Drawing on the work of Anupama Roa, Allison Powers writes-
Both Du Bois and Ambedkar deploy historical narratives and political concepts to demonstrate that a system of inequality made to seem purely social is both historically constituted and politically performed.
This is nonsense. Neither suggested that the difference between men and women was historically constituted or politically performed. It was a different matter than political or economic rights and entitlements might change for political or historical reasons. However, some social inequalities- e.g. between men and women, babies and adults, the disabled or very elderly and the rest of the population- are biological.
Both suggest a need to access political universals through the forms of embodied contradiction that challenge the foundational assumptions and limits of such politics, as Rao has demonstrated in The Caste Question.
Neither did so. Du Bois thought that African Americans must lift themselves up through education and an altruistic devotion to each other. Ambedkar hoped the Brits would stick around so he and his people could ally with the Muslim League against Gandhi & Nehru's Congress party. Neither of them gassed on about 'political universals'. Also, since neither was a Hegelian Marxist, they did not mention 'contradictions' or dialectical Historical processes.
And each suggests that only through the “politicization of the political”
which is what happens when you engage in politics by endorsing one candidate and attacking another on the basis of their political ideology or program.
can the implicit and illicit limits of political concepts masquerading (indeed, operating) as universals be exposed and undone.
Exposing your genitals causes them to be 'undone' and to fall away from your body. Sadly, political concepts don't masquerade or operate as 'universals' because they have are ideographic and context dependent. When the American founding fathers demanded freedom, they meant freedom for themselves, not their slaves.
Just as Ambedkar focuses on exposing caste as a product of the violence of “illegal law,”
he doesn't do anything quite so foolish. The plain fact is Indian law, as administered by the Brits, prohibited even Nehru's sister's marriage to a non-Brahmin. Ambedkar's own marriage to a Brahmin would have been illegal under prevailing law. It is a different matter that the law was not enforced. Incidentally, the British decision to stop recruiting Mahars was perfectly legal.
Du Bois proposes a kind of lawless legality or legal lawlessness that emerges in the South after Reconstruction.
such lawlessness emerged at the time of the Revolution. General Dunmore formed an 'Ethiopian regiment' composed of Blacks who gained emancipation thereby. But the Americans were able to throw off the shackles of British law.
He insists that the force of law was integral to the success or failure of the project of Reconstruction, that the freedmen needed “the protection of the law; and back of the law must stand physical force.”
In other words, only Federal troops could enforce de-segregation. However, Plessey v Alabama (1883) suggested this would not be constitutional even if the North was willing to fight another Civil War.
But what emerged instead in the South was a situation of “general lawlessness” (556), encouraged by planters and capitalists invested in the failure of democracy and producing a situation in which “white people paid no attention to their own laws. White men became a law unto themselves”.
Those White men thought the laws imposed by the Federal Government were themselves unconstitutional and illegal. This did not mean that the Whites respected no law concerning their own transactions- though, it must be said, there were feuds like that between the Hatfields and McCoys.
Although the overthrow of Reconstruction “had to be carried out in open defiance of the clear letter of law”,
just like the American Revolution
this defiance was then concealed under the guise of formal equality and democratic constitutionalism.
Sodomy was against the law. Yet many concealed their defiance of it.
As “a lawlessness which, in 1865 – 1868, was still spasmodic and episodic now became organized, and its real underlying industrial causes obscured by political excuses and race hatred,” Du Bois writes, quoting from Duncan Milner’s The Original Ku Klux Klan and Its Successor (1921), “a new generation was conceived and born to the South of both races that was literally conceived in lawlessness, and born into crime- producing conditions. Lawlessness was its inheritance, and the red splotch of violence its birthmark”.
Also some of those Southern dudes were engaging in sodomy. Why does Du Bois not mention the white jizz dripping from various anuses?
The resonances between Du Bois’s and Ambedkar’s theories of constitutionalism and modes of political critique are striking.
I suppose you might say neither put much faith in 'constitutionalism'. Both knew that their own people could only rise up through education, enterprise and collective action to secure more political power.
But whereas Ambedkar transforms Dalit from a negative political category into a positive juridical basis through which to stage collective rights,
This had already happened. Some Princely States and Madras Presidency had introduced affirmative action before Ambedkar returned to India. The 1935 Act, pushed through by the Tories, excluded Christian Dalits but extended affirmative action to both Hindu and Muslim Dalits. Ambedkar stripped the latter of such rights. He was only concerned with his own people.
