Du Bois shifted from race to class analysis of black oppression by 1911

Evidence

A new theme in the pages of the Horizon and The Crisis was Du Bois’s interest in the labor movement and in socialism. At one time he had viewed the white working class as the Negro’s ‘bitterest opponent.’ By 1904 he had come to believe that economic discrimination was in large part the cause of the race problem, and to feel sympathetic toward the socialist movement. Three years later, he was writing favorably of the socialists in the Horizon. Elsewhere he advised the socialists that their movement could not succeed unless it included the Negro workers, and wrote that it was simply a matter of time before white and black workers would see their common economic cause against the exploiting capitalists. Though in 1908 Du Bois did not vote for the socialists because they had no chance of winning, in 1911 he joined the party. In a Marxist exegesis in the concluding pages of The Negro, Du Bois viewed both American Negroes and Africans, both the white workers and the colored races, as exploited by white capital which employed the notion of race differences as a rationalization of exploitation, segregation, and subordination. And he predicted that the exploited of all races would unite and overthrow white capital, their common oppressor. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2189

Categorization

• XREF: Shows a leading Black radical adopting (then later abandoning) class-based political analysis — relevant to the rise-and-fall arc of the tradition vs. its Marxist frame.