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8/5/2023

120 Years of Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk: Education and Progress in “Of the Meaning of Progress.” By: Carlos L. Garrido

19 Comments

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Aristotle famously starts his Metaphysics with the claim that “all men by nature desire to know.”[1] For Dubois, if there are a people in the U.S. who have immaculately embodied this statement, it is black folk. In Black Reconstruction, for instance, Du Bois says that “the eagerness to learn among American Negroes was exceptional in the case of a poor and recently emancipated folk.”[2] In The Souls of Black Folk, he highlights “how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn.”[3] This was a stark contrast with the “white laborers,” who unfortunately, as Du Bois notes, “did not demand education, and saw no need of it, save in exceptional cases.”[4]

Out of the black community’s longing to know, and out of this longing taking material and organizational form through the Freedman’s Bureau, came one of the most important accomplishments of that revolutionary period of reconstruction – the public schools and black colleges. It was these schools and colleges, Du Bois argued, which educated black leaders, and ultimately, prevented the rushed revolts and vengeance which could have driven the mass of black people back into the old form of slavery.[5]

This year marks the 120th anniversary of Dubois's masterful work, The Souls of Black Folk. In this essay, I will be concentrating my analysis on the fourth chapter, titled "Of the Meaning of Progress," where I will peruse how the subjects of education and progress are presented within a greatly racialized American capitalism.

The Tragedy of Josie

The chapter retells a story which is first set a dozen or so years after the counterrevolution of property in 1876. It is embedded in the context of the previous two decades of post-emancipation lynchings, second class citizenship, and poverty for those on the dark side of the veil.

Du Bois is a student at Fisk and is looking around in Tennessee for a teaching position. After much unsuccessful searching, he finally finds a small school shut out from the world by forests and hills. He was told about this school by Josie, the central character of the narrative. Along with a white fellow who wished to create a white school, Du Bois rode to the commissioner’s house to secure the school. After having the commissioner accept his proposal and invite him to dinner, the “shadow of the veil” fell upon him as they ate first, and he ate alone.[6]

Upon arriving at the school, he noticed its destitute condition – a stark contrast to the schools he was used to. The students, while poor and largely uneducated, expressed an insatiable longing to learn – Josie especially had her appetite for knowledge “hover like a star above … her work and worry, and she,” Du Bois says, “studied doggedly.”[7] While certainly having a “desire to rise out of [her] condition by means of education,” Josie’s quest for knowledge also went deeper than that.[8] It was, in a sense, an existential longing for education – a deeply human enterprise upon which a life-or-death struggle for being fully human ensued. “Education and work,” as Du Bois had noted in the Talented Tenth, “are the levers to uplift a people;” but “education must not simply teach work-it must teach Life.”[9] “It is the trained, living human soul,” Du Bois argues, “cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.”[10]

Josie understood this well. She strove for that kind of human excellence and virtue the Greeks referred to as arete. But her quest was stopped in its track by the shadow of the veil; by the reality of poverty, superexploited labor, and racism which characterized the dominant social relations for the black worker.

A decade after he completed his teaching duties, Du Bois returned to that small Tennessee town. What he encountered warranted the questioning of progress itself. Josie’s family, which at one point he considered himself an adopted part of, had gone through a “heap of trouble.”[11] Lingering in destitute poverty, her brother was arrested for stealing, and her sister, “flushed with the passion of youth … brought home a nameless child.”[12] As the eldest child, Josie took it upon herself to sustain the family. She was overworked, and this was killing her; first spiritually, then materially. As Du Bois says, Josie “shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired,—worked until, on a summer's day, someone married another; then Josie crept to her mother like a hurt child, and slept—and sleeps.”[13]

In his youth Du Bois had asked: “to what end” might “[we] seek to strengthen character and purpose” if “people have nothing to eat or, to wear?”[14] Josie’s insatiable thirst for knowledge required leisure time, i.e., time that is unrestricted by the labor one does for their subsistence, nor by the weariness and fatigue which lingers after. Aristotle had already noted that it “was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured,” that philosophy and the pursuit of science “in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end… began to be sought.”[15] Josie’s quest for knowledge, her longing for enlightenment, was made impossible by capitalist relations of production, and the racialized form they take in the U.S. As dilemmas within her family developed, she was forced to spend every ounce of her energy on working to sustain the meagre living conditions of the household. Afterall, as Du Bois eloquently says, “to be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”[16]

It is true, as Kant said, that “all that is required for enlightenment is freedom;” but it is not true that, while being necessary, “the freedom for man to make public use of his reason in all matters” is sufficient![17] This freedom presupposes another – the freedom to have the necessaries of life guaranteed for oneself. What good can be made of the right to free speech by the person too famished to think properly? What good is this right to those homeless souls with constricted jaws and clenched teach in the winter? The artifices intended to keep people down, as Kant calls it, are also material – that is, they refer not only to the absence of opportunities for civic and political participation, but also to the absence of economic opportunities for securing the necessities of life.[18]

The great writer can emanate universal truths from their portraits of individuals. Du Bois accomplished this with Josie, who is a concrete manifestation of black folk’s trajectory post-emancipation. In both Josie and black folk at the turn of the century, the longing to learn, the thirst for knowledge, is met by the desert of poverty common to working folk, especially those on the dark side of the veil, where opportunity doesn’t make the rounds. As an unfree, “segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges,” it is not only the bodies, but the spirit and minds of black folk’s humanity which were under attack.[19] It is a natural result of a cold world – one that beats black souls and bodies down with racist violence, superexploitation, and poverty – that a “shadow of a vast despair” can hover over some black folk.[20] And yet, Du Bois argues, “democracy died save in the hearts of black folk;” and “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.”[21]

A Universally Dehumanizing System

Although intensified in the experience of poor and working class black folk – especially those in the U.S. – the crippling of working people’s humanity and intellect is a central component of the capitalist mode of life in general. This was already being observed by key thinkers of the 18th century Scottish enlightenment (e.g., Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, et. al.). For instance, in Smith’s magnus opus, The Wealth of Nations, he would argue that the development of the division of labor with modern industry created a class of “men whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations,” of which “no occasion to exert his understanding” occur, leaving them to “become as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”[22] “His dexterity at his own particular trade,” he argues, is “acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.”[23] “In every improved and civilized society,” Smith observes, “this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”[24]

Writing almost a century later, and hence, having the opportunity of observing a more developed capitalist social totality, Marx and Engels saw that the degree of specialization acquired by the division of labor in manufacturing had even more profound dehumanizing and stupefying effects on the working class. “A labourer,” Marx argues, “who all his life performs one and the same simple operation, converts his whole body into the automatic, specialized implement of that operation.”[25] In echoing similar critiques brought forth by Ferguson and Smith, Marx explains how the worker’s productive activity is turned into “a mere appendage of the capitalist’s workshop,” and the laborer themself is converted into “a crippled monstrosity.”[26] It is a form of relationality which reduces working people to “spiritually and physically dehumanized beings.”[27] As Engels noted, capitalist manufacturing’s division of labor divides the human being and produces a “stunting of man.”[28] Alongside commodity production is the production of fractured human beings whose abilities are reduced to the activities they perform at work.

This mental and physical crippling of the worker under the capitalist process of production provides an obstacle not only to their human development, but to their struggle for liberation itself. No successful struggle against the dominant order can take place without educating, without changing the minds and hearts, of the masses being mobilized in the struggle. Education aimed at the acquisition of truth is revolutionary, that is why ignorance is an indispensable component of capitalist control. The “Socratic spirit,” as I have previously argued, “belongs to the revolutionaries;” it is in socialist revolutionary processes where education is prioritized as a central component of creating a new, fully human, people.[29] As Du Bois put it, “education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.”[30] “The final purpose of education,” as Hegel wrote, “is liberation and the struggle for a higher liberation still.”[31]

“How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?”

In the capitalist mode of life, this contradiction between the un-development of human life and the development of the forces of production has always gone hand in hand. From the lens of universal history, this is one of the central antinomies of the system. Progress of a certain kind has always been conjoined with retrogression in another. Du Bois says that “Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.”[32] He is quite correct in a dual sense. Not only has class society – and specifically, capitalist class society – always developed the productive forces at the expense of the un-development of human life in the mass of people, but also, when progress has been achieved in the social realm, it has never been thanks to the kindness and generosity of owning classes, it has never been the result of anything but an ugly, often bloody, struggle. As Fredrick Douglass famously said, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.”[33]

However, it is the first sense in which Du Bois’s statement on the ugliness of progress is meant. He asks, “how shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?”[34] What is our standard for progress going to be? Human life and the real capacity for human flourishing? Or the development of industrial technologies and the accumulation of capital? Under the current order, all metrics are aimed at measuring progress in accordance with the latter. As I have argued before,

The economist’s obsession with gross domestic product measures is a good example. For such quantifiability to take place, qualitatively incommensurable activities must transmute themselves into being qualitatively commensurable... The consumption of a pack of cigarettes and the consumption of an apple loses the distinction which makes one cancerous and the other healthy, they’re differences boil down to the quantitative differences in the price of purchase.[35]

This standard for measuring progress corresponds to a mode of social life where, as the young Marx had observed, “the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion [to] the devaluation of the world of men.”[36] In socialist China, where the people – through their Communist Party – are in charge of developing a new social order, metrics are being developed to account for growth in human-centered terms. As Cheng Enfu has proposed, a “new economic accounting indicator, ‘Gross Domestic Product of Welfare,’”[37] (GDPW) is needed:

GDPW, unlike GDP, encompasses the total value of the welfare created by the production and business activities of all residential units in a country (or region) during a certain period. As an alternative concept of modernization, it is the aggregate of the positive and negative utility produced by the three systems of economy, nature, and society, and essentially reflects the sum of objective welfare.[38]

While forcing the reader to think critically about the notion of progress, it would be incorrect to suggest that Du Bois would like to entirely dispose of the notion. His oeuvre in general is deeply rooted in enlightenment sensibilities, in a belief in a common humanity, in the power of human reason, and in the real potential for historical progress. These are all things that, as Susan Neiman writes in Left is Not Woke, are rejected by the modern Heidegger-Schmidt-Foucualt rooted post-modern ‘woke left,’ and which stem, as Georg Lukács noted in his 1948 masterpiece, The Destruction of Reason, from the fact that capitalism, especially after the 1848 revolutions, had become a reactionary force, a phenomenon reflected in the intellectual orders by a turn away from Kant and Hegel and towards Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Nietzsche, and various other forms of philosophical irrationalism.[39]

Instead of rejecting the notion of progress, Du Bois would urge us to understand the dialectical character of history’s unfolding – that is, the role that the ‘ugly’ has played in progress. He would urge us to reject the mythologized ‘pure’ notion of progress which prevails in quotidian society and the halls of bourgeois academia; and to understand the impurities of progress to be a necessary component of it – at least in this period of human history.

Du Bois would also urge us to understand that, while progress in the sphere of the productive forces has often not translated itself into progress at the human level, this fact does not negate the genuine potential for progress in the human sphere represented by such developments in industry, agriculture, and the sciences and technologies. Progress in the human sphere that is left unrealized by developments in the productive forces within capitalist relations ends up taking the form, to use Andrew Haas’ concept, of Being-as-Implication.[40] As Ioannis Trisokkas has recently elaborated, beyond simply being either present-at-hand (vorhandenseit) or absent, implication is another form of being; things can be implied, their being takes the form of a real potential capable of becoming actual.[41]

It is true, under the current relations of production, that the lives of people get worse while simultaneously the real potential for them being better than ever before continues to increase. This is the paradoxical character of capitalist progress. When a new machine capable of duplicating the current output in a specific industry is introduced into the productive process, this represents a genuine potential for cutting working hours in half, and allowing people to have more leisure time for creative – more human – endeavors. The development of the productive forces reduces the socially necessary labor time and can therefore potentially increase what Martin Hägglund has called socially available free time.[42] This is the time that Josie – and quite frankly, all of us poor working class people – need in order to flourish as humans. The fact that it does not do this, and often does the opposite, is not rooted in the machines and technologies themselves, but in the historically constituted social relations which mediate our relationship with these developments.