Du Bois demonstrates the process by which the positive political category of citizenship has been emptied of its content by a mode of constitutionalism that produces the black citizen as a negative political subject capable of representation but ineligible for political rights or participation.
Du Bois was not a lawyer and thus could do no such thing. The fact is, African Americans were citizens whereas most First Nations people were not. It was only in 1924 that Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship act.
Du Bois contends that modern racialized capitalism is sustained by a mode of constitutionalism that conceals a violently enforced caste system.
No. Du Bois wasn't stupid. He knew that segregation didn't conceal shit. Railways had started segregating coaches when he was a teenager.
But the Constitution fetish conceals this reality through a continual process of transubstantiation in which corresponding ictions of race doctrine and equal opportunity are phantasmagorically made to appear as though they are the products of reason and natural law.
The 'Constitution fetish' of America is 'Dual Sovereignty'. The Civil War showed it didn't have any magical power. But the North didn't greatly care about 'red-skins' or darkies of Chinks or Mexicans.
Black Reconstruction suggests that American constitutionalism’s rendering of the social qua race war
there was a Civil War. There was no 'social' or 'race' or 'homo vs hetero' war.
as a realm private from law and the new imperialism’s legal staging of the anthropological as prior to law operate as mutually constitutive legal modes that circumscribe the limits to the political in the service of capital.
Did you know that the millions who died or were displaced by India's partition were the victims of Capitalism? Atlee was a well known Merchant Banker. The official name of the Labor Party is 'Party for the fucking over of Laborers and other such low class folk'.
The problem of lawless legality then must be addressed through
ahistorical history or just talking bollocks
the historical registers that operate as the foundations for the working of legal precedent.
Legal precedents give a summary of the pertinent facts of the case. But they don't reflect all the various historical factors which may have shaped the decision. It is up to the Bench to decide how to interpret such precedents.
Conclusion Black Reconstruction’s dialectics of historical truth
don't fucking exist. We have polemics, not dialectics.
are inextricably bound up in forms of historical evidence. Du Bois had to address the concealment of history
by whom? D.W Griffiths portraying the Ku Klux Klan as the saviors of Southern Chivalry? There was no concealment. There was boasting.
at the material level, given that most of the archival records from Reconstruction had been purposely destroyed by “Redeemers” intent on characterizing the decade between 1866 and 1876 in terms of “race war,” destined by natural law to fail, and any remaining records were largely inaccessible to him in the Jim Crow South.
In 'Gone with the Wind' we could see the corrupt Black official in cahoots with the 'carpet-baggers'. The film left one in no doubt who would prevail.
By reading the few primary records that he was able to access with and against the historiography of “Redemption,” Du Bois directs his dialectics
polemics. It was obvious that Blacks hadn't the economic and social power to defend their gains. That is why African Americans must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Ambedkar may have hoped the Brits would stick around. Blacks in America must not be so foolish as to think the Emperor of Ethiopia or Uncle Joe Stalin would send troops to vanquish their oppressors. On the other hand, homosexuals were welcome to look to the Queen of Sweden for aid and comfort. This is because the Swedish Queen had a very big dick. I once saw a movie on this theme. It put me off IKEA meatballs for good.
toward a critical reading of soicial history as the reified artifact of early twentieth- century capitalism.
Both Ambedkar and Du Bois saw Capitalism as offering liberation to their people. Sadly neither mentioned the theory of price/wage/service provision discrimination. BTW, Abba Lerner tried to convert Trotsky to marginalism. Apparently, a South African communist in Moscow in the early Thirties converted to this creed. Sadly, he died of liver failure before Stalin could suitably re-educate him in a Gulag. (I should explain, if 'marginal cost pricing' were enforced, then there would be no discrimination or 'market segmentation' on the basis of 'difficult to disguise' public signals' like gender or race.)
Beneath the vague and illusory historical causality of “race relations,” Du Bois recovers the hidden history of a Reconstruction characterized by political and economic experimentation in which true democracy was for the first time made possible in the United States
No. True democracy is about the majority getting their way. In the South, this had to do with Jim Crow. Charles Houston, the first special counsel for NAACP, played a big role in killing of that evil entity. Thurgood Marshall was his disciple. Houston saw that 'education' was not a panacea (though he served as Dean of Howard Uni.) You need a prosperous Black middle class able to support Black lawyers as well as Accountants, Actuaries etc. in order to use the law to enforce the law- or, indeed, to change it.
