W. E. B. Du Bois and European fascism between the wars

Abstract

This article examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s writings on European inter-war fascism. He left a wealth of commentary on Italian fascism and German Nazism which has yet to be explored. As an anti-racist scholar, Du Bois brought to his writings on fascism a sharp and incisive understanding of race and racism, as well as global imperialism. As the author demonstrates, Du Bois saw both racism and imperialism as social facts of a historical formation: the West. Du Bois articulated a particularly historical vision of fascism − not seeing the two world wars of the twentieth century to be an ideological break from the nineteenth. Slavery, he argued, was still conditioning global history and white-supremacist racial nationalism was the necessary social force for European fascist organisation.

[T]he meaning of fascism, the reason for the multi-iconic industries which interrogate and celebrate fascism is the historical manufacture of fascism as a negation of the Western Geist. The occurrence of fascism has been taken to signify the ‘damned’ historical identity which the West almost assumed but ultimately rejected. Fascism was made to signify the ‘dark side’ of Western civilisation.

Cedric Robinson ¹

Introduction

This article excavates W. E. B. Du Bois’s reactions to and analysis of European fascism in the inter-war period. Leaving us a monumental body of work produced over many years, Du Bois was indeed ‘one of the finest historians ever produced in America’. ² He was not only a historian of his past, but a historian of his present. He consistently transgressed the disciplinary boundaries characteristic of academia, blurring the lines between critical social theory, sociology, and history. ³ In doing so, his scholarship disordered the conventional narratives and practices of western historiography. ⁴ Amongst the abundance of materials he produced, his writings on Italian fascism and German Nazism – produced between the late 1920s and the years following the war – remain relatively under-analysed. ⁵ It is this body of writing I examine in this article.

Du Bois’s acute understanding of race and racism meant he did not reduce racism or fascism to a type of behaviour. Instead, he came to understand race as a social relation, a historical attribution to a people. That is to say, he developed his conception of race to focus on the social and economic mechanisms of racial assemblies. In this sense, Du Bois came to understand race as distinctively historical social technology. ⁶ Race could be wielded not only as political power, but through the weaponisation of history itself: ‘Which was the superior race? Manifestly that which had a history, the white race.’ ⁷

I begin this article with a brief discussion of Du Bois’s historical approach; i.e., how he saw the twentieth century and what became the ‘age’ of fascism. As we shall see, Du Bois framed it in specific terms. Rather than the age of fascism, it was the age of race, and the history of slavery was still very much a historical animus. Like the nineteenth century, the problem of the twentieth would be the ‘color line’.

Having looked at Du Bois’s historical vantage point, I turn to his writings on colonialism and fascism, largely revolving around the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia, which mobilised black and colonised peoples across the globe. Then, I examine his writings on German fascism. Following his trip to Germany in 1936, he released several commentaries on Adolf Hitler and Nazism which supply the bulk of the material for this section. Lastly, I consider where Du Bois’s arguments direct us. There have been increasing concerns in recent years that we are amid the rise of the far Right. No matter what terminology is used – fascist, extreme-right, radical-right, neo-fascist – we have witnessed a sharp increase in prejudicial discourses and authoritarian measures, in various guises, across the globe. Race and racism are the key elements and defining features of our current historical moment. If the study of fascism is going to meaningfully address the fascistic order of the present, it must look to figures who spent their lives theorising and combatting its key and organising principle: race. ⁸

Fascist studies, race and Black radicals

As European fascism evolved, Du Bois analysed it in its context. It was the age of colonial imperialism, Jim Crow and racialism. Fascism was then, for Du Bois, another expression of a racial social order. Such an analysis asks of us productive and demanding questions not only about the nature of fascism and the nature of the society which births it, but also the historical representation of it. In our time, fascism is, in the words of Arun Kundnani, ‘the politics of the hour’. ⁹ Far-right political violence and authoritarian measures are undoubtedly on the rise. For Black radicals like Du Bois, this was a historical condition.

There have been an increasing number of calls from within and outside ‘fascist studies’ for attention to be directed to radical Black analyses of fascist organisation in inter-war Europe. One such call came through a special issue of the journal Fascism. A number of scholars suggest there that the place of fascism in a broader genealogy of imperialism and racism should be considered anew. ¹⁰ Liam Liburd proposes we recover and ‘take seriously the polemical analyses of Black thinkers and activists – including W. E. B. Du Bois’. ¹¹ Liburd has elsewhere pointed out that race has been understood as peripheral to fascism. ¹²

It is the case that theorisations of race and racism in the study of fascism have often been thin and difficult to place. Ernst Nolte understood racism to be a marginal force in European thinking, an ‘extreme manifestation’. ¹³ George Mosse, a hugely influential figure in the development of western ‘fascist studies’, proposed that Mussolini introduced Nazi-inspired race-laws to ‘counter the criticism of a Fascism grown slack in power’. ¹⁴ Nolte commented that racism was motivated by Mussolini’s personal distaste for ‘race-mixing’, while Mosse simultaneously depicted it as its own contained ideology. ¹⁵ Both scholars illuminate invaluable aspects of fascist evolution, but the focus on racism as a consequence of human action, rather than race as a product of human relations, left key elements of fascism unresolved. Indeed, through Mosse’s reticence to confront how race is constructed in human social order, he seemingly turns to historical naturalism. The ‘growing intensity of contact with other people was what mattered’. ¹⁶

