Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction in America

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Jul 24, 2023 Dr. Gerald Horne, renowned historian, prolific author, and leading scholar of African American history, joins host Breht O'Shea and guest co-host PM Irvin for the inaugural episode of a compelling new series dedicated to exploring the profound life and influential work of W.E.B. Du Bois. A towering figure in American intellectual history, Du Bois was an innovative sociologist, pioneering Marxist socialist thinker, distinguished historian, and a passionate advocate of Pan-Africanist civil rights and liberation. In this richly detailed discussion, Dr. Horne provides his deep historical expertise and sharp analytical insight to illuminate Du Bois’s groundbreaking masterpiece, Black Reconstruction in America. This seminal text revolutionized the historiography of the Reconstruction era by highlighting the central role that African Americans played in striving for democracy and liberation following the Civil War, while powerfully dismantling the myths perpetuated by white supremacist narratives of American history. Listeners will gain a profound appreciation for Du Bois’s rigorous methodology, his penetrating critique of capitalist exploitation and racial oppression, and his visionary perspective on racial solidarity and international struggle. This episode not only marks the beginning of a comprehensive exploration of Du Bois’s prolific intellectual contributions but also serves as a crucial foundation for understanding the historical dynamics that continue to shape racial politics and liberation movements today.   Check out our other interviews with Professor Horne over at Guerrilla History:   Texas and the Roots of US Fascism and The Counter-Revolution of 1776   Also check out Dr. Horne's writings in The Nation ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have a wonderful guest for you, Professor Gerald Horn. The one and only Professor Gerald Horn is on to discuss W.E.B. De Bois, specifically his work, Black Reconstruction in America. This is a really great episode. I'm really excited for everybody to listen to it. And also, this is the first episode in a series. series that we're going to do here on Rev. Left on Du Bois and different aspects of his work, his life, his ideas, his legacy, et cetera. So this is a sort of inaugural episode of an ongoing series. We're not exactly sure how many episodes the series will be. And there might be some

random episodes sprinkled throughout. But certainly over the next month or so, we're going to try to do four or five, maybe six episodes covering Du Bois from different angles. And this is, In particular because I think that the American left, which is the bulk of this audience, really needs to understand our own history. And I think W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the best, most principled voices for really wrestling with American history from a Marxist, a black liberationist perspective. And so we wanted to dedicate not just one episode to De Bois, but several episodes. And that's what we're going to do. And in addition to that, I have a guest co-host with me through this series. My friend PM, who reached out, asked me about De Bois, was sort of the catalyst to not only an episode on De Bois, but a series on De Bois.

And we figured that it would be awesome instead of having him as a guest for a one-off episode, if he can just co-host these episodes with me as we have on various scholars to talk about various aspects of DeVoise's life and work. So P.M., can you introduce yourself for our audience, please? Yeah, hi, everyone. My name is P.M. Irvin. I am a PhD student in philosophy at the curious institution of Stanford University. And I am hoping to be a Du Bois scholar. I am working on a paper on his notion of real pacifism, which is not pacifistic in the traditional sense. I'm thinking about Du Bois's work on peace. I'm thinking about his radicalism throughout his work. And, yeah, I'm very, very excited to be doing this series with you.

Yeah, I'm very excited to have you on board for this series. It's been an incredible help with me because if I'm just doing a one-off episode, I don't know everything about everything, right? I have my strategies for coming up with questions for various guests, even if I might not know everything about it. I often am learning along with the audience. but PM's knowledge of De Bois is really helpful in constructing these series and importantly in constructing the specific questions because of your superior knowledge of De Bois compared

to me. It's incredibly helpful and what it ultimately gives rise to is just like better, more in-depth episodes on De Bois. So I'm incredibly honored to have you co-host this series with me. Now, we're going to get into the interview very shortly and I don't want to spend too much time in the intro here, but I do think it's important to kind of contextualize De Bois's work, Black Reconstruction in America, which we're going to be focused on in this episode with Gerald Horn. So before we get into that interview with Professor Horn, P.M., can you kind of give us some basic context, basic structure of the book itself and just help listeners sort of orient themselves to this text before we get into the details with Professor Horn? Absolutely. So this is a very interesting ex. It's viewed as Du Bois's magnumobus. it overturned 100 years of racist

historiography surrounding Reconstruction where the role that black people played in their own emancipation was really ignored the sort of widely held narrative was that Lincoln was the great emancipator and that white abolitionist played a bigger role than they actually did

and yeah I think I mean this is one of Du Bois's most significant works I think especially for the left to contend with. So this text is very long, first of all, it's about 800 pages, and it's about 800 pages of economic history, so it's not the most accessible thing.

But I kind of view it as a capital, like Marx's capital of the American context. It is a materialist analysis of the conditions of reconstruction. So I want to give a kind of brief overview of what I take to meet the central chapters. So first you have, I'm opening up with the black worker, and this is an interesting framing. He's framing enslaved black people as workers, and this is insisting that they have agency, as we'll get into in the episode with Gerald Horn. One of my favorite passages from the text is this, here's the modern labor problem, here's the kernel of the problem of religion and democracy, of humanity, words and futile

gestures avail nothing. Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes a surplus value filched from human beasts, which, encultured lands, the machine and harnessed power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor, and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, and black. So this is his remarks his analysis at its best. Next, we have the white worker. This is the beginnings of his analysis of the psychological wage of whiteness. We have the planter class, and these chapters together sort of give materials to analysis

of the different sections of the classes operatives at the time. You have the chapter on the general strike, where he frames black people leaving the plantations on a massive scale as a general strike, which is in place. important, and we'll get into that and be afterward. You have the price of disaster, the counter-revolution of property, whereas with any revolution, the backlash from reactionary forces immense, and slaveholders weren't going to give up their ownership of black people without a fight. Then you have the chapter called Black, back towards slavery, the public school, and the propaganda of history, and the propaganda of history reads overturning 100 years of

racist historiography. Beautiful. Yeah, so that is the basic structure of the text, and I think that's really helpful in allowing people who might not be very familiar with the text to sort of orient themselves to it before we get into it. But I think that's going to be it for now. We're going to go ahead and get into this interview with Professor Gerald Horn on W.E.B. DeBois's famous work, Black Reconstruction in America. And again, this is the first installment of hopefully a long series on De Bois's life and work. So without further ado, here is me and PM's interview with Dr. Gerald Horn. Enjoy. 1868 passes away in Ghana, West Africa, August 1963.

