Abstract
This article asks: “How was the rhetoric of post or anti-fascism used to develop colonial projects in the inter and postwar period?” Through investigating the Du Bois archive, I answer this through producing a Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism. While many have written about the connections between European fascism and colonialism in theories of “colonial fascism,” a Du Boisian approach leads us to the concept of colonial post-fascism, demonstrating the array of colonial practices which were instigated in the name of world peace in the inter and postwar era. Colonial post-fascism is characterized by three processes that Du Bois wrote about. First, colonial post-fascism involves a bifurcation between colonial violence and peace, such that Western powers in the inter and postwar period could make commitments to world peace without interrogating the actions of their empires. Second, colonial post-fascism involves the process by which empires developed their imperial practices to rebuild from the effects of the war against fascism. Finally, colonial post-fascism involves the U.S. empire increasing its militarization, which developed in the fight against fascism, to secure colonial power under the rhetoric of maintaining world peace. This article makes several contributions. First, instead of highlighting the link between European fascism and colonialism, I demonstrate how colonialism shaped European post-fascism. Second, I contribute toward the project of undoing bifurcated histories of the West which elide discussions of colonial violence. Finally, I highlight how Du Bois’s involvement in the peace movement was not just activism, but also generative to social theory.
Introduction
Much has been written about how anti-colonial thinkers drew links between European fascism and European colonialism (Go 2016; Gopal 2019; Shilliam 2019). Not as much attention has been paid to how colonialism shaped the logic of European approaches to “post-fascism” in the inter and postwar era. In light of this lacuna, in this article, I ask: “How was the rhetoric of post or anti-fascism used to develop colonial projects in the inter and postwar period?” Drawing on the digitalized Du Bois archive held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1 this article develops a Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism. The concept of colonial post-fascism enables us to understand how colonial violence was not only the foundation to, but also a consequence of, Western restructuring in the inter and postwar periods. In this context, colonial post-fascism refers to the constellation of colonial knowledges, practices, and developments which were instigated in the name of world peace in the inter and postwar era.
The concept of colonial post-fascism involves three processes that Du Bois wrote about. First, colonial post-fascism involves a bifurcation between colonial violence and peace, such that Western powers in the inter and postwar period could make commitments to world peace without interrogating the actions of their empires. Here, I engage with Du Bois’s writings to show how Western discussions about peace in the inter and postwar periods elided discussions of colonial violence; this enabled such Western powers to accelerate colonial projects despite their international commitments to peace and democracy. Second, colonial post-fascism involves the process by which empires developed their imperial practices in order to rebuild from the effects of the war against fascism. Here, I engage with Du Bois’s notion that World Wars I and II both marked a shift toward a “new phase of colonial imperialism.” In this new phase of colonial imperialism, the colonies became further investment opportunities for the Western states to rebuild from the effects of war and the battle against fascism. Seen both through the development of European welfare capitalism, and also the United States’ increasing finance capitalism, colonial post-fascism here is demonstrated by the colonial practices developed in the ruins of the war against fascism. Finally, I engage with Du Bois’s critiques of America’s growing status as an imperial empire. Here, I demonstrate how colonial post-fascism involves the U.S. empire further developing its militarization, which developed in the fight against fascism, in order to secure colonial power under the rhetoric of maintaining world peace.
This article makes a series of contributions. First, instead of highlighting the link between European fascism and colonialism, I adopt a Du Boisian approach to highlight how colonialism also shaped anti or post-fascism. Second, in highlighting the concept of colonial post-fascism, I contribute toward the undoing of bifurcated understandings of modernity and capitalism, demonstrating that one cannot separate the Western discourses and practices of peace and democracy in the inter and postwar period from the realities of colonization. Finally, I add to the burgeoning scholarship on Du Bois as a global social theorist (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020). In particular, scholars have argued that Du Bois’s involvement in the peace movement signaled his full turn away from social theory and into activism (Gilroy 2010), demonstrated his communist affiliations (Sinitiere 2022), and became a political project that he was involved in alongside his anticolonial and antiracist organizing (Marable 1983). By contrast, in this article I show how beyond his political affiliations, Du Bois’s involvement in the peace movement was also generative of a social theory of colonial post-fascism.
Colonial Fascism: On Anticolonial Theory
As previously remarked, researchers have highlighted the relation between European fascism and European colonialism. In historical sociology and history, this research has largely focused on demonstrating how twentieth-century European fascist parties (such as Nazism in Germany and PNF in Italy), both drew upon colonial techniques of exploitation and developed fascist social policies in their colonies. For instance, research has highlighted how Italy instigated a variety of fascist policies in their African territories to mirror what they were doing “at home,” such as the banning of the free press and political opposition (Finaldi 2019); others have highlighted how Mussolini saw increasing colonial expansion as a means to rival the economies of Britain and France (Labanca 2004). Likewise with Germany, scholars have focused on how Nazism’s genocidal campaign was a prototypical case of colonial modernity (Mrázek 2020), which both used colonial tactics in its mass executions (Wolfe 2006), and ideologically developed from myths of German purity and desires of ethnic homogeneity born in German’s imperial missions in the nineteenth century (Baranowski 2011; Bernhard 2017; Smith 1989). In sum, this research highlights the notion of “colonial fascism” in the way that the authors show clear epistemic and material links between the practices of European fascism and colonialism.