— as well as the ways a global system of racialized labor exploitation emerged out of the ruins of that experiment.
Fuck off! Transatlantic slavery was itself an example of 'global' racialized labor exploitation. It predated Reconstruction by many centuries. It was only during the Great War that the US became a net capital exporter.
Du Bois’s dialectic then reveals how concepts and categories, evidence and proof, are formed in and through the speciifc conigurations of history that serve as the basis from which such concepts and categories can be made actionable.
No. He wrote in a hysterical vein. But that was okay because younger men and women were better placed to carry forward the struggle.
His narrative offers insight into not only the historical contingency of all social forms, but also the ways in which modes of historicism produce and naturalize forms of social evidence.
No. Du Bois was looking backward to a time when he himself was young. Reconstruction had been a false dawn. Booker T Washington had risen to the challenge. He founded the Negro Business League. Du Bois, as a romantic type of intellectual, was going in the other direction. He would end up a citizen of Ghana and a member of the Communist party.
Although Du Bois deploys Marxian methods and identifies liberal goals for America’s political economy, he also critiques the a priori of universalism on which both liberalism and Marxism are founded.
But both were founded upon the 'Natural' superiority of Nordics. Kant was as racist as fuck. Marx actually became less so in London.
He suggests throughout Black Reconstruction that modes of misrecognition premised on the doctrine of race emerge part and parcel with concepts of the universal that have been actualized through the governance of diference.
He may suggest that to shitheads, but then anything at all will suggest shit to those with lots of shit inside their heads.
The fact is, it was Anna Cooper, who was born into slavery and who did her PhD on the Haitian revolution at at the Sorbonne in the nineteen twenties, who suggested to Du Bois that he challenge the view of 'the Dunning school' of Southern Historians (including President Wilson) who insisted Reconstruction had brough no benefits to anyone. Sadly, Du Bois was no longer capable of serious scholarship. He never completed his proposed account of Blacks in the Army during the Great War. That would have been very helpful.
If the dogma of racial diference is “simply the modern and American residue of a universal belief that most men are sub- normal and that civilization is the gift of the Chosen few,” then the problem might lie in aspirations to universalism as such.
Nobody had any such aspirations. It is not the case that men want to chop off their dicks so as to be more equal to women or so that a 'non-binary' universal cover the whole human race.
But Du Bois insists that it need not be so, that (I repeat), This whole phantasmagoria has been built on the most miserable of human ictions: that in addition to the manifest diferences between men there is a deep, awful and ineradicable cleft which condemns most men to eternal degradation.
Did you know that almost all men are unable to give birth or to breast feed? How is that fair?
It is a cheap inheritance of the world’s infancy, unworthy of grown folk. My rise does not involve your fall; no superior has interest in inferiority. Humanity is one and its vast variety is its glory and not its condemnation. The potential of man to operate as political universal is foreclosed by a human fiction: a foundational fiction concerning the hierarchical nature of humanity.
Why are babies not allowed to determine the bed-times of their parents? How is that fair?
By critiquing the humanitarian mode of humanism that undid the abolition- democracy as too metaphysical a ground on which to sustain an opening for democratic participation in politics, Du Bois enacts an antifoundational humanism.
Nope. He writes in a typically Socialist vein. Was there a 'general strike' of slaves? No. Blacks did desert the plantations for wage labor with the Union army and, at a later point, many White Southerners deserted. But this was the inevitable result of the North's superior economic and military power. Had there been large scale land redistribution to ex-slaves, the Blacks may have been able to hold their own. The problem, however, was that the terms of trade would move against primary producers. Also sub-division of land would lead to Malthusian involution. The plain fact is the American Left knew very well that there could be no return to a Jeffersonian Republic of peasant proprietors. Industrialization was the only way forward.
This humanism demands that universal man not act as a moral foundation but emerge instead through a mode of mutual recognition made possible through, rather than in spite of, embodied forms of contradiction.
In other words, it is stupid shit. If I am hit by a bus, I want a nice humanitarian person to come and help me and get me to the hospital. I don't want to be recognized as an equal by a shithead who then gasses on about the plight of the proletariat in Paraguay.
