collectives understand and are conscious of social structure and social transformation.

3. Once rational explanation references notions such as the a priori we are immediately in the realm of Kantianism and ultimately structuralism. With Munford the issue is not merely to explain the modalities of rational thought, but to construct a practical way of discussing and explaining racial oppression. Ian Hacking asserts that the historical a priori “points at conditions on the possibility of knowledge (2003:5).” For Munford the historical a priori is race and white supremacy: the conditions that make possible the structures of the modern world or current epoch, and thus condition the boundaries of explanation. This is what Bourdieu calls structuring structures, which overdetermine the conditions of knowledge.

4. My understanding of the modalities of structural, structuration, macro and micro logics is highly influenced by Kyriakos M Kontopulos’s The Logics of Social Structure (1993). His evaluation of the seminal nature of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, especially his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) has been important to my analysis of structuration theory and micro-logical and meso-logical analysis. In particular Bourdieu’s drawing the attention of theorists to the possibilities of understanding the behaviors of socio-historical structures as heterarchical rather than solely hierarchical. This appropriation of Marx’s idea of the multiple determinations of concrete historical reality is the significant point for me. Marx’s formulation suggests a heterarchical determination of reality. There is a dynamic dialectic sense of things wherein the structuring process, or structuration, takes place through a process of multiple indeterminacies. Hence, determination through indeterminacies. In this account the strategic intervention of agents, in Munford’s case collective agents identified as races, are critical to the structuration process. The deep structural level, the level of civilization, is possibly a dynamic structure, which is subject to the logics of structuration and indeterminacy. Civilization, Munford’s deep structure, should be subject to the same possibilities of determination through multiple indeterminacies as are other structures. This possibility seems to be a necessary consideration if the possibility of revolutionary disjuncture is to become a possibility. Indeed, the moment of revolutionary rupture is at this precise moment of instability.

5. Rather than local, folk, or micro-history, Munford believes that macro or global historical analysis is appropriate to a scientific African historiography and to coming forward with practical solutions to this global problem. This epistemology of history differs profoundly from, let us say, existentialism, phenomenology and psychoanalytical methods of approaching history.

6. In my “Being an African in the World: The Du Boisian Epistemology” (2000) I attempt to demonstrate how Du Bois shaped his scholarship as investigations of African Being and African Time. I have argued this represented a transgessive intervention into traditional metaphysics and ontology. I here suggest that Du Bois was attempting to make epistemology practical. This linking of epistemology to social change for Du Bois occurred through concretizing it and though Du Bois did not state it in this way, linking it to ideology. Du Bois, for instance, argues that history is propaganda. I take his use of the word propaganda to mean what we would call ideology.

7. This notion of the multiple determination of the concrete is taken form Karl Marx’s Grundrisse (1973). It is worth noting that the turn from a concern with the concrete or the material world, as it were, and a turn to primary concern with the subjective and psychological is a modality of doing the human sciences most associated with post structuralism, surrealism, magical realism and certain forms of existentialism. It represents a certain suspension of the concrete in order to “better understand the subject of history.” An important aspect of this turn is the linguistic turn and hermeneutics, or narrative interpretation.

8. Three recent studies show (and these certainly are only representative of a large and growing field), the global nature of the color line and its determining role in constructing the modern epoch and the world economic and political systems. Gerald Horne’s Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (2004), Paul Kramer’s “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880-1910″ (March, 2002) and Joseph K. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade Economic Development, (2002). Each is a type of revisionist history in that it expands our understanding of the role of race in events as divergent as Japan’s war in the Pacific 1937-1945, the slave trade and slavery and the creation of the modern British economy and race and race ideology and the Atlantic alliance and empire.

9. Gerald Home makes a parallel point. In a number of essays and now in his Race War: While Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (2004), he asserts that Asia in the 21st century constitutes a central, if not the central, location of the struggle against white supremacy. Munford would suggest that the struggle against white supremacy in the current moment will, of necessity, be Afro-Asiatic. He believes that a worldview in keeping with African and African American interest and struggle is what is required. Asians will, of course, construct the world and science in terms that reflect their interests and specific encounters with global white supremacy.

10. Again it must be stated that Munford considers Western civilization to be a marker for white civilization, whose essence he defines as white supremacist.

11. Walter Rodney’s thesis concerning the destructive dialectics that this encounter occasioned for Africans is worth considering. At the end of the day, the African social structure and modes of production were not undeveloped, but ruined. Hence, for the world capitalist system to develop, Africa and Africans had to be ruined. Advancing a thesis similar to Rodney’s (1970, 1981), Joseph Inikori (2002) presents a study demonstrating that English industrialization could not have taken place and experienced its profound and accelerated growth without the wealth accumulated in the transAtlantic Slave trade and plantation slavery in the “New World.” Manning Marable (1983) appropriated Rodney’s thesis and applied it to Black America, arguing that American capitalism forces underdevelopment upon Black America.

12. It is worth noting Munford’s three-volume study, The Black Ordeal of Slavery and Slave Trading in the French West Indies, 1625-1715 (1991), which documents the genocidal nature of the initial accumulation of European capital on the backs of the exploitation of Africans. Munford here argues that the modern forms of racism were forged in the process of slave trading. Munford calls its most virulent form sadoracism.

13. This idea of a racialized system, or racianated processes of social and institutional behavior, can mean several things. In its most robust formulation it means that race trumps class and social structures in explaining the nature and functioning of the system. A less robust position might suggest an inherent dialectic between race, class, gender and nation (see Patricia Hill Collins (2000) for a discussion of intersectionality). This less robust claim might support a certain form of black Marxism that understands class as being filtered through race and race being filtered through class the notion of the race/class dialectic. There is a liberal/ social democratic version of this race/class dialectic associated with the research of William Julius Wilson. His version goes so far as to claim that race as a social category is declining in significance in United States race and class relationships. Lastly, there is a functionalist view that has Marxist and liberal variants that argues that race and racism are merely super-structural, ideological or belief system variables. In this version racism is not fundamental to the operations and functions of the system.

14. This trend remains a rich area of approaches to issues of dialectics and the modalities of the transformation of material reality, especially social relationships. It is generally associated with the Soviet Academy and its leading philosophers, particularly E. V. Ilyenkov [The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital (1982)] and T. I. Oizerman [Problems in the History of Philosophy (1973) and The Main Trends in Philosophy (1988)]. The emphasis placed upon materiality, temporality, knowability, and totalities, at least from the standpoint of social theory, overcomes the problems of idealist metaphysics addressed by pragmatism. Lenin’s most important philosophical observations are found in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and Philosophical Notebooks, in particular his Notebooks on Hegel’s Logic.

15. Richard Rorty (see Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1979]) and neo-pragmatism’s critique of positivism is precisely at the point where positivism denies the need for a practical metaphysics that establishes modalities of praxis and engagement with the world. The problem with neo-pragmatism is that it discards foundations of thought and explanation all together. Among these are not just metaphysical foundations, but ideological foundations as well. Lewis Gordon’s reading of Fanon [see Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995)] moves in a parallel direction to Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism [see The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989)]. In one or another way micro level human relationships, micro power dynamics and culture, rather than rationality and foundations define the philosophical project.

16. Alfred Schmidt’s History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist Structuralist Theories of History (1983) parallels Munford’s methodology. The notion of reality consisting of both structure and dialectics is key to Schmidt’s understanding of dialectics. In Munford’s and Schmidt’s construal the pragmatist and hermeneutic preoccupation with thinking without foundations defies the possibility of scientific knowledge. Pragmatism, in contrast to Schmidt’s view, is about talk and not the modalities of social transformation.

17. I have encountered the term “historical ontology” in the works of the philosopher Ian Hacking (2003). His is a philosophical investigation of the uses of history in understanding the genealogies of ideas. His project is rooted in a Foucaultian understanding of the contexts and sociology of ideas. The existential philosopher Martin Heidegger precedes Foucault in attempting to understand the historical conditionalities of Being and what Hacking calls the historical ontological. Munford inverts the idealist and subjectivist stance of Heidegger, Foucault and Hacking by designating historical Being as historically constituted concrete collectives, i.e., races, civilizations, classes and nations.

18. In Black Skin White Mask (1967:12) Fanon identifies ” a massive psycho existential complex,” that is European or white civilization. Its existence assumes the African, or African civilization, as objects of white history. By removing the African from history as subject or agent you distort her/his historical consciousness, designating it false or pathology consciousness, or as with Hegel, outside of history, because the African stands outside world consciousness, lacking human identity. Munford’s project assumes the centrality of what Fanon recognizes, the centrality of black folk to the existence of the white world system and their centrality to its destruction. Lewis Gordon, in Franz Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, understands his own intellectual project as a disruptive intervention into European consciousness in the Fanonian sense. Gordon believes the study and clarification of black and white consciousness will be a contribution to white supremacy’s downfall.

19. The turn to the centrality of the fictive in understanding black realities in some ways suggests this turn. Moreover, the modern ways of constructing the novel using surrealism and magical realism is a way of taking the characters of the novel away from objective historical reality and inventing them out of imagined, sometimes improvised, absurdist realities. Objective history is suspended for the sake of the novel. The concerns are with the characters’ understandings or their confusions with their multiple subjective or psychological realities.

20. Here it is useful to recall Oliver Cromwell Cox’s Caste, Class and Race (1948). Munford’s work in some ways can be read as a discussion with Cox’s class-race dialectic, where class and class conflict determine race relationships. Michael Banton (1987:171-175) locates Cox’s work in the European class project and places it within the context of European epistemological concerns. It can be shown that what Cox wishes to explain is different from what Munford seeks to explain. They differ moreover, in how they identify the principal events in history. For Cox the explanandum is class and class conflict; for Munford it is race and the conflict with global white supremacy. For Cox history is dialectically understood as the history of class conflict; for Munford modern history is the history of race conflict. At the same time, Cox’s work has its genealogy in black Marxism of the 1920s and 30s, especially the works of Abrams Harris, E. Franklin Frazier and Ralph Bundle (see Holloway, Confronting the Veil).

21. In a review of Munford’s Race, and Reparation I argued that his civilizational procedure predisposes analysis to a hierarchical, top-down, modality and towards reliance upon single determinations. This cause-effect, linear or deductive nomological approach to explanation does not easily or readily grasp the complexity of socio-historical realities, their heterarchical or multideterminative nature, in a situation of dialectical complexity and rapid movement and change in all levels of the global system. In many respects as the global system of white supremacy and capitalism has become interconnected and is intertwined with civilizational, economic and ideological events and processes in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and therefore become more complex, we are forced to adopt less deterministic modes of explaining this system. Rather than strict causalities, we are dealing more often with probabilities and far from equilibrium dynamics.

Works Cited

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Copyright Black World Foundation Fall 2004

The financial system has been stabilized; we’re in the middle of a jobless recovery, the threat of a double dip recession and decades of stagnation loom ahead. Stag deflation (a dangerous combination of stagnation and falling prices), and the threat of sovereign debt default, (the federal government unable to pay its creditors, like China and other nations holding US bonds) is possible. Millions of people will never recover under current policies. Nouriel Roubini’s and Stephen Mihm’s Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance is a sophisticated, analytical, yet readable, look at the crisis and its aftermath. They assure us, “capitalism did not collapse”. It took the government pumping over $12 trillion into banks, investment firms, insurance companies, hedge funds, private equity funds, money markets and carmakers to “save capitalism”.

The US was the eye of the storm and the source of the collapse. While the banks and global centers of finance have for the time being been stabilized, the eye of the storm has shifted to sovereign debt. The federal debt, the authors say, “ will effectively double as a share of the nation’s gross domestic product as the deficits in coming decades are expected to hit $9 trillion or more (178)”, reaching 90% of GDP. If the federal government is viewed by nations like China as not credit worthy and thus refuse to lend us money, social calamity might follow, as the federal government reneges on its obligations to its citizens. Many state governments have already reached this point.

The fate of American capitalism is now heavily dependent upon global economic developments, especially in the emerging markets and in particular China. Emerging economies like Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC nations) and lately South Africa (BRICS) are driving the global economy and are the hope for sustained recovery. A major geopolitical and geo-economic shift was underway before the crisis, but has accelerated since. A sixty-five year period has ended. US economic and political hegemony and the dominance of the US dollar have come to a screeching end. Martin Jacques in his influential When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order argues, humanity is entering the Age of China. Roubini and Mihm agree. They speculate that the dollar in the not that distant future could be replaced by the Chinese renmimbi as the principal world currency. Few would argue that by 2030 China, now the second largest economy in the world (having this Spring surpassed Japan) will surpass the US. China ‘s continuing high rates of economic growth and its global standing among developing and developed nations, its alternative way of doing business (what is called the Beijing Consensus), makes it the attractive alternative to the US, IMF, the World Bank, the European Central Bank and Western financial and banking institutions. The Chinese remnmbi is increasingly the go to currency. Nothing, in this regard, is more dramatic than the China-Africa summits and China’s vast infrastructure investment throughout Africa.

This irreversible shift in all probability will be a messy affair, occasioning in the West sovereign debt default, currency crashes, crumbling markets, bank failures, exploding unemployment and underemployment and political and social unrest. Roubini and Mihm warn, “The status quo is unsustainable and dangerous and absent some difficult reforms it will unravel. Indeed, if the Unites States doesn’t get its fiscal house in order and start saving more, it’s headed for a nasty reckoning. When that reckoning will come is anyone’s guess, but the notion that it might be put off for decades is delusional. Indeed, some signs suggest that the tide is already beginning to shift (251).” What the authors call “difficult reforms” I call bold and purposeful action and planning, entailing fundamental alterations of the structures of US capitalism and finance. The authors urge in the short term a quick rebalancing of the global economy. China and Germany, for example, should consume more, and the US, Britain, Spain and Ireland, for example, should consume less, borrow less and save more. However, this only alters the context for the type of deep structural changes that must take place in the US and the West. But without a rebalancing of the global economy and establishing a new global equilibrium, the whole thing could snap. The next crisis would be worse and more than the garden-variety boom and bust cycle. “It would be,” they sat “ less a function of capitalism’s inherent instability than a deep ebb and flow of geo-political power. “ Actually, it would be a combination of both. Such an unraveling would constitute an earthquake and would occasion “a rapid, disorderly decline of the dollar (255).” Geo-economic and geo-political changes along with structural, cyclical and financial crises could produce a 21st century Great Depression The current crisis, therefore, rather than a once in a life time event, might be a taste of things to come.

The origins of this crisis are in modern capitalism. It is inherent in the nature of 20th and 21st century capitalism. Up to recently the US avoided the worst of Western capitalism’s crises. Europe was the epicenter. It experienced economic depressions and two world wars, European civil wars for dominance of the colonial world. These events evidenced new and deep contradictions within the world system. At the same time policies that supported banks becoming dominant and merging with the state were crucial. The financialization of the US economy, and the deregulation of Wall Street are decisive to the architecture of early 21st century US capitalism. The American (and British) free market model unleashed finance capital to do its thing on society. The most predatory, parasitic and criminal elements of Wall Street and bank capital became dominant over the economy and the government. Certainly, Bush II’s insane tax cuts for the richest 2% and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars worsened the problem of government debt and set the immediate context of the current crisis.

The economist Rudolph Hilferding pointed to the dangers of an economic structure where bank capital is dominant and the state becomes its protector and facilitator. A new capitalist economic structure results; a more exploitative and globalized system. He called this new arrangement finance capitalism. Lenin appropriated Hilferding’s analysis, adding that the new capitalist arrangement quickened the process of the export of capital to the colonial world, making colonies a part of the global system of capitalist production.

After World War II the US became the center of world capitalism and global politics, the dollar the major currency. American triumphalists named this the American Century. With the recent financial meltdown and the Great Recession all that has ended. Yet, we’re left with the outgrowth of finance capitalism, a vampire economy that competes with and sucks the blood of the real or productive economy. The logic of the vampire economy is that while it lives on the real economy, it will eventually take it down

The vast economy of derivatives and the market in debt and especially subprime mortgages are means by which the vampire economy sucks the life out of working people, the middle class s and the real economy. The financial meltdown began in the subprime market, but that was merely the most obvious sign of what Roubini and Mihn call systemic rot. The economic boom that preceded the collapse was a speculative bubble. The onset of recession in 2007 exposed fragility in the mortgage markets, which set off a chain of events that culminated in the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. It shook the edifice of the entire world financial system. The US, drowning in debt and overleveraged, was the source of the collapse. The banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, private equity funds etc increased their indebtedness from 22% of GDP in 1981 to 117% in 2008. Private debt overall went from 123% of GDP in 1981 to 290% in 2008. Economist Hymar Minsky pointed out the greater the reliance on debt the more fragile the financial system (see Roubini/Mihm pp82—83).

In a previous essay I supported Joseph Stieglitz’ calls for a restructuring of the US economy from the free market to a social market economy model, with tough regulations on Wall Street and the banks. I argued that this Keynesian model should be viewed as a transition to a socialist market economy as a stage to a developed socialist economy. I proposed a tough minded Keynesianism (a Keynesian/socialist synthesis), that would break up the “too big to fail banks” and nationalize their parts. The guts of their predatory impulses would be cut out. Like Roubini/Nihm and Stieglitz I agree that the state has to be the decisive player in the economy. However, the state and political systems must be democraticized, and made instruments of people’s needs, rather than of finance capitalism.

The first priority of the economy has to be the needs of the people. Thus an industrial and infrastructure development plan has to be instituted. The people have to give substance to Barack Obama’s green economy idea. Immediately we need a 21st century Works Project Administration that puts people to work on green and infrastructure projects. This must be a multi decade program, with planned and targeted government stimulus.

The US people will need help from the world to reconstruct our economy and society. China and other emerging economies can invest in this reconstruction. Their experiences with state capitalism and the socialist market economy will be helpful. Ideologically the US people have to recognize that we have moved from the Age of Europe and US hegemony to the Age of Humanity, where we must cooperate as an equal among other peoples and civilizations.

More than anything the US people have to initiate a great democratic movement that draws on the movements of the 1930’s and the 1960’s and 70’s, with the aim of creating a people’s democracy, and democratic culture, which takes over the mechanisms of the state. It must be a peace, anti-racist and social justice movement. It must target the military industrial and prison industrial complexes for dismantling. The military budget must quickly be cut by 75% and become a domestic jobs and rebuilding budget.

Roubini and Mihm state that American capitalism will never be what it once was. They conclude that the US financial system has to be reformed and restructured. China, they insisted, will be the major economic and geopolitical player in coming decades. What they do not argue for is a change from a rotten economic structure to a new one. It seems obvious that the existential crisis of US capitalism logically suggests that an alternative has to be considered. A new economic system is what is called for. Like W.E.B Du Bois I believe that system will be socialist.

Paul Robeson increasingly discovered that human cultures are not solely, or necessarily only the product of nations. He sought out the inevitable class foundations of national cultures. Robeson was drawn, therefore, to folk culture as the common underpinning of world civilization. Folk culture was for him the necessary material foundation of so-called high culture or “classical” culture, which almost inevitably had been appropriated by the ruling classes. Robeson believed, moreover, that for humanity to realize its true potential and occasion a renaissance of world civilization, the scourge of racism and imperialism would have to be eliminated from human history. The logic of this understanding drew him inevitably to the struggle for human emancipation. Having grasped the fundamental essence and global dimensions of oppression he never retreated from the struggle against it. For Robeson it was not enough merely to interpret the world, he dedicated his life to its revolutionary transformation. In February of 1999 the Public Broadcasting System aired a major documentary on the life and work of Robeson. It presented Robeson and especially his wife and comrade in arms Eslanda Goode Robeson in a truer light. For this reason I wish to revisit the only major biography of Robeson currently available; Martin Duberman’s 1989 804-page book titled simply Paul Robeson.

Martin Bauml Duberman’s biography of Paul Robeson is important if for no other reason than the significance of its subject. In the last instance, however, Duberman’s effort fails to grasp Paul Robeson and the meaning of his life. Duberman is the first historian given full access to the Robeson estate, which consists of some fifty thousand documents. He claims to have interviewed close to 135 people.

Methodologically Duberman’s work is a pscho-biography. In this respect Duberman attempts to construct a psychological portrait of Robeson; to disclose, what the author considers the “inner Robeson”. The “inner Robeson” is for Duberman a tangle of pscho-sexual contradictions. Thus a major organizing theme of this work is an attempt to “recreate” Robeson’s sexual life. The primary evidence for this recreation is hearsay and gossip. The point, however, is that much of this is fictionalized . In the end the historically significant is intertwined with and often takes a back seat to the purely trivial. Duberman creates a mind body duality where in the end Robeson’s mind and intellect are the victims to his uncontrolled passions. Robeson is ultimately rendered pathetic, tragic and dogmatic. Never is the reader able through this maze glimpse the vital core of Robeson enormous genius. Not once does Duberman even suggest the scientific rigor that guided Robeson’s study of areas as varied as harmonic theory and world politics. Finally, Duberman is silent concerning Robeson’s fresh discoveries and contributions to the scientific understanding of world cultures, history and music. Robeson emerges from Duberman’s book as a man far less than he was in real life. Indeed, he is reduced beyond recognition. Yet, in the final analysis, the book breaks little new ground in the study of Robeson’s life.

Duberman lack of professional competence in any of the areas that are significant to Robeson’s life from the beginning fated the book to failure. Furthermore, his stance as an ideological adversary of most of what Robeson stood for gives the book an adversarial, almost put down quality, rather than an objective and fair-minded investigation of this great man’s life, work and commitments He had done nothing in the areas of twentieth century African American history, labor history, African history, African American aesthetics, or the history of the Communist Party or the left. Duberman’s professional concern and competence had been with sexual history.[ see Radical History Review, Fall 1988] He , therefore, tailored this biography to what he knew and his principle interests. This may have been good for Duberman , but it obscures Robeson.
In dealing with the 1920′s-the height of the Garvey Movement and the Harlem Renaissance period–we learn little of Robeson’s relationships with that brilliant constellation of African American artist, writers, intellectuals and musicians that helped redefine the American intellectual and artistic landscape. Little or nothing is said of the philosopher Alaine Locke, poet Langston Hughes, anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, poet Nicolas Guillen, Africanists and historians Leo and Oscar Hansberry, muscian/composer Louis Armstrong, dancer/choreographer Katherine Dunham, Josephine Baker and Bessie Smith. Although Duberman develops Robeson’s relationships with the revolutionary and socilaist poet Claude McKay and NAACP leader and intellectual Walter White, he presents Robeson primarily in the context of his relationships with white patrons of the Black arts movement, like the Van Vechtens and the Knopfs. Of Robeson’s contemporaries in the popular and jazz fields of the 1940′s, ’50′s and ’60′s, such as Lena Horne, Billy Holiday, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillesspi, Thelonius Monk and Billy Eckstine little or nothing is said. The sense is left that Robeson’s relationships with African Americans were superficial with few organic social, cultural and intellectual links among Robeson and leading African American thinkers.

Of Robeson’s early political associations Duberman’s scholarship is especially arid. William L. Patterson, the pioneering civil rights fighter and leader of the Communist Party, was an intimate political and intellectual associate of both Eslanda and Paul Robeson from the early 1920′s. However hardly anything of this relationship is developed. Patterson appears briefly in the beginning and is missing from the book until the 1950′s. Benjamin Davis Jr., the Morehouse and Harvard educated lawyer and leader of the Communist party, was considered by Eslanda and Paul among their dearest friends. Robeson once remarked that he would even have given his life for Ben Davis. Yet Duberman reduces Ben Davis to nothing more than a political water boy, consigned to communicating the “party line” to Robeson. W.E.B DuBois, a major intellectual figure of the twentieth century, considered Robeson like a son. DuBois and Robeson shared common intellectual, scholarly and political concerns, commitments and projects. Yet again this relationship is presented in a most superficial manner. Of Robeson’s relationship to the Garvey movement, the African Blood Brotherhood, the early African American socialists etc. nothing is said.

Duberman also fails to trace the roots of Robeson’s socialist ideas and working class partisanship. Historian and Robeson scholar Sterling Stuckey argues that Robeson’s contact with the British trade union movement was the occasion for his earliest systematic study of socialism and that from these contacts emerged Robeson’s life long commitment to the working class movement and socialism.
Concerning Robeson’s contacts with the London based African students movement Duberman scholarship is thin. Previous scholars have considered this a rich source for tracking Robeson’s early anti-colonial sentiments. It was here that he developed his deep and life long interest in African civilization. With respect to Robeson’s links to leaders of the African liberation movement like Jomo Kenyatta, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah Duberman’s scholarship is silent.

Duberman casts Robeson’s support for socialism and the Soviet Union in mainly subjective and emotional terms. The author suggests that Robeson was at times naive and blind concerning the Soviet Union. However Robeson scholars have suggested that he viewed socialism as the historical alternative in our epoch to colonialism, national and class oppression. Philip S. Foner and others point to his high regard for the Soviet people’s support to the anti-colonial and anti-fascist struggles. Robeson never forgot the boundless suffering of the Soviet people in the defeat of Nazism ; nor their enormous support to the Chinese revolution. In his own writings and speeches, and especially in Here I Stand, Robeson evidenced an understanding of the Soviet Union that was unalterably linked to history. Robeson, therefore, did not view the Soviet Union or its leadership as perfect or infallible. He, therefore, viewed socialist transformation in the Soviet Union as an entire epoch, rather than a single event. Duberman, wrongly contends, that Robeson adopted an expedient silence with respect to the disclosures of Stalin’s violations of socialist legality and norms, and the crimes that emerged therefrom. As with much else in the book Duberman presents no historically valid evidence for such a contention. Yet Duberman uses this contention as an ideological stick to beat the left generally and Robeson particularly. Duberman condemns Robeson for not distancing himself from the struggles for peace and socialism. Robeson biographer Lloyd Brown points out that Duberman goes as far as to use anti-Soviet and Zionist sources concerning his account of the situation of the Jewish poet Itzik Feffer. These sources had sympathy neither with Robeson, world peace or the Soviet Union. Duberman’s point is to paint Robeson as on the one hand dubbed by the Soviet Union and on the other as compromised on the Jewish question and human rights generally. Neither is the case. In fact the entire episode appears to be a total fabrication. [see Lloyd Brown, "Robeson, Scholarship and Slander: Response to Martin Duberman's Biography of Paul Robeson" in Jewish Affairs, April 1989]

Duberman presents the Communist party and individual communist in a perverse and distorted manner. The CP is portrayed as a dogmatic and rigid sect that after the 1940′s narrowed Robeson’s base and ultimately attempted to control him. Although Robeson did not hold this position and fervently rejected it, Duberman arrogantly puts it forth. Henry Winston is said to have urged Robeson during the height of the McCarthy period to “stick to singing.” The source for this is Paul Robeson Jr. No attempt is made to seek further corroboration. Besides distorting the character of Henry Winston, what is manifested is Duberman’s anti-communism. Duberman makes other unsubstantiated claims concerning Robeson’s relationship to the Communist Party. It is claimed that Robeson got along with the “centrist” Eugene Dennis, but was estranged from William Foster, Henry Winston and William Patterson. Once again the sole source is Paul Robeson Jr. and no other evidence is presented of what had to be complicated political and ideological relationships. At the same time Duberman reduces Paul Robeson’s ceaseless fight against anti-communism, McCarthyism and the Cold War to Robeson’s loyalties to his friends on the left. Are we to believe that Robeson was so politically naive? Were there not deeply held principles involved? Can Robeson’s politics be explained in a more complex way, which would suggest that Robeson was a major and mature political actor on the world stage? The point is that Robeson maintained a principled relationship with the leadership of the Communist Party. These relationships were maintained on the basis of mutuality and respect. The problems with the Communist Party are Duberman’s not Robeson’s. This while Robeson maintained a critical attitude to leaders and pollicies of the Party that he disagreed with; as was the case with leaders of the civil rights and labor movements. Rather than truthfully developing the historical record, Duberman attempts to work out his own biases, his politics and his problems in the context of a Robeson biography and make them appear to be Robeson’s. In this respect, Duberman continues the anti-Communist and racist attacks that Robeson endured throughout the Cold War.