In between, he matriculates at Fiss University at Tennessee, historically Black University, where he then encountered the aftermath of enslavement of Africans, and indeed, the aftermath of the reconstruction to a degree. He goes on to matriculate both at Harvard University, and the University of Berlin, with regard to the former, his dissertation focuses on the suppression of the African slave trade, 80 volumes still were perusing, and in Germany, he had first-hand contact with what was then the most advanced socialist movement, at least in the North Atlantic community, if not globally,

which left a deep imprint on his consciousness, returning to the United States, he teaches at Ohio at Atlanta University. In Atlanta University, circa 1906, he is witnessed to a program against the black population of that Georgia metropolis with the body parts of black people being hung in Butcher shops, like so many shanks of meat, he also becomes involved in a conflict with the then-reigning black leader, speaking of Burpity, Washington. In part, this is dealt with at least inferentially in one of his better-known volumes, The Souls of Black Boat. A few years after the Atlanta program, he's involved in the founding of the NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, then, at least now, the longest

established civil rights, human rights organization in Black America. He becomes an editor of their periodical, the crisis, which becomes essential reading for activists nationally and globally. In that regard, he also becomes involved in helping organize Pan-African Congresses on behalf of the NACP, but alas, the NAACP and Du Bois have a parting of the ways in the 1930s, not least because of a dispute about the extent to which a black people should engage in a kind of self-reliance. From that point, he moves back to Atlanta and also launches research, which culminates, in the book Black Reconstruction emerging in the mid-1930s,

which we'll talk about it in a bit more detail shortly, but instead of World War II, particularly the U.S. version, 1941 to 1945, returns to the NWACP in 1944 as a kind of minister of foreign affairs slated to direct the organization as it navigated the choppy global waters involving decolonization

and also the agonizing retreat of more egregious aspects of U.S. Jim Crow or U.S. apartheid. What happens is that by 1948, the U.S. ruling class had come to a decision that U.S. apartheid, Jim Crow, was somehow inimical to the overriding interests of the U.S. ruling class in the ideological contestation with the dead and socialist cap and with the socialist cap led by the Soviet Union helping the national liberation movements in Africa and the Caribbean and Washington feeling handicapped in terms of that competition, not to mention the fact that during World War II, 1941 to 1945, many black nationalists were sympathetic to Tokyo. In fact, Vois himself was sympathetic to Tokyo to a certain

degree. And that weighed heavily upon the U.S. ruling classes, they came to realize what they should have known already, which was that U.S. to Jim Crow was the Achilles heel of U.S. imperialism and oftentimes compromise the most rudimentary aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Insofar is it created a kind of internal enemy that the antagonist of Washington from London in the 19th century to the Soviet Union in Japan in the 20th century could appeal

to this so-called internal enemy, speaking of black Americans. So as the United States begins to retreat from the more agonizing aspects of the U.S. Jim Crowe, Du Bois' presence in the NAACP becomes anomalous. And so far as the leaders thought that they had made a permanent deal for the incorporation of black Americans into the body politics. But actually, as we now see today, it was a kind of truce or ceasefire, not a permanent cessation of conflict. And so Du Bois was tossed overboard.

He then is pushed in a direction to which he is gravitating in any case, that is to say, towards the left. He backs the third-party campaign of Henry Wallace, a former FDR vice president against Schumann and Dewey in 1948. He himself, speaking of Duy, runs on a third-party ticket for the U.S. Senate from New York State in 1950. this happens at the same time that he's being indicted. He's in the process of being indicted at the age of 83 for being the agent of an unnamed foreign power speaking of the then Soviet Union because of its advocacy

of anti-nuclear weapons practice in the ban the bomb campaign and the campaign for the Stockholm Peace Appeal. He barely escapes prison and then that during the process of these events his first wife had passed he then marries the activist Shirley Ramp

who had various ties to the U.S. Communist Party ties which then Du Bois Bils upon and they reside in Brooklyn in a kind of internal exile up until about in 1961

when they decide to accept the invitation of their friend and comrade, Kwame, and Klymah, recently a leader of anti-colonialism in Ghana, West Africa, and they moved to Ghana-West Africa, where boys is slated to engineer the production of the Encyclopedia Afrikanah. But alas, he passes away in 1963, As the march on Washington, August 28, 1963, is inaugurating a new stage in the anti-Gem Crow movement, something that even Roy Wilkins, the N.W.C. leader, with whom he crossed swords,

during his Star Cross second tenure there, acknowledged before the 250,000 then gathered in Washington, D.C. Thank you so much for that. an excellent one down of Du Bois's life, contradictions, especially people don't know his ties with Kwame and Krumah. So for those who might not know, can you give us a basic overview of Black Reconstruction in America and what Du Bois was attempting to do with that text and why it's an important text? So Black Reconstruction emerges during the Depression decade of the 1930s. It's an attempt to overthrow the then-reigning consensus about this period following the U.S. Civil War, speaking of reconstruction, 1865, to let us say, or the sake of this discussion, 1877, when a compromise between two parties leads to a withdrawal of federal troops from Dixie, leaving, like, Americans, the newly freed, enslaved, the non-tutendor mercies of the clan and the Dixiecrats and the bloodthirsty thugs.

To the point that, like Reconstruction was published, there had been a consensus, which you can see still in the notorious pro-clan movie, Birth of a Nation, based upon the novel, The Clansman, written by Thomas Dixon, of birth of a nation, like its complement, gone with the wind, was wildly popular, at least amongst a certain segment of the Euro-American population, insofar as it portrayed the Reconstruction as an era of Negro corruption and navery and thievery, and this was the portrait that Dubois was seeking to old. overthrow in his book, like Reconstruction, which portrays Reconstruction as an attempt, a noble attempt, to impose a kind of democracy in the formerly slave states. But as Du Bois points out, it runs up against many barriers. number one, of course, is the fact that the formerly enslaved, the former enslavers were held bent on making sure that reconstruction was an abysmal failure.

That's why they organized the Ku Klux Klan. Even radicals today, I'm afraid to say, had neglected to notice that with the abolition of slavery, you had one of the most significant and massive expropriations of private property in history, to that point. That is to say, the investment

in the billions in the bodies of four million enslaved Africans. Nullify with the stroke of a pit, not to mention from the barrel of a gun, wielded by hundreds

of thousands of black men in arms, marching on behalf of the U.S. government, the actual turning point in that conflict, as Du Bois hastens to point out. But in any case, this abolition of private property, I would argue, still has current ramifications and repercussions, insofar as the United States, historically, has been a wildly anti-communist nation. That is, a lesson we should infer minimally from the Red Scare and the Cold War. And I would suggest that this anti-communism is grounded in no small measure in the point that socialism was fought, perhaps not incorrectly, to deliver the expropriation of private

property, oftentimes without compensation, which was precisely what happened in North America, Recalled that when Britain abolished enslavement in its territories in the Caribbean, Jamaica, Barbados, etc., the slave owners were compensated. Let's not even talk about reparations to the formally enslaved. And indeed, there has been reporting to suggest that up until about a decade ago or less, London was still making payouts to the descendants of the enslavers in the Caribbean. The expropriation of private property

without compensation, obviously terrified, mortified, and discombobulated the families of the former enslavers helping to serve as a recruiting ticket for the Ku Klux Klan Du Bois points out the terror that they inflicted. Du Bois also has interesting points to make, I should say,

about the weaknesses of the U.S. Constitution. He thought it was madness to endure what we are doing today with this concept of originalism. That is to say that we should be governed by what these men of property thought in the late 18th century when they crafted this document and of course

as Justice Kadanchi Brown Jackson has pointed out this originalism rather scrupulously ignores the Civil War amendments the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments which are routinely ignored and not incorporated

into this hairbrained doctrine of originalism. So Du Bois was trying to make a number of points in this text. You may know that I wrote an essay in the New York-based journal The Nation on Black Reconstruction on the occasion of a new edition. I think that your audience can find it online, where I go into more detail than I'm able to do during this time we have together. but allow me to say that, like many works of history to this very day,

