But this is the essence of the deep class division between the revolutionary and bourgeois sectors of Black struggle. The struggle for Democracy is at root a struggle for self-determination, they are two sides of one coin. Even a minority—for instance, the Black masses outside the Black south, though they mostly live in twenty-seven cities where they are a substantial plurality or majority—has rights. No one lives anywhere at any time to be oppressed. Black people did not vote to be poor and exploited and uneducated; this is the result of the anti-democratic context historically of our lives, and even the struggle for democracy must be preceded by the act of and continuing struggle for self-determination. In other words, we must literally build the weapons we must use to defeat our national oppression. We cannot merely starve while demanding food, we cannot have our culture reduced to MTV and Def Jam and Death Row and Hollywood while we are demanding a democratic culture, we must create these things to the extent we can, even to intensify the demand for them.
Of course, the bourgeois sector of the democratic movement calls such thinking “separatist,” just as they called Du Bois. But the whole scam that separates the movement for Equal Rights into one separatist wing and one integrationist wing is unproductive. Black people are struggling for national liberation, which is a democratic demand! We cannot struggle only through the institutions and traditional structures of the oppressor nation, “White America.” The form and method and ideological essence of that struggle are acts of self-determination.
Where the bearers of the “abolitionist democracy” philosophy have too often been remiss is that in their struggle for democracy, they have put out only a program to gain equal access to U.S. mainstream society (which we should definitely understand after the sixties) will be possible for only a small sector of the Black bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie. This was the truest criticism of Du Bois earlier, I feel, that in his focus on Democracy he did not completely correlate the function of Self-Determination, even to further that struggle. During the period in which people like Walter White, Ralph Bunche and A. Philip Randolph were calling him Nationalist, Du Bois advocated that we must begin to struggle for a stronger black unity politically and self-determination in education and a movement for economic and cultural cooperatives. For these would be the groundwork for a more informed and stable Afro American community, able then to intensify and raise the struggle for equal rights, by Self-Assertion, to new heights.
By the time he began to write Black Reconstruction, Du Bois had also been through the Garvey wars. He was being criticized by not only the Communist party and various social democratic nearbys, and by the Negro petit bourgeois, but by the nationalists like Garvey. I think this intense fire had some influence on Du Bois, and though he had made some precise criticism of Garvey and his movement, which proved absolutely correct (certainly about the shakiness of the Black Star Economic program and some of the con men who were high up in the UNIA, some of whom testified against him), both his and Garvey’s criticism of each other sunk to demeaning bombast. Garvey was, at root, a kind of militant Booker T. Washington, with a catalyst of West Indian nationalism, directly connected to the land-based struggles that raged and still rage all over the Caribbean. Garvey felt the major class struggle was a form of racial contention (as Du Bois, to a certain milder extent, had felt earlier; see “The Conservation of the Races”). Plus, the historic role of the light-skinned Black or mulatto in Jamaica, Haiti, & c, is different in the sense that light-skinned Blacks have never been set up so completely “classed off,” like they say, from the masses of the Afro Americans as in the Islands. In the U.S., since the whole of the Afro American people were a minority, the oppressor nation did not have to use them so clearly as surrogate rulers, a neo-colonialism of caste.
However, when Garvey began to change his line from Africa for the Africans and Black Self-Determination around 1919, and even began meeting with the Klan, Du Bois justifiably denounced him. Though in a summary later on, he tried to analyze Garvey’s contribution on balance. But the influence of Garvey was in forcing Du Bois to think more deeply about the question of what do we do till the “full manhood suffrage” comes, especially as Black people entered the Depression thirties. Now the teachings of Garvey about Black self-determination and self-reliance seemed more useful, and his belief in the leadership of what he called “The Talented Tenth” (the Black bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie) had been wasted by reality. So that he was also coming more clearly into recognition of the sharpening class struggle within the Afro American community, as he identified “a stunning kind of national selfishness” shaping the Black bourgeois classes that he did not understand would emerge naturally with the extension of democracy and capitalism within the Black community. His clashes with the NAACP Negroes and the “good whites” who were on the NAACP’s board, no doubt, helped bring this class struggle to him with sharper definition.
Black Reconstruction begins with an epigram that sums up what it intends. Each chapter has a similar summation, which in themselves are concise analyses of the material to be handled. At the top of Chapter One, “The Black Worker,” Du Bois says, “How black men, coming to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, became a central thread in the history of the United States, at once a challenge to its democracy and always an important part of its economic history and social development.”
The first three chapters, “The Black Worker,” “The White Worker” and “The Planter,” present a general historic and precise socioeconomic analysis of the main classes in action in the U.S. Civil War. As one reads these chapters, one is being loaded with the exact scientific and historic data, not only to understand the particularity of his further observations in “The General Strike” and “The Coming of the Lord,” but also to be carried along from observation to observation, all tirelessly detailed and confirmed by any number of other observers, and lifted up into the revelational sweep of Du Bois’s conclusions. For this work is not only a great work of science, of U.S. and Afro American history, but it is written as very few such works could ever be. For it is the soul of a poet that speaks to us, that points out and explains, that references and makes irony swim with gradual accretion of rationale for whatever he says. At times the poetry of the book is so stunning, it will make you pause to reread and savor, to read it aloud so that the other senses can dig it. The chapter called “The Coming of the Lord” actually made me stop and weep at such incredible power, that real life could be delivered to me silently, perfectly imaged by the facts it conveyed.
“The Black Worker” is a title of critical importance. Not The Black Slave, & c. Because Du Bois had understood, as some of us still do not, that The Black Slave was NOT a peasant. He was not a farmer. He was a slave worker. Such as Marx talks about in Das Kapital when he explains the corvée system as one basis of capitalism. In fact, Marx goes on to point out that North American Slavery is the anchor and base of capitalism generally. Saying that “without slavery” as its economic base, and the mode of primitive accumulation (of wealth to be turned into capital), Euro American civilization was impossible.
Du Bois makes it clear what is different about Black oppression, as he points out the similar exploitation and inhumane conditions that European workers and peasants and Asian peasants suffered, but he adds the stunning proviso, “But none of them was real estate”! This condition of the Afro American people remains at the bottom of our “twoness,” this legacy has been a continuing division between the Black struggle in the U.S. and the rest of U.S. workers. Because, no matter that the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution and Bill of Rights thundered a commitment to equal rights and democracy, African chattel slavery made those words hollow and created an actual society where “the conscience of the nation was uneasy and continually affronted its ideals.” At base, the U.S. was rooted in the vicious seizure and attempted genocide of the native Akwesasne peoples and the African slave trade. It was also likewise based on the exploitation o
f European workers, but by the eighteenth century the U.S. rulers had seen that if the white indentured servants were not given a status somewhat different from the native peoples and the Black slaves they would continue to make alliances to overthrow their mutual servitude as the Servants’ Rebellion (1663, Virginia) and Bacon’s Rebellion (1802, Virginia) had shown, which led to the consolidation of a “racial slavery” (see “The Invention of Racial Slavery”).
Du Bois shows the checkered history of equal rights for Black people anywhere in the U.S. where one year pre-nineteenth century you might be able to vote in Pennsylvania but not in New Jersey, maybe in Illinois, but not in Delaware, and then the next year it would change. That is, for the Blacks who had somehow gotten freed from chattel status, either by manumission for service in the Revolutionary War or having come up with the necessary monies, or at the bequest of some more kindly slave master.
In the North, and at first, in most of the South, Slavery was a domestic “house service,” i.e., to make life easier for the mostly white owners. (A few Blacks and Native people had slaves as well.) But, as Du Bois expresses it with a hammering resonance, “Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of blacks’ labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose in both Europe and America.”
This is so critical because it establishes both the centrality of the Afro American people to the rise of North America and Europe to world domination, but it also shows that with slavery, the separation of Black and white workers, as well as Black and white people, certainly in the U.S., was a fundamental characteristic of U.S. society. Chattel slavery was an actual contrasting material reality to what the rest of the American workers experienced. It was not just racism, i.e., persecution because of physical characteristics; it shaped an entirely separate perception of what America was from the outset.
Irony of ironies, the very cry of Democracy, accompanied as it has always been in the U.S. by slavery and Black national oppression, has allowed white workers to feel that somehow their destiny is separate from Black workers’. In fact, even today, many American workers refer to themselves as middle-class, unable to conceive of what a working class is. Plus, slavery, as an economic institution, created a competition with the so-called free white workers (who, in reality, were free only as far as their skin could eliminate wage slavery and the actual undemocratic nature of U.S. capitalist society).
Another striking point that Du Bois highlights is that for the white petit bourgeois and even large sectors of the working class, “The American Dream” not only seems achievable, but puts them in a psychological and philosophical mindset of not only believing this rich people’s propaganda but of striving to be in all ways as much like their rulers as possible. Hence we still are plagued with television programs like Escape With the Rich and Famous. Freed from indenture, the white worker could envision that with a little luck one day he might strike it rich and become the rich and the famous. Until recently, with the advent of the Buppies, it is safe to say that such an illusion was not widespread among the Afro American people.
Du Bois says, “The true significance of slavery in the U.S. to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free—were given schools and the right to vote—what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship and control; and how would property and privilege be protected?” The $300,000,000 American question.
