Rev Left Radio - W.E.B. Du Bois: Radical Black Peace Activism

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly joins Breht and PM for a second installment of our Du Bois series, this one focusing on Du Bois' human rights and peace activism and how he tied that in with his revolutionary Marxism. Together they discuss Du Bois' political evolution, the influence of his friend, comrade and wife Shirley Graham Du Bois, his book "In Battle for Peace", DR. CBS' articles on Du Bois, the targeting and trial of Du Bois by the US State, what he meant by "real pacifism", the Black Alliance for Peace, and much more!   Check out Dr. CBS' article “In Battle for Peace During Scoundrel Time” Check out her upcoming book  "Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States You can find PM on IG @worldmaking_   Or find out more about him and his work HERE Check out the Black Alliance for Peace and their Solidarity Network music 'Balloons'  by Noname (feat. Jay Electronica & Eryn Allen Kane)   Support Rev Left Radio or make a one time donation

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have the continuation of our ongoing series on W.E.B. De Bois and his work covering different texts that he wrote, different elements of his biography, learning what we can as we stand today from his life and his legacy and his works. And so this is the second installment with the one and only. Dr. Cherise Bird and Steli, aka Dr. CBS. She is finally on Rev Left. It's been a long time coming.

I've talked to her before on guerrilla history. I've communicated with her on Twitter, and we have always been wanting to do an episode together, and then once PM and I decided to do this series, I knew I had to reach out to her and bring her on because she, along with Gerald Horn and others, is a really well-known and well-respected scholar that focuses, among other things,

on De Bois's work. But this is the second installment. Maybe some people did not catch the first. There's no necessary order you need to listen to these episodes in. Each episode can stand on their own as a one-off listen for those that want to approach it in that way. But throughout this series, I do have my co-host, P.M. Irvin, on to help me as somebody who, I think, has a deeper well of knowledge on De Bois, who's actively studying De Bois and his work. I wanted somebody else on to help bolster this series to make it as good as it could possibly be, and PM was that person. So for those that haven't been acquainted with you from our first episode with Gerald Horn, PM, can you kind of reintroduce yourself and then take us into the interview?

Yeah, thanks so much, Brett. It's, as always, an honor to be included. I'm a long-time listener of the show, and I think the fact that we're doing a series on Du Bois's philosophy and political thought is really crucial. So my name is P. M. Erben. I'm a PhD student in philosophy at Stanford, which is a funny, I said this in the first episode, but it's a kind of a fun place to be because we have the over-institution. Yeah, so I work on W.B. Du Bois's radicalism, particularly with respect to his political thought, and racial capitalism and empire. And currently working on a piece on Du Boidus' conception of real pacifism and his, thoughts on peace more generally. So I want to orient us by adding a quote that crystallizes Du Bois' support for socialism and his opposition to imperialism and connecting that with his

radical peace activism, or what Dr. Shreveld and Stelie calls his radical black peace activism. Du Bois writes, I quote, I want progress. I want education. I want social medicine. I want a living wage and old age security. I want employment for all and relief for the unemployed and sick. I want public works, public services, and public improvements. I want freedom for my people. And because I know and you know that we cannot have these things and at the same time, fight, destroy, and kill all around the world in order to make huge profits for big business, for that reason, I take my stand beside the millions in every nation and continent and cry, peace, no more war.

So this is a statement and at a certain point of Du Bois's political development of his stand for peace. He was thinking about peace and even world peace throughout his career from as early as, I would say, Darkwater, which came out, I think, in 1920. But even before then, he's thinking about peace with respect to John Brown. and he wrote this by Albuquerand bombs, it's fantastic. It really gets into the details of Du Bois's radical sort of support for revolution, but particularly revolution for a more peaceful, more just social order, and that's what his support for peace is all about. Absolutely, and that's a great quote to usher us in to this wonderful conversation

with Dr. Cherise Burdenstelli on the Radical Black Peace, activism of W.E.B. De Bois. Enjoy. My name is Cherise Brunselli. I am an associate professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. For the 2023, 2024 school year, I'll be a visiting fellow at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University. And I am a member of the Black Alliance for Peace. Well, wonderful. It's very exciting to have you on. I think I speak for both me and PM when I say that we're genuine fans of you and your work. I think you're a really critical voice on the North American radical socialist left.

And I always appreciate whatever time I have to speak with you. Today, of course, we'll be talking about W.E.B. Du Bois. This is the second installment of our series on Dubois, which is going to go on for a sort of indeterminate amount of episodes. We're still getting things organized. Our first one was with Gerald Horn, who I know you've worked with in the past on Du Bois as well. But this one is going to be about Du Bois's radical peace activism, his text in Battle for Peace, the work that Dr. CBS has done on that work of Du Bois, et cetera. So let's just go ahead and dive into it. And first and foremost, can you tell us a bit about your personal history with Du Bois, how you got into them,

and why you think he's an important and even essential historical figure? Sure. So I first wrote about the boys in my PhD dissertation, I believe, when I was looking at the intersections of anti-communism, anti-radicalism, and anti-blackness. And so in doing that research, that was really the first time that I had. had encountered what I would call the radical DeBois. Prior to that, I was familiar with souls of black folk and conservation of the races in some of his earlier work, but not necessarily, you know, I wasn't familiar with his

radicalization over time, particularly between the 1930s and 1950s, which is the area that I studied. Then in 2007, summer of 2017, I got a fellowship. in the De Bois Papers at UMass Amherst. And that's really sort of when my deep research into DeBois kind of took off. And then shortly after that was when Gerald asked me to co-write a biography with him on W.B. Du Bois for the Black Lives series for the ABC, C-L-I-O press. and sort of out of that research also came the several different book chapters and articles

