Taking Freedom: Capitalism, Democracy, and W.E.B. Du Bois’ Two Proletariats

The Taking Freedom book series, a collaboration between The Social Justice Foundation, the Service Employees International Union’s Racial Justice Center, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), is intended to address a wide range of issues, from housing rights, to debt burden, to police reform, and more.

Key Points

• What is the relationship between class and race in the U.S.? Does class or race play a more critical role in shaping politics and society? These questions are at the heart of an ongoing debate among activists and scholars. This article argues that, in the U.S., race cannot be separated from class.
• W.E.B. Du Bois was an African-American sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist. He said that, because of race, in the U.S., there are two distinct working classes (or “proletariats,” using traditional Marxist language)—one white and the other black. Unlike other radical thinkers, who blamed all of society’s ills on elite bosses, Du Bois made the controversial point that the white working class played an important role in maintaining the oppression of black workers. As the voting majority in democracy, the white working class endorsed, supported, and carried out many of the policies of racial exclusion.
• Du Bois was not trying to let white elites off the hook. He was trying to understand and explain how labor and grassroots politics helped maintain the power of white elites.
• In the long run, their support of racism also hurt white workers, undermining their livelihoods and their democratic rights to the benefit of white elites.
• There have been many missed opportunities in our history to overcome these divisions and build a stronger democracy. For example, during the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War, there was a chance to expand voting rights, education, and land ownership to blacks, which would have created a much stronger foundation for widespread democracy and workers’ rights.
• There have been many white leaders (a long list, including abolitionist Wendell Phillips, murdered civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, trade unionist Henry Foner, and even Vice President Hubert Humphrey) and movements largely of whites (abolitionist, anti-apartheid, Central-American sanctuaries) that grasped the dangers of two separate working classes and dedicated themselves to fighting the structures dividing them, in order to create a non-racist democracy.
• Historically, black workers have tended to be more radical and anti-capitalist than whites. The last 120 years of black struggle against racist attitudes, physical segregation, repressive policing, and the denial of basic goods (such as quality education, decent income, and a lack of voter protection) are actually movements for uniting the two working classes by breaking down the barriers that divide them.
• However, black workers also are often more deferential and trusting of black elites than white workers are of their leaders. A key question is whether a distinct black working-class leadership will emerge in this time of widespread black economic deterioration (and increasing white protectionism) to put a check on black elites.
• If black and white workers could each better understand the divide between the two working classes and how it affects U.S. democracy and institutions, the result could be a powerful and forward-looking narrative about class and race that addresses both—opposing racism and helping workers see beyond immediate demands for wages—to build solidarity and a stronger democracy that supports well-being for all.