I don't think Du Bois pays sufficient attention to the indigenous question. For example, like many historians today, he points to the failure of land reform, the failure to distribute land to the formerly enslaved as a major problem. with reconstruction, helping to shed light on why it fails. And there's something to that, but of course, oftentimes ignored. In this context, is the question of the original inhabitants of the land. I could go into a lift the exposition with regard to the intersection of the indigenous question, enslavement, and settler colonialism, but I've already done that in a number of

books, and I don't think I could do it justice in the few minutes we have here, but I would say that that's a major problem with Black reconstruction, this unwillingness or inability to deal with the Indicrous question, but since folks even today in 2023 and not dealing with the indiscence question, that sheds light on why Du Bois at that oversight in the 1930s. Yeah, an incredibly important point. We'll definitely link to your article, so people who want to go more in depth with that particular argument can definitely get that. So that'll be in the show notes. And of course, we've had you on several times to our sister podcast, guerrilla history, where you've touched on to differing degrees, the question of settler colonialism and how that's,

you know, shaped the American experience, etc. I share your sentiment when you could barely contain your laughter regarding the idea of originalism and how it's actually used and the non-basis for it. That's certainly an important thing for people. people to think about. But this question of private property, I think leads well into this next question, which is about the Marxism contained in this text. So in Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois advances the view that racism and capitalism are co-constitutive, which precedes Cedric Robinson's analytical framework of racial capitalism by almost five decades. So how do you understand Du Bois's Marxism in this text? Well, as noted, Du Bois was exposed to Marxism,

most dramatically, while in Berlin, Germany in the 1890s. Roy's tries to employ a Marxist framework in Black Reconstruction. He speaks of a general strike

of the enslaved. And this raises another question which is still lacking, I'm afraid to say, within certain precincts of the U.S. left. That is to say, despite the fact that many of the the U.S. left, supposedly they style themselves as class waried, but always, oftentimes, I'm afraid to say, oftentimes trying to invoke the class question in order in their minds to undermine race question.

But in fact, when you're talking about enslaved Africans, you're talking about an unpaid sector of the working class. You're talking about a sector of the working class that did not receive wages. You're talking about descendants of that unpaid sector of the working class, who at 2023 still remain the most stalwart opponents of the right wing and are the most pro-union sector and the most prone to engage in class struggle and juxtapose that with sepillar colonialism, which as I pointed out in my book on the 16th century, on the roots of what is now in the United States,

it's ultimately a project in class collaboration involving Europeans from the 1% sponsoring Europeans of various class backgrounds, shopkeepers, de-classed elements, lumping elements, workers, etc. Who in the 1580s, decalpt in what they call North Carolina, for mutual advantage, that is to say, to dislodge of the indigenous from their land with a little bit of luck and a lot of pluck, can manage to rustle up some enslaved Africans to work for free and live what has been termed the, quote, American dream, unquote.

And so you cannot begin to understand U.S. politics. You cannot begin to understand January 6, 2021, the latest expression of class, class, whereby CEOs jetting in to Washington on airplane, private planes, and shopkeepers of military veterans and declass elements, lumping elements, workers, etc., almost all of them were European and descent, tried to engineer a coup. And it's no guarantee that they will be prevented when we're trying to power as of January 2025, a stat 18 months from now. And yet, in the left, the United States, there's our own leading discussion of this. As a matter of fact, I just reprimand and rebuke certain so-called scientists of society who took the time to critique these liberal black elements who are anti-racists, Tanahasi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Kim Crenshaw, and I said, alright, fair not, but why are you people

were taking the sources of racism? As opposed to people who were trying to grapple with racism and understand racism. That's a typical evasion, I'm afraid to say, of certain erstwhile comrades and friends on the left. But in any case, Du Bois does not evade the question

of class collaboration. In fact, He sees it essential to why Reconstruction ultimately fail. The ability of the former enslavers in their allies in the North to throttle democratic promise. And, of course, Du Bois, I think, could have paid more attention to the Haitian Revolution, 1791 to 1804, which is rather curious, since his antecedents are on the island, once known as Hispaniola,

or still known as Hispaniola in certain quarters, the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804 ignited a general crisis of the entire slave system that could only be resolved with its collapse. Once again, you may want to link to the article I wrote in the New York-based week, the nation, an analysis of the life of CLR. James, Trinidad and Tobago, who of course wrote the book

Black Jacobins dealing with the Haitian Revolution. You may know I wrote a book called confronting Black Jackalins, which deals with other aspects of that world historic event. But I think that Du Bois could have paid more attention to the impact of the Haitian Revolution. on the fortunes of the United States of America, on the fortunes of the enslaved throughout the world, and indeed, if I were to make a critique of not only Du Bois, but also Frederick Douglass, who perceived Du Bois as a leading black thinker,

I would say that one of the failures of Reconstruction and one of the failures of the post-18th century, progressive movement, and I would say up to and including the 21st century, is that it would have been well if they had launched a global crusade against slavery, because, as you know, slavery continued in Cuba, up until the 1880s, in Brazil, up until the 1880s, it continued, you could make an argument, it continues to this very day in Mauritania, Northwest Africa. Of course, it was a pestilence

that was an essential feature of the Indian Ocean Basin Basin, post-1865, certainly pre-1865. And to the extent that slavery continued, it weakened not only the working class globally, it weakened the black working class in particular, in Dixie,

just as it does today, which then brings me to another point that I think Du Bois could have addressed more fruitfully, and I ask my interlocutors to rein me in because maybe I'm making too many critiques. No, that's fine. And not enough praise and applause,

but which the book hardly merits and deserves, but bear with me because I'm talking about things that have been weighing on my mind up late. Please. and that is more of a critique

of the Buffalo soldiers these were the black Americans who under the U.S. flag wage war against Native Americans and I recall that I mentioned a moment or two ago

that I could digress on the intersection of the indigenous question the black question and settler colonialism but part of that story involves the Buffalo soldiers who then, of course, went on from there to wage war against Filipinos post-1898

were involved in the U.S. neo-colonial setup in Cuba during that same time. But I think that this would call, and this is a call I'll make right now, it really calls for a fundamental rethinking

of U.S. history. a rethinking that does not posit that the winners were historically correct. That is to say, that just because the settlers ousted the British in 1776,

over the objection of numerous Native American nations, not to mention numerous black people, that doesn't mean the settlers were correct. It doesn't mean the settlers were correct as a result of being able to triumph somewhat during the war of 1812. doesn't mean that the settlers were correct when they liquidated Native American nations or were able to oust the Spanish from the Philippines

and oust the royal families from Honolulu during that same time. So I think that when that reordering is done, we're going to have to look more carefully at relations between indigenous nations and black people. Some of that story is told in my book on Texas, which came out last year. Part of that story is told in the book by Roxanne Dunbar-Artees,

indigenous people's history in the United States. And I'm happy to say that Roxanne's book has led directly to the book by Ned Blackhawk, the Rediscovery of America, which also seeks to transform our fundamental understanding of how this country evolved by putting Native Americans