Duberman presents what can only be considered a racist and sexist portrait of Eslanda Goode Robeson, Paul’s wife and comrade in arms of over forty years. She is portrayed as jealous, self-seeking, petty, haughty, as well as a financial and emotional drain upon Robeson. Her intellect, politics, courage and life-long collaboration with Robeson are rendered of no significance. Historian Gerald Horne describes Duberman’s treatment of Eslanda as “misogynist”. Duberman draws selectively from Eslanda’s extensive diaries and correspondence and presents an inaccurate and demeaning picture of Paul’s and Eslanda’s relationship. As far as Essie’s character and personality are concerned we hear little of substance from the Robeson’s closest friends and associates. We learn nothing of her politics and ideas and their contribution to Robeson’s thinking. Nothing of her collaborations with Pearl S. Buck, only passing mention of her anthropological studies in Africa . We learn nothing of her fight to free Ben Davis and other imprisoned communists, or of her joint effort with Claudia Jones in these campaigns.

In the last instance, the Duberman biography undermines the integrity of the historical record as it concerns Paul Robeson. In the Review of Radical History,[Fall 1988] Duberman candidly admits a lack of professional scholarly involvement with studies of Robeson prior to being chosen by Paul Robeson Jr. to do this biography. What then were Duberman’s motives? Clearly there are ideological ones. Duberman places his ideological positions against those of Robeson. In so doing he attempts to belittle Robeson’s politics. Secondly, Duberman reduces Robeson’s significance in history. Creating a fictionalized psychosexual history of Robeson does this. Thirdly, Duberman uses this biography to distort the history of the Communist Party and to continue a Cold War portrayal of the Soviet Union. Duberman leaves us with a tangle of inaccuracies and distortions. It is to be hoped that the Robeson estate now housed at the Moorland -Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, as well as the archives in the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, will rapidly be made available to serious and committed scholars so that a rich and accurate scholarship worthy of Robeson can grow and be enriched by new generations of historians and social scientists.

In Banner-Haley’s dreamscape, Obama’s election is both an end and a beginning. He insists, “Barack Hussein Obama in many ways was a culmination of the Civil rights movement and the starting point for African American intellectuals to confront those new definitions of race and identity (7).” The implication is “the new definitions of race and identity” are those that arise from an alleged post-racial America. African Americans, to cite Obama, have come 90% of the way to freedom. Obama, and by implication Banner-Haley, accept the neo-liberal position that the major problems confronting black folk are rooted in black culture, psychology and behaviors, especially of the poor. The author says Obama gravitated to Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson’s “synthetic analysis” that drew from both political liberalism and right wing conservatism. Wilson claims that since 1968 we have been in a period of the “declining significance of race”.

The book points to a new crisis of African American intellectuals. Cloistered in elite universities and increasingly leaning towards neo-liberal ideas on race, economics and politics, they are separated from black working people, the poor and the black middle class. While Obama, remains popular among African Americans as symbol of racial progress, his policies, that favor large banks, Wall Street and the military, places him and those black intellectuals who “take their cue” from him, at odds with the fundamental economic and social interests of the vast majority of African Americans. On the other hand, Obama’s insulting and practiced indifference to black suffering, his performance of post racialism, while savage racism engulfs him,his family, his presidency and all African Americans, his practice of keeping most blacks at arms length, yet on occasion inviting chosen Negroes to the White House, is nothing short of a put down of African Americans; behavior none of us would accept from a white President, Democrat or Republican.

Banner-Haley says, “Unable to make the connection either with the immiserated black poor or many of those newly arrived in the black middle class, black intellectuals found themselves visible, but encapsulated in an insulated academic world that may listen but often does not hear and does not act on the ideas, analyses, and prescriptions that these women and men present (45).” Because they are preoccupied with talking to white elites, they lack moral standing with black people. This is the price they pay to integrate white elite and capitalist circles. This, however, is only part of the problem. The larger part is that politically they are race neo-liberals. At the highest levels there is hardly a radical among them, unlike most in the past who were race radicals. The other problem is that they choose not to live among black people. They have separated themselves in their life styles, culture, and aspirations from the working class and poor in particular. Finally, they’re caught in the bind of trying to appear to serve opposing social and economic class constituencies. Elite universities demand that black intellectuals assume a post-racial sensibility and lifestyle; on the other hand, the black masses daily experience the most savage racism. Faced with this dilemma, neo-liberal black intellectuals become apologists for race and class oppression, while performing a not very convincing symbolic blackness.

Banner –Haley has it wrong, there is no trajectory from Du Bois to Obama. A more accurate description would be from Booker T Washington, and race compromise to Barack Obama and race neo-liberalism. Du Bois started his public intellectual career in 1897 founding, along with Alexander Crummell, Anna Julia Cooper and others, the American Negro Academy. In 1903 he publically presented his position on black leadership in the essay “The Talented Tenth”. He assumed that leadership would come from the educated. Reviewing talented tenth stance in 1948, he said, “I assumed that with knowledge sacrifice would automatically follow.” Rather, he insisted selfishness was a far greater impulse. He criticized himself for not realizing that most in a privileged group would tend to constitute themselves as an aristocracy, rather than a leadership connected to the masses and their uplift. In the year that he published in Talented Tenth essay he published The Souls of Black Folk. He made the famous prediction that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. What he meant was that liberal, or bourgeois democracy, could not advance, in fact would turn in upon itself, if the race issue went unresolved. While not being in the camp of liberalism, or of bourgeois democracy per se, he rightly understood that the obstacle to democracy for all excluded groups rested on resolving the race problem, especially the issue of black civil rights and the vote. But its resolution demanded the agency and activism of black folk, and black folk needed consistent and reliable leadership. At a time when Booker Washington was arguing that race and civil rights should be taken out of public and political discourse and that black leadership should take a back seat to white intellectuals, Du Bois argued the opposite. In 1948, he disappointedly concluded, most of the talented tenth abandoned its possible historic mission and became consumed in universal selfishness. He called for a new configuration of black leadership and black intellectuals. Rather than a talented tenth he called for a guiding one hundredth; a new leadership cadre drawn not only from the educated, certainly not from the ranks of those chosen “to lead Negroes” by white elites, but from the educated lower middle classes and the working masses. At this point he saw class origins and class loyalties as a critical determinant of black leadership.

With the Civil Rights and Black Power movements completed and civil rights legislation on the books, rather than a new racial democracy we witnessed a counter-revolution against black equality, rooted in preserving white racial privilege, branded as a new conservatism (Reaganism). Yet a small segment of blacks has progressed. A new talented tenth, which attempts to straddle the ideological divide between Booker T Washington and Du Bois. They claim Du Bois in words, but substantively are Bookerites.

Banner-Haley implies Du Bois ceased thinking after 1903, the year of The Souls of Black Folk. In truth, Du Bois became more radical the older he got. In the last quarter of his life he was a radical, anti-imperialist, socialist and communist. On this matter Martin Luther King Jr declared, ” We cannot talk of Dr Du Bois without recognizing 
 that he was a radical all of his life. Some people 
 would like to ignore the fact that he was a 
Communist in his later years.” Most scholars wish either to ignore this fact or claim that Du Bois had by the 1940’s lost his way and chosen “another path”.

The break by significant elements of the black elite with Du Bois started with the Cold War and McCarthyism. The US government labeled him “an agent of a foreign government ” for his pro-peace and anti-nuclear war stance. Many took solace in looking at the Du Bois of the early twentieth century, saying that his radicalism signified his separation from the struggle for black freedom. He was, they insisted, no longer a part of the civil rights movement, but of the far left. In the universities his name was seldom if ever mentioned. It was only with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, that it became permissible to mention his name and write books and article on him. Still his radicalism was viewed as that of a disappointed and isolated elder. His detractors explained his radicalism as the result of bitterness towards the talented tenth and not of his on going engagement with the realities of racism, war, colonialism and imperialism. Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis, along with Cornel West and most recently Harvard professor Martin Kilson have looked on the last quarter of Du Bois’ life as a rupture with his “great period”, the period before 1945.

If we, as Dr King suggests, look at Du Bois’ life as a whole and view his latter years as part of an intellectual and scientific continuum of philosophical and practical development of the race question, his radicalism makes all the sense in the world. Elite African American intellectuals, most educated in white universities and who teach in these institutions, have made a break with Du Bois, while many, oddly enough, claim to be Du Boisian. American liberalism reached its high point in the 1930’s with the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Since the 1980’s American democracy has become more right wing and more authoritarian and liberalism has become increasingly neo-liberal rationalizations of American empire. The banks, Wall Street and the military have undermined most avenues of democracy, including elections.

Black intellectuals in the second decade of the 21st century should not take a cue from Obama’s presidency, but from Du Bois. They should stop being afraid of Du Bois’ radicalism and anti-imperialism and end their cow towing to the conservatism of the white academic establishment. King, one of the greatest black intellectuals was right, “It is time to cease 
muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and 
chose to be a Communist. Our obsessive 
 anti-communism has led us into too many 
 quagmires.”

Charles Pete Banner-Haley’s book is a political failure, but more, it distorts the truth and obscures the paths to developing a 21st century radical African American intelligentsia. Anchored in Obamism, and by implication neo-liberalism, Banner-Haley is blind to the real history of black intellectuals and of Du Bois. We do need a history of black intellectuals, (a project that professor Martin Kilson for some years has been working on) which is not an apologia for American capitalism and empire. We need 21st century intellectuals who are not afraid to reject neo-liberalism, who will speak the truth about the Obama Administration and race and US Empire, who are not fearful of criticizing free market capitalism, and indeed like Du Bois stand for a human future beyond capitalism. Black folk need a new radical intelligentsia in the Du Boisian tradition.

On the side of inductivism Bacon and later John Stuart Mill made robust claims. Mill asserted that every process leading to scientific knowledge could be represented as an inductive process. Such an assertion brought forward its opposite. The earliest criticism of Mill’s Logic was based upon its being solely bound to the sense content of phenomena and its failure to address properties, aspects, relations or structures of the object that is empirically given.

William Whewell, not unlike much that has followed, argued that empirical laws–meaning in Mill’s sense the causal connections of sense perception –could not lead to the discovery of new scientific laws. His view was that the discovery of new scientific laws introduced new scientific abstraction, which thereby serve to discover new connections between empirical data and thus form new theoretical systems. For Whewell this process of discovery is founded upon the process of applying a priori ideas to empirical material. He sought to discover new scientific laws through the introduction of new levels of abstraction. Whewell argued that empirical connections alone did not in and of themselves suffice to establish scientific discovery. For Whewell the new level of abstraction necessary was identified with a priori conditions of knowledge. It was here that new empirical connections could be discovered. The substance of Whewell’s argument, and that which remains valid in the rejection of old type inductivism, is the need to go beyond that which is given in sensation and the method of identifying sense data with the real. Mill’s inductivism was undermined by its inability to go beyond sense datum which placed radical limitations upon the possibilities of knowledge. It was therefore at variance with the advances being made in the natural sciences.

The unsatisfactory results of Mill’s Logic along with the enormous achievements in the natural sciences created the demand for new logico-methodological approaches to the questions of scientific knowledge. Moreover, the structure of scientific knowledge was increasing in complexity occasioning the use of mathematics to explain the unobservable. Ernest Mach and the empririo-critics suggested a new positivism that based its outlook upon Hume’s epistemology. [See Lenin, Materialism and Empririo Criticism, David Hillel Ruben.] Empririo criticism, while enjoying some popularity, failed to provide the necessary logical apparatus to address the pressing needs of science. Problems of logic were assuming a daily presence in the activity of science. Under these circumstances the logical, and more specifically the logico-methodological apparatus of theory, assumed a place of practical necessity in the unfolding of research. Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus sought to systematically address this situation. The formation of the Vienna Circle and the Society of Empirical Philosophy in Berlin attempted to construct upon the foundations of Principia and the Tractatus a consistent philosophy. They viewed past philosophy as a fetter to science. The objective then was to construct, based upon mathematics, a logical apparatus by which to determine the truth of the statements of science.

EMPIRICAL SIGNIFICANCE AND THE REDUCTIONIST PROGRAM OF LOGICAL EMPIRICISM

At the stage when the practical tasks of logic are to be found in the construction of the methodological apparatus of scientific knowledge that logical empiricism assumes centrality. What Suppe calls “The Received View” is an attempt to discover the “given” content of knowledge and the empirical significance of its elements. Logical empiricism, therefore, makes robust claims both from the standpoint of its negative and positive objectives. On the positive side it seeks a precise analysis of the cognitive significance of the concepts and statements of science in order to disclose their empirical or given content. Its negative function is to eliminate speculative philosophy from scientific discourse. This objective is best described as removing from statements of science all which is not reducible to that which is given in sensation. These objectives establish the reductionist and non-realist dimension of logical empiricism. Simply put, the logical empiricist program constitutes the reconstituting of the system of existing knowledge. Whereas for Bacon and Descartes the logic and methodology of science was directed to giving priority to searching for methods and techniques for discovering new knowledge, the logical empiricist seek to confirm existing knowledge.

Logical empiricism presents the primacy of empirical knowledge, what they have called the “directly given” based upon the reduction of knowledge to what is considered its primary empirical elements. Such a reduction ipso facto eliminates the possibility of levels of knowledge in the formation of knowledge, and literally collapses the theoretical into the empirical.

Logical empiricism has attempted various logical means of addressing the problem of levels of knowledge, while simultaneously maintaining their reductionist posture. For example, Russell proposed an extensional logic based upon the idea of nomological statements. Herein is reflected a change in the fundamental principles of methodology and logic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The roots of this change are to be found in the enormous complication of scientific knowledge and the development of the mathematical apparatus of science, the decline in the role of direct visualization or observation in scientific experimentation. The objective is to order and organize in a rigorous manner the exact meaning of scientific assertions and concepts. One would find it difficult to disagree with this objective if it is properly contextualized. However, to absolutize such an objective occurs at the expense of the creative and emergent characteristics of knowledge. Thus Russell and Whitehead’s Principia developed a mathematical logic that is extensional, the logic of truth functions. The truth value of each statement capable of being subdivided into component statements is determined unambiguously by the truth value of these components or, in other words, each component statement is a truth function of its components. If knowledge of reality requires reconstruction into a language whose grammar is extensional logic, the result of this reconstruction would be a set of statements interrelated by truth values. In order to rigorously define the “significance” of any statement, under this concept of logical structure, it is necessary to examine the connection of the given statement with other statements in terms of their truth values, that is to demonstrate of what statements the given statement is a truth function. It is, however, obvious that such a reductionist strategy cannot proceed endlessly. Such a system must contain ultimate statements, representing the limits of reducibility. Since the truth value of ultimate statements is not based upon the logical connection between them, they may only be postulated by some extra-logical means. It is at this point that purely logical procedures are of little value. The solution must be discovered at the level of epistemology. Thus the logical apparatus of the Principia finally rests upon certain epistemological and philosophical foundations. Russell rests upon an idealist, neo-Platonist epistemology, holding that sense perception is the ultimate source of experience. [See Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, p. 363.] For Russell all knowledge is reducible to a set of atomic statements or assertions, which are empirically verifiable by sense perception. Therefore, for logical atomism, all knowledge is a set of statements about sense data and the cognitive meaning of the set of fundamental statements is revealed in the last analysis through the empirical sense-perceived conditions of truth. Therefore, to understand an assertion or statement consists in knowing its empirical conditions, the sense datum which verifies them. Russell formulated this relation thusly, “Verification always consists in the appearance of the anticipated sense-data.” Schlick used the phrase “The meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification.” Obviously, the verification principle of logical atomism relies upon observation or sensation. But what of non-observable statements? Wittgenstein’s answer in the Tractatus held that logical and mathematical propositions do not constitute knowledge of reality, they are contentless and empty. They are basically guidelines indicating the permissible transformations of modes of linguistic expressions, but in no way bear upon their meaning. Logical propositions are tautologies which are true under any and all combinations. Such tautologies convey no knowledge of the actual world or bring forth no new information [see Suppe on the Received View]. Carnap later on took up this same view. [The Logical Structure of the World.] According to this view the world assumes the structure of mathematical logic and therefore proposes that the world is in a one to one correspondence with logic. [Russell, The Structure of the External World.]

The Theory of Correspondence

This unique theory of correspondence brings together the reductionist and anti-realist positions of logical empiricism. While later rejecting the earlier atomist ontology [Suppe, p. 67] it sacrificed nothing in terms of its logic and methodology. It merely separated analytical and synthetic truths [Suppe, p. 67]. Hindess goes so far as to suggest that neo-positivism treats all ontology as strictly meaningless [p. 239] Carnap as well argues in this direction [Schlick, 1963, p. 868] this constituted an abandonment of ontology by Carnap and the Vienna Circle. This constituted a solipsistic turn, and as V. S. Shvyrev suggests, the universalization of formal logic and the effort to build a theory of knowledge resting exclusively upon concepts of formal logic. Shvyrev finally makes the following point: “. . . abandonment of ontological presuppositions such as the theory which constitutes reality as a set of atomic facts does not in any way influence the essence of epistemological logic. . . . Therefore, by disregarding the pluralist ontology of logical atomism, the neopositivists of the Vienna Circle were able to borrow the fundamental characteristics of the conception of the epistemological logic of Russell and Wittgenstein: the view of knowledge as a system of extensionally related statements, the understanding of the truth of ultimate statements as empirical truth, and the fundamental opposition presumed to exist between the logical character of the propositions of both logic and mathematics on the one side, considered as procedures for symbolic transformations, and, on the other side, the propositions of the rest of science considered as empirical knowledge of reality” [pp. 15-16]. Thus the problem now becomes that of cognitive significance of statements. Statements therefore, either have formal meaning–i.e. synthetic significance, or empirical meaning–i.e., analytic significance. Finally, logic and mathematics and later semantics are contrasted to all other sciences as a formal science.

However, the problems of observation and empirical significance are seen as problems of the relations of logical knowledge to sensory knowledge–of tautological statements to sense datum [quote Carnap and Schllip].

Assertions containing empirical conditions of truth are contrasted to those which contain formal meaning. This synthetic-analytic distinction first appeared in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason [Suppe]. This distinction can be characterized as the observation-theoretical distinction. It is crucial to logical empiricism’s attempt at carrying out a logical analysis of knowledge directed at disclosing its empirical significance. Shvyrev suggests that logical empiricism’s concept of empirical significance reduces the logical and in particular the intellectual content of knowledge to sensory knowledge, to the expression of given sensations in speech, thereby depriving thought of its distinctive quality as the highest stage of reflection [p. 16]. Suppe [p. 80] draws attention to the untenability of the observation-theoretical distinction as developed by logical empiricism. Using the findings of Putnam-Achinstein Suppe argues that logical empiricism onesidedly develops the distinction. Moreover, he argues that logical empiricism artificially presents the distinction.

Underlying the concept of empirical significance is the conclusion that the cognitive meaning of an assertion about the world consists of the expression of an immediate site of things. Joergensen quotes Carnap as saying, “The meaning of a statement consists in its expressing a (thinkable, not necessarily also an actual) state of affairs. If an alleged statement expressed no (thinkable) state of affairs, it has not meaning and hence is only apparently an assertion. If a statement expresses a state of affairs, it is at all events meaningful, and it is true if that state of affairs exists and false if it does not.” [p. 29] The point is that for a statement to be factual it must be grounded upon experience. For Carnap the use of logistical concepts allows for the statements of various sciences being transformed into statements about immediate experiences having the same truth-values as original statements. Therefore, all scientific statements are capable of being verified or falsified by means of immediate experience. This method of achieving empirical significance came to be known as the principle of verification. For logical empiricism in general the meaningfulness of reality-sentences is connected to their verifiability.

The question of how to verify reality sentences is of utmost importance. Popper establishes falsification as the criterion of the meaningfulness of statements. Using this criterion of meaning Popper proposed to sort out empirical-scientific sentences from a priori analytical sentences (logical and mathematical) as well as from nonfalsifiable reality sentences (metaphysics). Popper is, therefore, suggesting rather than an absolute concept one that argues for “degrees of testability (Prufbarkeit)” (Joergensen, p. 73). Empirical testability is identified not with verification, but with falsification–i.e., the possibility of empirical refutation of statements. The principle of falsifiability is regarded by Popper as the “criterias of demarcation,” the distinction between scientific empirical knowledge of the world and “metaphysical systems” [V. S. Shvyrev, p. 21). Carnap in the essay "Testability and Meaning" (Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3] argues that truth and confirmation must be distinguished. Truth he says is an absolute concept, independent of time, confirmation, on the other hand, is a relative concept, the degree of which varies with the development of science. Carnap differentiates directly testable reality-sentences from those that are indirectly testable. Directly testable reality sentences are those based directly upon observation. Indirectly testable reality sentences consists in directly testing other sentences that have certain relationships to it. Concerning verification and confirmation and thus the basis of establishing empirical significance Carnap says,

If by verification is meant a definitive and final establishment of truth, then no (synthetic) sentence is ever verifiable, as we shall see. We can only confirm a sentence more and more. Therefore, we shall speak of the problem of confirmation rather than of the problem of verification.

Carnap, finally, proposer that logic, rather than a fact for verification is directed to confirming sentences. As such, as with further developments in analytic philosophy, logic and methodology are primarily tools for formalizing given knowledge.

With this overview I will proceed to the works of Mill, Russell and Carnap.

Mill’s Logic, Scientific Inquiry and Deduction
In his System of Logic Mill sought to separate the empirical foundations of natural science from Humean causality. As such, he wished to demonstrate that the philosophy of experience could be the epistemological foundation of scientific inquiry. Although his epistemology remained bound to the sense content of phenomena and remained traditional and empiricist, his logical approach was innovative. His Logic is essentially a discussion of inferential knowledge and the rules of inference. His final object was to establish the superiority of inductive reasoning. As far as deduction is concerned he held it could never be the source of new knowledge. Mill equated deductive reasoning with its most common syllogistic form and argued that the syllogism cannot contain more than is in its premises. As he posited, “no reasoning from generals to particulars can, as such, prove anything since from a general principle we cannot infer any particulars, but those which the principle itself assumes as known.” However, Mill defends deduction on the limited grounds that deductive and inductive reasoning proceeds “from particulars to paraticulars.” Syllogistic reasoning proceeds, “All men are mortal; Jones (not yet dead) is a man; therefore, Jones is mortal.” Our evidence that Jones wil die and therefore is mortal (a particular truth) is based upon our evidence that Smith, Johnson, Harris have died and others who in significant ways are like Jones have died. We, therefore, infer from thier deaths to his. We infer from one set of particulars to another. Finally, it is experiential evidence upon which prediction rest. Experience is the real foundation of inference. Deduction is a manner of interpreting our initial inference. The value of deduction rests, therefore, upon its capacity to prevent misinterpretation. However, no new information is brought forward. Syllogisms merely recover from general statements particular ones that were previously assumed. Deductive or syllogistic reasoning is tautological. Mill refers to deductive inference as apparent inference. The propositions that arise from deductive logic are called verbal propositions.

Induction, on the other hand, is that method of logic which gives non-verbal general proposition that go beyond apparent observation. Real inference comes only from induction.

Inductive Reasoning and Scientific Explanation in Mill’s Logic

Induction is for Mill the source of substantive general propositions. He uses the term induction in two ways: (a) as inference and (b) as investigation. Mill is here proceeding in a Baconian manner. He held that the cannons of the experimental method have the same function for induction as the cannons of syllogisms have for deduction. [O. A. Kubitz: 39] Mill’s definition of induction is classic and significant. Of induction he states: it is

the operation of discovering and proving general propositions. It is true that . . . the process of indirectly ascertaining individual facts is truly inductive and that by which we establish general truths . . . But it is not a different kind of induction; it is a form of the very same process: since on the one hand, generals are but collections of particulars, definite in kind but indefinite in number; and on the other hand, whenever the evidence which we derive from observation of known cases justifies us in drawing inference respecting even one unkown case, we should on the same evidence be justified in drawing a similar inference with respect to a whole class of cases. The inference either does not hold at all, or it holds in all cases of a certain description, in all cases which in certain respects resemble those we have observed. [Logic: 208]

Herein we discover Mill’s dual usage of induction. The first is the collection of facts–here MIll is wedded to the Baconian experimental method. Secondly, induction is used to infer from particular observation. [Kubitz: 144]

Causality in Mill’s System

Mill, in order to propose the possibility of inference from particulars to general truths, assume dregularity and constancy in nature. Such an assumption is rooted in Newtonian mechanics. Newton argued that the movement of solid particles occurs in an absolute spatial and temporal framework. Their movements, moreover, are governed by immutable laws. The method of finding these laws was characterized by Newton as a process of analysis and synthesis. Analysis included the experimental operations; synthesis the mathematical and deductive operations Mill, however, gave primary to the analytic or experimental. For Mill it is evident that the “uniformity of the course of nature is . . . itself a complex fact, compounded of all the separate uniformities which exist in respect to single phenomena.” [Kubitz: 48, quoted from Mill's Definition of Political Economy] Mill says of this method,

“the method of the practical philosopher consists . . . of two processes; the one analytical, the other synthetical. He msut analyze the existing state of society into its elements, not dropping or losing nay of them by the way. After referring to experience of individual man to learn the law of each of these elements, that is to learn what are its natural effects, and how much of the effect follows from so much of the cause when not counteracted by any other cause there remains an operation of synthesis; to put all these effects together, and from what they are separately, to collect what would be the effect of all the causes acting at once. [Early Essays: 152-153]

General laws are general regularities emerging from the synthesis of particular regularities. As he states in the Logic, “what happens once, will under a sufficient degree of similarity of circumstances, happen again.” [quoted from Nagel: 317] The assumption of constancy in nature makes this possible. Thus an effect has a constant cause given constancy of circumstance. Thus Mill argues, causality is an “unconditional invariable antecedent” [Logic: 326] Inductive logic has as its principle purpose to discover nature’s regularities–i.e., the “unconditional invariable antecedents.” Mill suggests that the problem of induction is to discover, “the fewest and simplest assumptions, which being granted, the whole existing order of nature would result.” This search for atomic truths, as it werre, will be rediscovered by Russell. Mill places this matter in the follwoing words, “What are the fewest general propositions from which all the uniformities which exist in the universe might be deductively inferred?” [Logic: 317] Mill locked upon this as a long process which occurs over generations.

Newtonian Macrophysics and Millsean Causality

It is helpful, I believe, in understanding Mill’s concept of causality to look at the basic assumptions of Newtonian Macro-physics. Professor Horz and his colleagues have written on Newtonian causality. If the state of a physical system, i.e., the position coordinates and momenta, and the forces affecting it are known with absolute precision at a given moment of time, the state of the system at any other time can be predicted with absolute accuracy. Characteristic of this classical-mechanical form of causality is the assumption of precise predictability.

According to this and the Millsean conceptualization law and causality are identical. Its power rests with its mathematical elegance and systematic construction which is based upon experimentally verified knoweldge and fully tested in practice [Horz]. Mill’s assumption that law-likeness or regularity in nature reflect invariance and precision are rooted in Newtonian mechanics. Moreover, Kubitz suggests that Mill’s understanding of analysis and synthesis was similar to Newton’s. According to Kubitz Newton and Mill adopted Stewart’s position on analysis and synthesis. Stewardt reversed the Greek foundation holding that the mathematical or geometric was distinct from that of the physicist. Mathematics begins from hypothetical assumptions and the object is to arrive at a known truth or datum by reasoning synthetically–a path that allows us to later on retrace our steps. The synthetic process is obtained by reversing the analytic process. Since both processes have in view the demonstration of the same theorem or the solution of the same problem, theyt form in reality different parts of one and the same investigations. [Kubitz: 173] Stewart states the problem in the follwoing manner,

Our analysis necessarily sets out from known facts, and after it has conducted us to a general principle, the synthetical reasoning which follows consists always of an application of this principle to phenomena, different fromm those comprehended in the original induction. [quoted in Kubitz: 263]

Both Newton and Mill appear to have adopted this process. Analysis is to be understood as the experimental and observational stage, while the formalization of the results into law is considered the synthetic stage. The discovery of cause results from the formalization of observation and experiment.

NOTES
* Hilary Putnam poses the question in the manner which asks, “How does the mind access the world.” Putnam, rather than transcendental idealism, argues for what he calls the method of internal realism, where concepts are intrinsically connected to the objects of reality. As he puts things, “‘Objects’ do not exist independently of conceptual schemes. We cut up the world into objects when we introduce one or another scheme of description. Since the objects and the signs are alike internal to the scheme of description, it is possible to say what matches what.” [p. 52] Putnam, therefore, suggests a transcendental connection which seeks to deny the correspondence theory of truth while upholding the necessity of sense datum being connected to a conceptual scheme. Putnam goes beyond Whewell, precisely by expanding the definition of what is real. The real becomes as well the conceptual.