This notion of colonial fascism was also essential to Black radical theorizing and activism in the early twentieth century. Indeed, Du Bois explicitly wrote about such connections, famously claiming that the two world wars were the outcome of struggles over colonial resources (Du Bois 1948b). By means of an introductory discussion to this article, I will begin by reviewing Black radical critiques of colonial fascism.
“Hitler Is Not Dead”: Padmore, Césaire, and Western Hypocrisy
Black radical movements in the twentieth century often theorized European fascism as a project which emerged from colonial tactics, organizations, and technologies. Two crucial figures in such anticolonial theorizing are George Padmore and Aimé Césaire, both of whom highlighted how European fascism, especially through the practices of the Nazi party, brought the logic of European colonialism to the interior of the European continent. To this extent, European fascism was not treated as something “new” which emerged endogenously within Europe, but rather was construed as an event in the larger story of modernity. Within such theorizations, figures like Césaire and Padmore pointed out the hypocrisy of Western powers condemning the actions of German and Italian fascists, while they were designing their own similar structures of violence in their colonies (Getachew 2019; Gopal 2019; Robinson 2019).
Straightforwardly, Black radicals pointed out that the practices of fascist parties in 1930s and 1940s Europe—particularly Italy under Mussolini and the German Nazi party—were extremely similar to the practices of European empires in their colonies. Such empire states were thus insincere in their condemnation of fascism. Indeed, Padmore went as far as to argue that the violent practices of fascist parties in Italy, Germany, and Japan actively distracted large waves of the British public from recognizing the violence of colonization practiced by empires; as he commented:
While the European scene is occupying our attention, the colonial “Fuehrers” are tightening their grip on the coloured workers in Africa and the West Indies. (Padmore 1939) Germany and her Axis partners, Italy and Japan, are trying to impose their imperialistic aims upon the peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa with tanks and dive bombers. They engage the attention of the British people to the exclusion of the equally sinister plans of territorial expansion within their own empire. (Padmore 1941:4)
Padmore’s provocation of “colonial ‘Fuehrers’” here is a deliberate one. As he argued, at precisely the same time that the British government were condemning the tyranny and cult of leadership of Mussolini and Hitler, they too were passing laws in their colonies which further infringed upon colonized peoples’ rights and autonomy. Padmore clarifies this with two examples: first, the sedition ordinances of 1938, which restricted the ability of those in the colonies to criticize the empire (Padmore 1938a); and second, the banning of strike and trade union activities across all Caribbean colonies, whereby the British empire declared oil and sugar as essential products for the war effort, and thus declared strikes in these industries (and others) as being antithetical to the fight for world democracy (Padmore 1939). For radicals like Padmore, therefore, empire states and fascist parties were two sides of the same coin. Just as the fascist parties would label insurgents as enemies of the state, so too were the British empire curtailing freedom of expression, and arresting union leaders in the colonies (such as Wallace-Johnson, Secretary of the West African Youth League and the local Trade Union Congress). Just as the fascist parties were engaging in eugenic projects within Europe, so too were empire states running similar regimes of violence in their colonies. As George Padmore (1938b) thus exclaimed,
We denounce the whole gang of European robbers and enslavers of the Colonial peoples. German Nazis, Italian Fascists, British, French, Belgian democracies—all are the same, IMPERIALIST EXPLOITERS. [caps original]
Essential to the Black radical tradition was thus pointing out the contradiction whereby, in Padmore’s words, European allies were pretending ‘to be fighting those evil things—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution [. . .] and at the same time practis[ing] Hitler’s methods in the colonies’ (quoted in Gopal 2019:384–85). In fact, George Padmore (1939) made a specific plea to the British government and to the British left in 1939 to recognize that the fight against fascism necessarily entails giving sovereignty to the colonies, and that one “cannot claim to be fighting for ‘freedom and democracy’ in Europe without stimulating demands for ‘freedom and democracy’ in its own Empire.” This was precisely the contradiction pointed out by Aimé Césaire in the postwar era, who was also attentive to how empire states bifurcated their colonial practices from the horrors of Nazism.