and their victories and defeats at the center of the discussion. And anyway, bring me back to Du Bois, please. No, thank you. Thank you so much for all of this and for drawing our attention to some of Du Bois's contradictions, especially with respect to his

relative lack of attention on the indigenous question. I mean, in John Brown and the sort of edited version, he has like a brief aside saying that, you know, before John Brown's war in Kansas, there was so much more bloody history there. But back to this text. Right. We would love to have you all day. So while it's a classic in Marxian history, it is well known that Black Reconstruction makes critical intervention. to Orthodox Marxist historiography, for example, his insistence that whiteness serves as a public and

psychological wage, which functions to make white workers maintain the status quo, police black people, and enact racial terror, all of which prevent class solidarity from forming between black and white workers in the American context. And you've already touched on this a little bit, but it'd be great to hear you expand upon this. What are your thoughts also in general on Du Bois's interventions and orthodox Marxist historiography? Well, let's deal with this concept of whiteness, which I think, as you correctly point out, is a significant contribution by Du Bois. And perhaps in the interest of balance, what I should point out is that in these hundreds of pages of Black Reconstruction, Du Bois is dealing with quite a bit, and perhaps it's churlish on my part to point out what he didn't deal with,

as opposed to pointing out what he did deal with, which is, of course, this concept of whiteness, which has become a major feel of the late 20th and 21st century. In fact, you might have seen the article in the New York Times, front page, just a few days ago, where a professor at the University of Chicago is what's trying to teach a course, the problem of whiteness based upon whiteness studies,

which is a fertile and important field and it outraged the right because many of our friends of the left they like to talk about what they call identity politics but somehow escaping their gaze is the militarized identity politics of whiteness that is to say this process whereby those involved in conflict on the shores of Europe

English versus Irish, English versus Scots, English versus Wells, Welsh, British versus German, German versus Paul, Poe versus Russian, Poe versus Lithuanian, Northern Italian versus Southern Italian, Serre versus Croix, Croat versus Macedonian. I mean, the list is endless. All of a sudden, when they cross the Atlantic, in a maneuver that would make Madison Avenue blush, they adopt a new identity, which is being white, unquote,

which is fundamentally a class collaboration, identity, insofar as it helps to galvanize war and conquest against the indigenous, not to mention keeping the enslaved in line, and then many of our friends on the left bless their hearts. They may just as such a fundamental era. In future generations may even question their integrity. What I mean is, so, obviously in the United States, per the First Amendment, there is an attempt to surpass the religious conflicts that had racked Europe.

That is to say, Catholic versus Protestant, Christian versus Jewish, etc. An attempt to escape the clutches of state-sponsored religion. Now, of course, you could say, as our friends in the Lord, left would argue that this is part of the enlightenment process, or you could take a more

materialist analysis and suggest that this is a very grubby maneuver to forge a new militarized identity politics that would allow Europeans to more successfully wage war against the indicted, which is basically what it is. even with that, it's clear that this new identity politics is not able to overcome the snares that are delivered by slavery in its right-wing trajectory because we know that despite anti-Catholicism in Europe, and we had thought, at least some had thought, it had been overcome upon arrival on these shores, although Ray Allen Bellington, in a book that came out decades ago, we're called a Protestant Hussein, talks about how convents were torched in the U.S. Northeast, for example, and in a book I'm writing now, I'm going to talk about anti-Semitism, that is to say, how in terms of some of the early foreign conflicts by the nation of the United States involving the so-called Barbary states of North Africa, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, to begin with, that the U.S. rulers were oftentimes charging that it was the Jewish population

that was collaborating with their so-called Muslim congregate in enslaving Euro-American Christians, of whom a number were enslaved, and of course, at least the Marine helm, from the halls of Montezun, went to the shores of Tripoli. That is to say, U.S. wars, in that part of Africa. And so Du Bois does quite a service

by being one of the first, if not the first, to try to problematize Whikis, which, as noted, has led to the establishment of an entire subfield of history, which is one of the more protean subfields in all of history, one of the more illuminating subfields in all of history, And we cannot thank Du Bois enough for having the insight of helping to unravel something that had escaped the attention of too many of his predecessors, not to mention far too many of his successors. That was incredible.

Yeah, I mean, thank you for drawing our attention to white. as class collaboration. I think that's a very fruitful thought that the left really needs to contend with. And also, I mean, Du Bois has multiple formulations of this, right, in dark water, and so as a white folk. He frames the whiteness as the ownership of the earth forever and ever on men, which is a very intramulation. But I would love to talk about this all the day, but I'm going to pass it on to get for the next question. Yeah, and just bouncing off that, the points you made about people

complaining about identity politics while ignoring the fact that white identity politics is not only a real thing, but actually essential to the whole of U.S. history and is actually the sort of predecessor for the emergence of like the dialectical counterparts to white identity politics and white domination, white supremacy, etc. So I think that's a very important point, especially for people on the left, on the white left, and particularly, in the West who want to make these points about identity politics but never seem to make room for the discussion of white identity politics, which is sort of the stage upon which all of this stuff is set and the entire sort of locus of American history orbits around. But I want to

keep moving in this direction. And another intervention that Du Bois makes in this text is that in telling the history of the reconstruction period, Du Bois insists upon the agency, black people had in their own emancipation. And this often contradicts with, you know, sort of U.S. high school and early college tailings of American history, which really places like the abolitionist, the white abolitionist, the Abraham Lincoln at the center of emancipation, which often obscures or outright ignores the role that black people themselves had in fighting back against slavery. And specifically, De Bois frames black enslaved people leaving the plantations en masse as a general strike, which I found very interesting.

So what do you make of this intervention? Well, it's exceedingly important. I've already made to the almost 200,000 Negro troops who fight arms in hand against the enslavers. The Emancipation Proclamation in January 1, 1863, has to be seen minimally as a warfighting measure insofar as it induces and entices, the enslaved to lead the plantations

and defect to the side of Lincoln military, which they do in mass, which is the turning point in the war. Because, as you probably know, the Confederacy had been faring rather well up to the point of the Emancipation orclamation. And then, with regard to black agency, I think,

you cannot begin to understand why slavery reaches a crisis point in North America without understanding global abolition, without understanding Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists who spent considerable time in London, when London was a major antagonist of the United States, it would be the equivalent of Paul Robson spending time in Moscow, when Moscow is a major antagonist of U.S. imperialism spending time in Canada when Canada was a

British territory up to at least 1867 and the following the North Star Canada was a mantra of whether they enslaved just like as I pointed out

in my work on Texas many black people were fleeing to Mexico, due south, as well. And you cannot begin to understand the crisis of slavery without understanding this global campaign. Just like you cannot begin to understand the crisis of colonialism in Southern Africa without understanding the worldwide campaign against apartheid in colonialism and the fact that so many from that sub-region of Africa were scattered across this small planet and were campaigned. assiduance on behalf of freedom for their homelands, and that was the case for black Americans as well. And then I would make another point. I'm in the process of reading a new book.

