Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.
—Karl Marx, The Political Writings of Karl Marx (Reference Marx2019, p. 480)
In the light of a full moon a group of Negro croppers were gathered at the rear of a cabin in Sumter County, South Carolina. They had come from the surrounding plantations to hold a stealthy meeting of what was then only the beginnings of a Croppers Union. A Negro organizer stood in the center of the group. He had sketched a map of the United States in the earth with a twig and marked off those sections of the South in which the Negroes were in the majority.
—James S. Allen, Negro Liberation (Reference Allen1935, p. 3)Introduction
James S. Allen (Reference Allen1935) depicts a palimpsest that destabilized the cartography of the plantation and the American nation-state. The cabin’s position within the plantation was in a space designed to order Black labor for its exploitation. However, within the plantation’s spatial order, the rear of the cabin provided a subversive meeting ground where Black laborers could gather and plan against their exploitation. The map on the soil paralleled the meeting’s subversion of the plantation by revealing that, underlying America’s cartography built on the subjugation of the Black minority to the White majority’s rule, there was a Black majority stretch of land, the Black Belt, where Black people could exercise self-determination.
James S. Allen and Harry HaywoodFootnote 1 were theoreticians and organizers in the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA.) Working from Vladimir Lenin’s understanding of self-determination, they both played a significant role in the development of the party’s Black Belt Thesis. In it, the party claimed that Black liberation would be impossible without creating an autonomous Black region that would collectively decide whether to secede or annex from the United States. Only through holding the Black Belt could Black people democratically decide their future in the United States, ensuring power and agency in their minority status.
Allen’s and Haywood’s imagination of self-determination was not only spatial but temporal. There was a time when Black people held political power in the Black Belt: the Reconstruction Era. For a brief period, the North established a military dictatorship over the post-war South in response to its rebellion. Backed by the North, the freedmen’s political participation would play a critical role in the South’s transition from an aristocratic, plantation-based society to a democratic one. Ultimately, the North would betray the South’s democratic development by ceding political control to Southern elites, restoring the rule of plantations through sharecropping. Reinstating Reconstruction’s democratic revolution became the central goal of Allen’s and Harry Haywood’s political theorizing. However, they were not alone in turning to Reconstruction for guiding their present. In the midst of the Great Depression, W. E. B. Du Bois promoted the formation of self-segregating, consumer cooperatives. He argued that cooperatives would mitigate the brutality of Jim Crow by focusing on the collective development of Black institutions. Instead of directing capital to White businesses, Du Bois believed that creating Black cooperatives would ensure that Black consumers would be assisting other Black consumers. Distinct from simply Black capitalism, the cooperative element, taken from James Warbasse, ensured a democratic element to keep businesses accountable. When theorizing his plan for self-segregating cooperatives, Reconstruction offered Du Bois another vision for Black democracy. Reconstruction was not limited to Black people gaining strictly political power but also involved a proliferation of economic cooperation that Du Bois’s present could continue. While Allen’s and Haywood’s Black Belt Thesis posited a territorial imagination, Du Bois envisioned a cartography of economic flows. In Du Bois’s “nation within a nation” thesis, Black people’s purchasing power comprised an entire country.Segregation ensured the extraction of their capital, limiting the potential power of their nation. By coordinating their purchasing power through a program of cooperation, Du Bois envisioned reinstating Black people’s lost democracy through their cooperative control over the public and private sectors.
This paper examines the role of Reconstruction in the thought and practice of Du Bois, Allen, and Haywood in the 1920s to 1940s. For all three, Reconstruction played a central role as an example of Black democracy that they sought to continue, albeit in different ways. This paper will examine how the differences between their historical interpretations resulted in diverging social and political programs. By comparing the Black Belt Thesis and self-segregating cooperatives through the lens of Reconstruction, this paper provides insights into the relationship between race and democracy, as well as the significance of Reconstruction in theorizing Black liberation.
Scholarship on Du Bois’s cooperative theory and Haywood and Allen’s Black Belt Thesis lacks a sustained analysis of the connection between their projects and their historical interpretations of Reconstruction. Drawing on Adolph Reed’s (Reference Reed1997) argument that Du Bois’s scholarship and activism cannot be separated, this paper argues that Du Bois’s historical analysis of Reconstruction played a key role in the formation of his cooperative theory. While Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction has garnered enormous attention, scholars have paid less attention to how Du Bois theorized the practical consequences of his historical insights. The connections between Black Reconstruction and his cooperative theory that have been made are often minimal, and there is a lack of prolonged work on detailing them (Demarco Reference DeMarco1983; Lemert Reference Lemert2000; Phulwani Reference Phulwani and Bromell2018; Svabek Reference Svabek2025). Meanwhile, the literature around the CPUSA’s Black Belt Thesis has failed to analyze the role Reconstruction played in their project (Campbell Reference Campbell1994; Carr Reference Carr1981; Forman Reference Forman1984; Kelley Reference Kelley1994; Tomek Reference Tomek2012). Reconstruction, for both projects, played not only an underappreciated role for the authors of the texts but also for the readers. The history of Reconstruction demonstrated Black people’s ability to operate their own state or economically cooperate. Therefore, by situating their theories as a continuation of Reconstruction, we can not only appreciate the vital sources behind their theories but also how the three thinkers used Black history as a political technology to legitimize their projects.
The reason for reading Du Bois, Allen, and Haywood together stems from rethinking their own disagreements with one another. Underlying their disagreements was a shared commitment to Marxism and socialism. Reed (Reference Reed1997) argues that Du Bois’s socialist roots derived from the late nineteenth-century corporatist belief, prominent across American universities, of a rationally planned society led by intellectuals. In the 1890s, Du Bois, during his studies in Germany, joined the German Social Democratic Party. In 1911, he joined the American Socialist Party but resigned from it only one year later (Marable Reference Marable2004; Saman Reference Saman2020). Du Bois’s transition to Marxism began with his admiration for the Bolshevik Revolution. For Du Bois, as well as Black CPUSA members, the Soviet victory enshrined anti-racism and anti-imperialism as a reality that, hopefully, African Americans could replicate (Saman Reference Saman2020; Solomon Reference Solomon1998). In 1926, Du Bois visited the Soviet Union, and, similar to Black CPUSA members, increasingly turned to the writings of Karl Marx and Lenin (Du Bois Reference Du Bois and Lewis1995c; McDuffie Reference McDuffie2011; Saman Reference Saman2020) By the end of his life, Du Bois supported the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, even joining the CPUSA (Du Bois Reference Du Bois and Lewis1995a; Porter Reference Porter2010).
However, Du Bois differentiated his understanding of Marxism from the CPUSA’s due to his disagreements with them about class and race. To contextualize his critique of American socialism, in 1891, Daniel de León became a leader of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), a predecessor to the later CPUSA, and his thought would influence the early twentieth-century socialist movement. De León’s analysis of race largely reflected the surrounding White labor movement’s class-reductionist perspective. He saw Black people as a “special division,” but failed to enact policies to combat racism. Similar to de León, the later Socialist Party (SP) ignored struggling against Jim Crow and framed Black liberation through purely supporting the party (Foster Reference Foster1952).
In 1913, after leaving the SP, Du Bois (Reference Du Bois and Lewis1995d) wrote “Socialism and the Negro Problem” in the New Review to critique American socialism. He questioned the color-blind position’s presupposition that socialism will ultimately liberate all by arguing that failing to address race as a distinct struggle would only subjugate Black people. He labeled the American proletariat an “industrial aristocracy” that relies on the exploitation of Black labor, removing the color-blind proletariat from a universally liberating position.Footnote 2 In his 1915 “African Roots of War,” he extended this argument to the development of a skilled imperialist “aristocracy of labor” that collaborated with the bourgeoisie to exploit labor internationally across the color line (Du Bois Reference Du Bois, Getachew and Pitts2022).
