First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: WEB Du Bois, Left-Wing Radicalism, and the Problem of Interracial Labor Unionism

Abstract

This article identifies and systemically analyzes a “core assumption” of WEB Du Bois’s social and political thought: the assumption that class-based, interracial cooperation among white and Black workers is extremely unlikely, if not totally impossible. It is argued that this assumption undergirds and informs most of Du Bois’s mature scholarship, serving as the theoretical grounding for his condemnation of the large-scale attempts to organize workers interracially on the basis of class, and explaining his uneven personal relationship with the Communist Party USA. Further, it is argued that this assumption leads Du Bois to attribute a methodologically untenable transhistoric logic to white working-class behavior, which has been adopted largely uncritically by contemporary analysts of white supremacy in the USA. The untenability of this Du Boisian logic is illustrated through historical analysis of interracial labor unionism, emphasizing the instances of interracial organization that Du Bois specifically denounced.