Socialism Was Central to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Thought
The leading black intellectual and freedom fighter W. E. B. Du Bois was a longtime committed socialist and, eventually, a Marxist — commitments that were central to his life and work. Liberals are dead set on suppressing this aspect of his legacy.
W. E. B. Du Bois participates in a press conference at the April 1949 World Congress for Peace in Paris, a largely Soviet-directed initiative. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)
In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois told his friend George Streator, “I believe in Karl Marx. I am an out and out opponent of modern capitalistic labor exploitation. I believe in the ultimate triumph of socialism in a reasonable time, and I mean by socialism, the ownership of capital and machines by the state, and equality of income.” A clearer short summary of Du Bois’s political perspective would be difficult to find.
Du Bois was sixty-seven years old when he wrote these words and at the height of his intellectual powers and influence. He had recently completed a quarter century editing The Crisis, the influential magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the civil rights organization he had helped to found in 1909. The previous week, Du Bois had submitted to his publisher the final proofs of his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, his magisterial contribution to what has been called the Black Marxist tradition — a book that produced, in the words of his biographer, David Levering Lewis, “one of those genuine paradigm shifts periodically experienced in a field of knowledge, one that sunders regnant interpretations into the before-and-after of its sudden, disorienting emergence.”
Rebel With What Cause?
Rita Coburn’s sprawling new PBS documentary, W. E. B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause, released last month, is brimming with words: the words of Du Bois, read dramatically by several actors; the words of Du Bois’s contemporaries; the words of an omniscient narrator, the actress and producer Viola Davis; and the words of commentators — lots and lots of academic commentators. But Du Bois’s letter to Streator is not mentioned. In fact, the viewer will never hear, not once, one word about Du Bois’s intellectual turn to Marxism in the early 1930s, the motives behind it, or how it shaped his ideas about race, Black Reconstruction, or any of his subsequent writings and activities.
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