Du Bois’s arguments above extended to the CPUSA, albeit with a twist. In his September 1931 Crisis article, “The Negro and Communism,” he acknowledged that the CPUSA’s racially progressive internal policies were different than the SP’s. For instance, in February 1931, the CPUSA’s Harlem branch held a sensationalized show trial against Finnish member August Yokinen due to his wanting racially segregated Finnish baths between Black and White people. According to Mark Naison (Reference Naison1983), the show trial evidenced the CPUSA being one of the first interracial organizations to demand “an interracial community that extended into the personal sphere” (p. 47). However, their internal policies contradicted their faith in a racially united proletarian revolution due to the reality of White working-class racism. For Du Bois (Reference Du Bois and Lewis1995e), even if a racially united working-class organization removed racial prejudice, this would only isolate them from the broader White working class and undermine their project.
Allen (Reference Allen1936) disagreed with Du Bois’s critique by acknowledging the existence of racism within the labor movement but arguing that the “weakening of capitalism and the growing class maturity of the proletariat,” (p. 167) as well as the CPUSA’s direct struggle against racism in the labor movement, was leading to a greater solidarity between the Black and White working class. In Haywood’s Reference Haywood1934 pamphlet, The Road to Negro Liberation, he sees Du Bois’s cooperatives as an attempt to utilize the growing petty-bourgeois nationalist elements “to catch the masses, to hold them back from revolutionary struggle” (Reference Du Bois1934, p. 26). For Haywood, nationalist movements usurped revolutionary language to maintain class domination for the petit-bourgeoisie. Allen’s critique (Reference Allen1936) was similar to Haywood’s in denouncing the ability of the petit bourgeoisie to play a progressive role in Black liberation.
While CPUSA scholars have not commented on Du Bois, Du Boisian scholars have reiterated Du Bois’s distinction of his Marxism from the party’s. Charles Mills (Reference Mills and Bromell2018) and Patrick Anderson (Reference Anderson2017) reference Du Bois’s distinction to define his unique Marxism, or, for Anderson, Pan-Africanism, in contrast to the party’s orthodox Marxist-Leninist, class-reductionist view. Some work (Phulwani Reference Phulwani and Bromell2018; Robinson Reference Robinson2021; Singh Reference Singh2004) that uses the CPUSA as an orthodox Marxist counterpoint to Du Bois acknowledges their complex Black Belt Thesis, which explicitly argued against class-reductionism, though these comparisons have been parenthetical.
While this paper shares the consensus view that Du Bois’s Marxism differed from that of Haywood and Allen, with the latter offering a more orthodox account, it will argue that bringing these thinkers’ shared commitment to Reconstruction together can problematize aspects of their previous differentiations. By framing racial liberation as the completion of Reconstruction’s unfinished revolution, Haywood’s and Allen’s theory demonstrates a thorough engagement with Black history, separate from orthodox, class-reductionist Marxism. Although significantly influenced by Marx’s and Lenin’s writings on Reconstruction and self-determination, their extensive historical analysis and political theorizing of particular African American conditions generated a distinct political program, irreducible to Marx or Lenin. Still, their ultimate reliance on an interracial revolution to establish the right to self-determination partially affirmed the critiques by Du Bois and the secondary literature.
Rather than comparing them to erase their differences, bridging the three through their shared commitment to revitalizing Reconstruction illuminates their differing hermeneutical frameworks for reading Reconstruction’s legacy. For Allen and Haywood, the past is situated within material and political stages, whereas for Du Bois, the past offered lessons for the present without foreclosing its possibilities. Instead of advocating for one methodology over the other, putting them in conversation allows us to see how both can offer insights into the other. Du Bois’s more open view of the past critiques Allen’s and Haywood’s distance from the immediate challenges facing Black people. Allen’s and Haywood’s advocacy for revolution, driven by political-economic stages, serves as a critique of Du Bois’s attempt to circumvent the question of violence in his radical project. This article does not aim to resolve the tension between their differing interpretive frameworks. Instead, it retains an openness that can be valuable for drawing on a multiplicity of past perspectives to confront the present and future challenges faced by Black people.Footnote 3
The first section focuses on Allen’s and Du Bois’s differing historical interpretations of Reconstruction in their respective works, Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy (Reference Allen1937) and Black Reconstruction in America (Reference Du Bois2017). While Haywood does briefly offer fragments for a history of Reconstruction in his Negro Liberation (Reference Haywood1948), I focus on Allen’s more substantive text on the period. Broadly, Allen and Du Bois share a general outline for Reconstruction. Though they would slightly disagree on how this was achieved, the deciding factor of the Union’s victory arose from Black people actively rebelling against the plantation system through collective enlistment in the Union Army. Upon gaining emancipation, the freedmen rapidly adjusted to their newfound freedom and successfully led Southern governments, implementing some of the most progressive policies across the nation. Lastly, Allen and Du Bois identify the failure of Reconstruction in Black democracy’s dependence on the North’s military dictatorship, resulting in the 1877 compromise between the North and South to exploit Black labor jointly.
However, their accounts begin to diverge in their interpretations of Marxism. Du Bois described the Reconstruction government as creating a dictatorship of labor, referencing Marx’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Allen, more faithful to Marx, instead viewed the period as a bourgeois democratic revolution. Du Bois’s appropriation of the dictatorship of the proletariat dislocated it from a Marxist developmental history by refuting the need for enlightened, industrialized workers to lead a revolution in dismantling capitalism. For Du Bois, agrarian workers suddenly found themselves in a position of power, which would lead to their gradual cultivation of a revolutionary consciousness. At the heart of Du Bois’s and Allen’s differing interpretations is, for the latter, a rigid stagist view of history, whereas the former takes a more open view of history that does not necessitate fulfilling the requirements of a pre-established stage.
The difference in their interpretations of Reconstruction led to distinct political and social projects in the 1920s to 1940s. Haywood’s and Allen’s stagist accounts argued for finishing Reconstruction’s bourgeois-democratic transition through the Leninist concept of the right to self-determination. Self-determination entailed the right of a persecuted nationality, in this case, African Americans, to secede and establish their own nation. By creating a Black republic, both (Haywood Reference Haywood1948; Allen Reference Allen1937) argued that Black people could decide whether to remain in the American nation or secede from it, guaranteeing the completion of Reconstruction’s bourgeois-democratic revolution. To accomplish this, Haywood and Allen envisioned an interracial agrarian or proletarian revolution that would create the conditions for Black people to exercise their right to self-determination. However, Haywood’s and Allen’s reliance on an interracial revolution presupposed the racial unity that they sought to create. The dissolution of their program stemmed from their strictly stagist account, which distanced them from the immediate challenges facing Black people.
Instead of another political reconstruction through revolution, Du Bois sought to outline a social reconstruction through the establishment of cooperatives. Due to Du Bois’s more open conception of temporality, his analysis emerged from the direct problems facing Black people and their resistance. He proposed a program where Black people would realize the agency in their purchasing power by advocating for them to only purchase from stores that would provide them with employment or other benefits. He responded to Haywood’s and Allen’s critiques of Black capitalism by appealing to a Black tradition, including Reconstruction, of non-capitalist cooperation. Beyond tradition, Du Bois advocated for the creation of a cooperative democracy to inhibit the enrichment of an individual or stockholder at the expense of others. However, Du Bois’s cooperative theory, similar to the Black Belt Thesis, would never come to fruition. Theoretically, Du Bois’s theory failed to adequately address how consumer cooperatives would compete against corporations, resist wealth inequalities, and survive Jim Crow violence. Haywood and Allen’s stagist account offered a response to the question of violence by positing the need for interracial solidarity and a revolution before enacting radical change. However, their account did not resolve how such a revolution was possible.