PUNTOS CLAVE

• ¿Cuál es la relación entre la clase y la raza en los Estados Unidos? ¿La clase o la raza juegan un papel más crítico en la configuración de la política y la sociedad? Estas preguntas están en el centro de un debate en curso entre activistas y académicos. Este artículo argumenta que en los Estados Unidos, la raza no se puede separar de la clase.
• W. E. B. Du Bois fue un sociólogo, historiador y activista de los derechos civiles afroamericano. Dijo que debido a la raza, en los Estados Unidos, hay dos clases trabajadoras distintas (o “proletariados” que usan el lenguaje marxista tradicional)—una blanca y la otra afroamericana. A diferencia de otros pensadores radicales, que culparon a los jefes de élite de todos los males de la sociedad, Du Bois planteó el punto controvertido de que la clase trabajadora blanca desempeñó un papel importante en el mantenimiento de la opresión de los trabajadores afroamericanos. Como la mayoría de los votos en la democracia, la clase trabajadora blanca respaldó, apoyó y llevó a cabo muchas de las políticas de exclusión racial.
• Du Bois no estaba tratando de dejar que los elites blancos se salieran con la suya. Estaba tratando de comprender y explicar cómo la política laboral y de base ayudó a mantener el poder de los elites blancos.
• A la larga, su apoyo al racismo también perjudicó a los trabajadores blancos, minando sus medios de subsistencia y sus derechos democráticos en beneficio de los elites blancos.
• Hubo muchas oportunidades perdidas en nuestra historia para superar estas divisiones y construir una democracia más fuerte. Por ejemplo, durante el período de Reconstrucción después de la Guerra Civil, hubo una posibilidad de ampliar los derechos de voto, la educación y la propiedad de las tierras para los afroamericanos, lo que habría creado una base mucho más sólida para la democracia generalizada y los derechos de los trabajadores.
• Hubo muchos líderes blancos (una larga lista, incluyendo el abolicionista Wendell Phillips, la asesinada activista de derechos civiles Viola Liuzzo, el sindicalista Henry Foner e incluso el vicepresidente Hubert Humphrey) y movimientos mayoritariamente blancos (abolicionistas, contra apartheid, santuarios centroamericanos) que comprendieron los peligros de dos clases trabajadoras separadas y se dedicaron a luchar contra las estructuras que los dividían, a fin de crear una democracia no racista.
• Históricamente, los trabajadores afroamericanos han tendido a ser más radicales y anticapitalistas que los blancos. Los últimos 120 años de la lucha afroamericana contra las actitudes racistas, la segregación física, la represión policial y la negación de bienes básicos (como la educación de calidad, ingresos decentes y falta de protección de los votantes) son en realidad movimientos para unir a las dos clases trabajadoras rompiendo las barreras que las dividen.
• Sin embargo, los trabajadores afroamericanos también son más respetuosos y confían en los elites afroamericanos que los trabajadores blancos a sus líderes. Una pregunta clave es si surgirá un liderazgo afroamericano distintivo de la clase trabajadora en este momento de deterioro económico de los afroamericanos (y el aumento del proteccionismo blanco) para poner un control sobre los elites afroamericanos.
• Si los trabajadores blancos y afroamericanos pudieran entender mejor la división entre las dos clases trabajadoras y cómo afecta a la democracia y las instituciones de EE. UU., el resultado podría ser una narrativa potente y progresista sobre clase y raza que aborde los dos—oponiéndose al racismo y ayudando a que los trabajadores vean más allá de las demandas inmediatas de salarios—para construir solidaridad y una democracia más fuerte que apoye el bienestar de todos.

As an ideal, liberal democracy has great appeal. What can be more radical or liberating than freedom and justice for all, and the cultivation of every person’s full human capacity? Utopia, however, is not the terrain where the concepts of class and race best operate. “Class” helps explain how those benefiting the most from capitalism actually go about handling capitalism’s fundamental political problems. “Race,” as Du Bois argued, similarly undergirds capitalism on this terrain. His reconstruction of Reconstruction, with color-class politics made foundational to capitalism, is an inspiration to rethink subsequent periods of political and economic reform, and the future, in similar ways.

Capitalism, of course, has formidable political challenges: How can workers be induced to sacrifice life and limb to provide enforcement (police, army) for capitalism, where they are the ones who profit least? How can capitalism be legitimated in a democracy, where the vast majority of voters are workers? In addressing such fundamental political problems, the intersection of the concepts of class and race is central.

Class and race are also useful concepts for advocates of workers and people of color on the bottom, but here there are different questions. How can workers realize (come closer to) the ideals of liberal democracy? How do workers make maximum use of their majority numbers (voting) to influence government, e.g., what divides them and what internal capacities do they lack? How can workers change capitalism to place their happiness at the center of the economic value system? (1)

Du Bois’ Two Proletariats

W.E.B. Du Bois’ analysis of capitalism in the United States, especially his book Black Reconstruction in America (2), suggested a different paradigm for thinking about capitalism than the class structures put forward by both Marx and Weber. Du Bois argued that capitalism created two proletariats:

[The] black proletariat is not part of the white proletariat … while Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalist system, the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers. It is white labor that deprives the Negro of his right to vote, denies him education, denies him affiliation with trade unions, expels him from decent houses and neighborhoods, and heaps upon him the public insults of open color discrimination. (3)

Moreover, capitalism (beginning with slavery) offered white workers, the second proletariat, a policing role in relation to the first proletariat:

The system of slavery demanded a special police force and such a force was made possible and unusually effective by the presence of the poor whites. … Considering the economic rivalry of the black and white worker in the North, it would have seemed natural that the poor white would have refused to police slaves. But two considerations led him in the opposite direction. First of all, it gave him work and some authority as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system. But above and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters. (4)

Du Bois argued in Black Reconstruction that the double proletariat structure was global:

The upward moving of white labor was betrayed into wars for profit based on color caste. … Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863. The resulting color caste founded and retained by capitalism was adopted, forwarded, and approved by white labor, and resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over. Thus the majority of the world’s laborers, by the insistence of white labor, became the basis of a system of industry which ruined democracy and showed its perfect fruit in World War and Depression. (5)

Unlike Marx, Du Bois made both race and the state constitutive of capitalism. Black Reconstruction presented a two-sided view of the state. The U.S. and Europe constituted a global (viciously repressive) white supremacy. Yet democracy—which poor whites had fought for—was real; it provided white workers with choices and responsibilities toward their own group and colored workers.