Du Bois’s class analysis digs deep into the reasons for the various classes of Americans to perceive and answer the question in their different ways. For the slaves, arriving in the U.S. as chattel took them outside the relevance of the question, as it was silently posed by the rulers and their sycophants and superficially traduced Americans. For Blacks the question, from the beginning, was freedom, the end of slavery. The entire spectrum of our history and culture is poised before this question. “The Gifts of Black Folks,” “The Gift of Labor, of Song and Story, of Spirit” all are shaped, from Jump, by the material conditions of our chattel condition, however perceived through the ancient cultures we had come out of, as we adapted and changed but remained always another people’s property. The U.S. is the society that asks the question, “Can property become a Citizen?”
By the nineteenth century most of the Black slaves were American born, and the folkways of Africa were continued and reinforced by the separation that slavery maintained. Stripped of the drum, all Black music is percussive anyway. Black Christianity is deeply African rooted, except when you get to Clarence Thomas’s churches. The Africans were the great artists of the world and any unbiased look at this hemisphere, certainly in the U.S., will show that at the vortex and root of U.S. culture is the African and Afro American western hemispheric cultural continuum. Even the bizarre discussion of Ebonics points out the falsity of American assumption. I have a poem called “BullEating”; it says, “If white people/ Can play the Blues/ Black People can speak/ American.” It means that just as the whole of U.S. and western hemispheric culture is a mestizo, a mix of Africa, Europe and Native Akwesasne, so is American speech. It is political power that determines what is correct or incorrect.
Slavery and National Oppression, with their segregation and discrimination, separate and unequal, have provided a continuity of Black national culture, that by this time, with the integration of full citizenship, would have provided a much more even distribution of its historic characteristics throughout the society. But even in chains, Black history, material life and culture have colored U.S. culture in a way that is profound and irreversible. So, too, the question of slavery and, past that, the Afro American National Question are at the center of any consideration of U.S. civilization. That is, there are very few aspects of historic U.S. life and culture that can be discussed, honestly, without reference to chattel slavery and the continuing national oppression of the Afro American people.
When Du Bois says The Black Worker, what he is asserting is that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, not only was it mostly Americans who were enslaved, but with the cotton gin and the extension of cotton production to an international market, what was feudal slavery became capitalist slavery. And those slaves were workers on an agricultural assembly line. The peasant is a small, middle or Big farmer, with a direct relationship to the land. The revolutionary potential of this class has been debated; the Trotsky-Lenin debate which led to Lenin’s Two Tactics. Two Tactics states that not only can the small and middle peasants become a reserve of revolution, rather than a reactionary reserve of the bourgeoisie, but that their struggle for full control of the land (which Marx observed in his summation of peasant struggles, such as the peasant wars in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century) should also be a force enlisted in the overall domestic force of revolution and even as a strategic ally in building the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But the slaves were not peasants, they were slave workers, except for the small groups of free Blacks and the overwhelming number of white farmers in the South. When chattel slavery was destroyed, the Black struggle also became a struggle for land, as the main democratic revolutions in Europe, Germany, Russia had been, so that the ex-slaves could become a class of small entrepreneurs, independent to some extent from the old chattel ties to the Planters. But with the betrayal of Reconstruction by the newly imperialist forces of northern corporate industrial power, the land (the vaunted forty acres and a mule) was seized by Wall Street (by 1873, eighty percent of southern lands were owned by northern capital), whose southern outpost was Atlanta.
The
Mexican war of 1848, the ongoing pacification of the Native peoples, was followed by big capital allying itself temporarily with northern abolitionist democracy, as Du Bois called it, and the multinational southern working class, both Black and white, and once the two hundred thousand Black troops had completely destroyed the plantation owners as a class, the superficial move toward full democracy and land settlement, education, equal citizenship rights was tolerated until big capital secured full control of southern land and remaining institutions and then the white middle-class, the small businessmen, politicians, overseers, small farmers, professionals were transformed into a comprador for a rising Wall Street-based U.S. imperialism.
Add to this the fact that, aside from those white southern workers and farmers who had opposed the Planters historically and who quickly signed the declaration of loyalty to the U.S., the mass of poor whites often lived in ways comparable to slavery or worse. The historic existence of slavery, with its racial metaphysics, made the uniting of class forces against the rise of imperialism and its betrayal of Black democracy and workers’ control of the south impossible. Plus, you knew it, there were Negroes involved with the betrayal, just as there are today. Telling us the war is over and if we are still exploited and oppressed it’s just some more of that black stuff and we need to get more mature and quit being so self-pitying. Check the post-Civil War Negro politicians who went over to the insurgent democratic party, the party, they said, of the “poor white,” which actually became the visible face of the ruthless reaction and counterrevolution that possessed the South once the Union military occupation had been removed, and the Black militia forces were disarmed.
What is so profound about Du Bois’s analysis is that it shows that all the classes of modern capitalism had come to exist within Afro America before chattel slavery was dispatched. There were Black slave owners in New Orleans, Charleston, Richmond, pre-Civil War. There were a fairly significant group of freed Blacks who formed the basis of an expanding, land-owning petit bourgeoisie. And then, of course, the myriad house Negroes who usually became part of that class as well.
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