I can retrieve it if you're interested by a scholar at Birmingham University in the UK, which upends our understanding of abolitionism. Generally speaking, the story has been to point. Point to London, as I have done just now, and point to Weberforce and Clarkson, et cetera, and then, you know, Frederick Douglass enters the stage, et cetera, equiano, for example. But this scholar pushes abolitionism back to the 17th century in the Lucophone world. This is a Lucophone scholar. That is to say, he's a scholar that's a offspring of Portuguese colonialism. And as he tells the story, you had Angolan's. Of course, Angola had been under the thumb of litmusmen since the late 16th century who were campaigning in the Vatican in the 17th century. Of course, Portugal was part of this Catholic front on behalf not only of enslaved Africans, but also

the exploited indigenous and also the so-called new Christians because as you know many Jewish folk on the Iberian Peninsula came under extreme persecution as a result of the Inquisition and many of them became so-called new Christians in other words they supposedly had converted

which the idea was either convert or die And so these black abolitionists were campaigning on their behalf as well. And so I think this points up, once again, the value of continued historical research. Because one of the things I've noticed, even by some of our friends from the left, they think they know it not. Everything we need to know, everything that we need to know, we already know, which is folly, of course, because new revelations emerge regularly. and secondly new revelations emerge with regard to the activism of the exploited because as Dubois's black reconstruction points out for the longest period the scholars were enmeshed in a pro-slavery matrix

and were routinely ignoring and or dismissing the activism of the enslaved not least in North America, not least because of the mysticism rounding 1776 is this so-called greatly forward for humanity which then tends to block out the price paid by the indigenous, the price paid by the enslaved, et cetera. And I should also make a point with regard to our earlier conversation, our immediately receding conversation involving whiteness, and then I'll pause.

And as I've written elsewhere, it would be useful to see whiteness as the highest stage of class collaboration and seeing class collaboration as the highest stage of whiteness. And until that fundamental point is glass, well, at least here in the United States of America, where even the more sober-minded

or discussing with utter sobriety the prospect of a ride of a kind of neo-fascism which would leave in its weight all manner of corpses and cadavers in particular in the United States of America we need to grasp that concept for which Du Bois structured the foundation in Black Reconstruction in the 1930s.

Yeah, that was incredible. And thank you for sort of drawing our attention to the importance of whiteness as the high-based stage of class collaboration. I think it's a fascinating formulation that should be explored more. So I want to return to the reconstruction period and specifically what Du Bois thinks should be done in the American context. So he writes, the rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later,

will and must go back to the basic principles of reconstruction in the United States during 1867 to 1876, light, land, and leading for slaves, black, brown, yellow, and white under a dictatorship of the proletariat. For those who may not be familiar with this Marx's notion, what is the dictatorship of the proletariat, or at least what is it for Du Bois? And how does he think this is going to relate to reconstruction?

Well, it's a contested term. Basically, it grows out of the idea that capitalism involves the dictatorship of the capitalism. that is to say there are rights, for example, when you are arrested, you have certain rights, but obviously the more money you have, the more rights you have. You have money, you can hire a $500 an hour warrior with an entire law firm behind him or her who can file all sorts of motions, as we were about to see with the difficulties of the 45th U.S. President and perhaps escape unscathed, whereas if you're a poor worker, you can't afford a $500 an hour lawyer.

Oftentimes, you have to go to a public defender who was overwhelmed with cases, and then whether you're guilty or innocent, compels you to engage in a plea bargain, which basically means instead of, say, serving 30 years, you serve, quote, only, unquote, 15 years. whether you're guilty or innocent, and that's an illustration of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, where you're right or dependent upon your pocketbook. And so the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, at least theoretically, and I would say to an extent with regard to how Du Bois was formulating it, was that that system I've just described would be turned on its head.

whereby the formerly enslaved would have a role in crafting laws in legislatures up to, including the U.S. Congress. And, of course, there was significant representation of black people in state legislatures in Dixie and in the U.S. Congress, and that the rights of property owners would not necessarily reign supreme because it was noted a few moments ago a good deal of their land would be expropriated and doled out to those who had been working that land. That's also an expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

I think today what happens is that when people are the term dictatorship, it rings alarm bells, rightly or wrongly. But I think after the alarm bells are wrong, that should cause us to then study and reflect more so than flee and harm, which is oftentimes the result to do our detriment. And I think that going forward,

we're going to have to look more closely at this concept. I mean, for example, right now, if you look at the U.S. working class, labor law is skewed against unions, for example, and skewed in favor of their employers. The writers in Hollywood and the actors in Hollywood were about to discover this if they did not already know it. the hotel workers in Los Angeles were also on strike, may be forced to grapple with this bitter reality, as will the teamsters, as they confront UPS and what might amount to one of the largest strikes in U.S. history, which may unfold as of August 1 involving hundreds of thousands of workers.

That is to say that capitalism involves class, class exploitation and class oppression. To the extent that workers are insufficiently organized, they have difficulty to put it mildly and challenging the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. To the extent that they're organized, they can push back and claw back rights to their benefit, ultimately clawing back rights

to the point where they can turn the table altogether against the bourgeoisie, forced them either to commit class suicide or some other form of extinction, shall we say. And he murdered triumphant with a system whereby they are in the driver's seat. They are in control through their political arm and acting laws for the benefit of the majority and to the detriment of the once exploiting minority. Now, in a sense, this is what Du Bois was driving it with regard to the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what he was espying in Dixie post-1865, that is to say, the glimmerings, the

embryo of that kind of system, but alas, is already noted. it was drowned in blood, did not have a fair chance of succeeding, and democracy has suffered ever since. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we want to be respectful of your time, Professor Horn. So I just have another question before we wrap up and let you go. And ultimately, I just kind of want to zoom out a little bit and look at the big picture, the importance of this text, the legacy of it, etc.

So what is the importance of this text for revolutionary? in the United States today, and what core lessons from this work would you emphasize as particularly relevant for us today? Well, there are so many lessons I'm not even sure where to begin, some of which we've already touched upon. That is to say, the necessity of demystifying U.S. history, demystifying the founding, demystifying the Constitution, the question of white, and demystifying that rudimentary and fundamental notion, the necessity of engaging in class analysis,

not only class involving capitalists and the paid sector of the working class, but also when you look at history, looking at the unpaid sector of the working class, speaking of the enslaved, and their descendants, The question of indigenous history, which is musseling its way into the forefront of consciousness as we speak, a reference the bibliographic notions that I've already put forward, which I would recommend to your audience.