We can have a form of progress which overcomes the contradictions of the current form; but this requires revolutionizing the social relations we exist in. It requires a society where working people are in power, where the telos of production is not profit and capital accumulation in the hands of a few, but the satisfaction of human needs – both spiritual and material. A society where the state is genuinely of, by, and for the people, and not an instrument of the owners of capital. In other words, it requires socialism, what Du Bois considered to be “the only way of human life.”[43]

References 

[1] Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle (Chapel Hill: The Modern Library, 2001), 689 (980a).

[2] W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Library of America, 2021), 766.

[3] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1986), 367-368.

[4] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 770.

[5] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 770.

[6] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 407.

[7] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 406-407.

[8] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 766.

[9] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth, In Writings, 861.

[10] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 854.

[11] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411.

[12] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411.

[13] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411.

[14] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 853.

[15] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 692 (982b).

[16] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 368.

[17] Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” in Basic Writings of Kant (New York: The Modern Library, 2001) 136.

[18] Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 141.

[19] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 390.

[20] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 368.

[21] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 40; Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 370.

[22] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol II (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1910), 263-264.

[23] Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol. II, 264.

[24] Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol. II, 264.

[25] Karl Marx, Capital Volume: I (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 339.

[26] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 360.

[27] Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 86.

[28] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1976), 291.

[29] Carlos L. Garrido, “The Real Reason Why Socrates Was Killed and Why Class Society Must Whitewash His Death,” Countercurrents (August 23, 2021): https://countercurrents.org/2021/08/the-real-reason-why-socrates-is-killed-and-why-class-society-must-whitewash-his-death/. In every revolutionary movement we’ve seen the pivotal role education is given – this is evident in the Soviet process, the Korean, the Chinese, Cuban, etc. As I am sure most know, even while engaged in guerilla warfare Che was making revolutionaries study. Education was so important that, as he mentioned in the famous letter Socialism and Man in Cuba, under socialism “the whole society… [would function] as a gigantic school.” For more see: Carlos L. Garrido and Edward Liger Smith, “Pioneros por el comunismo: Seremos como el Che,” intervención y Coyuntura: Revista de Crítica Política (October 11, 2022): https://intervencionycoyuntura.org/pioneros-por-el-comunismo-seremos-como-el-che/

[30] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 385.

[31] G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 125.

[32] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 412.

[33] Fredrick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. by Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1999), 367.

[34] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 414.

[35] Carlos L. Garrido, “John Dewey and the American Tradition of Socialist Democracy, Dewey Studies 6(2) (2022), 87.

[36] Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, 71.

[37] Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 13.

[38] Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic, 13.

[39] Susan Neiman, Left is Not Woke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023). Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2021). For more on the modern forms of philosophical irrationalism, see: John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 74 (9) (February 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/ and my interview with him for the Midwestern Marx Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4uyNEzLlRw.

[40] Andrew Haas, “On Being in Heidegger and Hegel,” Hegel Bulletin 38(1) (2017), 162-4: doi:10.1017/hgl.2016.64.

[41] Ioannis Trisokkas, “Being, Presence, and Implication in Heidegger's Critique of Hegel,” Hegel Bulletin 44(2) (August 2023), 346: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/hgl.2022.3 Trisokkas here provides a great defense of Hegel from Heidegger’s critique of his treatment of being.

[42] Martin Hägglund, This Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), 301-304.

[43] W. E. B. Du Bois, “Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Communist Party of the U.S.A., October 1, 1961,” W. E. B. Du Bois Archive: https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b153-i071
​

Author

Carlos L. Garrido
 is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute, and author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism and Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview.

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19 Comments
Ross Coyle
8/6/2023 12:21:02 am

"being as implication" I like that idea. A storehouse of potentiality. Great article. Ill be rereading it !

Reply
Marius
8/6/2023 12:11:34 pm

Really liked this article, especially the explanation of the contradictory nature of progress, and how this does not negate the concept of progress itself

Reply
Charles Brown
8/11/2023 04:27:34 pm

Wow! Excellent essay , Comrade
Without revolutionary theory, education, there can be no revolutionary political movement.

Reply
Charles Brown
8/11/2023 08:07:59 pm

Excellent essay comrade

Reply
Jon
8/12/2023 07:56:16 am

> "this represents a genuine potential for cutting working hours in half, and allowing people to have more leisure time for creative – more human – endeavors."