Interpreting Reconstruction
Civil War and Black Resistance
Du Bois and Allen utilized a Marxist framework to understand the material preconditions of the Civil War. According to Marx (Reference Marx and Blackburn2011), a driving force behind the war was the “struggle between two social systems: the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer peacefully coexist on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other” (p. 158). Slavery and capitalism both required a growing amount of land and laborers for their development, and the increasing tensions from their irreconcilability would pave the way for the Civil War (Allen Reference Allen1937; Du Bois Reference Du Bois2017; Marx Reference Marx and Blackburn2011).
While the above material conditions contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War, Du Bois (Reference Du Bois2017) and Allen (Reference Allen1937) emphasized the enslaved people’s rebellion as the turning point that would lead to the introduction of abolition and democracy. Du Bois’s account situated the origin of the Civil War as not a struggle for Black emancipation, since the White Northern masses were not willing to fight for abolition. If Black people were to gain freedom, it would have to be from their own movement. The enslaved people, independently of either Northern or Southern White people, collectively decided to commit a “general strike,” where they would desert plantations to fight for the Union. The strike both hindered Southern agricultural production and increased the size of the Union’s army. Due to the importance of Black soldiers to the Civil War, the general strike forced the North to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and decisively contributed to the Union’s victory.
Du Bois’s contemporaries widely criticized his use of the “general strike.” Abram Harris (Reference Harris1935) and Ralph Bunche (Reference Bunche1935) argued that the term implied that enslaved people across the South acted in concert with each other through a revolutionary consciousness to end slavery. Instead, for Harris, enslaved people’s participation came from the immediate destruction of plantations by Northern soldiers, and for Bunche (Reference Bunche1935), they, “finding an opportunity to escape from an onerous existence, simply took it” (p. 570).
Contrary to Harris’s and Bunche’s reading, Du Bois’s “general strike” invites a reconceptualization of the enslaved’s consciousness of their role in production and their corresponding resistance. Gayatri Spivak (Reference Spivak2014) offers a brief history of the general strike, founded on the Marxist epistemological point that striking allows workers to realize that they are at the center of production, that “if they stopped, then production stopped” (p. 13). She interprets Du Bois’s appropriation as considering how this process can take shape outside the “factory floor” to conceive of a subaltern revolutionary subject against the conventional industrialized proletariat.
Drawing on Spivak’s interpretation, Harris and Bunche misunderstand how Du Bois’s figuration of the “general strike” represents the enslaved’s realization of their ability to engage in “agrarian democracy”:
This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps a half million people. They wanted to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do that they left the plantations… The Negroes were willing to work and did work, but they wanted land to work, and they wanted to see and own the results of their toil. It was here and in the West and the South that a new vista opened. Here was a chance to establish an agrarian democracy in the South: peasant holders of small properties, eager to work and raise crops, amenable to suggestion and general direction (Du Bois Reference Du Bois2017, p. 60).
Du Bois’s appropriation seeks to demonstrate how fundamental Marxist insights, such as workers owning their labor power, have been present in Black history through different paths than Marx’s philosophy of history. The general strike involved a transformation in which workers recognized their control over the means of production. By recognizing their location in production, the general strike was not only a negative project against the plantation economy but also contained a positive element of realizing that their agricultural labor was not limited to the plantation. By organizing their labor autonomously, they could collectively create an agrarian democracy that would allow them to see the “results of their toil.”
Cedric J. Robinson uses the general strike as a dividing line between Du Bois and the CPUSA. For Robinson, the “general strike” presents a counterargument to the CPUSA’s perception of a concentrated revolutionary vanguard as the primary force leading the revolution. Robinson argues that the autonomous nature of the general strike proved that revolutions do not necessitate vanguardist leadership. Marx, Lenin, and the CPUSA, for Robinson, dismissed the spontaneous revolutionary potential of the peasantry, while the general strike demonstrated the possibility of their self-made revolt (Robinson Reference Robinson2021).
However, Robinson’s broad comparison of the CPUSA to Du Bois fails to engage with Allen’s reading of Black participation during the war. In Allen’s (Reference Allen1937) reading, the enslaved were agents of a popular revolution:
Destined to play a pivotal role in the revolution were the newly emancipated Negro masses, overwhelmingly predominant in the population of the plantation area, the very stronghold of landed power. If this was to be a people’s revolution, they would have to be the core of it; if democracy was to be established they would have to be its chief bearers. (p. 30)
Both Du Bois and Allen present enslaved people as the revolutionary protagonists of the Civil War. A possible contradiction in their descriptions is the Union army’s leading role in defeating the Southern plantocracy. This contradiction poses an even more significant problem for Allen, who avoids Du Bois’s argument that the enslaved people’s rebellion led to the Emancipation Proclamation. Allen (Reference Allen1937) resolves such a reading by stressing that, rather than being passive recipients of the North’s liberation, enslaved people tactically negotiated their participation based on the North fulfilling their “agrarian and democratic” demands. While the enslaved would momentarily align with the Union army for their own betterment, their participation was still part of their agential movement.
Furthermore, Allen (Reference Allen1937) described the enslaved people’s participation in the Civil War through the language of a slave revolt, emphasizing their autonomous participation:
The numerous slave revolts had been defeated in their isolation; but this was slave insurrection on a tremendous scale. Thousands of Denmark Veseys, Nat Turners, Shields, Greens, Browns and Copelands were in motion together with a powerful ally, in the stream of revolution… Charleston, the scene of Vesey’s defeat, became the scene of his victory (pp. 31-32).
Allen’s emplotment of the enslaved’s actions within their Black tradition of rebellion deepens their revolutionary agency.Footnote 4 His passage introduces a redemptive vision of historical materialism similar to Walter Benjamin’s account: “The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption… there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one” (Löwy Reference Löwy and Turner2016, p. 30). In Michael Löwy’s (Reference Löwy and Turner2016) reading, Benjamin points to a past awaiting completion (Volkollmenheit) of their resistance and strivings. Allen sees Reconstruction as not only continuing a legacy of slave revolts but also as historically fulfilling it, completing the revolution that Vesey, Turner, and many others had begun. Evident in Allen’s framework is a teleological element to history where the past leads into the future. The Black Belt Thesis, as we will see, is part of this teleology by finishing the revolution and redeeming the past.Footnote 5
The key hermeneutic difference between Allen and Du Bois lies in the former’s fidelity to Marxist concepts. While Allen moves beyond a reductive analysis of a homogeneous proletariat, he still preserves a fundamental belief in Marx’s teleology. Du Bois, by contrast, revised Marxist concepts, as needed, from Black people’s concrete experiences. The general strike did not operate within a capitalist mode of production, in which industrial workers could strike; however, Du Bois still saw points in Marx’s framework that were helpful in explaining enslaved people’s resistance.
