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DEWEY’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IGNORES HUMAN NATURE AND HISTORY
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- W.E.B. DU BOIS
- Socialism as Black Liberation
DEWEY’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IGNORES HUMAN NATURE AND HISTORY1. DEWEY IGNORES NATURAL DIFFERENCES AND INEQUALITIES Anthony Flew, professor of philosophy at the University of Reading, JOHN DEWEY RECONSIDERED, 1977, p. 87.
But even if we do concede that this opposite tendency really is implicit in the original insistence upon maximum “interplay with other forms of association,” there is no getting away from the truth of Bantock’s contention that “there are strong pressures of equality of outcome in the work of John Dewey;” for if associations are good and democratic in so far as their members share numerous and varied interests, and if education for democracy is to be a matter of concentrating on the development of various but always shared interests, then the variety of those shared interests, and the scope for independent individual development, necessarily must be limited correspondingly. It must, that is to say, be limited by and to whatever happens to be the maximum attainable either by the least richly talented or by the modal majority. Maybe Dewey himself would have been unhappy about the full force of these implications. But he never comes to terms in this context with the truth that people vary enormously in all natural endowments. 2. DEWEY IGNORES CLASS CONFLICT George Novack, Marxist philosopher and activist, PRAGMATISM VERSUS MARXISM, 1975, pp. 250-51. Dewey refused to believe that class conflict arises from deep-seated, compelling, and ineradicable causes in the capitalist system. It was an occasional and subordinate phenomenon that could be overcome by joint effort, good will, mutual give and take. He therefore looked to different agencies and means than the Marxists for achieving the desirable ends of a better life. He wrote: “That work can be done only by the resolute, patient, cooperative activities of men and women of good will, drawn from every useful calling, over an indefinitely long period.” In other words, class collaboration is the preferable means of social reformation, political action, and moral improvement. Class struggle goes in the wrong direction and gives disastrous results.
SOCIAL PHILOSOPHER 1868 - 1963Life and Work William Edward Burghardt DuBois was the most prolific black writer in American history. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in February of 1868, DuBois was to bravely enter the world of letters as an unapologetic proponent of racial equality and communitarian social philosophy. Before he had even graduated from high school, DuBois served as a correspondent for the newspaper New York Age, and by the time of his death in 1964 he had easily published millions of words on hundreds of subjects influencing scholars and activists such as Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Cornell West, and Molefi Kete. Historians believe him to be one of the greatest minds, black or white, that America has ever produced. After attending Fisk University, then graduating cum Laud from Harvard, DuBois taught at both the Universities of Pennsylvania and Atlanta. His academic life, however, was always considered secondary to his work in political writing and activism. In 1903 he published The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of personal essays that, 60 years later, would influence the development of Black Studies programs across the nation. He was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as well as the Pan African Congress, and he edited several political journals, including The Crisis and The Horizon. It was while writing for these journals that the core of his social thought was most clearly defined. Socialism as Black LiberationMore than any of his well-known Black contemporaries such as Booker T. Washington, DuBois was a strong proponent of radical racial equality and socioeconomic reform. Many of his colleagues, like Washington, were “accommodations” who favored low-key, incremental, non-confrontational Black activism. Such attitudes made DuBois angrier even than the white racism he encountered. His general formula for Black liberation included (1) Communitarian Socialism, (2) a rejection of American-style individualism, and (3) a recognition of the absolute moral repugnance of racism, especially apologetics for segregation based on the assumption that colored races were inferior. DuBois’s socialism, while never as radical as that of Marx or Lenin, nevertheless held that economic oppression was the greatest evil facing humanity. Socialism, he felt, would be necessary to liberate oppressed races because only it would do away with the material foundations of oppression. It was not enough to simply give abstract rights, like those found in the Constitution; those rights could only be guaranteed with access to the material means of fulfilling them. The right to life, for example, made little difference to a starving person. That person would need the actual resource of food in order to attain that right. Capitalism, however, guaranteed starvation for some, because crises of overproduction and underconsumption effectively priced out the poor from buying adequate means of living. Likewise, the right to liberty (due process, fair trial, etc.) was not in itself a guarantor against a justice system where the richest members of society could afford far better legal representation than the incompetent state-appointed lawyers divvied out to the poor. Only a socialist society, where the wealth was fairly divided to all members of the community, could promise real freedom; material freedom. There was a second reason, more moral in scope, that DuBois favored socialism. Capitalist thinkers often justify rampant inequalities of wealth by pointing out that the richest members of society must have had to work very hard, that the wealth was, after all, generated by their efforts. DuBois answered by pointing out, as had Marx a century earlier, that wealth in all its forms was always a social creation. One person alone cannot mine the resources, build the factory, manufacture the equipment and make and distribute, say, an automobile. Potentially thousands of people are in some way involved in the making of any individual product Moreover, the wealth an individual owner invest in his or her production was itself acquired through tremendous social processes. So while DuBois acknowledged that we often make particular people the trustees of our wealth, that wealth is social all the same, and this implies both that all members of the community ought to have some access to that wealth (whether in the form of massive social programs or simple co-ownership) and that at the very least some people ought not be made rich at the expense of others. Since socialism alone could make these principles work in reality, DuBois considered himself more a socialist than a capitalist. The spiritual degradation of acquisitive individualism was also a target of DuBois’s stern, often almost prophetic polemics. For DuBois, all social and political issues were somehow interconnected. For example, he resigned from the NAACP because he felt the organization was too accommodating to U.S. Cold War policies, and he later gave up his American citizenship and spent the remainder of his life in Ghana. In both cases, he was making an individual choice to protest large social forces. DuBois always believed that individuals ought to be more concerned about the community than themselves. The ultracompetitive world of capitalism pitted individuals against each other. Only through organization and self-sacrifice could humans realize the full extent of their humanity. Individuals had a moral obligation to do these things; without collective identity, people were like leeches sucking the lifeblood of those around them. 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