The Marxism of Black Reconstruction
A response to Dylan Riley on W.E.B. Du Bois
One reason I like to read the sociologist Dylan Riley is that I never know what to expect. Some of his work I really admire, some of it I find questionable. His most recent piece, a blogpost about W.E.B. Du Bois entitled “Marx or Jefferson?”, is puzzling, and not in a good way. In form, it is oddly perfunctory, containing not a single quotation nor citation. In content, it makes three claims: that Du Bois (specifically, in his masterpiece Black Reconstruction) was not an intersectional theorist; that he was not a Marxist either; that he was a Jeffersonian (in the sense of a small-r republic whose ideal was the independent family farm).
I think one of these claims answers a badly posed question, while the other two claims are just wrong. Readers can decide for themselves whether Riley’s piece exhibits “the most basic requirement for any student of intellectual history: the ability to grasp and reconstruct an idea with philological precision.”
(Above: W.E.B. Du Bois and comrades at the grave of Karl Marx, 1958, via UMass)
Intersectionality: A Red Herring
Riley doesn’t cite anyone calling Black Reconstruction an intersectional work, but I’m sure someone has done that. Riley points out that the word “intersectionality” is absent from the text, which is not surprising: the word was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. Of course, one can find precedents, such as Claudia Jones’ analysis of “triple oppression” (incidentally, Jones was a Communist who was buried to the left of Karl Marx in Highgate).
Naturally, Du Bois does address the dialectics of race and class—you can’t write about slavery and emancipation without doing so, however much liberals may try to excise class from their memory of Reconstruction. Consider the unimpeachably Marxist Barbara Fields, who compares class and race to the two halves of a fraction and calls on scholars “to define and specify each one, recognizing their difference as well as their relationship and their joint indispensability to the result.”1 Fields, of course, denies causal force to race (though not to racism). But even she recognizes that post-emancipation struggles involved categories besides class, most importantly the idea of a black nation.2
Black Reconstruction has little, if any, discussion of gender, but it would be a better book if it did. To name just a few obvious angles: the expansion of the supply of slaves, as well as the reproduction of racial categories, occurred through literal human reproduction; the basic idea of an independent household implies a male head and familial dependents; the extension of the franchise which defined Reconstruction politics did not extend to black or white women, etc.
Marxism: A More Serious Question
Du Bois never claimed to be “intersectional.” But he did place himself within the Marxist tradition, declaring at one point:
I believed and still believe that Karl Marx was one of the greatest men of modern times and that he put his finger squarely upon our difficulties when he said that economic foundations, the way in which men earn their living, are the determining factors in the development of civilization, in literature, religion, and the basic pattern of culture.
Black Reconstruction is presented explicitly as a work of Marxist analysis. So when Riley banishes Black Reconstruction from the Marxist tradition, he is claiming that Du Bois was mistaken about his own affinities. What is the evidence for self-deception? Riley makes two claims. First, he claims that Du Bois’ choice of historical protagonist is not properly Marxist. Second, he claims that Du Bois’ own personal social ideal is not properly Marxist. Both of these claims are presented without evidence. A look at the evidence shows that both claims are untenable.
Does Du Bois Misidentify the Subject of History?
Consider the first claim, that Du Bois’ choice of historical protagonist is not properly Marxist:
Du Bois’s proletariat, or at least its most politically important part, [is not] the industrial working class; it is rather the family farmer, both in the West and the South, both black and white.
If this were true, who cares? Are Marxist historians required to focus on industrial workers? Especially given that in 1860, 80% of Americans lived in rural areas and 59% of the labor force worked in agriculture? But it’s not even true that the subject of Black Reconstruction is “the family farmer.” When Du Bois introduces the black proletariat, he is writing about enslaved workers on plantations. Thus, the flight of these workers from the plantation is “the general strike of the proletariat.” The freedpeople, once free, did aspire to the independent ownership of productive landed property, but this was an aspiration that was never fulfilled for most black workers.3 It seems like basic hygiene to distinguish between the social forces involved in a historical crisis and radical visions of how that crisis might be resolved through the establishment of new social property relations.