This is the wrong conclusion. Marx said human nature is work. Suggesting otherwise is the capitalist/private property liberal position. If we had nothing but free time from automation we would degenerate and die out.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_07_11-abs.htm

Except in cases from anomalies like Marx, the world rightfully doesn't take theory from parasitic, imperialist countries like the U.S. seriously. We're already degenerating because we have less meaningful office type jobs. And it's why we get mocked by communists in exploited countries who don't want to listen to anything about communism from a country who has never had a revolution. Why would they listen to the same people who are exploiting them? It's like the proletariat accepting bourgeois theory. We've all been infected by material and social liberalism due to parasitism, and it shows.

Aside from that, I don't think most black people will be interested in this article, because it wasn't written by one of their own.

Reply
Jon
8/12/2023 05:57:59 pm

More on this since I didn't give the right solution.

The idea that automation will free us from work, or even cut hours, is the liberal's idea of a future society.

Future jobs will probably be more encompassing and holistic for everyone. A longer, more rewarding process. Not shorter hours, because even with a 40 hour work week in the U.S. we're already degenerating since most of our jobs are service jobs now that we outsourced production away to exploit workers overseas for really cheap labor. Less work would be even worse than the service jobs degeneration wise.

Reply
Charles Brown
8/13/2023 09:12:56 am

“ The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.
Karl Marx

Charles Brown
8/13/2023 09:22:24 am

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/capital/vol3-ch48.htm

Charles Brown
8/13/2023 09:00:55 am

I’m Black and I’m interested in itv

Also, Marxcand Engels do define freedom as LEISURE . In Communism , the Kingdom or Reslm of Freedom, humans have substantially mastered necessity with high technology such that TOILESOME labor is abolished. Toil is _not_ human nature . The origin of humans 2.5 million years ago , was the origin of stone tools made by design, _which reduced labor time _.
From _AntiDuhring_ “ With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the humanity's leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.“

Reply
Jon
8/13/2023 09:44:01 am

I couldn't directly reply to your comment, but I stand corrected on the shortening issue, thanks.

As for black people reading the article, I made sure to qualify that by saying most wouldn't be interested, which I still think is right.

Charles Brown
8/13/2023 08:45:56 am

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2023/08/in-his-1903-bookthe-souls-of-black-folk.html

The problem of the 20th Century was the problem of the colorline . And now with Brexit, French anti-immigrant Rightwing party , Italian rise of fascists , Poland , etc. , the KKK - Republican Party in the US , the colorline is also the problem of the 21st ! The chickens of colonialism have come home to roost !

Reply
Charles Brown
8/13/2023 12:41:58 pm


Thank you Comrade Jon for your reply . And thank you for reading so logically what I sent .

Of course you are correct on “most” people White and Black not interested in Dubois .

Reply
Jon
8/17/2023 05:49:22 pm

Don't be so quick to dismiss Du Bois. I once made the mistake of dismissing MLK Jr. because he wasn't a separatist like the other Black Panthers, but MLK Jr. was still a serious anti-imperialist that threatened the government.

Du Bois deserves recognition. Here's a quote by him recognizing the labor aristocracy from Zak Cope's Divided Class, Divided World book on page 35:

"It is no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic mo­nopoly, or even the employing class that is exploiting the world: it is the nation; a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor.”

Du Bois was a serious socialist that needs to be learned from. He knew the entire "working class" in rich countries like the U.S. were actually labor aristocrats and oppressors/exploiters leeching off the world's proletarians..

Reply
Charles Brown
8/13/2023 05:22:30 pm

With the institution of wage-labor, the right to a job is also fundamental because the exercise of all other basic human rights and freedoms is dependent upon, first, fulfillment of the basic needs for material survival – food, shelter, health care, etc. A job is key to obtaining these. Modern citizens cannot speak, think, vote or travel freely if they cannot eat. They cannot obtain equality before the law or due process without legal counsel at costs. A job at a living wage is a prerequisite for a decent life and for the exercise of all other human rights and liberties. Institutionalized, continuous denial of work to millions of people, permanent mass unemployment (even four percent is mass unemployment) is a violation of a most critical human right undermining all of the human rights of those millions unemployed.