* This process, under different circumstances and with different objectives, continued with logical empiricism, which declared the principle objective of logic to be the verification and later the confirmation of existing knowledge. Whewell did, however, address a principle weakness of Mill’s inductivism–i.e., its reductionism–while leaving unsettled the question of realism, an epistemological question which awaited the post positivist era to be addressed.

* Bhaskar p. 36 argues that neo-positivism holds that statements about being can be reduced to statements about knowledge, or putting it another way, ontological questions can be transposed into epistemological ones. Bhaskar calls this the epistemic fallacy.

* Popper felt that the initial statement of logical empiricism had complicated matters and that “logical positivism destroys, not only metaphysics, but also natural science. To correct the problem Popper proposed rather than verification, the method of falsification.
* See the contemporary efforts in mathematical logic, chaos theory, far from equilibrium dynamics and rational choice theory.

* Mill’s position on induction and deduction was demonstrated through mathematics. Geometry was considered by him to be based on deductive logic. Mill argued that the conclusions of geometry are based on premises grounded in observation and generalization from these observations. Engels, interestingly, arrived at a similar conclusion.

* This method of dealing with problem of analysis and synthesis reappears in logical empiricism, particularly the work of Carnap and in analytic Marxism, but in the more sophisticated form of the relationship between empirical and theoretical knowledge.

REFERENCES
Bhaskar, R.A., 1997 [1975], A Realist Theory of Science, London: Verso
Hörz, Herbert Philosophical Problems in Physical Science (1980). Minneapolis. Marxist Education Press.
Kubitz, O. A. The Development of John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic. (1932).Illinois studies in the social sciences
Mill, John Stuart. (1909) System of Logic. New York. Harper and Brothers
Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere (1986), Oxford University Press
Putnam, Hilary, Reason, Truth and History, (1980), London, Cambridge University Press
V. S. Shvyrev, “Some Problems in the Logico-Methodological Analysis of the Relation Between the Theoretical and Empirical Levels of Scientific Cognition,,Soviet studies in philosophy, Volume 8

W.E.B Du Bois, Race, and the World System
IN ESSENTIAL WAYS, W.E.B. Du Bois in his major works provides necessary elements of a state theory, a theory of the world system and of crisis. Du Bois’s work carries an overarching political meaning in the current historical context. The Souls of Black Folk, for instance, was designed to address the political task of the African American struggle and the struggle for bourgeois democracy at the start of the twentieth century. Besides many of the philosophical, historical and sociological significances of the text, its contemporary relevance is in the manner it addresses the struggle for democracy and bourgeois liberties under conditions of racialized state power. Even in his conceptualization of bourgeois democratic reforms Du Bois superseded both progressivism and socialism. Each were blind to the centrality of race and white supremacy as core dynamics of reaction and conservatism; but more, neither saw the state in racialized terms. And while each of these reform movements foresaw a crucial role for the state in bringing about reform in the political and economic systems, neither understood race as the critical foundation of the US state.
Scholars such as David Levering Lewis (1993) and Alex Schafer (2001) suggest that Du Bois was highly influenced by the normative and reform orientation of his professors in Berlin, in particular Gustav von Schmoller and Adolph Wagner, both leading figures in the school of historical economics. Du Bois was a graduate student in Germany between 1892 and 1894.( n2) The German historical school of economics assumed a major role for the state in the organization of a just and democratic society; this in stark contrast to the laissez-faire economics of the Anglo-American school. In defining the problem of the twentieth century as the color line and the struggle against it, he was anticipating both the civil rights and anti-colonial struggles, albeit in their bourgeois democratic dimensions. However, Du Bois was mindful in Souls of the ruin of bourgeois democratic political and economic relationships in the US after the long period of chattel slavery, the Civil War and the overturning of Reconstruction. And thus he viewed the onslaught against democracy as rooted in the racist overturning of Reconstruction and the forcing of the former slaves back towards slavery.
THE COURTS, he would argue, had become a universal device for the reenslavement of blacks. The second chapter of Souls “Of the Dawn of Freedom” creates a paradigm which suggests that Reconstruction’s great benefit was its demonstrating, often in limited ways, the possibility of arranging bourgeois democratic political and economic relationships upon non-racist foundations. The failure of Reconstruction, therefore, made it inevitable (a point that would be fully developed in Black Reconstruction) that the problem for democracy in the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line; or more precisely the problem of race and race relationships. The irrefutable assumption of the enterprise in Souls is that the overturning of Reconstruction inaugurated a new stage of the racialized US state and a racialized (or herrenvolk) democracy. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) enshrined these relationships as constitutional and thus protected by law. Du Bois conceived of this problem as a global problem, which he would over the course of his studies conceptualize as a world crisis for democracy.
RACE was seen as both the unfinished business of the US nation and the ultimate test of its creed. By the time of the writing of Black Reconstruction (1935) it is apparent that, for Du Bois, nothing short of revolutionary struggle would bring about the realization of democracy for black folk, especially the black proletariat. A decade later in Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945) the world system implications of the struggle for democracy are asserted. The world system, he argues, is profoundly anti-democratic, dictatorial and organized upon principles not that far removed from fascism.( n3) The white nations of Europe and America defend a world system that locks the majority of humanity in a perpetual crisis state, defined by poverty, disease, little or no education and super-exploitation; which at the same time supports luxury for the world’s white minority.
The political and moral agency of democracy, in the end, insists Du Bois, is not to be found in the “Western democracies” but among the colonized and oppressed throughout the world. And, finally, the crisis of the world system would be resolved through the anti-colonial struggle, economic liberation and the rearranging of the world’s political and economic relations upon antiracist, anti-imperialist, socialist and democratic principles (see Black Reconstruction, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace, The World and Africa, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois).( n4) This process, in the long view, would constitute a fundamental change of epochs from white supremacy and colonial imperialism to global democracy.
MOST SCHOLARSHIP has understood the word problem in the sentence, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” conventionally. The word problem has been interpreted to mean just that, a problem. I would suggest that the word problem in the Du Boisian oeuvre means crisis. In his work “The African Roots of the War” (1915), what Du Bois is clearly addressing are the crises in the world system brought about by the intensification of discrimination along the color line and colonialism, a crisis that led to the First World War. The problem, therefore, of US and world relationships, rooted in the “problem of the twentieth century” must be understood as a crisis which leads to war, repression and fascism. At the core of the problem of race relationships are the crises these relationships produce.
The color line as an explanatory category goes a considerable distance in explaining social, political, cultural, technological and other relationships and events that configure the world system. Race, the color line and race relationships are the context of the world system, At the same time, the world system is a set of concrete mechanisms through which the color line is actuated; the color line configures the relationships of the darker to the lighter races of humanity. Put another way, it configures the relationships of humanity to itself. Du Bois’s “The African Roots of the War” (1915), Black Reconstruction (1935), Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945) and The World and Africa (1947) are studies of crises in the US and world systems. The resolution of the crisis of race is central to resolving the crisis of the modern world system in Du Boisian logic. For Du Bois this requires more than a change in the nature of economic relationships, as it were, from capitalism to socialism. That change could be the start of a deeper attack upon the color line and thus a fundamental stage in resolving the crisis of human relationships and of the world system. If not, a change of modes of production might constitute a new way to arrange the world system and thus race relationships, rather than overthrowing the regime of white supremacy. This logic insists both upon the centrality of Africa and Asia and the anti-colonial struggle in remaking the world system; and rejects an economistic explanation that privileges economic relationships in measuring fundamental change.( n5)
IN THE CONTEXT OF THE COLD WAR and the global crisis created by the conflict between the capitalist and socialist systems, Du Bois argued that race and the colonization and neo-colonization of Africa and Asia are foundational to the world systems crisis. In this respect, Du Bois argues that the test of socialism as an alternative economic system to capitalism is its relationship to Africa–whether the leaders of socialism would deal with Africa upon anti-racist and democratic principles–or seek to rearrange the world system in such ways as to benefit from the oppression and neo-colonization of Africa. Would socialism promise to its working people a lifestyle similar to that of white people in the West? Would it as a system be over-determined by efforts to resolve internal political contradictions through organizing its social relationships upon consumerist, individualist and ultimately white supremacist principles? Would the ideal be a socialism of luxury? A socialism at odds with humanity’s non-white majority? In the end, the failure of European socialism is its failure to resolve the problem of white supremacy within its societies and to join humanity’s non-white majority in a consistent, indeed, revolutionary, struggle to alter the world system itself in such ways as to occasion a global redistribution of wealth based upon world democracy. This framework informs my understanding of US imperialism at the current stage and helps explain contemporary events.

The New Imperialism
PHILIP BOBBITT (2004), a defender of American imperialism, writes that George W. Bush is “the authentic voice of the liberal imperialist.” An imperialist who, according to Bobbitt, is concerned with a world of prosperity, women’s and minority rights, secularization and democracy. These policies, he insists, “take the doctrine of ‘democratic engagement’ of the first Bush administration, and the doctrine of ‘democratic enlargement’ of the Clinton administration, one step further. It might be called democratic transformation’. Or, it might be called ‘liberal imperialism.’” And then, he asks, “What is wrong with this noble idea?” This article will, in part, attempt to suggest “what is wrong with this noble idea.”
The current moment of empire and the new relationship of forces within the United States are crystallized in the Bush Administration’s Doctrine of Preemptive War,( n6) the USA Patriot Act, and the Homeland Security Act. The Justice Department and the Homeland Security Department are designed as the command centers of the attack upon civil and political rights. International law and international institutions, at the same time, are under assaulted as the Bush Administration declares its right to wage war unilaterally anywhere in the world. The Administration has literally declared itself outside of the bounds of international law and thus according to its own definitions, a rogue state. In economic terms, a policy shift from Keynesian state economic and financial planning to a neo-liberal Friedmanite free market, has been institutionalized.
THAT HAVING BEEN SAID, modern capitalism, bourgeois democracy, globalization and contemporary pop culture are virtually incomprehensible without understanding the modern racialized capitalist state. Nor can the new imperialism be understood without understanding its historical anchorage in the racialized US state. While these are issues that engage state and political theory they are also matters that must be investigated historically. The social psychological and ideological dimensions are particularly important. It is safe to say that the American population, particularly white people, views the current moment as a new and unsafe frontier. There is a perceptible transformation of the psychological and ideological impulses among white Americans and something that resembles a collective traumatization is occurring as the business of empire comes home to roost.
The psychological and ideological moment is nourished by the concerns that ordinary white people have with their own vulnerability and their awareness that it is they who are called upon to make significant sacrifices in the name of empire. It is in this milieu that we witness the attempt of leading elements of the state to forge a national identity and sense of purpose geared to fit this new moment. Indeed, the conscious and subconscious dimensions of the American belief system are historically constituted. On the one hand they are variants of extreme individualism; but, at the same time, they embrace notions of whiteness and white supremacy that acknowledge the contingency of the individual upon the larger group. This dialectic between the white race and white supremacy on the one hand, and individualism on the other, accounts for certain of the contradictions of action and thought among white folk. This is particularly pronounced as regards economic and class interests.
In the priority hierarchy of most white people class and economic interests are of secondary or tertiary significance in the determination of political behavior; race trumps class in defining consciousness and political behavior.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL and ideological realities of ordinary white folk are filtered through the prisms of race, nationalism and white supremacy. The perceived threats, therefore, are viewed as threats to white people as a collective and not solely to the economic interests of the nation, or even to specific class interests. For them the American dreamscape has been sullied and tarnished. Their sense of security and the expectation of privacy are wounded. In their minds, their dream world has to be redeemed in order that the American psyche be restored. In the deepest sense the privileges of whiteness and white supremacy are perceived as being under attack. Hence, the defense of America and of democracy is at the core a defense of the global rights of white people, articulated variously as defenses of civilization or the West.
What we have is the reassertion of the notion of civilized and uncivilized nations. Civilized nations are either Western or those whose elites adhere to or adopt Western civilizational values. Hence, the war against terrorism is to uphold Western civilization. However, once it is connected to its objective, an American global empire, it may be properly viewed as a war to universalize white supremacy and to establish the United States as its hegemon. This inevitably leads to tearing up of the international legal framework established since 1945; in particular, the UN Charter and its commitments to decolonization and universally recognized human rights. This constitutes a profound emasculation of international law and a return to the Great Nations system of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As is clear this system harkens back to the time of rampant colonization. Clusters of right-wing commentators are either calling for the US to leave the UN or to severely minimizes its participation. Others more boldly assert the need to for an alternative international organization called the League of Democracies, which would divide the world between the so-called civilized nations and the less than civilized or uncivilized nations.

The US State’s Evolutionary History
THE GENERAL HISTORICAL TREND is for the United States to move to the right in terms of foreign and domestic policies. This inexorable movement, with temporary moments of slow down in the 1930s and 1940s, and the 1960s, has reached an extremely dangerous moment. The overturning of Reconstruction inaugurated this movement.( n7) Race and white supremacy in the post-slavery history of the US have so shaped the nature of class and social relationships and thus of consciousness that the most significant trend among white folk is to the right and conservatism. Hence, support for most state policies of war and racism.
There is yet another way to understand state policy, which is as a manifestation of a growing crisis of the global economic system. World systems theorists as varied as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Immanuel Wallerstien, Samir Amin and Andre Gunther Frank have argued that the world system has been in crisis since the beginning of the twentieth century. According to world systems theorists, this has produced war, economic depressions and revolution. This idea of a crisis of the global system is periodized in two ways: one, from the standpoint of economic and business cycles and secondly from the standpoint of large socio-political phenomena, such as wars, national liberation struggles and revolutions. However, both types of phenomena tend to overlap in history and can be viewed as part of the multiple determinations of historical reality. Certainly, a plausible case can be made for the argument that the Bush strategy of war and empire fits a moment of economic crisis and the challenges to US hegemony by forces as disparate as China’s industrial development, India’s technological challenge and the antiauthoritarian movements in the Middle East. Commentators such as Chalmers Johnson (2004) are explicit in arguing that the Bush doctrine represents an effort to resolve profound problems in the global system.
WHITENESS is a dynamic and crucial factor of state formation. Traditional Marxian state theory understands state formation in the US as determined by class conflict. Hence, the class of slave owners, bankers, merchants and small capitalists seized state power in the American Revolution in the name of democracy and the American nation. In this construal the American Revolution was a bourgeois democratic revolution. Du Boisian historiography asserts that a racialized class, made up of slaveholders, merchants, bankers, small farmers and workers (see Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896), Black Reconstruction (1935) seized power and deployed it to maintain the main form of property–slaves–as the basis for national economic development and white privilege.
It is significant that Du Bois defines the slaves in Suppression as workers and in Black Reconstruction as a proletariat. Here rests his visionary reconceptualization of the class struggle and revolutionary agency. Indeed, it is the industrial working class or the proletariat as suggested by Marx that constitutes the revolutionary agency of modernity. However, Du Bois will initiate an act of profound theoretical displacement in Suppression and most decisively in Black Reconstruction, arguing that the former slaves are the racialized proletariat of America, and the principal agency of progressive and revolutionary change.
EVEN IN THE EARLY PERIODS of American history, in relationship to the slaves the white proletariat and petty bourgeoisie constituted a nascent labor aristocracy, which defines its social being in opposition to the black proletariat (see David Roediger, Wages for Whiteness, 2007; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 1995). Therefore, the dominance of slaves as the main form of property and the principle source for the production of wealth, gave a racialized definition and identity to the slaves, and to the classes that make up white people. In fact, the racialized dimension of these identities is overdetermining of other social relationships. To use Marxist language, the bourgeoisie in the American context (as well as in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) is first white. The working classes are, therefore, racially identified. All classes and strata of white people become identified as a separate race-class from blacks and therefore defined the nation and the state in racialized terms.( n8) A racialized nation-state is formed; and within this mixture, the core, or organizing mechanism of race, class, nation and nationality is the racialized state. The slaves constituted in Du Bois’s thinking the principal proletarian agency in nineteenth-century US history. The racialized self-identification of white workers and what Du Bois called “a wage for whiteness” bound them more strongly to the white bourgeoisie than to the black proletariat.( n9) This wage for whiteness is, so to speak, an ontological benefit to being identified as white. Hence, an ontological identification exists between white workers and white slave owners, white workers and white capitalist, etc.
The state, therefore, is not a mechanism of class rule, sui generis, it is a mechanism of race-class rule. It is legally constituted not merely as an instrument of governance and rule by a class of property owners, but of the dominant race-class. This rule is organized upon the ideology of white supremacy. Hence, the boundaries between the ruled and the rulers along class lines are blurred and fluid, while the real and most enduring boundaries are between the racially dominant and racially subordinated groups. Furthermore, as Du Bois suggests, from the racially oppressed emerges the proletariat and within it resides the vast reservoir of proletarian consciousness and agency (see Black Reconstruction, chapter 4 “The General Strike”). The “class struggle” in this Du Boisian construal is organized around the struggle against white supremacy and its central organizing principal is the struggle for black freedom. The racialized state functions as the instrument of white unity and white ideological identity against the threat of the black race-class and its proletariat core.
DU BOIS’S CONCEPTUALIZATION of the US state as a racialized instrument does not negate the Marxist theory of the state. His theory advances Marxism, realizing a new theoretical synthesis which is both theoretically and empirically more accurate. The Du Boisian construal is both theoretically elegant and highly predictive. Which is to say it fits the actual history of the US and is able to not merely describe the history of the racialized state, but anticipate its trajectories. Furthermore, it breaks out of the reductionist strategies of class essentialism and methodological individualists. It is the least dogmatic of the major theories of the state.
This Du Boisian standpoint informs a growing body of scholarship. A significant reexamination of state theory and its legal implication is occurring. Some of this is associated with the school of scholarship called critical race theory and thinkers such as Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, Cheryl Harris, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Charles Mills. Along side this school is the school identified as whiteness studies, whose proponents are David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, Theodore Allen and Joe Feagin among others. Thinkers like Bernard Magubane and Clarence J. Munford have thought deeply about the state using traditional Marxism as a starting point, but going beyond it in a Du Boisian manner. Their line of research and reasoning represents the most fruitful to understanding the racialized state.
Charles Mills argues that the US state is formed out of a racial contract between white folk. The state is an a priori condition of modern racialized societies. Bernard Magubane shows a similar process with respect to South African state formation. Magubane’s studies examines a white settler colony and the modalities of state formation that emerged from the conflicts and cooperation between English and Dutch settlers to control the African majority of South Africa.
THE HISTORICAL ACCOUNT of the US state emphasizes that it was formed and legitimated by white people based upon a protracted history of compromise, conflict, civil war and armed struggle among themselves, accompanied by a long, brutal history of betrayal by white working and middle class people of black slaves, workers, sharecroppers and middle classes. The betrayal of the Negro, to use Rayford Logan’s phrase, is critical in every moment of state formation and legitimization in American history. Noel Ignatiev’s study How The Irish Became White and David Roediger’s Wages for Whitness are recent explanation of the consequences of the white working class’s betrayal and its role in the legitimization of whiteness. Ignatiev says, “In the combination of Southern planters and the ‘plain republicans’ of the North the Irish were to become a key element. The truth is not, as some historians would have it, that slavery made it possible to extend to the Irish the privileges of citizenship, by providing another group for them to stand on, but the reverse, that the assimilation of the Irish into the white race made it possible to maintain slavery” (1995:69).
MARY FRANCES BERRY (1994) takes the story further, urging that the US state and Constitution were forged in the struggle to contain black resistance. The logic of Berry’s position is that whiteness and the racialized state function to suppress black resistance and maintain blacks as a “sub-proletariat.” Leronne Bennett, Jr. in his work Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000) argues that through it all Lincoln was unprincipled regarding the freedom of the slaves and had he lived beyond 1864 would have, like Jefferson, slaughtered the ideals of the nation upon the alter of white supremacy. Lincoln, in Bennett’s narrative, was another of a long line of white betrayers of blacks. What is missing in Bennett’s account is that Lincoln as President was first and foremost a defender of the racialized state, and his behavior was both constrained and facilitated by that state. Berry’s account is as close as one gets in the confines of academic discourse to arguing that the US state is a racist state.
Finally, the crucial moment in defining white rights and black denial and hence updating the US Constitution to reflect the new stage of US racial and economic life was the famous Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. Interpreting that case, Cheryl Harris (1993) insists that race and property rights define the foundation of US Constitutional law and that whiteness is essentially a form of property to protected under the Constitution.

Legal Evolutions of Whiteness
The legal evolution of whiteness begins with the three-fifths clause of the Constitution and is perfected through multiple political and Constitutional interpretations and rulings. Among these are the Dred Scott Decision (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and most notably the recent interpretations of the US Supreme Court holding that the equal protection clause of the fourteenth Amendment applies equally to white men as to blacks, Native Americans and other peoples of color.
White (or American) nationalism is, in this configuration, the political manifestation of whiteness. The racialized US state is the central political organ of white power. It is, however, a complex network of relationships and socio-political forces. It is a site of intense political and ideological conflict. It is neither sui generis, nor above the political and economic realities of the historical, socio-political and ideological contexts within which it exists. Thus it is possible to observe the command and control functions of the US state as well as its mediation functions. Whereas liberal theorists generally point to the mediation or “above class” functions of the state (see John Rawls, Theory of Justice and Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia), Marxists and other radical theorists point to the command and control functions as primary to the definition of a state.
IT IS CLEAR that both radical and liberal commentators on the US state can make a case that from the standpoint of theory the US state is both liberal (in the sense of above class) and class-based. However, the deeper issue is how the state functions to configure, defend and promote race and race relations at particular historic moments. In this respect neither the liberal nor traditional radical views are adequate. What is called for is an understanding of the US state as a racialized mechanism that is the principal organizer of racialized power. As an instrument of racialized power, i.e., the power of white people over non-whites, especially black people, it functions to mediate class conflict and fissures among whites and to exert, more than not, command and control functions with respect to blacks. This situation is not only deeply contradictory, but also profoundly ironical. Blacks, the spearhead of most of the important democratic reforms in US history, have benefited least from democracy. Remaining outside of the social contract, excluded from the liberal framework constructed and defended by the state and the chief objects of the state’s command and control functions, they appear almost as a stateless people, somewhat like the Palestinians or black South Africans under apartheid. The racialized dimension of the US state, dialectically, compels its class dimension to be contingent, indeterminate and fluid. The very fluid and dynamic nature of race and whiteness, their changing modes of political and social identities, predetermine certain indeterminacy with respect to the formations and development of the racialized state. Hence, rather than being a stable entity the racialized state is dynamic, somewhat unstable and an ever evolving structure.
DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES in the US population, resulting from immigration and low birth rates among whites, force the need to redefine whiteness in such ways as to guarantee a white majority as a condition of legitimization of white authority. Non-black immigrants are faced with complex negotiations between anti-black racism and whiteness. Many Latinos and Asians are so positioned to become in a generation white, or at least honorary, or near-whites.
Heterarchical, or multileveled logics of social structural formation, are what we see evidenced in the formation of the racialized state in the historical setting of the US. Hence, the processes that unfold are far more complex than the hierarchical top down logics usually identified with state formation logics in Marxist and left discourse. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction identified this heterarchical logic and suggested that the strategy for the achievement of bourgeois democratic rights by black folk would require multiple tactics that took into account the fluid heterarchical nature of the state. Du Bois even suggested that black folk seen as strategic actors could alter the political landscape and in so doing manipulate time, i.e. the rhythms and sequences of events. (For Du Bois on this aspect see Lemmert [2001]. Kontopolous (1993:236) speaks of this situation as heterarchy wherein structures such as the state are determined in and through contingencies and indeterminacies. Hence the logic of racialized state formation rather than top down and hierarchical is heterarchical, meaning top down and bottom up at the same time.( n10)
THIS IS THE SITUATION within which the dynamics of state formation occur at the present, post September 11, 2001 moment; a moment of political fluidity, war, militarism and economic transformation and uncertainty.
However, the theoretical defenders of the liberal state and its potential to stand apart and mediate race and class conflict are also defenders of the notion of a colorblind state and thus are themselves blind to the historically constituted racially determined nature of the US state. It is they, in the end, not the US state, who are colorblind. This colorblindness itself, as Charles Mills points out, entrenches white privilege.( n11) In being blind to the racial nature of the state they fail to see the profound command and control functions of the state, which are overwhelmingly constructed upon and defined by the US state’s role as the defender of racialized social relationships. The liberal democratic framework should have a sign outside of its door that reads, “For Whites Only.”
Bernard Magubane (1996) shows that the racialized state in South African was constructed on the basis of a race-class dialectic. The pure class analysis, he points out, cannot explain the racial factor in its formation. However, like the US state, it was profoundly malleable and entangled in a set of contexts that changed over historical time. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction is best understood as a study of the construction, deconstruction and reformation of the racialized state in order to reestablish white power over the former slaves, the work force in general and the nation. Du Bois shows this was a necessary condition for the establishment of state monopoly capitalism and US imperialism. In his book, Race and Civilization: Rebirth of Black Centrality, Clarence J. Munford (2001) traces the ideological roots of the racialized state to Europe and European ideology. He asserts that the Euro-American state is the principal agency of white civilizational power in the modern world. As such, it is connected to more than class power, but to the more enduring cultural and civilizational patterns that are based on white supremacy.
BESIDES HISTORICAL, sociological and philosophical studies of the racialized state and state theory, the nature of mass political mobilization to legitimate the state confirms its racialized nature. Clearly the legitimization of the American state rests upon a broad white consensus and the mobilization of that consensus by the principal institutions of white power, including the main political parties–the Democratic and Republican parties–the media, religious institutions, labor organizations, right-wing organizations, even liberal organizations and women’s organizations, to name but a few.
IN FACT, the racialized state achieves legitimacy to the degree that it resolves the class, ethnic and gender problems and contradictions among white people. In other words, the state meditates these socio-economic, ethnic, gender and politico-ideological fissures in ways that races trump these fissures in the politics of the nation. In this regard, I define the mediation of class issues to mean not only economic class issues, but above all ideological class issues. Thus Du Bois’s idea of a wage for whiteness, a nonmaterial or ontological wage, is crucial to understanding the legitimization of the state. Seymour Lipset writes, “A system in which the support of different parties corresponds too closely to basic sociological divisions cannot continue on a democratic basis, for such a development would reflect a state of conflict among groups so intense and clear cut as to rule out all possibility of compromise (1959:93).” When Lipset in this classic statement references sociological differences he is referring to economic and ideological differences among white people. In the two-party system both parties are multi-class (and in a certain way multiparty, consisting of coalitions of parties based on sectionalism, economic interests, programs and class constituencies) structures that compete to achieve the upper hand in determining the modalities by which white privilege is dispensed and defended. They cooperate to legitimize a white consensus.
Once class is no longer an issue and working-class seizure of state power is resolved, and when the state is legitimized through democratic and electoral processes, the question is what then defines the state and whom does it operate for and against.( n12) The two sources of the state’s legitimization are, first, the fear (real and imagined) of domestic unrest sparked by blacks and the global threat either from international communism in the past, or anti-imperialist and anti-globalization movements and militant Islam in the present. And second, that the subtle yet open message of the elite representatives of the racialized state is that it defends white privilege and whiteness against these domestic and foreign threats.( n13)

Du Bois and Bourgeois Democracy: A History
of the United States
DU BOIS STATES in Black Reconstruction, “The record of the Negro worker during Reconstruction presents an opportunity to study inductively the Marxian theory of the state (1992:381).” Charles Lemmert (2000:222) is right when he insists that Black Reconstruction “thinks race through in more enduringly substantial ways” than The Souls of Black Folk. It is, moreover, global in its scope and its intellectual and ideological implications. In thinking about Reconstruction, Du Bois was also thinking about the present and future of race, democracy, class conflict and the state. In Black Reconstruction he goes beyond themes that had appeared in his John Brown (1909): insurrectionary violence, the political and ideological agency of the slaves and state power. In Black Reconstruction Du Bois openly discusses the possibility of the dictatorship of the proletariat in several states of the former Confederacy, counterrevolutionary violence, the race-class dynamic and racialized democracy. He also looks at what we today would call racialized relationships of production. At the core of this set of production relationships is what he called “a wage for whiteness.” It is a work of theory and empirical research. Its point is to talk about the future. The paradigm it presents is revolutionary and transgressive. It establishes a framework for a larger revolutionary research project concerning US democracy, the racialized state and the relationship of class and class conflict to race and race conflict. It carries enormous predictive power. Which is to say, its categories of analysis provide a way to explain and indeed predict the modalities and regulatory principles of institutions, social structures and social classes and groups that make up American society.
At last, Black Reconstruction is successful as an act of ideological and theoretical displacement. It displaces liberal, social democratic and Marxist analysis of the state and democracy. In their place he proposes that race and racialized relationships of production are the organizing principles of American society. And that class taken outside of this historically constituted framework is theoretically impoverished. It is rare that so ambitious a project is so successful in realizing its intended goals, as is Black Reconstruction.
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION asserts that the twentieth century is a long century that begins with the overturn of Reconstruction; that out of this defeat comes the modern US state, modern class and race relations and so on. But more than this the book sums up the seventy-five-year historical period from 1860 to 1935, and on this basis establishes the ideological, philosophical and political framework for the struggles for civil rights and bourgeois democracy through the middle to end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. The work insists upon the centrality of African Americans as the principal agency of progressive and revolutionary change. And points to the conservative and at times reactionary impulses that animate white working people’s consciousness.
Du Bois is the first to establish whiteness as a social category and as such a critical core dynamic in the American social structure. In the end Du Bois redefines what class analysis is. He takes it beyond class reductionism and dogmatism to recognition of the embeddedness of class in race and that classes in the US context are racialized. For black people, the class conflict and bourgeois democracy are shaped in the context of the struggle against white supremacy and for freedom. Black freedom and democracy, Black Reconstruction argues, is the beginning and end of class analysis.
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN Du Bois had done considerable study in the methods of political economy. The German social science academy distinguished itself in that it sought to join historical and political economic studies with concrete empirical research. Du Bois’s research while in Berlin reflected this, especially his study of the small and large-scale agricultural production in the American South during slavery.( n14)
This line of research unfolded throughout his career, eventuating in his notion of a racialized system of production. Political economy as understood at the end of the nineteenth century meant exactly that, the joining of economic analysis to an analysis of the state and economic and social policies. From a reformist, indeed Fichtean and Fabian standpoints, this meant using the state as an instrument of advanced and progressive consciousness and policies.( n15) Hence, socialists imbued the state with programs and policies that reflected their scientific findings and progressive ideas, geared to improve the conditions of working people. There is no doubt that Du Bois throughout his career saw this as one way to advance the immediate and practical interests of the racially oppressed black people. A clear conclusion of his 1896 work, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870,” pertains to the failure of the state to enforce the 1808 treaty outlawing the international slave trade. The practical lesson that he drew from this. study was that the state has the power to move events in one or another direction, either towards the moral good or its opposite. Hence, it is clear that Du Bois as a young Ph.D. believed that knowledge linked to state power could alter race relationships. This represented his early commitment to positivism and a scientistic sensibility. This stance perhaps reflected practical necessity given that blacks were almost completely powerless and disenfranchised and living under what was virtually a fascist dictatorship in the southern states.
DU BOIS’S PROFESSIONAL CAREER started in the period of the Nadir, when blacks had been completely deprived of civil and human rights. The justification for this denial was that blacks were less than human, without history, and had no standing as equal citizens within society. As a political text Du Bois’s 1897 speech before the American Negro Academy “The Conservation of Races” is a defense of the rights of citizenship for blacks based on their being part of human history and civilization. Likewise, the political and ideological meaning of The Souls of Black Folk should be read as a passionate defense of the civil and human rights of black folk within the context of bourgeois democracy. The argument made in Souls and “The Conservation of Races” is that blacks had made fundamental contributions to US culture and the shaping of its democracy, were in fact at once the most consistent democratic force in the nation, but ironically were themselves without full legal and human rights. He insists this was attested to by their collective strivings; making black folk the best defenders of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.
Du Bois argues that the current situation of blacks was occasioned by the overturn of Reconstruction and the return, as he says, of blacks back toward a new form of slavery. The courts, he points out, had become the universal device for the reenslavement of blacks. Du Bois’s intellectual work is overarchingly political and confronts him not just with the color line, but the racialization of society’s hegemonic political and social institution, the state.
DU BOIS UNDERSTOOD that the modern US state was both liberal and racialized, which meant that he had observed the contradiction between expanding democratic rights for whites and the equally significant fact that the state operated as an instrument of racial subordination. This feature could be found in European states as well. The difference was that European powers primarily exercised the racialized dimension of state power in their colonies and in wars of national conquest and suppression (see Du Bois’s “African Roots of the War”). The uniqueness of the American situation is that both features were exercised within the national boundaries of the US nation-state. The liberal view is that the state constitutes a neutral player standing apart from, or above race and class, as the legal arbiter of societal relationships. The proto-fascist, authoritarian view is that the state is an open instrument of the interest of a race-class in its struggle for liberty, national consolidation and progress. These views coexist and are mutually supportive. The liberal view is almost solely associated with social contract theory and with the liberal view of the state advanced by John Rawls (1971).( n16) The proto-fascist or authoritarian view is as American as Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Lincoln.( n17)
Moreover, while present throughout Du Bois’s early works, including The Souls of Black Folk, is a clear predisposition to support the insurrectionary path to changing the racialized American state; this aspect becomes more pronounced in his writing after 1920, reaching its peak in Black Reconstruction. His view would supersede several extant socialist and communist constructions. On the one hand, his view would supersede the Fabian idea that the state plays a technical function and organizes the intellectual resources of society for the purpose of advancing the technical and social relationships of society.( n18) It would also go beyond the classical Marxist-Leninist position, that the state is the concentrated expression of the repressive power of the dominant class. In superseding these views Du Bois would insist that the Western state was racialized and thus constituted the concentrated power of the white race and hence defended existing race relationships within their national boundaries and internationally through colonialism and imperialism.
THERE EMERGES from the analytic dimension of his work the paramount role of African American political and moral agency in the context of the American republic. The slave rebellions and insurrections, the role of the Haitian Revolution and its leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture contributed to Du Bois’s conclusion that the role of the white masses in the history of resistance to repression was exaggerated by historians and had not measured up to the maroon and slave resistance. Du Bois’s startling view that the slaves refusal to work after 1862 constituted a general strike represented a revolutionary approach to American history writing. From this the sense that the crisis of slavery from 1860 to 1880 constituted a revolutionary situation and that black folk were the principal agents of revolutionary change lead logically to the hypothesis that in several southern states a “dictatorship of the proletariat” to use his language, could have possibly emerged. It is as important to examine how these ideas worked themselves out in strategy, tactics, organization and politics. The bulk of his work addressing the pressing need for blacks to achieve bourgeois democratic rights and liberties as a part of the struggle for full liberation, would require practical day-to-day organization, education and agitation.
Du Bois’s organizational work speaks above all else to his attempt to implement his ideas. In every stage of his career he was in some organization, or organizing and editing some political or scholarly journal. However, it is apparent that he fully understood that the path of bourgeois democracy for blacks would not proceed as it had in Europe or for that matter as it had for whites in the United States. It would be, in the end, a struggle for bourgeois democratic rights without the leadership of an existing or aspiring bourgeoisie. It would be as he conceptualized it in Souls a struggle for these rights by a people. The texture of this struggle was similar to what became the national liberation struggles of the mid twentieth century. At the start of the twentieth century rather than a revolutionary path to achieve these rights the reform path was the only available option available to blacks.( n19)

The Contemporary American State
THE ORIGINS of the modern American state can be traced roughly to the end of Reconstruction. The Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877 can be thought of both as a coda and the inauguration of the modern state system in the US. The South is back in the Union and blacks are being pushed back into a new form of slavery. The US is again a continental nation. America’s victory in the Spanish American War is the nodal point in the political and ideological consolidation of the US state as racialized and imperialist; seeking global reach. Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency (1901-1909) and with it the style of the strong man executive who is at once a man of action, vigor, and an intellectual defined the political and personal characteristics associated with contemporary American executive leadership. The presidency from Theodore Roosevelt’s time until now has usurped Congressional power, usually justifying this by a reference to one or another crisis that demanded centralized state leadership.
By this time the US was second only to England as an industrial nation and sea power. The two-party system became the institutional framework through which ideological and psychological mobilization of the masses occurred. Appeals to whiteness, Manifest Destiny( n20) and scientific racism( n21) were fashioned to give a progressivist cover to this mobilization. (See Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origins and Evolution of a Worldview [191] and Tukufu Zuberi, Thicker Than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie, [chapter 1]) The centrality of this period in defining the twentieth-century US nation-state is being examined by any number of establishment historians. Warren Zimmerman’s First Great Triumph: How Americans Made Their Country a Great Power tells a tale of the men who changed US state policy and ideology in such ways as to prepare it to assume a role on the global stage. I detect a direct lineage to the unilateralist policies and present war of the current Bush Administration from that period and the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.
WITH THE PRESIDENCY of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, the state as the guarantor of the economy’s health and as the principle regulator of social and economic processes was established. Keynesianism became the policy and philosophical framework for this new state interventionism. At the same time Congress’s power became profoundly diminished. The Cold War occasioned a renewal of the political and ideological rationale for the US state as the instrument of US imperialism and the global reach of its power. The nineteenth-century doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and the trope that white Americans were a chosen people, became a global doctrine in the struggle against “communism” This was best enunciated in the Truman Doctrine, which informs each stage of the American struggle against “the threat of communism.” The scope of Manifest Destiny included the vast majority of the world’s peoples in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Social Darwinist aspects of this doctrine were clear to any who would dare to look. Twentieth-century post World War II Manifest Destiny targeted Africa as the principal site of the Cold War conflict.
THE CURRENT PHASE of the formation of the US state begins roughly with the Reagan Administration. The balance between the Welfare and Warfare aspects of the US state, which had been maintained between 1945 and 1980, was upset in favor of the military-industrial side. One could speak of the period up to the first Reagan Administration as one where the policy and philosophical line on the state’s role in the economy as a Keynesian-neo-classical synthesis wherein the state serves the free market system and at the same time maintains the balance between classes and social strata within the white population.( n22) It was, therefore, a barrier to class conflict among whites, while holding to its racialized, repressive and control dimension vis-à-vis blacks. Thus, the twenty-three year period of shifting the balance of state power increasingly to the military industrial and police dimensions of the state has been completed. The process leading to this moment has been uninterrupted. Both parties supported it, albeit, with differing rhetoric, programs and tactics for achieving it. As such the competition dimension of the two-party system was lessened and the differences are today so slight as to be inconsequential. Milton Friedmanite neo-liberal economics prevail. Keynesianism as policy is either severely compromised or dead.
Empire, War and the Social Science
IN THE FACE OF THE CRISIS in the world system and the war and empire strategy of the Clinton and Bush Administrations, the social sciences are in crisis; a crisis which most professional social scientists seem to have no awareness of. American social science has been fashioned by the exigencies of the Cold War. As a consequence, American social scientists have tended to conservatism and forms of professionalism which self-define them away from political and ideological engagement with the state. This approach has served the overall needs of white supremacy and colonialism. The question is which side of the struggle for global democracy the social sciences will stand.
Franz Fanon (1967), Michel Foucault 1972), Edward Said (1978), V.Y. Mudimbe (1988), and Lewis Gordon (1995) have drawn attention to the crisis. Fanon, for example, demonstrated that the European social and philosophical sciences evidence not the superiority of European man, but the crisis of European man. He pulled the mask off the claims to reason and objectivity of European science. They were, he tells us, mere manifestations of the colonial and racist predispositions of European thought. Foucault’s contribution to understanding, if not resolving the crisis, was to place the social scientist as subject/agent at the center of interrogation. In so doing the field, or discursive space, becomes a legitimate area of investigation, and not above the fray. By establishing knowledge as contingent, conditioned and underdetermined, he focuses upon the agents of knowledge production and their discursive praxis and the ways discursive formations come about. Foucault believes that European social thought is in crisis; unlike Fanon he believes the crisis is resolvable on European terms through epistemic rupture. Fanon allows that only through revolutionary rupture based upon the revolutionary agency of the colonized masses will the crisis be resolved. Said and Mudimbe show the anti-Asian and anti-African moorings of European thought. Said interrogated the claims to objectivity of European knowledge especially about the “Oriental” Other; showing the imagined space that frames European knowledge, in which the Other is imagined to justify European hegemony and colonialism. European knowledge is self-referential and egotistic, and operates in a circular and insular manner to justify European hegemony and colonialism.
Du BOIS was a committed social scientist. He was deeply invested in the project of scientifically explaining human relationships, particularly race relationships. His bold and cutting edge approach to the human sciences displaced the old eugenics and Social Darwinist approaches and anticipated a good part of what is contemporary human science. In Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945) he observed that the rise of the US to the hegemonic economic and military power in the world did not occasion a democratic efflorescence. In fact it occasioned the opposite. The situation of the US as the main threat to peace and democracy compelled Du Bois to look anew at his political direction, but also to reconsider the ideological, political and epistemological foundations of the human sciences. He thus found himself in a situation of epistemic rupture in relationship to the social sciences. In their majority American social scientists were moving to the right and retreating into new forms of positivism and he was moving to the left and searching for new modes to critically investigate the epistemologies, methods and politics of the socials sciences. At the core of his renewed investment in social research was that uppermost must be the transformation of world economic and political relationships. For the human sciences to be truly human they must be global, they must be rooted in actual history and begin with the anti-colonial liberation struggles. At this stage in his life Du Bois had superseded the Fabian orientation of his early career. He now understood the strategic necessity of the seizure of the state by the oppressed. Since the racialized state functioned to uphold white supremacy and colonialism on a global scale, in dialectical fashion he grasped that the power of the oppressed would have to be actualized in state power.
To answer the question what is to be done, a study and extension of Du Bois’s understanding of the racialized state is paramount. The situation of anti-democratic and white supremacist assault upon the people’s rights is in a very profound sense the outcome of America’s racial history. To defend bourgeois democracy demands either radical reforms of the existing state system or its complete overthrow. Du Bois at various moments in his career argued both positions and suggested tactics, strategies and organizational modalities to achieve each.( n23)

Footnotes
(n1.) In Foreign Affairs (November/December 2002:149) Richard Holbrooke, in examining a body of new revisionist scholarship writes:
Max Boot, for example, has shown recently in The Savage Wars of Peace that, contrary to the ‘Powell Doctrine’ and the views of the current leaders of the American military, the United States has conducted endless small military interventions with success throughout its history. Walter Russell Mead, in Special Providence, has identified four different themes in American foreign policy and found continuity stretching back to the founding of the republic. Looking at events that straddle the Cold War but from a wholly post-Cold War perspective, Samantha Power has offered up ‘A Problem from Hell,’ her wholly original examination of consistent American failure to act in the face of genocide. And Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command is a somewhat different sort of book: a study of four historical events designed to prove the indisputable thesis that war is still too important to leave to the generals.
What Holbrooke suggests about this scholarship is that America has been a warfare state since the beginning of the twentieth century. Zimmerman (2002) concurs and persuasively argues that the US entered upon a path of imperialism and global conquest as policy from the start of the twentieth century.
(n2.) Of Du Bois’s time in Germany and his professors Gustav Schmoller, Adolf Wagner and Heinrich von Treitschke he says (1940/1986: 588) “I began to see the race problem in America, the problem of the peoples of Africa and Asia, and the political development of Europe as one.” Barkin (Fall 2000:86) argues that Du Bois’s attraction to von Treitschke, the ultranationalist and racist, is explained by von Treitschke’s recognition that lynching showed that blacks remained outside the law, which pointed to the feebleness of American law, institutions and democracy.
(n3.) In Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace, Du Bois insists, “…The mounting pressure of popular demand for democratic methods must be counted on throughout the world as popular intelligence rises. Its greatest successful opponent today is not Fascism, whose extravagance has brought its own overthrow, but rather imperial colonialism, where the disfranchisement of the mass of people has reduced millions to tyrannical control without any vestige of democracy (1945:84).” In The World and Africa, speaking of the global economy based upon capitalism and colonialism, Du Bois says that the global economy is a social process and “if not socially controlled sinks to anarchy with every possible crime of irresponsible greed. Such was the African slave trade, and such is the capitalistic system it brought to full flower.” He goes on, “A process of incredible ingenuity for supplying human wants became in its realization a series of brutal crimes.” He then insists that if capitalism can reform itself “by means other than Communism… Communism need not be feared.” However, “if a world of ultimate democracy, reaching across the color line and abolishing race discrimination, can be accomplished by the method laid down by Karl Marx, then that method deserves to be triumphant no matter what we think or do (1947:258).”
(n4.) David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (2000: 496-553) chastises Du Bois for moving to the “far left” in his later years. Gerald Horne (1986:289), contrary to Lewis, argues, “The trip from the NAACP in 1944 to the Communist Party in 1961 was not as convoluted as some might suspect; their immediate goals were closely congruent…The black community was probably the most left sector of the United States polity, and Du Bois was a leader of both Blacks and the left.” In The Autobiography Du Bois declares, “I have studied socialism and communism long and carefully in lands where they are practiced and in conversation with their adherents, and with wide reading. I now state my conclusion frankly and clearly: I believe in communism. 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” (57). This is a logical progression of his theory of the color line, capitalism and the state and that to alter world economic and political relationships the world system, especially its capitalist part, would have to be radically transformed.
(n5.) Franz Fanon (1967) makes a similar point. His critique of European socialism is precisely at the point that it retreats from an all-out attack upon the color line and white supremacy. He concludes, therefore, that the revolutionary initiative in world terms has shifted to the “Third World” and the anti-colonial struggles. At one point Fanon insists that the socialism imagined by the representatives of the Western working class is of a socialism of luxury, which would make imperative some form of neocolonialism.
(n6.) See “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” (http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html): “Remarks by the President at 2002 Graduation Exercise of the United States Military Academy” (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/release/2002/): “Vice President Speaks at VFW 103rd National Convention” (http://www.Whitehouse.gov/news/release/2002/). Here we have laid out the policy of global military domination and the strategy for enduring war and preemptive warfare.
(n7.) It should be noted that American history lacks a Jacobin or revolutionary democratic tradition, except among African Americans. In general, progressivism in the American setting has meant, in the main, progressivism for whites. This has been seen in the trade union, women’s rights and radical movements among whites.
(n8.) Slaves were the principal form of property in the period of the early accumulation of capital in the Unites States. The slaves occupy a peculiar, almost paradoxical, space in the political economy of world capitalism. The slaves are a proletariat who as human beings are the property of their “employers.” This against the classic European situation where the employer owns the labor power of the worker, not the worker him/herself. This slave condition and capitalist production based on slave labor produced a situation of super exploitation.
(n9.) David Roediger (1991:12) correctly interprets the meaning of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, pointing out that the book is organized around issues of race and class, and that in teasing out these issues Du Bois “continually creates jarring, provocative theoretical images.” Roediger points out that at the center of the problem of the class struggle in the US is the problem of whiteness, or a wage for whiteness; as Du Bois calls it, “a public and psychological wage.” Charles Lemmert (2000) insists that Du Bois in writing the history of Reconstruction was actually writing the history of the present and future. The point is that Black Reconstruction and Du Bois’s theory of the class struggle and class formation speaks as much to the twenty-first as to the nineteenth century.
(n10.) On strategic actors and the manipulation of time see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Kontopolous (1993:236) helps us conceptualize heterarchics. He says, “The combination of the dimensions of constraining, enabling and availing makes it possible to see each level, at least in reference to the top down aspect of interlevel relations as semi-independent and yet interdependent with others. And as it must be clear by now, we can extend this notion of availing to all level connections, thus positing considerable ‘degrees of indeterminacy’ or ‘degrees of creative discretion’ evidence [a] in the rise and differential strengthening of corporate and collective actors and forms of structures initiated by them at the quasi-global level; [b] in the formation of a variety of conjunctions and novel institutional forms, techniques of domination, technologies of invention and monopolization, and various forms of bio-power developed within them; and [c] in the emergence, within these novel settings, of a number of improvised or unauthorized strategies and practices, articulated and used by virtuosic strategic agents.”
(n11.) Charles Mills (1997:77) writes, “The black philosopher Bill Lawson comments on the deficiencies of the conceptual apparatus of traditional liberalism, which has no room for the peculiar post-Emancipation status of blacks, simultaneously citizens and non-citizens. The black philosopher of law Anita Allen remarks on the irony of standard American philosophy of law texts, which describe the universe in which ‘all humans are paradigm rights holders’ and see no need to point out that the actual US record is somewhat different.”
(n12.) Lipset (1996) makes the point that the US state and nation are basically conservative. He says that this conservatism during the New Deal period took on a social democratic tinge ( 38). Post-war economic growth lessened the class tensions that defined the Great Depression and returned the nation to its traditional conservatism. I would add that the conservatism is now tinged, to use Lipset’s word, with reactionism. This shift to the right and far right in American conservatism fuels the new drive towards global hegemony and empire.
(n13.) An aspect of this ideological function of the state is its treatment historically and in the present of black masculinity.
(n14.) David Levering Lewis (1993:143) says of this time in Du Bois’s life,” what kept Du Bois busiest was research for his seminar thesis, “Der Gross und Klein Betrieb des Ackerbaus, in den Sudstaaten der Vereinigten Staaten, 1840-1890,” or “The Large and Small-scale System of Agriculture in the Southern United States, 1840-1890. “Although he was able to build on his work under Hart at Harvard, the bulk of the essay was based on new reading, as well as new thinking about history and economics from, so to speak, the bottom up. Lewis says the two principal influences upon Du Bois in Berlin were Professors Gustav yon Schmoller and Adolph Wagner. Their theory of the state and the economy, Lewis tells us, came from Fichte’s notion that competing economic interests were kept in equilibrium by an intelligent state. This Fichtean idea of the relationship of the state to social and economic forces will find its way into Souls, but has all but disappeared by the time of Black Reconstruction. By this time the state is conceptualized as the instrument of white power.
(n15.) Adolph Reed (1997) identifies Du Bois’s early political thinking as within the bounds of Fabianism and its idea that science and scientific programs could act to advance progressivism from within the state.
(n16.) Modern communisms as well as modern social democracy emerge from the late nineteenth-century debates over the nature of the state, rather than over class per se. It is my view that while Hegel is a central influence, through his idea that the state transcends society and as such represents it (a view that seemed to inform the Boris Kautsky’s view of a “pure” democracy which resulted from the democratic evolution of society), Kant’s view that the state is both a moral and ethical arbiter of societal conflict has also left an enduring influence upon both social democratic and liberal theorists of the state.
(n17.) The American state is indeed a peculiar democratic institution. Like American society it is “both/and” rather than “either/or.” Hence, while democracy expanded throughout the nineteenth century for whites, repression and genocide increased for Native Americans and blacks. White populism as manifested by the presidency and ideology of Andrew Jackson stood for expanding rights for whites and the Trail of Tears for Native Americans and Fugitive Slave Act to protect the rights of slave owners. In the late nineteenth century, populism, as with the main thrust of trade unionism, signified to all sides of the “class struggle” expanding white identity and white rights.
(n18.) Adolph Reed (1997) discusses ways that Du Bois understood the state in the early part of his career as an instrument of altering race relationships in the US. This, Reed suggests, was an essentially technocratic view of the state and its functions, especially in addressing the color line. Hence, Reed sees Du Bois’s early effort as attempting to merge Fabianism to the struggle against racial oppression.
(n19.) Here there are two questions in the tactical and strategic struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One is the stance of Booker T. Washington and later Marcus Garvey, who not only trivialized the struggle to realize and uphold bourgeois or civil rights to blacks, but also attempted to substitute what appeared as an economic program for them. The other was the socialist-Marxist view to substitute the struggle for bourgeois democracy with the struggle for socialism, formulated, as the class struggle is the struggle for black rights. Each side seems to disregard the nature of racialized state power.
(n20.) Smedley (1993:191) points out that the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority became a central part of American racial thinking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She continues:
It also became part of the American mythology associated with republicanism, Protestantism, democracy, laissez-faire economic theory, progress and empire building. The superior “racial” traits of Anglo-Saxons became a stimulus for American expansion. Indeed the myth was at the heart of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, by which white Americans expressed belief in themselves as a “chosen people,” destined to dominate others. Over time, many non-English whites also assimilated this myth because it provided the basis for the general ideology of white supremacy.
Important to the new racism of the early twentieth century was “scientific racism” or eugenics, fathered by Francis Galton. Tukufu Zuberi (2001:53) points out that “Eugenics required an essential difference among humans in order to justify racial and class stratification.” Zuberi (54) then continues, “He (Francis Galton) believed (intelligence) was biologically inherent and that Africans and other people of color were inferior in intelligence to the lighter skinned Europeans.”
(n21.) The idea of white Americans as chosen people is not adequate to meet the ideological needs of rising American imperialism. To appeal to progressivism and American optimism there was a need for a rational or scientific addendum to the chosen people mythological narrative to justify the white American nation’s status in the world. Hence, Manifest Destiny and scientific racism combine to produce a credible explanation of the rights of white Americans to dominate “lesser” peoples.
(n22.) The notion of a Keynesian neo-classical synthesis I take from Irina Osadchaya, From Keynes to Neo-classical Synthesis: A Critical Analysis (1974). She argues that neo-Keynesianism, or the Keynesian neoclassical synthesis attempts to take the static Keynesian model and make it dynamic by merging macro theory with micro, or market, economic theories. Robert Skidelsky in his John Maynard Keynes, The Economist as Savior, 1920-1937, (1992) insists that Keynes’ General Theory was as much vision as economic logic and that the disconnection between economic logic and vision has left his followers attempting to sort out what Keynesianism is in terms of state policy, or macroeconomic theory and policy. In this respect, while Keynesianism can be considered a way of thinking about the economy in new ways, just as Nietzsche thought about morality in new ways, the actual modeling of the post World War II economy was left to neo-Keynesians and those who promoted a Keynesian neoclassical synthesis.
(n23.) In this regard the views of Clarence J. Munford (1996,2001) and Bernard Magubane (1996) are critical. Both are “revisionist” theorists of the state and both draw upon Marxist class notions, but supersede them by arguing that the racialized dynamic is the core or central dynamic in state formation in the West. Munford asserts, “the modern Western state has legitimized white racism while constantly modernizing it” (2001:111). Magubane asserts that the South African example leads him to concur with Fanon and Césaire who regard fascism “not as an aberration, but as a logical outcome of European colonialism brought home to roost.”

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The Bush and Obama Administrations’ bailouts, consequently, failed to restructure the failed financial system, or to place serious regulations upon the largest banks and investment houses. He declares, “The full consequences are not yet known. But almost surely, the failures of the Obama and Bush administrations will rank among the most costly mistakes of any modern democratic government at any time. In the United States the magnitude of guarantees and bailouts approach 80% of the US GDP, some &12 trillion (110).”

The Great Recession began in December 2007, brought on by the collapse of the financial system. Though the financial system has been stabilized the real economy and working people remain mired in recession. Stiglitz fails to mention that African Americans and many Latinos, the victims of finance capital and structural racism, are in a depression. Stiglitz insists the economic crisis cuts much deeper then the economy. He argues, “the failures in our financial system are emblematic of broader failures in our economic system and the failures of our economic system reflect deeper problems in our society. We began the bailouts without a clear sense of what kind of financial system we wanted at the end, and the same political forces that got us into the mess have shaped the result. We have not changed our political system, so we should perhaps not be surprised by any of this. (295).” We have created, Stiglitz says, “a society in which materialism dominates moral commitment, in which the rapid growth that we achieved is not sustainable environmentally or socially, in which we do not act together as a community to address our common needs, partly because rugged individualism and market fundamentalism have eroded any sense of community and have led to rampant exploitation of unwary and unprotected individuals and to an increasing social divide. “ The wealth and income divide is the widest in the world. However, African Americans live in a virtual neo-colony in relationship to white folk.

The wealth and income gap between black and white is horrific. Africans Americans are experiencing a transfer of wealth and income from their families and communities to the wealthy on a scale not seen since slavery. We are in the throes of de-development. There is no way to avoid the racist foundations to the economic crisis. Stiglitz, like other progressive economists, is unable to understand and factor racism into their analysis. In historical terms, racism, slavery, Jim Crow and the new forms of black oppression have always distorted the economy and predisposed it to crisis. Among the multiple determinates of the current situation race is a huge factor. Hence, critical to resolving the crisis has to be liberating the masses of black folk from the plunderous combination of white supremacy and finance capitalism.

All of this is symptomatic of national decline. Stiglitz posits this crisis is systemic, meaning it affect the deep structure of the economy and society and have features of a general crisis of American capitalism and the free market model. These symptoms were present in almost exact form in past capitalist hegemons, i.e. Spain in the 17th century, the Netherlands in the 18th century and Britain in the late 19th and early 20th century. Each of these nations was an imperial empire. Each, like the US, experienced imperial overreach, the domination of the nation by bank and finance capital and imperial arrogance, expressed in wars for resources and markets.

