The Strange Phenomenon of Duboisian Socialism

One of the most fascinating aspects of WEB DU Bois is its socialist militancy, for its amazing pragmatism; a tendency that obviously takes from its stay in Germany in the last decade of the nineteenth century, from the spectrum of Idealism. It's fascinating, because the conflict Du Bois encounters in Germany is purely political, not philosophical; although it turns to philosophy to justify his relevance, in the Young Hegelians, who were not philosophers in the strict sense.

Actually, and as a principle, this should not be strange either, because socialism does not arise from Hegelianism; but in the France of XVII and XVIII centuries, as a critique of modern industrialism and its alienation of the individual. It is, however, Karl Marx's economic neo-determinism what elevates it to ideologic systematization; creating the hermeneutical spectrum of Materialism, but because the need of Idealism to create its own critical referent.

Du Bois comes from the hermeneutical spectrum of American pragmatism, created by Charles S. Peirce; known for semiotics, but because its idealistic edge-cutting nature, not for its recovery of the realist tradition. Even this filiation is secondary in Du Bois, who —like the Young Hegelians— is not a philosopher in the strict sense; his own object is sociology, and not by the abstract character in which it develops, but by its own existential experience.

Indeed, sociology is born in European intellectualism, between French positivism and German negativism; that is why it does not have great roots in the United States outside academic circles, less popular than in Europe. However, it is interesting for Du Bois, as a free black in the midst of American racial tensions; and in whose context —even academic— the most attractive hermeneutical spectrum is Peirce's emerging pragmatism.

Hence Du Bois comes into contact with the political pressures of German socialism, not with its determinism; acceding by his own hermeneutics to the crisis, with his own experience of social contradictions. Hence, Du Bois's socialism is not an alternative system to capitalist, but its critical adjustment as reality; since his hermeneutics does not give him the economic referents of idealistic determinism, but of pragmatism.

This pragmatism, still moral –although already based in realism– would be what his original vision allows; by which socialism can be posed as an intrinsic and apotheosic contradiction of capitalism, not its nemesis. This would be due to the problems posed by the exercise of power and social configuration, in any political system; something not resolved by Marxism itself with its scientific communism, which postpones it in the socialist transition.

Hence, for example, the recurrence of the socialist alternative only in cultures of imperial tradition, such as China or Russia; at the same time as the character of permanent political crisis and economic precariousness, in cultures without that absolutist tradition. Important in this is the interference of European political elitism, with the intrigues of its feudal model; like the manipulations that ended the French monarchy, in its process of populist —not popular— revolution.

Du Bois understands these dangers, and therefore the unique nature of reality as a political one, in economics; which is nevertheless not deterministic but pragmatist, in a mediation of the hermeneutical conflict of socialism.  It is probably this singularity —even exceptionality— what determined his final break with the liberal tradition; not with socialism, which is ultimately a conservative variant, but with the intellectualist elitism of that tradition.

After all, in its ultimate demands to NAACP is the unusual pragmatism of these economic conditions; that seem to bring him closer to the industrialism of Booker T. Washington, but in reality keeps him in a distant criticism. Du Bois is  pragmatic but not capitalist, which is another form of moral dogmatism, in its alienation of the individual; rather, it postulates that strange form of pragmatic socialism, in which the individual would project himself freely in his society.