Elsewhere, Italian fascism and German Nazism are often demarcated on the grounds that the former held a ‘cultural’ racialism while Nazism forwarded ‘scientific’ race theory. ¹⁷ Aside from the evident ambiguity in such distinctions, this has been increasingly challenged in recent years. Patrick Bernhard has argued that, in fact, Italian race-theory was of such a premier standard in the early twentieth century that Germany was a keen student of it, particularly Nazism. ¹⁸ Interestingly, Bernhard proposes that the supposed differences between Nazism and Italian fascism were deliberately accentuated by the former to discharge claims against the Nazis that they were simply plagiarising their Italian counterparts. ¹⁹ Nonetheless, it remains the case that fascism is often disconnected from the broader ‘racial assemblages’ characterising the social formations in which it consistently appears. ²⁰

Du Bois understood things differently. As a member of the Black radical intelligentsia emerging in the early twentieth century, his focus was on the ‘relations of things’, that is, the historical formations in which race was an organising principle. ²¹ Du Bois came to understand race as a historical relation. In the words of Geraldine Heng, race is a structural relation and technology for management of human beings, ‘not a substantive content’. ²²

While it has been noted that fascism is ‘essentially racist’, this more structural view of race has not been a central component of ‘fascist studies’. ²³ As Liburd writes, this is concomitant with under-theorised work on white supremacy. Many have recently suggested we turn to Black radical intellectuals and race-scholars and bring their insights to the study of white supremacy, fascism and anti-fascism. ²⁴

In part, this recent interest in Black radical analyses of fascism has been spurred by the revival of Cedric J. Robinson’s seminal text, Black Marxism, and the republication of his other works. ²⁵ Robinson’s elaborations on ‘racial capitalism’, and the recent growth work on that theory of history, has ostensibly developed into its own field of study. ²⁶ Robinson’s work on fascism is particularly important for my purposes here, and acts as a framing device for Du Bois’s own evolution and analysis of fascism.

Identifying amongst both Black radical intellectuals and the Black masses a ‘pre-mature’ anti-fascism, Robinson looks to combat the presentation of fascism as an aberration:

From the perspective of many non-Western peoples, however, the occurrence of fascism – that is militarism, imperialism, racialist authoritarianism, choreographed mob violence, millenarian crypto-Christian mysticism, and a nostalgic nationalism – was no more an historical aberration than colonialism, the slave trade, and slavery. Fascism was and is a modern social discipline which much like its genetic predecessors, Christianity, imperialism, nationalism, sexism, and racism, provided the means for the ascent to and preservation of power for elitists. ²⁷

Robinson writes that Du Bois, like the Trinidadian Black Marxists C. L. R. James and George Padmore, understood fascism as sharing characteristics and histories with the liberal democracies of the West. James, Padmore and Oliver Cromwell-Cox held that these characteristics informed fascism’s formation. It was for them an ‘expression of capitalism’. ²⁸

The ‘one major exception’, however, was Du Bois. In locating fascism as a fundamentally racial movement, Du Bois departed from many of his Black radical comrades who were at the time heavily influenced by Marxist thought. ²⁹ Robinson is worth quoting in full on this point:

DuBois’s formulation of fascism as the ‘logical’ extension of white racism echoed that of the Black masses. And, paradoxically, it coincided with that moment when DuBois was most influenced by Marxism. As a pan-Africanist, however, DuBois had gone beyond Eurocentrism, and consequently had no vested interest in subordinating his analysis of race and culture to an economic determinism. He eschewed the rationalism of historical materialism for a theory of history which granted irrationalist forces their due. Like many ordinary Black people DuBois believed that the West was pathological and fascism an expression of that nature. ³⁰

Seeing fascism as a ‘signifier of the West’, as an expression of a civilisation, Du Bois simultaneously expanded the historical meaning of fascism and forces fruitful interrogations of fascism as ‘not a thing, not a generic phenomenon’. ³¹ His analysis of Europe as a historical formation was possible and indeed incisive because at least part of his ideological foundations was independent of it. ³² As Reiland Rabaka puts it, Du Bois synthesised ‘disparate parts of early white sociological discourse with strands of embryonic Pan-Africanist, Black nationalist, black Christian, Black bourgeois, and Black ethnological uplift thought’. ³³ This transdisciplinary alchemy provided Du Bois with the tools to offer a novel and race-critical understanding of fascism.

Such work has pointed us in productive directions, urging comparisons between American racialism and European fascism. To follow this line of thought, we must establish how exactly Du Bois configured inter-war European fascism. This entails considerations of his writings on imperialism, slavery and capitalism. It is also important to note that Du Bois did not overstate the influence of American racialism on Nazism, nor was the long history of intra-European racialism excluded from his thinking. ³⁴ Alberto Toscano’s recent and productive ‘meta-commentary’ on fascism renders, through the writings of Angela Davis and George Jackson, US fascism as ‘racial fascism’. ³⁵ This formulation is drawn from Amiri Baraka, who, in turn, developed the term from Du Bois’s own work in Black Reconstruction. ³⁶ There can be no doubt that the chapter of Du Bois’s seminal text, titled ‘The Counter-Revolution of Property’, appears as an implicit description of fascism. ³⁷ However, to use ‘racial fascism’ to describe US fascism is to potentially suggest there is such a thing as a non-racial fascism or, alternatively, to paint European fascism as harbouring non-racial variants. All fascism is racist, and Du Bois points us toward the racial grounds upon which fascism can grow. He understood this to be modern colonialism, the history of slavery and the onset of white supremacy. Du Bois noted in his later life that the colonialism of the great powers ‘had exactly the same object and methods’ as fascism and Nazism. ³⁸

Du Bois also directed us to the importance of racial-nationalism in Europe. He understood the ‘color line’ to be a global phenomenon. It was not isolated in America, even if the United States harboured one of its clearest manifestations. Race was socially attributed, it ran across the western social order. ³⁹ In this sense, Du Bois in his later life asked us to consider the proposition that race was and is the product of history. ⁴⁰ As he wrote in 1943,

No matter what we may think and say of Germany, by singular paradox the race-religion which Germany has suddenly thrust to the front, is but an interpretation of what America and Europe have practiced against the colored peoples of the world. ⁴¹

Black radicals such as Du Bois collectively centralised race and imperialism in the analysis of fascism. Race occasions the appearance of fascism, and to dissect this we require history. There are two qualifications to be made. First, this is not a biographical work on Du Bois. (Many a work has been produced on his life which contain details beyond the scope of this article, cited throughout.) Secondly, Du Bois was not a historian of fascism, per se. The value in his work resides in the ways in which he approached the signification of fascism. He was consistently battling the removal of Africa from western history, presented as the history of man. However, as I show, Du Bois understood that European fascism was a direct product of the history the West had cultivated.

