DuBois’ critique of racism still applicable today

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SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2013 11 Below are excerpts from the presenta­ tion by Dr. Anthony Monteiro at the Social­ ist Action East Coast Educational Confer­ ence, which took place in Philadelphia on March 23. Dr. Monteiro is a Distinguished Lecturer in African-American Studies at Temple University.

Obama represents the consolidation of the most counter-revolutionary forces in America. [He is hardly] a liberal reform­ ist, or even a centrist; these are delusion­ al concepts. It is interesting, however, that the front edge of counterrevolution­ ary ideology takes on what appears to be a not so vicious form. They say that we are in a “post-racial” America. That cer­ tainly doesn’t sound like what we usually associate with counter-revolution—un­ less we take seriously what the great W.E.B. Dubois said at the beginning of the 20th century.

DuBois said that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line. Everybody quotes that state­ ment, but I feel that very few people re­ ally understand what he was saying. In 1903, he said that the problem of bour­ geois democracy would be race. Well, 1903 was about 38 years after the end of the Civil War and chattel slavery, and 20-some years after the defeat of Recon­ struction, the first attempt at “democ­ racy” for the 4 million enslaved Africans. So, he says that liberal democracy would remain in a crisis unless the problem of race is solved.

He would evolve and develop that con­ cept over time; in 1935 he gets to his magnum opus, “Black Reconstruction in America,” which is more a theory of American history than a study of events. One of his great observations in that work, which he shows in Chapter Two, is entitled “The White Worker,” where he does a brief history of the labor move­ ment in the 19th century and says that its strategic weakness was its failure to take up the struggle against slavery—the race question. And he concludes that unless the labor movement and the left take as a strategic question that of race, neither labor nor democracy can move forward.

But then he makes another observa­ tion. He says that what we call slaves were really a proletariat. He says that after the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery, there was the possibility in sev­ eral states—including states where there were Black majorities such as South Car­ olina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and states where there was a decisive plurality like Georgia and Alabama—it was possible (this was in 1935) for the establishment of the “dictatorship of the Black prole­ tariat,” as a democratic mechanism for the fulfillment of democracy and the 14th & 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Now, he certainly understood that such a Black dictatorship would not remain at the bourgeois democratic level but would go on to a new social system.

But then he says that “a counterrevo­ lution of property” occurred. And he argues that that counterrevolution was based on the breaking of the Black prole­ tariat, and doing what Theodore Allen in his famous work, now re-issued and reedited by Jeffrey B. Perry, “The Invention of the White Race,” describes as creating a psychological and ideological category to prevent the development of a class

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SOCIALIST ACTION