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Recognizing the "Great Upheaval of Humanity" As Our Own
Considering
the analyses, perceptions and insights
of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois
Introduction
W.E.B. Du Bois, Staunch Polemicist
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868,
in
Great Barrington, Massachusetts and he passed away in Accra,
Ghana on
August 27, 1963. We celebrate the life and work of Dr. W.E.B. Du
Bois
today by considering the analyses, perceptions, and insights he
gave
rise to in the course of arduous work and struggle of particular
importance to the movement of the U.S. working class and people
for
liberation, equality and emancipation. They are also significant
for
all those who are part of the great upheaval of humanity
striving to
eliminate all systems of enslavement in society.
Dr. Du Bois was a polemicist. He argued out the problems of the day by providing evidence and examples. He brought out that the starting point for those he was contending with was a conception known today as End of History-type arguments which abounded after the fall of the former Soviet Union. They are based on the conception that ideology and ideological forms of struggle evolve and have an end point, which is liberal democracy. The terminology was popularized in the 1990s, especially by the 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. Du Bois does not use the End of History terminology but the essence of what he contended with is the same.
The specific form such arguments take today is that there is an end point to ideological development. The "evolution" has reached its highest form in liberal democracy and history-as-such ends. This is the same history-as-such referred to in the Necessity for Change! analysis given rise to by Hardial Bains in 1967.
The way this history-as-such is being used claims that all of history, with all its zigs and zags, can be reduced to connecting the dots event to event. Or, as Hollywood put it in the 1976 Watergate film, All the President's Men: "follow the money." Everyone now says that if you just "follow the money" you can analyze what's what. The "experts" claim that by doing so, you can see how Israel dominates the U.S. and all sorts of other unwarranted conclusions. Progress itself is also linked to money.
Du Bois stood against these falsifications of history and always brought to the fore the role of the people and the problem of enslavement of human beings, not only the Africans enslaved in the U.S., but systems of enslavement in society. He took this problem of society up for solution which is the same approach the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) takes in its own work.
We often speak of history being a mighty river. When history is being made, that river bursts the dam blocking progress and brings forth a mighty torrent of the peoples' striving for emancipation, opening the path to social progress.
We are raising the issue of a river here to speak to the question of anomalies. When looking at how any river flows, there are deviations that occur, known as anomalies. A deviation or anomaly is beyond the norm or standard for a river. It is something unexpected. A deviation could be that the river dried up, or flooded massively, far beyond the norm. Either condition could be given as an anomaly.
Du Bois said the system of slave labour was treated as an anomaly within the U.S. Constitution, a moral and economic anomaly. His book, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860--1880, is one of Du Bois' more significant contributions. In this book, Du Bois argues out a critique of the U.S. Constitution and everything considered "American" in terms of the ruling circles. He speaks of the great human upheaval of the period and deals with human rights, democracy and social development.
In saying the system of slave labour was treated as an anomaly, a deviation from the rest of the Constitution, Du Bois explained that the Constitution itself was a deviation from progress.
The way the word anomaly came into the English language in the 1500s was as "unevenness." From the Greek and Latin, it was uneven or irregular. Over a period of 100 years, it becomes deviation from the common rule. When Du Bois uses it, however, he does so in the manner of Lenin who also spoke to the law of uneven development. The way we use the word anomaly, it refers to uneven development, to not being parallel development.
In calling attention to anomaly, when we are talking about evenness or unevenness, we are dealing with "the same as" or "different than." In breaking down the word anomaly, "an" is not, and "omalos," is even or the same. So, it is "not the same" or "not even" or "different than." The term also has roots in ancient India and other cultures of ancient origin.
Reconstruction's Upheaval of Humanity to Eliminate Enslavement of All Kinds
In giving his arguments, Du Bois brings out that what is said about the Constitution and Reconstruction is all veiled historiography. It portrays the history of the counter-revolution of property and privilege as progress. This included presenting the Civil War as an issue of North vs. South or Black vs. white. Du Bois brings out that the Civil War was not about culture and race but about eliminating enslavement of all kinds and putting in place "the dictatorship of labor."
Some of the scholars who study Du Bois say he gives a convincing argument about "racialized capitalism." They quote the part about the counter-revolution of property -- but leave out the content about the counter-revolution not being about culture and race.