Slavery and the twentieth century

W. E. B. Du Bois understood the Transatlantic Slave Trade, colonialism and racism to be historical forces animating the events of the twentieth century. As I shall show throughout this article, Du Bois consistently returned to slavery to explicate the historical roots of the great wars, and the appearance of fascism in Europe.

By 1914, he was highly attuned to the workings of race in America, having established over the course of several texts the problem of the ‘color line’. ⁴² As Reiland Rabaka puts it, Du Bois knew that ‘race and racism were European modernity’s weapons of choice’. ⁴³ The eruption of the first world war indicated to Du Bois that not only was the ‘color line’ an issue for Black Americans or Africans, but also for Europe. That is, modern history was not moving on from race but was rather conditioned by it. As he wrote in 1914,

The present war in Europe is one of the great disasters due to race and color prejudice and it but foreshadows greater disasters in the future. It is not merely national jealousy, or the so-called ‘race’ rivalry of Slav, Teuton and Latin, that is the larger cause of this war. It is rather the wild quest for imperial expansion among colored races between Germany, England and France primarily, and Belgium, Italy, Russia and Austria Hungary in lesser degree. ⁴⁴

To explain the outbreak of World War One, Du Bois looked to the histories of Black and colonised peoples. Western civilisation was, he wrote, ‘fighting like mad dogs over the right to own and exploit these darker peoples’. ⁴⁵ The European incursions into Africa in the late nineteenth century were fresh in his mind. The German mass-murder of the Herero and Nama peoples, ⁴⁶ the Belgians in Congo, ⁴⁷ and the Berlin Conference of 1884−85, were all key to the roots of the war for Du Bois. ⁴⁸ Because of this, he was determined to understand the Great War as a manifestation of a colonial system touching all corners of the world. Following the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, Du Bois was sure European civilisation had ‘failed’. He wrote:

But when Negroes were enslaved, or the natives of Congo raped and mutilated, or the Indians of the Amazon robbed, or the natives of the South Seas murdered, or 2,732 American citizens lynched – when all this happened in the past and men knew it was happening . . . we civilised folk turned deaf ears . . . We explained that these ‘lesser breeds’ . . . could not understand civilisation . . . This was a lie and we know it was a lie. The Great War is the lie unveiled. ⁴⁹

As the war dragged on, Du Bois became more certain in his historical framing of things. That is, the West was not immune from its actions in the colonies. The war had exposed ‘the cruelty of the civilisation of the West’. ⁵⁰ It was in 1915 that Du Bois penned ‘The Atlantic Roots of War’. ⁵¹ This was his most prescient effort to show ‘how in the dark continent are hidden the roots, not simply of war today but of the menace of wars tomorrow’. ⁵² Anticipating Hannah Arendt’s focus on the imperial histories pertinent to the rise of fascism, Du Bois demanded his readers considered colonialism in Africa as a progenitor of European conflagrations, ⁵³ and also directed attention to nationalism and the important relation this had with imperial wealth. Speaking of the European peoples involved in the war, particularly the working classes, Du Bois wrote,

Their national bond is no mere sentimental patriotism, loyalty, or ancestor worship. It is increased wealth, power and luxury for all classes on a scale the world never before saw. Never before was the average citizen of England, France and Germany so rich, with such splendid prospects of greater riches. ⁵⁴

This wealth came ‘primarily from the darker nations of the world’. ⁵⁵ The maintenance of this global system required a ‘a close union between capital and labor at home’, ⁵⁶ Du Bois wrote, and the competition between nation states also meant competition between developing and matured nationalisms. In 1918, he wrote of Black and white workers ‘being used against each other as helpless pawns’, and that only when this was overcome would there be a better opportunity for ‘real democracy in the south’ of the US. ⁵⁷

At the level of human agency, of contingency and chance, the war may be traceable to the Balkan ‘storm-centre’, wrote Du Bois. But this was ‘mere habit’, and ‘convenient’. It was the historical nature of modern capitalism, of colonialism, that offered a more accurate picture of things. It was ‘the ownership of materials and men in the darker world’ that was ‘setting the nations of Europe at each other’s throats’. ⁵⁸

The nineteenth century was pressing on the twentieth. In some respects, Du Bois’s approach is similar to what in 1929 would become the modus operandi of the Annales school. For Du Bois, history could only be understood through something akin to the longue durée. ⁵⁹ Cedric Robinson, who was himself influenced by the Annales School, ⁶⁰ explains:

The point is that the construction of periods of time is only a sort of catchment for events. Their limited utility, though, is often abused when we turn from the ordering of things, that is chronological sequencings, to the order of things, that is the arrangement of their significances, meanings, and relations. Increments of time contoured to abstract measure rarely match the rhythms of human action. It is important to bear this in mind as we seek to come to terms with the Black theorists whose writings and thoughts have appeared primarily in the twentieth century. Their era began with the endings of slavery. They were, it might be said, the children of the slaves. The phenomenology of slavery formed and informed them. ⁶¹

