While “abolition” politics has become the trend among armchair intellectuals in the academic community, some PLP members working in the Marxist Literary Group this past year have engaged the political writings of two preeminent Marxist philosophers, Karl Marx and W.E.B.DuBois, alongside academic workers who can potentially join our party.  Struggling over the main political contributions put forward in Marx’s Capital, Vol. I (1867) and Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935), our comrades in the MLG underscore Marx’s concept of “human labor pure and simple,” as a foundation for emphasizing PLP’s call for egalitarian communism.  PLP demonstrates how this concept was absorbed by Du Bois and became the foundation of his new theory of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era in the US; namely, that it was an uprising of Black “human labor pure and simple” that radically challenged “the dictatorship of property” in the slaveholding Confederacy.  These ideas reinforce our current recognition that black workers are key to communist revolution at this moment in history.   

Lesson #1: Black Workers Were the Greatest Abolitionists of the Civil War
The two books have many points of contact. Capital is the definitive analysis of how capitalism works, the exploitation of workers’ labor-power through the wage-form. It was written before and during  the U.S. Civil War, which Marx called “a pro-slavery rebellion,” and published just as Reconstruction began in the U.S.. Marx’s own communist party, the International Workingmen’s Association, got going at the same time as Reconstruction, and corresponded with the new American labor movements, whose tragic flaw of racism was highlighted by Du Bois. A fierce abolitionist, Marx refers often to American slavery in Capital, including the famous  passage “Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin” (p.414). Chapter 10, “The Working Day,” with its horrific picture of mid-century factory work in England, often compares forms of workers’ enslavement in the factory or on the plantation (pp. 345, 377-8, 398, 414-5).

For his part, Du Bois wrote his history of Reconstruction in the Depression 1930s, when communist thinking was at its most influential in the U.S., and he was reading Capital as he wrote. Black Reconstruction is considered his most Marxist work. Several times, for example, he calls for an international “dictatorship of the proletariat,” most resoundingly at the end of Chapter XIV, “Counter-Revolution of Property.” Here in the depths of the Depression he sees the surge of Black revolt in Reconstruction pointing ahead to a global workers’ rebellion:

The exploiting group of New World masters…fought for trade and markets and materials and slaves all over the world until at last in 1914 the world flamed in war…. And 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 1867-1876—Land, Light and Leading for slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat (p. 762).  Marx and Du Bois both understood that workers necessarily had to take state power by force, to abolish capitalist property, and to keep power in their hands to suppress the inevitable counter-revolution. Their radical understanding of workers’ power came from their belief that it is workers’ labor, “simple average labor,” which creates the world, and with capitalists out of the way it is simple average labor which will rebuild it.

LESSON #2: ORDINARY, ANTIRACIST WORKERS CAN AND MUST RULE THE WORLD
What was this core idea of Marx that so galvanized Du Bois, “equal or abstract human labor”?

Early in Chapter 1 Marx writes:
"Tailoring and weaving, although they are qualitatively different productive activities, are both a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc., and in this sense both human labor….More complex labor counts only as intensified or rather multiplied simple labor…all labor is an expenditure of human labor-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labor that it forms the value of commodities (pp. 135-7)."

The political consequence of seeing labor this way, in both Marx and Du Bois, is to affirm the right and duty of ordinary workers to rule the world. That was the lesson Marx drew from labor in the capitalist system and Du Bois from the Black revolt against American slavery. Du Bois describes in Chapter IV how Black workers withdrew their labor from the slave regime by escape, sabotage, and armed struggle in the Union Army. He saw that massive upheaval by enslaved workers as a kind of “General Strike” of Black labor to abolish slavery. It was racist ideas, plain and simple, that prevented white workers from joining in the radical aim of “abolition democracy.” While the 1880s multiracial class struggle led by the Knights of Labor showed the power of workers from Louisiana to Chicago when they organized as a class, internal weaknesses in these groups and the labor movement overall left white workers—then and now-- handicapped in seeing fellow-proletarians in the enslaved or freed Black worker. Yet for Du Bois the defeat of Reconstruction merely invites us to re-see ourselves, and rebuild , as one.

Lesson #3: No Good Bosses in a Racist System
Just as the so-called abolitionist Northern capitalists, whose military presided over the entire process of Reconstruction, ultimately prevented that legal abolition from going further towards workers’ power, so too do the liberal fascist bosses of today stand to implement the most imperialistic, war-mongering, and anti-immigrant policies of the working class in the US.  Whether it is was the Obama-led oversight of crackdowns on antiracist protestors from Ferguson to Baltimore or the current Biden-led oversight of anti-immigrant concentration camps across the Mexican border, history shows that capitalism always makes good on its commitment to racism, and that the best ideas of Marx and DuBois remain more valid today as ever. Join us!

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction & Other Writings, Library of America edition, 2021.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (trans. Ben Fowkes), Penguin Classics edition, 1990.