Du Bois also shows the close connection between the struggles of Black people in the U.S. and those of the peoples of Africa. In the chapter on "Counter-Revolution of Property," Du Bois speaks to the military crushing of Reconstruction and "the capitalistic dictatorship of the United States, which became the most powerful in the world, and which backed the new industrial imperialism and degraded colored labor the world over" (Black Reconstruction, p. 630).
Du Bois in the 1930s was doing an intensive study of Capital by Karl Marx when he wrote Black Reconstruction. He also wrote for the magazine, The Crisis, a publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The materials are worth reviewing, especially the articles in which he spoke about his work corroborating that of Marx.
Hardial Bains used this term corroborate when taking up any work by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Like Du Bois, it refers to analyzing existing conditions to corroborate what is said by them.
This was not the way corroboration was used by some leftists in the U.S. who, while talking of "applying" theory to practice, instead imposed pragmatism to oppose Marxism-Leninism. Going back to the 1500s, the word corroborate was used to give legal confirmation of something, or evidence. It comes to mean strengthening with evidence. The work that the Ideological Studies Centre (ISC) is doing, starting with the affirmation that we are our own models, corroborates what Marx says. And we can measure corroboration, to make strong, strengthen by evidence.
Because Du Bois corroborated what Marx said, he gave a different argument concerning Reconstruction to the one given by the Left of his day and still given today. For example, when Du Bois speaks of Reconstruction as the period from 1860-1880, he includes the Civil War while others separate the Civil War from the period of Reconstruction after the war. This serves in part to mystify the character of the Civil War and lessen the significance of Reconstruction.
In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois brings out that when Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, he said it was a long argument about how to look at life. Du Bois says he is giving an argument about how to look at society -- not at Black people, but at society and social development. A main thesis he gives is, "The unending tragedy of Reconstruction is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its real significance, its national and worldwide implications" (ibid, p. 708).
This is his thesis for providing historiography of the period. Like a river, this history shows unending tragedy coming out of the brutal crushing of Reconstruction and the counter-revolution of propertied interests. We could also extend the date back further to the 1830s and U.S. wars against Indigenous Peoples, called the Indian Wars, with the same conclusion of unending tragedy.
Du Bois gives the argument that the necessary conception of history is a conception of revolution, and the unending tragedy occurs when counter-revolution prevails. Du Bois recognizes the connection of the struggles in the U.S. to global struggles and the connection of civil wars giving rise to imperialist wars.
On a global scale during a similar time period, 1830-1880s, there were many rebellions that took place. China saw the Taiping Rebellion, where 20 million people lost their lives in struggle against the British and Manchu dynasty. In British North America, there were the Lower Canada, Upper Canada and North-West Rebellions. During this period, Europe saw modern nation-building projects and the Paris Commune (1871). It is a time when the first wars of independence took place in Asia and Latin American, like those in India in which millions of people also lost their lives in their brave fight against the British Raj. This spelled the beginning of the British empire going into a tailspin. This period also saw the "Scramble for Africa" by the European powers to dominate and colonize the African peoples. Then, at the time of World War I in 1914, the big imperialist powers fell into the Thucydides Trap of an established power going to war to contend with rising powers.
From 1910-1934, Du Bois was
editor of The Crisis
and major contributor to the magazine of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He
regularly made the connection between the struggle of Black
people in the U.S. and those of the peoples of Africa. Above,
examples of The Crisis
and below Du Bois in his office at the magazine. (New York Public Library Archive)
Du Bois with staff in the magazine’s office.
Du Bois (sixth from right in front row) with other members of
the NAACP in 1929.
Du Bois (third from right in front row) with other members of
editorial and advisory board of the Encyclopedia of the Negro
project, in 1936.
Du Bois participated in the struggles of his day and faced
repeated repression of the U.S. government. Left: pamphlet on
the petition submitted to the United Nations in 1951, We Charge
Genocide. Right: a
1951 flyer opposing charges against him of being a “foreign
agent” for Russia for organizing for peace
as chairperson of the Peace Information Center. While he was
acquitted in 1952, the U.S. still took his passport. (Howard University Digital)
Left: Du Bois and Paul Robeson meet at the World Peace
Conference, Paris, April 20, 1949.