From this vantage point, the organisation of European fascism in the inter-war years was not an aberration. Du Bois entered the twentieth century with an anti-racist historical consciousness, attuned to the systems of racialism characteristic of Jim Crow America. This, as we can see, had a profound impact on his diagnoses of the first world war. It also meant fascism had a specific signification, to which I now turn.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Italian fascism and colonialism

Reflecting on the catastrophe of the first world war, Du Bois wrote: ‘This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration or insanity; this is Europe’. ⁶² The ‘duty’ of Europe, he wrote, had been and was ‘to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe’s good’. ⁶³ This was accomplished through and managed by a colonial system of relations. Consequently, the fact that north African possession was an ambition of Italian fascism was unsurprising. The defeat of Italian forces at Adwa in 1896 was fresh in the memory of both Italian nationalists and Du Bois. As Gerald Horne writes, through its’ resistance to Italian colonialism in the 1890s, Ethiopia had become ‘a beacon of hope and pride for Black America’. ⁶⁴ Fascism, Du Bois knew, sought to redress the humiliations of the past. This is not to say Du Bois offered an immediate diagnosis of fascism. It took him some years to comment on it. He was certainly not alone in hesitating over what fascism represented. Indeed, in an examination of European Marxist reactions to fascism, David Beetham points out common confusions in the face of fascism. Antonio Gramsci, despite his later perspicaity, had by 1921 offered a variety of contradictory statements about the nature of fascism. ⁶⁵ For Du Bois, across the Atlantic, the problem was compounded by the simple fact that he had ‘no means of knowing’ the ‘truth concerning conditions in Italy’. ⁶⁶

Du Bois approached fascism not to discover its ‘nature’ or ‘essence’. He was interested in how to think about it. In his first articles on the subject, he does not mention the term ‘fascism’. Italy, he stated, ‘wants to become more imperial’. ⁶⁷ Italy had found itself in a similar position to Germany prior to the first world war. That is, they held long-term imperial ambitions that, due to the uneven development of European industry and imperialism, had not been realised. Du Bois knew that Mussolini wanted territory, but ‘whither does he cast his eye?’. There was little chance Italy would risk further conflagrations with more powerful European neighbours:

What Italy wants is Abyssinia. She has wanted Abyssinia a long time. When the Mahdi overthrew the English in the Sudan, the English with great generosity gave Italy the chance to seize Abyssinia and Italy foolishly attempted it. But at the great Battle of Adua, March 1, 1896, the Abyssinians, under the leadership of Menelik and the Empress Taitou, killed four thousand Italians and captured two thousand prisoners. Since then England, France and Italy have been content to draw a cordon around Abyssinia and bide their time. They have tied up her economic resources, taxed her exports and imports and mortgaged her railroads and such other tangible assets as they could get hold of. It is time now for a further step. ⁶⁸

This formulation is important. Du Bois is articulating fascism not as a generic phenomenon, but a consequence of imperial ambitions, of a practice of colonialism concreted and refined in the previous century. This history provided the grammar of Italian foreign policy. Subsequently, this ‘further step’ in Italian modernity was fascism. The strategy in this sense was African possession, fascism the tactic. Furthermore, Du Bois’s articulation was one in which Italian nationalism and imperialism were tied. That is to say, to varying degrees imperial intent and the lust for overseas expansion had become an animating compound of Italian nationalism after the first world war. This perspective also remained central to Du Bois’s analysis of fascism when he examined the German variant. Imperialism and the social technologies of race – including racial nationalism – provided fertile ground for fascism. Du Bois’s focus on nationalism, I show later, meant that conventional Marxist assessments of fascism were limited. Jairus Banaji has indicated such a view highlights the limitations of classical Marxist understandings of fascism. Banaji urges us to

deal with the deeper forces from which fascism stems and not fall into the trap of thinking, for example, that fascism only emerges in a context of massive economic crisis or is even caused by economic crisis, as a lot of Marxists still think. ⁶⁹

With its ambition of a new empire and a rejuvenated nationalism built upon that supposed destiny, Du Bois wrote that ‘Italy is particularly to be feared’. ⁷⁰ The proximity of Europe to further wars on its own soil heightened the parallel with colonialism in Africa:

Adowa, one of the decisive battles of the world, very nearly resulted in European world war. Within a week after the battle . . . England and France stood at Fashoda, on the headwaters of the Nile, ready to precipitate national conflict. ⁷¹

Du Bois’ fears over Italy were realised in 1935 when the fascists invaded Ethiopia. He wrote in 1920 that the ‘indictment of Africa against Europe is grave’. ⁷² The invasion of Ethiopia was cast through Du Bois’s writings in similarly historical terms. Europe had in the nineteenth century looked to Africa for raw materials, labour and resources. The ‘Scramble for Africa’ and the Berlin Conference were focused on these necessities for industry and capital accumulation. ⁷³ In 1935 the invasion of Ethiopia was, in Du Bois’s mind, another phase of this historical relation. ⁷⁴ Du Bois was clear, ‘other nations have done exactly what Italy is doing’. Other powers, including Belgium and Germany, ‘determined to construct their own colonial empires. Indeed, they felt that if they were to follow the path of modern industrialisation, they must do so or die.’ ⁷⁵