Certainly when we talk about settler colonialism, a concept too, which is muscle this way on to center stage, per force. That means you have to grapple with indigenous history. So I also should point out the necessity that Du Bois helps to illuminate either by direct reference or by its absence of engaging in a domestic analysis, an analysis of the United States, that takes into account the global correlation of forces. a domestic analysis, if it's to be accurate and useful, perforce has to be part of an overall global analysis. And that points to another factor, which is that the working class, the exploited, particularly in North America,

particularly given the rampant nature of class collaboration, the exploited classes have to engage in internationalism. The exploited classes have to lengthen the battlefield, have to link hands and arms with folks across the border, with folks across the oceans. That is our saving grace. So that's just a thumbnail sketch of what Du Bois's

ethical work happens to engender at least in my estimation and in my understand. Yeah, incredibly well said, and internationalism is essential. One of the things that you do that I really appreciate is you're constantly even when we're talking about historical

figures, you're constantly linking it to the contemporary moment to help make sense of it. And we have a couple more minutes here, so this is not about DeBois necessarily, but while I have you, I was hoping I could slide this question in before, we let you go, which is just your thoughts on Cornell West and his run. Of course, we all know the limitations of bourgeois electoralism, but I'm just very genuinely, personally

curious about your take on the Cornell West third party run. Well, I should begin and purpose my remarks by saying that I'm a friend of Cornell and therefore people should take that into account as I began to speak about his campaign that I will try to engage in objective analysis, but inevitably, some of my remarks may be tinged with the scintilla of subjectivity. Having said that is important with regard to U.S. presidential campaigns to recognize that we should take advantage of these mechanisms that the founders of this so-called republic established in order to thwart democracy, one of which is the electoral college, which means, as Silary Rodham Clinton could well attest, that you could get the most votes in a gross

sense and still lose, because a U.S. presidential race is 50 plus different races. And I'm speaking to you from Texas where the Republicans, now I would say the ultra Maga Republicans, have a stranglehold on this state and have had

so for decades. For those who clamor against Cornell's attempt to get the Green Party nomination and worry about its impact on the Democrats, well, you know,

You should talk to Beto or Wood. I feed this guy. I mean, he ran for president, grab for governor, he grabbed the Senate, and, you know, has been soundly defeated. And, you know,

it's not, it's not like he's some sort of radical. It's an expression of the depths of class collaboration and white supremacy in the long-star state. And so to say that Cornell is going to hurt the Democrats in Texas,

I mean, people are, you know, people are not doing an analysis. They're not paying attention. I mean, and stuff. As I said a few moments ago, it makes me even more to question their integrity, because they must know how presidential races run. Otherwise, I assume they wouldn't speak about it. And we already know with regard to the result in at least 40 of these jurisdictions. And so if you're going to say Cornell should not rule,

run, please limit your remarks to the 10 jurisdictions that are up for grabs. Obviously, Texas is not up for grabs, New Zealand is not up for grabs, Mississippi is definitely not up for graph, and when you do your analysis of Mississippi and a good deal of Dixie, please give us an explanation of why it is that, for example, nine out of 10-year-old Americans across class lines, both for the right, why it is in 1991, David Duke, a leader of the Nazis in the clan, got 55% of the Euro-American boat in a race for governor of the Pelican state, Louisiana. I mean, and if you want me, for example, to tell Cornell not to run, please tell me, what are we going to do about what I've just outlined going forward?

Besides, you know, some sort of waving in the hand talking about people being misled or whatever. And please give a materialist analysis of how we got to this point. I mean, one of Cornell's winning lines is that you can vote for one candidate, speaking of Trump, and face the prospect of civil war, or you can vote for the other candidate, speaking of Mr. Biden, and face the prospect of World War III, with his rather brash challenge to China, coupled with the proxy war in Ukraine. So once again, I think it's well past time as we stare into the face of an ugly and ghastly fascism that we really need analyses that are particular, that are historically grounded, that do not seek to evade troublesome questions like class collaboration and how it intersects with lightness, because, first of all, we shouldn't have been invading these questions all along. Shouldn't have been?

And secondly, it's well past time today to grapple frontally with these questions. And in any case, Cornell is just a contender for the Green Party nomination. There's no guarantee that he'll win the nomination. So we'll see what happens. Yeah, well, thank you very much. for that. I appreciate you indulging me on that personal curiosity of mine. And yeah, I largely completely actually agree with your, with your points. You mentioned Texas, and I just have to say, I think it's one of your most recent books, if not your most recent book, The Counter Revolution of 1836,

Texas slavery and Jim Crow and the roots of U.S. fascism. It's a wonderful book. We did a full interview about it over at Guerilla History. If people are interested in that, thank you so much for being generous with your time today, Professor Horn. Before I let you go, can you let our listeners know where they can find you and your work online? Well, I'm all over YouTube for various reasons. You can check the activist news network or a number of

my appearances on the media. And also that intersects with a number of Facebook pages as well. And I should also say that my latest book is a revolting capital. Racism and radicalism in Washington, D.C., 1900

to 2000. Perhaps we can discuss that book at some later date. It deals with the anomaly of the capital of a white supremacist state, speaking of the United States of America, intermittently having being regarded as, quote, chocolate sitting, unquote, as to say majority black, intermittently, which creates all sorts of contradictions, some of which our progressive movement has not taken advantage of. But I think it'll be front and center as these prosecutions of Mr. Trump proceed because he'll be trying to avoid these majority black districts, excuse me, majority black juries in Washington

like to play. It serves as a real restraint on the right way that when they run afoul of the law and then they're in the district, oftentimes the juries are unfordiving, unfulgiving black jurors. for example, which helps to throttle the neo-fascist impulse. And by the end, by October, my next book will be out, I dare say, colon, a Geraldhorn reader, it's sort of a greatest hits, it's sort of a collection of articles I've written over the years on the Watcher of Bull in 1965, anti-apartheid movement.

The question of the lumpen, which is a very important theoretical concept for various reasons that I won't go into. the question of what I call left-wing white nationalism, which I dealt with in the course of our talk today, and many other questions of that nature. That'll be out by October. And then, hopefully, by the end of the next year, will be this book entitled,

Armstrong Struddle, question by. Anthers and communists, black nationalists and black liberals in Southern California through the 1960. And I think the title is self-explanatory, so I will elaborate. Nice. Very excited for that. Amazing.

Thank you so, so much, Dr. Horn, for your time. It has been wonderful being in conversation with you, and we will be sure to check out those books when they come out. Yeah, send me the link to this conversation. Absolutely. Absolutely. We'll do. Thank you so much, Professor Horn.

Good luck to you. You too. All right. That was a wonderful, wonderful conversation with Dr. Gerald Horn. Absolutely love discussions with him. He's so wonderful. He's so knowledgeable. He has these amazing little turns of phrases. And sometimes I was on mute, but you couldn't hear my laughter. But there's plenty of times throughout that episode where he made me crack up and he does that quite often. But yeah, there's one question we didn't quite get to just because, of the time constraints for for professor horn. And that was the question about abolition democracy. So a PM as a sort of this little afterwards segment we're going to have throughout this series where we just sort of wrap up the conversation, reflect on the specific conversation and maybe it flesh some things out. We didn't get a cover in the conversation. That's what this is now. So I'm toss it over to you and just maybe you can give us a breakdown of abolition democracy and how Du Bois makes use of that concept. Yeah, absolutely. So this is one of the central contributions of the text, and it's too bad that we didn't get to hear Dr. Horn weigh in on it. But Du Bois introduces this notion of abolition democracy. So the basic idea is that you can't just have the abolition of slavery as a negative project. You also have to have reconstruction, which is a positive building up and a substantive amount. of black people. So he conceives this of this in democratic terms, as abolition democracy, right, as building new democratic institutions, as expanding the ideal of democracy in a fundamental and radical way. This is also not independent of the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, by the way. So as Dr. Horn said, the dictatorship of the proletariat, you know, people hear dictatorship and they get a little scared, but in Du Bois's conception, it is a state where only those who work can vote. So it's a fundamentally democratic conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat,

which is at odds in certain ways with like the Leninist conception in certain ways. But I think there's interesting resonances between Du Bois and that. So I think a quote from This new W.B. Du Bois School of Abolition and Reconstruction in Philadelphia. Shout out to them. They're doing amazing work. And it's a school, by the way, just for the listeners, it's a school for organizers in Philly to acquaint themselves with radical abolitionism and internationalism. So the quote is that there can be no abolition without reconstruction. And I think this perfectly encapsulates Du Bois's idea of abolitionism.

is not just a negative project, but as creating new institutions and particularly new democratic institutions that grant substantive and not just, in words, emancipation for black people. So the idea of abolition democracy is absolutely central for Dubois. This is his substantive vision of how reconstruction should go. It has to go to the principles of abolition democracy. And I'll just read a quote. So he writes that abolition democracy demands for Negroes, physical freedom, civil rights, economic opportunity and education, and the right to vote as a matter of sheer human justice and right.

