Enacting a “Readjustment of Ideals”: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Cooperative Critique of Capitalism

Abstract

This article assembles an archive of published and unpublished material to reconstruct Du Bois’s cooperative critique of capitalism. For most of his life, Du Bois supported efforts to organize African American communities into consumers’ cooperatives and championed cooperation as a key practice of industrial democracy. I leverage these cooperative investments to illuminate Du Bois’s critique of the psycho-social regime of capitalism, taking us beyond the well-studied problem of the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness. African American communities needed a mass cooperative movement, Du Bois maintained, because the practice of cooperation could enact a “readjustment of ideals” away from individualized concerns with wealth accumulation toward an embrace of the ideals of public welfare and no-profit service. Such psycho-social renewal would produce empowered collectives, unburdened by the narrow thinking promoted in capitalist culture and eager to find “new ways of doing things.” While this cooperative critique makes visible Du Bois’s insightful concern that dominated peoples can come to desire their own “exploiting set-up,” translating it into practice proved difficult work. The failure to organize a mass cooperative movement raised a practical question: How do you attract new cooperative participants in a world already saturated with the depleting psychologies of late modern capitalism?