In his Discourse on Colonialism, for instance, Aimé Césaire ([1950] 2001:36) construes the fascism of the Nazi party as “appl[ying] to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the [N-word] of Africa.” Césaire consequently argued that we need to avoid reductive accounts of history which equate the collapse of Nazism with the collapse of fascist logic, instead demonstrating that such fascism lives on through colonial racisms:
When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I turn on my radio, when I learn that Jews have been insulted, mistreated, persecuted, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when, finally, I turn on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been inaugurated and legalized, I say that we have certainly been lied to: Hitler is not dead. (quoted in Fanon 1986:90)
As recounted by Cedric Robinson (2019), this Black radical understanding of European fascism shaped multiple Black internationalist projects. Most commonly known, perhaps, was the wave of Black internationalist support for Ethiopia upon Mussolini’s invasion in 1935 (Shilliam 2019). Here, organizations such as the International African Friends of Ethiopia in England, the Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia and the African Patriotic League, and the Committee of the Blacks and Arabs of Paris put pressure on international organizations, such as the League of Nations, to condemn the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. At the same time, colonized people across Kenya, Egypt, British Guiana, Cuba, Trinidad, and the Bahamas sought permission from colonial authorities to fight in defense of the Ethiopians (Robinson 2019). Here, as Robbie Shilliam (2019) recounts, Black internationalists knew that the fight against fascism was the same as the fight against colonization. Thus, a year after the Italian invasion began, Cedric Robinson (2019) also describes how Black internationalists across Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean fought in the Spanish civil war against Franco in 1936 2 ; Robinson (2019:155) refers to the remarks from African-American soldier Milton Herndon, who presciently linked colonial invasions to European fascist expansion: ‘Yesterday, Ethiopia, Czechoslovakia—today, Spain—tomorrow, maybe America. Fascism won’t stop anywhere—until we stop it’. Thus, it was clear in the Black radical tradition that anti-colonialism must be anti-fascist, and vice versa.
Du Bois on Colonial Fascism and the Two World Wars
Du Bois (1950a:3) was directly involved in this Black radical approach to European fascism, praising Padmore’s work on “colonial fascism.” Much like Césaire and Padmore, Du Bois (1946a:6) was quick to note that the racist practices of the Nazi party were not novel inventions; as he claims:
There was no Nazi atrocity of concentration camps [. . .] which the Christian civilization 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.
Du Bois consequently saw European fascism as a logical extension of colonial racism. Du Bois says as much when he comments on his experience of viewing the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany, stating that Hitler was a “crude but logical exponent of white world race philosophy since the Conference of Berlin in 1884” (quoted in Robinson 2019:156). Even one year prior to this experience at the Olympic Games, in 1935 Du Bois commented on Nazism as “the last great effort of white Europe to secure the subjection of black men” (quoted in Robinson 2019:167). As argued by Robinson (2019), Du Bois thus developed an understanding of European fascism as being one consequence of the pathology of the global color line (Thomas 2020). Du Bois’s view thus converged with those of other Black radicals in the way that he critiqued the hypocrisy of Western anti-fascists endorsing colonial rule, stating:
We have conquered Germany [. . .] but not their ideas. We still believe in white supremacy, keeping Negroes in their place and lying about democracy when we mean imperial control of 750 millions of human beings in colonies. (Quoted in Getachew 2019:72)
It was clear, therefore, that Du Bois theorized colonial fascism in a similar way to other Black radical theorists, such as the aforementioned Padmore and Césaire. However, without contradicting himself, Du Bois’s understanding of colonial fascism was loose enough to also consider how colonialism and European fascism may have had divergences in the interests, groups, and people articulated in the respective projects. This discussion was particularly apparent in the way that Du Bois discussed the two World Wars, and especially the second World War.
On the one hand, Du Bois made similar comments to other Black radicals when he considered how the two World Wars could be construed as struggles over colonial resources. World War I, Du Bois argued, followed directly from the Berlin Conference of 1884, and was mostly a war over what Germany construed as the unfair distribution of African colonies; as Du Bois (1949:158) commented:
[The] real cause of this World War [was] the despising of the darker races by the dominant groups of men, and the consequent fierce rivalry among European nations in their effort to use darker and backward people for purposes of selfish gain, regardless of the ultimate good of the oppressed.
Reviewing both World Wars, Du Bois (1948b:25) further commented that they were “wars primarily of jealousy between imperial nations and efforts to reallocate the mastership of the world.” Indeed, Du Bois’s view on these world wars was not too dissimilar to George Padmore’s (1938b) own assessment in 1938 that: “If Britain and France go to the aid of Czechoslovakia, it is not to defend international law and order, as they say, but to prevent Hitler from over-running Europe and stealing their colonies.” For Du Bois, similar to Padmore, the motivation for Western powers to stand against European fascism was not necessarily born from goodwill, but rather from a colonial anxiety.
However, in Gandhi and the American Negro, Du Bois (1957) hints toward a different interpretation of the two World Wars, and especially the Second World War. Here, Du Bois points out that the World Wars were not wars fought between good (democracy, anti-fascism) and evil (fascism), but rather between two expressions of the color line: colonial capitalism on the one hand, and European fascism on the other. As he summarizes (Du Bois 1957:2), “[in World War One] we joined with American capital to keep Germany and Italy from sharing the spoils of colonial imperialism [and in World War Two] we again joined Western capital against fascism.”
Here, Du Bois’s interpretation of World War II offers a novel approach to colonial fascism. Namely, by considering World War II as a battle between Western capital and European fascism, Du Bois is highlighting an example of a divergence between the interests of Western capitalism (itself a colonial project) with European fascism. In this case, while both colonialism and fascism, in Du Bois’s larger oeuvre, are considered to be expressions of the same color line, he is pointing out a historically specific moment in which one cannot simply reduce European fascism to colonialism. Instead, one must view such fascism as being its own disparate project which came into conflict with Western colonial powers.