Right: Du Bois speaks at the conference. (Du Bois Papers/UMass Amherst
Libraries)
Du Bois (second from right) at the Pan African Congress in
Brussels, 1921.
Defying the anti-communism of McCarthyism in the U.S. and
pursuing his research, Du Bois visited Russia and China. Left:
Du Bois at the 1959 May Day Parade in Moscow.
Right: Meeting with Mao Zedong in China, 1959.
Left: Du Bois speaking on the anti-colonial struggle in Africa
in 1953.
Right: Du Bois receives honorary doctorate from University of
Ghana, 1963.
Significance of Unending Tragedy and Its National
and International Implications
Du Bois' concept of unending tragedy also goes against the notion of the End of History and puts forward instead that history entails the struggles and striving for revolution. Looking at history in this way brought out Reconstruction's real significance, which had national and worldwide implications.
Writing in 1935, Du Bois is not using the bourgeois conceptions of progress which presents it as a sequence, where human society progresses from primitive to slave to feudal to capitalist. He also does not hold to the concept prevalent then of "new imperialism." He provides evidence about the U.S. from the 1890-1900 period that corroborates Lenin's analysis that this is the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution. This countered arguments being given at that time limiting debate to imperialism only. These denied the conclusion reached by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto that "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."
Du Bois, in speaking of the U.S. in the 1930s, links conditions at that time to the unending tragedy of Reconstruction. It is a different argument than the one the 1960s generation grew up with which is still prevalent today about this period from 1860 to 1880. That argument focuses on the conflicts among the ruling circles as northern capitalists vs. southern slaveholders or presents the Civil War as mainly Black vs. white. These arguments leave out that the system of slave labour included northern capitalists. For instance, New York City had one of the largest markets for enslaved Africans. Most importantly, they leave out that for the peoples, a general strike was underway. A revolutionary struggle for emancipation, for the victory of all labour was taking place. As Du Bois puts it, this period from 1860 to 1880 was "the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen" (ibid, p. 727).
Du Bois also brings out that following Reconstruction, where although this humanity and their upheaval were militarily crushed and terrorized by the state, the people were still organizing and demanding progress. This included the great struggles for the eight-hour day in the 1880s. As part of blocking these efforts, Du Bois explains that "since emancipation in this land, we face one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social life and religion" (ibid).
Du Bois gives a quote from the book by John William Burgess: Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866-1876. Burgess, who founded the political science department at Columbia University, was a prominent scholar at the time. Burgess said that the nation "has changed its views in regard to the political relation of races and has at last virtually accepted the ideas of the South upon that subject. The white men of the South need now have no further fear that the Republican Party, or Republican Administrations, will ever again give themselves over to the vain imagination of the political equality of man" (ibid, p. 728).
Du Bois states right after this quote from Burgess: "Immediately in Africa, a Black back runs red with the blood of the lash; in India, a brown girl is raped; in China, a coolie starves; in Alabama, seven darkies are more than lynched; while in London, the white limbs of a prostitute are hung with jewels and silk. Flames of jealous murder sweep the earth, while brains of little children smear the hills. This is education," in 1935, "this is modern and exact social science; this is the university course" in history.
Burgess gives the conception, also promoted today, that the state determines the character of society. As well, he is saying that while men may be "created equal," as put forward in the U.S. Constitution, there will never be political equality.
For the rulers, there is history-as-such, where they can say this river of history is flowing all over the place, with no direction, no attention to human upheavals. The rulers, in going from event to event and personality to personality, say there is a place where you come to a stop in that flowing river of history. Somehow it simply ends.
For our part, like Du Bois, as is the case with the classics of Marxism-Leninism, we recognize that the ensemble of human relations and these momentous struggles of the peoples determine the character and order of society and social development. As Du Bois put it, the great "upheaval of humanity," as seen during Reconstruction, is decisive.
Du Bois does not forget the vital role of the peoples as the makers of history. In his work he does not divide natural and social science, just as the ensemble of human relations does not separate relations between humans and humans and those between humans and nature. It is one ensemble of all the many relations.