How then, Black Reconstruction asks, might we arrive at such a conception of man and humanity as the grounds for politics?
Tell lies.
Perhaps, Du Bois suggests, through attention to the ways in which tragedy functions as historical form.
It doesn't. I often used to inquire from my Greek girl-friend, how my pal Agamemnon was doing. She told me his wife killed him. I decided to return the engagement ring I had just bought. Thus the lady escaped a tragic outcome.
References to Greek political aesthetics recur throughout the narrative of Black Reconstruction. The splendid failure of Reconstruction was, Du Bois tells us, “a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution.”
The Civil War was a mighty upheaval. Reconstruction was a whimper without a bang.
And “yet we are blind and led by the blind,” because we cannot recognize it as such.
Sure we can. Even if the Blacks had been given '40 acres and a mule', they would soon have ended up working for big farmers with scope and scale economies. The White sharecropper in the South was little better off than his Black neighbor. By the early 1930s, there were 5.5 million white tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and mixed cropping/laborers in the United States; and 3 million Blacks. Du Bois & Co. had to pretend to care about the whole bunch of them- but they didn't really. Still, we are willing to believe that a Black man might feel strongly about Black slavery and so he is welcome to whine about it.
Du Bois evokes the specter of tragedy throughout the text, continuing on to state that “like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture”.
Bullshit. Henry Ford and the Du Ponts and so forth were as rich as fuck. They didn't bother with 'cheap colored labor'. They wanted smart guys who understood Physics and Chemistry and so forth.
He quotes Stevens, characterizing the mandate of the federal government to guard the rights of the poor and downtrodden as “the eternal labor of Sisyphus, forever to be renewed”.
Back then, that's how Collidge Professors were supposed to talk. Now, of course, they need to say 'the invagination of the catachresis of the Neo-Liberal Sublime called me a lesbian whore. I demand that President Biden has immediate gender reassignment surgery preferably under the scalpel of a homeless disabled Palestinian cat.'
Du Bois’s account of the tragic movement “Back toward Slavery” likewise begins with his account of “how civil war in the South began again — indeed had never ceased; and how black Prometheus bound to the Rock of Ages by hate, hurt and humiliation, has his vitals eaten out as they grow, yet lives and fights”.
Meanwhile, his brother Epimetheus had fucked off to a retirement condominium in Florida.
What is Du Bois doing with these references?
Showing he was edumicated. Y'all white folks thinks us darkies don't know our Aeschylus from a hole in the ground.
Nemesis, Sisyphus,
I had a mate who got sisyphus from a toilet seat
and Prometheus evoke of course the privileged place of Greece in genealogies of political democracy.
Not Indian democracy. On the other hand, there were actual Indo-Greek Kings.
But they also serve as myths, much, perhaps, like the myth of the doctrine of race as tragedy can function as a mode of historical misrecognition with material efects.
Anything at all can serve as a myth. I should know. It was my jizz which created the Milky Way.
The black man is not in fact the “Nemesis” of American politics nor the “central problem” of democracy; the myth of racial diference only made it seem as though this were so. The work of Reconstruction need not have been the work of Sisyphus; it was misrecognized as such through a constitutional metaphysics that characterized politics in terms of punishment.
The South lost the War and was punished. Initially, there was some talk of rewarding the slaves. Then people lost interest.
And the black Prometheus, Du Bois suggests, who stole nothing but his own freedom, was then reenchained. But if bound to the Rock of Ages, he may soon be freed by his own creation: men, recognized finally as men.
Prometheus wasn't a man. He was a titan.
If Black Reconstruction is lawed as historicopolitical theory,
it isn't. It is some shite a silly, half senile, Socialist wrote long ago.
then its laws do not lie where we expect to encounter them.
They definitely do not lie up my arsehole. Kindly stop looking there for them.
Neither Marxian nor liberal approaches to politics fully capture the contours of Du Bois’s dialectics;
because it is stupid shite.
neither separatist nor universalist conceptions of equality inform his treatment of race. The limits that Black Reconstruction comes up against are those of the figure of man himself.
Because the book isn't about otters who have magical adventures in other space.
Black Reconstruction theorizes the politics of a man whose membership in the nation as citizen renders him vulnerable to, rather than protected from, violent lawlessness.