In my opinion, Du Bois’s suggestion of a conflict between European fascism and colonialism nudges us toward a disparate intellectual paradigm to extant social theory. Namely, while considerable attention has been paid toward theorizing colonial fascism, we would do well to also theorize colonial post-fascism. Such a concept would enable us to answer the central question of this article: “How was the rhetoric of post or anti-fascism used to develop colonial projects in the inter and postwar period?” As captured in the writings held in the digitalized Du Bois archive, I suggest we can develop a Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism. Such a Du Boisian approach enables us to see how colonial violence was an explicit and implicit foundation to the Western designs of post-fascism in the inter and postwar periods. Through theorizing colonial post-fascism, we can highlight how colonialism and fascism may have been cut from the same cloth, but they were also not synonymous to one another; after all, Du Bois argues, colonialism was in fact used as a solution to move beyond European fascism.
Toward A Du Boisian Theory Of Colonial Post-Fascism
Colonial post-fascism refers to the constellation of colonial knowledges, practices, and developments which were instigated in the name of world peace in the inter and postwar era. As aforementioned, I argue that the concept of colonial post-fascism involves three processes which Du Bois wrote about—doxic colonial violence, a new phase of colonial imperialism, and growing U.S. militarization—all of which were instigated in the name of anti or post-fascism.
Colonialism as a World War
First, I will begin with Du Bois’s writings on colonialism as itself being a world war characterized by ubiquitous violence. Through analyzing these writings, we can see that colonial violence was a doxic component of the world order, to the extent that inter and postwar peace discussions elided an understanding of colonial violence. This allowed for colonial violence to continue even as the West sought to rebuild the world on the foundational principle of global peace.
To Du Bois, the ubiquitous violence of the color line was instigated through colonization. Through colonization, we got the naturalization of the ‘non-ethics of war’; processes which are typically associated with the most brutal tactics used in warfare, such as sexual violence and genocide, became part of the social realities of the “Hellish existence” of those in the colonies (Maldonado-Torres 2007:255; see also Fanon 1963). Through the colonial encounter, therefore, Du Bois held that the global color line was held in place through the logic of warfare, commenting in 1948 that “not only has there been these two world wars, but there has been a history of almost continuous minor wars during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which have given us a war psychosis” (Du Bois 1948a:4). In the postwar context, Du Bois (1946a:12–13) even pointed out that the violence enacted through colonialism meant that “the colonial system caused ten times more deaths than actual war.”
The connections between violence, war, colonization, and race were essential to Du Bois’s understanding of the global arrangements of the inter and postwar eras. As organizations such as the United Nations were attempting to reach consensus on world peace, Du Bois highlighted how colonial violence and the logic of war in the colonies were not being included into such discussions, and were simply assumed to be a doxic component of global politics. As Du Bois pointed out, postwar discussion of world peace tended to fixate on returning arrangements back to what we had in the so-called one hundred years of peace between the battle of Waterloo (1815) to the Battle of the Marne (1914), without recognizing that this century involved the acceleration of colonial violence; as he commented:
[. . .] the vaunted “Hundreds Year of Peace” from Waterloo to the Battle of the Marne, was not peace at all but war of Europe and North America on Africa and Asia with only troubled bits of peace between the colonial conquerors. I saw Britain, France, Belgium and North America trying to continue to force the world to serve them by monopoly of land, technique and machines backed by physical force which has now culminated by the use of atomic power. (Du Bois 1957:2)
Du Bois’s reflections here in 1957 connect directly with his comments after the First World War. Here, he again noted how the United States and European nations gathered to discuss peace arrangements without so much as noting the existence of colonial violence, such that:
[. . .] the real pawns, the real prizes at stake, are not distributed. They are not brought into the picture. Hardly a word has been said about them at the London conference, at the Geneva Conference, at the Washington Conference [. . .] the victims of this situation, the black laborers, and yellow laborers, and brown laborers, in Asia and the lands of the sea, are not only voiceless in these conferences but the mass of the intelligent people of England, France, Germany, Italy and America do not consider that the interest of colored peoples is of enough importance to be considered. (Du Bois 1930:5–6)
Furthermore, Du Bois pointed out an irony that developed post-World War I, whereby Western powers were claiming to be moving toward peace while rapidly developing their military spending. Again, Du Bois argues that this militarization was testament to the fact that colonial violence was so doxic to the global polity that it did not constitute a violation to peace. As he explained (Du Bois 1930:5–6),
We are spending sums upon great war machines, which are nothing less than ridiculous in their amount [. . .] Englishmen do not want to fight Americans. Americans do not want to fight Englishmen. The French and the Germans have had all the fighting that they want. All that Italy wants is the control of certain masses of laboring Black folk in areas now controlled by France. What England wants is to hold intact a great Empire predominantly colored and not to have her economic advantage there shaken by the incursions of powerful commercial interests in the United States. What Germany wants is to get big areas of colored labour and raw material which she lost in the great war. These matters are so important to all these countries that despite what is said large numbers of men and influential groups are willing to direct organized murder in order to keep their present advantage or to increase their advantages [. . .] Manifestedly under these circumstances, the great decrease and abolition of navies and armies is unthinkable, and manifestedly, we have got to face with unblinking eye the color problem before the problem of navy reduction, military disarmament and peace can be settled [emphasis added].
