New approach needed to save Australia’s non-perennial rivers

FLINDERS UNIVERSITY

Non-perennial rivers, which stop flowing at some point each year, dominate surface water movement across Australia, yet monitoring the continued health of these vital waterways demands a new type of research attention.

More than 70% of this nation’s rivers are non-perennial due to a combination of ancient landscape, dry climates, highly variable rainfall regimes, and human interventions that have altered riverine environments.

An extensive review of current research incorporating geomorphology, hydrology, biogeochemistry, ecology and Indigenous knowledges identifies prevailing factors that shape water and energy flows in Australia’s non-perennial rivers – but the review also points to research deficiencies that must be addressed if these river systems are to be preserved and protected.

“Australia relies on our rivers, and has a strong history of research to understand river flows and ecosystems and the human impacts on them. Now, we must address emerging threats to river systems due to climate change and other anthropogenic impacts,” says lead author of the review, Dr Margaret Shanafield, from Flinders University’s College of Science and Engineering.

“We have to work together to tackle emerging threats to our rivers. If we are going to plug gaps in existing knowledge, which this review identifies, then a new style of inter-disciplinary scientific research is necessary to achieve the required outcomes.”

While dominant research themes in Australia focus on drought, floods, salinity, dryland ecology and water management, four other areas of research attention are urgently needed, namely:

• • Integrating Indigenous and western scientific knowledge;
• • Quantifying climate change impacts on hydrological and biological function;
• • Clarifying the meaning and measurement of “restoration” of non-perennial systems;
• • Understanding the role of groundwater.

Addressing these areas through multi-disciplinary efforts supported by technological advances will provide a map for improved water research outcomes that the rest of the world can follow.

“Australia is globally unique in its spread and diversity of non-perennial rivers spanning climates and landforms – but most, if not all, of the classes of non-perennial rivers found in Australia also occur in other regions of the world with similar climates and geology,” says Dr Shanafield.

“Therefore, the evolving body of knowledge about Australian rivers provides a foundation for comparison with other dryland areas globally where recognition of the importance of non-perennial rivers is expanding.”

The review authors are concerned that Australian non-perennial river research has been driven by the needs of its inhabitants for survival, agriculture, resource economics, environmental concern and politics.

“Considering the continent's ancient geological history and its harsh, arid climate, it comes as no surprise that significant attention has been directed toward water resource management during drought periods, the reduction of salinisation, and gaining insights into the intricate dynamics of the transient rivers that are a defining feature of central Australia,” says the review.

“The prevalence of prolonged drought periods has had a marked impact on driving research – so it is critical to address the knowledge gaps this review has identified, given that increasing trends in hydrological droughts are projected to negatively impact streamflow not just in Australia, but also in South America, southern Africa, and the Mediterranean.”

The review authors – a multi-disciplinary collective of scientists from across more than two dozen institutions and government departments – say more investment in long-term hydrological monitoring is desperately needed to increase water management knowledge that can address the competing water needs of communities, agriculture, mining and ecosystems in a dry environment – not only in Australia, but throughout the world.

“We anticipate that changing global water fluxes and continued groundwater pumping will cause more of the world’s rivers to become non-perennial, accelerating our need to understand these systems across many disciplines,” says Dr Shanafield.

“In turn, a more thorough understanding will help to underpin science-driven management of non-perennial rivers to both meet the needs of a growing Australian population while protecting the integrity of ecological systems.”

The research - Australian non-perennial rivers: Global lessons and research opportunities, by Margaret Shanafield, Melanie Blanchette, Edoardo Daly, Naomi Wells, Ryan Burrows, Kathryn Korbel, Gabriel Rau, Sarah Bourke, Gresley Wakelin-King, Aleicia Holland, Timothy Ralph, Gavan McGrat, Belinda Robson, Keirnan Fowler, Martin Andersen, Songyan Yu, Christopher Jones, Nathan Waltham, Eddie Banks, Alissa Flatley, Catherine Leigh, Sally Maxwell, Andre Siebers, Nick Bond, Leah Beesley, Grant Hose, Jordan Iles, Ian Cartwright, Michael Reid, Thiaggo de Castro Tayer and Clément Duvert – has been published in The Journal of Hydrology. doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2024.130939

---

JOURNAL

Journal of Hydrology

DOI

10.1016/j.jhydrol.2024.130939 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Literature review

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Australian non-perennial rivers: Global lessons and research opportunities

 

Death of a Prophet

by Michael K. Smith / April 4th, 2024

April 3, 1968 – Memphis

In town to help striking Memphis garbage workers, an exhausted and downcast Dr. King is already in his pajamas when the call comes in from Reverend Abernathy at Mason Temple, informing him that two thousand people have braved tornado warnings and a driving rain to hear him speak. “I really think you should come down,” Abernathy pleads. “The people want to hear you, not me. This is your crowd.”

Dr. King gets dressed and goes out into the stormy night.

In the blaze of lights at the podium he appears nervous. He tells his audience that if he were at God’s side on the dawn of creation he would ask to see Moses liberating his people, Plato and Aristotle debating philosophy, Renaissance Europe, Luther tacking his 95 theses on the church door, Lincoln emancipating the slaves, and Roosevelt navigating his way to the New Deal. But he would not dally in any of these times or places, preferring to move on and experience just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, when masses around the world rose up to say: We want to be free. 

Dr. King, abandoned by militants, vilified by the press, stalked by death and the FBI, is deeply grateful to share in the freedom struggles that heap his life with hardship.

With the crowd shouting its approval, he bellows that he has been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land. Brushing aside prospects of premature death, he declares that longevity has its place, but that on this night he is not worried about any thing, not fearing any man.

A burning passion in his eyes, his voice rising to a shattering crescendo, he declares his last will and testament.

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” 

April 4, 1968

The bullet explodes into his face, severs his spine, and brings Dr. King crashing down, down, down, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

Reverend Abernathy bolts to his side, calling out to those in the parking lot below.

“Oh my God, Martin’s been shot!”

 Dr. King, a look of terror in his eyes, clutches uselessly at his throat. His head lies in an expanding pool of blood. Abernathy tries to comfort him.

“This is Ralph, this is Ralph, don’t be afraid.”

 Reverend King, still conscious, his magnificent voice silenced forever, cannot answer. His mouth quivers once and then Abernathy feels he is communicating through his eyes.

In King’s motel room, the Reverend Billy Kyle bangs his head against the wall again and again, screaming into the telephone for an operator.

Dashing up sobbing from the parking lot, Andrew Young gropes for a pulse.

He screams: “Oh, my God, my God. it’s all over.”

American cities begin to burn.

Excerpt From The Speech That Got Dr. King Killed: 

The peasants watched as we supported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself with extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasants watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts, annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, where thousands of homeless children roamed the streets like animals, begging for food and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers. What do the peasants think as we test our latest weapons on them, as the Germans tested new medicines and tortures in Europe’s concentration camps?

 . . . we have destroyed their land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionary political force – the Unified Buddhist Church. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators!

— Dr. Martin Luther King, New York City, April 4, 1967

Source for above material [1]:

[1] Michael K. Smith, Portraits of Empire, pps. 129, 132Facebook

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Michael Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire." He co-blogs with Frank Scott at www.legalienate.blogspot.com He co-blogs with Frank Scott at www.legalienate.blogspot.com. Read other articles by Michael.

The U.S. has tried to ‘fix’ Haiti before. How will this time be different?


By Widlore Mérancourt,

Amanda Coletta and

John Hudson
March 16, 2024 


PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Heavily armed gangs are sowing mayhem, killing indiscriminately, breaking open prisons and blocking aid. Nearly half the country is hungry; 1 million people are starving. The country’s leader has announced plans to resign.

Haiti has been here before — several times, in fact, since the ouster of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986: Its government has fallen or been chased out, the streets have erupted, and the United States has stepped in to lead international efforts to stand up new leaders who can be seen as legitimate and will be friendly to Washington.

It has yet to work.

Haiti’s presidency has been vacant since the 2021 assassination of Jovenel Moïse. Its National Assembly has been empty since the last lawmakers’ terms expired last year. Prime Minister Ariel Henry has been unwilling or unable to bring new elections.

When Henry left the country this month to build support for a U.N. security force to restore order, the gangs rampaged, shutting down the international airport and the main seaport and attacking at least a dozen police stations. They haven’t let him back in.

Now U.S. officials see a way forward. After emergency negotiations this week between U.S., Haitian and neighboring leaders, the Caribbean Community (Caricom) announced the creation of a panel of Haitian leaders to put the country on the path to elections. Henry said he’d resign once this transitional presidential council picked an interim prime minister to succeed him.

The United States has a long history of intervening in Haiti. U.S. Marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Washington initially supported the murderous and kleptocratic Duvalier dictatorship. U.S. forces invaded in 1994 to restore ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and returned in 2004 to restore order after Aristide fled to exile.

In 2011, the United States helped Michel Martelly win the presidency. The United Nations last year accused him of using “gangs [during his term] to expand his influence over neighborhoods to advance his political agenda, contributing to a legacy of insecurity, the impacts of which are still being felt today.”

This time, U.S. officials say, they’ve learned the lessons of history. They’re not imposing a government on Haiti, they insist; they’ve made a concerted effort to center Haitians in the talks.

Haitian prime minister says he’ll resign, clearing way for new government

“It’s Haitian-designed,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Wednesday. “It’s Haitian-led.”

But critics ask just how Haitian-led an agreement can be that was negotiated by foreign diplomats meeting in Jamaica while Haitians joined by Zoom. They say it was cobbled together hurriedly and lacks a long-term vision for security.

U.S. Marines in an armored vehicle patrol Port-au-Prince in March 2004 after Aristide fled to exile in the Central African Republic. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

And they say the council would simply turn the problem over to a political and business elite that in some cases is responsible for the nation’s dysfunction. Many in this squabbling, insular group have been trying and failing to achieve political consensus and stability for years.

“The idea that this ultimately should be a Haitian-driven solution is right,” said Christopher Sabatini, senior Latin America fellow at London-based Chatham House. “The question is: Which Haitians?”

U.S. and other officials reject criticism that the agreement was drawn up in a backroom with little Haitian input. A senior State Department official told The Washington Post that at least 39 Haitian stakeholders participated in the Jamaica talks. A Jamaican official put the number at 66.

“It’s not one meeting at which things were agreed behind closed doors,” Kamina Johnson Smith, Jamaica’s foreign minister, told reporters this week.

More than two centuries of subjugation and exploitation by larger powers helped transform Haiti from the economic powerhouse of the Caribbean to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. That history weighs heavily on the Biden administration.

Georges Michel, a Haitian historian, warned of the long history of the international community and the United States seeking to “impose their will — whether openly or discreetly.”


