MIM Notes #225     January 1, 2001

W.E.B. Du Bois: Remembering the Great Trailblazer

David Levering Lewis
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 
1919-1963
NY, NY: Henry Holt & Company, 2000, 715 pp. h.b.
Adolph L. Reed Jr.
W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the 
Color Line
NY, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997, 282 pp.

reviewed by MC5, December 4, 2000

David Levering Lewis has published part II of a mammoth work on 
W.E.B. DuBois, the seminal Black leader of the NAACP (National 
Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the first 
secretary of the first and chief organizer of subsequent Pan-
Africanist Congress meetings. Although Lewis has his own agenda of 
which we are not certain, there is no doubt that he has drawn 
well-deserved attention to W.E.B. DuBois, who has influenced much 
of this century's thought including much of MIM's. To a lesser 
extent, Reed who has one of the better post-modern agendas also 
brings Du Bois alive for academic readers.

World War I 

Lewis resumes his two part biography of Du Bois in 1919, when Du 
Bois's opinions about World War I were still very much at issue. 
As MIM reported before in MIM Theory #10, Du Bois made a huge 
error in backing the U.$. side of World War I by urging Blacks to 
join the military and pay with blood for the chance to be whitened 
bone-white.

Du Bois's opinions were important at the time, because in 1918 his 
periodical "The Crisis" had a circulation of 100,000 
people.(Lewis, p. 4) MIM informs readers that rarely have 
communists in the U$A achieved such circulation except at brief 
moments, and the population of the United $tates was much smaller 
at the time of Du Bois's 52nd birthday. No other Black leader was 
so well-known.

From reading Lewis's book, we learn that Du Bois's mistake of 
World War I was repaid several times over by mistakes of younger 
leaders who split from him. In his final autobiography, Du Bois 
says he is unsure of whether he was right to enter World War I and 
attempt to join military intelligence. From reading Lewis's book, 
we learn Du Bois's stance on World War I was at the root of Du 
Bois's split with Marcus Garvey and other radical or progressive 
Blacks, who saw nothing of value in siding with one colonialist 
bloc over another.

In his final autobiography, Du Bois informs readers that he is 
telling it as he would like readers to know it. In the 
autobiography, Du Bois makes light of his split with Marcus 
Garvey. Lewis attempts to correct the impressions left by the 
autobiography by giving much more space to 1) the political 
competition with Garvey and the communists 2) romantic affairs of 
Du Bois the "Casanova" 3) academic power struggles 4) power 
struggles within the NAACP over Du Bois's role and leadership.

Garvey met Du Bois in 1916 and initially appears to have regarded 
Du Bois as a leader worthy of respect despite what Garvey said 
later about Du Bois.(Lewis, p. 51) Garvey, anti-lynching womyn 
activist Ida Wells-Barnett and Monroe Trotter then turned against 
Du Bois in 1918 after his July, 1918 "Close Ranks" editorial that 
was the biggest mistake of Du Bois's first half of life. 

Unfortunately as is so often the case, the younger leader Garvey 
attacked Du Bois over World War I, but he did not have the 
intellectual direction to truly replace what Du Bois had provided. 
While posing as more radical than Du Bois, once the split 
occurred, Garvey found himself unable to sustain his radicalism as 
consistently as Du Bois. Garvey ended up veering in all 
directions, first approving Bolshevism, then opposing Bolshevism 
and appearing at KKK concerts, supporting anti-Semitism and 
hailing Mussolini.(Lewis, p. 81, 83) Marcus Garvey was a talented 
motivator of people and Lewis correctly raises the "what if" 
wondering how history would have been different had Du Bois 
managed to work with Garvey more closely.

Du Bois calculated in a pragmatist way and made a mistake. It cost 
a generation of support that went to the Garveyite movement and it 
cost the Amerikan communist movement its ability to come to grips 
with the white working class in a Marxist way much earlier than it 
did. On the plus side, the Black people learned through historical 
and collective practice in World War I, that integrationism -- 
even just in the army -- would not work.

The split with Garvey and the other more minor splits of the time 
are a warning to those petty-bourgeois intellectuals constantly 
pressuring MIM to "tone it down" in a pragmatist way. When the 
middle-class succeeds in exerting pressure on would-be proletarian 
leaders to "tone it down," the truly oppressed in society will 
simply turn somewhere else. In the end, it is the truly oppressed 
who have the views and needs that move society forward.