Reconstruction Democracy
After emphasizing enslaved people’s active participation during the Civil War, Du Bois and Allen focus on the North’s post-war military dictatorship of the South and the institution of new state governments. Allen (Reference Allen1937), drawing on Marx’s teleology, defines Reconstruction as a “bourgeois-democratic” revolution, in which the Northern bourgeoisie attempted to instill capitalism and democracy into the feudal South. Du Bois (Reference Du Bois2017) expands on this view by arguing that the plantocratic system not only politically disempowered Black workers (i.e., the enslaved) but also White workers. He explains how the plantocracy used slavery to consolidate power against poor White people by instilling property qualifications and utilizing the enslaved population as part of their legislative representation. The Civil War not only represented the possibility for politically enfranchising Black people, but also removing an aristocratic plantation system that indirectly disenfranchised poor White people.
Both Du Bois (Reference Du Bois2017) and Allen (Reference Allen1937) turned to South Carolina to exemplify the success of Black people’s democratic participation during Reconstruction. In the summarizing prelude to his chapter “The Black Proletariat in South Carolina,” Du Bois (Reference Du Bois2017) wrote: “How in the years from 1868-1876, in a state where Blacks out-numbered whites, the will of the mass of Black labor, modified by their own and other leaders and dimmed by ignorance, inexperience and uncertainty, dictated the form and methods of government” (p. 339). Du Bois and Allen noted that South Carolina’s new constitutional convention passed democratic land reform, the extension of women’s rights, the removal of any property qualifications for office, the abolition of debt-imprisonment, and the creation of public schools. Though there was some corruption, little could be attributed to Black politicians relative to their White counterparts. Ultimately, Black political participation, backed by the northern military, introduced democracy to South Carolina.
Reconstruction additionally oversaw the creation of robust civil society institutions essential to democracy. Allen (Reference Allen1937) details that the South Carolina government sponsored a Black militia to protect Black people’s democratic participation from the Ku Klux Klan. Du Bois (Reference Du Bois2017) highlights the growth of a Black labor movement, formed by farmers and longshoremen, creating a space for Black workers to demand better working conditions, an avenue unavailable at the height of plantation slavery and foreclosed during Jim Crow. Allen (Reference Allen1937) describes the formation of the Colored National Labor Union along similar lines, labeling it a “people’s assembly” that “can be characterized as a broad Negro congress encompassing the pressing needs of all strata of the people… in which labor was represented as such and exerted some independent influence” (p. 172).
A central problem running throughout the new Reconstruction governments was the increasing state debt resulting from the transition from an aristocratic state to a democratic one. The new governments required spending taxes for social spending and infrastructural development, which was previously irrelevant during the plantocracy’s rule. In addition, the new governments suffered from prevalent corruption by railroad companies that would secure public expenditure for their own enrichment. The increased taxation and corruption would detract from White support of the Republican Party (Allen Reference Allen1937; Du Bois Reference Du Bois2017).
Along with taxation, Reconstruction governments’ deficits and the dim economic circumstances from the Panic of 1873 threatened the prevailing Republican control over the South, and with it their protection of Black labor. The Democratic Party began to scapegoat Black people as the reason behind Reconstruction’s economic difficulties to garner political support. Allen (Reference Allen1937) stresses the plantocracy’s use of White supremacist language as key to gaining political support from poor White people, as well as utilizing the KKK for intimidating political opponents. Property’s counterrevolution culminated in the Compromise of 1877, where the North ceded political control over the South, inviting the resumption of ruthless, unfettered Black exploitation (Du Bois Reference Du Bois2017).
Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Though their historical outlines were largely similar, Richard Enmale notes in his foreword to Allen’s Reconstruction that the dividing line between Allen’s and Du Bois’s interpretations was in their differing Marxist understandings of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Reference Marx, Engels and Harvey2008) argues that the “first step in the revolution” demands that the proletariat seize and utilize the state as a coercive force to dispossess the bourgeoisie and control production. When detailing the history of the Paris Commune, Marx (Reference Marx2019) stresses the proletariat “as the only class capable of social initiative,” since the proletarian movement was the only one to protect the middle class from exploitative creditors and strike at the capitalist encroachment of peasants’ land.
Influenced by the Marxist theory of the state, Du Bois (Reference Du Bois2017) positioned the “dictatorship of labor” within the North’s military dictatorship over the South. He used the term “abolition-democracy” to signify a coalition of workers and small capitalists that viewed slavery as a grave threat to capitalism. Abolition Democrats supported the democratic integration of Black people as citizens to eliminate this threat.Footnote 6 To protect the freedmen’s democratic integration, abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens advocated for a military dictatorship over the South, repressing the aristocratic planter class. Though Sumner and Stevens were not aware of the consequences of what they were doing, for a brief time, the North militarily backed a government where “poor men were ruling and taxing rich men” (Foner Reference Foner2013, p. 415).
Allen (Reference Allen1937) critiques Du Bois’s use of the term by arguing that bourgeois interests guided the North’s military dictatorship. The goal of the North’s military dictatorship over the South, as mentioned earlier, was to curb the development of slavery and enlarge capitalism. Reconstruction represented the intersection between the freedmen’s demands for emancipation, suffrage, and land redistribution, and the interests of the bourgeoisie in expanding capitalism. However, the bourgeoisie’s support, and therefore the military dictatorship enforcing the government of workers, would dissolve if the freedmen’s demands contradicted their own.
Before Allen’s critique, Du Bois received a letter in 1934 from Benjamin Stolberg criticizing his appropriation of the Marxist concept. Warning that it will put him in “critical difficulties,” Stolberg (Reference Stolberg1934) argues that the purpose of abolition-democracy was not to destroy capitalism but to expand the American Assumption, the belief that capitalism allows workers to move upward through hard work. Du Bois’s interpretation of the concept was wholly divorced from Marx (2008), whose first requirement of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the abolition of private property, nowhere to be found in abolition-democracy. Referencing Stolberg’s critique in a footnote, Du Bois (Reference Du Bois2017) renamed his chapter, “The Dictatorship of the Black Proletariat in South Carolina,” to the title, “The Black Proletariat in South Carolina.” Nevertheless, Du Bois continued to use the language of the “dictatorship of labor” throughout Black Reconstruction, demonstrating he still saw value in the concept.
Cedric Robinson (Reference Robinson2021) argues that the primary difference Du Bois held from preceding Marxist theory was that the revolutionary consciousness develops from the revolution, rather than being its cause. Reconstruction began with a Black consciousness steeped in the American Assumption, yet slowly, “it was beginning to learn; it was beginning to assert itself. It was beginning to have radical thoughts as to the distribution of land and wealth” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois2017, p. 527). The stagist temporality of Stolberg’s and Allen’s critiques freezes the enslaved into a past of false consciousness without regard for their development within Reconstruction’s government. Du Bois reworked the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat to refer not to a moment guided by the consciousness of an enlightened vanguard, but to a more ambiguous moment in which workers suddenly find themselves in power and introduce something new.
The key difference between Du Bois and Allen lay in their approach to the teleological element of history. For Allen, Reconstruction was teleologically insufficient for establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat that would ultimately lead to the endpoint of the state withering away. However, Du Bois’s deployment of Marxism evaded the existence of such ends, refusing “purposive history” (Lemert Reference Lemert2000, p. 244).
To understand how both conceptualized history, Robert Gooding-Williams’ interpretation of beauty in Du Bois’s Darkwater provides a helpful framework. One conception of a beautiful life unfolds through pre-established life events, allowing one to feel fulfilled. There is a similarity to this conception and Marx’s teleology in that the completion of history relies on passing through each necessary teleological stage. In Allen and Haywood’s dialectical materialism, Reconstruction attempted and failed to reach the bourgeois-democratic stage, and the later goal of their Black Belt Thesis was to finish the failed stage.