In Du Bois’ account, the supremacy of capitalism had as much or more to do with the political orientation and actions of white workers as with the bourgeoisie. Putting equal or greater responsibility for capitalist oppression on workers (the political majority) themselves—as one must in a democracy—is a major shift in orientation from blaming the bulk of the ills of society on “the ruling class.” It may run the risk of excusing wealthy elites for their misdeeds, but it more importantly highlights labor and grassroots politics, and it demystifies how the ruling class rules. In Black Reconstruction, for example, Du Bois showed that not all whites went in the direction of racial division and capitalist hierarchy following the Civil War. Radical Republicans like Wendell Phillips and Thaddeus Stevens fought hard to move the country in a different direction; other whites could have joined them and chose not to. Black Reconstruction similarly disclosed a missed opportunity for further democratizing the state and capitalism: a stronger Freedmen’s Bureau, enactment of land redistribution to former slaves, widespread public education (including higher education), and freedom of voting could have been cornerstones of building an entirely different Republic.

Du Bois did not downplay the difficulties of working-class solidarity across racial lines, not hesitating to note that most white workers could not conceive of blacks as fellow human beings—much less imagine solidarity with them. It would have taken more struggle and likely bloody conflict to protect and expand democratic gains after the Civil War. Yet, it was still a missed opportunity. From the standpoint of Du Bois’ critique of capitalist structure, there was no path, whether for socialism or “abolitionist-democracy,” other than confronting and overcoming the differences between the two proletariats.

The last 120 years of black struggle against racist attitudes, physical segregation, repressive policing, denial of basic goods like quality education and decent income (needed for effective political participation), and lack of voter protection are best understood, in my view, as movements for uniting the two proletariats—by breaking down the structures that divide them. If there are indeed two proletariats, such anti-racist movements should be seen as exhibiting a higher degree of “class consciousness” or universalism than labor unions and “critical Marxisms” that downplay or ignore racist structures. This is certainly how Martin L. King, A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, and the Black Panthers understood their own advocacy. Yet outside parts of Southern history and black studies circles, black struggles have long been misunderstood in the academy as limited to procedural civil rights (like the right to vote), or black “particularity,” or pursuit of a utopian “dream” rather than attempts to win over white workers to a common cause. The white labor-Left has had similar difficulty understanding the proletariats—both white and colored. White workers did not embrace the universal class solidarity Marx promised. Those workers most disposed to revolutionary consciousness have been black, from Union Leagues in the 1870s to the Black Lives Matter movement today (6). Yet, the labor-Left did not consider black radical movements part of “their” labor movement, leading the latter to lose confidence in “the” working class.

It is true that black movements did not often embrace the cause of labor unions or speak in the language of universal class solidarity. But how could they? The (anti-capitalist) struggle against slavery started long before trade unions existed. White unions, once established, rarely wanted black members. When blacks were finally included in unions, mostly through lawsuits in the 1970s, they were marginalized. Meanwhile, dominant class rhetoric continues to marginalize the importance of blacks and other coloreds in capitalism. That the black proletariat developed its own identity and radical language (as did other coloreds), and its own critiques of class (sometimes nationalistic), does not make black movements any less about labor or capitalism than the historical white labor movement or self-proclaimed socialist radicals. Social action, including revolutionary action, does not depend on actors having Enlightened European reasons for acting. Du Bois argued in Black Reconstruction that it was their religious beliefs—not a studied calculation of interests—that motivated slaves to rebel (7).