I've written about Du Bois. During that time, I also spent time in David Levering Lewis's papers, specifically the interviews that he had conducted for his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Du Bois, as well as in Bernard Jaffe's papers, who was Du Bois's lawyer at one point and also the lawyer of Shirley Graham De Bois. And so even though De Bois's paper are digitized, like being in person and fully immersed in those collections really gave me a lot of insight. And honestly, through that, through De Bois's papers that I discovered people like Doxy Wilkerson and Marvell Cook and Esther Cooper Jackson and other radicals that I had been kind of familiar with, but it was through my research on De Bois

and I started making broader connections and thinking more deeply about what I call the tradition of radical blackness. So, yeah, so that's my orientation to Du Bois. Wonderful. Yeah, that's awesome. So the next question I was going to ask you about Du Bois's biography, but I know that that's a huge question. And I actually heard you speak on a friend of the show, a Devin Springer's podcast,

Groundings podcast, just about how much there is in that biography. And it's really too much to cover in one question, maybe even too much to cover in one episode. So I was hoping that maybe you could talk about his biography specifically in the context of his personal political evolution and his eventual embrace of Marxism. I know in that same podcast and just now in the intro, you mentioned Shirley Graham Du Bois eventually would marry and be the wife of W.E.B. Du Bois, but was also a really strong communist influence on him as well. Can you just kind of talk about his political evolution and how that eventually led to him

embracing Marxism over time? Yeah, I mean, Du Bois was a member of the Socialist Party as early as 1909. So he always has sort of social democratic, I would say, tendencies or for a very, very long time. So for example, Manning Mirable has written a biography. We call him a black radical Democrat. There's a bunch of different interpretations about Du Bois's Marxism or not, or, you know, not being a Marxist or whatever. Of course, he's also the subject of, of Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism alongside CLR James and I forget

who was the other person? Richard Wright, I think. Is that right? Yeah, Richard Wright. Anyway, so there's a lot of different interpretations about the boys' Marxism. I look at the period really between kind of 1930 and 1960, and there's some

interesting letters in the 1930s between he and Abram Paris, who at that time is a radical economist, 40, asking Abrams to provide him with a reading list on sort of Marxism and, you know, the readings that a good Marxist must know. And of course, at this time is when he is a drafting Black Reconstruction. And so I don't know if at that time he was, he certainly was a member, he was not a member of the Communist Party at that time. And of course, it was still quite critical of the Communist Party because as we know, he was part of the faction of the NAACP that was at loggerheads

with the international labor defense, which was a communist-adjacent organization in the defense of the Scotsboro Boys. So he still had a skepticism about the sort of the Communist Party USA in the 1920s. He had visited Russia. And he had said something along the lines of, you know, if what he saw in Russia was Bolshevism, he was a Bolshevik, but he wasn't convinced at that time. And that is to say the mid-1920s, that that was the solution for the United States or for black people, the United States per se. over time, I would say he continued his study of Marxism. And then when he, from 1934 to 1944, I believe he was a professor at Atlanta University. And he was said to have the most comprehensive sort of Marxist library in the South at that time.

He had taught several courses on Marxism and sort of radical political economy. There's some speculation that he was actually ousted from. Atlanta University after the death of John Hope in 1944 because of his radicalism. So he was ostensibly retired for old age. Of course, he was also subsequently ousted from the NAACP, not too long later, I believe, in 1948. Again, for supporting Henry Wallace, but also for his increasing radicalization. after his ouster from the NWACP, he joins the Council on African Affairs.

And of course, it is at this time that he's in conversation with people like the Jackson. So James and Esther Cooper Jackson with Herbert Affleck and with Doxy Wilkerson, who actually bring him into the Council on African Affairs, which is a multi-tendency African advocacy organization. But by the time, the Boyce had left Abbotus, but in the CAA between Max Yergan, who was one of the founders but had become this cold warrior and then Paul Robeson so by the time

anyway short story long by the time de Bois joined the CAA it was pretty much a sort of left wing kind of Marxist radical pan-Africanist organization by that time so I think it obviously we could see the Marxist influences in black reconstruction but it's still a very much a Du Boisian take on on Marxism or even on you know, dialectical materialism. It's not until the, you know, 1961 that he actually formally

joins the Communist Party. And he does so right before relocating Tagana permanently. And so I think that he had a, but he was still part of sort of Marxist, um, adjacent or communist adjacent organizations. Like, he would give lectures,

for example, at the Jefferson School of Social Sciences. Um, he, during the 1950s, he took several trips to China and the Soviet Union. He won a litan peace prize. And so he was, he was very supportive, I think, of international socialism and international communism as a movement. But there was always some sort of ambivalence there. And in the 1930s, I think, is where we see it's one of his most kind of ambivalent decades.

Because on the one hand, he's sort of advocating for an independent, black, cooperative economy. This is most evident in the position he offers up at the Aminia conference in 19. 1933. But again, he's also studying Marxism very deeply and writing Black Reconstruction at that time. And surrounding himself with some Marxist thinkers. So at that time, most people like Ralph Bunch, again, Doxy Wilkerson, there was a kind of a group of radicals and kind of Marxist spokes at Howard at that time who were kind of helping do research not only for Black Reconstruction, but also for what Gunnar Mirdall's An American Dilemma. That was a lot of of a random, random DeBois facts about Marxism, but I think what's important is that I think

