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One prominent trend in African American and African diaspora studies involves the search for a more thoroughly egalitarian black politics, especially by reopening the question of race and economic equality. The radicalism of W. E. B. Du Bois figures prominently in much of this work, including recent books by Joy James, Kate Baldwin, Alys Eve Weinbaum, and Nikhil Pal Singh. We share this interest in Du Bois's radical social democracy, while at the same time offering an alternative genealogy of its origin and development. In the readings of all the recent critics named above and a number of earlier critics, too, the significant phase of Du Bois's radicalism dates from his contact with Third International socialism, whether initiated by his visit to the Soviet Union in 1926 (at the earliest) or his immersion in Marxism in the early 1930s (the consensus view).1 What we find is a much earlier emergence of radicalism: in the socialism that Du Bois formulated in the 1910s, with his characteristic emphasis on cooperative black economics developing by his 1911 novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, and his analysis of imperialism and capitalist exploitation in evidence by his 1915 monograph. The Negro.
The following essay both describes the early development of Du Bois's socialism and analyzes the significance of that development. We find three ramifications especially for interpretations of Du Bois and, by extension, for an understanding of African American socialism. First, an early date prevents Du Bois's radical social democracy from being dismissed as an idiosyncracy of his elder years: instead of being the product of his marginalization by the civil rights establishment, Du Bois's socialism was cultivated and maintained during the period when he was the most visible and influential of black Americans, and it was articulated in the pages of the Crisis whereby it reached tens of thousands of NAACP members. An earlier emergence of Du Bois's socialism thus places social democracy closer to the center of African American politics than has usually been supposed. Second, an early date for Du Bois's socialism counteracts the impression that it was unduly influenced by models ill-suited to black America, particularly the supposedly "color-blind" socialism of the Second Internationale. Therefore, although American socialists of this period were seldom able to...