So I think also implicit in this idea of abolition democracy is a critique of the seriously imperfect democracy that we live on. I mean, it's questionable whether it even is in democracy. Du Bois does think it is. But in other texts, he highlights the real lack of what he calls industrial democracy in the United States context. So industrial democracy, he thinks, is most clearly realized by the Soviet Union. It is democracy in everything relating to workplace. conditions. And this includes, by the way, I think in the African Roots War, which is a short paper, it's absolutely fantastic from I think around 1905 or the early 1900s anyway. So industrial democracy is democracy in everything from workplace conditions to the very setting of wages. And this is a very radical notion of democracy, right? Because imagine if we as workers were able to decide how wages would be allocated. I mean, we could say, like, you know, the CEO or the leader of a company or an organization or whatever have you doesn't get paid more than the average worker.

And that's, that fundamentally restructures the existing hierarchy of workplace conditions that we have under capitalism. So that is an important tool in the way that, if it, if it, sort of anti-capitalist world making would be played out. It's a radical sort of an extension of the ideal of democracy, and it's bound up with abolition. And I should also say that the idea of abolition democracy is very influential for contemporary abolitionists, especially Angela Davis. So she writes this book, a very short book called abolition democracy, where she says explicitly that she's thinking of prison and police abolition as not just being the eradication of these oppressive institutions, but also being a building up of democratic institutions that eliminate the need for police and prisons in the first place. So what this looks like is securing people's basic needs, you know, it's broadly socialistic picture.

and encouraging sort of democratic participation in a radical way, not in the sort of bourgeois electoral way, democratic participation in the conditions of everyday life. You know, if you and I are sharing an apartment building, we get to decide who and what and how everything is allocated if the, well, I mean, there wouldn't landlords in this area, but you get the idea if the apartment manager is not doing their job as well as we would like them to, then we can kick them out and have someone new.

So it's a radical extension of democracy, and I think it's something that the left can learn from both in terms of understanding our sort of goals, but also in organizing practices. of those. Yeah, absolutely. And that's something I wanted to kind of touch on as well, is this relationship between democracy and dictatorship in the Marxist term. Because in Marxist language, when we call something a dictatorship, what we're just saying is that because of our analysis of class society, that wherever there is class society, there's going to be a dictatorship of a given class. And that almost always takes the form of the dictatorship of the owning class, right? Under ancient slave societies, it was the ownership by the slave class.

Under feudalism, it was the monarchs, the aristocrats, the nobles, the lords. And under capitalism, it is the capitalist class. And while technically the U.S. is a formal democracy, in Marxist terms, we understand it as a dictatorship with the bourgeoisie. Because the democracy that we get, even in its best, is completely shrunk and limited to only the political realm and under bourgeois rules only through the outsourcing of real democratic. power to representatives who then go through the institutions of bourgeois rule to, I quote unquote, represent their constituency or their people. But it's very clear that while it's true to say technically that the U.S. is a democracy in Marxist terms, we understand it as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And what better way to protect a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie than to give

it the formal facade of a democracy, to convince the people in that dictatorship that they actually have a say. But what do we actually have a say in? Well, we get to, I guess, choose between a handful of representatives of the owning class. Is it this millionaire in blue or this millionaire in red, right? That's our choice. And so in that context, I find even the use of the term democracy, you know, probably wrong. And in the context of the dictatorship of the proletariat and in the context of abolition democracy, that's real democracy. For me, if we're going to talk about real human democracy. It's only going to be possible in this transition state under the dictatorship of the proletariat. And importantly, it's going to be expanded into the realm, as you were sort of

alluding to, of economic reality, right? Like, we can choose our political leaders every four years by voting. But we have no say in the companies that we work for in our wages, in the economy at large. We have no say, like no democratic input like you were talking about in relation to our living spaces, you know, being tenants and renters, we have no democratic input against the landlord. And so, ironically, these terms, democracy and dictatorship are seen as at odds with one another. But in reality, under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie democracy is really only a facade under the dictatorship of the proletariat given the right amount of like democratic mechanisms, right? We talk about the Soviets or in Chinese, under the Chinese

communist revolution, there is the unleashing of the masses on the party itself, right? These experiments in radical democracy. And in this context of abolition democracy, we see given the history of the United States's white supremacy and the immiseration of black people, which is ongoing to this day, that the abolition of in Du Bois's day, slavery, Jim Crow, etc., through segregation, through the injustices that black people face today with the carceral system in particular, but even more broadly than that, that abolition is sort of a prerequisite for the possibility of a true democracy. As long as black people as a group, as a class are oppressed in the United States, you know, democracy has sort of never existed for them. Fascism has always

been the norm for especially the lower classes of the black communities and the indigenous communities, et cetera. So I just, I find the tensions between these terms incredibly interesting. And while on first pass they can seem to be in opposition to one another. It's just really a matter of understanding the way in which the term dictatorship is mobilized in Marxist theory. And once you understand that, you can actually see that, again, the dictatorship of the proletariat is much more democratic in every way than the so-called democracy of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And I just think that's important for people to understand. Yeah. And the, I mean, the reason for that is that the dictatorship of the proletariat is enacting industrial democracy, right? And it's realizing industrial democracy. So you have the seizure of private property and the abolition of oppressive capitalist relations. I think also, you know, with respect to Lenin, Marcel Liebman's book, Leninism on