Unemployment is not a necessary part of an efficiently functioning modern industrial economy as many apologists for the American system claim. Rather unemployment is the result of an unplanned economy in which basic production is carried out with the goal of maximizing accumulation of profit for private corporations and individuals. Permanent mass unemployment is also a key tactic for keeping wages down by keeping the demand for jobs high in relation to the supply of jobs. If there were full employment, the bosses would have no scabs to hire to break strikes.

Needed: Constitutional Amendment for the Right to a Decent Job



http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/07/needed-constitutional-amendment-for_4.html



By Charlie Brown, Attorney-at-law



tags: living wage, labor movement, workers rights, constitution, human rights, poverty, employment



Introduction The goal of full employment and the highest quality of life for all is at the heart of our struggle to make human rights more sacred than property interests. To accomplish this goal in the United States will take a mass, organized movement that through progressive stages and leaps reforms and ultimately revolutionizes our relations of production. An important aspect of this movement will be the legal forms that come to crystallize and institutionalize the fundamental economic changes won by the People.



The tactics and strategy in the economic struggle always necessarily include political and legislative goals. As our efforts address the most fundamental political economic issues, it is important that we have goals, strategy and tactics concerning the most fundamental law of the land, the Constitution, no matter how much the ruling class is above even that authority for now.



Why a right to a job: a historical materialist perspective

Reply
Charles Brown
8/13/2023 05:25:06 pm

Why a right to a job: a historical materialist perspective



Historical materialists focus on the working class and class struggle as keys to revolutionary social change in this epoch. This is the perspective worked out by Engels and Marx which holds that social ideas, ideals and laws reflect and are ultimately determined, limited and changed by changes in the relations and forces of material production; and not quite equally so vice-versa. Thus, historical materialism sees Constitutional changes, like all legal change, as ultimately reflecting underlying class struggles. In our era of the bourgeoisie, we herald the rise of the working class to emancipate itself and all of the oppressed groups and despised classes (though taking longer than we thought!)



This approach sees that the US, connected with most of the globe more closely than ever, has capitalist relations of production. We have wage-labor and private ownership of the basic means of production.



The institution of wage-labor makes the need for a job fundamental for the overwhelming majority of the population, for they must work for a living. This institution of wage-labor means most people must sell their labor power to obtain the basic necessities of life, and avoid personal and social ills. It is not possible for most people to employ themselves in small, self-sufficient economic units and survive as they did in earlier societies. The economic system is highly socialized. That is it consists of a large number of interdependent economic enterprises of all sizes. This socialization of labor, or division of labor has reached a new qualitative level and is in some sense global today, for example with 'world cars' and other commodities assembled from geographically scattered points of production.



The right to a job is a mature universal human right now. This is already recognized in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and indirectly in the United Nations Charter Articles 55 and 56 on promoting full employment and Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The right to a job, or to earn a living, in a world wide web of wage-labor is central in the struggle for economic and human rights and to ameliorate human suffering. For, unemployment is a root cause of our most personal and social tribulations – poverty, hunger, homelessness, urban crisis, crime, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, physical and mental illness, wife abuse, child abuse and so on.



With the institution of wage-labor, the right to a job is also fundamental because the exercise of all other basic human rights and freedoms is dependent upon, first, fulfillment of the basic needs for material survival – food, shelter, health care, etc. A job is key to obtaining these. Modern citizens cannot speak, think, vote or travel freely if they cannot eat. They cannot obtain equality before the law or due process without legal counsel at costs. A job at a living wage is a prerequisite for a decent life and for the exercise of all other human rights and liberties. Institutionalized, continuous denial of work to millions of people, permanent mass unemployment (even four percent is mass unemployment) is a violation of a most critical human right undermining all of the human rights of those millions unemployed.



Unemployment is not a necessary part of an efficiently functioning modern industrial economy as many apologists for the American system claim. Rather unemployment is the result of an unplanned economy in which basic production is carried out with the goal of maximizing accumulation of profit for private corporations and individuals. Permanent mass unemployment is also a key tactic for keeping wages down by keeping the demand for jobs high in relation to the supply of jobs. If there were full employment, the bosses would have no scabs to hire to break strikes.



