Du Bois saw white labor as co-exploiter alongside capital

Evidence

However, in the lower orders, where the mist was thickest and where received wisdom has taught us to expect Blackness, the contemporary spectrum was more complex: the natives of the New World obtained a savage red, European labor a mottled gray. Above their heads it was a simpler matter: the ruling classes stood in dramatic, white relief. But between ourselves and the specter of that American past are the historical and racial fables that obscure the related exploitations and oppressions of African, European, Asian, and Amerindian peoples during the intervening 200 years. As a means of obliterating these events, the myth of white solidarity arose and came to dominate American sensibility. It was for the most part a lie but a terribly seductive one. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 427 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postwar racial myths functioned as labor discipline for capital; Neither Du Bois nor Washington understood capitalistic labor exploitation.; Du Bois revised Marx’s theory by foregrounding mass action over class vanguard. (+6 more)

Related

• Du Bois reconceptualized American slavery as a subsystem of world capitalism (similarity 0.85)
• Du Bois saw race ideology as a rationalization that divided the exploited working classes (similarity 0.85)
• Du Bois revised Marx’s theory by foregrounding mass action over class vanguard. (similarity 0.84)
• Postwar racial myths functioned as labor discipline for capital (similarity 0.84)
• Both Du Bois and Washington missed capitalism’s exploitative core (similarity 0.83)
• Du Bois insisted Black people’s historical significance lay in their labor, not enslaved status. (similarity 0.83)
• Du Bois concluded slavery and capitalism were systemically linked and periphery drove revolution (similarity 0.82)
• Du Bois recognized Marx had not anticipated imperialism’s transformations of capitalism (similarity 0.82)
• Racism, not production relations, blocked the rise of a US labor movement. (similarity 0.82)
• Du Bois traced 1930s Depression roots to white labor’s antislavery responses (similarity 0.82)
• Du Bois and Washington shared a blindness to capitalist exploitation despite their public feud. (similarity 0.82)
• Du Bois’s critique of labor hardened from warning into indictment (similarity 0.81)
• Du Bois read the 1930s Depression and the slavery crisis as analogous capitalist transformations (similarity 0.81)
• American workers’ identities responded as much to race as to class (similarity 0.81)
• Du Bois shifted from viewing white workers as enemies to embracing socialism by 1911 (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• White solidarity as a racial identity was a myth obscuring shared exploitations #corroborates (0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 427
• Du Bois concluded slavery and capitalism were systemically linked and periphery drove revolution #expands (0.75)
• Post-1877 racial division of labor was engineered to stabilize capitalist wealth #expands (0.60)
• Racial ideology functions as a labor discipline for capital #complicates (0.55)