The signing of a Treaty of Friendship in August 1928 between Italy and Ethiopia was nothing more than lip-service, and arguably allowed the Italians reconnaissance in Ethiopia. In response to the invasion, Du Bois wrote a flurry of articles and speeches condemning the invasion. ⁷⁶ Having left The Crisis and the NAACP in 1934, he spoke to his readers through other mediums. He offered to them the historical background of Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan. ⁷⁷ He also asked them to consider ‘When the next war comes, where will Negroes fight, and why?’ ⁷⁸ A potential repeat of the first world war was clearly something Du Bois seriously considered. Indeed, when asked about the public opinion regarding the invasion, he stated:

the World War has taught most of Europe and America that the continuing conquest, exploitation and oppression of colored peoples by white[s] is unreasonable and impossible and if persisted will overthrow civilization. ⁷⁹

In a 1935 article for Foreign Affairs, Du Bois considered the ‘Inter-Racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis’. ⁸⁰ He reiterated his view that the Ethiopian crisis, and indeed the strife of the inter-war years, was due to the uneven development imperialism had not only imposed on Africa, but also on Europe. ⁸¹ Italian fascism was one such symptom, further compounding the historical humiliation fascists felt so acutely in the Treaty of London of 1915. On 26 April 1915, a deal was struck between Italy and London. Italy would be granted the borderlands of Trentino and Trieste, Istria, most of Dalmatia, Valona, power in the Dodecanese and ‘dangerously worded compensation in Asia Minor and Africa’. ⁸²

Germany is determined to have back her colonial empire and Italy is determined to make France and England fulfill to her the indefinite promises of the Treaty of London of 1915. Toward this end Mussolini and Hitler sought to cement an alliance, but the project was suddenly ended by the attempt of the Nazis to take possession of Austria. This alarmed both France and Italy and threw them into each other’s arms, with the result that France withdrew her opposition to Italian expansion in Ethiopia. But if Italy takes her pound of flesh by force, does anyone suppose that Germany will not make a similar attempt? ⁸³

Like many Black Americans, Du Bois admired Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie, and thought Mussolini ‘criminal’ for uprooting the Ethiopian leader. ⁸⁴ The Ethiopia crisis put the nail in the coffin of the League of Nations, and confirmed to Du Bois that such international bodies were powerless in the face of Europe’s reliance on colonial expansion.

Indeed, the episode of League of Nations sanctions against Italy discredited and embarrassed the League. Soon after the 3 October 1935 invasion, the League of Nations brought sanctions against Italy into effect. These were on a monetary basis, as had been tradition up to this point, and targeted mostly arms, munitions, imports and exports. The oil and coal embargo, arguably the most important elements of these sanctions, were not implemented. Mussolini utilised the sanctions to galvanise the Italian populace, blaming the western powers for Italy’s economic hardships, and pressed on. There were oil fields in Ethiopia. After a year, the sanctions were lifted with the agreement of the European nations who had originated them, including Britain.

On 5 May 1935 Mussolini declared ‘Ethiopia is Italian’. ⁸⁵ The episode indicated the League’s weakness in the face of aggression. Britain, a key player in the League, wanted to avoid war with Germany and Italy. Such a conflict would only further damage Britain’s imperial interests. George Padmore’s commentary on this episode is insightful:

Mussolini stood firm and sanctions failed, for the simple reason that Britain, although she had taken the initiative in this direction, never intended carrying them to the point of causing Italy to suffer defeat. Britain feared such an outcome more than anything else. For defeat for Mussolini would not only have been a serious blow to capitalism in Italy, but would have served as an inspiration to the anti-Fascist forces in other European countries, as well as the anti-imperialist movements in Africa and Asia. For long before the war started, the colonial peoples, especially in Egypt, South Africa and the Near East (Palestine) had begun to get restless. So while shouting for sanctions and still more sanctions, the British imperial government, which has the controlling interest in the Anglo-Persian (Iraq) Oil Company, was seeing to it that Mussolini got all the oil that his aeroplanes needed to drop poison gas bombs upon defenseless villagers, women and children. British imperialism is the bulwark of world reaction. ⁸⁶

The subsequent occupation of Ethiopia and the first colonial victory for fascism had confirmed that imperialism and global hegemony, as conditions of western stability, would prevent the League from moving to more decisive or aggressive action. Du Bois, who had hoped for an international solution to colonialism, was heartbroken:

The harm that Benito Mussolini has done to humanity by his rape of Ethiopia is incalculable and unending. He has smashed the league of nations − the noblest dream of a united humanity . . . He has impoverished and ruined Italy in heart and body, and he has killed the faith of all black folk in white men. ⁸⁷

The uneven development of imperialism and the prospect of colonial resources had plagued the very body – the League − which had sought to punish Italy for their aggression. It was these ‘belated lands that play Hell’. In the face of other nations ‘forging ahead’, instead of waiting, Italy had decided to ‘rush in and kill and muddle . . . that is what Italy is doing today . . . Italy breaks my heart’. ⁸⁸

To overcome their position as a lesser industrial power, to step into modernity, Italy’s course of action was, to Du Bois, clear. They were ‘copying a dying technique of empire that needs not copying but an entirely new art’. They had plunged ‘a red dagger into Africa’s heart and dances and struts in savage joy amid her squalor’. ⁸⁹ Reflecting on this instance of fascist colonialism after the second world war, Du Bois complicated the assertion that fascist violence was an aberration. He was aware that fascism was being in the post-war years constructed as an anomaly in European history. But for Du Bois it had been and was a condition of history for the colonised outside the West:

There was no Nazi atrocity – concentration camps, wholesale murder maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood – which the Christian civilisation of Europe had not long been practising against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for defence of a Superior Race born to rule the world. ⁹⁰

This was not an argument that colonial techniques and the racial practices constitutive of colonies had ‘rebounded’ back into Europe, producing fascism. Du Bois offered, as I show below, a reading of fascism that understood both colonial and intra-European racialism as historically linked, as co-constitutive. The importance of racial nationalism to the imperial order of things comes to the fore of Du Bois’s analysis of fascism following his trip to Nazi Germany in 1936. This conception of nationalism had, however, been germinating in his mind for some time.

It was in the late 1920s and early 1930s that Du Bois attempted serious study of Marxism. Until this point, Du Bois’s engagement with Marxism had been ‘latent at most’. ⁹¹ The Bolshevik Revolution had demonstrated that Marxism could be realised as a material force. After his trip to Russia in 1926 he had extolled the virtues of the new Soviet state, declaring to his readers ‘I am a Bolshevik’. ⁹²

Du Bois was, nonetheless, sceptical of white labour in the West. This spurred many of his advancements to and interventions into Marxist theory. For him, proletarian organising had been perverted by the social forces of race and nationalism: ‘The white workingman’ had ‘swallowed the white employers’ race prejudice’. ⁹³ In the American context, it was white workers, Du Bois said, which ‘formed the backbone of the Ku Klux Klan’. ⁹⁴ It was race and its connective, if fictive, tissue of the nation which Du Bois found to be the stumbling block to proletarian revolution. In the face of Black workers organising, ‘the nation will unite as one first to crush them and them alone’. ⁹⁵ Du Bois pointed to the place of these relations in the development of a racial world system:

the extension of the world market by imperial expanding industry had established a world-wide new proletariat of colored workers, toiling under the worst conditions of 19th century capitalism, herded as slaves and serfs and furnishing by the lowest paid wage in modern history a mass of raw materials for industry. ⁹⁶

Consequently, ‘colored labor has no common ground with white labor’. However, a close reading shows that Du Bois did not mean Black and white workers should avoid organising together – he argued in fact that they had much in common – but in order to do so, whiteness had to be confronted. ⁹⁷ The nature of global accumulation from ‘darker peoples’ meant that the maintenance of an imperial system was also in the economic interests of white labour. ⁹⁸ The relevance of this for Du Bois’s analysis of fascism is twofold. Firstly, it highlights the racial character of global accumulation, of which fascism in the inter-war years was a contingent element. Second and connectedly, it points to the centrality of whiteness as a formative set of relations, embedded within this global accumulation, and critical therefore to western nationalisms. As we shall now see, Du Bois understood racial nationalism as the unifying force for and the precondition of fascism’s appearance in Europe.

W. E. B. Du Bois and the transcendent force of racial nationalism

In 1936 Du Bois travelled across Europe, to Russia and China. ⁹⁹ One stop on this trip was Nazi Germany. The visit had a profound effect on his view of the new German regime. Following the trip, he developed a theory of racial nationalism and historical colonialism which, in his words, was characteristic of fascism. This, I argue, is critical to grasping Du Bois’s analysis of inter-war Europe. He had clearly read reports regarding Nazi antisemitism before his trip. The Crisis had published in 1933 a range of material in which can be found frequent condemnations of Nazism. ¹⁰⁰ He was astonished at the popularity of Nazi racism considering ‘what the Jew has done for German civilisation’. ¹⁰¹ It was after the trip that his thoughts are laid bare.

But we must be careful in examining his thoughts during his visit to Germany. Firstly, Nazism in 1936 was at a notably different evolutionary stage from Nazism in 1938. The Jewish situation in Germany was in 1936 ‘desperate but not yet deadly’. ¹⁰² Additionally, this was the year of the Berlin Olympics. The Nazis tried, due to this international platform, to reduce the most violent manifestations of their antisemitism. ¹⁰³ Secondly, Du Bois was a notable academic of international repute. He was for the most part treated as such. Guided by an Oberlander Trust official – the organisation from which he had obtained the funds for the trip – he was treated as an ‘honorary Aryan’. ¹⁰⁴ There can indeed be little doubt he was shielded from the darkest corners of Nazi violence. Thirdly, Du Bois himself clearly understood the precarious position he was in. While Nazism and particularly its racial policies and rhetoric disgusted him, ‘none of this could he write while still a guest in Germany’. ¹⁰⁵

None of the above prevented Du Bois from seeing the soul of this growing and evolving Nazism. The trip remained, despite his treatment, a ‘harrowing experience’. ¹⁰⁶ The variable grammar and historical dependency of race had produced antisemitism as the locum of Nazi racialism. So, as a Black academic, Du Bois was spared the worst vestiges. ¹⁰⁷ There can be no doubt, however, that anti-blackness was an important part of Nazism, confirmed in Hitler’s own Mein Kampf, in which Jews and Blacks are presented as conspiring against the German nation. ¹⁰⁸ Tina Campt has shown how Black peoples were often considered as threats to racial-nationalist unity, which thus informed Nazi policies of sterilisation. Campt shows how the sterilisation campaigns were as much about ‘racial hygiene’ as they were the emasculation ‘of Black German sexuality and the desexualisation of this threat to the purity of the Aryan race’. ¹⁰⁹

After the trip to Germany, Du Bois released a barrage of articles on Nazism. These persisted through the late 1930s and into wartime. Du Bois was fluent in German, having learned as a student in Germany in the 1890s. He reported on the words of high-profile Nazis, such as Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, who demanded ‘the return of German colonies’. The aggression within fascist ambition would have, he was sure, ‘enormous repercussions for American Negroes and Negroes the world over. They foreshadow a new alignment of European power, a new fight to dominate coloured labor and monopolize raw materials and new wars. We will do well to watch with bated breath these developments.’ ¹¹⁰ As we can see, the historical logic through which Du Bois traced the roots of the first world war remained.

He was sure that ‘Germany in overwhelming majority stands back of Adolf Hitler [sic]’. The accomplishments of Nazism’s industrial programme were clear to him upon his visit. Germany had ‘food and housing, and is, on the whole, contented and prosperous’. Unemployment was down, new homes built, new roads, new public works and the public order was ‘perfect’. There was ‘almost no visible crime’. Clearly, Du Bois was sheltered from the horrors unfurling under Nazi rule. But this was not completely lost on him. Despite these apparent improvements to domestic infrastructure, Germany was ‘silent, nervous, suppressed; it speaks in whispers; there is no public opinion, no opposition, no discussion of anything’. The racial nature of Nazism was unconcealable. There was ‘a campaign of race prejudice carried on, openly, continuously and determinedly against all non-Nordic races, but specifically against the Jews, which surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen; and I have seen much’. ¹¹¹

Convinced of the potential catastrophe Nazism harboured for the globe, Du Bois looked to its origins. The Treaty of Versailles as well as the rise of America to the pinnacle of global finance were key contextual factors, spotted throughout his writing. ¹¹² Most important of all, however, Du Bois understood a nationalist fervour intent on rectifying insults and failures of the past as key to Nazism. Hitler had ‘rode into power by accusing the world of a conspiracy to ruin Germany by economic starvation’, teamed-up with the Junkers, industrialists and managerial classes in the face of revolution. Subsequently, Hitler and the Nazis had ‘made a state without a single trade union and where the discussion of change is a crime’. Hitler had shown the German people a ‘way out’, it was a ‘nation at work’. He makes the important point that even with the tyranny of spies, informants, police forces, a large military and a myriad of severe punishments, there needed to be more: ‘this was not all Hitler did. Had it been, he and his state would have disappeared long ere this.’ Hitler had to keep the German people convinced – hence the new infrastructure – they had ‘new ideals, a new state’ and most importantly, ‘a new race’. ¹¹³

Being well-read on German history, Du Bois had tracked the events of the German revolutionary period of 1918−19. The Nazis were, he wrote two years into the second world war, constructing a ‘new order in Europe’. ¹¹⁴ The article, titled ‘Neuropa: Hitler’s New World Order’, published in The Journal of Negro Education, is one of Du Bois’s most acute and considered articles on Nazism.

The installation of war, oppression and racism would be the characteristic features of this new order. Du Bois thought there were, however, greater forces at work than the Nazis. The worker-revolutions and labour movements which followed the first world war were still reverberating. In the class struggle which ensued after the Great War, ‘there was no unity’. The ‘single aimed will’ of Adolf Hitler was the necessary force to unify the classes and disparate interests of Germany. The Nazis seized upon education, Du Bois suggested, and centralised the distillation of Nazi propaganda through the state. This shared some resemblance with Russia and Italy, but he suggested Germany’s population was ‘much more intelligent’. The German people were also ‘peculiarly susceptible’ to this education. Yearning for order, Du Bois argued that Germany was ripe for a centralised force such as Nazism, and the ordering mechanisms of fascist leadership. To complete their ascendancy, the Nazis needed ‘an ideal’. This ideal, Du Bois argued, was racial nationalism. – the substitution of the class struggle for ‘Germanism’. This served as a transcendent cosmology through which order could be provided. The ‘new race’ was both a conclusion and a beginning to German history. If we read Du Bois closely, this was the revolution he spoke of. The class struggle which had erupted in Europe following the Great War had transformed into a racial-nationalist revolution. The workers of Europe had been split by the appeals of fascism and, to varying extents, labour organisation took on a new form. This racial revolution became known as fascism, and it manifested for a time in the different nations of Europe. ¹¹⁵ It was a revolution that, Du Bois was convinced, could not be successful on its own terms. The racialism of fascism could not succeed: ‘no matter how degraded people become, it is impossible on a large scale and forever to keep them down’. ¹¹⁶

The United States and Britain combined did not have, in his estimation, enough might to crush the new German order, as things stood in the late 1930s. Once war ensued, however, Du Bois instructed that it was a war against the clearest expression of ‘race hate’, and in that sense was paradoxical: it was also a war against a state racially categorising human beings. This inevitably motivated, following the war, questions regarding race laws in the US itself. This point was made by Oliver Cromwell Cox following the war,

during World War II, President Roosevelt declared there should be no ‘master race’ in the world as the Germans claimed to be . . . Both the ‘master race’ ideology and fascism, however, are social attributes of a particular social system. They may not be eliminated by international war. ¹¹⁷

It was the application of modern Germany’s industrial might to the final solution which set it apart from the US, in Du Bois’s eyes, not the logics of racialism. In 1940, he commented that should Germany win, it would present the most violent, ‘staggering’ country seen in modern history. ¹¹⁸ Indeed, when news of the Holocaust and the implementation of the Final Solution reached Du Bois in Atlanta, Georgia, he reiterated his view that Europe had collapsed. Europe had been the centre of history for centuries, and this is what it had produced. ¹¹⁹ He looked to the historical character of Nazism, its foundations, and the homologous nature of its roots:

The present massacre and persecution of Jews is to be looked at, not simply from the point of view of what they are suffering, but, even more, from what this persecution means as an exemplification of modern civilisation. There is scarcely a modern civilised land that did not have its part in laying the foundation upon which Hitler has builded [sic]. ¹²⁰

The character of western nation-states in the inter-war period was shared. Du Bois is arguing here that Europe had laid the necessary tools down for Hitler’s programme of persecution. As he wrote during war time, they all shared responsibility for what was unfurling. Reflecting on the Holocaust, Du Bois was not sure whether in his lifetime the nature of the process would be fully understood. The ‘slaughter so vast and cruel that we will not be able to realize what happened to six million human beings in Eastern Europe during the Second World War until years have gone by’. ¹²¹ The Holocaust was the most fateful catastrophe:

that modern civilisation has known . . . It is a case of race prejudice on a scale unknown and unconceived of since the Emancipation Proclamation . . . 3 million are dead and the rest are being slowly exterminated by torture and starvation. We rightly shrieked to civilisation when American Negroes were lynched and mobbed to death at the rate of 400 to 500 a year. Today in Europe and among peaceful Jews, they are killing the number each day. ¹²²

