Prefer Contingency over Universalizing Alternatives: Antiblackness is not ontological, and capitalist exploitation is a key internal link to the direction of the impact

Labor, Capitalism, and Slavery Du Bois was arguing that once slavery was addressed in comprehensive terms, in world-historical terms, its true nature was revealed. Beneath its appearance as a “feudal agrarianism” lay the real relation of slavery to the emergence of modern capitalism. As America was a critical subsector of this developing system, the conflicts between American creed and reality, the contradictions of American society, the distortions of its social structures and political institutions ensued from its dependence on slavery and would resound throughout the system into the twentieth century.69 Slavery, then, was not a historical aberration, it was not a “mistake” in an otherwise bourgeois democratic age. It was, and its imprints continued to be, systemic. Here is the real modern labor problem. Here is the kernel of the problem of Religion and Democracy, of Humanity. Words and futile gestures avail nothing. Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human breasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black. (p. 16)70 In America, “free labor”—the vast majority of it supplied by immigrant Europeans from Ireland, England, Italy, and Germany—was also profoundly affected: The new labor that came to the United States, while it was poor, used to oppression and accustomed to a low standard of living, was not willing, after it reached America, to regard itself as a permanent laboring class and it is in the light of this fact that the labor movement among white Americans must be studied. The successful, wellpaid American laboring class formed, because of its property and ideals, a petty bourgeoisie ready always to join capital in exploiting common labour, white and black, foreign and native. (p. 17) Eschewing the traditions forming in the European labor movements that would mature into the nineteenth century’s socialisms of the First and Second Internationals, syndicalism and anarchism, the transplanted European workers became preoccupied with the possibility of accumulating wealth and power, of becoming capitalists. Thus it was that American liberalism in the nineteenth century, with its ideals of individualism and its antagonisms to socialism, became manifest in a particular way. Its character was molded by an economic order that severely delimited material wellbeing and a racial consciousness that at one and the same time removed an entire section of the working classes, the Blacks, from the possibility of access to that well-being while also supplying a fictive measure of status to non-Black workers. The wisest of the leaders could not clearly envisage just how slave labor in conjunction and competition with free labor tended to reduce all labor toward slavery. (p. 19) It was only a minority of these non-Black workers that would join with liberal intellectuals and freedmen to form the abolitionist movement.71 Du Bois had stated as early as 1915 that the “labor aristocracy” that was the result of the trade unionism of a materialistic labor movement—in Germany, England, and France as well as in the United States—was a crucial support to the imperialism and colonialism of the late nineteenth century.72 In the United States, Black and non-Black labor became politically opposed “instead of becoming one great party.” The northern non-Black working-class movement effectively excluded the freedmen, the slaves, and the five million poor whites of the South. (It was even more specifically exclusionist after 1850 as it concentrated on a base of skilled industrial workers and craftsmen.) But it was a more generalized antagonism that would envelop Black and non-Black workers. During the Civil War itself, this conflict would erupt into race wars against Blacks. With the enactment of the Draft Laws in 1863, and with the encouragement of “pro slavery and pro-Southern” Copperheads from the North, the frustration of the nonBlack workers, with their living and working conditions and the war, were turned against Blacks. In the summer of 1863, hundreds of Blacks were killed by mobs of workers in New York City. The report of the Merchants’ Committee on the Draft Riot says of the Negroes: “Driven by fear of death at the hands of the mob, who the week previous had, as you remember, brutally murdered by hanging on trees and lamp posts, several of their number, and cruelly beaten and robbed many others, burning and sacking their houses, and driving nearly all from the streets, alleys and docks upon which they had previously obtained an honest though humble living—these people had been forced to take refuge on Blackwell’s Island, at police stations, on the outskirts of the city, in the swamps and woods back of Bergen, New Jersey, at Weeks-ville, and in the barns and out-houses of the farmers of Long Island and Morrisania.” (p. 103) More than once, in Black Reconstruction, in his editorials in The Crisis, and other works, Du Bois would return to this period in order to identify the roots of racial violence in the labor movement of the twentieth century. It also provided, he believed, an explanation for the tradition of skepticism found among Blacks for organized labor. What was true for the mainstream of the American labor movement was also a factor in the radical traditions in the country. Though mid-nineteenth-century socialism had been largely transferred from areas of Europe where antipathies toward Blacks were inconsequential, its adherents, too, had not been capable, generally, of resisting the corrosive influences of slavery. This had been the case for both Marxist and non-Marxist socialists. The precedents established during this period would be of no substantial help to twentieth-century socialists whether their programs directly or indirectly addressed themselves to “the Negro Problem.” Even when the Marxian ideas arrived, there was a split; the earlier representatives of the Marxian philosophy in America agreed with the older Union movement in deprecating any entanglement with the abolition controversy. After all, abolition represented capital. The whole movement was based on mawkish sentimentality, and not on the demands of the workers, at least of the white workers. And so the early American Marxists simply gave up the idea of intruding the black worker into the socialist commonwealth at that time. (pp. 24–25) Though there had been exceptions,73 the lack of an identity between the interests of Black and non-Black workers was fairly consistent in the labor movement. Wherever one looked—among those who saw the movement in political-electoral terms, or those who