Du Bois held that genuine revolution precedes visible convulsion and is already underway.

Evidence

[T]he matter of greatest import is that instead of our facing today a stable world, moving at a uniform rate of progress toward well-defined goals, we are facing revolution. I trust you will not be as scared by this word as you were Thursday [Du Bois was referring to the audience’s reaction to a speech by Dr. Broadus Mitchell of Johns Hopkins University]. I am not discussing a coming revolution, I am trying to impress the fact upon you that you are already in the midst of a revolution; you are already in the midst of war; that there has been no war of modern times that has taken so great a sacrifice of human life and human spirit as the extraordinary period through which we are passing today. … Some people envisage revolution chiefly as a matter of blood and guns and the more visible methods of force. But that, after all, is merely the temporary and outward manifestation. Real revolution is within. That comes before or after the explosion—is a matter of long suffering and deprivation, the death of courage and the bitter triumph of despair. This is the inevitable prelude to decisive and enormous change, and that is the thing that is on us now. … We are not called upon then to discuss whether we want revolution or not. We have got it. Our problem is how we are coming out of it. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 922

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Du Bois redefines revolution as an internal, long-suffering process rather than a visible explosion, and locates the 1930s within it rather than before it — a reorientation that reframes how to read the Depression and its politics.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” and the Italian subaltern studies treatment of revolution as long revolution, and to E.P. Thompson’s view of class formation as a process over time.