In contrast, Gooding-Williams (Reference Gooding-Williams2025) reads Du Bois as defining an alternative understanding of completion: “living a fulfilled life, a complete life, requires not that one acquaint oneself with all the significant kinds of experience that life has to offer, but that one brings one’s life to an end that lends it a satisfactory shape” (p. 89). Establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat does not necessitate completing the previous bourgeois-democratic step. Instead, its completion of America’s democratic promise, for all to be free politically and economically, can derive from historically contingent circumstances.
Furthermore, Du Bois considered the contingency of history as beautiful. Gooding-Williams (Reference Gooding-Williams2025) interprets Darkwater as stating that ugliness is an eternal part of life. Rather than this entailing pessimism, it suggests that humans are aware of what to expect and can face it with confidence. In contrast, beauty is marked by its strangeness, allowing the reader to view things in an unforeseen light. Du Bois’s understanding of time refuted the necessity of any pre-established historical stage and invited the reader to consider the beauty of what could not have been predicted. The means that the enslaved and freedmen took to overcome democracy’s contradictions did not come from a necessary dialectical stage, but what they, contingently, had at hand.
The Black Belt Thesis
Allen’s reading of Reconstruction emplotted it into an unfinished revolutionary stage that the present demanded finishing. To finish the bourgeois-democratic revolution, Allen and Haywood turned to Lenin’s concept of self-determination. Self-determination derived from Lenin’s response to Marxist debates around the role of nationalities in revolutionary struggles. Marx called for the dissolution of particular nationalities through a “proletarian internationalism” (Löwy Reference Löwy1976). However, he argued that they could play a progressive role, such as Irish independence, in the transition to communism. Rosa Luxemburg (Reference Luxemburg and Davis1976) drew on Marx’s proletarian internationalism to critique nationality as reactionary, dropping Marx’s recognition of progressive aspects in specific national struggles. Against Luxemburg, Lenin (Reference Lenin2022) returned to Marx’s teleology to argue that proletarian internationalism depends on the formation of equal, independent nationalities: “mankind can achieve the inevitable merging of nations only by passing through the transition period of complete liberation of all the oppressed nations, i.e., their freedom to secede” (p. 140). For Lenin and Luxemburg, imperialism signified an increasingly globalized world that would forge the path for workers around the world to unite. However, for Lenin, proletarian internationalism presupposed national equality to ensure unity. To create equality between nations and nationalities, Lenin argued that they should have the right to secede from larger nations, thereby gaining agency in determining their future.
For self-determination within the CPUSA, the Communist International (Comintern)—an international association of communist parties active from 1919 to 1943—proposed studying the application of Lenin’s writings on the national question at their 1922 Fourth Comintern Congress.Footnote 7 At the 1928 Sixth Comintern Congress, Nikolai Nasanov, Sen Katayama, and Haywood (2012) proposed directly implementing the right to self-determination for African Americans. They suggested that the Black Belt, a continuous area of Southern land with a majority Black population, fulfilled the requirements for a distinct nation with Black people as a separate nationality. The proposal supported the Black Belt’s right to self-determination, ensuring that they could decide whether to secede from the United States or remain within it. The Comintern approved their proposal, instituting the Black Belt Thesis as policy (Haywood Reference Haywood1978)
Self-determination entailed a new, distinctly Black struggle predicated on continuing Reconstruction’s project to establish democracy in the South. At the end of 1927, Haywood met Nasanov, who had just returned from the United States as part of a Young Communist International mission. Nasanov’s observations of the American South led him to view African Americans as “an oppressed nation whose struggle for equality would ultimately take an autonomous direction, and that the content of the Black liberation movement was the completion of the agrarian and democratic revolution in the South, a struggle which was left unresolved by the Civil War and the betrayal of Reconstruction” (Haywood Reference Haywood1978, p. 218). Haywood initially rejected Nasanov’s hypothesis of self-determination for a Black nation because he thought that only a united, pure class struggle could establish socialism. Nasanov and his colleagues defended self-determination to Haywood, claiming he misunderstood how race operates. Racism, when signified as a distraction from class struggle, fell into the “bourgeois liberal trap” of reifying race into a subjective “attitude.” “Slurr[ing] over the economic and social roots of the [Black] question,” articulating race as an attitude failed to grasp its connection to material structures (Haywood Reference Haywood1978, pp. 221-222).
Nasanov’s critique focused on what Charisse Burden-Stelly (Reference Burden-Stelly2023) terms the Structural Location of Blackness: “Born out of racial slavery, the Structural Location of Blackness exceeds the category of race, is not reducible to class, and does not fit the specifications of caste” (Burden-Stelly Reference Burden-Stelly2023, pp. 21-22). In Burden-Stelly’s connection between her concept and the CPUSA’s program of self-determination, she argues that “skin-color” remained superstructural to the particular material conditions in the South that condemned sharecroppers to serfdom. Therefore, Black liberation shifted from simply correcting the subjective attitudes of White workers to substantively altering the social and material structures of the South, which necessitated finishing Reconstruction.
The influence of Nasanov’s critique is evident in Haywood’s understanding of nationality. For Haywood, nationality was not an ahistorical construct that tied a group together, but a dynamic process shaped by material conditions. The beginning of Black people as a nationality derived from the Middle Passage, forcing Black people into concentrated areas, plantations, with separate conditions from White people. The significance of Reconstruction was the possibility of dissolving the concept of Black nationality through economic and political integration. However, the Compromise of 1877 killed this possibility, finalizing African Americans into an oppressed nationality relegated to semi-slave status. Reconstruction’s failure signaled the persistent irreconcilability of Black people into the fabric of American democracy. The White proletariat and bourgeoisie’s betrayal of Reconstruction’s democratic project indicated the necessity of conceiving Black liberation as an independent project from simply democratic integration (Haywood Reference Haywood1978).
Haywood argued that little has changed since the Reconstruction era. Beyond equality, Reconstruction promised to upend the plantation structure by threatening the plantocracy’s control of land across the South. The failure of Reconstruction to alter the plantation-based agricultural structure led to the continuation of antebellum conditions. Sharecropping’s only significant change was the introduction of peonage to replace antebellum models of disciplining labor. The persistence of sharecropping labor arose from the South’s lack of development in the world economy, relegating it to an internal colony providing raw materials (Haywood Reference Haywood1948).
For Haywood (Reference Haywood1948), the first step in realizing self-determination was for Black majority regions to take control over their local governments. Allen (Reference Allen1936) and Haywood cited Reconstruction as evidence for the success of Black self-governance. Still, control over local governments was insufficient alone for Black people’s racial liberation, and its implementation was a precondition for realizing their right to self-determination. Allen argued that fully realizing this right required an agrarian or proletarian revolution that would institute an independent “Negro Republic.” The republic would decide whether to remain in the broader American nation or secede, fully exercising the right to self-determination. The revolution to establish the Black state would come from an interracial coalition between the proletariat and peasantry. The central difference between the 1920s-1940s and Reconstruction was the increasingly revolutionary Black and White proletariat. For Allen, a primary fault of Reconstruction was the leadership of the bourgeoisie in the democratic revolution. However, the increasing Northern Black proletariat, due to the Great Migration, constituted a new presence in the labor movement. The Black proletariat’s participation in the labor movement would lead the broader working class to incorporate the specific needs of Black liberation into the revolutionary program, including the right to self-determination in the South.