“The history of Haiti is replete with foreign actors trying to shape the outcomes and decisions around the leadership of Haiti,” a senior State Department official said. “And what they’ve said is that it’s vital that there be Haitian ownership of the political process and the way forward.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the diplomatically and politically sensitive situation.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken shakes hands with Guyanese President Irfaan Ali, as Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness gets up from his chair, at a Kingston, Jamaica, meeting this week of the Caribbean Community to discuss Haiti. (Collin Reid/AP)

It’s difficult to overstate the severity of the crises in Haiti, a country where the legacies of colonialism include corruption, endemic poverty and warlordism. Gangs control 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, the capital; they’ve killed thousands with impunity and driven hundreds of thousands more from their homes.

The country’s democratic institutions have been hollowed out. The few hospitals operating in Port-au-Prince are full. Schools are closed and businesses are shuttered; Haitians mostly stay home.

“The challenge that lies ahead is gigantic,” said Romain Le Cour, a senior expert with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “You have to rebuild almost every institution from the ashes.”

As leader resigns, Haitian politicians rush to form new government

The council is to include seven voting members nominated by civil society, private-sector and political groups, including allies of the deeply unpopular Henry. There’s to be one nonvoting member each from the private sector and the faith community.

The panel is to make decisions by majority vote. Le Cour, for one, is skeptical it can work.

“We have to be realistic about the fact that building a transitional council with seven members — in some cases belonging to parties or currents that are antagonistic — and making them work together, align with common interests and advance toward a comprehensive and transparent and cohesive political solution is going to be a significant challenge,” he said.

U.S. officials reject claims that the council’s reliance on elite members of the business or political community poses a significant problem.

“Whether these are elites or whether or not these are people who have been active and known faces in Haitian politics or society for quite some time, I would note that those are the people that Haitians are turning to when they are trying to reach an agreement on who will represent them in this council,” the State Department official said. “This is not the group that will govern Haiti indefinitely as a group.”

Haitians shot dead in street and there’s no one to take the corpses away

There are signs already that standing up the council won’t be easy. U.S. officials said Tuesday that they expected members would be appointed in the next 24 to 48 hours. But by the end of the week, the council had yet to materialize, underscoring the deal’s fragility.

Moïse Jean Charles, a former senator and presidential candidate, told reporters here Wednesday that his Pitit Desalin party, which initially agreed to the proposal and was granted a voting spot on the council, had decided to “reject” it. He said he would not work with Henry’s allies.

“Like it or not,” he said, “we are going to install our own presidential council.”

His three-member council would include Guy Philippe, who led the 2004 rebellion that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Philippe has support from some gangs, but is barred from the negotiators’ transitional council on at least two grounds: He pleaded guilty to U.S. charges of money laundering and conspiracy, and he has publicly opposed the U.N. security mission.

Most of the negotiators’ council has been named, but a couple of seats remained unfilled, Blinken told reporters during a visit to Austria on Friday.

“This is never going to be smooth and never going to be linear,” Blinken said.

The delay in forming a council is evidence of a rigorous and inclusive process, the State Department official said.

“If this had been simply an edict from the international community … it’d be decided by them,” the official said.

‘Collective rapes’ surge as weapon in Haiti’s gang war

The United States would like to see the process move along faster, the official said, but Americans should appreciate how long it can take to forge political consensus, the official said.

“It’s being hashed out by Haitians right now, and yeah, they have differences,” the official said. “But imagine trying to come up with a similar institution in the United States if you’re talking to stakeholders in our country, to form a presidential council and you have people on one end of our spectrum and people on another end of our spectrum, trying to find a way forward in an agreement. It’s complicated.”

The Caricom plan won’t be effective unless there are serious efforts to build state capacity, Sabatini said. In the past, he said, the international community has focused on getting Haiti to elections no matter their circumstances.

“That’s dangerously facile,” Sabatini said.


Coletta reported from Toronto and Hudson from Washington. Michael Birnbaum in Vienna contributed to this report

By Widlore MérancourtWidlore Mérancourt is a Haitian reporter and editor-in-chief of AyiboPost, a renowned online news organization. He has covered major news events in Haiti for The Washington Post, including the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Twitter

By Amanda ColettaAmanda Coletta is a Toronto-based correspondent who covers Canada and the Caribbean for The Washington Post. She previously worked in London, first at the Economist and then the Wall Street Journal. Twitter

By John HudsonJohn Hudson is a reporter at The Washington Post covering the State Department and national security. He was part of the team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He has reported from dozens of countries, including Ukraine, China, Afghanistan, India and Belarus. Twitter

Gangs force nearly half of all Haitians to seek humanitarian aid as agencies unable to operate

EVENS SANON AND DÁNICA COTO
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A man eats a meal and a child covers his face after both received containers of free food at a shelter for families displaced by gang violence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on March 14, 2024.

ODELYN JOSEPH/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A crowd of about 100 people tried to shove through a metal gate in Haiti’s capital as a guard with a baton pushed them back, threatening to hit them. Undeterred, children and adults alike, some of them carrying babies, kept elbowing each other trying to enter.

“Let us in! We’re hungry!” they shouted on a recent afternoon.

They were trying to get into a makeshift shelter in an abandoned school. Inside, workers dipped ladles into buckets filled with soup that they poured into foam containers stuffed with rice to distribute to Haitians who have lost homes to gang violence.

About 1.4 million Haitians are on the verge of famine, and more than 4 million require food aid, sometimes eating only once a day or nothing at all, aid groups say.

“Haiti is facing a protractive and mass hunger,” Jean-Martin Bauer, Haiti director for the United Nations’ World Food Program, told The Associated Press. He noted that Croix-des-Bouquets, in the eastern part of Haiti’s capital, “has malnutrition rates comparable with any war zone in the world.”

Officials are trying to rush food, water and medical supplies to makeshift shelters and other places as gang violence suffocates lives across Port-au-Prince and beyond, with many trapped in their homes.

Only a few aid organizations have been able to restart since Feb. 29, when gangs began attacking key institutions, burning police stations, shutting down the main international airport with gunfire and storming two prisons, releasing more than 4,000 inmates.

Background: Roots of crisis in Haiti stretch back to old alliances between politicians and gangs

The violence forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry to announce early Tuesday that he would resign once a transitional council is created, but gangs demanding his ouster have continued their attacks in several communities.

Bauer and other officials said that the gangs are blocking distribution routes and paralyzing the main port, and that WFP’s warehouse is running out of grains, beans and vegetable oil as it continues to deliver meals.

“We have supplies for weeks. I’m saying weeks, not months,” Bauer said. “That has me terrified.”

Inside the makeshift shelter at the school, things were a bit more orderly, with scores of people standing in line for food. More than 3,700 shelter residents compete for a place to sleep and share a hole in the ground for a toilet.

Marie Lourdes Geneus, a 45-year-old street vendor and mother of seven children, said that gangs chased her family out of three different homes before they ended up at the shelter.

“If you look around, there are a lot of desperate people who look like me, who had a life and lost it,” she said. “It’s a horrible life I’m living. I made a lot of effort in life and look where I end up, trying to survive.”

She said she occasionally ventures out to sell beans to buy extra food for her children – who sometimes eat only once a day – but ends up being chased by armed men, spilling her goods on the ground as she runs.

Erigeunes Jeffrand, 54, said that he used to make a living selling up to four wheelbarrow-loads of sugar cane a day, but that gangs recently chased him and his four children out of their neighbourhood.

“My home was completely destroyed and robbed,” he said. “They took everything I have. And now, they’re not even letting me work.”

He sent his two youngest children to live with relatives in Haiti’s more quiet countryside, while the two eldest live with him at the shelter.

“Can you believe I had a home?” he said. “I was making ends meet. But now, I’m just depending on what people provide me to eat. This is not a life.”

More than 200 gangs are believed to operate in Haiti, with nearly two dozen concentrated in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas. They now control 80 per cent of the capital and are vying for more territory.

Scores of people have died in the most recent attacks, and more than 15,000 have been left homeless.

The situation has prevented aid groups like Food for the Hungry from operating at a time when their help is needed the most.

“We’re stuck, with no cash and no capacity to move out what we have in our warehouse,” said Boby Sander, the organization’s Haiti director. “It’s catastrophic.”

Food for the Hungry operates a cash-based program that helps about 25,000 families a year by sending them money, but he said that the ongoing looting and attacks on banks have crippled the system.

“Since Feb. 29, we have not been able to do anything at all,” he said.

On a recent morning, the fragrance of cooking rice drew a group of adults and teenage boys to a sidewalk near a building where aid workers prepared meals to distribute to shelters elsewhere in the city.

“Can you help me get a plate of food? We haven’t had anything to eat today yet,” they asked people going in and out of the building. But their pleas went unanswered. The food was destined for the shelter at the school.

“We know it’s not a lot,” said Jean Emmanuel Joseph, who oversees food distribution for the Center for Peasant Organization and Community Action. “It’s too bad we don’t have the possibility to give them more.”

At the shelter, some adults and children tried to get back in line for a second serving.

“You already had a plate,” they were told. “Let others get one.”

Shelter resident Jethro Antoine, 55, said the food is meant only for residents, but there’s little that can be done about outsiders who squeeze in.

“If you go and complain about it, you’re going to become the enemy, you might even be killed for that,” he said.

The U.S. Agency for International Development said that around 5.5 million people in Haiti – nearly half the population – need humanitarian aid, and pledged $25-million in addition to the $33-million announced earlier this week.

The WFP’s Bauer said the humanitarian appeal for Haiti this year is less than 3 per cent funded, with the UN agency needing $95-million in the next six months.

“Conflict and hunger in Haiti are moving hand-in-hand,” he said. “I’m frightened about where we’re going.”

Inside Haiti’s descent into anarchy — what life is like under the rule of a gangster named Barbecue

By Phoebe Hosier and Brad Ryan

Pierre Ricot is one of hundreds of thousands who have been displaced amid spiralling gang violence in Haiti.(Supplied: Amina Umar)

As Yousaf al-Omari shows us through the blackened rubble of one of Haiti's many razed homes, he warns us there are questions he can't safely answer.

"There is some things we cannot say right now," he says.

"There is gangsters around us now."

Yousaf, a volunteer charity worker, is translating for Pierre Ricot, a sound engineer who lives in the Caribbean nation's besieged capital, Port-au-Prince.

The men are giving us a tour via video call through what remains of Pierre's home.

It was torched by gangsters while Pierre was at work last week, they tell us. His wife and three of their children were home at the time but managed to escape.

The car he relies on as a taxi — his second job — was also set alight.

"Everything he was working hard to make, to build — in one day, in one minute, he loses everything," Yousaf says.

Mr Ricot stands in the rubble of his home after it was torched by gangs with his wife and children inside.(Supplied: Amina Umar)

Gang violence was already rampant in Haiti but it exploded in late February while the unelected and unpopular prime minister, Ariel Henry, was overseas.

Gangs hell-bent on overthrowing him set fire to buildings and cars and stormed prisons, freeing more than 4,000 inmates.

"Now every prisoner [who escaped] rejoined the gangster group," Yousaf says. "Now every gangster group [has] become more stronger."

Henry has stepped down, and Port-au-Prince is now largely under gang control.

"Every day, I see bad things," Yousaf says.

"I saw people die in front of me by hunger, I saw people die by thirst, I saw the gangsters killing people and burn[ing] their body."
The streets of Port-au-Prince resemble something of a hellscape under gang control.(Reuters: Ralph Tedy Erol/file)

After we speak, Yousaf films the area around him. He sends us videos showing the charred remains of a body and stray dogs sniffing about in the rubble. Mounds of tyres burn nearby. Plumes of toxic smoke descend over the desolate streets.

It's a snapshot of a nation that's been plunged into anarchy.

According to the UN, more than 360,000 Haitians have now been displaced by gang violence — half of them children. And 1.4 million people are on the brink of famine.
Violent protests erupted against the now ousted prime minister and his government.(Reuters: Ralph Tedy Erol/file)

"We've had plenty of really significant crises … [but] this is really the most acute crisis in modern times," says Robert Fatton, a Haitian American and professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia.

"You have no government, virtually all institutions have collapsed and the formation of a new government is a very complicated business.

"And you have increasingly powerful armed men that may ultimately be the arbiter of what happens next, which is very bad news for the country."
A lawless island with no leader

Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have been displaced by recent gang violence.(Reuters: Ralph Tedy Erol )

Haiti hasn't had an elected president since 2021. In July of that year, then-president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated by armed men in his home in the middle of the night.

A group of ambassadors later selected Ariel Henry to become the nation's interim prime minister.

The de facto leader promised to hold elections, but they were never held — his administration citing instability as a major obstacle.

Decades of political turmoil have fanned the flames of civil unrest, fuelled by anger over corruption and foreign interference.
Questions over Ariel Henry's political legitemacy have fuelled protests in the Haitian capital.(Reuters: Ricardo Arduengo)

Amid the power vacuum, gangs have flourished. The terror unleashed on residents has become increasingly violent. Kidnappings are common.

People who live in the capital's sprawling Cite Soleil slum are routinely raped, beaten and killed.

Now more than 8,400 people are estimated to have been victims of gang violence in Haiti last year, according to the UN Security Council.

This includes murder, kidnappings and injuries — an increase of 122 per cent on 2022.
The rise of a notorious gangster

Professor Fatton painted a picture of a vast and deeply rooted gang landscape home to some 200 groups.

At the top of them sits Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier — the former elite police officer who leads an alliance of several gangs known as the G9.

Asked about his nickname, Barbecue claims he got it after his mother's famous grilled chicken. But his opponents claim it alludes to his penchant for setting his victims on fire — an accusation he denies.

Violent mobster Jimmy "Barbecue" Cherizier leads the G9 gang alliance.(Reuters: Ralph Tedy Erol/File Photo)

The 47-year-old is the most high-profile face of the nation's recent unrest and has been an outspoken critic of Henry.

"He considers himself Che Guevara sometimes, [Fidel] Castro other times, then Martin Luther King, [Nelson] Mandela," Professor Fatton said.

"He presents himself as a revolutionary, as the guy who's going to change Haiti."

In a seven-minute voice recording circulated on WhatsApp, the mobster threatened the politicians appointed to join a "transitional council", which is set to replace the prime minister under a deal brokered with Caribbean nations, the US and Canada.

Once formed, the council will appoint another de facto prime minister and prepare for a future presidential election.

"You have taken the country where it is today. You have no idea what will happen," Barbecue told the politicians.


"I'll know if your kids are in Haiti, if your wives are in Haiti … if your husbands are in Haiti. If you're going to run the country, all your family ought to be there."

Another gang leader thought to be more powerful but less visible than Barbecue is Johnson André, also known as Izo.

Weapons and wealth on display in a music video featuring Johnson "Izo" André on YouTube.(Supplied: YouTube)

The 26-year-old is known for the brutal violence he inflicts on those he perceives to have targeted his members and the rap videos he posts to social media.

Professor Fatton said the mass prison break that happened this month, which triggered a state of emergency, was made possible with the help of drone surveillance provided by Izo's gang.

The Mawozo gang is yet another key group. It is believed to have been behind the 2021 abduction of 17 American and Canadian missionaries from an orphanage in Port-au-Prince.


"These gangs are not something that came out of the blue — they were nurtured. They were financed by powerful interests in Haiti, businessmen, politicians, et cetera," Professor Fatton said.

"What's more alarming is that at one point, there was warfare between the different gangs … but for the last 10 days the gangs have federated, they've united," he said.

Now a coalition of dangerous armed groups control 80 per cent of the nation's capital and are independently funded by the proceeds of arms and drug trafficking, kidnappings and extortion.

"They control the main arteries from the southern part of Haiti to the capital city … so every major convoy of gas, which is essential for the functioning of the city have to go through territories controlled by the gangs."
Brokering a deal with gangsters

Security concerns have plunged the Caribbean nation further into the depths of a humanitarian crisis. Roadblocks have led to shortages of food and fuel, while water is unable to be distributed.

The World Food Bank estimates 44 per cent of the population faces critical food insecurity.

Hospitals are deserted as medical staff are unable to get to work without risking their lives.

Haitian women carry containers to collect water after a state of emergency was declared.(Reuters: Ralph Tedy Erol)

Médecins Sans Frontières runs seven emergency health facilities across Haiti but even their operation has at times been forced to close.

The organisation's lead Samora Chalmers said an attack on one of its ambulances this year left staff traumatised after unidentified men killed one of their patients.

"We had to close for two months to really talk to the community, to make sure that we can function in security, and … to make sure they won't harm us," she said.

"We have this guarantee, for now."

Samora Chalmers says a deadly attack stopped MSF's emergency medical care earlier this year.(Supplied: Médecins Sans Frontières)

Ms Chalmers estimates her organisation will run out of some critical medicines within two weeks. Blood supplies are also running low.

Meanwhile, women and girls as young as 12 are suffering systemic sexual violence in areas controlled by gangs, according to the UN.

Ms Chalmers has seen this firsthand. She says her organisation has seen more than 4,000 women seeking help for rape and sexual assault in the past three months alone.
Finding homegrown solutions

Now a transitional council, backed by the US and Caribbean nations, is in the process of being established.

Once it's formed in the coming days, it will vote to appoint the future de facto prime minister of Haiti and prepare the nation for a future presidential election.

The council is made up of nine members, seven of which have voting powers. These include foreign representatives and local Haitian political parties.

The US, which is one of the voting members, has chosen career diplomat Dennis Hankins to represent America on the council.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Jamaica for an emergency meeting with Caribbean nations.(Reuters: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/file)

It comes as an international security mission, to be led by Kenya, is set to be deployed to restore order to Haiti once a new government is in place.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the council and security force were "a work in progress" but were moving forward.

"This is never going to be smooth and never going to be linear," he said on Friday, as the US announced a further $33 million in humanitarian aid.

Professor Fatton isn't convinced the answer lies in more foreign intervention: "Haitians want Haitian solutions to Haitian problems," he said.

"I don't know how you extricate the country from the current crisis. If I knew I would tell you. But I have a very bleak view of the future."

On the ground in the besieged Caribbean capital, many cling to hope for what's left of their country.

"One day Haiti will be nice," Yousaf said.

"Because Haiti was not like this … [and] because the people of Haiti are good people."

Crisis in Haiti comes after decades of turmoil: A chronology


By Bryan Pietsch
March 16, 2024 

Chaos in Haiti has reached new heights in recent weeks.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry said he would step down amid growing violence and a humanitarian crisis. Armed gangs, whose power has surged in the vacuum left by the still-unsolved assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, have overrun much of the Caribbean country, leaving it on the brink of collapse.

But social and political turmoil are no anomaly in Haiti, which has fought through waves of upheaval since its founding.

The first nation forged by a rebellion of enslaved people, Haiti in the 19th century struggled for decades under debt to France, coerced into paying reparations to former enslavers. The indemnity was an economic drain on the country, which remains impoverished even today. The United States invaded Haiti in the early 20th century, imposing a system of forced labor.

In the past 40 years, an era that began with a popular uprising that ended decades of dictatorship, the country has been beset by compounding crises — coups, violence, economic hardship and natural disasters, atop a history of botched or repressive interventions, imperialism and international exploitation.

Here’s a chronology of key events in Haiti’s modern political history, leading up to the ongoing crisis.

1. 1986: ‘Baby Doc’ flees to France

Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier was the only son of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the physician who was elected president of Haiti in 1957. Initially supported by the United States, Papa Doc held on to office for years, stealing millions of dollars in public money and international aid, while ruling through sham elections and fear.

When Jean-Claude, 19, came to power upon his father’s death in 1971, many hoped he would use a lighter hand. He chose the opposite course. He leaned heavily on his father’s shadowy Tonton Macoute — a paramilitary force named for the Haitian child-stealing boogeyman “Uncle Knapsack” — to terrorize the people into silence. Rampant corruption, violence and killings continued.

In the 1980s, as the increasingly dysfunctional country sank into economic turmoil, Baby Doc faced growing opposition at home and abroad. He fled the country in 1986 on a U.S. Air Force plane — his Louis Vuitton luggage allegedly stuffed with $120 million in cash — to exile on the French Riviera.

2. 1986 to 1990: Rapid succession

Baby Doc’s legacy persisted. Henri Namphy, a wealthy lieutenant general who had been close to Papa Doc, led a council installed after Baby Doc’s departure.

Namphy promised to bring democracy to Haiti, but his tenure was marred by more killings, including a massacre that disrupted voting. Still, Namphy kept his promise to hand over power to an elected president.

Leslie Manigat, a professor, won the 1988 election with just over 50 percent of the vote. But his administration didn’t last long: Namphy took power months later after a coup forced Manigat out.

Another coup followed that year, when another lieutenant general, Prosper Avril, declared himself president. Avril had been an associate of Baby Doc’s, and in 1990, as the specter of civil unrest loomed, he also fled on a U.S. Air Force plane.

3. 1990: Aristide appears to usher in a new era


Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a polyglot priest from the slums, was elected in 1990 with about two-thirds of the vote. Jubilant Haitians were hopeful that the charismatic leader could provide calm and prosperity for the country, although Haiti’s military and elites were skeptical of him.

His term lasted less than a year: He was pushed out by a coup. Nearly three years of military rule followed, until the United States helped return him to power in 1994.

Elections were held in 1995, and the following year, René Préval assumed the presidency in what was seen as the first peaceful transfer of power in Haiti’s history. But the quiet didn’t last long. A series of coup attempts set off another power struggle. Aristide was reelected in 2000.

Aristide’s return came with echoes of his predecessors, as he came to rely on gangs known as the chimères to snuff out dissent.

Prominent rebel leader Guy Philippe celebrates with fellow fighters in Cap-Haïtien in February 2004, the month they would overthrew Aristide. (Daniel Morel/Reuters)

4. 2004: U.N. mission seeks to stabilize Haiti

In 2004, Aristide faced an uprising seeking to oust him yet again, led by Guy Philippe, a prominent rebel leader. (He would go on to serve a prison sentence in the United States on a money-laundering conviction, before returning to Haiti late last year as something of a political wild card.)