Du Bois says there is an unending flow of that river of history. He speaks to the unending tragedy flowing from the crushing of Reconstruction using brute force and the inability of the "American mind" to grasp its real significance. He is referring here to the outlook of the rulers, who cannot see the implications entailed by this unending flow. They cannot see the transition points in history, where that mighty human upheaval succeeds in fundamentally changing society.
Du Bois points out that integral to the unending tragedy was the attempt to make Black men U.S. citizens. In a certain sense it was a failure, the political equality did not emerge, but he calls it a splendid failure. It did not fail where it was expected to fail. Where people like Burgess and others said it failed based on attempts to promote the fiction that there could be political equality.
Du Bois speaks about all the splendid struggles that took place to bring an end to this tragedy, this enslavement. He shows how this "American mind" of the rulers continually fails to grasp the national and worldwide implications of this unending tragedy. They fail as long as computation lies simply with the wealth and power of major imperialist powers, rather than the strength that comes from a measure of corroboration. One can measure corroboration among the people, strengthen it with evidence and give legal confirmation to the popular will. The direction Du Bois is going in is that the people can write their own constitution -- which was not the direction of the "American mind," the outlook of rulers and their academics like Burgess.
In talking about this "American mind" or general intellect of the rulers, Du Bois is dealing with their outlook. He does not fall prey to the line of just "follow the money" when analyzing conditions and history.
He argues that because people fail to grasp the real significance of Reconstruction, they cannot work out its national and worldwide implications today. History is not static. It involves change, motion and development. Du Bois makes the point that we must look at the conditions where phenomena emerge. And what is commonly missing is corroborating developments with the unending tragedy of Reconstruction and its consequences.
The book Black Reconstruction was published in 1935 during the same period the 1936 Constitution of the U.S.S.R. was adopted. The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course was published in 1938. These appear to be unrelated developments where we cannot connect the dots. Du Bois feels they all flow directly from this 1860-1880 period marked by imperialism and splendid human upheaval. Counter-revolution is also not a belief. It exists; it is an actual historical phenomenon, an unending tragedy.
Du Bois states: "The United States was turned into a reactionary force. It became the cornerstone of that new imperialism which is subjecting the labor of yellow, brown and black peoples to the dictation of capitalism organized on a world basis; and it has not only brought nearer the revolution by which the power of capitalism is to be challenged, but also it is transforming the fight to the sinister aspect of a fight on racial lines embittered by awful memories" (ibid, p. 631).
He speaks to the struggles of the people on their own basis, as a people and together fighting to advance humanity. This is corroboration of Marx's argument that productive powers could be known with the precision of science and that ideological forms change and develop as part of how people fight out their struggles.
Understanding Is Not a Belief
Du Bois is against the argument that there is something separating natural and social science. In addition to the arguments corroborating the significance of developments such as Reconstruction, like Marx he looks at which questions can be addressed precisely, like economic development, and which belong to ideological and cultural forms.
In respect to this, Du Bois gives arguments for how to overcome category mistakes. These category mistakes, made frequently by the rulers, bring together conflicting propositions that do not go together -- like national security and democratic rights. The dilemmas which plague the ruling circles, like the security dilemma, are given as reasons why we face, for instance, total nuclear annihilation. For them it is inevitable and there is no alternative for humanity to strive for.
Academics and philosophers of the rulers, who put themselves forward as experts on fascism, talk about false ideological beliefs (FIBs). The argument about FIBs is used to characterize what are called fascist beliefs and to talk about a fascist personality. The argument is that there is fascism or democracy, or there is autocracy or democracy. Their talk of FIBs actually hides the falsification of history concerning fascism, communism and U.S.-style democracy.
One such academic is Timothy Snyder, considered an "expert" on fascism and autocracy. He was a Yale professor who fled the U.S. out of fear of President Trump. In September 2025, he secured a teaching position at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, as chair of Modern European History.
As part of addressing autocracy, Snyder tries to equate communism with fascism. He does so by comparing Hitler and Stalin. He refuses to acknowledge that the verdict of the world anti-fascist war was that one could not be anti-fascist and be anti-communist. On the contrary, he today supports the Ukrainian fascists and neo-Nazis. As Chair of Modern European History, he is supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, known for its anti-communism and promoting the falsification of history surrounding the Holodomor myth concerning "man-made famine" in Ukraine. Snyder and his wife have contributed more than $100,000 to the Monument in Ottawa to the "Victims of Communism," notorious for glorifying Nazi collaborators as victims of communists.