The real focus of Black Reconstruction is not any particular class, but the whole ensemble of social relations (in Du Bois’ words, “the broader problems of work and income as affecting all men regardless of color or nationality”). In this story, industrial workers (and capitalists) do play an important role. Du Bois clearly recognizes the significance of what he calls “modern industrial development.” In the years before 1861, the planters’ “capitalistic rivals” were “devoting their whole energy and intelligence to building up an industrial system.” After the war, Northern industry continued “forging forward with furious intensity…this movement was foremost and predominant in the mind and vision of living persons in that day.” For Du Bois, the self-organization of industrial workers is, along with the self-emancipation of enslaved workers, one of two labor movements of the time. Both were of great consequence; most consequential was the fact that they did not become one.
Riley is an outstanding interpreter of Gramsci, and he notes in a parenthetical that some of Gramsci’s work “bears a resemblance to Black Reconstruction.” The thought is not developed further, but it implies a closer relationship between Du Bois and Marxism than Riley wants to concede in the rest of the piece. I agree that the two great theorists can be fruitfully compared. A key example here is Du Bois’ concept of “the abolition-democracy.” In my experience, people sometimes take “abolition democracy” as just another way of saying “the thing Du Bois liked” or “Du Bois’ democratic ideal.” But consider the following description:
The abolition-democracy was the liberal movement among both laborers and small capitalists, who…saw the danger of slavery to both capital and labor. It began its moral fight against slavery in the thirties and forties and, gradually transformed by economic elements, concluded it during the war. The object and only real object of the Civil War in its eyes was the abolition of slavery, and it was convinced that this could be thoroughly accomplished only if the emancipated Negroes became free citizens and voters.
This is a description not of a regulating ideal but of a concrete, dynamic coalition of social forces coming together to transform existing property relations—the kind of historical object Gramsci would call a “historical bloc.” If the original basis of the abolition-democracy was laborers and small capitalists, in time “[larger] Northern industry made its great alliance with abolition-democracy.” Naturally, the freedpeople—for whom abolition had the most profound meaning—become an important component of this bloc, from their general strike into the organized black politics of the post-war. The US military (a group which included black soldiers) was also an important material force in the project of abolition-democracy.
Like all cross-class movements, the abolition-democracy contained contradictions. The contradictions led to its demise. More precisely, it led not to demise but to transformation along lines dictated by the most powerful member of the coalition, Northern capital. To make a longer story short, a new alliance was established between Northern capital and white Southern elites, which led to the withdrawal of Republican support for interracial democracy and the fuller integration of the South into the circuits of capital. This outcome reflected the balance of forces within the bloc: “The abolition-democracy itself was largely based on property, believed in capital and formed in effect a powerful petty bourgeoisie. It believed in democratic government but only under a general dictatorship of property.”
This successful “counter-revolution of property” had its counterpart in the failure of another alliance to emerge out of the raw materials of 1870s class society. The historical task facing the Reconstruction-era American working class was to use universal suffrage “with such intelligence and power that it would function in the interest of the mass of working men.” This would have required a different bloc: “a union between the champions of universal suffrage and the rights of the freedmen, together with the leaders of labor, the small landholders of the West, and logically, the poor whites of the South.” But, unfortunately for workers, black and white and present and future, “this union of democratic forces never took place.”
Did Du Bois Think “Jeffersonianism” was Adequate to the 1870s?
There are more details that could be added to the summary above, but the basic point should be clear: in no sense is Du Bois fixated on “family farmers” as the subject of his history of class struggle. But it is true, as Du Bois writes, that the central demand of the formerly enslaved was “that the great plantations be subdivided and given to him as his right.” The freedpeople saw independent smallholding as the economic basis for preserving their political power—indeed, they saw land redistribution as the very meaning of freedom.4
What is DuBois’ attitude towards this political program? He is sympathetic: land reform “was a perfectly fair and natural demand and ought to have been an integral part of Emancipation.” The demand was not simply just, but radical: it ran up against not only “the settled determination of the planter South to keep the bulk of Negroes as landless laborers” but also “the deep repugnance on the part of Northerners to confiscating individual property.” (Jefferson, it’s worth pointing out, would surely have been alarmed by this as well).