Recognizing this ubiquity of colonial violence (and the Western misrecognition of colonial violence) is the first step toward a Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism. In a Du Boisian approach, we see that violence is not only a defining feature of the global color line, but that this violence is often not even construed as violence to begin with. This is precisely the problem that Du Bois was analyzing in the inter and postwar periods, where he demonstrated that colonial violence was so naturalized that Western discussions and consensus around civic codes and peace became bifurcated from their colonial practices (Hammer 2020).
3
In particular, Du Bois criticized both the League of Nations (Du Bois 1921) and then the United Nations (Du Bois 1947b) for being content to maintain the colonial world order despite their founding principles of freedom and self-determination.
4
Stating of the United Nations (UN), Du Bois (1947b:1) thus commented, “the Trusteeship council was deliberately so constituted as to give colonial governments power to block most efforts to advance colonial peoples or obtain reliable knowledge of their condition,” also commenting on Britain and the United States’ involvement in constructing the UN such that:
At a time when it is possible by re-organizing the outlook of Great Britain toward democracy and race tolerance [Churchill] proposes to the United States that we should help restore that empire, help to insure its investments, help to perpetuate its hold upon colonial peoples. (Du Bois 1946b:1)
It is no surprise, therefore, that Du Bois argued that peace would only happen in the context of the abolition of the color line, in which we have “the extension of the principle of government by the consent of the governed, not simply among the smaller nations of Europe, but among the natives of Asia and Africa, the Western Indies and the Negroes in the United States” (Du Bois 1949:158). However, as Du Bois demonstrates, the matter of colonies only really figured into peace discussions—if at all—as resources and territories, ironically to be (re)distributed in the name of restoring international peace itself. Colonial post-fascism, in this first context, thus relates to the process by which freedom of, and peace within, the colonies was bifurcated from Western discussions and agreements of world peace in the inter and postwar period. Within this period, colonial violence was not seen as a threat or contradiction to the efforts of rebuilding a world founded on the principle of global peace as Western powers increasingly deployed a rhetoric and a commitment to anti-fascism.
The New Phase of Colonial Imperialism
While writing about the doxic nature of colonial violence, Du Bois (1954) also turned his attention to what he referred to as a “new phase of colonial imperialism” in the inter and postwar period. I argue that Du Bois’s writings here again contribute toward a theory of colonial post-fascism in the way that he pinpoints how wealth extraction from the colonies was used to rebuild war-torn economies and infrastructure in the metropoles.
Essential to Du Bois’s consideration of the new phase of colonial imperialism is his overall philosophy of history. Briefly, Du Bois argues that the global color line first involved a “new degradation of labor through African slavery” which dominated from the fifteenth through to the eighteenth century (Du Bois 1947a:5). Following this, there developed “modern colonialism,” described as “the child of slavery and is in essence slavery without a foreign slave trade” (Du Bois 1947b:1). 5 This “child of slavery” was defined less by “stealing slaves [. . .] to controlling labour in Africa and Asia” (Du Bois 1947b:1). As we progressed through industrialization into the early 1900s, Du Bois (1953:2) argues we got the development of finance capitalism—a form of capitalism which was “free from State control and yet working in a state-protected market and under the dictation of a banking oligarchy.” Du Bois (1953:7) argues that after the First World War, and at an even greater pace after the Second World War, this finance capitalism quickly rolled into colonial imperialism, in which particularly “American capital began to play an increasing role in Africa.”
This colonial imperialism, Du Bois argued, was marked by increasing Western capital ventures into the colonies as a means of rebuilding the West in the inter and postwar era. Colonialism, to this extent, especially after the Second World War, was presented as being the answer to solving the material consequences of fighting European fascism. Du Bois (1948b:24) points this out when he summarizes the dominant view among the Western world in 1945 that “the future development of the mankind meant the rule of white Europe and North America over the rest of the world” which was “done for the best interests of the other peoples in the world and because they had shown no aptitude for government and particularly none for democratic development.” Pointing out the state of the world in 1945, Du Bois (1948b:25) thus predicted that
Great Britain controlled four hundred and eighty-five millions of people. France had in her colonies seventy-two million, the Dutch sixty-one, Portugal eleven million, Belgium fourteen million, Spain one and a third million, and the United States 18 million counting the Philippines.
This grand scale of colonialism was in part due to the postwar “determined effort by the British, French and Portuguese and Belgians to concentrate an intensified colonialism in Africa. This was backed by increasing American colonial investment” (Du Bois 1947b:1). Importantly, Du Bois (1948b:25) construed the notion that colonization is in the best interests of the world as being directly correlated to the previous two World Wars, stating “the world has been re-cast on the imperialist-colonial idea. This crisis of this organization came with the two world wars.” Nevertheless, there were differences, Du Bois argues, in how the United States and Europe pursued colonization in their respective developments of colonial post-fascism. While Europe pursued colonialism to develop what Du Bois (1953) referred to as “state capitalism” in their development of various welfare programs, the United States, Du Bois argues, concentrated their efforts on furthering military and economic control of European and American colonies.