Du Boisian. I don't know that he's a Marxist. I know that he's a Pan-Africanist. He has some revolutionary black nationalist trance. He has some sort of some classical nationalist views. He certainly has some dialectical materialist methodology. He has some Marxist leanings. He does join the Communist Party. At one point, he's a member of the Socialist Party. But I think the Du Bois all of these remains somewhat of an idealist. He is never for violent revolution per se. And so that is why I would classify him more as a Du Boise in his own sort of methodology and ideology and framework

as opposed to like a classical Marxist. And I suppose this is why I referred to him in the last chapter of our De Bois book, the chapter why Du Bois Matters as a sort of black Marxist, which is basically the way that people from, from Walter Rodney to Du Bois, to even people like Claudia Jones, who was a former member of the Communist Party, but they really mailed together, like, Black Liberation and Socialism, that sort of, you know, to use Phenon's terminology, that stretches Marxism to really

have the Negro question and sort of Black liberation at its center. Yeah, absolutely. And so far as there was an influence from Shirley Graham, eventually Shirley Graham DeBois, what was that exactly, that influence? Oh, sure. Yeah. So interestingly, there's a speculation about whether or not she actually was a member of the Communist Party, but I've actually found the letter that between her and Earl Browder about bringing the boys into the Communist Party. And I believe this letter was in the late 1930s or early 1940s. They got to be the 1930s because I think Browder was ousted by like 44 or 45. But anyway, so. she certainly, and then many of the boys as sort of interlocutors, talks about how she surrounded him with communists and radicals. It really helped him in the development of a sort of more radical, even a more worker focused or a more labor focused orientation. There's some

letter in the 1950s between the boys and a Russian person whose names alludes me, alludes me where he says, you know, it wasn't until comparatively recently, but he understood. said himself as part of the working class, right? Even though he, Du Bois was never a wealthy or rich man. He was part of the black bourgeoisie in terms of his cultural capital of being a professor, etc. But he really, it really is kind of relatively late that he sees himself as a worker. This is not to say that he was never in solidarity with workers, but to understand himself as like the knowledge worker, for example, was kind of late in his development. And of course, it's in 1950 or 1951 that he actually married Shirley Graham Du Bois, but they had been having

an affair since at least in 1930s, even as he was married to his first wife. But she was a profound influence, I think, on his ideological development. Very interesting. So I'll ask one more question here, and then I'll toss it over to my co-host PM to ask a few back-to-back questions on his end. But one of the things that we're going to talk about today is, of course, De Bois's peace activism. And he wrote, I think, is one of his lesser-known books in Battle for Peace, where he weave's autobiography with his political and racial analysis at that time, depicting, you know,

his attempt to mobilize Americans against the Cold War and facing McCarthyist political backlash for that, even criminal charges and a trial in the process. Can you kind of give us an overview of this work by De Bois? And then we'll kind of get into some of the details. Yeah. So in Battle for Peace, well, it starts with DeBois talking about his time in the Council on African Affairs, which was on the heals again of his ouster from the NAACP for his radicalism, among other things, one of which was his kind of the ire at his insistence upon a petition called an appeal to the world being heard before the UN General Assembly, which was something that people like Eleanor Roosevelt and a lot of Americans really protested because they thought it penned the United

States in a bad light. So that kind of was the beginning of the end for him and the NACP. He goes on to the Council on African Affairs. And then part of what he talks about in terms of his time at the CAA really brings to bear this dialecting between like black radicalism and repression because the CAA had been, it was an organization that advocate, that was anti-colonial, anti-imperial. And that was meant to like raise the consciousness of throughout the diaspora of issues within the African continent. Obviously from a radical perspective, a man called William Althea's Hunton was really integral in that organization. And he talks about the financial difficulties that the CAA faced, not least because of the

incessant attack by the government on this organization. They were listed, for example, on the attorney general's list of subversive organizations. William L. B.S. Hutton went to jail for six months. At one point, we're not turning over a list of donors to the CAA. So he really talks about the difficulty of doing anti-colonial, anti-imperial or even black liberation work in the context of the red, the so-called second red scare, which is actually the third red scare, but whatever, in the context of McCarthyism because of state repression. And so that's how the book really opens up. Then he goes back a bit to talk about his long history

of travel and how it was those contacts with kind of foreign peoples, like from Europe, Asia, Africa, et cetera, that really developed his understanding that it's really peace and not peace as this sort of kumbaya, inactive, inert thing, but peace as really the cessation of global conflict through the fulfillment of what Adabu Baraka calls people-centered human rights, but the fulfillment of the everyday needs of ordinary people, that that was the foundation of human cooperation. And it was through his travel that he developed that understanding. There are chapters on the several peace conferences that he both attended and that he helped

convened and the really negative reception by the U.S. government of these peace conferences. So, for example, he talks about how in 1949 when he convened, helped to convene a peace conference in New York, Pablo Picasso, the world renal painter was prevented from coming because there was such deep hostility to peace activism. And it's construed by people like John Foster Dulles and Truman and the U.S. government writ large that it was a Soviet plot, right? There's a chapter about how he ran for Senate. And he ran for the Senate as part of the Progressive Party, I believe, basically to put forth his peace platform because by that time and earlier, he was.

had kind of realized and articulated that both of the parties, Democrat and Republican, were capitalist, imperialist, war-mongering parties. The chapter on the piece of information center was an organization. He helped to co-bound and actually, because of his membership of that organization, he was indicted by the government. There's chapters on the indictment trial and ultimate acquittal, as well as the national, international protest that was incited by his indictment. And the surprise, really, the U.S. government that Du Bois has so much. much support because even though the boys was a pretty prominent figure, he was just a negro to them. They really failed to grasp the deep connections he had made through his

internationalism. And in fact, it was that, you know, his internationalism and those connections that made him dangerous and that that sort of continued his blacklisting until he left the United States in 1961. The other interesting thing I'll say about in Battle for Peace is that it's interspersed the commentary from Shirley Ground DeBois. So again, there's a test to, you know, by this time when it's published in 1952, she really is his life partner. Elsewhere I write about this concept of mutual comradeship, but they really were comrade as well as romantic partners.

And her commentary helps to sort of not only give her perspective, but to also fill in some details about sort of how she fit into this whole operation and how his personal life sort of was affected by, by his political work and this political repression. But also that she's kind of there in lockstep with him. For example, when they go on this national tour to raise money for his defense, she's also giving speeches. She's also being targeted by the government.

She also was having trouble with employment because of state repression. And so it's a really interesting text in that regard as well. That's great. Thank you so much. So in your article in Battle for Peace, stoundrel time, you write that radical black peace activism is, quote, a fundamental but often forgotten feature the modern black liberation movement, end quote. What is the tradition of radical black peace activism as you understand it? And what is it significant? So radical black peace activism is essentially a sort of small but significant group of black folks. I focus on the sort of

post-World War I and Cold War period, but it really extends much and further back than that. But of these people who understood that war was inevitable as long as capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism prevailed, and that the key to sort of global human cooperation was not the United States as the world police. It was certainly not the eradication of the Soviet Union or the socialist block, but rather was the fulfillment of just the basic needs of ordinary people and not only the fulfillment, but the fulfillment through the empowerment of ordinary workers. They also understood that peace does not mean, again, peace is not the absence of conflict, and that wars of independence or self-defensive violence is actually in the service of

piece that really the drive toward for example world war three which was a huge concern during the cold war was a product of the nuclearization of the world specifically you know with the united states as as the lead as the sort of main arm of of pushing nuclear war um the inability of the majority of the world the racialized world to to determine it's the way it wanted to organized as politics and economy, continued environmental degradation, and the enslavement or virtual enslavement of the majority of the world to the end of accumulation for a very, very tiny percentage of people. And so in the radical black people tradition, the conditions of black people in the United States and the Caribbean and in Africa are at the center of that

analysis to really illuminate the dynamics of the globe writ large. And so, for example, there's an organization called the Sojournish for Truth and Justice who talk about how their sons and fathers are drafted into the Korean War. They're drafted into a war against other racialized people when black people don't even have basic rights at home. And so the other thing that radical black peace activism does is it makes connection. between, for example, Jim Crow and the Korean War and ongoing attacks on labor. So this wartime ethos also legitimates repression.

It legitimates the rollback of workers' rights. It pushes women, for example, out of industry, back into the home. So Patti Jones writes about this. And so radical black peace activism is really about how peace is, the center of any notion of human flourishing that as long as war and war mongering and militarism are at the center of international relations, then all we get is death, destruction, and ecological devastation. Thank you so much. And you focus on how we can understand the very idea of peace as not merely the absence of conflict, absence of conflict, but

as something that's inconsistent with oppression. So I want to jump ahead a little bit. So there's an interesting text in dark water called The Hands of Ethiopia, where Du Bois argues for politics of what he calls real pacifism, which is the commitment to a world organized for peace along anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-columial lines. And this isn't pacifistic in the traditional sense, in like the Gandhian or MLK type sense.

because importantly, this conception of real pacifism is consistent with armed struggle. He writes, I quote, if the attitude of the European and American world is in the future going to be based upon the same, essentially the same policies as in the past, then there is but one thing for the trained demand of darker blood to do, and that is as definitely and as openly as possible to organize this world for war against Europe. What can you learn today from Du Bois's politics of real pacifism? Yeah, I mean, I think that,

that it sort of lives to what I was speaking about earlier, that war in defense of people's sovereignty and self-determination cannot be conflated with wars of aggression. And this includes sort of soft war tactics like sanctions, like embargoes, like something that's now called irregular warfare, like NED, like coups, etc., etc. That, black people, third world people, colonized people and racialized people defending, have a responsibility

or historical task to defend themselves against Euro-American domination because it is that domination that is, for example, the primary polluter of the world. It is the primary source of destabilization of super exploitation and of oppression. And so

any peace that accommodates these relations of domination is not real peace, right? It's simply mollification. And so there's a quote actually from in Battle for Peace that I want to read that sort of sums up this connection between war and anti-communism and colonialism. So Du Bois writes, let us not be misled. The real cause of the differences which threaten world war is not the spread of socialism or even the complete socialism which communism envisages. Socialism is spreading all over the world and even in the United States. Against the spread of socialism, one modern institution is working desperately, and that is colonialism. And colonialism has been and is and ever will be one of the chief causes of war.

Leading this new colonial imperialism comes my own native land, built by my father's toil and blood, the United States. The United States is a great nation, rich by grace of God, and prosperous by the hard work of its humblest citizens. Drunk with power, we are leading the world to hell and a new colonialism with the same old human slavery which once ruined us, into a third world war which will ruin the world, end quote. So here again, we see that for Du Bois,

the source of sort of war in the incalculable human, ecological and social devastation that it causes is colonialism, is the domination of particular groups of peoples by another, generally to the end of accumulation. And so this is why the solution is not, the solution to war is not to, you know, do nothing. It's not to eschew or to to condemn the violence of the oppressed or self-defensive violence, but rather to organize in support of those who are trying to throw off the yoke of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, et cetera, because ultimately that is a condition by which true peace will be realized. That's great. And I really think the attention to true peace is something that the left needs to

contend with. So in your article, you explain how radical black peace activism was viewed by the United States as a national security threat. And this is interesting because, I mean, for many reasons, but one of them is that the U.S. likes to pride itself on being peaceful, which while, you know, destroying the world. So on the one hand, to what degree be was this imagined or fabricated Cold War hysteria? And on the other hand, how might radical black peace activism pose a real, tangible threat to militaristic U.S. domestic and foreign policy? So I do think that peace is a threat to the United States, which is really, you know, as they say, like three corporations stacked up in a trench coat. And the strongest of those corporations being like the defense industry, right?

and we see this happening right now in real time with a conflict in Ukraine. We also see this through the fact of entities like Afriqom or the Africa Command, the South Command, the Indo-Pacific Command, and what's happening in Niger currently where the United States is using ECOWAS as its puppet to possibly invade Niger because the U.S. has three strategic bases there,

one CIA base into africom bases and also nigerza is one of the key producers for places like france of uranium which is a key wormongering mineral and so um so peace activism radical black peace activism which also entails the sort of organization of the masses of people the means of international relations. It does threaten the United States who likes to position itself as the world's police, who likes the position itself as the arbiter of democracy, safety, and security globally. We know that it is the United States that has been behind virtually every major coup that has happened within the last, you know, 60 or 70 years. It is the United States that the only country in the world that has dropped an atomic bomb

is the United States. It is the United States who just sent pluster munitions to Ukraine to the horror of most countries throughout the world where these munitions are banned. And so it is the United States

who pulls this sort of this okey-doke, if you will, whereby they consider themselves to be protectors of peace when that peace is really again,

malification is enforced submission through techniques of starbation, directs domination, invasion, and extraordinary violence,

again, to the end of accumulation and not even accumulation for a large swath of people. It's a shrinking subset of people who actually benefit

from war. So in that way, peace activism is a threat. But, But on the other hand, the way that the threat is constructed is not, of course, the United States saying, actually, we are the monsters. And therefore, the monster slayers are dangerous. What they're saying is, well, at this particular historical moment, like during the Cold War, they're saying peace is the machinations of the Soviet Union. That it's not that the Soviet Union wants. Peace. What the Soviet Union wants is to weaken the United States and by extension democracy and the free market. They're saying, that, you know, people who advocate peace are stooges where are agents of Moscow, or of China, for example, that these are subversives. They are engaging in sedition. And so that's the sort of lie of it all. That's the, that is how peace activism, even though it is, peace is really popular.

Peace is a deeply popular concept among the majority of people because who wants to be displaced? Who wants to be starved out? Who wants to have their life significantly disrupted? Who wants to be murdered or have their family members murdered? Pretty much no one, right? But because of state repression in the propaganda machine, peace is made to be seen as something sinister, as something anomalous, as something that is aberrant to the United States.

In fact, I'm going to read another quote that comes. from the Peace Information Center after its members were indicted. What they say is that for the information of the public, the facts concerning the indictment of the officials of the Peace Information Center should be clarified. These five persons are not accused of treason or conspiracy against the United States. The government admits that the activities of this organization and advocating peace circulating petitions on the atom bomb were legal exercises of citizens' rights. The Department of Justice has indicted them not for these acts,

but for refusing to declare that in its activities, the center was acting as an agent of a foreign person or foreign organization. This, the accused Vietnamese, they declare that in their work for peace through the center, they were acting as Americans for America and that their work was supported by funds raised solely of the United States. And they go on to say that basically by construing their work as foreign-inspired, the United States is saying that the very concept of peace is anathema to its existence, right?

And so this is what we're up against even now. For example, the African People Socialist Party was indicted last year, ostensibly for being an agent of Moscow, for a number of reasons, one of which was speaking out against the war in Ukraine. Another was who were circulating another genocide petition, something that DeVos has signed on to a 1951, the original genocide petition. So again, we're seeing these scare tactics. Oh, we also saw recently in the New York Times, the People's Forum, the Tri-Continental, and Pola Pink were accused of being sort of funded by China because of their anti-war work. So again, there's this miscontrol of peace as something that is dangerous and that is sort of sinister because of, because the United States is basically a military and a real estate speculation corporation disguised as attention. That's great. Yeah. So this reminds us the importance of anti-imperialist anti-war organizing efforts.

you distinguish between the sort of conception of peace coming from empire where what they call peace really amounts to domination and that is distinguished from a radical and substantive peace which is true peace as you articulate it. I'm wondering if you could speak to the importance of anti-imperial, anti-war organizing, and, I mean, you talk about the sort of legacy of this Cold War hysteria in terms of, you know, peace, the Soviet Union trying to fight for peace is viewed as like a communist plot, which is ridiculous, quite frankly. So could you speak to the kind of anti-imperialist, anti-war organizing we're seen today? What of that might be fruitful and what sort of horizons we might look to?

Yeah, I think that, as Cheryl Horn would say, our friends on the left in the United States have two, maybe three key problems. one is a historicism or a complete lack of historical perspective. The second is a complete misunderstanding of an international situation that leads to this sort of equivocation of U.S. imperialism with other so-called imperialisms that completely distort what the primary contradictions are. And I think the third is a sort of race problem. and an inability to contend with settler colonialism. And so I think that can lead to particular distortions

in how war is understood and lead to what I would call asinine proclamations like patriotic socialism. The fact of the matter is the war machine, again, is the biggest aggressor in the world. It is the biggest polluter in the world. It is the source of destabilization and of the hoarding of wealth and resources so that really our life chances

continue to be diminished as long as, for example, the United States has 800 military bases throughout the world. So at anti-imperialist, anti-war position, or anti-imperialist peace position would say that we have to overthrow imperialism in order for peace to be fully realized in that, again, peace is not about these sort of paper agreements that are made, just as sort of combating climate change is not about these hollow promises that these governments make or these pledges that these government makes as they continue

to pollute the world through both their domestic and foreign policy. And so I think that anti-imperialist, an anti-imperialist anti-war position has to contend primarily with the United States as the problem. And we don't have to be mannequian whereby we say U.S. bad, therefore X, Y, Z is good. But I think we do have to understand, again, what the primary contradiction is. and who is the source of, the primary source of oppression throughout the world. And as long as we continue to try to sort of absolve the United States of its role in sort of global conflict, I think we'll never have a real anti-war movement.

I think the other thing that gets really difficult is so recently there was a large anti-war protest that happened, I believe in D.C. that accommodated, that was said to be a success because it was supposed to bring together like the left and the right, because both are ostensibly anti-war. But I think that what else, what radical black peace activism and what Du Bois teaches us is that racism and racism or racial, what we call racial capitalism and imperialism are bound up together with war. And so we also have to combat sort of the way, you know, we can't make equivocations or we can't accommodate, just as we can't accommodate imperialism.

We also can't accommodate fascist tendencies in our attempts to organize, right? to organize against war. And so I think that all of these things are really, really important. And that's something that we have to really figure out is what are the social relations we need to engender to be able to build up an authentic, internationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-war position. Yeah, I think that's incredibly crucial to keep in mind. And I also completely agree with your points about these chauvinist elements trying to masquerade as different strains of socialism, patriotic, socialism, maga-communism, these attempts to do left-right collaboration.