Stiglitz’ examination at once forces the reader to think in historical terms and consider the long trajectories of national development and decline. We are drawn to look at systemic causes and solutions, rather than merely policies and Presidents. Lastly, he demands of the reader that we suspend the traditional pragmatic approach to problems and examine the place of ideology and class and race interests in creating the crisis. Stiglitz argues that ideology and policy have actively created conditions and contexts for this crisis. In particular, he shows the ideological role of free market fundamentalism, in shaping economic policy. We can note that Alan Greenspan is a fervent disciple of the reactionary individualism of Ayn Rand.

Twenty-first century capitalism is essentially two economies, a real economy and a virtual, or fictitious economy. The real economy is the economy of goods and services, the virtual or fictitious economy is the economy driven by hedge funds, investment banks and produces nothing except paper and derivatives, like Credit Default Swaps and Credit Debt Obligations. Globally the real economy is about $70 trillion dollars, the fictitious economy is $700 trillion. Wall Street is about the fictitious economy and the White House operates to protect it. The Bush and Obama Administrations socialized the banks’ losses and allowed the banks to privatize profits, and working people are paying for the whole bloody mess. And we will pay for this in closed schools, hospitals, libraries, firehouses, and police protection and so on for generations.

The financial crisis first appeared as a problem of the subprime mortgage market. Yet, risky and unmanageable debt went beyond subprime mortgages. Working people, the middle class and the poor were encouraged to go into deeper and deeper debt. Big banks and Wall Street made unheard of profits from this indebtedness. Realizing from the start that large numbers of people would default on their mortgages and credit card debt, the banks invented ways to spread risk widely. This is known as securitization. At the same time Wall Street invented new ways to make profits at the expensive of the productive, or real economy. These new instruments are called derivatives. Derivative have exotic names like Collateralized Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps and are managed by Hedge Funds and special units of investment and commercial banks. The virtual, or fictitious economy traded in debt and leveraging debt and betting on whether debts could be repaid or not. This can also be called a vampire economy, which lives off of and sucks the life from the real economy. The economy in deratives, the fictious economy is at the root of the current crisis and the deeper systemic crisis. Aline van Duyn, writing in the Financial Times (“Financial markets: Derivative dilemmas”,August 11, 2010) points out,”The root cause of the financial crisis involved losses on risky US mortgages. The entire global financial system was exposed to these mortgages after hundreds of billions of dollars of complex securities linked to them were sold to investors from Illinois to Iceland. Derivatives were the building blocks for those securities.” She argues the derivative markets and the players in this market might be too large to regulate. “The cast of characters embraces not only big banks such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Barclays Capital and Deutsche Bank but exchanges such as CME Group, Nasdaq OMX, NYSE Euronext and Intercontinental Exchange, which want clearing business. It also includes smaller banks and brokers that are trying to expand their derivatives business, for instance Nomura and Jefferies, as well as inter-dealer brokers including Icap, and other financial groups that want to get into clearing or trading, from Tradeweb to State Street to tiny start-up brokerage firms( Financial Times, August 11,2010).”

For Stiglitz, a Keynesian economist and Social Democrat, the way out is a social market economy, where the state plays a central role in managing the economy and regulating finance capital. This is similar to the European model, especially in nations like Sweden and France. It is opposite of the American and British small government, free market approach. What is missing from Stiglitz’ analysis is a definition of the current stage of US capitalism. His analysis, however, closely fits Rudolph Hilferding’s in the book Finance Capital (1909). Hilferding’s is a Marxist analysis of the transformation from competitive and ‘liberal capitalism’ into monopolistic ‘finance capital’. Hilferding contrasted monopolistic finance capitalism to the earlier, “competitive” capitalism. Finance capital creates an oligopolistic finance capitalist system, where the banks and the state operate as one. As a description of the structure of the US economy Hilferding’s analysis and Stiglitz’ agree.

Lenin appropriating Hilferding’s analysis into his own, suggested the capitalist system could not reinvent itself in a progressive way. Finance capitalism could neither go back to earlier forms of capitalism, or forward to a more “progressive” brand of capitalism. It would seek to export its crisis to its colonies, creating a global market. However, Lenin insisted that the crisis of finance capitalism made necessary the movement to a new economic system. The banks, he said, were parasites upon the real economy and working and middle class people, and especially the poor.

Stiglitz’ radical critique is less bold when seeking solutions. He proposes Keynesian and New Deal answers to the economic crisis. However in the eighty years since the New Deal began the capitalist system has evolved and the banks are far more powerful today, debt is much greater and social breakdown is more profound. More is required.

In 1994 Stiglitz published a book titled Whither Socialism. It came in the wake of the failure and collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He felt that socialism was destined to fail, because it was overly centralized and too much authority was in the hands of the state. He was correct in seeing the crisis of state socialism as a crisis of over centralization and too much decision-making from the center and not enough in regions and local areas. At another level the lack of a market made the system over bureaucratized. Stiglitz wisely opposed the policies of rapid and brutal transition to free market capitalism being proposed by conservatives in the US and Europe. He called for a social democratic regulated market system. Sixteen years later the crisis and failures are now in the heart of global capitalism, the US. He proposes answers to this crisis not unlike those he proposed for Eastern Europe.

However, the social market economy can only be a transition to a socialist market economy and ultimately to advanced forms of 21st century socialism. In this new type of economy, finance capital would be completely eliminated. Banks would exist, but they would either be highly regulated or state owned. There would be planning of industrial, social, cultural, environmental, energy and infrastructure development. Planning should be factored into even Stiglitz’ social market economy. In the social market transitionary economy and the socialist economy the emphasis would be upon the social and cultural development of people and civil society. Education, health care and housing would be social rights. The moral foundation of society would anchor in the welfare of people. In both the transitionary and socialist stages of development the struggle to eliminate institutional and personal racism from social and cultural life would assume utmost significance.

Twenty first century Keynesianism in the social market transitionary stage would occur as what Professor Robert N Rhodes terms a Keynesian-Socialist synthesis. As he puts it, Keynesianism hedged with conditions of going over to socialism.

The Obama team opted to muddle through, rather than adopt bold and purposeful measures to restructure the financial system and the economy. I would suggest that in terms of solutions we must be bolder than Stigliz. To adequately address the now time of US capitalism, we have to imagine and plan for the future of humanity. We are in a crisis, but we are possibly on the cusp of a transition from what is to what is necessary and inevitable.

A NEW WAY OF KNOWING THE WORLD AND BEING IN THE WORLD: DU BOIS AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

Du Bois’ radical rejection of Europeancentrism and privileging of Africa would in his construction separate the American and European social scientific and intellectual projects. Turner et. al. (1995:1) make clear that sociology, and the social sciences generally, emerged in the nineteenth century as intellectual endeavors to make sense of historical developments in Europe. “Sociology” they remind us, “was formed from theoretical questions about the European historical experience.” Modernity, science and reason became central issues for it to explain. Class, social status, prestige, the relationship of the individual to society and the state emerged as dominant themes. The social universe was viewed as being exclusively European. To be human, and thus worthy of scientific consideration, meant being European. European social scientist sought in the 19th century to organize themselves as branches of science and to model the social sciences on one of the natural sciences. In this respect positivism, in the Comtean sense of metaphysical or general statements being tested against carefully collected facts, increasingly defined what it meant to be scientific in the social sciences. Du Bois sought to apply scientific methods to the study of the African American people, with the intent of upsetting the prevailing notions of race superiority and inferiority.
While not immediately transparent, Du Bois’ project challenged a fundamental assumption of Eurocentric social thinking; the idea that only Europeans and only European societies were worthy of scientific investigation. Indeed Africans were civilized. In 1897 Du Bois declared before the American Academy of Social and Political Sciences, the Negro “is a member of the human race, and as one who, in the light of history and experience, is capable to a degree of improvement and culture, is entitled to have his interests considered according to his numbers in all conclusions as to the common weal.” And he concluded, “The American Negro deserves study for the great end of advancing the cause of science in general. (see Dusk of Dawn: 60, 61).” On this point he became more tough minded over the years.
Africans, in the European mind, were objects of history and had not emerged beyond the state of nature. Social science as a study of human agency was, by definition, not concerned with Africans. Biology or anthropology were considered the appropriate fields for studying Africans. Du Bois challenged these assumptions from the start of his career.
Science, in the post bellum United States was the new intellectual fad. In the Progressive Era it was being touted as the answer to most of the extant problems of white civilization. Du Bois (1940:50) speaking of his education at Fisk, Harvard and Berlin said, “The main result of my schooling had been to emphasize science and the scientific attitude.” While the natural sciences were well on their way into the twentieth century, the social sciences, Du Bois observed, “ were engaged in vague statements (1940:51).” Herbert Spencer’s ten volumes Synthetic Philosophy (the final volume, Social Statics, was published in 1896) reflected the intellectual and scientific style of the age. Spencer sought to use biology as a methodological analogue for society. He agreed with Darwin that evolution is a process of adaptation of organisms to their environment. The mind, he argued, was a part of natural evolution. And as biological evolution had produced superior and inferior species and intelligences, social evolution had produced inferior and superior societies, races and classes, with distinct moral, physical and intellectual capacities. William James, Du Bois’ professor and friend at Harvard, passionately disagreed with Spencer’s social Darwinism; opposing him from a Darwinian standpoint. James believed Darwin’s theory implied that the mind’s job is to select aspects of the world important for us to act on and thus assist in our adaptation to the world. James recognized that the core of Darwin’s theory was the idea of local adaptation to specific conditions, rather than a grand theory of “progress” predicated upon a linear notion of stages of development, wherein each succeeding stage is considered superior to what preceded it
The biological analogy, while striking for its bold generalizations, would have to await Francis Galton’s discoveries in statistics to be translated into what would pass for a scientific research program. Galton’s contribution to positivist social science by inventing techniques that could measure social Darwinian principles. Statistics were, he thought, a method for proving that through selective breeding a superior racial stock could be created. In 1869 he published Hereditary Genius, designed to convince the skeptical public of the superior hereditary endowments of certain eminent British families. Smedley (1993:266) indicates, “Arguing that there is a physiological basis for psychological traits, he invented techniques for measuring what he thought was intelligence, along with the bell shaped curve for demonstrating its ‘normal distribution.’” Du Bois had experienced an even more lethal form of social Darwinism in Germany in the classes of the German ultra-nationalist and racist Heinrich von Treitschke. For along with normal social Darwinism, German academics combined it with the Nietzschean concept of the superman. This was the 19th century’s legacy to the 20th on race; extending the positivist philosophical bent to measurement of human genetic inheritance.
Du Bois, the young positivist, evidenced a profound opposition to social Darwinism. He recognized, as he indicates that a real situation presented itself for him, and he hoped for the social sciences. He would use science against scientific racism in the interest of reform and uplift, “but nevertheless, I wanted to do the work with scientific accuracy (1940:51).” Du Bois subsequently turned his “gaze from fruitless word-twisting and fac[ed] the facts of my own social situation and racial world, I determined to put science into sociology through a study of the conditions and problems of my own group (1940:51).” Du Bois earnestly sought to discover and then to equip the social sciences with methodologies appropriate to its object of inquiry. Yet, in so doing he rejected both the lures of reductionism, solipsism and the pure objectivism of positivism. This, in the end, placed Du Bois in an irreparable conflict with social Darwinism and the hereditarian research program that accompanied it. For most white Americans these views expressed both common sense and experience. They became the dominant ideological and research paradigms on race matters within Anglo- American social science and research of the time. Each actively supported racism, class subordination and were strongly anti-immigrant. Social structure and social behavior were viewed as the consequences of inherited genetic characteristics. As the official scientific explanation of their age, they dominated political and social discourse. A problem, which Du Bois early in his career attributed to society’s lack of scientific knowledge, which he traced to the conceptual and methodological poverty of the social sciences. A situation he hoped to change.
What he failed to see early on in his career was that rather than science, this research program was ideologically driven. Race and white supremacy were for it what Bourdieu (1977) calls structuring structures. Which is to say, white supremacy shaped the intellectual space within which Anglo-American social thought and research operated. In the end, the irreducible element in the equation, ordering white intellectual space and operating as a springboard for shaping and reshaping its geography, was white supremacy. Race and white supremacy were elemental to the configuration of capitalism itself. Social Darwinism and the hereditarian research program, therefore, while constituting a “science” of race, were ideologically linked to capitalism and its relationships of production. Race, as an ideological category was a decisive part of the ideological production of the social structure based on race and class inequalities.
DU BOIS’ EPISTEMIC COMMITMENTS
As Du Bois strode from Harvard to assume his place in the world, perhaps his motto could have been that of a fellow alumnus of Berlin University, Karl Marx, “Until now philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.” Du Bois was convinced early on that sociology must develop methods suitable to what was then considered science; methods that would allow that social knowledge be deemed scientific. He was, however, dissatisfied with the ways that the natural and social sciences were discussing race. He would, in order to alter this situation, invent a unique science of race. This would demand a multidisciplinary exploration of knowledge itself as well as the objects of knowledge, in this instance race and civilization. A great intellectual leap would be called for. A new categoreal grid would have to be constructed out of the inadequate European foundations. Africa would have to be introduced as an integral part of world history. He explored, in this respect, a wide and complex philosophical terrain. His Harvard and University of Berlin training had allowed him to become conversant in, and acutely sensitive to, the contending philosophical camps of his day. He intellectually engaged the competing claims of pragmatism and European epistemology. Scholars differ about where Du Bois came down philosophically. Robert Gooding-Williams (1991), David Levering Lewis (1993) and Shamoon Zamir ((1995) argue that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind exerted a strong and enduring influence upon him. Arnold Rampersad (1976) and Cornel West (1989), on the other hand, claim that Du Bois remained a Jamesian pragmatist. As Rampersad (1976:30) contends, “the overall impact of William James was preeminent.” Du Bois’ sociological and historical studies demonstrate, however, what I consider a synthesis of several philosophical and methodological stances. He, nonetheless, brought a specific philosophical and methodological attitude to the understanding of race; one which acknowledged the plebian and existential orientation of pragmatism as articulated by Emerson and William James, along with its sense of contingency and specificity, the phenomenology and dialectics of Hegel and the inductivist methods of his German professors of economic history Adolph Wagner (1835—1917) and Gustav von Schmoller (1838—1917). Du Bois, at the same time, remained committed to a version of positivism; which is to say, he did not abandon either in sociological or historical research hard data, be it from official censuses, government documents, specific studies, or his own carefully gathered information, most time through well constructed and executed surveys. Du Bois was, at the same time, a masterful ethnographer. Through his ethnographic work he sought to discover that uniquely human dimension of behavior and society; the non-material, the psychological and , if you will, spiritual, dimensions. This would bring him into the domain of anthropology and cultural studies. Yet, Du Bois constructed not merely a distinctive methodological approach to the problems of race, but a distinct episteme, a way of knowing, and for him, changing the world of race relations. Thus, his intellectual commitments can be best understood as deeper then merely methodological, but as epistemic commitments.
To understand these commitments it is necessary to go beyond his academic training. Alexander Crummell, his mentor in the American Negro Academy, is one such influence. Crummell was an Anglo-African nationalist. Moses (1978: 59) locates Crummell’s Anglo-African nationalism in commitments to Christianity, the destiny of Africa, an authoritarian political style and belief in Black separate institutions. While Du Bois, unlike Crummell and later Marcus Garvey, was not an Anglophile, he, like they, believed in a single destiny for Black folk in Africa and the US. In his 1897 paper before the American Negro Academy “The Conservation of Races” he argued that Blacks must operate as one union of “200,000,000 black hearts beating in one glad jubilee” and that Negroes in the US should take their place in the vanguard of Pan-Negroism. Du Bois, though, would intellectually break with Crummell over the question of Africa and African civilization and its presence in the culture and resistance of the Africans in America (see Souls, Robert Gooding-Williams, Sterling Stuckey)
Present throughout Du Bois’ work is discovered a deep respect for the Haitian Revolution, the slave uprisings of Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner, and significantly mid-nineteenth century nationalism. To this must be added his identification with Frederick Douglass’ call for constant struggle. Here rests the ideological foundations of his theoretical and research projects. His identification with not just Blacks, but the Black struggle, sets boundaries for the manner that he conducted scholarship and thought about the world. This radical politics is asserted forthrightly by Du Bois throughout The Souls of Black Folk, but especially in the chapter “Of Booker T. Washington and Others” (see pp. 42—44).
In large measure the disputes about where to place Du Bois intellectually and politically emerge from the fact that most commentators have failed to examine his effort in epistemic terms. Thus, without coming to terms with epistemic issues and perspectives inherent to his scholarship and political activity it is not possible to accurately locate him and his project. Du Bois’ episteme, in its broad outlines, is holistic—which is to say it was non-reductive and sought to arrive at global or general principles to explain specific events. Hegelian concerns with world history are combined with an acute awareness of contingency, and a sense of the significance of day to day events. This synthesis was first revealed in a paper, “The Large and Small-Scale System of Agriculture in the Southern United States, 1840—1890”, done for Schmoller. He believed it would become the thesis for a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin. The paper looked at the land tenure system in the US South from the bottom up. What we see here from a methodological and philosophical point of view are the influences of the German school of historical economics (headed by Schmoller and Wagner) which according to Du Bois’ class notes, “tries as far as possible to leave the Sollen [should be] for a later stage and study the Geshehen [what is actual] as other sciences have done” (see Lewis, 1993: 142). This view that large patterns emerge only after determining the pattern of particular events mirrored what Du Bois had heard at Harvard from his professors William James and Albert Bushnell Hart.
Du Bois in the late 1890’s evidences an effort to combine often conflicting views of radical democracy, Black Nationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism. He was, though, in the process of development; a process not unconnected to the real world of ideas and Black oppression. It was, after all, a period of profound racism and reaction, when the social sciences were that only in name, with very little to say to the nation or Black folk. Du Bois came into the twentieth century with a plan to change that. It is, however, with The Souls of Black Folk that Du Bois, the full and mature intellectual arrives.
DU BOIS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF KNOWING
Du Bois’ philosophical sensibilities were firmly demonstrated in a term paper titled “The Renaissance of Ethics: A Critical Comparison of Scholastic and Modern Ethics” for a course with William James at Harvard in the academic year 1888-1889. The paper was a harbinger of his future philosophical orientation. It shows common elements to the paper in Berlin, especially in handling the philosophical issues surrounding the mind-matter duality. It, furthermore, suggests that Du Bois and his idol William James diverged sharply on philosophical matters. Rampersad (1976:25) contends “The Renaissance” “is by no means a mature work.” “Du Bois tried to be coherent and methodical” Rampersad argues, “but certain passages show an unsure grasp of his material, as well as attempts to conceal his uncertainty by bold assertions and ambiguous suggestions (1976:26).” Contra Rampersad, I would suggest, that when working out complex problems, uncertainty need not be a curse, but can be a blessing. Rampersad would have had Du Bois affect a certain pose more characteristics of certain modern academics, which act like they know what they see only through a glass darkly. Or to do what logical positivists have perfected, the rush to reduce knowledge to logical statements, and on this basis declare them truth. Du Bois , even as an undergraduate, had better instincts then to make either of these mistakes, and would avoid them for most of his life. Zamir (1995:59) believes the strength of the work is in its attempt to resolve the late 19th century dualism of psychology of mind and science by historicizing ethics and ethical choices. He sees Du Bois drifting from Jamesian ethical relativism to historicism. Du Bois , thus combines a sense of agency, with a beginning recognition of its restraints by history. David Levering Lewis indicates that Du Bois approached the perennial mind-matter problem in a way not unlike Marx in Kapital and Engels in Anti-Duhring. He (1993:95) argues, “Marx and Engels maintained that the structure and laws of the world became revealed through the manipulation (engagement) of the forces of nature. Essentially, ‘The Renaissance of Ethics’ waveringly arrived at the same conclusion: ethical imperatives arose out of the interaction of mind and matter, as both became transformed and purposive through willpower.” James commented upon the thesis of the paper that he (James) believed there was an unbridgeable chasm between facts and ethical beliefs. David Levering Lewis (1993:95) insists, “the philosophical distance between James and Du Bois would grow as the latter soon became committed to a program of finite investigation, incremental accumulation of data, and confidence that unity of knowledge and the discovery of truth, behind or beyond mere contingency of which he wrote in his Philosophy 4 essay, was with perseverance and intellect, possible.”
To understand Du Bois’ approach to the social sciences and the methods he used in The Suppression of the Slave Trade, The Philadelphia Negro, The Souls of Black Folk and in constructing the department of sociology at Atlanta University, these intellectual foundations are vital. In a certain way they made his approach to the discipline profoundly unique. He throughout his sociological research asserts that right and wrong are involved in social matters and that scientific knowledge is a method of their discovery. The activist manner that Du Bois framed and conducted the research for The Philadelphia Negro, his belief, as stated there, that knowing should lead to action and public policies to correct wrongs, in important ways can be traced back to his stated beliefs in “The Renaissance of Ethics”. Indeed, there remained throughout Du Bois’ sociology this uniting of research, theory, public policy and practice. We discover, as well, in his work the notion that research should be purposeful and knowledge construction and research be part of social transformative activity. That the social scientist is engaged and must be so, is because of the nature of social science. And thus the sociologist is by the nature the discipline compelled to a certain amount of intellectual engagement. Moreover, his intellectual practices are as significant as the texts themselves. And certainly the “The Renaissance of Ethics” informed an intellectual practice that produced The Suppression and The Philadelphia Negro. The practice of engagement, therefore, was certainly not rooted in either pragmatism, or Kantian rationalism and its transcendental approach to discovering ethical principles. Du Bois throughout his life would assert a praxis of mass involvement and a commitment to the African American people.
His most important works, moreover, have that rare quality of being paradigmatic; that is, setting the broad philosophical and conceptual outlines of disciplinary research. In this respect, his work in both sociology and history established an alternative research program to the dominant ones in the US academy. His scholarships in history, sociology, social history, political economy and his artistic production in his novels, plays and poems have that quality of taking on fundamental questions in a scientific and courageous manner. This gives a timeless quality to his most important work and many of his historical predictions. Of this kind is Du Bois’ brilliant prediction at the beginning of this century that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”. The lasting significance of this prediction is that in making it, Du Bois did not absolutize the issue of race by suggesting that it would be the only problem of this century, nor did he separate race from the manifold problems that emerged in the twentieth century. He throughout his life continued to evolve and expand the notion of the color line. What his scholarship and research did was to verify the interactive relationship between race, class and the multi-level configurations of the social structure of modern society. Of deep significance is how Du Bois conceptually arranged the race-class-social structure problem. His causal sequence places race in a determining position with respect to class and social structure. This in its development would constitute a major break with previous social theoretic constructions of the problem. Furthermore, Du Bois articulated race in a global context. He connected it to the colonial and the world economic systems. He insisted the twentieth century could not be understood unless the issue of race was understood. Whereas modern European social theory associates modernity variously with new class arrangements (Marx), the rise of new relationships of status, prestige, state and bureaucratic arrangements and the centrality of the individual (Weber) and the appearance of anomie and normlessness (Durkhiem), Du Bois contended that the central feature of modernity is race. He is , thus, the only major theorist of modernity to come to grips with race and race oppression as overarching and overdetermining in the formation of the modern world.
EARLY SOCIOLOGY ON RACE MATTERS
When sociology appeared as an academic discipline in the1890’s there was no rush to examine the race problem. Early white academic sociologists wrote no books on it and only a scattering of articles. McKee (1993:28) points out, “a few brief comments on race appeared in some books such as those by Franklin H. Giddings, E.A. Ross, and Lester F. Ward.” Furthermore, little concerning race appeared in the first five volumes of the new sociological journal The American Journal of Sociology. Ross (1991:95) indicates that American social scientists of this era viewed themselves as an intellectual gentry. Coming from upper class families, they were more concerned with the rise of working class militancy and the specter of socialism. They saw class conflict as a threat to the Gilded Age’s notion of American exceptionalism. Class, not race, was viewed as the problem of the age. As a result of vast social and economic changes occurring in the 1890’s, Ross (1991:50) points out that “many social scientists revised the idea of American exceptionalism. They argued that realization of American liberal and republican ideals depended on the same forces that were creating liberal modernity in Europe, on the development of capitalism, democratic politics, and science.” The Schwendingers (1974:97) view these theorists as transitional thinkers, whose ideas manifested the transition from free market to monopoly capitalism. Whether in their laissez faire or monopoly capitalist expressions, the founders of American sociology adhered to the essentially conservative idea that social science had the object of finding the natural laws of social behavior necessary to integrate and stabilize society. These laws revealed themselves, the Schwendigers (1974:97) suggest, in “Ward’s conception of genetic evolutionary processes, in Ross’ assertion that inequality is functionally necessary for the survival of society and in Small’s conception of interest group relationships.” Each of these thinkers drew upon ideas developed by French reformers, going back to August Comte, and the German “socialist of the chair”. The white founders of American sociology, moreover, agreed with the substance of social Darwinism, especially as it related to race. However, Ward, Giddings, Ross and Cooley were what has been described as reform social Darwinist. Theirs was a modified racist view, which believed in guided, or managed, social evolutionary change, to quicken evolutionary social developments in a reputedly “enlightened manner”. Their views, while racist, still understood the central problem of American society to be social class and not race and what they viewed as industrial violence.
The great gulf between their understanding and reality is recognized when one looks at the age objectively and certainly, as Du Bois must have. The era began with the destruction of Reconstruction and the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, followed by the Supreme Court’s declaring the equal accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional (1883) and reaches its high point with the Plessy v Ferguson (1896) decision. Rayford Logan refers to this period in African American history as the nadir. Class conflict was a crucial part of this moment, however, the race issue and its complex relationships to the entirety of class, gender, social and political issues would prove to be the overarching and central question.
In larger historical and political economic contexts, the period 1896 to 1914 (the period when Du Bois produced his main sociological research) was a glorious period for world imperialism and racism. Between 1859 (when Charles Darwin’s Origins of the Species was published) and the Boer War of 1902, white Western men conquered, explored, fought over and partitioned among themselves all of Africa south of the Sahara desert. In 1895 when Du Bois became the first African American to receive a Harvard Ph.D., The Great Abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, died and The Great Accommodator, Booker T. Washington, delivered his Atlanta Compromise speech. These events occurred at the very moment when Black leadership was passing from the revolutionary democrat Frederick Douglass to the politician of compromise Booker T. Washington. Of Douglass Du Bois said, “in his old age, (he) still bravely stood for the ideals of his early manhood—ultimate assimilation through self assertion, and on no other terms.” Of Booker T. Washington he declared, “Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission.” And his program “practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races (Souls: 44, 45).”
Du Bois began his teaching and public careers at a time when the forces of reaction had achieved political, ideological and cultural supremacy. He chose a path based on scientific rigor and an unbending partisanship to the cause of African American equality. In the process he would redefine the social sciences, creating a new paradigm of race and race conflict. Du Bois’ literary and research production is massive. Herbert Aptheker (1989) says it is on “a Dickinsian scale”. Du Bois published books and essays in magazines throughout the world. He edited or wrote for The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Historical Review, The American Sociological Review, Fisk Herald, The Moon, The Horizon, The Crisis, The Journal of Negro History and Phylon. He, as well , contributed weekly columns to newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Chicago Defender (see Aptheker, 1973).
I will in the remainder of this paper demonstrate the dimension of the Du Boisian episteme by presenting how it was worked out in several of his major works I will look at The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896), “On The Conservation of Races” (1897), The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), John Brown (1909), and Black Reconstruction (1935) as models. I will indicate the form and substance of a Du Boisian method of conducting social science.
DU BOIS AND THE ROOTS OF SOCIOLOGY
Du Bois’ skills as a researcher in sociology and history were magnificent. These were no where better
demonstrated than in The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard and The Philadelphia Negro. Few sociologists would deny that he is one of American sociology’s major pioneers. However, his place as an innovator and a full recognition of the enormity of his contribution has not yet occurred. In a sense, sociology has only dealt with him in passing and his contribution only superficially.
Green and Driver (1980:39) insist, Du Bois rightly deserves a place among the giants of sociology for his work during the years 1896-1910, when sociology was being established as an academic discipline. Along with establishing a department of sociology at Atlanta University, he created a sociological laboratory, instituted a program of systematic research, founded and conducted regular sociological conferences on research, founded two journals (Crisis and Phylon: A Journal of Race Relations), attempted to organize a sociological society in 1897, or eight years before the American Sociological Society. Moreover, he established a record of valuable publications which has rarely been equaled by any sociologist.
Du Bois’s department at Atlanta University was the second to be established in the US. Albion Small set up the first at the University of Chicago in 1892. The sociological laboratory and the Atlanta University Conferences he directed made his department unique. The Atlanta Conference met annually between 1896 and 1914 and produced The Atlanta University Publications, consisting of 18 monographs. Stark (1994:27) points out that,” [f]rom 1896 through 1914 Du Bois published a book based on his sociological research every year and wrote many articles and gave many speeches as well.” But unlike other sociology department Du Bois’ was centered upon Black people and a strong anti-eugenics and anti-hereditarian program. In 1898 in an article entitled “The Study of the Negro Problems”, printed in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, he wrote, “The present period in the development of sociological study is a trying one; it is the period of observation, research and comparison—work always wearisome, often aimless, without well settled principles and guiding lines and subject ever to pertinent criticism 1973:70).” He was convinced that the Negro was a worthy subject of serious sociological inquiry. He dreamed, as Lewis (1993:219) indicates, of a laboratory that could inform the wider public of the conditions of a “concrete group of living beings artificially set off by themselves.” He anticipated that the Atlanta Conferences would bring together the best minds in the world and his students, in the manner of a University of Berlin seminar, would devour bibliographies and data on the Negro. This annual meeting turned out some of the most influential research of its time and attracted the likes of Max Weber and Franz Boas.
The research Du Bois headed was rigorous and based on the best scientific methods of its time. As he put it, “the Atlanta Conference sought to apply to the study of the Negro problem the methods of sociological inquiry which the trained experience of the world has found most successful, and it seeks to interpret the results in the light of similar data obtained by students the world over (1985:70).” In retrospect, Du Bois’ scientific effort has prevailed over the research program of scientific racism. This in spite of the fact that scientific racism continues to rear its ugly head, as revealed in the publication of The Bell Curve. Du Bois’ emphasis upon race, class and social structure as primary causal factors of social behavior, social action and social conflict subsequently propelled a tradition in American social science that stretches from Franz Boas, to the Chicago School of Sociology and up ‘till the present. Professor E. Digby Baltzell (1967:xxvi) argues that Franz Boas in The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), was echoing the findings of Du Bois when he wrote that “the traits of the American Negro are adequately explained on the basis of his history and his social status … without falling back upon the theory of hereditary inferiority.”
In a profound sense American sociology still has not caught up to Du Bois. It remains a child of its Gilded Age beginnings and it reluctance to face head on the issue of race and of the complex interactions of race, class and social structure. Nor has it successfully challenged the strictures of pragmatism and positivism. Du Bois’ German education, especially Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind and the political economic methods and theories of his German professors Scmoller and Wagner, along with his life long studies of the Black Belt South, gave him a strategic advantage over most sociologists of his time and even of ours.

