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Speech The Sage of Imperialism: At 90, Harry Magdoff has Made His Marx by Susan Green » About RECENT ESSAYS ON: BACK ISSUES: April 2003 March 2003 February
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November 2003, Volume 55 — Number 6 c o n t
e n t s In this number we are celebrating the
hundredth anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black
Folkby devoting a special issue to race and imperialism. MR is proud
to have had a connection with Du Bois. Fifty years ago he wrote his famous
article “Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the United States”
for MR(April 1953; reprinted in the magazine last April). In addition,
Monthly Review Press is the publisher of Du Bois’ Education of Black People: Ten Critiques,
1906–1960, edited by Herbert Aptheker. This was a book that
Du Bois had planned, based originally on seven critiques of education that he
had delivered as speeches over the years. But his attempts in the 1940s to get
it published proved futile. One publisher after another turned down the
work—no doubt scared off by the very same ruthless critique that made his
work so valuable. Yet, Du Bois never gave up hope of bringing out this book and
it was found among his papers after his death in 1963. The published version,
which was announced in the MR Press catalog in 1973 and has remained in print
ever since (a new edition with a new foreword by Aptheker was brought out in
2001), included the original seven critiques and the short introductions that
Du Bois had written for each of them for the book. It also contained three
critiques of education that he had written in subsequent years. Everyone
interested in the effects of race and class exploitation on higher learning in
the United States would gain from a careful study of this profoundly
humanistic, often lyrical, and fundamentally subversive work. In his 1908
lecture, “Galileo Galilei,” included in The
Education of Black People, Du Bois wrote: “The greatest gift that
a scholar can bring to Learning is Reverence of Truth, a Hatred of Hypocrisy
and Sham, and an absolute sincerity of purpose.” There is no doubt that Du
Bois exemplified this principle throughout his entire life. REVIEW
OF THE MONTH We are living in a period in which the rhetoric of empire knows few bounds. In a special report on “America and Empire” in August, the London-based Economist magazine asked whether the United States would, in the event of “regime changes...effected peacefully” in Iran and Syria, “really be prepared to shoulder the white man’s burden across the Middle East?” The answer it gave was that this was “unlikely”—the U.S. commitment to empire did not go so far. What is significant, however, is that the question was asked at all. Africa:
Imperialism Goes Naked The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from its home, where it assumes respectable form, to the colonies, where it goes naked (Karl Marx, "The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune, January 22, 1853). Marx's statement is telling and relevant. Capitalism has always acted as a global system, working across or between nation states. The ever-present imperative to produce profit has pushed capital from its historic heartlands in northern Europe to all societies. But as Marx implies, the process of expansion has not been a homogenizing one: the bourgeoisie has double standards, or perhaps multiple standards, as it negotiates its presence in a wide variety of locations. The standards that most would define as minimally acceptable (social democracy) have been a product of specific historical and material conditions: a result of the emergence of institutionally robust and interventionist states and the political demands of working classes. But, these historical conditions are part of the same conditions that produced very different states and economies in sub-Saharan Africa: the colonial states arising from the scramble for colonies of the late 1880s are themselves part of the same capitalism which produced the bourgeois civilization that Marx ironically attributes to late Victorian England. The hypocrisy is that civilization in Europe, plus plunder, primitive accumulation, and famine in the colonial world were part of the same overarching liberal ideals. Martí, Race, and Cuban
Identity I have to confess to an instinctive skepticism toward a certain construct of race relations in Cuba, which makes the Cuban Revolution the ultimate healer of a serious case of separation, racism, and discrimination. Born and raised in a small town in the northeastern part of Cuba, where blacks were a minority, I still look with wonder at relations between the races in my childhood and early teens. When the United States Army was trying to restore order in Little Rock, Arkansas, after the attempt to desegregate public schools, and while blacks were boycotting the segregated buses in Birmingham, Alabama, the children of Mir, my hometown, black and white, were playing softball together in a field where cattle kept the grass short; or were sitting next to each other in the rundown and only public school; or were attending church services at the same local Methodist church, with no segregated pews. Du Bois vs.
Neoliberalism What is today viewed as globalization is not in fact a new phenomenon as the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois attests. Dr. Du Bois understood the impacts of what today we call neoliberalism, its damages, its causes, the interests it serves, and the way it divides the working class and undercuts the progressive movements with horrible consequences at home and abroad. These remain our themes today, though we would add "and women" in brackets where Dr. Du Bois wrote only "men," and we would include ethnicity and religion as part of the discussion of the color line. R E P
R I S E The Blue Heron Press Jubilee edition of The Souls of Black Folk appeared in 1953. In 1949 Du Bois had purchased the plates to the book, which was then out of print. At that time, during the anticommunist hysteria, it was extremely difficult to keep in print or to publish works that raised fundamental questions about U.S. society. In 1952, best-selling novelist Howard Fast had his latest novel Spartacus turned down by his usual publisher and by every other he turned to-presumably, because of his association with the Communist Party as well as the incendiary nature of his novel, which was about a revolt against slavery, albeit in antiquity. Fast's only choice was to publish the book himself. Devising his own imprint, Blue Heron Press, he solicited orders by direct mail and finally had enough so that he could print 50,000 copies. This self-published book became a best-seller, and with the proceeds Fast reissued a number of his earlier historical novels. The Souls of White Folk "The Souls of White Folk," as it appeared in Du Bois' Darkwater (1920) and is reprinted here, was based on an essay in the Independent, August 18, 1910, together with part of a another essay, "Of the Culture of White Folk," Journal of Race Development, April 1917. The final version in Darkwater was reworked numerous times up to its final publication in 1920. C O M M
U N I Q U É S The following statement was one of several broadcast by the Zapatista liberation movement to coincide with a massive demonstration on September 11, in Cancun, Mexico-where the World Trade Organization (WTO) was having its annual meeting. The demonstrators, led by Korean farmers, one of whom committed suicide, were protesting the economic policies of rich western countries that have caused the ever-accelerating impoverishment of billions worldwide. The focus for these farmers and others from around the world was on the agricultural subsidies granted to the agribusiness corporations of the rich countries by their governments, allowing them to export crops at lower prices than farmers in the poor countries can match.
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