Riley points out that there are situations in which land reform can be regressive, or problematic for social revolutionaries. Fair enough. But he doesn’t say why it would have been so in this specific case. Surely the fact that even most white Republicans scorned the idea suggests that confiscation and redistribution were, in this context, anti-systemic? Strangely, Riley skips over some major episodes in the history of Marxism. He says that “[unlike] Du Bois, most European Marxists have been wary of calling for the redistribution of large landed estates, on account of the political and economic consequences of establishing a small holding peasantry.” But why limit the search to Europe? Revolutionaries around the world, notably the Viet Minh and Viet Cong, established their social base precisely by land reform benefiting poor and landless peasants.
Of course, communist land reformers tended to see their ultimate goal as collectivization. But Du Bois also rejected smallholding as the ultimate goal. While giving smallholding its due as the major demand to emerge from the real movement of Reconstruction, Du Bois does not exaggerate its radical potential. Consider the following statement:
To emancipate four million laborers whose labor had been owned, and separate them from the land upon which they had worked for nearly two and a half centuries, was an operation such as no modern country had for a moment attempted or contemplated. The German and English and French serf, the Italian and Russian serf, were, on emancipation, given definite rights in the land. Only the American Negro slave was emancipated without such rights and in the end this spelled for him the continuation of slavery.
As an admirer of the Russian Revolution, Du Bois presumably did not think that this kind of policy had completely satisfied the needs of Russian peasants, or removed the need for much more radical transformations. But we don’t need to get into world history here, since in Black Reconstruction Du Bois is explicit about the limits of the Jeffersonian ideal which Riley mistakenly posits as his essential political commitment. Du Bois discusses the problem under the heading of “the old American Assumption of economic independence open to all,” the idea “that any average worker can by thrift become a capitalist.” According to Du Bois, the Assumption was never true. But, like all effective ideologies, it had some connection to reality: “it was undoubtedly more nearly true in America from 1820 to 1860 than in any other contemporary land.” The ideology was plausible enough that it helped power the free soil politics which fed into the abolition-democracy.
It was precisely the experience of emancipation and Reconstruction that revealed “for the first time…that the American Assumption was not and could not be universally true.” A progressive answer to the social question of the 1870s required going beyond the American Assumption, and indeed going beyond the freedpeople’s own vision of land redistribution. What was required was “the development of a laboring class into a position of power and mastery over the modern industrial state.” Unfortunately, “very few” black leaders had “any clear and distinct plan” for how to do this. Among other factors, the leaders had absorbed from their Northern colleagues traditions of “capitalism and individualism [which] gave little training for an economic battle just dawning in the world.”
It is hard to blame the black leadership too much, since almost no one in the US in the 1860s and 1870s possessed “any clear and distinct plan for the development of a laboring class into a position of power and mastery over the modern industrial state.” Du Bois nonetheless argues that this “lack of vision” was part of the failure of Reconstruction. Specifically, workers during Reconstruction failed to achieve a “dictatorship of the proletariat ending in industrial democracy.” Du Bois’ definition of the latter is distinctly un-Jeffersonian: “universal suffrage does not lead to a real dictatorship until workers use their votes consciously to rid themselves of the dominion of private capital.” There were “signs of such an object among South Carolina Negroes, but it was always coupled with the idea of that day, that the only real escape for a laborer was himself to own capital.” To Du Bois’, Reconstruction visions of freedom were flawed to the extent that they were premised on the republican ideal of dispersed private property ownership. This is more or less the opposite of Riley’s claim.