Fuck off! Plenty of 'Red Indians' were not citizens. This didn't stop the Union Army from massacring them.
But Du Bois does not give up on the possibility of man as universal political subject.
Because his dick might drop off by itself- right?
If historical dialectics operate as fated chance,
then there is no fucking historical dialectics
structured by conditions of the basis on which concepts and categories can be made actionable, then politics and history always possess the possibility of excess, of exceeding these bases through which they are thought to function.
In other words, if you are writing an essay on France under Macron or Cheesemaking in ancient Poland, you can start gassing on about the 'possibility of excess' as constituting the anteriority of its own self-transcendence as the differance of the alterity of its own gay cousin who incarnates the ipseity of Uranus.
If we are left at the end of Black Reconstruction with the image of Babylon and its wages of shame,
Nineveh used to pay Babylon for coming on her tits. Babylon was all like 'what I do with my own body is up to me. Anyway, I have an MFA from Vassar.'
the tragedy of such a return suggests that man might prove surprisingly resilient to the persuasive power of that greeting, that command: Salutem in Dominus, sempernatum!
'semper natum' means 'always born'. Perhaps she means 'sempiternam'- i.e. may the Lord ever preserve and keep you (in good health). This may be a greeting. It is not a command.
In the end, Black Reconstruction leaves us with no first causes, stable bases, or metaphysical foundations through which to account for the “splendid failure” of Reconstruction.
If so, it is utterly shit. Would '40 acres and a mule' have worked? Probably not. Sooner or later an agricultural recession would have caused a 'shake out' in black land ownership. The Communists may have believed so- they thought collectivization had succeeded in Russia- but perhaps it was wiser to keep mum on the subjects.
After 729 pages tha interrogate the workings of legal and constitutional metaphysics, of corresponding and conflicting fetishes, of suspended dialectics and the doctrine of race, Du Bois leaves us with no mechanistic explanation, no forms of objective causality through which to make sense of such a history.
The South was bound to be a shithole so long as it was mainly agricultural. Americans understood this.
Instead, he leaves us with only the figure of man.
Why not a cat?
Beneath the potent poverty of the historical ontology of race war,
which is what Haiti had and is the reason Whites are thin on the ground there except for Jane Seymour. But she is a virgin and has voodoo powers.
In a particularly purple passage Du Bois wrote
'One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair.
Not really. We know that the terms of trade move against primary producers. Land ownership should shrink and mechanization should be based on the use of fossil fuel, not human or animal power. Industrialization can lead to affluence provided there is demographic transition and a knowledge based economy which continually climbs the value chain.
It is at once so simple and human, yet so futile. There is no villain, no enemy, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power,
rather than being sodomized in a chain gang.
men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled.
Everybody crawled as babies.
They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked by hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all.
Which is why you should let people sodomize you if that's what they really want.
So a slight gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment.
But it would be a pain in the arse- so let's not bother.
If the misrecognition of history produces the misrecognition of men,
it doesn't. Just because I confused History with Chemistry does not mean I was not quickly recognized as the person who set off a stink bomb. Also, I fudged my pants. Damn! I didn't mean to tell you that.
Du Bois points toward the potential evocative power of a slight gesture, a single word, to inaugurate an emancipated intelligence.
That word was 'supercallifragilasticexpiallydocious'- right?
By making visible the process through which American constitutionalism has transubstantiated a tragic model of historical narration into the reified form of law
Did you know that the Danish constitution is based on the reified ghost in Hamlet? It was originally going to be Omelette but some fucking Swede ate it up.
that posits degraded man as its subject,
but only so as to deconstruct the catachresis of its ipseity by anteriorizing the posterior up which it has shoved its own head.
Black Reconstruction operates as a mode of insurgent political thought that seeks to once again make possible a politics of man as such.
Previously, a politics of man could only be founded upon everybody pretending to be otters having marvelous adventure up Uranus.
To do so, Du Bois demonstrates that juridico- political and phenomenological modes of recognition cannot be thought apart
sure they can. The US could recognize Palestine as a sovereign state. That's juridico-political. Biden, however, may get confused and think Netanyahu is actually Hanan Ashrawi. That's phenomenological and has to do with the fact that Biden is as old as fuck.
and that history is this site at which we can and must approach their formation — their constitution — together
Only if we are paid to do so. Otherwise we won't approach any such shit.
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