Haiti appealed for international help to quell the unrest, and the United States, Canada, France and Chile sent in troops as the United States helped Aristide evacuate. A United Nations mission, known by the French acronym MINUSTAH, entered the country, where it remained until 2017.

The U.N. mission meant to stabilize Haiti failed to do so, and faced accusations of sexual misconduct committed by U.N. peacekeepers.

Outside the remains of Haiti's National Cathedral in Port-au-Prince on the first anniversary of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hit the country on Jan. 12, 2010. People were still living in tents. (Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images)

5. 2010: Earthquake devastates Haiti

A 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, killing more than 200,000 people. The temblor devastated the capital, Port-au-Prince, reducing much of it to ruins and leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless.

International relief efforts sought to help Haiti recover, but were criticized as slow and ineffective. Two years later, half a million people were still living in tents. U.N. troops from Nepal brought cholera to the country, setting off an outbreak that killed about 10,000 people. The United Nations in 2016 accepted responsibility for its role in the outbreak, but many Haitians say it has failed to adequately compensate those affected.

Haitian President Jovenel Moïse walks on the grounds of the National Palace after his February 2017 inauguration in Port-au-Prince. (Dieu Nalio Chery/AP)

6. 2021: President assassinated after power struggle

Jovenel Moïse was elected to a five-year term in 2016 but did not take office until the following year because of disputes over the election. That delay entitled him to stay in office beyond the scheduled end of his term, he argued, though opponents said it had ended in February 2021. He said efforts to replace him amounted to a coup attempt. The disarray led to a constitutional crisis: Moïse maintained that he was still president while opponents said Supreme Court Judge Joseph Mécène Jean-Louis was interim president.

In July 2021, armed men stormed Moïse’s Port-au-Prince home and he was fatally shot. The circumstances surrounding the killing remain unclear, with Colombian nationals, U.S. citizens and Moïse’s wife accused of involvement.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry, center, talks with former acting prime minister Claude Joseph on July 20, 2021, after being officially sworn in. The two had struggled for power after the assassination of Moïse. (Joseph Odelyn/AP)

7. 2024: Henry resigns amid gang turmoil

Two days before Moïse was assassinated, he had appointed Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon, as the next prime minister. But he had not been sworn in when Moïse was killed.

The assassination set off a power struggle between Henry and Claude Joseph, who had been serving as acting prime minister. Joseph continued to assert that he was acting prime minister.

But as international support, including that of the United States, coalesced around Henry, Joseph stepped down. The State Department said at the time that it was doing all it could “to support the formation of a unity government that is inclusive and that puts Haiti down a more united path.”

Gang violence worsened after Moïse’s assassination. In an effort to quell the chaos, Henry appealed to the international community to help restore order in Haiti. Other governments, including that of the United States, have been reluctant to intervene, however, after decades of failed foreign involvement. Kenya has said it would lead a U.N.-backed multinational police force deployed to Haiti, but has faced logistical and domestic legal obstacles in standing one up.

While Henry was in Kenya trying to further that plan, Haiti fell further into chaos. Gangs this month led a mass prison break and shut down the international airport. Amid clamor for his resignation, Henry went to Puerto Rico.

On Monday, Henry announced in a video address that he would resign once a transitional presidential council was put in place and an interim leader selected. With the country in shambles, it was not immediately clear who that person might be. If a coalition of gangs continues to strengthen its hold on Haiti, it could be the emergent leader of that bloc, Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, who determines the country’s direction.


Widlore Mérancourt, Ruby Mellen, Adam Taylor, Anthony Faiola and Stephanie Hanes contributed to this report.

Black Reconstruction as Class War

Jeff Goodwin
CATALYST JOURNAL

VOL 6 NO 1 SPRING 2022

LONG READ

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 is one of the greatest modern studies of revolution and counterrevolution. While it deserves its place alongside the classics, it is also an extraordinary example of a materialist and class analysis of race under capitalism. In recent years, the latter aspect of the book has been obscured and even denied. This essay seeks to restore Du Bois’s great work to its rightful place on both counts.


W. E. B. Du Bois’s magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, published in 1935, is one of the greatest scholarly studies of revolution and counterrevolution.1 It deserves a place on one’s bookshelf next to other modern classics, including Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, Georges Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution, and Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Scholars of revolutions, unfortunately, have not usually considered the US Civil War to be one of the great social revolutions of the modern era, akin to the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Many readers, in fact, view Du Bois’s book much more narrowly, as a response to white-supremacist histories of the Reconstruction era (1865–76) and, more particularly, a defense of the role of African American politicians — and the black voters who elected them — in the Southern state governments of that time. Du Bois does present such a defense, but Black Reconstruction offers much, much more than this.

Black Reconstruction is not only a towering work of history but also a work firmly embedded in the Marxist tradition. Du Bois reinterprets the Civil War as a social and political revolution “from below” — a workers’ revolution — that brought about the overthrow of both slavery and the Confederate state, thereby opening a door to interracial democracy in the South. The book then reinterprets the subsequent overthrow of this democracy as a class-based counterrevolution that destroyed the possibility of freedom for half the Southern working class and imposed a “dictatorship of capital” that brought about “an exploitation of labor unparalleled in modern times.”2

But why should one read Black Reconstruction in the twenty-first century? In short, because Du Bois is writing about issues that remain of tremendous political importance, including the nature of racial oppression and the racism of white workers. Unlike most contemporary analysts of race, moreover, Du Bois approaches these issues from the perspective of political economy. He rejects an approach to racial oppression that starts with prejudice, discrimination, or culture, trying instead to dig beneath these and understand how they are rooted in the material interests of different classes. Instead of insisting on the separation of race from class, as so many liberals do, Du Bois insists on their intimate connection.3

Black Reconstruction is rightly famous for stressing the collective agency of enslaved people in winning their own freedom and for its impassioned rebuttal of racist historiography. What has been less emphasized is the way in which Du Bois very explicitly rejects analyses of the Civil War and Reconstruction that emphasize race and racism as the primary drivers of historical events. Racism certainly played a hugely important role in that era, Du Bois argues, but it was a product of — and usually disguised — another, more powerful force: capitalism. More specifically, Du Bois argues in Black Reconstruction that two characteristic features of capitalism — capitalists’ competition for labor and workers’ competition for jobs — are the root cause of conflicts that seem to be driven by racism.

This perspective on Du Bois’s masterpiece runs counter to some influential interpretations of his work. Not surprisingly, there is resistance in some quarters to stating plainly that Black Reconstruction is a work of Marxism. Many people who come to Black Reconstruction for the first time are not expecting to read a Marxist text. They have most likely read Du Bois’s earlier collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, which precedes his turn to Marxism by three decades.4 While a number of authors do recognize Du Bois’s Marxism,5 many others deny that Black Reconstruction or his subsequent writings are Marxist. In 1983, for example, Cedric Robinson described Du Bois as a “sympathetic critic of Marxism.”6 Gerald Horne’s 1986 book examines in great detail Du Bois’s involvement in leftist (mainly Communist) causes after World War II, but he never offers an opinion as to whether Du Bois was a Marxist.7 And Manning Marable’s book on Du Bois, published just a few months later, portrays him as a “radical democrat” — although Marable later suggested that Du Bois might usefully be viewed as part of the “Western Marxist” tradition.8

More recently, a group of “Du Boisian” sociologists recognizes that Du Bois integrates some elements of Marxist thinking into his worldview. But according to these writers, not only is Du Bois not a Marxist but his ideas clearly transcend Marx’s. Marx gave theoretical primacy to class, they say, whereas Du Bois grasped the “intersectionality” of class and race, emphasizing their connections while giving theoretical primacy, by implication, to neither.9 According to these writers, this theoretical move allowed Du Bois, unlike Marx and his followers, they claim, to understand colonialism, the ways in which race “fractures” class consciousness, and racial oppression generally.10

In this essay, I argue that these “Du Boisians” and others who deny Du Bois’s Marxism are wrong. Du Bois actually does give theoretical primacy to capitalism. In both Black Reconstruction and his subsequent writings, Du Bois repeatedly emphasizes how racial oppression is a product of capitalism. Time and again, furthermore, Du Bois takes issue with what we would today call “race reductionism,” that is, attempts to explain historical events primarily in terms of race. His rejection of race reductionism only deepened in the years after Black Reconstruction’s publication.

After 1935, in short, “Du Boisianism” is Marxism. Du Bois’s failure lay not in the fact that he embraced a Marxist orientation but that he came to uncritically support Soviet authoritarianism. This was perhaps the greatest tragedy, in my view, of Du Bois’s long life. But the main point of this essay is to show that, despite all efforts to ignore or deny his Marxism, Black Reconstruction stands as a brilliant work of class analysis.
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA

Du Bois’s turn toward Marxism occurred rather late in his life, shortly before the publication of Black Reconstruction. His trip to the Soviet Union in 1926, months before Joseph Stalin’s consolidation of power, certainly pushed him in this direction. “Never before in life,” writes his biographer David Levering Lewis, “had he been as stirred as he would be by two months in Russia.”11 Du Bois traveled more than two thousand miles across the Soviet Union, “finding everywhere … signs of a new egalitarian social order that until then he had only dreamt might be possible.”12 “I may be partially deceived and half-informed,” Du Bois wrote at the time. “But if what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.”13 (Du Bois would visit the Soviet Union again in 1936, 1949, and 1958.)

Du Bois later wrote that his trip to the Soviet Union led him to question “our American Negro belief that the right to vote would give us work and decent wage,” or would abolish illiteracy or “decrease our sickness and crime.”14 Only a revolution, by implication, could attain these ends. Du Bois also now believed that “letting a few of our capitalists share with whites in the exploitation of our masses, would never be a solution of our problem.”15 Black liberation was impossible, in sum, so long as the United States remained a capitalist society, and “black capitalism” was a dead end.

Du Bois had been broadly familiar with Marxist ideas since his graduate student days at Harvard and in Berlin. But it was not until 1933, in the midst of the greatest crisis of capitalism in world history, that Du Bois began conscientiously to study Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. He was then sixty-five years old. As Lewis writes, Du Bois fell hard for Marxist analysis:


Like so many intellectuals in the thirties who broadcast Marxism as a verifiable science of society, the Atlanta professor was mesmerized by dialectical materialism. Calling Marx the “greatest figure in the science of modern industry,” Du Bois seemed to rediscover with the avidity of a gifted graduate student the thinker who Frank Taussing, his Harvard economics professor, had smugly ignored. Marx made history make sense — or more sense, Du Bois came to believe, than all other analytical systems.16

Du Bois was prodded to master Marxist theory by the rise of a group of so-called Young Turks within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the civil rights organization he helped found. These young scholar-activists, including Abram Harris, Ralph Bunche, and E. Franklin Frazier (all members or soon-to-be members of the Howard University faculty) “were attempting to shift the Negro intelligentsia’s focus on race to an analysis of the economics of class.”17 All were convinced that a powerful interracial labor movement was necessary to smash racial oppression, and they were critical of the NAACP for its lack of an economic program. Members of this group would offer advice to Du Bois about which texts were essential for him to read. Harris’s book, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement, coauthored with Sterling Spero, proved particularly influential; it was no coincidence that Du Bois titled the first chapter of Black Reconstruction “The Black Worker.”18 (I discuss the precise significance of this below.)