AFRICAN SCHOLARSHIP AND THE AFRICAN SCHOLAR
Du Bois viewed himself not only as a scholar of Africa and Africans, but as an African scholar. There was in his mind and in the ways that he worked both a geography of ideas and a cultural location of himself as a scholar. The construction of his African scholarship demonstrates this.

SUPPRESSION OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE AND AFRICAN SCHOLARSHIP
The Suppression of The African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, according to Herbert Aptheker (1989:11) is “the first full-length product of Afro-American scientific scholarship; as such it is the seed.” It, furthermore, has not been supplanted. Like The Philadelphia Negro that was to follow it, Suppression adheres closely, as Zamir (1995:81) indicates, to the empirical realism of Smoller’s idea of the social sciences and the methods Du Bois had encountered through Hart and others at Harvard. Suppression, Du Bois tells us is “a contribution to the scientific study of slavery and the American Negro”, based on “a study of sources, i.e. national, State and colonial statutes, Congressional documents, reports of societies, personal narratives, etc (1896:3).” Zamir (1995:81—82) argues, “It is this emphasis on the centrality of primary documentation and the rigorously localized focus that put Du Bois’s work at the forefront of contemporary developments in American historiography rather than with the more outmoded literary tradition of nineteenth-century historiography represented by figures like Macauly (whom Du Bois had read with relish as a child and then at Fisk), Carlyle, or the American George Bancroft, whose History of the United States from the Discovery of America (1834—87) was informed by a nationalist mythology of heroic achievement and progress buoyed up with inflated liberal and nationalist sentiments.” While seeking to adhere as closely as possible to what seems to be positivist methods, it is clear the work is subversive of American racism and its myth of racial progress. Rather than a narrative about the triumph of liberty, the history of the slave trade is narrated as a series of failures and of the triumph of self-interest over law. He points to the consistent failures to enforce the 1808 act outlawing slave trading, the subsequent growth of the trade, especially after 1820 and he noted the continual calls for the revival of the slave trade. Du Bois attacks America’s continual bargaining and compromising with slavery. In the end, he offered a stinging rebuff to the normal view that American colonial and revolutionary history represented the rise of liberty and democracy. “No American,” he would insist, “can study the connection of slavery with United States history, and not devoutly pray that this country may never have a similar social problem to solve.” He would continue, with a forthright challenge to the ideology of American exceptionalism and progress. “We have the somewhat inchoate idea that we are not destined to be harassed with great social questions, and that even if we are, and fail to answer them, the fault is with the question and not with us. Consequently we often congratulate ourselves more on getting rid of a problem than on solving it (1896:197).” In The Suppression Du Bois evinces an approach to history writing that does not exclude advocacy or partisanship. For instance, in it Du Bois commented upon Charles A and Mary R. Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization. In their work, he argued, the impression is left ” that nothing right or wrong is involved”. Their approach manifested a strict historical positivism, which Du Bois would flirt with but rejected. In Suppression Du Bois indicated that two antagonistic systems had developed in the North and South and “they clash, as winds and waters strive”. Du Bois disputed the Beard’s “mechanistic” approach to history, which failed because human experience is not machine- like and humans are not machines. The slave trade and slavery were not inevitable. They manifested actual political and economic interests. These interests were regional , national and international, connected to a world system of capital, slavery and commerce in cotton. Du Bois (1896:153) would contend, the “fatal rise of the slave labor large-farming system, which before it was realized, had so intertwined itself with and braced itself upon the economic forces of the industrial age” would determine the course of US history. This system in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, had changed from “a family institution to an industrial system.” And it would take a “vast and terrible civil war” to displace it. Du Bois, already in his dissertation indicates a point that he will more fully develop in Black Reconstruction, that the slaves were in fact workers, whose conditions of work after 1820 were of an industrial type. This would lay the foundation for his concept of the class struggle as the central dynamic of the anti-slavery struggle. However, he saw the class struggle as being shaped by race and slavery. This view, as we will later show, represented a profound inversion of Eurocentrist Marxism. What is significant for what will become a Du Boisian explanation of US history and society is his concept of the centrality of race to the formation of class and class relationships in the US.
The book was widely and favorably reviewed in among others the Nation, The American Historical Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. According to Aptheker (1989:8), “One of the most discerning reviews … came from the pen of H.T. Kealing of Philadelphia, the editor of the A.M.E Church Review…” Kealing called the book “epochal” and drew attention to its emphasis upon the role of Toussaint, leader of the Haitian revolution. Kealing found its emphasis upon slave militancy and rebellion valuable. Kealing’s review contained the hope, with which most of Du Bois’ work was received by the African American public, that it would help bury “the almost antediluvian conceit of exclusive Caucasian scholarship”. The Suppression was out of print for some fifty years, although it was cited thousands of time. At the same time, relatively recent works like those of Staughton Lynd (1967) and Ronald Takaki (1971) which though covering the same terrain as Du Bois’ Suppression, and while not superseding it totally ignore it. On the other hand recent scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade like that of Joseph Inikori (1986), Ronald Bailey (1992) andClarence Munford (1991) have taken account of the work of Du Bois. Its republication was in 1954 by Social Science Press headed by than doctoral student Eugene Genovese. In this edition Du Bois included a “postlude”–”a short explanation of the omissions in the book”. Of these were what Du Bois considered a certain naivete with respect to human psychology, “which reflected he felt, the pre-Freudian epoch of the book’s production”, and the other weakness which he gave greatest weight, “namely, that of the Marxian analysis”. Du Bois acknowledged the existing economic emphasis in the book, but indicated the absence of the concept of class domination of the State, class struggle and class interest as basic to the historical process. In 1954 he evaluated the book as a good one, which represented a conscientious effort.
ON THE CONSERVATION OF RACES AND THE AFRICAN ROOTS OF THE WAR: TOWARDS A GENERAL THEORY OF RACES
Between the publication of Suppression and The Philadelphia Negro, and while polishing the research and language of PN, Du Bois delivered a paper before the American Negro Academy, entitled “On the Conservation of Races”. It can be viewed as a prolegomenon to a general theory of race. It seeks to provide a general concept of races; uniting the general concept of races , or large populations, with the particularity of the African or Negro race. The work proceeds from two compatible, yet not fully worked out notions: first a populationist definition of races, i.e. that races are large groups of people united on the basis of culture and phenotypical characteristics; and secondly, a geno-geographical definition, which suggests gene populations occupy, generally, certain geographic regions of the planet and that language and culture correlates with geno-geographical populations. Both definitions are suggested in the work and provided a foundation for later conceptualizations of race as seen in Dusk of Dawn (1940) and The World and Africa (1947).
Suppression and PN provide enormous empirical and historical data to demonstrate the reality of race, “Conservation” seeks to generalize upon that data. In a concrete sense we witness Du Bois working from the concrete to the general, from specific knowledge to general explanation. Races as he articulated them are constituted on the basis of geography, genes, history and culture. Race is a type of supra-national community of people. The object of the paper, however, was to assert the civilizational equality of the Negro race, with other great races. Africans were one of his eight major races. The paper was to become the basis of scientific research and political agitation for civil and political rights. It used as its foundational assumption that Africans were civilized and more than that Africa was where human civilization originated. He would insist that African Americans, only a little over thirty years out of slavery, still brought much to the table of human culture. From the standpoint of the Du Boisian oeuvre this paper should be viewed as an initial approximation to a more general theory of race and race construction and not his final statement. “Conservation” helps us understand Du Bois’ oeuvre generally, and to understand how each work was a further approximation to a deeper understanding of social complexity. His life’s work should be viewed as a series of approximations, amendments, additions, revisions and rethinkngs, as new evidence and new arguments and explanations come forward. And yet, he would always attempt to empirically verify the categories of his thinking. This paper was, however, given the time, competitively plausible and generally progressive. It, like all of his scholarly and intellectual work, was profoundly political. Du Bois was responding to the racist and colonialist notions of world history. It was a call for Pan African unity. He declared, “We believe that the Negro people as a race have a contribution to make to civilization and humanity, which no other race can make.”
The reactionary political and racial climate which made such a work necessary is suggested in Dusk of Dawn (1940:98). This context helps explain its political and intellectual strategy. It assumes a militant nationalist voice, not heard in either The Suppression or PN; explained, certainly, by its audience, a Black Nationalist led group. In The Souls of Black Folk the militant and political tone in “Conservation” reappears. Du Bois proposes a conceptualization of races which views them as culturally and historically distinct, while each, and significantly Negroes , have contributions to make to civilization. In the graduate schools at Harvard and Berlin race became a matter of culture and cultural history. The history of the world was paraded before the observation of students, Du Bois tells us in his Autobiography. Comparative history was done for the sake of determining superior and inferior races and peoples. The white race, of course had history, and thereby civilization. There was some mention, Du Bois continues, of Asiatic culture, “but no course in Chinese or Indian history or culture was offered at Harvard, and quite unanimously in America and Germany, Africa was left without culture and without history (Dusk of Dawn: 98).”
What most commentators have missed in assessing the paper is that Du Bois was arguing for the conservation of races and peoples as distinct cultural entities, but not in a separatist, insular or invidious ethnocentrist manner. What he was demanding was recognition of both the flowering of and pride among races and peoples, on the one side, and their coming together to form a better humanity on the other. Hence, revealed in Du Bois’ thinking is recognition of a two sided historical process among races, cultures and peoples. A stance that he would champion throughout his life.
But in Black Reconsturction he would define race and the problem of race in far more radical terms.”[H]is fight is a fight to the finish,” he says of the African American struggle. “Either he dies or he wins.. He will enter modern civilization here in America as a black man, or he will enter not at all. Either extermination root and branch, or absolute equality. There can be no compromise. This is the last great battle of the West (1992:703.” In Dusk of Dawn he looks at African American raciality in robust cultural, historical , political and ideological terms. He says, “But the physical bond is least and the badge of color relatively unimportant save as a badge; the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery, the discrimination and insult; and this heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the south Seas. It is this unity that draws me to Africa (Dusk of Dawn: 117).”
THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO: EMPIRICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH
The Philadelphia Negro (1899) is the first major work of American empirical and urban sociology and remains unsurpassed in its methodology, research design, conceptualization, scope and rigor. It should be viewed as the masterwork in the field. Although basically ignored by most scholars it is the preeminent model in urban sociology. With it Du Bois initiated the field. Zamir (1995:89) argues that “Du Bois succeeded in deploying empirical practice against the alliance of pseudo-science, liberal optimism, and racism not only because his marginalized position fostered critical understanding, but also because he enlarged his scientific training to include a more historical assessment of the evidence in his work .” A survey of the urban sociology literature from the Chicago School in the 1920′s to the present indicates an enormous debt to Du Bois. In an appendix to his famous study of the American race situation, An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal, in discussing the need for further research on the Black community stated, “We cannot close this description of what a study of the Negro community should be without calling attention to the study which best meets our requirements, a study which is now all but forgotten. We refer to W.E.B Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro…(see Batzell, 1967:ix)” The Philadelphia Negro can be considered part of a larger scientific project, which included Du Bois’ Atlanta Studies. Following his fifteen-month work on The Philadelphia Negro Du Bois was hired as a professor at historically African American Atlanta University. What links Du Bois’ sociological work between 1896 and 1910 (which includes the research on The Philadelphia Negro and the Atlanta Studies) is its empirical orientation, combined with an up close, in the trenches ethnography. Anderson (1996) argues that The Philadelphia Negro is perhaps the first major ethnographic study of an urban population, and that its ethnography, is its highpoint. Green and Driver (1980:37) say “He was firm in his commitment to the use of sociological measurement to describe and delimit social phenomena.” Moreover, “Implicit in this belief was a more general belief in the worth of quantitative, empirically based sociology which, if properly practiced, would form the foundation of social policy.”
The Philadelphia Negro emerges out of the social reform movement of the late 19th century. Du Bois’ scholarship became a central part of that movement. The Settlement House and Social Gospel Movements in the US stimulated early empirical sociological research. Reform minded and activist women like Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, Vida Scudder, Ellen Gates Starr, Dr. Jane Robbins, Susan Wharton and Isabell Eaton were leaders of these early “uplift movements”. The University of Pennsylvania sponsored Du Bois’ research. Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis contextualized the intellectual and social situation that Du Bois found himself in.
Du Bois knew his sponsors held a theory about the race to be studied. The city was ‘going to the dogs because of the crime and venality of its Negro citizens.’ ‘Something is wrong with a race that is responsible for so much crime,’ the theory ran, and ‘strong remedies are called for.’ Another junior academic (and a minority scholar at that), given the chance to impress rich and pedigreed sponsors for future assignments and fellowships, might have been conscientious about fleshing out the data but neutral or even collusive about their implications. To believe Du Bois, however, he ‘neither knew nor cared’ about the agenda of the reformers. ‘The world was g wrong about race, because it did not know.’ He would teach it to think right. The task was ‘simple and clear-cut’ for someone with his cutting-edge training in sociology. He proposed to ‘find out what was the matter with this area and why’ and he would ask ‘little advice as to procedure’. It was an opportunity-a mandate really–whose scientific and racial implications made the politics behind his appointment unimportant (188-89).

Du Bois’ anti-hereditarian beliefs defined and shaped not only the design of the study, but the fact that he set out to show that social conditions and previous servitude best explained the behavior and social situation of Blacks. As Du Bois states, “The final design of the work is to lay before the public such a body of information as may be a safe guide for all efforts towards the solution of the many Negro problems of a great American city (1899:1).” In 1896 Du Bois understood what many conservative and liberal sociologists have yet not digested, that ghettoization and poverty are not the creations of the poor, but are the result of processes controlled by economic and political forces far removed from the ghetto and the poor themselves. Du Bois argued that poverty, ghettoization and crime were, finally, symptoms of institutional and structural racism. There are present in this work data and analysis, which counter the “culture of poverty”, and social pathology arguments which blame the poor for poverty and which have been reinvented in the 1980′s and 90′s to justify conservative social and economic policies. Du Bois considered the situation of Black folk in Philadelphia “a disgrace to the city–a disgrace to Christianity, to its spirit of justice, to its common sense”. His judgement remains valid.
There is the belief found here which is also found in “Conservation”, that the African Americans are part of the great Negro race based in Africa. And that African Americans exhibit cultural and behavioral patterns found in Africa. For instance, in the section of The Philadelphia Negro devoted to the Black Church he observes that in its organization it repeats the communal feature of African village life (201). The idea of African survivals in the African American community, later asserted by Boas and Herskowitz and disputed by E. Franklin Frazier, has its roots in Du Bois’ engagement with 19th century Black Nationalism. It was his way of arguing that Blacks should not be expected to behalf like white Americans, while he would uphold a certain behavioral norm appropriate to civil society.
Elijah Anderson (1995) indicate that the work anticipates the research of the Chicago School of urban sociology headed by Robert Parks and was preceded by the works of Charles Booth and Jane Addams. Anderson (1995:xviii) points out that “the work of these authors probably served as models for Du Bois.” Du Bois used the same methods as they, including maps, census data, descriptive statistics and in-depth interviews. Because Charles Booth’s influence spread beyond London to New York, Pittsburgh and Chicago and “the works of the Westside Studies and the Pittsburgh Survey, sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1914, resemble those of Addams and Booth as well as those of Du Bois. In this perspective, Du Bois may be viewed as a link in the empirical chain engaged in the central social scientific, if not ideological, work of the Settlement Movement (Anderson, 1995: xviii).” However, besides an ideological link that Du Bois had to Hull House and Booth, that link possibly also leads back to mid 19th century Marxism. Aptheker (1989: 17) indicates that the radical critique of Marx and Engels propelled the reformist works of Jacob Riis in the United States in the 1890’s and Samuel A. Barnett and his Oxford and Cambridge colleagues in England a decade earlier. The efforts of Barnett et. al. resulted in the founding of Toynbee Hall (1884) and the Fabian movement that led to the studies of Charles Booth, especially The Life and Labour of the People of London (1889—1891) that eventuated in a massive seventeen volume study completed by 1903. Among the researchers assisting Booth was the young Beatrice Potter (later Beatrice Webb). Jane Addams was a friend of Beatrice Potter, who visited London to observe Booth and his colleagues and was impressed with the work of Toynbee Hall. The Settlement House movement in Chicago, Boston, New York and Philadelphia, and therefore, traces its roots to Toynbee Hall and Fabian socialism. Thus, reformers and Fabian socialists shaped a significant part of the intellectual environment that Du Bois worked in. Environmental factors that help explain aspects of the work.
Du Bois’ study also parallels Engels’ The Conditions of the Working Class in England. (1845). The Philadelphia Negro’s ethnography and advocacy has much in common with Engels’ work. Du Bois, like Engels, examines the formation of a distinct urban population, for Engels the working class, for Du Bois Philadelphia’s Black community. Engles points to profound demographic changes that flow from changes in technology and class relationships; Du Bois sees the Philadelphia Black community as a distinct population that grew as slavery grew and its changes in the post-bellum United States.While Engels’ project is part of the European class project, Du Bois’ is centered in his understanding of race and its impact on the shaping of the modern city. Both Du Bois and Engels advocate on behalf of those that are the object of their studies. While Engles calls for socialism and militant class struggle, Du Bois was probably at this point a reformist or Fabian socialist.
Du Bois’ concept of class in PN is racial, social, economic and cultural rather than only economic. Classes are defined on the basis of occupation, education, income, values and behavior. In some ways his concept is of a type of eth-class or race-class that was later articulated by certain sociologists of race and ethnicity. The top tenth were the educated elite, whom he felt were obligated to serve and lead. At the bottom were what he called the “submerged tenth’. This was a declasse stratum. However, all classes among Philadelphia’s Black community were shaped by, and determined on the basis of race oppression and discrimination. Classes are then race-class categories, rather than purely economic classes. However, one finds a sense of the dialectic of race and class as well. The race class phenomenon would repeatedly appear throughout his work. No scholar has so consistently explored this problem as Du Bois did. It would come close to a final resolution in Black Reconstruction.
In spite of his marvelous achievement (The Suppression and The Philadelphia Negro were finished by the time he was thirty) Du Bois a generation later in a favorable review of Harris and Spero’s The Black Worker (1931) critiqued his Philadelphia Negro for a certain “provincialism” which tended to view the oppression of Black people “from the view of religion, humanity and sentiment.” What is undeniable is that PN was a significant contribution to the development of an American sociology. It cannot be overlooked that Du Bois operated in an intellectual environment where social scientific thought and practice were severely impoverished, lacking either methods or firm philosophical groundings to explain the American social structure which was so securely rooted in race.
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK: TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF RACE
Souls is a unique Du Boisian effort to philosophically address the problem of race and the failure of American pragmatism and positivism to provide a philosophical framework for a social science of race. In many respects Souls can be viewed as a narrative with Hegel, where Hegelian idealism is inverted. Du Bois’ narrative is based in action, -manifested as a striving, or struggle to achieve freedom. Freedom is understood as achieving a new stage in history. Du Bois rejects both the naive optimism of American exceptionalism and the idealism of Hegelianism. “The history of the American Negro,” he says, “is the history of this strife, –this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would neither Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.” While many Afrocentrist have viewed the Du Boisian notion of double consciousness as a capitulation to whiteness and Eurocentrism, it is in fact a recognition of the reality of being Black in a multi-ethnic state, founded on race oppression. Yet, he also acknowledges in Souls the Native American civilizational presence in America. In the beautiful and sociologically compelling last chapter “The Sorrow Songs” Du Bois speaks of Africa and America. This understanding goes quite a way in explaining how he understood double conscious, or multiple forms of social being in America. “Little of beauty has America given the world save the grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom,” he says. The human spirit as manifested in the white American “expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.” And then the critical, yet too often overlooked sense of the principal side of the dialectic of double consciousness as Du Bois uses it; he insists, “And so by fateful chance the Negro folk song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands today not simply as American music, but as the most beautiful expression born this side of the seas.” He then reminds us, “it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people (Souls: 197—198).” This music of an unhappy people, “the children of disappointment; tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world of misty wanderings and hidden ways.” In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” Du Bois hints at, but does not fully develop, the intermixture of African and Native American culture. “[T] here is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folk-lore are Indian and African (Souls: 15).” The sense, therefore, of the doubleness and what he meant by America can be found here. He did not see America as white only, but a mixture of races and cultures. He insists upon an America of Indian, African and Caucasian; and an African or Negro consciousness, expressed in the Sorrow Songs, which preceded America. Doubleness, then is even more complex than merely twoness. It seems from the ways that Du Bois unfolds the concept throughout Souls he is speaking of racial, social and cultural complexity and the forms of African American consciousness in the midst of this complexity. The painful realities of Black life in capitalist America are Du Bois’ starting point.
Du Bois in Souls starts to come to terms with pragmatism. He would not (and did not) countenance self-edifying individualism. He demanded a commitment to the oppressed Black masses. While American pragmatists and Hegelians avoid real history, Du Bois confronts it head on, and seeks to construct a philosophy of real history, and of human action. Souls when viewed in relationship to the research that preceded it is part of a Du Boisian challenge to the limits of the social sciences and philosophy of the time. How, Du Bois seems to ask, to construct a social scientific and philosophical discourse on race at the start of the 20th century. Du Bois understood that the audience for Souls was wide and interracial. However, the text speaks in specific ways to the black talented tenth. He joins the attack upon the compromise policies of Booker T. Washington. He locates the black freedom struggle in the long struggle for democracy and especially the Haitian Revolution. In drawing upon Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind and adapting its categoreal grid to understanding the specificities of the US, Du Bois gives to US social science the intellectual tools to understand the complexities of race. Zamir (1995:117) suggests that Du Bois reworks Hegel’s Phenomenology. Most American nineteenth century readings of Hegel were upbeat, justifying the idea of an organically united people, with a historic mission. Du Bois’ critical reading of Hegel is similar to the one that emerges form Marx or Sartre. “What Hegel’s idealist philosophy makes available to Du Bois,” Zamir insists, “is a complex model for thinking about the relationship of consciousness and history(117).” And Du Bois makes a radical rupture with Hegel by anchoring his enterprise in actual history. Yet, like Hegel’s Phenomenology Du Bois acknowledges complexity, contradiction, striving and movement in history and day to day events.
Du Bois in Souls rejects naive psychologism. of the Jamesian and Deweyan types. His examination of the collective souls of Black folk is his way of historicizing psychology. He develops an historically contextualized and contingent notion of double consciousness and of Black strivings which suggests a social psychology which argues that Black folk emerge from a history of oppression and resistance. In the last chapter of Souls, entitled “The Sorrow Songs”, Du Bois locates the Negro Spirituals within the context of the striving for freedom and justice, and the realization of a collective self–a peoplehood. He, however, defines the Sorrow Songs as the central historical narrative of Black folk. “They are,” he tells us, “the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.” Yet, “Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope–a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.” And then he asks, “Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?”
This engagement with the sorrow songs and Du Bois’ locating them as the central narrative of the African American people is also part of his locating the role of the talented tenth. Chapter XII entitled “Of Alexander Crummell” develops a notion of the centrality of the Black masses. Crummell an Anglican priests and ascetic believed that the essential need of freedmen was moral uplift. Du Bois believed their essential need was freedom, civil rights, the vote and education. Crummell believed the talented tenth were a civilizing tenth, which would bring Christianity and thus civilization to the former slaves. Du Bois believed the talented tenth were obligated to serve and that the freedmen through the Sorrow Songs and the anti-slavery resistance had demonstrated they were civilized. Crummell notion of the sublime personality is thus countered by Du Bois’ notion of the sublimeness of a people , whose resistance to oppression had elevated them above their oppressors. Here Du Bois emphasizes the mass and calls upon the intellectuals to enter into an organic relationship to them. Here is found, finally, Du Bois’ belief in an activist, practical and engaged social science. Rather than an intellectual gentry, the social scientists has a moral and professional obligation to be part of the mass that he studies.
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION TOWARDS AN ENGAGEMENT WITH MARXISM
The formation of the idea for a study of Reconstruction can be traced to themes Du Bois was writing on at the close of the 19th century and especially the essay in The Souls of Black Folk, “On The Dawn of Freedom”. Of great significance to the formation of his ideas on Reconstruction was his 1909 paper presented at the American Historical Association meeting, entitled ““Reconstruction and Its Benefits”, which was published in the 1910 volume of The American Historical Review. However, I believe the roots of the analysis go back to themes he was researching at the University of Berlin for his doctoral thesis, titled “The Large and Small-scale System of Agriculture in the Southern United States 1840—1890”. The thesis written in the Department of Economics under Gustav von Schmoller, looked the farming system in the South from the bottom up; that is from the standpoint of the peasantry and slaves. Clearly, while building upon the work of Hart at Harvard, Du Bois was showing the influences of the German school of economics and history. The theories of the German Social Democratic Party and one of the many forms of Marxism whirling around him no doubt influenced him. As well, it was a response to the racist interpretation of Reconstruction as evidenced in the film “Birth of A Nation”. By 1924 in The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America Du Bois would begin to make the case that is more fully developed in Black Reconstruction; that the question of slavery and Reconstruction was in the end a question of labor. “The Negro still is the mightiest single group of labor force in the United States (64).” But he would also make the argument that the cause of the Civil War was slavery, and not as main stream historiography had argued, a regional North-South conflict.
We glimpse Du Bois’ methods of inquiry and presentation. Indeed, we get a sense of his unique scientific method. Du Bois worked collectively, actively engaging colleagues from the Niagara and Pan African Movements, as well as, fellow academicians like Rayford W. Logan and Anna Julia Cooper, principal of Washington DC’s elite M Street High School.
John Brown (1909) is an important foundational work in the formation of Du Bois’ notion of Black Reconstruction. While it is an interpretative biography of the white abolitionist who led the armed raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, it is also a study of Jacobin or radical democracy. In some ways John Brown plays a role in Du Bois’ understanding of race, democracy and anti-slavery similar to that played by Thomas Munzer, the early 16th century German peasant leader in Engels’ conceptualization of German history. John Brown and Thomas Munzer were prototypes and metaphors to explain larger historical forces. Du Bois’ study of John Brown was part of a larger research project that would eventuate in Black Reconstruction. In a sense Brown for Du Bois and Munzer for Engels were revolutionaries in what might be conceived of as pre-revolutionary times. Both were defeated and executed.
The book John Brown is what a leading Black fighter for full freedom in the twentieth century thought of the great Martyr–himself white–in the struggle for freedom in the nineteenth century. Herbert Aptheker contends, Du Bois’ “interpretation emphasizes that John Brown’s uniqueness stemmed from the reality that he was a white an in nineteenth-century United States who had consciously burned racism out of himself.” In this sense it is part of Du Bois’ larger anti-racist research agenda. Brown, himself becomes a metaphor for what was possible for white anti-racists, yet what was seldom realized. In the preface to John Brown, Du Bois states,
John Brown worked not simply for Black Men–he worked with them; and he was a companion of their daily life, knew their faults and virtues, and felt as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot- The story of John Brown, then, cannot be complete unless due emphasis is given this.

