W. E. B. Du Bois and the Critique of the Competitive Society

Andrew Douglas

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780820355108
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Teoria sociale

Competition and competitiveness are roundly celebrated as public values and key indicators of a dynamic and forward-thinking society. But the headlong embrace of competitive market principles, increasingly prevalent in our neoliberal age, often obscures the enduring divisiveness of a society set up to produce winners and losers. In this inspired and thoughtfully argued book, Andrew J. Douglas turns to the later writings of W. E. B. Du Bois to reevaluate the very terms of the competitive society.

Situating Du Bois in relation to the Depression-era roots of contemporary neoliberal thinking, Douglas shows that into the 1930s Du Bois ratcheted up a race-conscious indictment of capitalism and liberal democracy and posed unsettling questions about how the compulsory pull of market relations breeds unequal outcomes and underwrites the perpetuation of racial animosities. Blending historical analysis with ethical and political theory, and casting new light on several aspects of Du Bois's thinking, this book makes a compelling case that Du Bois's sweeping disillusionment with Western liberalism is as timely now as ever.

CHAPTER 1

A More Perfect Union

Competition, therefore, is a law of nature. Nature is entirely neutral; she submits to him who most energetically and resolutely assails her. She grants her rewards to the fittest, therefore, without regard to other considerations of any kind. If, then, there be liberty, men get from her just in proportion to their works, and their having and enjoying are just in proportion to their being and doing. Such is the system of nature.

WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER, “THE CHALLENGE OF FACTS” (1914)

But, bless your soul, man, we can’t all always attain the heights, much less live in their rarified atmosphere. Aim at ’em—that’s the point.

W. E. B. DU BOIS, IN DUSK OF DAWN (1940), PARAPHRASING THE WORDS OF A FICTIVE WHITE FRIEND

Competition would seem to be an inexorable feature of the human situation. We rival, we jockey for position, we claw and scratch in efforts to get the better of one another. This is a simple but sobering observation, to be sure, and it is one that has long been a cornerstone of the liberal tradition, indeed a key part of that tradition’s celebrated genius. In the words of W. E. B. Du Bois’s fictive White friend, “We can’t all always attain the heights.” There will be winners and losers. But a good society, or at least a reasonably decent one, gives us a fighting chance, and, well, that’s the point.

Of course, these epigraphic words of Du Bois’s are meant to convey a degree of sarcasm. Certainly Du Bois was drawn to the liberal paradigm. His legacy could well be defined by a spirited effort to pry open the gates of opportunity, to expand the protection of individual rights and liberties, to give the abused at least something of a fighting chance. But Du Bois grew increasingly disillusioned with a political and economic philosophy that sought to facilitate competition among private parties. The worry was that competition would always guarantee loss and defeat for some, and if divisions between the successful and the rest could be cast as perfectly natural, perfectly consistent with a liberated humanity, then a freely competitive society would seem poised to remain a rather damning place for people of color and others historically subjected to the weight of competitive disadvantage.

This was a prescient concern. A half century after Du Bois’s death, a more fully liberated America has become a more fiercely competitive place, a society somehow more freely torn between winners and losers. And as the worry would have it, women and men of color continue to bear the brunt of this apparently inexorable way of the world. In the absence today of any real public scrutiny of the competitive way of life, it will be worthwhile to revisit the provocations of a Du Bois engaged in old-fashioned ideology critique. The idea, we are told, is to relish in our freedom to compete, to duke it out for that “rarefied atmosphere.” But, bless our souls, “we can’t all always attain the heights.” As Du Bois’s later work indicates, that’s a key point worth considering.

This book sets out to stimulate a more critical dialogue about how the public values and organizational structures of our liberal-capitalist society induce competitive behavior, often in ways that constrain or delimit good-faith efforts to confront racial and economic inequities. The argument draws inspiration from Du Bois’s mature writings, principally those of the Depression era. While the commitment to competition has always been fundamental to the institutional and cultural workings of the economy and polity of the United States—“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” James Madison said—the decade of the 1930s was a signal period in the consolidation of what we might call the competitive society.¹ In the throes of economic crisis, market reformers on both the left and the right effectively doubled down on a commitment to the competitive form and began to argue that the state had to take on a more active role in facilitating private competition. This economic argument fell in line with a broader political vision, a sense that structured competition could most effectively guard against monopoly power in the political domain and could potentially stave off the kind of one-party domination that fascist movements in Europe had begun to put on gruesome display.² What began to emerge—a circumscription of the political imagination by market rationality, an effort to apply competitive market principles to further dimensions of human interaction—can be said to prefigure what has grown into contemporary neoliberal orthodoxy. Recent historical work on what we might call the long history of neoliberalism has begun to document this.

If the decade of the 1930s was a watershed in the consolidation of the competitive society, it was also a signal moment in the maturation of Du Bois’s critical theory. By the onset of the Great Depression, Du Bois had begun to question the integrationist politics of an egalitarian liberalism. He urged Black women and men to engage in self-segregation, a kind of strategic racial separatism as a means of economic and political empowerment. This, of course, put Du Bois at odds with the program of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the civil rights organization that he had helped to found nearly a quarter century earlier. By 1934, he had formally resigned as editor of the Crisis, the NAACP’s journal, and had resumed his professorship in Atlanta, where he took up serious study of Marxist thought, wrote some of his most significant later works, including Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and Dusk of Dawn (1940), and established his mature vision for a pan-Africanist educational and scholarly program.³ In this moment Du Bois had become, as Michael Dawson puts it, a “disillusioned liberal,” a critic who had lost hope in the American creed.⁴ This is a framing trope that I work from throughout the book. I argue that Du Bois’s Depression era disillusionment entails a generative suspicion of competition as the sine qua non of a broadly liberal political and economic legacy that endures well into our time.

To be sure, Du Bois’s attitudes toward competition can be elusive. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and other early writings, Du Bois took issue with the social Darwinist discourse that was prevalent in much of the mainstream scholarship of the period. He challenged the abhorrent notion of a brute power struggle among competing racial groups. But this criticism tended to give way to a vision of another sort of competitive meritocracy, a survival of the morally and reasonably fittest.⁵ Furthermore, his early conception of the “problem of the color-line” has been, and in many ways continues to be, taken to reflect a problematic ceiling of sorts, a line qua barrier to access or opportunity or perhaps to the freedom of a more openly competitive society. This reading of Du Bois’s most famous statement contributed to the shaping of the civil rights agenda in the twentieth century, and it remains an implicit conceptual framework that contemporary critics of liberalism’s racial contradictions tend to accept in one way or another.⁶ But Du Bois was always suspicious of the philosophy of competitive individualism. He was always suspicious of the ways in which key spokespersons of European modernity sought to legitimize a spirit of contentiousness as a reflection of human behavior in its “state of nature.” And by the time he read Marx in the 1930s, he had become deeply concerned with the ways in which these ideas about private competition and competitiveness, these “White world” ideas, had been made to support a logic of capital accumulation, ultimately a consolidated capitalist society that puts nominally free market actors into competitive relation with one another. Du Bois’s challenge to the liberal paradigm was not simply an effort to document a rigged system and to expose a public culture marked historically by disingenuous appeals to the competitive form. His originality and enduring critical import are to be found in his disillusionment with the theory as such. As I argue in the chapters that follow, the Depression era Du Bois helps us to see that even fair competition reproduces loss and defeat for some, and as a structural characteristic of liberal-capitalist society, the competitive form breeds a divisive public ethos that feeds on the exploitation of racial and other ascriptive differences and is incredibly difficult to resist, even if we are persuaded to try.

Given the sheer magnitude of Du Bois’s corpus and the extent to which his many readers have been invested in various aspects of his legacy, it is important to qualify the scope of this study. This is not a book about Du Bois’s intellectual or political development. And it is meant to speak only indirectly to Du Bois scholarship and exegesis. The more direct aim is to press a broad readership into serious thinking about our competitive culture and the racial politics of a society set up to produce winners and losers. The contributions to be considered here are perhaps best thought of as provocations, as opposed to the rudiments of an alternative vision or a more traditional philosophical argument. To my mind, this is only befitting of Du Bois. He is an elusive figure, an author of “fugitive pieces,” writings that run from conventional wisdom and at times risk losing themselves in unfamiliar territory, writings that do not necessarily contribute to a consistent or fully formulated theoretical narrative.⁷ Moreover, by casting the mature Du Bois as a disillusioned liberal, I intend to capture a sense of frustration and philosophical uncertainty that I think is strangely appropriate to the contemporary moment. Finding ourselves caught rather squarely in the throes of the liberal (or now neoliberal) paradigm, compelled by force of circumstance to accommodate the competitive way of life, our contemporary situation does not seem to suggest a viable alternative, theoretical or practical. And yet, as this way of life continues to yield tragic consequences for so many, the frustration and uncertainty endure. In this moment, and at the very least, we might counsel the stirrings of a critic moved by discontent.⁸

In this opening chapter, I provide some historical context and establish some of the study’s core concepts before turning to provide a detailed prospectus of the argument as it develops over the ensuing chapters. The contemporary neoliberal moment, hypercompetitive and racially divisive, is an expression of an underlying competitive form that has deep historical roots. These roots can be traced back at least to the 1930s, when Du Bois’s engagement with Marx and his explicit disillusionment with core tenets of liberal theory shaped his mature critique of the competitive society. Contemporary scholars have gone to great lengths to show how things have changed since the 1930s, how older conceptual or theoretical frameworks—laissez-faire liberalism, neoclassical economics, Marxist theory—are simply ill-equipped to explain or make sense of distinctive features of the contemporary political and economic landscape. But core structural features of the competitive society endure, and the mature Du Bois offers a distinctive critical theoretical perspective that speaks quite generatively to the enduring racial politics of a political and economic tradition that, nowadays especially, most of us simply take for granted.

Neoliberal Disillusionment

The decade of the 1930s suggests itself for several reasons. Du Bois found himself grasping for conceptual resources at a moment of tremendous intellectual and political upheaval in the United States and around the world. This was a time in which liberalism, what has been called “the metacategory of Western political discourse,” was experiencing several significant attempts at transfiguration. The emergence of fascist regimes in Europe had inspired an effort among many Anglophone intellectuals to renew and enlarge the liberal canon, to insist on a more wide-ranging tradition with a longer historical genesis, one that could be traced back to the Lockean commitment to individual liberty and limited government and that could be held up to the fascist threat as an expression of the true political values of Western civilization.⁹ Moreover, in the midst of global economic crisis, the classical liberal principle of laissez-faire had come under scrutiny from the Keynesians and New Dealers, on the one hand, and by the early neoliberals who sought to renew or “modernize” a market-based political economy, on the other.¹⁰ It was the early neoliberals in particular who sought to build a liberalism more fully committed to the active facilitation of private competition. It was the early neoliberals who began to vivify the competitive way of life in ways that endure into our own time. There is no evidence that, in the moment, Du Bois was attuned to any of these neoliberal theoretical innovations, what would become, what has become, the neoliberal reformation of the liberal paradigm. But recent scholarship on the long history of neoliberal theory has revealed the Depression era emergence of a set of normative commitments and the intellectual roots of an ongoing political project that the Du Bois of the 1930s, at least in some ways, could have anticipated. I begin with a detour of sorts, a brief commentary on historical and theoretical context, before returning to Du Bois.

Much has been made of the neoliberal break with classical liberal theory.¹¹ Nowadays it is often said that neoliberalism amounts to a kind of market fundamentalism, the celebration and application of market principles at every level, in nearly every domain of human interaction. But what the market and marketization entail in neoliberal theory and practice cannot be easily squared with classical liberal doctrine. Traditionally, liberal theory held that market interactions were simply a reflection of human nature, what Adam Smith famously referred to as the “natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.”¹² The political principle of laissez-faire was meant to capture a sense that functioning markets, and the purported leveling and coordinating effects of economic exchange, required little more than formal institutionalization, essentially the maintenance of a currency and a minimal protection of private property rights. But into the 1930s especially, in the throes of widespread market crisis, defenders of the liberal paradigm began to challenge these assumptions in ways that have had a cascading effect on the development of neoliberal rationality.

I highlight two shifts in particular. The first derives from the neoliberal insistence that markets are to be created and not simply left to flourish on their own. As the French economist Louis Rougier put it at the Colloque Walter Lippmann, the 1938 conference in Paris in which the term “neoliberalism” was coined, the “liberal regime is not just the result of a spontaneous natural order as the many authors of the Natural codes declared in the eighteenth century.”¹³ For the early neoliberals, to theorize about market relations was not simply to describe spontaneous human behavior. It was, rather, to actively promote a distinctive kind of behavior. The idea was to implement and enforce market interactions. This point leads to a second significant shift. Markets are appealing, the early neoliberals claimed, not because they give form to mutually beneficial exchange relationships, as classical liberals had argued, but because they foster and support a competitive mode of economic, political, and, significantly for our purposes, social relations. In his famous Collège de France lectures on the early history of the neoliberal movement, Michel Foucault put it this way: “For the neo-liberals, the most important thing about the market is not exchange, that kind of original and fictional situation imagined by eighteenth-century liberal economists. The essential thing of the market is elsewhere; it is competition.”¹⁴

To be sure, competition has always been a part of the liberal paradigm, a key factor in the normative defense of the theory. The idea that we ought to be free to compete in various ways has always been part of the pitch, both politically and economically. But this explicit shift in the 1930s, on the part of a group of avowed neoliberal reformers, toward a driving focus on competition, on the active facilitation of competitive market relations as “the essential thing,” marks the beginning of what has become a very significant development in how we tend to think about and legitimize social inequality. Building on the work of Foucault and others, William Davies has shown that “rhetorics and theories of competition and competitiveness have been central to neoliberal critique and technical evaluations from the 1930s onward.” And as Davies points out, “To argue in favor of competition and competitiveness is necessarily to argue in favor of inequality, given that competitive activity is defined partly by the fact that it pursues an unequal outcome. From this perspective, that of neoliberal theorists themselves,” he says, “inequality is something to be actively generated, represented, tested, celebrated and enforced, as a mark of a dynamic and free society.”¹⁵ Another way to capture this point would be to say that the emergence of neoliberal thinking contributes to a shift away from the classical liberal emphasis on equality of input—state-sponsored emphasis on a level playing field, equal protection of rights and opportunities—and toward a more open acknowledgment of inequality of output, winners and losers as tangible proof that society is functioning precisely as it should. We can’t all always attain the heights. And as the early neoliberals would have it, that’s the point.

The political theorist Wendy Brown has argued that in the attempt to wrestle “the market economy from the political principle of laissez-faire,” the neoliberal vision set out to “activate the state on behalf of the economy, not to undertake economic functions or to intervene in economic effects, but rather to facilitate economic competition and growth and to economize the social.”¹⁶ Again, what begins to emerge in the neoliberal reformation of the 1930s is less a descriptive theorization of market relations and more of a political project of marketization, what Brown calls the economization of the social. As neoliberal thinking develops into the twentieth century, drawing concep...