Although he would later grow close to the pro-Soviet Communist Party, Du Bois’s guides to Marxist theory in the early 1930s also included two anti-Stalinist leftists. One was Benjamin Stolberg, a journalist who later served on the Dewey Commission (officially the Commission of Inquiry Into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials), which was named after its chairman, the philosopher John Dewey. The other was a young leftist by the name of Will Herberg. Herberg was a Jewish Russian immigrant who flunked out of the City College of New York, joined the Communist Party, and was expelled along with others associated with Jay Lovestone for opposing Stalin’s foreign policy at the time. The Lovestonites, however, were ardent defenders of the Soviet Union. Herberg brought Marx’s writings on the Civil War to Du Bois’s attention, as well as Herberg’s own Marxist pamphlet on the Civil War and Reconstruction, “The Heritage of the Civil War,” which Du Bois would quote and cite in Black Reconstruction.19

Du Bois takes up a great many issues in Black Reconstruction, but the book mainly attempts to answer three broad questions: First, how did the Civil War become a revolution that overthrew slavery and brought democracy to the South? Second, what were the nature and main achievements of the Reconstruction state governments in the South? Finally, how are we to understand the counterrevolution that overthrew democracy and brought about a kind of semi-slavery for Southern blacks?


THE CIVIL WAR AND THE “GENERAL STRIKE”


The opening chapters of Black Reconstruction are not about Reconstruction at all. They deal with the antebellum period, workers (white and black), the nature of slavery, and the Civil War. These chapters make many important arguments and claims, none more important than the idea that enslaved people freed themselves during the Civil War through an extensive and prolonged “general strike.” This strike, like all strikes, was an instance of class struggle that involved the withholding of labor by one class of people, the workers or “direct producers,” from the owning or ruling class. As in other great revolutions, the opportunity for this class struggle from below was created by inter-elite conflicts that erupted into war.20

Du Bois insists that “slave workers” (as he calls them) should be seen as an integral part of the interracial working class in America, not as a group set apart by separate and distinct interests. It was the tragic error of Northern workers and the Northern labor movement — and an error of subsequent analysts who are blind to class — not to comprehend this. Thus, Du Bois titles the first chapter of his book “The Black Worker,” not “The Black Slave” or “The Enslaved.” And the second chapter is called “The White Worker.” Of course, Du Bois is keenly aware of the difference between enslaved labor and free wage labor. “No matter how degraded the factory hand,” he writes, “he is not real estate.”21 But Du Bois wants to emphasize, in Marxian fashion, that these two groups of workers, despite their different circumstances and despite their racial difference, share the same basic material interests. This was true, moreover, both before and after the Civil War.

But white workers failed to see their common interests with slave workers. “[W]hite labor,” writes Du Bois, “while it attempted no denial but even expressed faint sympathy, saw in [the] fugitive slave and in the millions of slaves behind him, willing and eager to work for less than current wage, competition for their own jobs.” It was this competition for jobs that fueled white racism. However, “What [the white workers] failed to comprehend,” writes Du Bois, “was that the black man enslaved was an even more formidable and fatal competitor than the black man free.”22

There thus arose, Du Bois relates, not one but two labor movements in antebellum America, one to free the slave workers of the South and the other to improve the wages and working conditions of the mainly immigrant working class in the North. The union of these two movements, Du Bois points out, would have been “irresistible.” But it was “almost impossible,” he writes, for white labor leaders to understand this:


They had their particularistic grievances and one of these was the competition of free Negro labor. Beyond this they could easily vision a new and tremendous competition of black workers after all the slaves became free. What they did not see nor understand was that this competition was present and would continue and would be emphasized if the Negro continued as a slave worker.23

This explains why white workers kept their distance from the abolitionist movement, which, for its part, failed to “realize the plight of the white laborer, especially the semi-skilled and unskilled worker.”24 This division within the US working class, of course, weakened both labor movements.

The general strike during the Civil War took the form of slave workers fleeing the plantations for the front lines and encampments of the Union Army. Du Bois estimates that five hundred thousand of the South’s four million enslaved blacks fled the plantations. These families and individuals typically worked on behalf of the Union Army as long as the war lasted; eventually, some two hundred thousand were armed and fought for the Union against the Confederacy. The general strike was thus a double blow to the South: the withdrawal of labor disrupted and weakened the Southern economy and war effort — cotton production in particular declined precipitously — and the labor made available to the Union Army strengthened the North’s military might. “Without the military help of the black freedmen,” Du Bois argues, quoting no less an authority than Abraham Lincoln, “the war against the South could not have been won.”25

Du Bois points out that this general strike “was followed by the disaffection of the poor whites,” who saw “with anger that the big slaveholders were escaping military service; that it was a ‘rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight.’”26 The exemption from military service of men who owned twenty or more slave workers was galling, “and the wholesale withdrawal of the slaveholding class from actual fighting which this rule made possible, gave rise to intense and growing dissatisfaction.”27 Du Bois also notes the poor whites’ “fear and jealousy of Negroes” in the advancing Northern army: “If the Negro was to be free where would the poor white be? Why should he fight against the blacks and his victorious friends? The poor white not only began to desert and run away; but thousands followed the Negro into the Northern camps.”28 In 1864 alone, according to Du Bois, one hundred thousand poor whites deserted the Confederate Army.29

Where does racism fit into Du Bois’s analysis of slavery? His discussion of racism in the antebellum period is classically materialist: racism did not produce slavery; slavery produced, and continuously reproduced, racism. The planters’ need for cheap labor — and the extraordinary wealth it produced — was its root cause. Slaveowners could not increase the productivity of their plantations by giving more resources to slave workers, or educating them, or teaching them skills, as this would undermine the very institution.30 Due to competition with other planters, moreover, the slaveowner “was forced, unless willing to take lower profits, continually to beat down the cost of his slave labor.”31 In this context, racism was “found, invented and proved” in order to justify the horrors (and inefficiencies) of slavery. This is how Du Bois puts it:


If the leaders of the South, while keeping the consumer in mind, had turned more thoughtfully to the problem of the American producer, and had guided the production of cotton and food so as to take every advantage of new machinery and modern methods in agriculture, they might have moved forward with manufacture and been able to secure an approximately large amount of profit. … But in order to maintain its income without sacrifice or exertion, the South fell back on a doctrine of racial differences which it asserted made higher intelligence and increased efficiency impossible for Negro labor. Wishing such an excuse for lazy indulgence, the planter easily found, invented and proved it. His subservient religious leaders reverted to the “Curse of Canaan”; his pseudo-scientists gathered and supplemented all available doctrines of race inferiority; his scattered schools and pedantic periodicals repeated these legends, until for the average planter born after 1840 it was impossible not to believe that all valid laws in psychology, economics and politics stopped with the Negro race.32

“The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority by the South,” Du Bois concludes, “was primarily because of economic motives and the interconnected political urge necessary to support slave industry.”33 (Du Bois has more to say about the racism of white workers, which I examine below.)

Du Bois’s explanation of the Union’s victory in the Civil War also highlights the efforts of English workers to prevent their government from recognizing the Confederacy and entering the war against the Union. “Monster meetings” of workers in London and Manchester in 1863 had a real impact, in Du Bois’s estimation. “Karl Marx,” he writes, “testified that this meeting [in St. James’ Hall, London, in March 1863] … kept Lord Palmerston [the prime minister] from declaring war against the United States.”34 Du Bois quotes the text of a speech, written by Marx, which was read at a subsequent demonstration in London, a text addressed and sent to President Lincoln:


Sir: We who offer this address are Englishmen and workingmen. We prize as our dearest inheritance, bought for us by the blood of our fathers, the liberty we enjoy — the liberty of free labor on a free soil. … We rejoiced, sir, in your election to the Presidency, as a splendid proof that the principles of universal freedom and equality were rising to the ascendant. We regarded with abhorrence the conspiracy and rebellion by which it was sought at once to overthrow the supremacy of a government based upon the most popular suffrage in the world, and to perpetuate the hateful inequalities of race.35

These English workers embraced just the type of interracial working-class solidarity that Du Bois would come to see, seventy years later, as essential for the eradication of racial oppression and for the liberation of workers of all colors.

The slave workers’ general strike destroyed slavery directly but also indirectly, by inducing Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. It also proved decisive for the Union defeat of the Confederacy. The result was thus a social as well as a political revolution. With the eradication of personal servitude, democracy became, for the first time, a real possibility in the South. Along with Du Bois, accordingly, we have every right to consider the Civil War truly epochal: “Its issue has vitally affected the course of human progress. To the student of history it ranks along with the conquests of Alexander; the incursions of the Barbarians; the Crusades; the discovery of America, and the American Revolution.”36 For Du Bois, “the emancipation of the laboring class in half the nation [is] a revolution comparable to the upheavals in France in the past, and in Russia, Spain, India and China today.”37


RECONSTRUCTION: AN “EXTRAORDINARY MARXIST EXPERIMENT”


For a dozen years following the Civil War, the Union Army occupied the South, and African American men could vote and run for political office. During these years, African Americans elected a large number of black and progressive white representatives to state governments across the South. Sixteen African Americans also served in the US Congress during these years, including two senators. For white elites, the Reconstruction era was a disaster. They would eventually create and distribute an image and historiography of Reconstruction that vilified both black representatives and black voters as ignorant, greedy, corrupt, and vengeful, truly unworthy of suffrage or indeed of any rights that whites were bound to respect.

The truth, as Du Bois shows in several chapters in Black Reconstruction, was quite different from this narrative. He believed that democracy, defended by federal troops, had allowed the working class to come to power in the South — fifty years before the Russian Revolution. Du Bois was tempted to describe this as a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” although he eventually decided to use the phrase “dictatorship of labor”:


[A]mong Negroes, and particularly in the South, there was being put into force one of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world, before the Russian revolution, had seen. That is, backed by the military power of the United States, a dictatorship of labor was to be attempted and those who were leading the Negro race in this vast experiment were emphasizing the necessity of the political power and organization backed by protective military power.38

Several interlocutors dissuaded Du Bois from using the term “dictatorship of the proletariat.” As he explained at the start of a chapter titled “The Black Proletariat in South Carolina”:


I first called this chapter “The Dictatorship of the Black Proletariat in South Carolina,” but it has been brought to my attention that this would not be correct since universal suffrage does not lead to a real dictatorship until workers use their votes consciously to rid themselves of the dominion of private capital.39

According to Du Bois, there were some indications of this intent among blacks in South Carolina, “but it was always coupled with the idea of that day, that the only real escape for a laborer was himself to own capital.”40 Indeed, most of the former slave workers wanted land of their own to work. Du Bois presumably used the phrase “dictatorship of labor” to signal that the Reconstruction governments were elected and supported by propertyless blacks and some poor whites — and that the officials so elected represented the interests of these workers.