It was this identification which led him to make the supreme sacrifice. More than a record, the book is a tribute to the white man Du Bois says, “has come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk”. John Brown Du Bois believed was an exemplar of a white Jacobin tradition in US history. He saw that quality that most African Americans seek out in their white fellow citizens. John Brown was also the product of profound historical forces and the example of the individual who fights to be on the correct side of history. Lastly, Du Bois drew attention to the manner in which John Brown led his life. Du Bois insisted,
He sought them [Black people] in home and church and out on the street and hired them in his business. He came to them on the plane of perfect equality–they sat at his table and he at theirs.
Du Bois in John Brown cites what became his life’s motto: “the cost of liberty was less than the price of repression”. Du Bois praises John Brown’s guiding principles, “the Hebrew religion” and the French revolution. Moreover, according to Aptheker (1989:94), Du Bois was in this volume thirty to forty years ahead of US historiography in demonstrating the insurrectionary and revolutionary spirit of the slaves, the significance of the slaves self initiative and organization and what would later appear in Black Reconstruction, the “deepest realities of slavery, the expansionism of the slave system and the nature of Reconstruction and its overthrow in 1876.” Du Bois by examining the life of John Brown was exploring white consciousness and behavior on race. He would finally conclude that the majority of whites were not capable of such anti-racist heroism as John Brown. Du Bois’ John Brown was out of publication for over fifty years, until 1962. Aptheker indicates that the white commercial press generally ignored its republication, although the African American public warmly received it.
In Black Reconstruction, his “magnum opus”, Du Bois theoretically develops and justifies the idea of the centrality of the struggle for African American equality to American democracy. Professor Stanley Aronowitz (1981: ix) called Du Bois the “greatest” of the 1930′s Marxist scholars and his Black Reconstruction a “path-breaking historical treatment” in “the tradition of Marxist historiography”. In this book one gets a sense of the ways Du Bois conducted scholarship, of how ideas were germinated and nurtured over years and how he finally developed and presented them. We furthermore witness how Du Bois’ scholarship is connected to current social and political events. The radical tone of the work cannot be separated from the Great Depression and the radical politics of the time. In fact, the last chapter is boldly titled “The Propaganda of History”, contending that history has been used to advance certain social and class positions over others. In many ways Black Reconstruction can be compared with Frederick Engels’ The Peasant War In Germany. Both are shaped to address politically pressing questions of the moment from the standpoint of an analogous political moment. For Engels’ the German peasant uprising of 1525 was used to explain the German revolution of 1848—1850. Du Bois used the civil war and Reconstruction to indicate the direction of US history and to assert the centrality of the Black struggle to democracy and working class militancy.
Given the liberal tenor of the country in the 1930′s, the book received a positive reception and an enthusiastic response from Afro-American periodicals and journals. Du Bois’ long associate in Pan African efforts, the immanent historian Rayford Logan, said that Black Reconstruction revealed Du Bois “as both the merciless critic and constructive historian.” “The real value of this epoch making book” according to Logan, is that it is “the first Marxian interpretation of this crucial period.” Historian Charles Wesley portrayed Du Bois as a “lyric historian, the literary knight with the plumed pen.”
In this book, Du Bois emphasizes the momentous impact upon the nature of American society, and therefore upon world history, of the failure to democratize the South, which is what the defeat of Reconstruction, signified for him. Du Bois also sought to make clear that Reconstruction was an episode in the entire, worldwide struggle of the rich against the poor. Property and property relationships shape his thesis in the book. He emphasized not only the specifics of the land question in the South but the entire matter of property rights; indeed, he called one of the most pregnant chapters in this book “Counter-Revolution of Property”. Du Bois understood the question of property to be central to the State and democracy. “In this sense”, Aptheker (1989: 251) says, “Du Bois saw the story both of Emancipation and Reconstruction as an essential feature of the story of labor … in the generic sense of those who had to work to make ends meet.” But chattel slavery turns Blacks as human beings into property, not just their labor power. What this produces is a situation where the race struggle inevitably shapes the class struggle. Aptheker raises in this context important theoretical questions that are present in Du Bois’ effort. For instance, Du Bois’ notion of Radical Reconstruction included the possibility of a proletarian dictatorship. He later backed away from such a notion contending that the “the state of South Carolina and country was not ready for that dictatorship of the proletariat which might have come in a later development and in other surroundings.” Herein rest the important question of the relationship of the struggles for democracy to that for socialism. It might even be suggested that Du Bois conceived of Reconstruction as a continuation of John Brown’s armed activity in 1855 and raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859; perhaps assuming a generally proletarian revolutionary situation issuing out of the Civil War. What was clear is that Du Bois believed in a radical democratic, or Jacobin, solution to the race question in the South. And this undertaking Aptheker (1989:90) forcefully argues, “would almost certainly require—like the Civil War—the shedding of much blood.” Du Bois , no doubt, viewed himself as continuing in the Jacobin tradition of Nat Turner, the Haitian Revolution, John Brown and Frederick Douglass.
The theoretically most innovative and engaging chapter in the book is Chapter Four, “The General Strike”. Here Du Bois affirms a revolutionary agency for the Blacks slaves, whom he defines as workers. What must, however, be acknowledged is that Du Bois was applying his massive genius to understanding Reconstruction as part of a scientific effort to discover the foundations of institutional and legal racism in the United States and its overturn. The race and class dialectic and their interpenetration in the formation of the struggles for radical democracy are primary focuses of the work. His scientific accomplishment, therefore, should be placed in the context of his effort to define the logic of democratic transformation in the context of the race problem. Hence, this book seems to signal the full maturity of Du Bois as a theoretician of social change.
CONCLUSION
This paper views Du Bois as a seminal thinker in the social sciences, precisely due to the Africa factor of his intellectual project. Moreover, it looks upon his development of social theory and research not as a trickle down from, or black face imitation, of white thinkers. His intellectual and scholarly practices emerge from his racial, political, professional and ideological positions within US society. The ways that he thought about the world and attempted to resolve both theoretical and practical problems cannot be separated from these relationships. His thinking emerged from an intellectually and politically hostile environment, where his status was always marginalized. Yet he was more than a leader of protest against these circumstances; he critically analyzed and constructed theories to explain them. I differ, therefore, with Elliot Rudwick (1968) and August Meier (1963) who see Du Bois almost solely as a propagandist of protest and in the process misrepresent the depth of his contributions to social theory. Rudwick (1968:49) contends that Du Bois’ Philadelphia Negro and the Atlanta Studies “were lacking in systematic theory”. Du Bois’ research, he asserts, was essentially geared to propaganda. “The Atlanta studies,” he tells us, “may not have improved the conditions of the race very much, but they probably did improve its morale.” Francis L. Broderick (1959:228), however, makes one exception. The Philadelphia Negro represented, he tells us, Du Bois’ only first class scholarship. These writers exemplify the racist treatment Du Bois’ work has received from white academics.
Arnold Rampersad’s The Art and Imagination of W.E.B Du Bois (1976) takes Du Bois seriously as an intellectual, yet falls into the trap of searching out what are believed to be all of the white influences on him. Rampersad expresses the view that Du Bois, with differing levels of success and accuracy, reflects the ideas of one or another white theoretical or philosophical mentor. The Souls of Black Folk, Rampersad argues, is “The fruit of a secondary career of cultural commentary, based on history and sociology… a work of definitive importance to the future of Black culture (1976:48).” What Rampersad fails to acknowledge is that the work is foundational to the construction of a social science of race. Cornel West (1989), like Rampersad, views Du Bois as part of the history of American pragmatism. “Du Bois” West insists (1989:139) “seems to have been attracted to pragmatism owing to its Emersonian evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy, and his sense of pragmatism’s relevance to the Afro-American predicament.” He was a Jamesian organic intellectual for West. Du Bois, therefore, is a less seminal thinker then the pragmatist whom he allegedly followed. Reducing Du Bois within the frame of pragmatism or another European or Euro-American intellectual movement carries with it the idea that Du Bois was actually an intellectual utilitarian who eclectically, and without concern for their foundations, graft ideas together to make a propaganda point. Hence, he was not a serious or critical thinker. Others, such as Marable (1986) and Moses (1988) see Du Bois almost solely from the standpoint of political activism and attempt to locate him politically, failing to locate the philosophical and theoretical foundations of his politics. Adolph Reed’s W.E.B Du Bois and American Political Though: Fabianism and the Color Line (1997) attempts to locate the philosophical and theoretical foundations of Du Bois’ politics. He contends (1997:4) “little book length scholarly work has concentrated on the theoretical dimension of Du Bois’s political thought.” Yet, Reed, like Rampersad and West, believe, ultimately, that it is impossible for Du Bois to stand on his own as a thinker. And when he does he usually falls on his face. For Reed Du Bois not only operated within a certain political and intellectual context of his time, but was basically not unlike white thinkers of the period.
Du Bois, however, has to be dealt with on his own terms. His work must be judged from the standpoint of the theoretical, philosophical, methodological and ideological problems they sought to address and solve. He looked at the social universe very differently from white thinkers of his day (and of most even of our time). He saw what they did not see. But more then this he, in the process, developed a unique way of examining the world. Du Bois placed race as the central dynamic of modernity. In so doing he understood race as a set of complex global relationships, including as his studies of the US South indicate, relationships of production. This I consider to be a major innovation in social thinking. In Kuhnian terms it could be considered a paradigm shift, not alone in US letters, but in the world’s understanding of itself. This suggests that to one or another extent European social theories of modernity in one or another way express false consciousness
My basic contention in this paper is that as a thinker stands on his own. However, his innovations in thought were not just a “black thing”, they were crucial to the world’s understanding of itself. His insights, and the research program that flowed from them, developed over the course of more than seventy-five years of research, activism and reflection. In the end, what was produced was a distinct episteme, which I call a Du Boisian episteme. The Du Boisian episteme is a distinct intellectual product which cannot be accounted for merely by, as most have done, talking about where he went to school , who his professors were and how his views parallel those of dominant white thinkers. Moreover, through most of his life his intellectual audiences, scientific environments and colleagues were Black. These organic ties have been poorly researched. They are, however, decisive in explaining and understanding his thought. work Du Bois, rather than merely leaning on others, constructed an intellectual and scientific edifice upon which others are now standing.
It behooves African American Studies to examine and understand the foundations upon which Du Bois stood, because in large measure they are our intellectual foundations. We have, in the end, only barely begun to construct an organized understanding of the core of Du Bois’ intellectual vision, and that from which his thought and life radiated. This paper has been an effort to get at that core.
Du Bois’ place in intellectual and political history must also be evaluated from the standpoint of how it can shape the future geography of ideas. It should not, as Reed (1997) has done, be limited to the Jim Crow period of American history. Du Bois’ central contribution is to the conceptualization of race and modernity. His thinking constitutes a strategic break with the Eurocentric paradigm. His was a specific anti-racist episteme. One that recognized social change as being rooted in the worldwide struggle to alter relations of racial oppression. The Du Boisian episteme lays the basis of a progressive research program that should become the property of African American Studies as it prepares to enter the 21st century.

Du Bois was born three years after the end of the Civil War, at the beginning of 
 Reconstruction, on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington Massachusetts, to Alfred 
 and Mary Burghardt DuBois. He passed away gently in the West African nation of 
 Ghana on August 27, 1963 where he had gone at the invitation of President 
 Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah to restart work on a project he first proposed in 1909, the Encyclopedia of Africa. Nkrumah, speaking over Ghanaian radio, summed up Du Bois’ life with simplicity and 
 eloquence. “Dr. Du Bois”, he said, “is a phenomenon. May he rest in peace.”

The 
 world’s democratic and revolutionary forces over the next days would bid farewell 
 to Du Bois as a comrade in arms, an internationalist and communist. Gus Hall, General Secretary of the CPUSA, Chief 
 Awolo, leader of Nigeria’s independence movement, Cheddi Jagan of British 
 Guiana, Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria’s National Liberation Front, President Kim Il 
 Sung of The People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, and Walter Ulbricht of the 
 German Democratic Republic paid the highest tribute to his life and work. Ulbricht 
wished that “the memory of Dr. DuBois–an outstanding fighter for the liberation 
 and prosperity of Africans–continues to live in our hearts.” Chou En-lai, head of 
 state of China, insisted that DuBois’s life was “one devoted to struggles and truth 
seeking for which he finally took the road of thorough revolution.” Nikita Kruschev, 
 General Secretary of the CPSU wrote to Du Bois’ wife Shirley Graham Du Bois 
 that her husband’s “shining memory” would remain forever “in the hearts of the 
Soviet people.”

Paul Robeson said of him, “His is a rich life of complete dedication to the 
 advancement of his own people and all the oppressed and injured.” He continued, 


let us not forget that he is one of the greatest masters of our language: the 
 language of Shakespeare and of Milton on the one hand; and on the other, of the 
 strange beauty of the folk speech– the people’s speech– of the American Negro…For Dr. Du Bois gives us proof that the great art of the Negro has come 
from the inner life of the Afro-American people themselves….and that 
the roots stretch back to the African land whence they came.

Du Bois, however, wrote his own last will and testament some years earlier. In his 
 posthumously published Autobiography, subtitled “A Soliloquy on Viewing My 
Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century” he wrote, “I have studied 
 communism long and carefully in lands where they are practiced and in 
conversation with their adherents, and with wide reading. I now state my 
conclusion frankly and clearly: I believe in communism.” He declared, “I shall 
therefore hereafter help the triumph of communism in every honest way that I 
 can…I know well that the triumph of communism will be a slow and difficult task, 
 involving mistakes of every sort. It will call for progressive change in human nature 
and a better type of manhood than is common today. I believe this possible, or 
 otherwise we will continue to lie, steal and kill as we are doing today.”

The path he 
traveled to arrive at this conclusion was complex, often contradictory, yet filled with 
 profound meaning. Du Bois’ scientific and scholarly work were organically intertwined with his life and 
 revolutionary activity. The profound importance of his scientific achievements were 
 that they laid a materialist foundation for the study of race and racial oppression. 
 He established that racism and colonialism were central organizing mechanisms of 
 the modern world. That they stood along side and were in dialectical relationship to 
 the system of capitalist exploitation. In the end, the world could not be understood 
or changed without grasping this central dynamic.

THE PATHS OF HIS SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT 


The ultimate form of Du Bois’ scientific work is inseparable from his humble and 
working class beginnings.These social and class roots as well his early contact in the South with ordinary peasants inspired his imagination and anchored his sensibilities to art, beauty and social transformation. His family was one of an estimated thirty five African 
Americans families living in the Berkshires of Western Massachuettes at the time of his birth. While race 
 prejudice was not unknown to whites or Blacks in Great Barrington, it in no way 
 took on the violence and brutality of the South’s Jim Crow segregation. By the time he was a teenage he knew he was racially different than his 
classmates, however, he overcame the affects of prejudice through becoming an 
academic overachiever and a superior athlete to most of his buddies. And he could in this racially ambiguous environment fall 
 back upon the fact that while the blood of Africa flooded his veins, there was as he 
said a “strain of French, a bit of Dutch”. His racial identity, however, would only 
 achieve its permanent anchorage when he began college in Nashville Tennessee at 
 the historically African American Fisk University. Still, it was his humble roots and his experience with racial prejudice, albeit considerably milder than the bulk of 
 African Americans were experiencing in the South, that shaped within him a 
 democratic sensibility early on. At the age of fourteen in his first published articles 
 appearing in The New York Globe, an African American newspaper published by 
 the radical T. Thomas Fortune, Du Bois evidenced a moral rejection of racism. A 
 moral sensibility which would assert itself throughout his life, finding intellectual 
 expression in his greatest works.

At Fisk University his general democratic leanings were deepened. As he would put 
 it, it was during this period that he “learned to be a Negro.” The summer after his 
 sophomore year was spent in the poverty ridden Black Belt of rural Tennessee. He 
 later wrote, he “touched the very shadow of slavery.” Du Bois biographer David 
 Levering Lewis writes of this period, ” Wilson County, Tennessee, would remain in his memory bank for a 
 lifetime, influencing a prose to which he was beginning to give a mythic 
spin, his conception of what he would later call the black proletariat, and 
most profoundly, his gestating, romantic idea about African American 
 `racial traits’.”

This early experience with the Black Belt proletariat would germinate throughout 
 his life finding theoretical and social scientific expression in among other works The 
 Souls of Black Folk(1903),”The African Roots of the War” (1915) and eventually 
in his monumental Black Reconstruction in America (1935).

In the Fall of 1888 after graduating from Fisk he entered Harvard to pursue an 
undergraduate degree in philosophy. He found his Harvard professors no more 
qualified than those at Fisk, only better known. He would at Harvard come in 
 contact with the philosophy of G.W.F Hegel, the theories of American liberalism and philosophical pragmatism. The intellectual high point of Du Bois’ Harvard years was a fifty-two page 
 handwritten essay entitled “The Renaissance of Ethics: A Critical Comparison of 
 Scholastic and Modern Ethics”, prepared for a course taught by the American 
 pragmatist William James. Pragmatism as articulated by James and later John 
 Dewey held that human knowledge was severely limited to immediate experience. 
 As such the possibilities for changing the world were restricted to the limitations upon human knowledge. Human beings had to, more or less, with reforms in existing societies. Capitalism, racism and colonialism, in this rendering, 
 were, therefore, almost immutable and some suggested expressions of human nature and the natural order. There were, as a consequence, no revolutionary 
 alternatives to poverty, exploitation and racism.

Pragmatism’s roots must be traced 
 to British empiricism and skepticism, and because of its subjective idealist 
 substance shares a similar philosophical zone with philosophical positivism. Both 
positivism and pragmatism were viewed by their proponents as alternatives to 
 dialectical and historical materialism. For the young Du Bois pragmatist’s limitations 
 on knowledge and transforming the world were intellectually unacceptable, but 
 more rang untrue.

In his paper Du Bois proposed an elemental materialist alternative to pragmatism. In 
 fact, he proposed answers to pragmatism, which in their larger significance, were 
allied to the alternatives to idealist philosophy posited by Marx in Capital and 
 Engels in Anti-Duhring and The Dialectics of Nature. He , however, from the standpoint of ethics. What Du Bois essentially 
 argued was that the ethical and moral imperatives were determined by the actions they led to. In certain respects this stance anticpates Sartre’s concept of good faith which would appear in his ground breaking Being and Nothingness. While it cannot be said that Du Bois at this stage of his 
intellectual development had discovered a consistent philosophical position, he gravitated away from idealism and towards an action focused materialism. In this regard, his term paper for 
 William James was a harbinger of his future intellectual and ideological materialism. 
 At the root of his argument was the idea that morality and ethics rather than being 
 issues of pure reflection, as Kant and following him most of German philosophy, 
 were to the contrary matters decided in life and through praxis. After receiving his undergraduate degree and being accepted to Harvard’s graduate program in the social sciences he expressed the view that he would apply the principles of the social sciences “to the social and economic rise of the Negro 
 people.”

At the very moment that Du Bois was deciding upon his life’s vocation the US 
 ruling class was facing the specter of a rising working class which was challenging 
 the citadels of capital. The Haymarket riots and repression and the wave of railroad strikes in 
 1886 was the beginning, followed by the Pinkerton carnage at the Homestead 
 Steelworks outside Pittsburgh and the massacre of copper miners at Coeur d’Alene, 
 Colorado in 1892. The assault upon the rights of labor in the late 1880′s and 
 throughout the 1890′s coincided with the wave of lynchings and KKK terrorism 
 against Blacks in the South and the Supreme Court’s legalization of racism in its 
 Plessy v Ferguson decision in 1896.

New economic theories were hatched that reflected the time and were used to justify both class exploitation and racial oppression.Du Bois was confronted by the new economic doctrine which 
 claimed to answer the Marxian formulation that capitalist profits flow from the 
exploitation of labor. In a 158 page critique and analysis of this new economics 
 entitled “A Constructive Critique of Wage Theory” he argued, in social democratic 
fashion, for restrictions upon the unfettered maximization of profit. While this paper 
fails as a theoretical reformulation, it proposed that from a ethical standpoint society 
 was obligated to moderate profits in the interests of a fair distribution of incomes 
 and wealth. The significance of the paper in terms of Du Bois’ later intellectual 
 trajectories is a two page examination of Marx’s labor theory of value. This is the first evidence of Du Bois’ interest in Marxian economics. A interest more fully explored in Black Reconstruction in America (1935).

Upon the completion of the course work for his Harvard doctorate Du Bois applied 
 for and received a fellowship to do graduate studies at the University of Berlin. His 
 intention was to study philosophy and economics. He studied German philosophy, 
 especially Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind, as well as 
 Marxian social theory. He also studied the innovative historical research methods 
than in vogue in the German academy. He, as well, attended meetings in the working 
 class Pankow district of Berlin of the German Social Democratic Party. He later 
 said that his interest in socialism at this time was exploratory and that he did not 
 grasp the differences between Marxism and the revisionism of Lasalle, Bebel and 
 Karl Kautsky. These issues, he said, were “too complicated for a student like 
myself to understand.” He blamed his student status for inhibiting “close personal 
 acquaintanceship with workers, which in his Autobiography he felt he needed for a full understanding of socialism.

While in Berlin Du Bois spent much of his time alone, and between classes he often reflected upon 
 the world and his possible contribution to changing it. Many of these reflections 
 were entered in his diary. One particularly significant entry made on his twenty fifth 
 birthday. A stream of conscious consideration upon his life tells us much about his consciousness and his mental processes, which combined imagination and poeticism. He declared in his diary, “The hot dark blood of a black 
 forefather–born king of men– is beating at my heart, and I know that I am either a 
 genius or a fool. O I wonder what I am– I wonder what the world is– I wonder if 
 live is worth striving…I do know: be the truth what it may, I will seek it on the pure 
 assumption that it is worth seeking–and Heaven nor Hell, God nor Devil shall turn 
 me from my purpose till I die… there is a grandeur in the very hopelessness of such 
 a life–? and is life all?” He then conclude, “These are my plans: to make a name in 
 science, to make a name in literature and thus to raise my race. ” And then, “I 
 wonder what will be the outcome? Who knows?… and if I perish–I PERISH.”

The historical methodology of both Marx and Hegel, and contemporary German 
 academicians, along with reflections upon the race question, helped to convince 
 him that racial oppression must be understood as part and parcel of the world 
 system of economic relations and thus its elimination would have world historic 
 meaning. He became further convinced that only the most advanced scientific and 
philosophical methods could advance understanding of this system. In this regard he 
 sought to do for the issue of racial oppression what Marx had achieved for class 
exploitation.

In respect to his intellectual development his work began to combine social 
 scientific data and analysis with historical studies. He began what he hoped would 
 be his doctoral dissertation at the University of Berlin (which if successful would 
 have become the first of two Ph.D.’s), a study of the land tenure system in the US 
 south. We glimpse what that dissertation might have looked like from a term paper 
 entitled “The Large and Small Scale System of Agriculture in the Southern United 
 States 1840–1890″. It presented his research, using the materialist methods than 
 popular among German historians, looking at social and economic phenomena from the standpoint of peasants and proletariat, that is from the bottom up. This evidenced his further move towards methodological materialism and its application to historical, economic and sociological 
inquiry.

The world would never see that dissertation, because the 
semester before he was to complete his courses his fellowship was ended. David 
Levering Lewis suggests DuBois’ failure to win a 
 German doctorate resulted from a combination of circumstance and the sinister. 
 DuBois’ German professors were effusive in their support of his academic work. 
 They were prepared to trim off a semester of work so as to allow him to get started 
 on writing his thesis. Johns Hopkins President Daniel Gilman a trustee of the Slater 
 Fund, from which DuBois was receiving his scholarship, however, expressed the 
 view that `Negro education’ should be more practical and that DuBois’ program of 
 study had become too rarefied. This was an expression in DuBois’ early life 
of white liberal racism which was now throwing its support to Booker T. 
 Washington and the gospel that Blacks should “put your buckets down where you 
are”, and of the pedagogy which came to be known as the Hampton-Tuskegee model. Blacks with doctorates from prestigious German universities were not a 
 priority in the new Jim Crow atmospher.

Returning to Harvard, and what he called “nigger hating America”, he completed his dissertation in 1896, entitled, “The 
 Suppression of the Slave Trade to the United States of america 1638–1870″, which 
a few years later was published as the first volume in the prestigious Harvard 
 Historical Series. In spite of the achievement in the his dissertation six decades later 
when a new edition was being prepared for publication DuBois included an 
 “Apologia”. He criticized the book, asserting that what was needed was “to add to 
 my terribly conscientious search into the facts…the clear concept of Marx on the 
class struggle for income and power…” After receiving his Ph.D. DuBois was offered a teaching position at Wilberforce 
College, a small African American college in Ohio. After a year of teaching at 
 Wilberforce he was contacted by a group of upper class Philadelphia Quaker women, involved in social welfare and with the poor, to 
 conduct a study of the African American community in Philadelphia. They felt that 
 such a study could embarrass the corrupt city administration, leading to possible reform. Du Bois was offered 
an ‘assistantship’ at the University of Pennsylvania, which meant the University 
 would pay his salary, but he was neither allowed to live on its racially segregated 
 campus or to teach in its all white classrooms. For almost two years Du Bois and his new wife 
Nina Gomer Du Bois lived in the 7th Ward in the heart of the Black ghetto near the 
 corner of 6th and Lombard (across from Bethel African Methodist 
 Episcopal Church founded by the anti-racist radical Richard Allen) where he 
 worked on what became the Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study.While his sponsors had no idea 
 that such a major study would be produced, Du Bois wrote a book that initiated the 
field of urban sociology and advanced empirical sociology itself.
What The Philadelphia Negro achieved, in spite of an overdose of stern Victorian 
 moralizing and a preaching to poor African Americans to conduct themselves in 
culturally acceptable ways, was to empirically verify the social and class origins of poverty 
and racial inequality. He substantially showed that the Black ghetto was a creation of 
 poverty and racism, rather than the so-called innate inferiority, intellectual deficets and supposed 
criminal tendencies of African Americans.

Upon the completion of his research in Philadelphia he took a teaching position at 
 Atlanta University, an historically African American institution. For twelve years he 
not only taught, but became the prime mover of the annual Atlanta University Conferences which 
drew scholars from around the world to examine the social, economic, historical 
 and cultural roots of Black life. He led researchers who produced a series of 
 monograms and papers known as the Atlanta University Studies, the most significant 
 bodies of scientific research on Black folk at the beginning of the twentieth century.