Nonetheless, Du Bois saw distinct parallels between how the German and US states treated Jews and Black Americans respectively. Social and legal exclusion, the appropriation of property and the deprivation of food. These, Du Bois wrote, were ‘strangely familiar’ to the ears of Black Americans: ‘the present plight of the Jews is far worse than ours. Yet it springs from the same cause; and what is happening to Jews may happen to us in the future.’ This is why Du Bois suggested it would not be understood or grasped in his lifetime. It was not simply because of the scale of the violence, but because to him race and racism were conditions not only of Nazism, but of the West. This was an ‘unreasoned prejudice’, the ‘most dangerous thing in the world today. Unless it is destroyed, rooted out, absolutely suppressed, modern civilisation is doomed.’ ¹²³ Once again, Du Bois is anticipating here what later scholars noted. Hannah Arendt, for example, proposed that racism ‘may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilisation.’ ¹²⁴

Fascism was, to Du Bois, a historical signifier. It caused a host of devastation on European soil hitherto unknown. As events, that is, fascism and Nazism were catastrophic. However, Du Bois brought to his framing of things something of a historical-theoretical disclaimer. He had sought throughout his writings to return Africa to history. Reflecting on the war, he was even more certain of this task. ¹²⁵ In 1946, he was sure that slavery and its attendants − racialism and white supremacy − were ‘the prime and effective’ causes of ‘the contradictions in European civilisation . . . and the collapse of human culture’. ¹²⁶ Du Bois’s commitment to Pan-Africanism and anti-racist thought had provided the historical kaleidoscope through which Du Bois could see the true order of things: ‘Before our blinded eyes, war was continuous.’ ¹²⁷ Refusing to be seduced by the event of fascism, he placed it in a historical framework the horizon of which was not bourgeois mythology, but an experience of history in which race had proven to be a deadly social force well before the organisation of European fascism.

Fascism and the fate of the world

Du Bois, throughout the second world war, wondered at the fate of the colonies under the control of the major powers. He wondered how democracy in the West could be sustained while the ‘majority of the peoples of the world are kept in colonial status’. ¹²⁸ This was invariably tied to his continued intellectual discussion with Marxist theory. There is no doubt he lauded Marx and his writings. He wrote, as central Germany fell to the allies: ‘the central problem behind all change is economic . . . the Marxian proposition that economic development is basic to all human progress. There is no gain-saying this truth.’ The problem to be overcome was the economic relations of imperialism. If, following the war, these relations remained, Du Bois questioned the framing of the war as a ‘fight for freedom’. Freedom for whom, he asked. ¹²⁹ Indeed, if most peoples were to remain ‘poor and ignorant’ for ‘the profit of the civilised nations of the world’, what was it for? ¹³⁰ Fascism was neither an aberration nor the war against it a war for freedom. The US itself was enough evidence of this for Du Bois. He had consistently likened the anti-democratic attitudes in America to European fascism, pointing out that such treatment cannot be overturned with integration into the US franchise. ¹³¹

Du Bois knew, too, that the conflict would not just have repercussions for the different ‘races’ of the globe, but also the theories of those races. ¹³² To put it another way, the processes of race-making and the histories out of which both race and anti-racism were to be produced were up for grabs. Indeed, the racialism of Nazism, Du Bois wrote, was one of the ‘most effective stimuli’ for nationalism and ‘group revenge’. ¹³³ It is also instructive that Du Bois looked to countries such as China, South Africa, India and the West Indies. These countries were, he wrote, central to the ‘race problems’ of the twentieth century. Poor and ruled over to varying degrees by the western powers, Du Bois presciently suggested to his readers that race and war were linked, and if economic warfare was a condition of existence in these countries, the ‘color line’ would persist. ¹³⁴

Du Bois’s writings demand we consider the historical representation of events and the historical framework they appear in, which developed over a length of time overlooked by much conventional history. ¹³⁵ He brought to his analysis a view of history that did not begin with a date or an action, but with people, with the enslaved Africans of the nineteenth century. He was not unsympathetic to the impoverished workers of Europe. Indeed, he argued it was precisely because of their conditions that something as colligating as racial nationalism was required. It is precisely for this reason, as Robinson writes, that ‘nationalism is the most important ideology of our times’. ¹³⁶ Fascism was and is a fundamentally racial movement, mobilised through racial order and dependent upon it. Studies of fascism must begin to consider Black radical theorists and scholars of race, not least in our moment of political fissures and racial violence. As Robinson suggests, ‘if you put enough pressure on European communities, they will re-imagine their identity in terms of race – in terms of whiteness’. ¹³⁷

It is important to recall also that it was European civilisation which brought race to the colonies, to America. By the eighteenth century a ‘racial mist’ had settled over America, out of which appeared ‘white solidarity’. This was a force not dissimilar to inter-war Europe that could transcend class contradictions. ¹³⁸ Du Bois, too, identified this force. Upon searching for the foundations of the deadliest political force seen on the European continent, he glimpsed the roots of war and the historical reflection of slavery. Du Bois posed the problem of war not as an event, but a process. Not of consequences, but of conditions. ¹³⁹ There had been for non-European peoples ‘one continuous war over the earth’. The nineteenth century ‘was not a century of peace but an era of world war’, and the twentieth century was ‘its legitimate heir’. ¹⁴⁰