Du Bois insists that Reconstruction cannot be understood in race-centered terms — that is, as a struggle between the black and white races, fueled by racism. Rather, Reconstruction was a conflict among classes that were struggling to find new ways of surviving after the demise of the slave economy. “Reconstruction,” as Du Bois puts it,


was not simply a fight between the white and black races in the South or between master and ex-slave. It was much more subtle; it involved more than this. There have been repeated and continued attempts to paint this era as an interlude of petty politics or nightmare of race hate instead of viewing it slowly and broadly as a tremendous series of efforts to earn a living in new and untried ways, to achieve economic security and to restore fatal losses of capital and investment.41

For Du Bois, the key actors of the Reconstruction era were workers (still divided by race, as before the war, into separate movements) and capitalists (divided into two main fractions). Reconstruction encompassed, first of all,


a vast labor movement of ignorant, earnest, and bewildered black men whose faces had been ground in the mud by their three awful centuries of degradation and who now staggered forward blindly in blood and tears amid petty division, hate and hurt, and surrounded by every disaster of war and industrial upheaval.42

Second,


Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.43

Third,


Reconstruction was the turn of white Northern migration southward to new and sudden economic opportunity which followed the disaster and dislocation of war, and an attempt to organize capital and labor on a new pattern and build a new economy.44

Du Bois is here referring to the Northern capitalists, both large and petty, who moved to the South in search of riches after the war — the “carpetbagger capitalists,” as he calls them. “Finally,” writes Du Bois,


Reconstruction was a desperate effort of a dislodged, maimed, impoverished and ruined oligarchy and monopoly to restore an anachronism in economic organization by force, fraud and slander, in defiance of law and order, and in the face of a great labor movement of white and black, and in bitter strife with a new capitalism and a new political framework.45

This, of course, is the formerly slave-owning planter class. Du Bois attributes the turmoil, corruption, and violence of the Reconstruction era to the “fierce fight” among these classes and class fractions for control over the “capitalist state.”46

What were the key achievements of the “dictatorships of labor” in the South while they lasted? The fact that African Americans enjoyed a modicum of civil and political rights during this era is of course tremendously important. For the first time in its history, universal manhood suffrage prevailed in the United States. For Du Bois, perhaps the most important achievements of Reconstruction were the public schools and black colleges that were founded in this era. (Du Bois himself attended one of these colleges, Fisk, a mere decade after Reconstruction.) He devotes an entire chapter (“Founding the Public School”) to this development, arguing that these schools were nothing less than “the salvation of the South and the Negro.”47

For Du Bois, interestingly, these schools played an important moderating role. “Without them,” he writes, “there can be no doubt that the Negro would have rushed into revolt and vengeance and played into the hands of those determined to crush him.”48 Du Bois also praises the new schools (and the black church) for creating “a little group of trained leadership.” He credits these leaders, and their political moderation, with preventing the reestablishment of chattel slavery after Reconstruction:

Had it not been for the Negro school and college, the Negro would, to all intents and purposes, have been driven back to slavery. His economic foothold in land and capital was too slight in ten years of turmoil to effect any defense or stability. His reconstruction leadership had come from Negroes educated in the North, and white politicians, capitalists and philanthropic teachers. The counterrevolution of 1876 drove most of these, save the teachers, away. But already, through establishing public schools and private colleges, and by organizing the Negro church, the Negro had acquired enough leadership and knowledge to thwart the worst designs of the new slave drivers.49

These leaders, Du Bois suggests, “avoided the mistake of trying to meet force by force.” He praises their resilience and patience in the face of violent provocation: “They bent to the storm of beating, lynching and murder, and kept their souls in spite of public and private insult of every description.”50

Nevertheless, Du Bois emphasizes that the main economic demand of the freedmen was never attained during Reconstruction: the extensive redistribution of land, including the big plantations, to the formerly enslaved. The typical freedman, according to Du Bois, had “but one clear economic ideal and that was his demand for land, his demand that the great plantations be subdivided and given to him as his right.” Du Bois writes that this demand was “perfectly fair and natural” and “ought to have been an integral part of Emancipation.” He points out that French, German, and Russian serfs and peasants 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.”51 More specifically, the absence of land reform in the South opened the door to a counterrevolution that would transform the propertyless freedmen into semi-slaves — indebted sharecroppers, convict laborers, and the like.

Du Bois casts some blame for the absence of land reform upon the same black leaders whose moderation he otherwise praises. “The Negro’s own black leadership was naturally of many sorts,” according to Du Bois:


Some, like the whites, were petty bourgeois, seeking to climb to wealth; others were educated men, helping to develop a new nation without regard to mere race lines, while a third group were idealists, trying to uplift the Negro race and put them on a par with the whites. But how was this to be accomplished? In the minds of very few of them was there any clear and distinct plan for the development of a laboring class into a position of power and mastery over the modern industrial state. And in this lack of vision, they were not singular in America.52

Du Bois seems to be suggesting here that the weakness of socialist ideology among black leaders and Americans generally is responsible for “this lack of vision.” That said, the petty-bourgeois background of so many black leaders raises serious doubts about Du Bois’s characterization of the Reconstruction governments as “dictatorships of labor.” In fact, as Eric Foner points out, most black politicians during Reconstruction were conservative or silent on the issue of land redistribution.53 On this particular issue, Du Bois’s analysis should have been more materialist than it was.


THE COUNTERREVOLUTION OF PROPERTY


Du Bois was arguably even more concerned in Black Reconstruction with explaining the counterrevolution that overthrew Reconstruction than he was with celebrating its achievements. Hundreds of pages of the book discuss this issue, including two of the book’s final chapters, namely, “Counter-revolution of Property” (chapter 14) and “Back Toward Slavery” (chapter 16). One of the key themes of these chapters is that this counterrevolution was brought about by a class (the planters) for economic reasons, not by a race (whites) for reasons of racial animus or racial ideology. This was truly, Du Bois emphasizes, a counterrevolution of property.

Du Bois writes that “the overthrow of Reconstruction was in essence a revolution inspired by property, and not a race war.”54 Elsewhere he adds, “It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.”55 This was a bourgeois counterrevolution against the “dictatorships of labor.” This is how Du Bois summarizes this counterrevolution, otherwise known as the Compromise of 1876, which included the withdrawal of federal troops from the South:

The bargain of 1876 was essentially an understanding by which the Federal Government ceased to sustain the right to vote of half of the laboring population of the South, and left capital as represented by the old planter class, the new Northern capitalist, and the capitalist that began to rise out of the poor whites, with a control of labor greater than in any modern industrial state in civilized lands. Out of that there has arisen in the South an exploitation of labor unparalleled in modern times, with a government in which all pretense at party alignment or regard for universal suffrage is given up. The methods of government have gone uncriticized, and elections are by secret understanding and manipulation; the dictatorship of capital in the South is complete.56

“The dictatorship of capital in the South is complete” — not a dictatorship of an undifferentiated white race. In fact, Du Bois argues,

The new dictatorship became a manipulation of the white labor vote which followed the lines of similar control in the North, while it proceeded to deprive the black voter by violence and force of any vote at all. The rivalry of these two classes of labor and their competition neutralized the labor vote in the South.57

The dictatorship of capital, in sum, brought about the oppression and disenfranchisement of black workers, in part to win the support of white workers. But while white workers kept the right to vote, they had little more political power than blacks. The outcome of the counterrevolution of 1876 was thus the racial oppression of black workers; the destruction of democracy; a divided working class; and the “unparalleled” exploitation of labor, black and white. Indeed, capital in the South enjoyed, in Du Bois’s words, “a control of labor greater than in any modern industrial state in civilized lands.”58 Without civil and political rights, moreover, many black workers were eventually reduced to the status of semi-slaves, tied to planters by debt and violence. The planters would remain the politically dominant class in the South until their power was finally broken by the Civil Rights Movement.59

This brings us to the question of white working-class racism. Why did white workers support the dictatorship of capital and the oppression of black workers? Du Bois viewed such racism as extremely powerful and extensive, so much so that he sometimes doubted whether working-class solidarity and socialism were in any way realistic in the United States. In fact, Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction during a period when he was unusually pessimistic about the possibility of interracial solidarity. The year before Black Reconstruction was published, Du Bois penned an infamous editorial in The Crisis, the magazine he long edited, which called for the voluntary self-segregation of African Americans.60 The editorial stirred up a firestorm of criticism within the strongly integrationist (and interracial) NAACP.

But self-segregation was never a principle or ultimate end for Du Bois. It was a tactic — and one he gradually abandoned during the 1940s. Similarly, Du Bois never concluded in Black Reconstruction, or in any of his subsequent writings, that interracial working-class solidarity was impossible. It was just, at specific times and for specific reasons, very difficult to achieve. For Du Bois, white working-class racism was above all a puzzle that needed to be solved, not a permanent state of affairs. It troubled him because he was convinced that neither capitalism nor the racial oppression it produced could be overthrown if racism prevented the unification of white and black workers. And Du Bois was clear in Black Reconstruction that his ultimate goal was to unify “slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat.”61 There was no other road, as he saw it, to either the emancipation of labor or the overthrow of racial oppression.

As it happened, white workers in the South generally supported the overthrow of Reconstruction and the oppression of blacks. They generally supported, that is, the bourgeois counterrevolution of property that established a dictatorship of capital. What explains this paradox? Why would a group of workers who would have been stronger had they united with another group of workers instead support their exploiters in the oppression of that other group? Throughout Black Reconstruction, Du Bois emphasizes that white working-class animosity toward blacks stems from competition over jobs. Capitalism everywhere pits workers against one another, such that workers view others as competitors, even enemies. Capitalism creates a kind of war of all against all as workers scramble to find jobs and keep them. Of course, this war allows capitalists to keep wages low. For Du Bois, white working-class racism evolved out of their fear that capitalists would replace them with black workers, including newly emancipated workers, who were willing to work for lower wages. It was this same fear of competition, Du Bois argued, that had led to the formation of two labor movements in the antebellum period.

The fear of unemployment, according to Du Bois, was particularly strong before the creation of the modern welfare state. And so white workers used what power they had to exclude blacks from the labor market. Hence white demands that blacks be banished from certain occupations or workplaces; hence the exclusion of blacks from craft unions; hence white violence against black coworkers and strikebreakers. Racism could be “found, invented and proved” in order to justify these practices, in the same way that slaveowners had earlier “found, invented and proved” racism to justify theirs. Here is Du Bois explaining the violence of whites against African Americans:


Total depravity, human hate and Schadenfreude, do not explain fully the mob spirit in America. Before the wide eyes of the mob is ever the Shape of Fear. Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake, is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something. Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime. And of all this, most ubiquitous in modern industrial society is that fear of unemployment.62

White workers, in short, believed that it was better to be exploited than not to be exploited (i.e., unemployed). They feared unemployment, which meant no wages, more than they feared low wages. And so white workers sided with people who were offering jobs and looked like them instead of with darker people who shared their plight. This was an understandable decision but an error nonetheless. White workers as well as black suffered — and continue to suffer — from their lack of solidarity.