AFRICA ROOTS OF WAR AND BLACK RECONSTRUCTION 


Landmarks of DuBois’ scientific praxis are found in his Atlantic Monthly 
 article “The African Roots of the War” (1915) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Together 
 they demonstrate Du Bois’ full intellectual powers and his encounters with, revisions of and verifications of Marxism and radical thought. 
 “The African Roots of the War” parallels Lenin’s Imperialism The Highest Stage 
of Capitalism and in several formulations anticipates it by at least a years. Like Lenin, 
he viewed world economic relationships as being now dominated by finance 
 capital–a new situation where banks controlled industrial and merchant capital. A position already conceptualized by the German social democrat Rudolph Hilferding in his book Finance Capital (1910). The 
 merger of industrial and bank capital under the hegemony of big bank capital he 
called finance capital. The nation itself, as Lenin and Du Bois saw it, was now under 
the heal of the financiers, who through the export of capital were carving out 
economic spheres throughout the world. Du Bois makes his argument from the 
 standpoint that a new epoch in world history had arrived. What Lenin would define 
 as the imperialist stage of capitalism, which made capitalism overripe for revolution. 
Du Bois saw Africa as the weakest link in the imperialist chain. It is worth 
 commenting upon Du Bois’ support of President Woodrow Wilson’s call for the US to enter WWI in 1918. Du Bois’ stance in support of Wilson was conditioned by two facts; first he viewed Germany , the aggressor in WWI and the nation seeking to extend its colonial possessions in Africa, as an immediate threat to the possibility of African decolonization. Wilson claimed he was interested in a democratic peace, which for Du Bois meant the possibility of decolonization: the second point was Du Bois mistaken notion that patriotism might lead to civil rights concessions from the US government. His political stance in support of Woodrow Wilson was a tactical maneuver on his part and was an attempt to 
play US against German imperialism in the interest of gaining time for and 
 strengthening the position of the anti-colonial forces in Africa and the anti-racists in 
the US. Furthermore, Du Bois’ stance after the war at the Versailles Peace 
 Conference is significant. Again his stance was a consistently anti-colonial position, 
geared to use the contradictions between European colonial powers and their 
weakened position after the war to advance the cause of African freedom. At this 
 stage he indeed harbored illusions about the possible role of the US as an ally of the 
 African struggle. And it should be remembered in evaluating Du Bois’ position that 
 right at the moment of the Versailles Conference he called the First Pan African Congress in Paris, dedicated to the joint struggle and liberation of Africans and their 
 descendants in the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean.

David Levering Lewis evaluates DuBois’ “African Roots” as “one of the analytical 
 triumphs of the early twentieth century.” He goes on to contextualize the work in the following manner:

Du Bois poured into it his mature ideas about capitalism, class and 
 race…The essay opened with a novel proposition–that, ‘in a very real 
 sense’ Africa was the prime cause of the World War. Using a quotation 
 from Pliny as his text–’Semper novi quid ex Africa’ (‘Africa is always 
 producing something new’)–DuBois passed in kaleidoscopic review the 
 ravages of African history from earliest times to the European 
 Renaissance, Stanely’s two-year charge from the source of the Congo 
 River to its mouth in 1879, the partition five years later of the continent 
 at the Berlin Conference, and the miasma of Christianity and commerce 
 suffocating indigenous cultures and kingdoms. European hegemony 
 based on technological superiority had produced the ‘color line’, which 
 became ‘in the world’s thought synonymous with inferiority…Africa was 
 another name for bestiality and barbarism.’ The color line paid huge 
 dividends, and DuBois described the ‘lying treaties , rivers of rum, 
 murder, assassination, rape and torture’ excused in the name of racial 
 superiority with his staple power and imagery.

Du Bois posited that finance capital had produced mutually exclusive and competing 
 economic spheres controlled by differing imperialist nations for the sake of 
 exploiting peoples and natural resources. A situation which would inevitably cause 
world war. He makes a crucial discovery concerning the nation, bourgeois nationalism 
 and white supremacy. He argued that bourgeois democracy, big power nationalism 
 and imperialism went hand in glove. And that the democracy of the imperialist 
 bourgeoisie was but a mechanism for its expansion and a cover for its barbarity. 
 Bourgeois rhetoric about democracy and the so-called common interests of workers 
 and capitalists was but a ploy Du Bois argued, to win labor to the so-called national 
 interest as defined by imperialism. Du Bois put it bluntly, “it is the nation, a new 
democratic nation composed of united capital and labor,” where “[t]he white 
 workingman has been asked to share the spoils of exploiting ‘chinks and niggers’.” 
 Even though labor’s percentage of the gross was minimal, its ‘equity is recognized.’ 
 What Lenin proposed, however, and which was not present in Du Bois’s analysis, 
 was the concept of a labor aristocracy, a bought off section of labor leaders who 
 actually did share in the spoils, at the expense of the interests of the labor 
movement.Du Bois in Black Reconstruction put forward the idea of a psychological wage for being white, that often compensated the white working man for not benefitting directly from colonialism and racis. He called this “a wage for whitenesss”.

More, the nation, its political, economic and cultural 
 resources were transformed into a mechanism of imperialist expansion and war. 
 However, as a result the nation itself is spoiled, corrupted and destroyed as 
monopolies become transnational corporation. The working class is for the 
 imperialist bourgeoisie nothing by fodder for its wars to control the world. In this 
sense Lenin’s concept of capitalist social relations being overripe for revolution 
carries with it Marx’s warning made with respect to the class struggle in France, that 
 when a revolutionary situation is in place and neither of the major classes is able to 
win a circumstance leading to the `destruction of all classes’ is possible. It is this 
ruin of nations and classes by imperialism that Du Bois saw. World Wars are but 
 its most horrific expression.

The lasting strength of Du Bois’ analysis , however, was how he understood the 
 `scramble for Africa’ as the central cause of World War I. And how this scramble imparted an irreversible and overriding racist nature to the colonial 
 system and imperialism in general. Therefore, World War I had a racist imprint. 
Du Bois’ understanding of the historical evolution of European bourgeois nationalism 
 and his recognition that it in substance had become a racist nationalism is of lasting 
significance as well. This feature would take on its most extreme forms with the rise of 
Nazism in Germany.

Black Reconstruction which appeared almost twenty years after “The African 
 Roots of the War” in essence is an extension of the Du Boisian understanding of the class-race dialectic, and thus a fundamental contribution to the development of 
 Marxism and Black radical thought. It was conceived not only as a scholarly study, but as a theoretical 
 justification of the possibilities of socialism, and what he called the “dictatorship of the black proletariat” in several southern states. The study is an examination of the 
 period after the Civil War when the forces of democracy were hegemonic in the 
 former states of the Confederacy. Du Bois suggests this was the most democratic 
period not only in the history of the South, but of the nation. He insists under 
 the right conditions the democratic remaking of the South could have possibly gone 
 over to the dictatorship of the proletariat. He felt that this could have sparked a socialist revolution throughout 
the nation. He, thus, saw the Civil War, the overturning of slavery and the period of 
 Reconstruction as a single revolutionary period, with Reconstruction constituting a 
 revolutionary democratic situation pregnant with deeper revolutionary possibilities. 


A crucial feature of his thesis was the centrality of the African American question to 
 democracy and the class struggle. While Black Reconstruction focused upon the 
 pre-imperialist stage of capitalist development in the US, when combined with the 
earlier “The African Roots of the War” a single logic is apparent. That logic is based 
upon Du Bois’ notion of the fundamental nature of the unity of the labor movement and class struggle 
and the struggles against racial oppression and colonialism. The political conclusions from these two basic 
works are first, that the labor movement and the struggles 
against racism and colonialism share similar interests and are central to the struggles for democracy and 
 socialism; second, the imperialist stage of capitalist development ushers in a new 
 epoch where the anti-colonial struggle assumes a larger role in the fight for peace, democracy 
 and socialism; and third, that Great Power nationalism leads to the ruin of nations 
and peoples and to war. These ideas would be further developed in Color And 
Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945) and The World and Africa (1947).

Du Bois’ scientific work presents a single line of 
 philosophical-theoretical-ideological development, albeit with zig-zags. Nonetheless, Du Bois’ radicalism is congealed by the end of the second decade of the 20th century in a radical theoretical-ideological stance. 
 His radicalism theorizing was creative, empirically and historically grounded, taking into account the specific 
 conditions of US capitalism. Perhaps more than any thinker of his time he
 saw the profound significance of racism and colonial oppression in the development 
 of capitalism and how the struggles against racism and colonialism are central to the 
fight for democracy and revolution.

THE NIAGARA MOVEMENT 


Du Bois was an initiator, participant in and leader of many organizations, magazines, journals and mass movements. The Niagara 
 Movement, the NAACP, Pan Africanism, and the Council on African Affairs, the Stockholm Peace Appeal and the World Peace Council are 
 high points of his organizational activity. Besides which he founded, published and 
 edited any number of journals and magazines, The Moon, The Horizon, Phylon, 
 and the most successful of his publishing and editing careers The Crisis, the magazine of 
 the NAACP, which he founded and edited for over twenty five years. What is crucial in understanding DuBois as a leader of mass movements is how his 
 ideological positions animated and interacted with his organizational activity. From 
 this standpoint the major debates and polemics he waged with leaders within the 
African American struggle, such as the ones with Booker T. Washington and 
 Marcus Garvey, are central.

The DuBois-Booker T. Washington debate which begins at the start of the 20th century, rages until Washington’s death in 1915, defined the terms of the African 
 American struggle. Washington assumed the mantle of “leader of the race” after the 
death of Frederick Douglass in 1895. Washington became known as the `Great 
 Accommodator’, because of his willingness to accommodate the aspirations of 
 Black folk to the reemergence to power of the former slave owners. The terms of the great compromise was expressed in the slogan “Duty without 
 Rights”. Rather than fight for the right to vote and other civil rights, the obligation 
 of Blacks was to serve whites and subordinate themselves to the Southern ruling class. 
 Eventually whites would reward our service by granting us rights. In the 
 meantime, Washington urged Blacks to `put your buckets down where you are’. 
 Washington’s deal was a Faustian Bargain–an agreement with the devil. Du Bois’ 
 The Souls of Black Folk answered the liberal and conservative racists and Booker T. 
 Washington’s accommodation to them.. It is here that Du Bois proclaimed that `The 
Problem of the Twentieth century is the problem of the color line’.
Its historical context is the defeat of Reconstruction and the pushing of Blacks back towards a new form of enslavement and the crisis for liberal democracy occasioned by the failure to resolve the race problem. The two main targets were neo-racism, the 
 so-called liberal racism of monopoly capitalism, and Booker T. Washington 
 accomodationist line. The two were political ideological bedfellows; each cross fertilized the other.
The Souls of Black Folk was for the struggle of the African American people what The Communist Manifesto was for the class struggle in Europe in the mid 19th 
 century and the Declaration of Independence was for the American revolutionaries. 
It, however, suffered from a failure to address the class question. A problem 
addressed head on by Du Bois a year after its publication. At a public speech on Des 
Moines Iowa he insisted that the color line “was but the sign of growing class privilege and caste distinction in America, and not, as some fondly imagine, the 
 cause of it. (quote taken from Lewis: 313)” Having said this the overriding question 
 for DuBois remained the color line and Booker T. Washington’s accommodation to 
 it.

The Souls of Black Folk and the color line
 is further illuminated by placing alongside DuBois’ John Brown. By the 
turn of the century DuBois had certainly concluded that to overturn the new system 
 of segregation and racism would require a renewed revolutionary struggle and 
 certainly the loss of blood. In this respect DuBois saw himself continuing the line of 
 struggle of Nat Turner, Denmark Vessey, Harriet Tubman, Soujouner Truth and 
 Frederick Douglass. The Souls his then a call to arms, not a call to vote, even if 
 Black folk had the franchise. Its essence is revolutionary and democratic, not as 
some contend cultural nationalist. As with the anti-slavery struggle DuBois 
 understood that Black people would need white allies. Hence the example of John Brown. As he put it in the opening of the book:

John Brown worked not simply for Black Men– he worked with them; 
 and he was a companion of their daily life, knew their faults and virtues 
 and felt, as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot. 
 The story of John Brown , then , cannot be complete unless due 
 emphasis is given this. And then Du Bois observed, “He came to them on a plane of perfect equality..” 


John Brown became an archetype of the white ally, the anti-racist, the white 
 revolutionary. It appears at the very time the NAACP was being formed and can be 
 considered a guidepost for what the Blacks in the Niagara Movement would expect 
 of their white allies in the NAACP.

By the summer of 1905 a cadre of radical African American democrats, many 
college educated and professionals, arrived at the conclusion that it now rested upon 
 their shoulders to strike the first blow on behalf of the freedom of their people. A 
 Call for the convening of a conference to begin “organized determination and 
 aggressive action on the part of men who believe in Negro freedom and growth”, to 
 open July 10 in Canada (on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls). The 
 conference began what became known as the Niagara Movement. Thirty nine men 
 made up the first conference. Journalist Monroe Trotter and Du Bois drafted the Declaration 
of Principles. It declared, “we refuse to allow the impression to remain that the 
 Negro American assents to inferiority…that he is submissive under oppression and 
 apologetic before insults. Through helplessness we may submit, but the voice of 
 protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows, 
 so long as America is unjust.” They called for an all-sided assault upon racism and 
inequality where ever it was to be found, including the policies of the Samuel 
Gompers led American Federation of Labor for the practice of “proscribing and boycotting and oppressing 
 thousands of their fellow-toilers, simply because they are black.” Proclaiming the 
beginning of a new era of protest they spoke in words that resonated 
throughout the century. “The Negro race in America stolen, ravished and degraded, struggling up 
through difficulties and oppression, needs sympathy and receives 
 criticism; needs help and is given hinderance, needs protection and is 
given mob-violence, needs justice and is given charity, needs leadership 
 and is given cowardice and apology, needs bread and is given a stone. This nation will never stand justified before God until these things are 
changed.” 


Symbolic of the identification of the Niagara Movement with the nation’s 
revolutionary and abolitionist past was the holding of the second conference in 
 Harper’s Ferry West Virginia to celebrate “the 100th anniversary of John Brown’s birth, and the 50th jubilee of the battle of Osawatomie.” The sharpening repression against African Americans 
 which was dramatically demonstrated in the Atlanta riots of 1906, deepened 
 Du Bois’ radicalism. In 1907 he assumed the editorship of a new magazine named 
 The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line. In its second issue Du Bois declared 
 his faith in socialism. He was, as he put it, a “socialist-of -the-path”. The natural 
 allies of Black folk were, he declared, not “the rich, but the poor, not the great, but 
 the masses, not the employer, but the employees.” He believed that America was 
 approaching a time when railroads, coal mines, and many factories can and ought 
 be run by the public for the public.” And he asserted, “the one great hope of the 
 Negro American” is socialism. The Niagara movement would convene annually 
until 1910, when it was superseded by the more broadly based civil rights 
 organization the NAACP. Most of those in the Niagara Movement joined the new 
 organization, with Du Bois becoming a member of its executive board and editor of 
 it monthly journal The Crisis. The Niagara Movement is the predecessor to the 
NAACP. The origins of the NAACP, therefore, are in the 1905 Niagara 
 Conference. Monroe Trotter and Ida Welles Barnett, radicals from the Niagara 
 Movement and socialist like DuBois and Mary White Ovington joined with liberal 
 anti-racist like Joel A. Spingarn and Oswald Villard to form a broader and larger 
 organization. Nevertheless the Niagara Movement left an indelible mark on future 
 struggles. Its most important achievement was that it gave an organized form to the 
 left and socialist forces within the African community, who were prepared to take 
 on Booker T. Washington and his backers. By so doing they laid the basis for a 
 new level of unity against racism. By rekindling the fires of protest they 
 established that freedom would only be achieved through struggle; realizing in life 
 the dictum of the great Frederick Douglass, “Without struggle there is no progress, there never has been and there never will be.”

As the executive secretary of the Niagara Movement Du Bois proved himself an 
able organizer. Added to his proven skills as a scholar, journalist, propagandist, 
 editor and publisher, he stood as a potent force and invaluable resource in his 
 peoples struggle and a force which would have to be reckoned with by all sides.

THE NAACP


As the first decade of the century moved to a close Du Bois’ concept of the alliance 
 between the African American people and labor , between racism and class 
exploitation deepened. In the interest of advancing this strategic notion and while 
 keeping heat on Booker T. Washington he attacked the “color-blindness” of certain 
 left liberals and socialists. The philosopher John Dewey, for instance, held that racism 
deprived society of social capital. This instrumentalist explanation made no mention of 
 the denial of the vote and other civil rights to Blacks. Eugene V. Debs, the nation’s 
leading socialist, articulated the view that the Socialist Party could not “make 
 separate appeals to all races…” “There is,” he stated, “no `Negro problem’ apart 
 from the general labor problem.” After the 1912 presidential election, where Debs 
got over 1 million votes, Du Bois would declare, `the magnificent Debs’, as he called 
 him, wrong. “The Negro problem, then, is the great test of the American socialists.”

As Booker Washington became more reactionary Du Bois and his allies became more merciless in 
their attacks upon his program. Washington, he insisted, was the past, the Niagara 
Movement the future. He tied the `Great Accommodator’ to monopoly capital. 
 Accommodationism, Du Bois argued, was submission pure and simple. “The vested 
 interest”, DuBois wrote in May 1910, “who so largely support Mr. Washington’s program are to a large extent men who wish to raise in the South a body of black 
 laboring men who can be used as clubs to keep white laborers from demanding too much.”

With helping found the NAACP Du Bois for the first time became a full time 
 employee of an organization other than a college or university. As Levering Lewis 
 put it, “The problem of the twentieth century impelled him from mobilizing racial 
data to becoming the prime mobilizer of a race.(408)” Du Bois’ imprint was 
 considerable upon the organization from its outset. The name itself bares the 
 imprint of DuBois’s worldview. Rather than having Negro or black in its name the 
 new organization used the term colored, because as Du Bois saw things the 
 Association should fight the color line on a world scale and thus fight for the rights 
of all peoples of color and all victims of racism and colonialism. Du Bois would 
became the editor of the NAACP’s journal, named (and once again reflecting his 
 ideological impact on the new organization) The Crisis: A Record of the Darker 
Races. No one could have predicted the success and impact of the journal. It 
 eventually would reach over 150,000 African American households, becoming the 
main instrument for forming Black opinion. It manifested Du Bois’ militant brand of journalism. The Crisis, according to Levering Lewis, traced its roots from 
 Frederick Douglass’s North Star, and William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator back to 
 North America’s first newspaper published by person’s of African descent, Samuel 
Eli Cornish and John Russwurm’s Freedom Journal.

However, while the terrain of struggle had shifted the essence had not. The decline 
of Booker Washington had shifted the terms of the fight. On the horizon was World 
 War, President Woodrow Wilson’s drive to make the world safe for imperialism 
with a democratic face, the rise of the nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose aim was to 
extend the program of Booker Washington to Africa and the Caribbean, the 
appearance of the `New Negro’–a movement of militant Black artists and intellectuals– and 
 significantly for the development of Du Bois’ world view,the Russian Revolution 
 and the rise of the world communist and national liberation movements. In the face of 
 these events, pregnant with danger and enormous possibilities, Du Bois’ direction 
was clear–everything to the front of struggle for African American freedom.

His greatest battles within the NAACP were with white and Black liberals who 
 preached caution and compromise. DuBois’ militant anti-imperialism and Pan Africanism and support 
 for the Russian Revolution made the liberals uncomfortable. He became after 1919 
 the central figure in the rise of the Pan African Movement which linked the struggle 
for African American rights to the struggle for African independence. This movement became 
 another way of fighting the `color line’ on a world scale. He used the The Crisis to 
 assail lynchings, police brutality, the rise of the KKK and pogroms against African 
 Americans. In one editorial he excoriated Jim Crow mob`justice’, where Black men 
were regularly lynched in the North and South on trumped up charges of raping 
 white women. DuBois declared the crime of Black men was their blackness. 
 “Blackness” he said, “is the crime of crimes… It is therefore necessary, as every 
 white scoundrel in the nation knows, to let slip no opportunity of punishing this 
 crime of crimes.” Reflecting the rising spirit of resistance, Du Bois would editorially 
 declare in The Crisis, “But let every black American gird his loins. The great day is 
 coming. We have crawled and pleaded for justice and we have been cheerfully spit 
upon and murdered and burned. We will not endure it forever.” And than the words 
 that would inspire Claude McKay’s revolutionary poem, DuBois demanded, “If we 
 must die, in God’s name let us perish like men and not like bales of hay.”

Going beyond what liberals, pro-capitalists and `respectable’ civil rights leaders 
 could stomach, Du Bois linked his calls for militant, even armed, resistance, to racist violence to anti-imperialism and internationalism. His Pan Africanism was, 
 therefore, qualitatively different from Garvey’s pro-imperialist big business oriented 
 version. Garvey was mainly interested in business contacts and relationships with 
 Africa and was at best only inconsistently anti-colonial. Yet, for millions of African 
Americans who faced the rise of racism in the late teens, for whom the North, 
 rather than the promised land, was more of the same old Jim Crow, now occurring 
in large city ghettos, Garvey’s calls for self improvement and self uplift through 
 hard work were appealing. For Du Bois after the rhetoric was swept aside Garvey 
was proposing more submission and acceptance of oppression here in the US and in Africa.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND IMPERIALIST WAR 


The World War and the Russian Revolution were united as part of a single cloth in 
 DuBois’s world view. The War represented the fact that the greed of the capitalist 
 class had plunged Europe into chaos, occasioning a profound European 
 civilizational crisis, with more long term meaning than the War itself or the 
 economic depression which followed it. As he put it, Western civilization had met 
 its Waterloo. He lectured the US ruling class concerning its racist double standard. ” 
The civilization by which America insists on measuring us and to which we must 
 conform our natural tastes and inclinations” he insisted, “is the daughter of that 
 European civilization which is now rushing furiously to its doom.” And he impatiently proclaimed that as soon as the stinking edifices of racism and class 
 exploitation crumble, the sooner the world would be bathed “in a golden hue that 
 harks back to the heritage of Africa and the tropics.” Imperialism, he demanded, 
 had consumed European civilization transforming it into its opposite and 
 demeaning its humanity. Civilization was looking more and more like barbarism.

As Woodrow Wilson was proclaimed his `Fourteen Freedoms’ which under US 
 tutelage was to make the `world safe for democracy’, African Americans were 
 being lynched and massacred from the Black Belt South, to East St. Louis and the 
 South Side of Chicago. Once again Du Bois warned the nation, and the ruling class 
in particular, “We are perfectly well aware that the outlook for us is not 
 encouraging…We, the American Negroes, are the acid test for occidental 
civilization. If we perish we perish.” And in the most stern language he warned, 
 “But when we fall, we shall fall like Samson, dragging inevitably with us the pillars of a nation’s democracy.” Racism, thus, could not, and he would not, view it as a 
 `Negro problem’, if not solved it would destroy the nation.

Du Bois increasingly viewed the Russian Revolution as the opposite of racism, 
 exploitation, war and the civilizational crisis they propelled. He viewed the Russian 
 Revolution as creating the material bases to create a global emancipatory alliance of 
 Russia and the darker races. A position not that far from the strategic thinking of 
 Lenin who urged the Communist to support the revolutions in the Third World 
 because here was imperialism’s weak link. Lenin highlighted India and China and foresaw an alliance of Soviet Russia, India and China as 
 constituting the majority of the planet’s population and thus main specific weight of 
 the world revolutionary process. Du Bois would propose that a belief in humanity 
 “means a belief in colored men.” and that “The future world will, in all reasonable probability, be what colored men make it.” His position on the civilizational dimensions of racism began to take form in an 
 article published in 1919 entitled “The Souls of White Folk”. He argued 
that “Those in whose minds the paleness of their bodily skins is fraught with 
 tremendous and eternal significance” had foisted a unique racial perversion upon 
 humankind. He insisted, as he challenged the racist view of history, that in 
the sweep of history the achievements of white folk were as recent as yesterday. He condemned as tragicomic arrogance, a joke were its consequences not so 
 horrible, the presumption that “whiteness alone is candy to the world child.” This 
 tragicomic view of world history undergird both liberal and conservative racists and 
 was part of the ideological arsenal of Presidents and KKKers.

The Russian Revolution for Du Bois was contextualized within broad civilizational 
 terms. He embraced after his first visit there in 1926. Upon his return from his first trip to the 
 Soviet Union he declared, “If what I have seen is Bolshevism than I am a 
 Bolshevik.” The fate of humankind rested with the success or failure of the 
 Communist in Russia to consolidate their revolution. In this endeavor they deserved 
 the support of all fighters against the color line. This stance he maintained until his 
death.

DU BOIS AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES 


Gerald Horne indicates that Du Bois’ relationships with the CPUSA was of long 
 standing and thoroughly principled. Du Bois was friendly with James W. Ford the 
African American Communist who ran for Vice President of the United States in 1932 on the ticket with 
party chairman William Z. Foster. He was also friendly with Foster whom he lent 
 books to, as Horne tells us, one on Haiti, for Foster’s ‘complex historical studies” 
 which Du Bois praised highly. “But the comrade to whom Du Bois probably had the 
closest relationship was Foster’s ideological compatriot, the Amherst and 
 Harvard-trained lawyer, Ben Davis. (306)” It was this close relationship that 
naturally brought Du Bois to the forefront in the struggle to defend Communist 
 during the Cold War and Mc Carthyism. In fact, there are few who did more than Du Bois to campaign 
 against the imprisonment and political harassment of Eugene Dennis , Ben Davis, Gus Hall, Henry Winston, 
George Meyer, William L. Patterson, James Jackson and others. George Meyers’ wife, for example, was highly appreciative of how positively Du Bois’ writings had affected her jailed husband (Horne:302). According to Horne, “Du Bois’ formal casting of his lot with the Communist 
 was not an aberration(296). Neither was it an aberration or a radical departure from 
logic of his ideological and political trajectories.

US imperialism’s drive to turn the twentieth century into the `American Century’ 
 did not cause Du Bois to retreat, but “to deepen his study of 
 Marxism-Leninism”–even though he was than in his eighties (Horne:289). And 
 while Du Bois had done a thorough study of Marx in the 1930′s and produced one 
of the great Marxist classics by 1935, by 1954 he was “reading again Lenin’s 
 Imperialism” and searching for the “best logical follow-up of his argument (Horne:ibid).”

In his letter to Gus Hall requesting membership in the Communist Party of the 
 USA, “on this first day of October” 1961, he openly acknowledged past differences 
 with the Party on “tactics in the case of the Scottsboro boys and their advocacy of 
a Negro state”. That aside he declared, “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to 
 self-destruction. Communism…this is the only way of human life. It is a 
 difficult and hard end to reach–it has and will make mistakes. On this 
first day of October 1961, I am applying for admission to membership in 
the Communist Party of the United States.” 


THE LEGACY AND MESSAGE 


Dr. James E. Jackson, close friend of DuBois and former leader and theoretician of 
 the Communist Party, summarized the life of Du Bois thusly, “W.E.B. DuBois, the scholar and scientist, was equally a man of action. He chose 
to keep the banners and goals of full equal rights flying from the halyard of 
 principle, no matter the difficulties and hardships.” Of Du Bois’ “lasting testament” 
 Jackson declares, “His last historic deed was to dramatize his firm conviction that `capitalist 
society is altogether evil.’ He concluded that to finally solve the problem 
 of racism, to really solve the problem of poverty, and to secure peace to 
the world’s peoples, humankind must, sooner or later, come to the 
 conclusion that this old structure is beyond effective reform.” ” W.E.B Du Bois”, he continued, ” was a great fighter for the people, a true scientist, thinker 
 and humanist. He held aloft a bright torch of poetic inspiration that 
lightens the way and illuminates the path of all who struggle for freedom. The questions that Du Bois posed and dealt with along the way of a long 
 and arduous life of unceasing service and dedication to the cause of 
 people’s progress will find resolution on the path that he chose, the route 
of the great humanists and social scientists,the Marxists. (Political Affairs, July ,1989,5)

W.E.B Du Bois is our future. To understand his life and legacy is to 
 take hold of and understand our future. To be indifferent to it 
is to considerably weaken our ability to fight for and realize 
 humanity’s, and Black folk’s, democratic, peaceful and 
socialist future.

“History cannot ignore W.E.B. DuBois,” 
 Martin Luther King insisted. In the end we are called on to heed the words of Dr. King who in celebrating 
 the 100th anniversary of Du Bois’ birth in February 1968 declared,
” We cannot talk of Dr Du Bois without recognizing 
 that he was a radical all of his life. Some people 
 would like to ignore the fact that he was a 
Communist in his later years. It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed th support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and 
 corresponded with him freely. In contemporary life the English-speaking world has no difficulty 
with the fact that Sean O’Casey was a literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist or 
that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the 
greatest living poet though he also served in the 
Chilean Senate as a Communist. It is time to cease 
muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and 
chose to be a Communist. Our obsessive 
 anti-communism has led us into too many 
 quagmires.”

At the close of the 20th century the radical and scientific legacies of W.E.B Du Bois are strategic as we with all of humanity attempt to resolve the problems and crises of humanity and the modern age.