We need a mass movement to do it

Reply
Charles Brown
8/14/2023 08:57:09 am

Why a right to a job: a historical materialist perspective



Historical materialists focus on the working class and class struggle as keys to revolutionary social change in this epoch. This is the perspective worked out by Engels and Marx which holds that social ideas, ideals and laws reflect and are ultimately determined, limited and changed by changes in the relations and forces of material production; and not quite equally so vice-versa. Thus, historical materialism sees Constitutional changes, like all legal change, as ultimately reflecting underlying class struggles. In our era of the bourgeoisie, we herald the rise of the working class to emancipate itself and all of the oppressed groups and despised classes (though taking longer than we thought!)



This approach sees that the US, connected with most of the globe more closely than ever, has capitalist relations of production. We have wage-labor and private ownership of the basic means of production.



The institution of wage-labor makes the need for a job fundamental for the overwhelming majority of the population, for they must work for a living. This institution of wage-labor means most people must sell their labor power to obtain the basic necessities of life, and avoid personal and social ills. It is not possible for most people to employ themselves in small, self-sufficient economic units and survive as they did in earlier societies. The economic system is highly socialized. That is it consists of a large number of interdependent economic enterprises of all sizes. This socialization of labor, or division of labor has reached a new qualitative level and is in some sense global today, for example with 'world cars' and other commodities assembled from geographically scattered points of production.



The right to a job is a mature universal human right now. This is already recognized in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and indirectly in the United Nations Charter Articles 55 and 56 on promoting full employment and Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The right to a job, or to earn a living, in a world wide web of wage-labor is central in the struggle for economic and human rights and to ameliorate human suffering. For, unemployment is a root cause of our most personal and social tribulations – poverty, hunger, homelessness, urban crisis, crime, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, physical and mental illness, wife abuse, child abuse and so on.



With the institution of wage-labor, the right to a job is also fundamental because the exercise of all other basic human rights and freedoms is dependent upon, first, fulfillment of the basic needs for material survival – food, shelter, health care, etc. A job is key to obtaining these. Modern citizens cannot speak, think, vote or travel freely if they cannot eat. They cannot obtain equality before the law or due process without legal counsel at costs. A job at a living wage is a prerequisite for a decent life and for the exercise of all other human rights and liberties. Institutionalized, continuous denial of work to millions of people, permanent mass unemployment (even four percent is mass unemployment) is a violation of a most critical human right undermining all of the human rights of those millions unemployed.



Unemployment is not a necessary part of an efficiently functioning modern industrial economy as many apologists for the American system claim. Rather unemployment is the result of an unplanned economy in which basic production is carried out with the goal of maximizing accumulation of profit for private corporations and individuals. Permanent mass unemployment is also a key tactic for keeping wages down by keeping the demand for jobs high in relation to the supply of jobs. If there were full employment, the bosses would have no scabs to hire to break strikes.



We need a mass movement to do it

Reply
Charles Brown
8/14/2023 09:01:29 am

On education of Negroes in the early 20th Century, Dubois’s Talented Tenth , the renowned founder of Negro History Week, Carter G. Woodson, wrote an important criticism/self -criticism of that potential Tenth : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mis-Education_of_the_Negro

Reply
Adalys Cantin link
8/14/2023 09:12:47 am

Very good comments, but the article is excellent, for those of us who did not know about the subject outside the USA, I like these topics about which little is written outside that country.

Reply
Jon
8/14/2023 09:37:01 am

It doesn't matter how accurate or informational it is, writing about another nation's history, especially during a period of time when they were heavily exploited, might be crossing a fetishization line.

Black people who speak English are a nation. They're part of the Black-English Nation. If you're writing about them as part of some overall history in the U.S. that includes the Native American, Anglo-English, and Spanish Nations then it's more acceptable. Or even writing about them post 1965 civil rights would be more acceptable too, since black people became labor aristocrats after that event exploiting the entire world, like every other nation and person in the U.S.

But to focus mainly on their nation at a time period of heavy black exploitation, when there are plenty of black historians that could write it, could be seen an opportunist. This is just one article, but imagine a non-black person building an entire academic career off black history. That's not gonna sit well with any black person.

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