Du Bois also emphasizes that the planter class was ever prepared to encourage and aggravate the animosity between white and black workers. “They lied about the Negroes,” he writes, and “accused them of theft, crime, moral enormities and laughable grotesqueries.” The planters’ purpose was to forestall “the danger of a united Southern labor movement by appealing to the fear and hate of white labor and offering them alliance and leisure.”63 The planters, Du Bois writes, encouraged white workers “to ridicule Negroes and beat them, kill and burn their bodies” and “even gave the poor whites their daughters in marriage, and raised a new oligarchy on the tottering, depleted foundations of the old.”64

Du Bois very briefly presents another explanation for white working-class racism — in the post-Reconstruction era — that has become the focus of much attention. His discussion of this spans only a few paragraphs, but it is sometimes discussed as if it were the very core of Black Reconstruction. And it is the source of the most popular catchphrase of the book — although Du Bois himself never used the phrase — namely, “the wages of whiteness.”65

Du Bois suggests that white workers in the South — but not blacks — received “a sort of public and psychological wage” as a supplement to the low wages paid by their employers.66 Of what did this wage consist? Du Bois points out that white workers could enter public parks, send their children to “the best schools,” and apply for jobs in police departments. Blacks could do none of these things. White workers could also walk public streets without being accosted or assaulted; blacks could not. In addition, white workers had the right to vote, and while this did not result in any real political power, the courts treated them with leniency because they were dependent on white votes. Blacks could not vote, so the courts treated them harshly.67

Du Bois is mainly alluding here to the civil and political rights of white workers, and to the exercise of those rights. Calling these rights a “psychological” wage, however, is confusing: These rights were real and enforceable; they did not just exist in the heads or minds of white workers. In any event, “the wages of whiteness” turn out to consist primarily of the civil and political rights enjoyed by white workers but denied to blacks following Reconstruction. White workers had certain rights in addition to low wages; black workers had no rights and even lower wages. This is a useful shorthand description of the Jim Crow era.

Du Bois also includes “public deference and titles of courtesy” in the extra “wage” that white workers but not black were given. White workers had a certain status (at least among other whites) that blacks did not. And Du Bois notes that newspapers flattered the poor whites while ignoring or ridiculing blacks. Here again, these things were not just in the minds of white workers, so calling them “psychological” is odd. In any event, “the wages of whiteness” refers to the rights and status enjoyed by white workers in addition to their low wages.

The question is, how do these “wages” explain racism? They describe a racist society, but how do they produce racial hatred or violence? Du Bois does not say much about this, but he implies that white workers felt compelled to resist any effort to extend to black workers the same rights and deference they received:


[White] laborers … would rather have low wages upon which they could eke out an existence than see colored labor with a decent wage. White labor saw in every advance of Negroes a threat to their racial prerogatives, so that in many districts Negroes were afraid to build decent homes or dress well, or own carriages, bicycles or automobiles, because of possible retaliation on the part of the whites. Thus every problem of labor advance in the South was skillfully turned by demagogues into a matter of inter-racial jealousy.68

If blacks enjoyed the same rights and social esteem as white workers, Du Bois seems to say, white workers could no longer claim to be superior to them or to anyone else in society — and that, by implication, was presumably intolerable to whites, even if it meant “eking out an existence.”

Du Bois thus presents two explanations for the racism of white workers: white workers become racists to justify their efforts to prevent black workers from replacing them at work, and they become racists to justify their efforts to prevent blacks from enjoying the same rights and status they enjoy. There is undoubtedly some truth to both these arguments. But it is also obvious to Du Bois that neither adequately explains why white workers could not or would not come to see that a united front with black workers against capitalists would result in higher wages, greater rights, and a higher status for themselves as well as for black workers. This failure of vision, Du Bois understood, is not inevitable.

In fact, Du Bois clearly did not believe that his two explanations worked in all times and places. As noted earlier, Du Bois held out hope in Black Reconstruction for the emancipation of “slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat.”69 As we shall see, he would later praise certain trade unions for building interracial solidarity, and he would advise radical black youth that the liberation of both blacks and whites depended upon their mutual cooperation and friendship. Du Bois never developed a simple formula or technique for bringing about working-class solidarity. Of course, no such formula or technique exists. But Black Reconstruction reminds us why workers’ solidarity is so important, and Du Bois would preach the gospel of interracial solidarity for the rest of his days. He later wrote that Black Reconstruction marks a break with his earlier “provincial racialism” and was an attempt “to envisage the broader problems of work and income as affecting all men regardless of color or nationality.”70

AFTER BLACK RECONSTRUCTION

Du Bois would remain a committed socialist and Marxist until his death in 1963. Black Reconstruction, in other words, was just one part — the most extraordinary part, no doubt — of a larger body of Marxist work written by Du Bois. Unfortunately, Du Bois also became a Stalinist, and he would articulate a view of socialism that was deeply problematic. A brief review of some of Du Bois’s key writings after 1935 demonstrates that Black Reconstruction was by no means a unique or unusual foray into Marxist theory.

In 1940, Du Bois published an autobiography, Dusk of Dawn.71 He was then seventy-two years old. (A second autobiography was published posthumously in the United States in 1968.72) Near the end of this volume, Du Bois presents a “Basic American Negro Creed” that he originally wrote in 1936, as an appendix to an essay in which, among other things, he declared his belief in Marxism.73 “We believe,” the creed states, “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.” Toward this end, the creed advocates 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.” And the creed calls “for vesting the ultimate power of the state in the hands of the workers.”74 Working-class solidarity, interracial unionism, the fight against racism, common ownership of the means of production, and workers’ control of the state — this is Du Bois’s program for black workers and, indeed, for working people around the globe.

Several years later, during World War II, Du Bois would become preoccupied, and not for the first time, with the question of colonialism. A longtime advocate of pan-Africanism, Du Bois rightly worried that colonialism would endure long after World War II, despite the high-minded phrases and promises of European leaders during the war. Shortly after presiding at the Fifth Pan-African Conference in Manchester, England, Du Bois summarized his views about the capitalist basis of colonialism and the color line in his book Color and Democracy. “Not until we face the fact,” writes Du Bois, “that colonies are a method of investment yielding unusual [i.e., large] returns, or expected to do so, will we realize that the colonial system is part of the battle between capital and labor in the modern economy.”75

Du Bois goes on to criticize the race-centered view of imperialism when he presents his own alternative perspective:

It happens, not for biological or historical reasons, that most of the inhabitants of colonies today have colored skins. This does not make them one group or race or even allied biological groups or races. In fact these colored people vary vastly in physique, history, and cultural experience. The one thing that unites them today in the world’s thought is their poverty, ignorance, and disease, which renders them all, in different degrees, unresisting victims of modern capitalistic exploitation. On this foundation the modern “Color Line” has been built, with all its superstitions and pseudo-science. And it is this complex today which more than anything else excuses the suppression of democracy, not only in Asia and Africa, but in Europe and the Americas. Hitler seized on “negroid” characteristics to accuse the French of inferiority. Britain points to miscegenation with colored races to prove democracy impossible in South America. But it is left to the greatest modern democracy, the United States, to defend human slavery and caste, and even defeat democratic government in its own boundaries, ostensibly because of an inferior race, but really in order to make profits out of cheap labor, both black and white.76

Racism, in other words, is the “ostensible” motivation behind — and a justification for — slavery, caste, and colonialism. But this is a fig leaf — or “camouflage,” as Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction.77 The actual motivation is the accumulation of profits by means of cheap labor. Herein, for Du Bois, is the secret of “white supremacy”: the capitalist imperative to exploit labor is achieved by creating a color line that oppresses workers of color and deceives white workers into believing they are superior to them, thereby dividing and cheapening all labor.

Following World War II, Du Bois entered into the orbit of the pro-Soviet Communist Party of the United States, a group from which he had long kept his distance for a variety of reasons, despite his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union. In October 1946, Du Bois was invited to speak in Columbia, South Carolina, to delegates of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, a group founded by the Communist Party. (Paul Robeson and the novelist Howard Fast spoke to the group the night before Du Bois’s speech.) In his address, “Behold the Land,” Du Bois advises the delegates:


Slowly but surely the working people of the South, white and black, must come to remember that their emancipation depends upon their mutual cooperation; upon their acquaintanceship with each other; upon their friendship; upon their social intermingling. Unless this happens each is going to be made the football to break the heads and hearts of the other.

Du Bois goes on to say:

The oil and sulphur; the coal and iron; the cotton and corn; the lumber and cattle belong to you the workers, black and white, and not to the thieves who hold them and use them to enslave you. They can be rescued and restored to the people if you have the guts to strive for the real right to vote, the right to real education, the right to happiness and health and the total abolition of the father of these scourges of mankind, poverty.78

Du Bois then speaks of the white workers, the “poor whites,” of the South. He has become much less pessimistic about the possibility of interracial solidarity than he was a decade earlier:

It may seem like a failing fight when the newspapers ignore you; when every effort is made by white people in the South to count you out of citizenship and to act as though you did not exist as human beings while all the time they are profiting by your labor, gleaning wealth from your sacrifices and trying to build a nation and a civilization upon your degradation. You must remember that despite all this, you have allies, and allies even in the white South. First and greatest of these possible allies are the white working classes about you, the poor whites whom you have been taught to despise and who in turn have learned to fear and hate you. This must not deter you from efforts to make them understand, because in the past, in their ignorance and suffering, they have been led foolishly to look upon you as the cause of most of their distress.79

This attitude, Du Bois suggests, “has been deliberately cultivated ever since emancipation.”80 He insists that the color line between black and white workers must be broken, a division deliberately fostered by capitalists and their political servants. This was an idea to which Du Bois returned again and again during his final decades, an idea that goes back at least to his 1920 essay “On Work and Wealth.”81

As we have seen, Du Bois encouraged black workers to join trade unions in his 1936 “creed.” In the following years, Du Bois continued to see trade unions, especially the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), as the best hope for creating interracial working-class solidarity in the United States. In a 1948 essay, Du Bois writes, “Probably the greatest and most effective effort toward interracial understanding among the working masses has come about through the trade unions.”82 The CIO’s efforts had brought about “an astonishing spread of interracial tolerance and understanding. Probably no movement in the last 30 years,” he wrote, “has been so successful in softening race prejudice among the masses.”83

In this same 1948 text, Du Bois reiterates his belief that racism and imperialism — and wars of liberation — are primarily generated by capitalists and their pursuit of profits:

[T]he American Negro is part of a world situation. Negroes are in a quasi-colonial status. They belong to the lower classes of the world. These classes are, have been, and are going to be for a long time exploited by the more powerful groups and nations in the world for the benefit of those groups. The real problem before the United States is whether we are really beginning to reason about this world-wide feeling of class dominance with its resultant wars: wars for rivalry for the sharing of the spoils of exploitation, and wars against exploitation.84

It is telling that Du Bois describes imperialism and colonialism here in terms of exploitation and class dominance and not in terms of national or racial oppression. Of course, Du Bois fully understands that colonialism entails national and racial oppression, but its primary cause is the capitalist’s search for cheap labor.