You know, when some people on the right don't even believe in the basic humanity of various workers based on their identity and you want to unite with them because they happen to have a similar idea about war in the abstract, you're setting yourself up for not only failure, but a lot of negative things to be happening within those organizing circles insofar as they take off. And of course, as Marxist, we understand that if we want something in the world, we have to address the material foundations of that thing. So like, you know, Marxist will often debate anarchist on the question of the state, you know, just on the lines of understanding how the state arose historically

and saying if you want to get rid of the state, you have to take away its material foundation in private property, among other things. And in a similar way, if you want real lasting peace, you have to address the material foundations of war and imperialism, which is ultimately colonialist, imperialist capitalism. And so to try to pretend that you can be a pacifist or that we can achieve peace within the realm, within the confines of capitalism, imperialism, I think is an idealist fantasy and ultimately an error. You did mention Africom, and I think it's really important. And I don't think a lot of people on the North American Socialist Left are as caught up on the imperialism in Africa as they necessarily should be, modern day, present, ongoing imperialism. So for those interested, we have an episode on Rev. Left called Against Africom with members of the Black Alliance for Peace, talking about U.S. imperialism in Africa. And over on guerrilla history, we also have on, we had on Takaya Harper Shipman to talk about Afriam and China's, you know, China's actions in Africa.

and kind of correcting the record on some of the sensationalist stuff that gets said about China in Africa. But this all leads to this question that I kind of want to ask outside of the outline and just your general thoughts. I know you've done work on this, ongoing work on this, which is the connections between anti-communism and anti-blackness and how they're often marshaled together. Of course, Martin Luther King Jr. was called a communist in an attempt to, you know, delegitimize him and his work. I'm sure Du Bois faced many accusations and slanders and smears. Can you kind of talk about the history there in the U.S. about how wedded anti-communism and anti-blackness have sort of been historically? Sure.

And for me, this sort of connection is what makes the conceptual framework of racial capitalism useful. I know there's a lot of debate about that. But if you have a society that is fundamentally predicated on racial, objection, primarily indigenous dispossession on the one hand and African enslavement, on the other hand. So if that's one foundation and the other foundation is private property and the concentration of wealth in the hands of very few, then the people that you are going to historically target as enemies are those who are for black liberation, right? And those who are for, who are anti-capitalist, but anti-capitalist to the end of a

competing, a viable competing political economic system, i.e. socialism and communism. And these have historically been thought together in a number of ways. One example that I always give is in the 19th, excuse me, in the 1930s, there was something called the Fish Committee. And it was a sort of precursor to Hewock. And one of the questions that they would asked people to determine if they were communists is if they had ever had black people in their home and if they believed in Negro equality. And so what that says is number one, it is the communists who, even though there are many contradictions, it's the communists who are at the forefront of a sort of promoting and trying to model interracial organizing and interracial

equality. So they are the really progenitors of affirmative action, if you will. With that also says is that what is considered to be true Americanism and what is considered to be par for the status quo is the subjection of black people. And if you think and if you believe in black equality, then you must be part of this sort of foreign, this foreign inspired subversion that communism comes to be known as. It's not reducible to communism. The industrial workers of the world, for example, were targeted in the early 1900s. And in fact, some of the earliest anti-sidicalism laws were targeting the IWW because it was from its inception an interracial organization. It had a comparatively small number of black people because at that time there weren't a lot of black people who belonged to the trades that constituted the industrial workers of the world.

But nonetheless, part of the reason that they were targeted was because they at least set out to model and set out to promote interracial organizing. So if it is that your belief in black equality can mark you as a communist, and also if it is that communist belief in sort of interracial solidarity as well as black liberation, then these two things are understood together, and they're considered to be sort of mutually constitutive threats. Yeah, and that's interesting because I'm sorry, PM, really quick, is just that this connection, like reactionaries in the U.S. history have always, you know, sort of. tied these two things together, sort of slandering one side or the other. But what they really do

are sort of telling on themselves, showing how much their anti-blackness is sort of synonymous with their defense of capitalism. So tying anti-capitalist politics and black liberation or any attempt for black equality together, on one hand, is this rhetorical attempt to try to undermine both. But on the other hand, it really does show where they're coming from. And it sort of reveals something that they're actually not trying to admit, which is that anti-blackness goes hand in hand with capitalism, with racialized capitalism. It depends on racializing some people outside of the sphere of who is considered fully human. So every time that they advance this sort of anti-communist and anti-blackness smear together, they're at the same exact time, really telling on themselves,

which I think is interesting. Right. Just something to add quickly is that, for example, when we see the rollback of the sort of the most egregious aspects of Jim Crow, for example, at the passage of Brown v. Board of Education, we see anti-communism really ramp up. And anti-communism becomes the means by which you get at anti-blackness when some of the more egregious forms of anti-black racial oppression kind of fall out of favor. They're still there to be sure. But we see anti-communism as the way to discipline out those who are working for radical structural transformation, which includes sort of racial justice as well as economic justice. So, and we, you know, we see, we see the suturing today. We see this sort of attack

on so-called cultural Marxism, concomitant with the attack on so-called wokeism and the attack on black studies, the attack on teaching black history as well as, you know, the attack on LGBTQ plus, which is also considerative of both red scares, really. And so, and then, of course, we saw in Florida, you know, whatever, whoever the man was, was a Rick Scott or something coming out and telling socialists, you know, socialists are not safe here, et cetera. And so in this time that we see increased, we're seeing increasing racial polarization, we also see an increased attack on socialism and communism, not to mention the actual material attacks on places like Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua.