There is at least one important caveat to the proposition that the political economy of Reconstruction failed to go “beyond [the] demand for land.” As Du Bois writes, “The fight for the domination of the new form of state which Reconstruction was building took the direction of using the income for new forms of state expenses.” In many cases, this meant “public investment for private profit,” including explicitly or implicitly corrupt state support for the railroads. But beside this early instance of political capitalism, there was something else going on here. This was the “the increased disposition to vote public funds for the benefit of the pauperized masses.” Breaking with Southern tradition, the expanded Reconstruction electorate imposed direct taxation to fund public schools, for the support of indigents, and so on.
This is what Robin D.G. Kelley has in mind when he says that the freedpeople “created the world’s first social democracy.” It also fits Ellen Meiksins Wood’s definition of classical democracy as “rule by the poor.” The violent overthrow of Reconstruction, which united Northern capital and Southern planters, put an end to “the anomaly of letting people who had no property vote away the wealth of the rich.” None of this is present in Riley’s gloss, which presents the aim of Reconstruction as the creation of black kulaks.
Did Du Bois Think “Jeffersonianism” was Adequate to the 1930s?
Du Bois regarded small-scale property ownership as insufficiently radical even in the 1870s. We should expect that Du Bois regarded small-scale property ownership as even less adequate in the 1930s. And, as it turns out, there is no support in Black Reconstruction for Riley’s contention that Du Bois’ “ideal political subject was the independent family farmer” or that
Du Bois is a deeply American thinker whose critique of capitalism is more republican than socialist. For Du Bois’s concern was not really the failure of a socialist revolution, but rather the missed opportunity of a Jeffersonian Arcadia.
The very idea seems to rest on a kind of category error: Riley’s only evidence that Du Bois was a Jeffersonian is that the freedpeople were (aspirational) Jeffersonians. This is a little like saying that Eric Hobsbawm was a bandit, or E.P. Thompson a deluded follower of Joanna Southcott.
Even in his earlier work, written before serious study of Marx, Du Bois clearly recognized the irrelevance of old-fashioned individualism. In a stunning passage at the end of John Brown (1909), Du Bois invokes a vision of social freedom clearly at odds with the ideals of the Founding Fathers:
Freedom has come to mean not individual caprice or aberration, but social self-realization in an endless chain of selves…So, too, the doctrine of human equality passes through the fire of scientific inquiry, not obliterated but transfigured: not equality of present attainment but equality of opportunity, for unbounded future attainment is the rightful demand of mankind.
It is therefore not surprising that the Du Bois of Black Reconstruction welcomes the economic crisis of the 1930s for killing off the zombie ideology of republicanism:
The validity of the American Assumption ceased with the Civil War, but its tradition lasted down to the day of the Great Depression, when it died with a great wail of despair, not so much from bread lines and soup kitchens, as from poor and thrifty bank depositors and small investors.
Four years later, Du Bois’ idiosyncratic autobiography Dusk of Dawn contained an even sharper statement of socialist historical self-consciousness:
We are of course obsessed with the vastness of the industrial machine in America, and with the way in which organized wealth dominates our whole government, our education, our intellectual life and our art. But despite this, the American economic class structure-that system of domination of industry and the state through income and monopoly-is breaking down; not simply in America but in the world. We have reached the end of an economic era, which seemed but a few years ago omnipotent and eternal. We have lived to see the collapse of capitalism (emphasis added).
At the end of his autobiography, Du Bois attaches a “Basic American Negro Creed” which he had written back in 1936 (one year after he published Black Reconstruction). The creed makes clear the actual thrust of Du Bois’ political program:
We believe that Negro workers should join the labor movement and affiliate with such trade unions as welcome them and treat them fairly. We believe that workers' Councils organized by Negroes for interracial understanding should strive to fight race prejudice in the working class.
We believe in the ultimate triumph of some form of Socialism the world over; that is, common ownership and control of the means of production and equality of income.