At the height of McCarthyism in the United States, in 1950, Du Bois drafted a book-length manuscript called “Russia and America: An Interpretation.” His publisher refused to print it because it was too pro-Soviet and too critical of the United States. Incredibly, it has still not been published.85 One important section of this book — the whole of which is too long to adequately summarize here — argues that the Soviet Union is more democratic than the United States because Soviet citizens are able to discuss, debate, and decide “matters of vital interest to the people, that is, work and wage and living conditions — matters not simply of interest, but of personal knowledge and experience.” For Du Bois, clearly, this is the core meaning of socialist democracy:

Everybody wants to talk about these matters; everyone attends meetings twice or three times a week; they discuss the local industries; the water supply, the schools and the man or woman best fitted to represent their thought and decision in the county meetings. If the delegate selected does not act and vote as they wish, they recall him and substitute another.86

“It is a mistake,” Du Bois concludes, “to think democracy has been throttled in the Soviet Republics.” He likens local soviets to New England town meetings, a venue in which ordinary people “come together to talk, propose, argue, and to decide; to elect a delegate to a higher Soviet which in turn elects to one still higher and so on to the Supreme Soviet. Here is pure and effective democracy,” Du Bois suggests, “such as has almost disappeared from the United States.”87 In the United States, in fact, “our election of the president, appointment of judges, representation in the Senate and inequality of electoral districts show the legal restraints on democracy; while extralegally but by common consent are disfranchisement of Negroes and the poor, the use of money in elections, and the well-paid lobbyists of Big Business in our legislatures, not to mention the press and periodical monopoly.”88 Du Bois concludes,

It is with the greatest difficulty that the American electorate gets a chance to express its mind or receive the truth upon which to make up its mind; or secure sanctions by which it may make its legislators carry out the popular will. In both Great Britain and France, and in pre-war Germany and Italy, and certainly in the United States, the will of the people has long been thwarted by wealth, privilege, and ignorance.89

In 1952, Du Bois began teaching at the interracial Jefferson School of Social Science in Manhattan, which was devoted to workers’ education. The school was established by the Communist Party to educate working-class people and to train class-conscious militants. Du Bois taught courses on imperialism, the slave trade, Africa, pan-Africanism, and Reconstruction. (The writer Lorraine Hansberry was in his first class.) The course on Reconstruction argued that the socialist revolution requires interracial solidarity against capitalists.90 Du Bois taught at the Jefferson School until 1956, when it was forced to close.

Du Bois’s politics were never closer to the Communist Party’s during these years, and, as we have seen, his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union continued unabated. In 1953, Du Bois penned a paean to Stalin — with the obligatory insults to Trotsky — following the death of the Soviet leader.91 Du Bois justified the Soviet dictatorship as necessary until such time as Soviet workers were “more intelligent, more experienced and in less danger from interference from without.”92 It was just such alleged interference, moreover, that led Du Bois to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Not surprisingly, he vehemently denied that socialism must be democratic, although that was certainly his ideal.93

Du Bois’s vision of socialism is problematic, to say the least. It was based in part on his long-standing belief that smarter and better educated people — the “talented tenth,” as he called them — had a responsibility to lead “ignorant” and uneducated people, who were not capable of governing themselves. Du Bois saw Stalin (and later Mao Zedong) as educated and experienced leaders who were selflessly pulling — or perhaps dragging — masses of ignorant peasants into the twentieth century. Their noble ends allegedly justified their often-brutal methods. This kind of elitism erupts, incidentally, in a little-noted passage in Black Reconstruction in which Du Bois states that it would have been “best” (even if politically impractical) if there had been a property qualification for voting after the Civil War and only a “gradual enfranchisement” of black workers, pending the establishment of public schools throughout the South.94

Du Bois drafted a second autobiography in 1958–9 and slightly revised it in 1960. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois was edited by his friend Herbert Aptheker, a longtime Communist Party activist whom Du Bois had befriended after the war and whom he would appoint as his literary executor. Shortened versions of The Autobiography were published in the Soviet Union in 1962 and shortly later, posthumously, in China and East Germany. It was finally published in the United States in 1968. In this text, Du Bois again expresses his Marxist beliefs and distances himself from his earlier “racialism” or race-centered views. “I believe in the dictum of Karl Marx,” he writes, “that the economic foundation of a nation is widely decisive for its politics, its art and its culture.”95 Du Bois adds that as a young man, “What I wanted was the same economic opportunities that white Americans had. Beyond this I was not thinking”:


I … did not realize what wretched exploitation white Americans and white workers of all sorts faced and had faced in the past, and would face in years to come. Although a student of social progress, I did not know the labor development in the United States. I was bitter at lynching, but not moved by the treatment of white miners in Colorado or Montana. I never sang the songs of Joe Hill, and the terrible strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, did not stir me, because I knew that factory strikers like these would not let a Negro work beside them or live in the same town. It was hard for me to outgrow this mental isolation, and to see that the plight of the white workers was fundamentally the same as that of the black, even if the white worker helped enslave the black.96

A group of workers who would have been empowered by uniting with another group of workers instead helped to oppress that other group. This is the tragedy — and the puzzle — of the American labor movement of Du Bois’s time. But Du Bois’s earlier racialism, he implies, not only blinded him to the exploitation of workers of all races but thereby prevented him from understanding the true nature of the racial oppression of blacks.

Du Bois also speaks in The Autobiography about the type of society he desires: “I believe in communism,” he writes. “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.” Du Bois adds that “all men should be employed according to their ability and that wealth and services should be distributed according to need. Once I thought that these ends could be attained under capitalism,” Du Bois notes, but “After earnest observation I now believe that private ownership of capital and free enterprise are leading the world to disaster.”97 Du Bois adds that democratic government in the United States “has almost ceased to function,” noting that one-quarter of adults are disenfranchised and half do not vote. “We are ruled by those who control wealth and who by that power buy or coerce public opinion.”98

Du Bois settled in Ghana in 1961 to work on a projected multivolume Encyclopedia Africana. He died there in 1963 at the age of ninety-five. Before he left the United States, Du Bois applied for membership in the Communist Party of the United States, to which he had been close since World War II. Du Bois’s last major speech in the United States addressed, not surprisingly, the topic of “Socialism and the American Negro.” It was delivered in May 1960 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Folkways Records produced a vinyl recording of the speech that same year.

In this speech, Du Bois reiterated his belief that “there is no doubt that the world of the twenty-first century will be overwhelmingly communistic.”99 He also offered some interesting critical reflections, from a Marxist perspective, on the Civil Rights Movement, which was by then in full swing. (The student sit-in movement began in February 1960 and spread across the South in a matter of weeks.) Du Bois’s thoughts are worth quoting at length:


The legal fight led by the NAACP has been an astonishing success. But its very success shows the limitations of law, and law enforcement, unless it has an economic program; unless the mass of Negro people have not simply legal rights, but have such rights to work and wage that enable them to live decently. Here in the United States we have had a stirring, in the Negro population, which emphasized these facts. … The experience in Montgomery, the extraordinary uprising of students, all over the south and beginning in the north, shows an awareness of our situation which is most encouraging. But it still does not reach the center of the problem. And that center is not simply the right of Americans to spend their money as they wish and according to law, but the chance for American Negroes to have money to spend, because of employment in which they can make a decent wage. What then is the next step? It is for American Negroes in increasing numbers, and more and more widely, to insist upon the legal rights which are already theirs, and to add to that increasingly a socialistic form of government, an insistence upon the welfare state, which denies the further carrying out of industry for the profit of those corporations which monopolize wealth and power.100

Martin Luther King Jr — who also became a socialist, like Du Bois — would say much the same thing about the necessity of decent wages for blacks just a few years later, demanding, among other things, a guaranteed income for all.101 And like Du Bois, King became a strong advocate of multiracial trade unionism and working-class solidarity as the best means to end poverty and racism.102
CONCLUSION

Du Bois’s turn to socialism and Marxism did not entail any lessening of his interest in or disgust with racism and the color line. Du Bois was committed to destroying racial oppression before he became a Marxist, and he remained just as committed to destroying racial oppression after he became a Marxist. Du Bois became an unapologetic Marxist and a committed socialist, in fact, not in spite of his hatred of racial oppression, but precisely because of that hatred. He was driven and attracted to Marxism and socialism by his quest to understand racial oppression and the best strategy to destroy it. Of course, his understanding of both racism and how we might subvert it changed radically once he became a Marxist and a socialist. This change is missed by scholars who assume that Du Bois’s ideas were essentially fixed around the time he wrote The Souls of Black Folk.

Du Bois came to believe that the exploitation of the labor of black, brown, and “yellow” workers was the main foundation of and motivation for racial oppression around the globe and that the liberation of people of color, accordingly — all people of color, and not just workers — required the elimination of this exploitation, that is, socialism. Du Bois also looked at the “color line” differently after he became a Marxist. For the socialist Du Bois, the color line was problematic because it divided workers as well as races and thereby rendered working-class solidarity and socialist revolution — and the eradication of racial oppression as he now understood it — more difficult.

Du Bois deserves to be remembered as an eloquent critic of capitalism and its ineluctable consequences: racial oppression, colonialism, imperialism, war, poverty, and gross inequality, political as well as economic. Du Bois saw a clear relationship between capitalism and racial oppression, namely, cause and effect. He ranks among the most astute Marxists who have addressed the question of racial oppression, an incredibly rich tradition that includes such luminaries as Hubert Harrison, Claude McKay, José Carlos Mariátegui, Max Shachtman, C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, Harry Haywood, Herbert Aptheker, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Claudia Jones, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Harold Wolpe, Neville Alexander, Angela Davis, Manning Marable, Stuart Hall, Adolph Reed, and Barbara Fields, among many others. We need to recognize and credit not only the Marxist Du Bois but this entire pantheon of Marxist theorists of race. Du Bois did not transcend this tradition, as some have implied. He was at the heart of it.

At his best, Du Bois could also be an eloquent advocate for democratic socialism — for multiracial working-class solidarity, for workers’ control of the state and economy, and for an economy based on human needs. It is true that Du Bois’s elitist vision of socialism was deeply flawed, and his apologetics for Stalin’s dictatorship and authoritarian socialism are indefensible and detract from his legacy. Yet many of his contemporary acolytes deny the Marxist Du Bois, portraying him as a race-centered theorist or an “intersectionalist.” He was neither. Black Reconstruction in America, I have shown, is a brilliant Marxist study that explains racial oppression and racism as products of capitalism. Denying Du Bois’s Marxism results in a distorted view of Du Bois’s life and ideas, including, ironically, his analysis of racial oppression and how we might destroy it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff Goodwin teaches sociology at New York University.