And you can say what you will about whether these are really socialist places, et cetera, et cetera, China as well. But we do know is that that's the rhetoric that is being employed to delegitimize these countries. Absolutely. Well, we're really looking forward to your upcoming book,

Black Scare, Red Scare. It's going to come out in November 2023. So I have one final question. Then I'll pass it over to Brewer. at. In color and democracy, Du Bois talks about the relation between peace and the colonies. That's another neglected text. So I'm interested in what you think or what you take to be the relation between Du Bois's support for political movements like communism and Pan-Africanism and his radical black peace activism. Yeah, they're really, I think, interrelated. not least again because, for example, part of the way that the United States, on the one hand, works to preserve colonialism and then at a certain turning point advocated decolonization was through anti-communism, which meant that the United States could only accommodate a very particular form of decolonization, that is to say, one that embraced a U.S.-led market-centered economy. And so, you know, the boys' work against colonialism and imperialism,

and especially as it relates to the African continent, was very much attuned to how the Soviet Union was used as a bludgeon to African self-determination. That is to say that, you know, countries were attacked or destabilized or their decolonization that was attempted to be delayed or the U.S. came in and immediately try to impose corporate rule ostensibly to stave off the Soviet Union, but the actual effects were the disciplining and punishment of African populations.

And so we really see how, on the one hand, right, One of that one aspect of colonialism is accumulation. So according to Ross-Rondney, colonialism is the sort of political administration of imperialism. Imperialism is a project of sort of accumulation and of market capture. So that's the role of colonialism, which means that something like communism or socialism, or even non-alignment is absolutely anathema to that. And then on the other hand, we see how the quest for, decognization and self-determination is undermined, both rhetorically, but also in terms of foreign

policy by the ostensible threat of the USSR. That threat, of course, being a road to independent development. And we're seeing it today, of course, with this rhetoric about Russia and China, which is why we're seeing in places like Molly and Niger and Burkina Faso, African populations waving a Russian flag because Russia represents a sort of antidote or a challenge to a particular form of Western Euro-American neo-colonialism and imperialism that has been the primary source of suffering for African populations. Now, you know, that's something that needs to sort of be interrogated. But it is a sort of continuation of the ways that challenge to U.S. or Euro-American

imperialism and neo-colonialism is generally welcomed in places that have historically been underdeveloped and rendered dependent by those entities. Yeah, very important stuff. I did want to mention one thing a question ago. You were talking about Florida and we're talking about how these various forms of bigotry are also tied up with anti-communism. So in Florida, you know,

know, there's like the banning of what they call CRT, but basically anything that covers black history from a sympathetic perspective. There's the attack, full frontal attack on LGBTQ people in their very existence and any books that even mention the fact that LGBT people are real and exist and can be parents and deserve, you know, basic dignity and respect. And at the same time, not only did you have, I believe you're right, it was Rick Scott coming out and saying communists don't come here, but also I think Desantis is Florida in general has given the green light to teach explicitly in their public schools that communism is an evil ideology that must be combated. So, you know, I think all of these things going

together is by no means a coincidence. And ultimately, I think communists believe in human equality. We believe that all human beings are deserving of dignity and respect and basic, you know, equality before the law, before the economy, before anything else. And capitalism and its defenders simply do not. So as they attack marginalized identities and vulnerable groups, they also have to attack the overarching ideology, which is constantly asserting the basic equality of human beings. And so these things, of course, are always going together. But at the same time, we want to be very respectful of your time. So I just have a question or two left. And one of the ways to wrap up this discussion on Du Bois, before we talk briefly about the Black Alliance for Peace,

which I think is a crucial organization in the United States. States. But to wrap up the De Bois conversation, I wanted to kind of reflect on what we can learn from him today. So ultimately, what can revolutionaries today learn from Du Bois in general, but specifically learn from his peace and human rights work? I think that what's interesting about Du Bois and important is that he represents an opposite trend to what we commonly see. That is to say, he became more radical over time as opposed to more conservative. Often we see, you know, And it's part of our common sense that as you age, you're going to get more conservative that, you know, radicalism is a young man's game. And I think that the boys really defies that in important ways that, you know, black liberation and socialism or any type of sort of human democracy. It is a, it's a long distance. It's a long distance game. It's something that we have to constantly, you know, they say freedom is a constant struggle. It's something that we have to. work at and it's hard. I think the other thing about Du Bois is that he always belongs to an

organization. He was either building organizations or founding organizations or joining organizations. And that's important, especially in our historical moment where there's a lot of pushback, especially from some of our friends on the left, at least they understand themselves to be on the left, against organizations. For some reasons that are valid, right, because of a lot of the social dynamics that can be reproduced within organizations. But, you know, as I've said several times, we live in a racist, capitalist, secular colonial society. Those contradictions are going to be present in our organizations and any

organizations that don't have those are probably CIA threats. And so part of what Du Bois conveys is that this has to be a collective fight, It has to be a collective struggle. And we need to struggle in principle of ways within our organizations because they're not perfect. They're made up of humans, right? But that we have to have real political objectives rooted in clear ideology in order to make any sort of progress toward peace, you know, as conceived by Du Bois and others in the radical black peace tradition. So I think that's important. I think Du Bois wasn't afraid to change his mind to be wrong.

And that is important because I think so much of the time what parades as organizing or activism is really an attempt to demonstrate mastery that you've read Marx the closest or you know all the right things to say. When really that is not that important, I do think language is important. I do think political education and study are important. but part of, we have to have a sort of, you know, epistemic openness within reason, right? It's not to say we're going to accommodate liberalism. We need to combat liberalism. But, like, you know, we have to, part of what ideology is meant to do is to guide us. It's not meant to sort of render us an nerve and for us to sort of stay, to become inactive because of the ideology. So all of that to say, I think that the voice, he changed his mind a lot. He's often accused. of being hypocritical or contradictory. But that's because he's trying to resolve things in real time. And that is actually our historical task to try to resolve all these issues and problems, whatever our tools are, whether we're intellectuals or organizers, activists, artists, whatever.

But our historical task is to resolve these things in real time or to attempt to do so collectively. I think that finally the boys was an internationalist always from his earliest days from his first visits to Germany in the 1890s he was always

an internationalist he always was striving to understand the international situation to cultivate international connections and to relate back to what was happening in the United States and to enact change on a sort of international scale. And that's something that as a result, for example, of U.S. state repression, that's something that's sort of been disciplined out of our politics.

But it is something that is crucially important because the capitalists are internationalists. They don't respect boundaries or borders, but somehow we're supposed to, and we become very myopic and very sort of stunted in our analysis if we don't understand the international situation. I think that those are all broad lessons that we can take from Du Bois. Beautifully said, yeah. So just to recap and summarize, De Bois maintained and even extended his radicalism with age. I think that's so crucial for many reasons.

Obviously, as people age, at least in previous periods of American history, they can often get more comfortable. They can become homeowners. You know, they can be more invested in the status quo that then benefits them. But to maintain a radicalism and even expand it as you go deeper in age by learning more and never stop learning. never stop caring about other human beings, I think that's so essential. And then what happens is that those elders become mentors for the next generation. They keep the fire alive. They tend the flame of revolution for the next generation. And whether we're talking intellectually or organizationally can sort of hand down knowledge that has already been a hard one so that the younger generations

don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they burst onto the scene. And one of the concerted efforts of anti-communism in the mid-20th century in the United States was precisely to destroy radicals to either co-opt them into the bourgeois institutions and therefore neuter them or to eradicate them and then push comes to shove assassinate them so the more mentors and elders we have the better and that's beautiful the second thing was organization of course we have numbers is our only advantage but those numbers don't mean shit if they're not organized properly And as you said, Dr. CBS, the capitalist class is highly organized and international and very class conscious. We should be as well.

Humility and eagolessness, absolutely essential. No one person knows everything. Marxism is fundamentally a communal philosophy. We construct knowledge and we make change communally. Anybody pretending to have all the knowledge that anybody needs to know and to be the sole dispenser of Marxism should be looked at with extreme skepticism. and, of course, finally, internationalism. Those are great, great lessons that everybody listening should really internalize and take to heart. So for the final question, I'm going to sort of weave two together, which is you are a prominent member of the Black Alliance for Peace, an organization I've, you know, platformed on Rev. Left, on guerrilla history, big fan of.

Can you tell us a little bit more about Black Alliance for Peace? And then when you're done with that, just let listeners know where they can find you and your work online. Yes. I encourage everybody to visit Black Alliance for Peace.com and to follow BAP as we are known on social media. So it's Black Alliance for Peace on Instagram and Blacks or the number four and then peace on Twitter. It is a anti-Aperialist pen African organization that was founded to bring back the modern day anti-war or anti-war. anti-imperialist, anti-war movement. We are one of the first organizations and most persistent organizations to really shed light on Afriacom, to shed light on Haiti. So our Haiti-America's team, for example, does a lot of work around what's happening in Haiti and the current neo-colonial imperialist, excuse me, occupation of Haiti that has been ongoing

throughout the 20th and 21st century. but that recently took off on sort of new intensity after the, well, there was some labor strikes, but then there was the assassination of Joveno Mouis that has led to a new round of occupation and a new call for invasion of Pady, the art organization, people like Jamima Pierre and Erica Keynes and Austin Cole have really been central to shedding light on the situation in Haiti in the role of the core group and the organization of African States, for example, in that occupation. And to point out that people's radicalism really stops at the shores of Haiti, that whereas we can be critical about how the media covers

all these other places when it comes to Haiti, we tend to believe all of the things that are said about it and to advocate for its occupation. We put out numerous statements, statement against the, for example, the Renasir Act that was enacted against Nicaragua, statements about aggression against Haiti. We just are most recently put out a statement condemning ECOWAS for its potential invasion of Niger as a puppet of the United States. And so we put out a lot of statements. We have a lot of great analysis. And it's analysis that is principled and anti-imperial, which is not always popular, right? So the position, for example, that we put out about the conflict in Ethiopia, for example, got a lot of

pushback in various ways. But we keep anti-imperialism front and center. We don't advocate for individuals. We advocate for movements and people. And our most recent campaign is a zone of peace campaign, which is trying to build a people-centered ground up popular movement to sort of consolidate the C-LAC in 2014. They called for it to make America, the America, excuse me, the region of the America's zone of peace. And so a lot of work has been done on that. Yeah.

So we, you know, we've done work around the 1033 program in the United States. which is the program that allows the federal government to arm and militarize state and local police forces and connecting the 1033 programs to Afrika, as well as to the deadly exchange program between the United States and Israel. So Bab does a lot of political education work, a lot of propaganda work. And because we are in a work of ideas currently, I think that work is very, very vital, as well as a lot of the organizing that's done on the ground, for example, by BAP organizations around Stop Cop City. There was a few years ago around Operation Relateless Pursuit in Baltimore. So there's just a lot of work that BAP does, but I think that BAP's role

in the war of ideas is absolutely crucial. So yeah, I definitely encourage people to check it out Thank you so much. This was really helpful. I just wanted to give a quick shout out to the Bab Solidarity Network as well. So I recently joined this. It is for non-black people who want to get involved and help support the work of that. So you can check that out on the website. And then also... Oh, yeah. Just to add to that. So, yes, Solidarity Network, absolutely crucial. Shout out to them for the Afghanistan work that they do, the Afghanistan newsletter that they put out one of the only organizations. focused on the ongoing issues in Afghanistan after the U.S. pullout and even sort of leading up to those dynamics. And so that's a really, really important newsletter among the many things that the Solidarity Network does. So shout out to y'all. Yeah, thank you so much. And thank you again for a wonderful episode centering Du Bois's radical black peace activism. It's something that we really need to learn from, especially in this new, heating up new Cold War. We're seeing with China, which, I mean, in certain ways, isn't really new, but is heating up anyway.

So thank you again, Dr. CBS. It was wonderful being in conversation with you, and we will certainly link to the Black Alliance for Peace in the show notes. Bad is fucking dreaming of scenarios But Saratona laughed at us Still aside with the hybrid Baby couldn't pass it up Coochie cutters in the concert

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