However, Allen’s (Reference Allen1936) and Haywood’s (Reference Haywood1948) arguments were unclear regarding the demands of self-determination in relation to the immediate problems facing Black people. By presupposing interracial revolution, even citing the Soviet Union as their precedent for the success of the right to self-determination, their approach revolved around circular logic. If Black people could gain the solidarity of White people to include the right to self-determination as part of their revolutionary program, then it is unclear why simply integration would not be preferable. Their approach additionally did not offer a new perspective on how to create interracial solidarity from preceding class-reductionist approaches. They also failed to address the possibility that a proletarian or agrarian revolution could reproduce anti-Blackness rather than upend it, nullifying Black people’s ability to construct an independent state.
The theoretical confusion surrounding the relevance of the Black Belt Thesis and its application resulted in the policy lacking a coherent approach. At the sixth Comintern Congress, self-determination never found strong support among Americans apart from Haywood (Tomek Reference Tomek2012). The event did energize the CPUSA’s attention to Black people, though little of the ensuing work could be directly linked to actualizing the Black Belt Thesis (Campbell Reference Campbell1994). Erik McDuffie (Reference McDuffie2011) notes how Black communist women utilized the party’s position on self-determination to advocate for community organizing efforts, such as the Harlem Tenants League, but these efforts did not intrinsically demand creating a Black republic.
The thesis was crucial for the CPUSA’s praxis in the South, which included help in establishing the Southern Sharecroppers’ Union, creating the newspaper The Southern Worker, and sending organizers (Allen Reference Allen2001; Burden-Stelly Reference Burden-Stelly2023; Johnson Reference Johnson2011). Allen, active in Southern organizing, claimed that the slogan of self-determination did not interest Southern sharecroppers. Their predominant concern was with how Southern organizers would change their day-to-day lives. The League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR) (1933), an organization focused on the struggle for self-determination, argued that fighting for improving sharecroppers’ conditions would ultimately unite and empower the Black Belt until it could institute a revolution and form a Black republic. Still, the Black Belt Thesis seemed contingent on a distant future that had little relevance and impact on the current conditions of the South. The confusion surrounding the thesis ultimately led to the party replacing it with “centrality,” the belief that race played a central role in all the party’s activities. Centrality retained the practical effects of self-determination without the confusing program, ending the Black Belt Thesis’s chapter for the CPUSA (Allen Reference Allen2001).
The failure of the Black Belt Thesis partially stemmed from its reliance on a strict Marxist teleology. The theoretical need to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the South did not adequately respond to how Black people could directly struggle against Jim Crow. While the national question offered a unique model of analysis that incorporated the structural oppression of Black people, Allen’s and Haywood’s reliance on a proletarian revolution rendered it similar to prevailing class-reductionist approaches. The burden of finishing Reconstruction’s revolution prevented the project from confronting the distinct, present circumstances of Black people, a direction that Du Bois’s alternative temporality avoids.
Du Bois’s Cooperatives
Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1933) argued against the CPUSA’s belief in an interracial revolution in his 1933 Crisis article “The Right to Work.” He claimed that their racial politics position Black people as “shock troops” for a revolution that will not change their place in society. Due to being antagonized across White class lines, Du Bois concluded, “we cannot use the power of a state because we do not form a state, we cannot dictate as a proletariat because we are a minority” (Reference Du Bois1933, p. 93). For him, Black people were not in a position to establish another dictatorship of the proletariat, separating them from a Leninist revolution.
Du Bois even remained skeptical of politics as a dependable path forward. In his unpublished manuscript, “Negro and Social Reconstruction,” he argued that Reconstruction demonstrated that gaining political equality before economic security was “putting the cart before the horse.” Political power alone was unstable, and “ownership of land, control of some capital and education” must secure it (1936, p. 9). To recall Reconstruction’s failure, Black people’s weak economic position rendered them vulnerable to being a scapegoat for the political unification of Northern capitalists and Southern landowners. He does not discount political struggle, but one first needs the “basis of economic security that allows one to fight” (Reference Du Bois1936, p. 89). If Black people were to attempt another political reconstruction, they needed to institute a social reconstruction first.
Du Bois’s skepticism toward politics resulted in his departure from the NAACP. At the onset of the Great Depression in 1930, decreasing funds caused the NAACP to begin to view Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, as a liability (Marable Reference Marable2004). In addition, the NAACP grew increasingly critical of Du Bois’s insistence on building self-segregated economic institutions for Black people to mitigate the effects of the Great Depression. In 1934, Du Bois published a section of his Crisis postscript defending segregation; he argued that nothing was wrong with Black people creating their own institutions and cooperating together, yet this did not entail a justification for Black people’s unequal treatment by the nation (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1934). The importance of segregation was creating economically autonomous networks that did not have to rely on a racially discriminatory New Deal program to survive and develop (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1936). For Du Bois, White racism was not going to disappear for quite some time, and Black people needed to develop self-segregated institutions so they could immediately survive the Great Depression (Ikuta Reference Ikuta2024).
Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1936) utilized cooperatives to outline a program that would establish a limited form of economic control crucial to the development of Black communities. Black people’s collective power as consumers would play a significant role in his project:
[…] we should remember that the American Negro numbers about 12,000,000 and thus we are much larger than either Denmark, Greece, Hungary… This surely indicates that we must have great economic power. This power is curtailed by the fact that we have no decisive economic place in production or transportation, in commerce or credit, or in government; we sell our labor and farm produce at prices determined by a market in which we have little influence (p. 73).
Black people’s agency to decide where to spend their nation’s worth of capital would contribute to the development of Black communities. One direct effect of his program was to combat Black people’s disproportionately high unemployment levels. Black people could “confine [their] patronage to such retail stores as employ colored people and treat colored customers with honesty and courtesy” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1936, p. 74). He actively encouraged movements, such as the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign, that used Black people’s economic power of consumption to protest White businesses that refused Black employment (Singh Reference Singh2004). By insulating consumption through these movements, Black people would be able to increase their employment and raise wages, “without antagonism to the white group, without any essential change of law and without a national organization involving army and police” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1936, p. 76). Cooperatives signaled an alternative path to Black liberation from revolution.
As mentioned, Allen and Haywood dismissed Du Bois’s program as petty-bourgeois nationalism. Haywood would critique the “Jobs for Negroes” movement, similar to the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign, for dividing the Black and White working classes and empowering the Black petit bourgeoisie. At the heart of Haywood’s critique was a distrust toward “the segregated ghetto economy” as a forum for Black liberation. Liberation could not come from Black capitalism, and the campaign failed to grasp the centrality of class struggle.
Du Bois explicitly organized his cooperative project to counter the belief that Black capitalism was liberatory. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois critiqued the predominant understanding of the American Assumption, the capitalist notion that Americans had to pull themselves by their bootstraps, for justifying opposition to necessary land reform against the preceding plantations. His critique recognized that Black people’s freedom depended on fulfilling the interests of workers, rather than engulfing them into a fictitious socio-economic ladder. Larry Svabek (Reference Svabek2025) argues that in the 1933 Rosenwald conference, Du Bois connected his critiques of the American Assumption, in Black Reconstruction, to his theory of cooperatives by asserting that cooperation displaced the profit motive as the goal of production.
In the resolution of his 1907 Atlanta University study “Economic Co-operation Among Negroes,” Du Bois warned against a “crisis” in which Black businessmen were turning to individualism and profit. He worries that this will lead to economic structures that rely on “prey[ing] upon the ignorance and simplicity of the mass of the race and get[ing] wealth at the expense of the general well-being” (Reference Du Bois1907, p. 4). Against this tendency, Du Bois turns to publishing history of economic cooperation among Black people, highlighting “group cooperation” that ensures a “wide ownership of small capital” against “great riches amongst the few” to convince Black people that the profit motive was not the only path forward for them (Reference Du Bois1907, p. 4). Du Bois hoped that this would inspire them to continue a non-capitalist tradition by creating ventures of their own.