advocated revolutionary violence, or those who were committed to economic trade unionism—the labor movement was most often at best ambivalent toward Black liberation and progress. The ideology of racism in combination with self-interest functioned to pit immigrant and poor white workers against the Black worker and the slave. And after the Civil War, the same social consciousness divided the working classes—immigrant and white—from the ex-slave. More than twenty years before the appearance of Black Reconstruction, and while his experience with the Socialist Party was still fresh in his mind, Du Bois had recognized this as a contradiction in the labor movement.74 And during the intervening years, his anger had not dissipated. When it reappeared in Black Reconstruction, it was no longer simply a warning to a negligent labor movement, but an indictment. By then, the labor movement and capitalism were older and in deep crisis. By then, Du Bois spoke as a Black radical: Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863. The resulting color caste founded and retained by capitalism was adopted, forwarded and approved by white labor, and resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over. Thus the majority of the world’s laborers, by the insistence of white labor, became the basis of a system of industry which ruined democracy and showed its perfect fruit in World War and Depression. And this book seeks to tell that story. (p. 30) Slavery and Democracy We have already noted how the idea of slavery, to Du Bois’s mind, was opposed to the ideals of democracy. The ideology necessary to rationalize slavery disallowed the further development of liberal democracy except as a myth. But Du Bois understood that the relationship between slavery and democracy was not a question of the clash of ideas. His approach to history was similar in this respect to that which Marx and Engels had presented in The German Ideology: This conception of history . . . comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into “selfconsciousness” or transformation into “apparitions,” “spectres,” “fancies,” etc., but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which give rise to this idealistic humbug.75 For Du Bois, the creation of those political institutions and structures identified with American democracy involved congruence with the country’s economic character, that is, with the slave system and capitalism. And so, though the American Constitution reflected the power of the plantocracy only in its devices for electoral representation, that had been sufficient advantage for the domination of the federal government by that class during the Republic’s first several decades. This had meant a domination by a class that consisted of 7 percent of the South’s population: It had in American history chosen eleven out of sixteen Presidents, seventeen out of twenty-eight Judges of the Supreme Court, fourteen out of nineteen AttorneysGeneral, twenty-one out of thirty-three Speakers of the House, eighty out of one hundred thirty-four Foreign Ministers. (p. 47) Consequent to this power, the plantocracy had established a legal structure that effectively eliminated the civil rights of the nine million Black and poor white workers to be found in the South in the mid-nineteenth century. This perversion of the apparatus of representative democracy had survived the Civil War and Reconstruction and had persisted into the next century despite the challenges of Populism, organized labor, political radicalism, the Depression, and the mass Black movement of the unia.76 Federalism had evolved into states’ rights, the ideological dressing for first, slavery, and then the Black Codes, Jim Crow, and more contemporary forms of repression. Each shift in the apparatus of repression had been associated with the changing forms of exploitation as Blacks moved from being slaves to being sharecroppers and peons, and finally, to being proletariats or a labor reserve. In the North, “the dictatorship of property” had been manifest in capital and investment. Not as rich or as powerful as the plantocrats in the beginning, the northern merchants, manufacturers, and industrialists had developed on the backs of southern agriculture and European labor. The North exploited its labor more efficiently, not having to absorb the costs of developing it during its nonproductive years. Those costs were incurred by the socioeconomic sectors of Ireland, Germany, Italy, and England. The North supplied the middlemen between the South and its European and domestic markets; it supplied the shipping and transportation for the South’s produce. It was also in the process of developing a national economy of total integration before the Civil War, while the South was becoming increasingly dependent. In the world market, the merchants and manufacturers had all the advantages of unity, knowledge, and purpose, and could hammer down the price of raw material. The slaveholder, therefore, saw Northern merchants and manufacturers enrich themselves from the results of Southern agriculture (p. 41). His capitalistic rivals of the North were hard-working, simple-living zealots devoting their whole energy and intelligence to building up an industrial system. They quickly monopolized transport and mines and factories and they were more than willing to include the big plantations. . . . The result was that Northern and European industry set prices for Southern cotton, tobacco and sugar which left a narrow margin of profit for the planter. (p. 37) Capital, both industrial and financial, continued to grow until the northern industrialists could challenge the political power of the plantocrats. And while it grew, it too undermined the structures of democracy: The North had yielded to democracy, but only because democracy was curbed by a dictatorship of property and investment which left in the hands of the leaders of industry such economic power as insured their mastery and their profits. Less than this they knew perfectly well they could not yield, and more than this they would not. (p. 46) Once the industrial class emerged as dominant in the nation, it possessed not only its own basis of power and the social relations historically related to that power, but it also had available to it the instruments of repression created by the now subordinate southern ruling class. In its struggle with labor, it could activate racism to divide the labor movement into antagonistic forces. Moreover, the permutations of the instrument appeared endless: Black against white; Anglo-Saxon against southern and eastern European; domestic against immigrant; proletariat against share-cropper; white American against Asian, Black, Latin American, and so on.