Lennon does a great job about spelling out the sort of radical democratic impulses of Lennon in the context of Soviet Union and then also what's the book, Adom Gittachu, I hope I'm not mispronouncing her name, but she wrote a fantastic book called World Making After Empire, which talks about the sort of relation and the sort of origin of the idea of self-determination in anti-colonial nationalism in the 20th century. There was another point I wanted to say about radical democracy,

but, yeah, I think that'll suffice for now. That's my cat, Lyra. Okay, very nice. Do you have anything else to say any last words on this particular episode? Anything else you want to get out there? So I think Gerald Horn's

formulation that the highest stage of class collaboration is whiteness and the highest stage of whiteness is class collaboration, giving you, I mean, in a philosophical sense, a definition of whiteness in terms of class collaboration. I mentioned earlier in the show that Du Bois has a very interesting formulation of whiteness in the, sorry, the souls of white folk in Darkwater, which is a neglected text, I think. It's one of my favorites. And it's early on, it's before he

becomes explicitly Marxist, but he's still radically anti-imperialist, radically internationalist. And, I mean, it's a fantastic text. But the formulation is that the whiteness of the ownership of the earth forever and ever on men. So this is framing whiteness in terms of the ownership of fiber property in a way that I think is worth contending work. And thinking with Gerald Orne, which again, fantastic episode, but thinking of the formulation of whiteness as class collaboration, I think is generative and I think we're going to have to contend with him more. Because as he points out, to use his language, our friends on the left,

seriously neglect the ways in which whiteness, I mean, even functions, operates. According to Du Bois, whiteness and white supremacy and white power are literally ordering the world. So you have this conception where he says the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line, where white Europe and America dominate the rest of the world, and in the 21st century, you see the United States being the preponderant military empire that has wreaked unspeakable havoc on the world. So it's very important to think about this in terms of whiteness and not just treat whiteness as something ideological or superstructural, but as a material force, I mean,

we're materialist, so understanding it as a material force in the world. Yeah, absolutely. course, you know, we have all these people pretending to be on the left today who want to downplay these issues. They want to downplay the issues of racism and white supremacy through like a pithy dismissal of quote-unquote identity politics. They want to eradicate the settler colonial question altogether. And there's no, there's no coincidence that where these, the parts of the so-called left, where these ideas really take root, are the most reactionary elements of the left so, so much so that I would even, you know, not even place them

on the left. There's a long tradition of the left wing of fascism masquerading as a left wing movement while, you know, sneaking in all of these sort of right-wing ideas. And we see that happening right now in this period of reaction we're living through. But of course, colonialism is the material predecessor to capitalism. And our modern notions of racism, our modern notion of whiteness comes out of that material process of colonialism. And so, you know, to say, it's merely superstructural or to say that it's no longer relevant, I think is a real, real, either, you know, mistake or like a cynical conscious manipulation of reality. But for me, a thoroughgoing revolution in the United States, given our material history,

is going to have to include a revolutionary confrontation with settler colonialism and white supremacy. And anybody on the left who claims to be a revolutionary and who wants to downplay those essential aspects of American life and the entire structure of the American political, economic, and social sphere should be looked at with great suspicion. Again, maybe they're just ignorant. Maybe they need to be educated. In some cases, that's certainly true. In other cases, I think it's much more cynical than that.

But in either case, I think for the principled revolutionary living in the United States, these are absolutely essential points. They're going to be part and parcel of any revolution. and a figure like Gerald Horn, I think, makes these people on the right that pretend to be on the left very uncomfortable because of the important, passionate, and clearly knowledgeable and deeply informed way that Gerald Horn traces the history of the United States, points these things out, and puts them at the center of his analysis. And that's why he is a figure that is disliked by these, you know, right-wing figures and these reactionaries masquerading as principled Marxists or comments. immunists or revolutionary. So, yeah, I'm in complete agreement with you on that front. Yeah, I mean, as Shreis Burden Steli says Gerald Horn, I remember this quote because I thought it was fantastic. Gerald Horn's probably the most analytically tapped in intellectual of our time.

So, I mean, we need to be studying Gerald Horn like we're studying Du Bois. As an additional note, I mean, I think the sort of ignorance with respect to the depth of white power and structuring the global order even goes to anti-fascist organizing to some degree. I mean, I think, at least in my experience, anti-fascists tend to be focused on the sort of particularly grotesque forms of white power. So you have literal Nazis roaming our streets, organizing, training for God knows a lot. But often in anti-fascist circles, at least as far as I can tell, and maybe this is related to sort of white anarchism. But there's a failure to really contend with international politics and see the kind of lines of solidarity between. white power across the globe. So you have the United States propping up various states

and supporting materially, sort of Western domination, which is not independent of white supremacy, but art and parcel of it. So I think it's absolutely critical that we return to the source and return to Du Bois and engage in a substantive and deep study of reconstruction as well, not just as sort of something that happened in the past, but something that we need to learn from and strive towards. And this is something that I see as being necessary for all segments of the left, whether you're a Marxist, an anarchist, whatever have you. There can be no liberation, as you said in the American context

without addressing settler colonialism, without addressing black liberation, and without addressing the problem of empire. And so we need to fight along these fronts against the white power structure to strive towards a liberatory world. Amen.

And the ground that's laid for that struggle is this sort of political education. where we go back, we understand our history at deeper and deeper levels, we understand how race and class are co-constitutive, we understand concepts coming out of De Bois or the work of Gerald Horn or, you know, whoever, and apply those in our own time and place, in our own material circumstances. And so this political education, informing yourself, educating yourself, then going out, educating others. This is the sort of necessary groundwork for that more robust principled fight to take place because we see these areas, whether it's on the anarchist or

the Marxist left, where there is not this theoretical education. What happens is that the sort of default cultural assumptions of our society peek through and try to justify themselves. And if you are really rooted in good theory, you have a sort of inoculation against that stuff from creeping in. If you don't have that theory, or you're taking your, you're learning all of your Marxism from like one egomaniac on Twitch or whatever, you're going to have a very elementary and stunted understanding. And then of course, wherever there's deep ignorance, there's deep arrogance. So people don't know what they don't know. And, you know, some of the most arrogant people on the left or the right are often some of the most ignorant people. And that's no

coincidence either. So all food for thought, all important stuff. But again, Gerald Horn is a, is a beacon of light if you're trying to wrestle with these issues. And you really want to get a good grasp on the material reality of America and American history, Gerald Horn is just one of those scholars that is utterly indispensable. So I think that's going to wrap up this, unless you have anything else to say, P.M. Just a couple of final thoughts. So on, so I think Du Bois's intervention in conceptualizing black people leaving the plantation as a general strike is absolutely critical. And the very idea of the general strike is one that's, at least per my reading of this article, abolition, black ultra-radicalism, and the general strike is being

contributed to heavily by black theorists, if not generated by black theorists. So I think that's good for future reading. We will continue to talk about Du Bois and his words. And he in his life throughout and his organizing experience because he was a very talented organizer throughout the series. But places to look dark water even though it's not explicitly Marxist is

fantastic. His biography of John Brown for full defense of revolutionary violence is very important and also just John Brown is very interesting. The book The World in Africa is a very good sense.

gives you a very good sense of how he's thinking about Africa and in relation to what he calls colonial imperialism, where he's seeing colonialism and imperialism as very same, of the very same system. And color and democracy is also great. It stresses the relation between colonial imperialism, the colonies, and peace, which he organized for Browder's Law. Wonderful. Those are some great readings for. people to engage with if they're interested in this stuff. And we'll also try to cover as much of that as we possibly can in this ongoing series on W.E.B. Du Bois. All right. So that's going to wrap it up for today's episode. Thank you everybody who listens. I'm really excited about this series. And thank you so much, PM, for reaching out to me, being the catalyst to this series and joining me along this ride. It's really crucial. And I really, really appreciate your insight, your depth of

knowledge and helping me and my audience navigate the world of W.E.B. Du Bois. So thank you so much for that. And to everybody else listening out there, we'll be back with you shortly. Love and Solidarity. You know,