One example from the study was early enslaved insurance networks that would involve a small group illegally pooling money together to assist in healthcare or burials. Another example, close to Du Bois’s time of writing, was the Farmers’ Improvement Society of Texas. With around ten thousand members, the society aimed to “fight the credit or mortgage system, which is the Negro’s second slavery” through cooperative ownership (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1907, p. 173). They additionally held agricultural fairs and lectures for improving agricultural techniques, operated an encompassing insurance program, and created an Agricultural and Industrial College. During Reconstruction, he noted that multiple cooperative stores opened in Baltimore and achieved initial success. Although they failed, he labeled their central issues, lack of capital, and untrained management as remediable in future efforts.
Another case study from Reconstruction was Davis Bend, Mississippi, a plantation seized by the Freedmen’s Bureau and distributed to the freedmen for their relatively autonomous self-government (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1907). In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois (Reference Du Bois2017) revisited this case study and argued that, “private interests were displaced and an interesting socialistic effort made with all the property under the control of the government” (p. 63). In his 1937 series of Pittsburgh Courier articles outlining the history of Black cooperatives to prove their viability, similar to his Atlanta Study thirty years prior, he would return to Davis Bend as exemplifying an “economic reconstruction… for the benefit of masses by the widest democratic control” through the residents collectively working farms (Du Bois Reference Du Bois and Aptheker1986, p. 211). By providing various examples of Black economic cooperation from a wide range of political contexts, Du Bois detached the concept from presupposing a fixed political structure. Therefore, continuing the spirit of Reconstruction’s abolition-democracy did not require reviving the political Reconstruction project.
Thomas Holt argues that Du Bois’s reading of Reconstruction not only relayed examples of economic cooperation but presupposed it. Witnessing the success of the 1906 Lowndes County, Alabama, cooperative during a survey, Holt (Reference Holt2013) argues that Du Bois likely gained the vision of seeing “men and women of initiative, fully capable of mobilizing and organizing indigenous organizations to meet their needs—and fully independent of white control” (p. 429). Holt argues that this would provide the foundation for Du Bois’s vision of Black people’s participation in abolition-democracy in Black Reconstruction. Footnote 8 Cooperatives and Reconstruction played a significant role in helping Du Bois and his audience envision a world not driven by the profit motive, and a future where workers can govern for the benefit of all. By highlighting the persistence of economic cooperation throughout Black history, Du Bois sought to encourage its resurgence in his present.
Curtis J. Haynes (Reference Haynes1993, Reference Haynes, Carson, Horne and Sinitiere2020) critiqued the notion of economic cooperation in Du Bois’s Reference Du Bois1907 work for including Black businessmen as philanthropists who could use capitalist accumulation for ethical ends. Haynes (Reference Haynes1993) argues that Du Bois’s later embrace of James Warbasse’s cooperative democracy shifted his perspective, supplementing the tradition of economic cooperation with a structure of democratic oversight to prevent private accumulation at the expense of others. In 1918, Du Bois published Warbasse’s Crisis article “The Theory of Cooperation.” In it, Warbasse grounds cooperation as a democratic process:
The basis of such an organization must be democratic. The necessary share-capital must be raised, preferably by the one-member-one-share principle. One member, one vote; interest not above the current or legal rate; and returns to members based on the volume of purchases which each member makes, are the essentials of success (Reference Warbasse1918, p. 222).Footnote 9
Consumers were able to collectively participate in how the business was run, and profits would be rebated to consumers rather than divided among private shareholders. Cooperatives would ultimately have to rely on an educated leadership governing businesses, but the democratic structure ensured that this leadership would be overseen by the Black public (DeMarco Reference DeMarco1983). Through democracy, Black cooperatives were able to structurally replace the profit motive with a focus on community betterment.
Du Bois’s model of cooperative democracy was fundamental to his vision of creating an “economic nation within a nation” that is capable of replacing a White economy bent on Black exploitation with one democratically run by Black people for their development (Reference Du Bois1935). To achieve this, Du Bois first advocated for the formation of small retail cooperatives through selling shares to the local community. Next, the cooperative would federate with others to create a wholesale society that could negotiate more effectively with the White economy. The expansion of democratic cooperatives would lead the way to a planned economy where the Black public would oversee production (DeMarco Reference DeMarco1983; Du Bois Reference Du Bois, Gates and Bogle2007; Haynes Reference Haynes, Carson, Horne and Sinitiere2020).
In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois (Reference Du Bois2017) describes how, after gaining land from the Union in the Sea Islands, SC, Black people, “instead of producing solely for export, [were] producing to consume” (p. 66). By linking production to consumption, the freedmen were able to work less, have “more time for self-expression,” and raise their standard of living (p. 66). Du Bois’s cooperative democracy proposed an economy centered on Black consumers, envisioning a new economic and political structure that prioritized the people as the heart of production.
Through the formation of a “cooperative commonwealth,” Black people would be able to, albeit in a limited manner, replicate the self-government found during Reconstruction (Du Bois Reference Du Bois, Gates and Bogle2007, p. 109). Cooperatives would allow consumers to have power over “public service agencies, like telegraph, telephone, electric power, railroads and the like” for the “employment of colored people and greater courtesy and consideration in the treatment of colored customers” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1936, p. 74). Placing the public sector under cooperative governance allowed Black people to participate in governmental functions, such as budget allocations and managing local services, through democratic deliberation. James Warbasse argued that the institution of cooperatives would lead to a “fading state” since cooperatives would replace the state’s previous operations (Warbasse Reference Warbasse1923).
One of the most important public sector operations that Black people could control was education. For Du Bois (Reference Du Bois, Gates and Bogle2007), Black people faced exploitative local taxes that went to schools they were not allowed into and did not sufficiently invest in the schools where they were allowed. Cooperatives could improve pedagogical conditions through careful planning and a central focus on cultivating an educated Black population. As Jessica Nembhard (Reference Nembhard2014) explains, the increase in education would play a vital role in the development of further cooperatives: “Du Bois’s concepts of ‘intelligent cooperation’ and ‘intelligent democratic control’ in economic leaders and institutions depend heavily on public information and member education and training” (p. 86). In addition to better structuring cooperatives economically, greater education would cultivate a citizenry that would be crucial to the democratic integration of Black people.
In his 1946 “Winds of Time,” Du Bois argued that creating cooperatives would express the core of democracy:
the carrying out of the consumers cooperatives can lead us into a knowledge of what political democracy really is. We long tried to envisage a modern democracy as mainly political; it is not. So far as it succeeds and where it succeeds, it is and must be economic (p. 2).
In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois (Reference Du Bois2017) claimed that the “kernel of the problem of Religion and Democracy, of Humanity” is failing to recognize that “the emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and Black” (pp. 12-13). The introduction of abolition-democracy was not simply the granting of abstract political rights to the freedmen but creating a mode of government where workers were able to secure their economic liberation. With the path of political reconstruction seeming near impossible, Du Bois turned to creating cooperatives with the little resources Black people had: their purchasing power. Through their power, aggregated to the size of an entire nation, he imagined recreating Reconstruction’s promise of emancipation through an alternative direction.