The issue of colonialism and welfare capitalism was directly spelled out in Du Bois’s ([1947] 2007) World and Africa, written during, and published shortly after, the Second World War. Here, Du Bois ([1947] 2007:276) makes passing reference to how soldiers returning to the metropoles will want certain social improvements in light of their war efforts, stating:
[. . .] during and after this war the working people of Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium, in particular, are going to demand certain costly social improvements [. . .] this means that the temptation to recoup and balance the financial burden [. . .] by investment in colonies [. . .] is going to increase decidedly [. . .] the working people of the civilized world may thus be largely induced to put their political power behind imperialism, and democracy in Europe and America will continue to impede and nullify democracy in Asia and Africa.
Showing how the West would sponsor such social improvements not through wealth taxation, but from colonial exploitation,
6
Du Bois (1944:450) points out the contradiction where
postwar planning enables Europe and America to fight for democracy and the abolition of poverty while ignoring the fact that race prejudice makes this fight consistent with compulsory poverty, disease, and repression of most of the workers of the world.
In Human Rights for all Minorities, Du Bois (1947a) tracks this link especially between colonialism with the development of European welfare states by focusing on the example of the British empire controlling West African exports (particularly cocoa). Here, Du Bois (1947a:21) points out that there were hopes among those in West Africa that a postwar left government in Britain would signal some commitment to democratic governance; instead, the government actually tightened their grip on cocoa production, proposing to “put all West African produce under control of a board sitting in England, with representation of the manufacturers [. . .] and with no representation of the farmers.” Furthermore, previous profits taken from the cocoa trade (which Du Bois predicts summed to 25 million British pounds between 1939 and 1943) were not going to be distributed to the locals, as initially promised, but were instead used to develop British industry and the develop British “experts” who could advise on West African production (Du Bois 1947a). For Du Bois, such colonial developments were typical to the European project of postwar reconstruction, where the (moral and economic) costs of fascism were to be redressed by the financial and social profits of colonialism.
In the American case, Du Bois emphasizes the increasing desire toward military and financial control of their (and others’) colonies. Importantly, for Du Bois (1954), this increasing role of American capital created a shift toward a new phase of colonial imperialism, involving more explicit collusions between government and private enterprise in the economic exploitation of the colonies. Du Bois (1960) describes this development of colonialism in his piece Insanity, where he critiques the 1948 Marshall Plan for increasing investment in European colonies under the guise of charity and development:
What it really helped was American business to buy into European industry [. . .] we are using our public tax funds to give rich American investors private capital or to bribe native quislings in India and Africa to betray their countries to American industry. Already in New York alone we have four “African” organisations, financed by Big Business, and offered by Negroes supposed to give “information” on Africa. (Du Bois 1960:5)
An American lawyer involved in this Marshall Plan, Alow Moffat (1950:302), confirmed Du Bois’s assessment when he commented on how the aim was ‘to further their [colonial territories’] development so that the inhabitants can presently enjoy an increasingly higher standard of living.’ Indeed, to Du Bois this economic interventionism was typical of postwar American colonial practices, signaled by the U.S. government stating themselves that one of their primary objectives was to “take steps as appropriate to improve the climate for private investment” in Africa (National Security Council 1958). Putting (private) money where their mouth is, U.S. investment in the postwar era became increasingly funneled toward Africa, and particularly to South Africa, with the government (National Security Council 1958) admitting: “it is in the Union of South Africa where most of the American economic interests lie [. . .] The United States is heavily dependent on the area for diamonds, cobalt and chromite. The area is also an important producer of many other minerals and agricultural products.” Commenting on this role of American capital in postwar colonization, therefore, Du Bois (1950b:12) noted:
[. . .] it is American money that owns more and more of South African mines worked by slave labor; it is American enterprises that fattens off of Rhodesian copper and Nigerian tin; it is American investors that seek to dominate China, India, Korea and Burma; that are throttling the starved workers of the Near East.
7
In sum, Du Bois’s critiques of the developments of European and American capitalism can thus inform our Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism. Here, Du Bois’s writings highlight at least two germane processes. First, Du Bois points out the situation whereby European welfare capitalism was relying upon further colonization and colonial exploitation in order to rebuild metropolitan society. Second, Du Bois points out the shift in the global field in which American capital became an increasing force in postwar colonization—again, as a means of profiting from the world system left by the battle against fascism. In both cases, the fight against fascism, and the aftermath of this “moral crusade,” created the conditions for a blossoming of old and new forms of colonial expansion, exploitation, and expropriation. The rhetoric and climate of “post-fascism,” therefore, produced the legitimating background for expanding colonialism.
