Du Bois, and the New Slavery
Today’s post was triggered by an invite from Diana Popescu (Nottingham) to present later this month at the CRISPI Conference June 2025: The Idea of Freedom and Modern Slavery (here). I appreciate invites that nudge me into expanding my intellectual horizons! (Recall this post on Gilbert Murray; and this post on Cugoano.)
The last (seventeenth) chapter of Du Bois’s (1935) Black Reconstruction in America, “The Propaganda of History,” works with an implied distinction between the old slavery of colonial America (that eventually led to the civil war) and a new slavery that arose in its aftermath. The distinction is discernable in earlier chapters, but the contrast is not so quite explicit as in the final chapter.
In this chapter Du Bois argues for the claim that “If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with that accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation.” (p. 637 in the 2017 Routledge/Transaction edition) So, crucially, Du Bois does not see a necessary tension between scientific history that is socially action-guiding and (let’s call it) the embrace of values in such a history. In fact, it is quite clear that he thinks scientific history presupposes some values and may itself even be moralistic/moralizing in character.
As an aside, Du Bois anticipates here some of Leo Strauss’ claims (see here for details); I write that to discredit neither Du Bois nor Strauss. I think a point in the vicinity is obviously true that if history (and social science) is going to be useful in policy, it must presuppose some evaluative standard. The details are not so easy to pin down, but let’s see how Du Bois thinks of it.
The wider significance of the passage that I am about to quote has been discussed by, for example, Robert Gooding-Williams in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and it is worth quoting it in order to situate my discussion:
Du Bois criticizes histories that discuss slavery with moral “impartially,” depicting America as helpless and the south as blameless, while explaining the difference in development, North and South, as “a sort of working out of cosmic social and economic law” (1935, 585). An example of this sort of history is Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization, which treats the clash between north and south as if it were a clash between winds and waters. In the Beard’s “sweeping mechanistic interpretation” of history, Du Bois writes, “there is no room for the real plot of the story, for the clear mistake and guilt of rebuilding a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy; for the triumph of sheer moral courage and sacrifice in the abolition crusade; and for the hurt and struggle of degraded black millions in their fight for freedom and their attempt to enter democracy. Can all this be omitted and half suppressed in a treatise that calls itself scientific?” (1935, 585).
Okay, so much for set up. Here’s the text from Du Bois that I have in mind (which: is two short paragraphs before the one quoted by Gooding-Williams):
Here in the United States we have a clear example. It was morally wrong and economically retrogressive to build human slavery in the United States in the eighteenth century. We know that now, perfectly well; and there were many Americans North and South who knew this and said it in the eighteenth century. Today, in the face of new slavery established elsewhere in the world under other names and guises, we ought to emphasize this lesson of the past. Moreover, it is not well to be reticent in describing that past. Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center. The difference of development, North and South, is explained as a sort of working out of cosmic social and economic law. (p. 638)
So, the explicit purpose of Du Bois’ distinction between the old and the new slavery is, first, to help unmask obfuscation (the use of names to disguise) and, second, to allow lessons of the past to be named and emphasized “in the present.” One of these lessons is that a certain kind of ‘'impartial,’ purportedly scientific language neutralizes agency such that grotesque wrongs are disguised into blameless social forces “subject to cosmic social and economic law.” There are interesting implications lurking here of Du Bois’ critique of some Marxists’ suspicion of moralizing in science.
The other lesson, which is explicit in the paragraph quoted by Gooding-Williams is to be able to diagnose and name, “the clear mistake and guilt of rebuilding a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy; for the triumph of sheer moral courage and sacrifice in the abolition crusade; and for the hurt and struggle of degraded black millions in their fight for freedom and their attempt to enter democracy.” (p. 638) This is actually a bit obscure. But Du Bois had announced the point early in the book just after introducing the idea of a new slavery (p. 26):
Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863. The resulting color caste founded and retained by capitalism was adopted, forwarded and approved by white labor, and resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over. (p. 26)
Du Bois here anticipates what came to be known as the “Williams thesis” as found in (recall) Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery (which makes more precise the nature of the relationship between slavery and modern capitalism), and the whole analysis of what came to be known as “racial capitalism” (discussed, for example, by Kofi Bright and Táíwò in their essay in Dissent back in 2020 (here)).
The new slavery, then, is, in part, the plight of the working class in modern capitalism (and this working class itself has a color hierarchy). This is linked to the old slavery by way of causation and by way of analogy. Interestingly enough, if I understand Du Bois correctly, the new (white) slaves both benefit from and are in part implicated in the consequentialist evils of the old slavery and can be usefully compared to them as victims.
This line of argument actually echoes an explicitly anti-imperialist point that Du Bois had made back in 1920 in the third chapter of Darkwater: