Du Bois and Marx, Du Bois and Marxism

Abstract

W. E. B. Du Bois’s engagement with the thought of Karl Marx forms an important aspect of his intellectual biography, yet its contours crystallize explicitly only late in his written work, and its development prior to the 1930s remains insufficiently understood. In order to bring to light the mix of criticisms, reservations, ideals, and inspirations that shape this reception, this article explores its trajectory as exhaustively as the available documentation permits, beginning from Du Bois’s early training in economics as a university student, continuing through his increasing attention to socialism in the early 1900s and his embrace of Soviet communism in the 1920s, and culminating in the 1930s in his teaching of Marx at Atlanta University and the overtly Marxian positions he adopts in Black Reconstruction (1935).

In the Shadow of World War

“…Arguably the most controversial aspect of Black Reconstruction is Du Bois’s Marxist framework and class analysis. Prior to the World War, Du Bois had a guarded relationship with Marxism, viewing it as too theoretically abstract for his tastes and politically inapplicable to the unique conditions of the “race problem” in America (Saman 2020). Historical developments created by the war, most notably the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the founding of the Communist International in 1919, the mass migration and proletarianization of southern African Americans and West Indians to the urban North, the development of the Communist Party USA, and the role of prominent Black communists like Claude McKay in shaping discussion around the “Negro Question,” forced Du Bois to take Marxism more seriously 13 .…”