Black Reconstruction

Mm-hmm.

In Black Reconstruction in America, he called the history of slavery the most magnificent drama in human history, the most magnificent-

Hmm

... drama in human history because it put Black people in the United States as a force for revolution and socialism.

There's just, I'm kinda, I'm trying to do my job the best I know how to do, and that includes, like, looking at past people who did the work well and seeing how it worked, like what they did to make their work work.

And not like emulating or falling in line, but sort of like taking inspiration from what they did to make their stuff effective, taking inspiration from the fact that, again, this is a Du Bois thing, working in any number of different modes, right? So if you read his, um, obviously The Souls of Black Folks, which is his most famous book, but, uh, Darkwater, uh, Letters from Beyond the Veil, even Black Reconstruction, you will notice that Du Bois works in prose.

He does poetry, writes verse, and is always bringing different literary forms to bear on trying to understand, explain, unpack something.

Now, I'm not much of a poet.

Now, one of the things I want to emphasize in this context is that there are two great predecessors of history from below, and in my own work, as you'll know, I'm trying to integrate them.

One is W.E.B. Du Bois with his classic Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, which foregrounds the general strike of the slaves.

This is the US Civil War from below.

The general strike of the slaves breaks the back of the Confederacy and puts 200,000 Black men under arms in the Union Army and Navy.

But that legacy that Du Bois laid out 90 years ago Its recovery and its extension has been the greatest contribution to the study of slavery in, in the United States.

And really, it's been absent from the new history of capitalism, which is one of the reasons why my book is forcing, I hope, those folks doing the new history of capitalism to come to terms with this African American tradition of history from below in the United States.

So if people wanted to really start, uh, just getting familiar with these areas, start with chapter four of Du Bois's book on the general strike of the slaves in Black Reconstruction in America, and always read CLR James' The Black Jacobins.

It's a mind-blower.

Second Reconstruction.

Black Reconstruction.

He's just going.

Just going.

But many poor whites resisted that.

Du Bois writes compellingly about this in his masterwork, Black Reconstruction, which everyone should read.

It's the greatest book on American fascism.

And and he's makes it very clear that many poor whites refuse to take that side.