It was not by accident that Du Bois endorsed “Socialism the world over.” Despite Riley’s insistence that Du Bois is “a deeply American thinker” in thrall to “Jeffersonian Arcadia,” no one who reads Du Bois can miss his radical internationalism. This is very much true of Black Reconstruction, which argues that the consolidation of a dictatorship of capital after 1876 turned US capitalism into “the cornerstone of that new imperialism which is subjecting the labor of yellow, brown and black peoples to the dictation of capitalism organized on a world basis,” a development which has “brought nearer the revolution by which the power of capitalism is to be challenged.” This is clearly someone in conversation with Lenin, not Jefferson. One wonders what Riley makes of the fact that Du Bois lost his passport during the post-1945 Red Scare (in part to prevent him from attending the Bandung conference), or that—when he finally got it back—he went to Ghana and accepted citizenship in the new nation?
In his last autobiography, published just before the trip to Ghana, Du Bois wrote:
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.
If this is not plain enough, Du Bois added: “all men should be employed according to their ability and that wealth and services should be distributed according to need.”5
Marx or Jefferson? The question should answer itself, leaving us with a new question: why would any historical materialist want to excommunicate an outstanding Marxist?
See Fields’ famous 1990 New Left Review essay, which denounces the tendency of “many scholars to adopt and impose on others, as a pious duty, the meaningless task of deciding whether race is more or less ‘basic’ to historical explanation than other—and similarly reified—categories; a waste of time …Someone might as well undertake to decide in the abstract whether the numerator or the denominator is more important to understanding a fraction, instead of settling down to the more sensible task of trying to define and specify each one, recognizing their difference as well as their relationship and their joint indispensability to the result.”
From the same essay: “Afro-Americans invented themselves, not as a race, but as a nation. They were not troubled, as modern scholars often are, by the use of racial vocabulary to express their sense of nationality. Afro-American soldiers who petitioned on behalf of ‘These poor nation of colour’ and ‘we Poore Nation of a Colered rast [race]’ saw nothing incongruous about the language.”
I imagine that Riley’s “family farmers” is supposed to refer to sharecroppers. This isn’t the way I would use the terms, since sharecroppers paid (in kind) to work on someone else’s land (they also often moved around between farms from year to year). It is true, however, that sharecroppers worked, and received their share of the crop, as a family.
There is also an extensive debate about whether sharecroppers should be considered proletarians, with the dispute turning on whether shares should be considered essentially a form of wages (Riley alludes, but just alludes, to this debate with his reference to “the amphibious figure of the share-cropper”). But that disagreement is premised on the idea that a proletariat must receive wages. In describing enslaved workers as a proletariat, Du Bois rejects this premise. This choice aligns him with the classical Roman definition of the proletarii (citizens who owned little or no property) and the more recent trend among Marxists to define the proletariat as those “without reserves,” whether they be waged or unwaged. On the other hand, Du Bois could himself be accused of inconsistent language, as when he refers to the post-Reconstruction order as “a new feudalism.”
This is not the place to settle those arguments but two points are important. First, even if one thinks Du Bois uses the term “proletariat” incorrectly or inconsistently, this disagreement is hardly evidence that Du Bois is outside the Marxist tradition. Second, Riley himself describes “the independent family farmer” as one “able to withdraw from labour and commodity markets to some extent, or at least to engage with them on favourable and independent terms.” It seems to me that this description is clearly inapplicable to sharecroppers; even on Riley’s terms there is reason to reject the idea that the freedpeople are better described as family farmers than as proletarians.
As memorably demonstrated in the following exchanges between Union officers and leaders of the freedpeople in Georgia in 1865:
Q: State what you understand by Slavery and the freedom that was to be given by the President's proclamation.
A: Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the proclamation, is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, take care of ourselves and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom.
Q: State in what manner you think you can take care of yourselves, and how can you best assist the Government in maintaining your freedom.
A: The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor–that is, by the labor of the women and children and old men; and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare. And to assist the Government, the young men should enlist in the service of the Government, and serve in such manner as they may be wanted…We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.
These quotes from Dusk of Dawn and The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois can be found in Jeff Goodwin’s piece on Du Bois and Marxism, which was very helpful in the writing of this post. Riley does not cite other scholars, but it seems possible that he has seen Goodwin’s article, given its venue and clear similarities in framing.