On the Danger of Peace
Importantly, both Du Bois’s aforementioned critiques of the ubiquity of colonial violence, and the “new colonial imperialism” directly related to his overall involvement in the postwar peace movement. “Peace is dangerous” was the title of a speech Du Bois (1951) gave at the Boston Community Church on November 11, 1951, where he stressed that the postwar era had demonstrated that while fighting between metropolitan powers was detrimental to the global economy, this same global economy necessitated ongoing colonial violence, destruction, and generalized warfare. To Du Bois, ironically, peace thus constituted one of the greatest threats to the world order in the postwar era. I contend that we can use Du Bois’s reflections on the peace movement to isolate a third process of colonial post-fascism—specifically, the growing role of the U.S. empire, legitimating itself under the guise of maintaining world peace. Here, Du Bois’s writings highlight how U.S. militarization, developed in the fight against fascism, ended up being used to consolidate postwar colonization.
The military expansion of the United States during the Second World War, and the accompanying economic growth, is not a particularly novel finding. Historians have documented such growth highlighting the “17 million rifles and pistols, over 80,000 tanks, 41 billion rounds of ammunition, 4 million artillery shells, 75,000 vessels, nearly 300,000 planes, and many more items and services [made] for the war,” raising the American GDP by 72 percent between 1940 and 1945 (Fishback 2019). Commenting on this period of military growth, Du Bois (1951) thus recognized the connection being formed between war and profit, stating: “those who gain from war and suffer from peace are [. . .] the munition-makers; and those who furnish war materials and machines.” Important to Du Bois was that the project of rapid militarization—initially sparked by the battle against fascism—ended up being a key technology in the consolidation of American colonial imperialism.
8
Indeed, in his speech outlining his platform on running for Senate, Du Bois (1950b:2) argues that this postwar militarization has created a “slow but steady descent into belief in complete and universal war” whereby the United States has:
[. . .] its armed forces in every continent and on every sea, pledged to conquer and control masses of mankind, order the thought and action and belief of the nations of the world and ready to spend for these objects more money than it ever spent for religion, education or social uplift altogether.
Du Bois’s writings here directly feed into our understanding of colonial post-fascism. He spots a link whereby the United States was able to use anti-fascism (and world peace more broadly) as a façade for their colonial project of military expansion and control. Indeed, this sentiment was already clearly explicated by President Truman himself, when he announced to the citizens of the United States by radio in 1945 that
“[Berlin] is a ghost city,” [. . .] To spare Americans such a fate, and to protect the world from “the ravages of any future breach of the peace,” Truman continued, the United States had to “maintain the military bases necessary for the complete protection of our interests and of world peace.” (Quoted in Heefner 2022: 55)
With approximately 1,139 overseas military bases in 1946 (Herrera and Cicchini 2013), Du Bois (1951:20) thus spotted efforts on behalf of the United States “to control the world by force of arms,” which he describes “as fantastic as it is evil. Our last desperate plan to restore colonial imperialism with the help of Germany and Japan is the greatest dream of a crazy age.” While Du Bois (1948b:26) asked the rhetorical question in 1948 as to whether American colonial imperialism can “be accomplished without political and military domination?,” it seems that by the early 1950s he was convinced that the rhetoric of peace and post-fascism was being used to legitimate such relations of political and military dominance.
Furthermore, essential to Du Bois’s critique is that American militarization demonstrated the profitability of colonial imperialism to the burgeoning U.S. empire and thus the profitability of colonial violence became connected to the lives of the everyday American consumer. The profitability and social effects of colonial violence in the postwar United States, Du Bois argues, meant that there was no homegrown mainstream public movement against U.S. imperialism. Thus, returning to his provocation that colonialism itself is a form of warfare, Du Bois (1950b:13) comments in 1950 that the continuity of (colonial) warfare is destined to continue due to its profitability, stating:
We were at war yesterday; we are at war today; we will be at war tomorrow because big business wants war and builds its profits, direct and indirect on war, on the attempt to murder all who want peace and abundance.
Carrying on this critique, Du Bois argues that these profits from colonial warfare have sponsored an increased quality of life in the American metropole, and that it therefore became impossible to have the valorized “American way of life” at the same time as having world peace. As Du Bois (1951:18) summarized,
[. . .] if the United States stops trying to own cheap colored labor, to control land and raw materials over the world; to regulate exchange of goods and services while cocoa and sugar call for the highest prices, the peons who raise them do not get enough to eat: if we stop our war to continue this system, will world peace be dangerous to the American way of life? [. . .] if this self-denial on the part of certain Americans would prevent World War and give Chinese children enough to eat, would we be willing to make the sacrifice?
It will come as no surprise that Du Bois answers his question in the negative—Americans, he argued had come to see colonial imperialism as a doxic component of the world system, necessary for the maintenance of peace in the postwar era. “Race prejudice,” as Du Bois (1935:12) had earlier commented, through colonial imperialism continued to be “one of the most profitable investments which capital can make”; especially in the ruins caused by the fight against fascism in the postwar era, the United States saw such capital investments as ideal opportunities for growth and dominance.
Discussion: Du Bois On Colonial Post-Fascism
While he did not use the term explicitly, I believe we can use Du Bois’s speeches and writings to develop a Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism. This theory consequently helps us to better understand how the rhetoric and environment of post (or anti) fascism was used in the inter and postwar period to develop colonial projects and practices. In this article, I have spotted three trends that Du Bois demonstrated in the inter and postwar era, all of which culminate broadly in the Du Boisian notion of colonial post-fascism as a central principle of the twentieth century.
First, Du Bois isolated the process by which the ubiquity of colonial violence continued in the inter and postwar period. Du Bois demonstrated that this ubiquity of colonial violence was doxic to the global order to the extent that inter and postwar peace discussions elided an interrogation of colonization. Through such elisions, colonial violence was allowed to continue even as the West sought to rebuild the world on the foundational principle of global peace. At this very same time of the inter and postwar period, Du Bois argues that there emerges a new form of colonial imperialism, marked both by the increasing involvement of the United States, and the increasing involvement of Western capital more broadly, in the colonial project. In this context, Du Bois argues the colonies became further investment opportunities for the Western states to rebuild from the effects of war and the battle against fascism. Seen both through the development of European welfare capitalism and the United States’ increasing finance capitalism, colonial post-fascism here is demonstrated by the colonial practices developed in the ruins of the war against fascism. Finally, Du Bois turns specifically to the United States in the postwar era, and their quest for being a leading figure in the instigation of world peace. Here, again inspired to act in the ruins of the war against fascism, U.S. militarization, which developed as a tool against European fascist powers, ended up being used to secure colonial power under the rhetoric of maintaining world peace. Put together, these three dynamics help us to theorize colonial post-fascism as a constellation of colonial knowledges, practices, and developments which were instigated in the name of world peace in the inter and postwar era.
While extant theories have demonstrated the importance of theorizing colonial fascism, I have engaged with Du Bois’s critiques to add a different dimension to our historical repertoire. Theorists of colonial fascism have, rightfully, highlighted the flows of knowledges and practices which connect the projects of European colonialism and fascism (see Gopal 2019; Shilliam 2019). Indeed, even Du Bois contributed toward theorizing this approach. However, Du Bois’s writings also point us toward a Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism, in which colonialism and colonial practices were explicitly wielded by Western powers as an answer to the material problems and international relations engendered by European fascism and war. Here, European colonialism and European fascism are not just seen as two expressions of a same thing, but they are construed as disparate projects whereby one (colonization) is seen as a solution to the other (fascism).
Concluding Thoughts: Du Bois As A Global Social Theorist
In this article, I raised the question “How was the rhetoric of post or anti-fascism used to develop colonial projects in the inter and postwar period?” Answering this question through constructing a Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism enables me to not just highlight ascendant colonial practices legitimated in the name of post or anti-fascism, but also to further pinpoint Du Bois’s role as a global social theorist; I will conclude this article with some more reflections on this area of Du Bois and global social theory.
In the ongoing Du Boisian turn, there has been a concerted effort to highlight how Du Bois placed himself into the fore of global political debates (de Leon and Rodríguez-Muñiz 2022), and produced social theories which excavated the global color line (Go 2023b; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Meghji 2024b; Morris 2015). While certain scholars have argued that Du Bois’s increasing role in activism shifted his attention away from social theory (e.g. Gilroy 2010), I have shown that Du Bois’s political speeches, writings, and activism offer a deep reservoir from which we can construct Du Boisian social theories (such as the theory of colonial post-fascism). Bifurcating between Du Bois’s scholarly writings while he was employed as a sociologist and his “activist” writings when he was an ostracized communist, constrains our ability to see how Du Bois—along with many other anticolonial thinkers (Go 2023b)—had to think sociologically about race and empire in his activism in order to successfully make the case for decolonization, peace, and justice (Meghji 2024a). In this article, through engaging with Du Bois’s writings on the inter and postwar eras, we can see how he offered a series of ways for thinking about the use of anti and post-fascism as a rhetoric and background for accelerating colonial projects. Imbued in these writings we can see Du Bois’s efforts to transcend forms of bifurcation which plague metrocentric thinking (Go 2016), especially in the way that Du Bois highlighted the deep contradiction whereby Western powers were increasing colonial violence at precisely the same time they were placing emphasis upon developing world peace. Thus, while this article has mostly focused on Du Bois’s political writings and speeches, it is clear how these activist interventions were both using the tools of sociological thought and producing novel sociological interpretations of the social world.
In the larger sphere of social theory, this article also therefore contributes to the ongoing attempts to undo bifurcated sociological histories which elide the centrality of colonial violence to the development of the modern world (Hammer 2020). As the Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism highlights, colonialism was so essential to the organization of the global polity that even as the West were trying to rebuild the global polity on the premise of world peace in the postwar, post-fascist era, colonial violence was still taken as a given (and, indeed, as a route to this world peace itself). 9 Future research can continue the undoing of these bifurcated histories through a Du Boisian frame, and can also focus on the concept of colonial post-fascism to again highlight the myriad of colonial practices that were (and continue to be) legitimated in the name of anti and post-fascism.
