W.E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 is one of the greatest modern studies of revolution and counterrevolution. While it deserves its place alongside the classics, it is also an extraordinary example of a materialist and class analysis of race under capitalism. In recent years, the latter aspect of the book has been obscured and even denied. This essay seeks to restore Du Bois’s great work to its rightful place on both counts.

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

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

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

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

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  Deng Panyi

　　From:https://catalyst-journal.com/2022/06/black-reconstruction-as-class-war(Vol 6 No 1 Spring 2022)