Another dispiriting consequence of not recognizing the two-proletariat structure is a consequent blindness to revolutionary white liberalism. There are many white leaders (Wendall Phillips, Viola Liuzzo, Henry Foner, even Hubert Humphrey—a long list) and movements largely of whites (abolitionist, anti-apartheid, Central-American sanctuaries) that grasped the logic of the two proletariats and dedicated themselves to fighting the structures dividing the two classes—in order to create a non-racist democracy. These individuals and movements are not often seen as part of labor history or as anti-capitalist. But, as revolutionary anti-racist liberalism (along with revolutionary black nationalism), they posed more consistent political challenges to capital than socialist movements or labor unions in the U.S (8).

Across the globe, it is still true that workers of color live hard lives, often in misery, compared to Western white workers. The latter often enthusiastically supported capital in militarily repressing workers of color. Nonetheless, the U.S. white proletariat is now moving to oppose “globalization”—the drawing in of more and more workers of color into highly exploitative labor relations. Their opposition is for the “wrong” reasons: to keep good “American” jobs as opposed to working in solidarity with colored workers—but it is opposition nonetheless. Meanwhile, the global spread of capitalism, and rising importance of colored elites abroad for U.S. capitalism, along with the rising importance of colored workers in domestic politics, creates opportunities for black political elites (like Barack Obama). The latter could leverage their political power to construct a real (non-petty) black bourgeoisie, or they could alternatively play a leadership role in organizing the colored proletariat to transition away from capitalism—asserting different economic values and goals.

Much of what they can do depends on the black proletariat. The black proletariat has tended to be more radical and anti-capitalist than the white historically, but often more deferential and trusting of black elites than white workers of their leaders. A key question is whether a distinct black proletarian leadership will emerge in this time of widespread black economic deterioration (and increasing white xenophobia) to put a check on black elites. A challenge for emerging colored proletarian leaders is how to envision forms of economic cooperation that reverse historic racial divisions. New forms of economic cooperation will require institutions to rework global planning—whether to coordinate supply chains, steer investment where most needed, or to control unneeded growth and carbon emissions, or to promote health, or deal with labor migrations. Fortunately, in the nearly a century since publication of Black Reconstruction, there have been (and are) many “Freedom Bureau” type political-economy experiments at different levels of government, in a variety of banking and business organizations, and in “community Open Source” ventures—in the U.S. and globally. Much can be learned from study of these experiments to think beyond capitalism.

To my mind, what could emerge from an understanding of the struggle between the two proletariats and its connection to U.S. democracy and institutions is a more powerful and forward-looking metanarrative of class and race than either a utopian universalist liberalism stripped of a beating heart, or a narrow-minded working class interested only in its next meal and incapable of advancing democracy.

Thompson, J. Phillip. 2016. “Capitalism, Democracy, and Du Bois’s Two Proletariats.” Items: Insights From the Social Sciences, December 6, 2016. Reprinted with permission. Items is an essay forum of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

Notes

1. Regarding the latter, environmentalists are showing that capitalist moral values promoting expansion can be subordinated to another social goal—carbon reduction—while leaving individual goals of profit maximization in place. Is this still capitalism, or socialism, or a transition to a new form of economic governance for which we lack a name?
2. Du Bois, W. E. B., 1935. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. Free Press.
3. Du Bois, W. E. B., 1933. Marxism and the Negro Problem. Crisis Publishing Company.
4. Black Reconstruction, no. 30, p. 12.
5. Ibid, p. 30.
6. Mills, Charles W., 2003. From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
7. Robinson, Cedric J., 2000, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Second Edition. University of North Carolina Press.
8. For a discussion of revolutionary liberalism and nationalism, see Michael Dawson’s Black Visions: Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies. (University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Discussion Questions

1. Why does the author say that there are two working classes instead of one?
2. In what ways have wealthy elites relied on white workers to divide the working class?
3. How does anti-black racism hurt white people? What are some of the challenges to getting white people to understand this?
4. How does an emphasis on the white working class impact elections?

PREGUNTAS DE DISCUSION

1. ¿Por qué el autor dice que hay dos clases trabajadoras en lugar de una?
2. ¿De qué manera los elites ricos dependieron de los trabajadores blancos para dividir a la clase trabajadora?
3. ¿Cómo lastima el racismo contra los afroamericanos a la gente blanca? ¿Cuáles son algunos de los retos para conseguir que las personas blancas comprendan esto?
4. ¿Cómo impacta las elecciones el énfasis en la clase trabajadora blanca?