Similar to self-determination, Du Bois’s cooperative vision was never fully realized. In 1918, Du Bois participated in the formation of the “Negro Co-operative Guild,” an organization to study and help organize Black cooperatives. The guild assisted with the founding of several cooperatives; however, they would soon end due to competition or state intervention. Du Bois faulted the cooperatives’ failure on insufficient education and a lack of preparatory work. Still, in his 1940 Dusk of Dawn, he saw the project as “fundamental and prophetic,” concluding that they “must and will be revived” (Reference Du Bois, Gates and Bogle2007, p. 140). Nevertheless, according to Nembhard (Reference Nembhard2014), the guild was never revived, and research indicates that he did not directly attempt to institute cooperatives again.
During his 1937 Pittsburgh Courier series of articles on cooperatives, he received a question from a reader about why he was not applying his cooperative theory, and he responded with:
The man who thinks and talks is not called upon to do anything. If, of course, once in a blue moon the Planner and the Doer are one, they may work in unison; which usually results in the disappearance of one or the other. The Executive dreams and the Dreamer dies. But one thing I can do, and that is to intimate what some other people are doing (Reference Du Bois and Aptheker1986, p. 231).
He followed his response with a detailed account of a cooperative attempt in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and a significant portion of his editorial series was devoted to summarizing previous cooperative attempts. For Du Bois, his role in cooperatives was to reconcile Black history, including Reconstruction, with the social and political possibilities of his present. How people implemented his suggestions was outside of his grasp.
Still, there were internal tensions in Du Bois’s theory. A significant challenge, complementing Allen and Haywood’s critiques, was consumer cooperatives’ inability to challenge preceding economic inequalities, ultimately reproducing capitalist exploitation. As Haynes (Reference Haynes1993) and Bernard Harcourt (Reference Harcourt2023) describe, wealthy consumers could own more shares, thereby increasing their decision-making power within the firm. Moreover, Haynes (Reference Haynes1993) critiques Du Bois’s failure to address how cooperatives could compete with large corporations.
One of the most significant theoretical faults in Du Bois’s cooperative theory was his aforementioned argument that establishing cooperatives would avoid posing a threat, in contrast to political forms of resistance. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black residents from the Greenwood District, also known as “Black Wall Street,” achieved relative financial success due to segregation creating a closed Black economy. Their relative economic well-being proved Du Bois’s thesis of internal consumption, with “each dollar circulated in the community as many as thirty times before being spent outside” playing a significant role in their success (Lewis Reference Lewis2022, p. 13). However, in 1921, a White mob burned down the district due to accusations of a Black resident attacking a White girl. Jovan Scott Lewis (Reference Lewis2022) explains the violence as White people fundamentally restoring the White supremacist racial order.
Parallels to Tulsa are evident in Du Bois’s 1911 The Quest of the Silver Fleece. The penultimate chapter depicts a mob burning down the school at the center of the cooperative out of hatred from the sight of White and Black children playing together. Strangely, the final chapter does not address how the community recovered from the burning or sought to prevent future acts of violence. The absence of the mob’s aftermath continues onto Du Bois’s general cooperative theory through a lack of accounting for how successful cooperatives could survive Jim Crow violence (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1969).
Allen and Haywood’s Marxist-Leninist stagist approach critiques the possibility of establishing cooperatives peacefully. In his analysis of France’s 1848 revolution, Marx (Reference Marx2019) critiqued the Louis Blanc-led “party of Anarchy’s” conception of a “peaceful implementation of their socialism,” instead maintaining the necessity for an intermediary class dictatorship that could realize their goals (p. 456). Lenin (Reference Lenin1923) praised cooperatives as part of the Soviet Union’s New Economic Policy, but, while Du Bois (Reference Du Bois and Aptheker1986) references Soviet cooperatives as evidence for his theory, Lenin argues that their development presupposed workers’ control over the means of production through a political revolution.
Black people’s particular conditions, in the 1920s to 1940s, distanced them from Marx’s or Lenin’s theorizations on revolution, and a new framework was necessary for confronting Black people’s political reality. Still, a benefit from Haywood and Allen’s strict stagist account was recognizing the political and material limits of an epoch. They recognized that without a base level of interracial worker solidarity and a revolution against capitalists, attempting to create an independent Black republic would be untenable. While they believed that racial liberation was irreducible to class liberation, they recognized the need to organize the Black and White working classes together. However, the dismal possibility of such an interracial solidarity and the use of a Black republic after an interracial revolution led their theory into a confusing position. Du Bois attempted to circumvent the revolutionary question and its corresponding problems by working within the confines of segregation. Still, the unaddressed examples of Black Wall Street and The Quest of the Silver Fleece complicate whether the development of his cooperatives could truly avoid repressive violence.
The question of violence played a key role during Reconstruction. Briefly, Black workers possessed a monopoly of violence through the North’s military dictatorship over the South. Under protection, Black people saw the proliferation of governmental and civil society institutions that inspired Du Bois, Allen, and Haywood. The thinkers responded to the absence of North’s military dictatorships in various ways, and their solutions ultimately collapsed. Their failure represents less their theoretical inadequacy but more the sheer difficulty of the task facing them.
Conclusion
Reading Haywood’s, Allen’s, and Du Bois’s theorization of Reconstruction helps to understand the unique challenges that these thinkers faced during Jim Crow in conceptualizing race and democracy. Today, the narrative of integration is intrinsic to democracy. Racism led to segregation between Black and White people, and the Civil Rights Movement led to an integrated democracy. Viewing Reconstruction’s success and failure, Haywood, Allen, and Du Bois held differing perspectives on the relationship between Black people, integration, and democracy. Reconstruction oversaw Black people’s democratic integration; however, the short-lived nature of their integration revealed the necessity of creating an autonomous structure, whether it be an independent Black republic or self-segregating cooperatives, to supplement their struggle for freedom.
The Black Belt Thesis aimed to remedy Reconstruction’s failure by promoting the formation of a Black proletariat that could assist in creating an interracial, revolutionary proletariat. This proletariat could bring about a revolution that would politically empower the Black Belt, resulting in the region collectively deciding whether to remain in the US or secede. Du Bois, disillusioned with the prospect of such a revolution, attempted to create a form of democracy within the confines of segregation by concentrating Black capital. By utilizing their collective purchasing power, Black people could democratically cooperate on their internal development, which would be crucial to economic survival during the Great Depression and the creation of an alternative society that did not revolve around the profit motive. However, Du Bois’s cooperative theory left unaddressed how consumer cooperatives could struggle against pre-existing material inequalities, compete in the capitalist economy, and confront the reality of Jim Crow violence.
Evaluating Haywood and Allen’s Black Belt Thesis and Du Bois’s self-segregated cooperatives is difficult since neither came into fruition. Nevertheless, their thought exhibited creative approaches to a stark political reality. They drew on the history of Reconstruction to envision Black democracy, and their differing hermeneutical engagements with the past led to alternative ways to consider their present. In our dim political moment, marked by fascism and the increasing normalization of anti-Blackness, their approaches to Reconstruction and history raise valuable questions around analyzing the immediate forms of resistance and attempting to create broader theories around it, as well as recognizing certain political-economic barriers to political maneuvers. While the Civil Rights Movement and integration cause us to encounter a different present than theirs, sitting with their unique conception of the past, present, and future, and its political consequences, can be valuable to confronting our own.
Acknowledgments
This article originated from my Master’s dissertation at the University of Chicago. Thank you to Adom Getachew and Max Benjamin Smith for their supervision and assistance in crafting the paper. Additional thanks to James Wilson, Angus Harwood Brown, Maxime Zigrand, Tsing Ngia, Chris Dakich, Aya Elsehaimy, and my Master’s “Perspectives” cohort for their feedback on earlier versions. Lastly, thank you to the editors and staff at the Du Bois Review as well as my anonymous reviewers for all their hard work.
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