Russian Revolution

Du Bois moved toward a more and more favorable view of Lenin's 
Russian Revolution of 1917. By 1925 he had decided that the 
revolution was on the whole a good thing. (Lewis, p. 197) Of 
course, much of what he said the enemy called "Bolshevik" anyway. 
In this sense, Du Bois's fate was always linked to the Russian 
Revolution.

By 1926, Du Bois said that from his own tentative investigation in 
the Soviet Union that "'I am a Bolshevik.'" He had definitely 
concluded that having some Black capitalists to exploit Blacks 
would not be a solution to the problems of the Black and African 
peoples.(p. 203) It can be fairly said that given the failure of 
liberal integrationism, this last analytical point guaranteed that 
Du Bois would become increasingly Marxist with age, no matter what 
people said about the white working class. By the early 1930s, Du 
Bois was claiming that he had one of the largest private library 
collections of "scientific socialism" in the United $tates. 
(Lewis, p. 263) In 1931, he started systematically going over the 
ideas of communism in his NAACP newsletter "The Crisis."(Lewis, p. 
262)

Du Bois's willingness to leave the NAACP in 1934 if it did not 
continue on his radical path traces to the fact that "'We have not 
made the slightest impress on the determination of the 
overwhelming mass of white Americans to treat Negroes as 
men.'"(Lewis, p. 341) For this reason, Du Bois increasingly 
advocated communist nationalist positions for Black people: 
Liberalism and its strategy of integrationism had failed in 
practice. The Russian Revolution loomed larger in that context.

W. E. B. Du Bois and MIM's third cardinal principle on the white 
labor aristocracy

Du Bois was a far-seeing persyn looking at the overall situation 
of oppression in the world in a scientific way. Contrary to common 
narrow nationalist opinions, Du Bois often believed that other 
people were more oppressed than Black people in certain contexts. 
Having witnessed first-hand treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, Du 
Bois said he had seen nothing worse in his life, despite having 
"'seen much.'"(Lewis, p. 398) During World War II, he took the 
Soviet side, but he signed a petition against the internment of 
Japanese-Americans.(Lewis, p. 470) When it came to his essay 
"China," in his autobiography, he believed that the revolution had 
delivered China from 2000 years of oppression worse than Black 
slavery.

Du Bois spoke of race often but correctly denied that there was a 
scientific definition of it, especially in terms of inherited 
characteristics.(Lewis, p. 455) Not surprisingly, in 1958, when he 
was 90, and before the Sino-Soviet split was public, Du Bois 
advised his disciples including Kwame Nkrumah that their closest 
bonds with white people were with the white people of the Soviet 
bloc. Previously he had already noted as early as 1893 that the 
peasants of Hungary were more oppressed than Black serfs.(1) Thus, 
in no sense can Du Bois's cries against the white working-class be 
considered those of a narrow nationalist, spending too much time 
navel-gazing. Du Bois was a well-traveled and cosmopolitan persyn 
studying and trying various ideologies.

Although Du Bois made a huge practical mistake in World War I, 
once the U.$. military kicked him out before he could be of 
service, and while Blacks in the military found that they were not 
accepted as true citizens despite their sacrifices, Du Bois 
arrived at the same conclusions as Lenin. "What distinguished Du 
Bois's analysis ... [was] its cogency in exposing the paramount 
factor of racism in selling imperial expansion to the white 
working classes. It was plain as day to modern white civilization 
that the 'white working classes cannot much longer be maintained,' 
he contended. 'But there is a loophole.' In places beyond the Suez 
Canal where 'no labor unions or votes or questioning onlookers or 
inconvenient consciences' existed--'where 'niggers' are cheap and 
the earth is rich' -- Europe and America could rack up profits 
sufficient 'not simply to the very rich, but to the middle class 
and to the laborers.'"(Lewis, p. 15)

All along it was Du Bois trying to inject some reality into 
Marxism with regard to white workers. At every step so-called 
Marxists resisted his teachings, usually in the name of political 
unity and without reference to the labor theory of value. Today 
MIM asserts categorically that what Du Bois was talking about was 
the true Marxism taking shape in his day that became more and more 
true with each passing year. His opponents were unable to apply 
Marxism to concrete conditions and merely applied over and over 
again rote formulas they never understood. The crux of the problem 
is that few so-called Marxists understood what would happen when 
the surplus-value flooded into the imperialist countries from the 
exploited nations in ever larger quantities.

Already in 1920, in his essay, "The Souls of White Folk," Du Bois 
learned from concrete experience, and before any serious reading 
of Marxism, that World War I was foreshadowed by the phony 
socialists, today called "social-democrats" who sided with their 
own governments in World War I in Europe. World War I's brutality 
according to Du Bois "had been foreshadowed when in Germany and 
America 'international' Socialists had all but read yellow and 
black men out of the kingdom of industrial justice. Subtly had 
they been bribed, but effectively: Were they not lordly whites and 
should they not share in the spoils of rape? High wages in the 
United States and England might be the skillfully manipulated 
result of slavery in Africa and of peonage in Asia." (2) 

It is MIM's third cardinal principle and Du Bois which concretely 
link Marxism to Pan-Africanism. Progressive Pan-Africanism and 
Maoism are linked across the bridge of Du Bois. We invite 
progressive Pan-Africanists to join us in the struggle to rescue 
Marxism for its original purpose on behalf of the international 
proletariat.

In no way does Du Bois deserve the fate of being claimed by the 
"CP-USA" of today. One need only read a few pages into his 
autobiography of his 90th year of life written 1958-59 and 
slightly revised in 1960 to see the whole second chapter lay down 
his line on imperialism, which is the same as MIM's: "There is no 
European labor party ready to help emancipate the workers of Asia 
and Africa. On the contrary, all are willing to take higher wages 
based on colonial profits; and to fight wars waged to defend those 
profits. Back of this attitude of Western Europe is the United 
States: ready with funds to help Europe; ready to assist any 
European power to keep control of colonial peoples, or to supplant 
it as a colonial ruler."(3)

W.E.B. Du Bois and MIM's first and second cardinal principles

Since Du Bois died before the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and 
was more of a contemporary of Lenin than of Mao, we cannot say Du 
Bois had a chance to agree with all our cardinal principles. On 
the other hand, he was definitely of our historical tradition and 
we can claim him as a forebear.

Although W.E.B. Du Bois stood for pictures with arch-revisionist 
Khruschev in the Soviet Union in 1958, that was before the split 
in the international communist movement became public knowledge. 
When told of Khruschev's slanderous attacks on Stalin, who died in 
1953, W.E.B. Du Bois did not budge from his position defending 
Stalin according to Lewis. (Lewis, pp. 557, 561) More importantly, 
Du Bois wrote a brief and favorable biography of Stalin. MIM finds 
it especially hypocritical that the "CP-USA" purged people for 
defending Stalin, but it never fails opportunistically to claim Du 
Bois's legacy, because Du Bois was more famous than any of the 
"CP-USA" leaders in the Gus Hall era.

Of note even in today's ongoing debate about China, Du Bois had 
this to say about Tibet in his "China" chapter of his 
autobiography as a first-hand witness. "Let 'Divine Slavery' 
persist in Tibet until China kills it. The truth is there and I 
saw it." He repeatedly mentioned slavery in Tibet and took the 
Chinese communists' side.(4) While he himself was near the border 
of Tibet, the historic and counterrevolutionary rebellion of 
Tibetan slaveowners broke out.

Mao's own assessment of Du Bois was high. He created a national 
holiday and organized demonstrations of greeting for Du Bois. When 
the two met, Du Bois confessed his mistakes for not taking up 
Marxism earlier and more thoroughly, but Mao said that Du Bois had 
never made a mistake because he had always kept fighting. "'You 
have continued the struggle for your people, for all the decent 
people of America.'"(Lewis, p. 564) As a trailblazer for Black 
people in many, many ways, Du Bois deserved this assessment from 
Mao, because Du Bois truly and sincerely learned from his struggle 
and studies, no matter if his struggles started in a non-communist 
way.

Du Bois's assessment of China was thus: "I have never seen a 
nation which so amazed and touched me as China in 1959."(4) Also 
he said, "I have seen the world. But never so vast and glorious a 
miracle as China."(5) Making self-criticism with regard to his 
previous criticisms of the Stalin-era Communist Party of the 
United States, Du Bois said, "it was not until I saw the miracle 
of modern China that I realized how splendidly and surely the 
world could be led by the working class; even if at times they 
wavered and made vast mistakes."(6) A few paragraphs earlier, Du 
Bois mentioned the exploitation of white workers starving during 
the Depression and in previous history.

Weaknesses of Lewis's and Reed's books

Readers will want to question why only 12 pages in Lewis's book 
cover all of the last five years of Du Bois's life. We could have 
used some more insight into Du Bois and the Sino-Soviet split or 
Du Bois and Pan-Africanism. Lewis makes it clear that he believes 
the brief treatment is a favor to Du Bois's memory as Lewis takes 
up the mistaken view in line with "communism is dead" that Du Bois 
moved too far "left" and was just cranky by that stage of life.

In passing, Lewis slams the Great Leap in China with standard 
bourgeois shibboleths.(Lewis, p. 563) Furthermore, Lewis tells us 
in passing that Trotsky was the "ablest intellectual"(Lewis, p. 
202) in the Soviet communist party after Lenin and like Trotsky, 
Lewis refers to the defenders of Stalin as "totalitarian." Here we 
get a whiff of the slight academicism in Lewis, so MIM cannot 
heartily back Lewis; even though Lewis educates readers 
extensively in important matters and the attention he brings to Du 
Bois is progressive, whatever Lewis's intentions. 

Lewis should have paid some attention to what Du Bois said about 
Trotsky in his biography of Stalin: "He [Stalin] early saw through 
the flamboyance and exhibitionism of Trotsky, who fooled the 
world, and especially America. The whole ill-bred and insulting 
attitude of Liberals in the U.S. today began with our naive 
acceptance of Trotsky's magnificent lying propaganda, which he 
carried around the world."(7)

One last point we will make is that Lewis lacks attention to 
feminist theory. It is not that he leaves out the womyn question 
throughout the book, not at all. However, his understanding is at 
the knee-jerk Christian individualist level, such that one gets 
the sense it would be impossible to be a man and have a biography 
written by Lewis that did not find some fault. We will only 
mention here that Du Bois received blame for his daughter's 
marrying a gay man, a disastrous marriage. Although it is true 
that Du Bois had the stature and children to play the traditional 
role of patriarch, the idea that he was at fault for his 
daughter's disastrous marriage ascribes a leadership role to Du 
Bois of questionable merit. Perhaps the truly feminist position 
would be that Du Bois's daughter and others had to recognize that 
father Du Bois did not and could not play the decisive role. 
Having a strong leadership role or feminist attitude does not 
guarantee the politics or happiness of one's children, unless we 
presume that children are the property and perfect reflection of 
their parents. Even a strong intellectual presence such as Du 
Bois's does not mean that people such as the daughter, have an 
excuse for their own decisions. We consider it an insult to 
Yolande to ascribe so little role to her that her father gets the 
blame for her marriage.(Lewis, p. 228) It is also a reflection on 
the poor level of theory in pseudo-feminist academe that the safe 
thing to do is for authors like Lewis to come up with some 
criticism or another of men's individual lifestyles with regard to 
gender. No academic gate-keepers will criticize Lewis for saying 
that Du Bois should have "tried harder" in his individual 
lifestyle and thus there is always an opportunist solution for 
biographical writers enabling avoidance of struggle over feminist 
theory.

With regard to Reed's book, we will not deny its progressive 
impact, but we will not mention it further. It is of interest to 
post-modernist academia. We will only say that we are thankful 
that as the book progresses, it increasingly pulls its readership 
toward putting its feet on the ground in a materialist way.

Conclusion

MIM had under-emphasized the life of W.E.B. Du Bois till the 
publication of part I of Lewis's biography and MIM's review in MIM 
Theory #10. Part of the reason for that was that Du Bois seemed to 
belong to the tradition of the phony "Communist Party USA" and 
while MIM was aware that Du Bois upheld Stalin, extricating him 
from the Gus Hall revisionists seemed an arduous task. 

Not long after the Supreme Court of the USA upheld a McCarthyite 
law (the McCarran Act), Du Bois applied for membership in the "CP-
USA," significantly, on the anniversary of China's revolution, 
October 1, 1961, at age 93.(Lewis, p. 567) Du Bois made his 
application from abroad and was never to return to the United 
$tates. The U.$. embassy in Ghana refused to renew his passport, 
so Du Bois became a Ghanian citizen at age 95, because his 
disciple Kwame Nkrumah was in power and hosting the end of Du 
Bois's life. 

Du Bois was underlying MIM's own positions all along and none of 
his major positions on Stalin, China, the white workers and the 
role of super-exploitation of the Third World fit in the phony 
"CP-USA." MIM vows henceforward to fight to rescue Du Bois from 
the fate of the late Gus Hall's party that claims his fame for its 
own, but ignores his political line.

ITAL The complete text of this review is on-line at 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/bookstore/offbooks.html. END

Notes:

1. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (NY: International 
Publishers, 1968), pp. 404, 25-6.

2. Eric J. Sundquist, ed., The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader (NY: 
Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 507.

3. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (NY: International 
Publishers, 1968), p. 21.

4. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (NY: International 
Publishers, 1968), p. 47.

5. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (NY: International 
Publishers, 1968), p. 53.

6. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (NY: International 
Publishers, 1968), p. 306.

7. Eric J. Sundquist, ed., The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader (NY: 
Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 288.