We argue that the conception of FIBs, according to which all beliefs can be divided into true or false, or reduced to pro and con, is itself a FIB. Marx says there is economic development which can be measured with the precision of science, and there are ideological forms used for people to fight out problems. This raises the question of where science gets its precise measurements and what are the forms in which these ideological, cultural, religious battles are fought out?
Quite a few academics do not recognize that understanding is not a belief. General intellectual and collective consciousness is not a series of beliefs someone sorts out -- this one is good, that one is bad, etc. Du Bois goes against this false conception by using the conception of corroboration. Du Bois says the "American mind" of the rulers cannot grasp corroboration. He raises the significance of Reconstruction as people in the world in motion for change, for revolution.
Du Bois was a serious scholar with considerable stature. He trained at top universities in Germany and at Harvard. Leading sociologists from Germany considered him the "go to" person for matters pertaining to the United States.
In 1947, a year before the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights was adopted, Du Bois and the NAACP submitted a petition to the UN titled, An Appeal to the World! -- A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress. He and others spent a year putting together the facts, evidence and analysis for the 96-page petition.
Du Bois put the petition in a global context and sought to make a presentation before the UN General Assembly, with media coverage. The U.S. prevented this.
In December 1951, Du Bois joined Paul Robeson and William Patterson in submitting another petition to the UN, "We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People." The Civil Rights Congress submitted the petition, which 100 U.S. intellectuals and activists signed. Robeson presented it at UN headquarters in New York City. Du Bois was to accompany Patterson to Paris to deliver it to a UN meeting there, but the U.S. refused to allow him to leave the country. As Du Bois persisted with his organizing work, to further block his work and influence, the U.S. took away his passport in 1952 and subjected him to every infamy possible.
Of great relevance today is the central thesis that Du Bois provides a long argument corroborating that the unending tragedy of Reconstruction is the utter inability of the "American mind" to grasp its significance. This "American mind" of the rulers cannot see the direct participation of peoples in history. That is missed. The struggles of the peoples worldwide are ignored. Du Bois makes a profound argument in that one sentence. He deals with corroboration in different fields, different paths and how to find corroboration.
Du Bois also raises what in 1935 was called a problem of decision-making. At that time, the computers of today were still being imagined but questions were raised as to what kind of machine could calculate without the role of humans in making decisions. When something is endless, for example, how do you know when you can ask a question with precision? When to intervene in events to your advantage involves this question. When and how to make calculations? Not everything can be computed, as some phenomena are unending. Marx brought out that the ideological forms used for humans to fight out problems cannot be computed.
When looking at corroboration, it is not standing outside of history and then you apply it to history. There needs to be a one-to-one correspondence. We have theory and are going to apply it to practice -- a one-to-one correspondence. There is a mental act that can be turned into a speech act, to practice. We can visualize an arrow from one to the other.
Du Bois in his work shows how arguments being given against his analysis are self-refuting and cannot be sustained except by violence.
Toward the end of his life, right after he joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) at the age of 93, Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah invited Du Bois to participate in the research centre they were developing. He was asked to develop and edit an Encyclopedia Africana, a comprehensive encyclopedia of people of African descent. It was a project he had long considered. In 1961, having secured his passport, he went to live in Ghana and became a Ghanaian citizen. He lived there until his death on August 27, 1963, a day before the historic March on Washington -- another example of the unity of labour fighting for progress. His stature was such that a moment of silence was observed at the march in his honour.
Du Bois was a person of international stature who had witnessed lynchings and the horrific conditions facing Black people and workers more generally -- conditions that forced him to confront historiography and examine and write about what was needed for the global public good. Like all his work, the Encyclopedia Africana would connect global and national matters -- and speak to the great upheavals of humanity -- to the general interest. He died as an internationalist in 1963, the same year that Hardial Bains founded the organization The Internationalists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia.
(Conversations, August 21, 2025)
This article was published in
Volume 56
Number 4 - July 2, 2026
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/TML2026/Articles/TS56042.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca