DU BOIS, W[illiam] E[dward] B[urghardt] [Pronounced: doo-BOYZ] (1868-1963)
An influential African-American intellectual, sociologist, historian and civil rights activist,
who was born in Massachusetts. Du Bois studied with William James at Harvard and at the University
of Berlin (where Max Weber was an admirer). He was the first African-American to earn a doctorate
(from Harvard University in 1895), and then became a professor at Atlanta University. He published
the first systematic sociological studies of African-American communities.
Du Bois was a nationally prominent leader of the
civil rights movement. While Booker T. Washington proposed what was known as the “Atlanta Compromise”,
that Southern Blacks would work and submit to white political rule in return for basic educational
and economic opportunities, Du Bois insisted on full equality with whites. He also worked for
increased political represenation by Blacks, which, however, he thought could be best brought about
by the African-American intellectual elite, “the talented tenth”. He was a co-founder of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and served for a long period as
the editor of its journal.
“Racism was the main target of Du Bois’s polemics, and he strongly protested
against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause
included colored persons everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in their struggles against
colonialism and imperialism. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several
Pan-African Congresses to free African colonies from European powers. Du Bois made several trips
to Europe, Africa and Asia. After World War I, he surveyed the experiences of American black
soldiers in France and documented widespread bigotry in the United States military.” —From the
Wikipedia entry on Du Bois, from which some other information here is also taken.
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote many books and articles. His work The Philadelphia Negro (1899)
comprehensively discusses what more recent bourgeois sociologists call the Black urban “underclass”.
One of his most famous works was The Souls of Black Folks (1899/1903), a collection of his
essays. There he presents the theory of dual consciousness which shows the influence of William
James’s ideas about the psychological self. Du Bois remarked that “it is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of
measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels
this twoness—an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring
ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength keeps it from being torn asunder.”
What is often described as his magum opus, Black
Reconstruction in America, was published in 1935. In it he effectively challenged the then
prevailing racist theory that Blacks were responsible for the social failures of the Reconstruction
period after the Civil War.
Du Bois did have some serious shortcomings, many of
them along the lines of any person who struggles for social equality without fully challenging
the basic framework of bourgeois society. For example he supported the participation of American
Blacks in World War I as a means of promoting equality for Blacks. He was much criticized on the Left
for supporting an inter-imperialist war, and rightly so. Du Bois did believe that capitalism was the
primary root cause of racism, and he was generally sympathetic to socialism, though it is doubtful
if he had a clear idea what that would really mean, let alone how to bring it about. (In his very
old age he joined the hopelessly revisionist Communist Party, U.S.A.)
He was also a strong activist for peace and nuclear disarmament. But he was never a revolutionary
Marxist.
In 1961, two years before his death, he moved to
Ghana and renounced his U.S. citizenship. He had had enough of racism in the U.S., and perhaps felt
too old and weary to effectively continue his long fight against it.
See also:
PROFITS [Du Bois quote],
TWO-PARTY SYSTEM [Du Bois quote]
DUAL POWER
A political situation in certain places and periods of time (always quite short) in which
different and antagonistic social classes each have a share of
state power. In such a situation each of the contending classes works to secure total state
power for itself, while attempting to deny the enemy class with any share of power whatsoever.
This is why dual power is so tremendously unstable and short-lived.
One example of dual power was the situation in
Russia after the “February Revolution” (in March
1917!) overthrowing the Tsar, and lasting until the “October
Revolution” (in November 1917!), when the Bolsheviks led by Lenin seized complete
power for the working class. During this period of about 8 months, there was official power
in the hands of the “Provisional Government”, but very extensive de facto power in the
hands of the Soviets (councils) of workers, peasants and soldiers.
For example, while the Provisional Government was nominally in charge of the Russian army, in
reality most army units would generally only obey government orders if they were also OK’d by
their local Soviet.
It was originally said that the situation in
Nepal immediately after the end of the People’s War in 2006 was also a period of dual power. In
this case the Nepal Army was under the control of the feudal-capitalist alliance, but there
still existed a separate army, the People’s Liberation Army, which was controlled by what was
then called the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). Similarly, the UCPN(M) was the
largest party in the Constituent Assembly (which was serving as the interim parliament), though
it didn’t have a majority. Since major decisions required a two-thirds majority, there was in
effect a stalemate there as well as militarily. But this was obviously also a very unstable
situation, and in the end the supposed “Maoist” party surrendered to the bourgeoisie and became
just another reformist-minded social-democratic party.
DUALISM
The philosophical theory that both matter and
mind exist, but that they are “completely independent” aspects of the
world, and that neither depends on the other or is an outgrowth or development of the other.
Consequently this is supposed to be a middle position between
materialism and idealism. However,
from the Marxist, materialist standpoint dualism is itself a type of idealism, since it also
denies the primacy of matter.
One irresolvable conundrum for dualism is the
simple question of how someone can raise their arm when they decide to do so. This is a clear
case of a mental cause resulting in a physical or material result, and is totally
inexplicable if mind and matter are imagined to be “completely independent” things. It can only
be explained if we understand mental phenomena such as decisions to be a sort of
abstract functional characterization of what at bottom are really ongoing physical, material
processes in the brain and body.
One famous version of dualism was
Leibniz’s attempt to explain both mind and matter by means of a
single mysterious “substance” he called “monads”.
Interestingly, despite its philosophical
absurdity and fundamental disagreement with materialism, dualism historically played a positive
role in the promotion of materialist thought. One of its earliest proponents was
René Descartes, who argued that the body and “soul” should be
considered independently. This allowed him to discuss the body itself in materialist terms, as
a machine, and led others to do the same. Eventually scientifically inclined people came to
realize that there was no further need for or even room for any such thing as a
soul.
See also:
EPIPHENOMENALISM,
OCCASIONALISM,
PSYCHOPHYSICAL PARALLELISM, and
Philosophical doggerel about
dualism.
DULLES BROTHERS (Allen and John Foster) [Pronounced: DULL-us]
A pair of extremely influential Wall Street lawyers and imperialist political figures in the
early post-World War II era in the United States. John Foster Dulles (1888-1959) was the
Secretary of State in the Eisenhower
Administration who favored the ready use of nuclear weapons against countries which
resisted total domination by U.S. imperialism. Allen Dulles (1893-1969) was the head of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under Eisenhower and responsible
for all sorts of murders, genocide and other outrageously immoral covert activities by that
agency.
During the 1930s, and to some extent even
during and after World War II, both the Dulles brothers were sympathetic to and supportive
of fascism in Nazi Germany and elsewhere. And after the war they helped many Nazis and other
fascist war criminals excape punishment and recruited numbers of them into their various
anti-Communist activities and operations.
See also:
NUCLEAR WEAPONS—First Use Policy,
OPERATION SPLINTER FACTOR
“The Bay of Pigs [the attempted CIA-led invasion of Cuba which turned
into a complete fiasco] came after a long string of [Allen] Dulles victories. Given free
rein by President Eisenhower to police the world against any insurgent threat to U.S.
domination, Dulles’s CIA overthrew nationalist governments in Africa, Latin America, and
the Middle East, and even targeted troublesome leaders in allied European countries.
Dulles called himself ‘the secretary of state for unfriendly countries’—which had an
ominous ring when one took note of what happened to unfriendly countries in the American
Century. Meanwhile, his brother John Foster Dulles—Eisenhower’s official secretary of
state—brought the gloom of a doomsday-obsessed vicar to his job, with frequent sermons on
Communist perfidy and his constant threats of nuclear annihilation. John Foster Dulles
needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin, the infamous British double agent Kim
Philby once remarked. With his long dour face topped by his ever-present banker’s homburg,
the elder Dulles always seemed to be on the brink of foreclosing on all human hope and
happiness.” —David Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of
America’s Secret Government (2015), p. 2. [Talbot is merely a liberal, but even many
liberals have been shocked and alarmed by warmongers and murderers like the Dulles
brothers. —Ed.]
“Nikita Khrushchev, the canny and down-to-earth political survivor who
was emerging from the Kremlin’s scrum as the top Soviet leader, closely observed the
personal dynamics between Eisenhower and his secretary of state [John Foster Dulles] in
Geneva and concluded that Foster was in charge. ‘I watched Dulles making notes with a
pencil, tearing them out of a pad, folding them up, and sliding them under Eisenhower’s
hand,’ Khrushev later wrote in his memoir. ‘Eisenhower would pick up these sheets of
paper, unfold them, and read them before making a decision on any matter that came up.
He followed this routine conscientiously, like a dutiful schoolboy taking his lead from
his teacher. It was diffficult to imagine how a chief of state could allow himself to
lose face like that in front of delegates from other countries. It certainly appeared
that Eisenhower was letting Dulles do his thinking for him.’” —David Talbot, ibid., p.
246. [Maybe there was more truth to Herblock’s cartoons portraying Eisenhower as a
simpleton than most people realized at the time. —Ed.]
DUNAYEVSKAYA, Raya (1910-1987)
The founder and leader of a tiny Trotskyist sect in the United States named after its newspaper,
News and Letters, and promoting an idealist Hegelian-inspired philosophy she called
“Marxist Humanism”. Dunayevskaya had been one of the secretaries for Leon
Trotsky while he was in exile in Mexico, but broke with him in 1939. She was then associated
with C. L. R. James in various sectarian organizations in the U.S. Trotskyist movement, but later
split with him as well to form her own doctrinaire group.
In the 1940s one of her major ideological campaigns
was directed against Soviet economists for recognizing that the law
of value continued to hold during the period of socialism. This demonstrated that she really
did not understand the deep nature of socialism as a transition period from capitalism to
communism, and that the law of value can only be progressively restricted during this
transition.
Dunayevskaya, along with other Trotskyists, is
also known for her outrageous slanders of Mao Zedong and the great Chinese Revolution.
DUNS SCOTUS, John (c. 1266-1308)
John Duns, the Scot, was an early scholastic philosopher/theologian
of the Roman Catholic Church. He focused mostly on metaphysics,
especially in relation to the “nature and reality” of God, and other major “transcendental”
categories such as being or existence, the true, the good, causation,
and so forth. He was a nominalist, and hence a representative of
an early and very partial expression of materialism in the Middle Ages.
Although called the doctor subtilis (“subtle
doctor”) in his own day, in a more enlightened later age his followers were called “Dunsmen”—from
which is derived the modern word ‘dunce’!
DUTY (Ethics)
In talk about morality ‘duty’ is simply the common word for moral obligation. However,
‘duty’ carries connotations that the more formal term ‘moral obligation’ does not, because of
other actual or imagined “duties” we have, such as family duties, religious duties, or
patriotic duties, where an extreme sense of shame is conditioned to arise in most people who
fail to properly perform such duties.
See also:
DEONTOLOGY, OUGHT
DZERZHINSKY, Felix Edmundovich (1877-1926)
[Family name pronounced jer-ZHIN-ski where the ‘zh’ sound is like the z in the word ‘azure’.]
An important Polish-born Soviet revolutionary leader best known for his activities as a Bolshevik
party member and close friend and assistant to Lenin in the October Revolution and for his very
important role as head of the Vecheka or Cheka, the
revolutionary national security organization which the Bolsheviks set up to help consolidate and
continue proletarian political power.
Dzerzhinsky led in developing revolutionary
organizations in Poland and Lithuania in the two-decade period before World War I when those
countries were part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. He was one of 15 delegates at the first
congress of the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP) in April 1896, and envisioned the
eventual merger of the LSDP into the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. In this he was a
follower of Rosa Luxemburg on the national question and
apparently did not support the right of self-determination by oppressed nationalities.
He was arrested in 1897 and escaped from his
first Siberian exile in August 1899. In Warsaw he re-established Rosa Luxemburg’s then defunct
Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and, after escaping in mid-1902 from his second
exile to Siberia helped expand that party to also include Lithuanian branches.
Dzerzhinsky was repeatedly arrested and spent
over 11 years in prison and Siberian exile, including the last 4 ½ years before the
February Revolution in 1917. When freed after that revolution he soon joined the Bolshevik
Party where he then played an important role in the October Revolution.
Because of counter-revolutionary activity by
the still not fully defeated Tsarist forces and their bourgeois allies, in December 1917
the Bolsheviks set up the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution
and Sabotage (called the Vecheka or Cheka after its Russian initials), with
Dzerzhinsky as its chairman. Neither he nor Lenin and the other Bolsheviks attempted to hide
the harsh measures that were necessary in this situation, including many arrests of
counter-revolutionaries and numerous summary executions. Dzerzhinsky himself wrote that:
“We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly stated—terror
being absolutely indispensable in current revolutionary conditions.... We terrorize the
enemies of the Soviet government in order to stifle crime at its inception. Terror serves
as a ready deterrent.” —Felix Dzerzhinsky, in Svoboda Rossii [Russia’s
Freedom], June 9, 1918; English translation in Harold Shukman, The Blackwell
Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution (1988), p. 182.
Dzerzhinsky remained the head of the revolutionary security organizations as they were
reorganized in 1924 and until his death from a heart attack in 1926. While he fully implemented
the harsh measures that were necessary in that revolutionary situation, it should be stated that
Dzerzhinsky himself was an exceptionally honest and honorable person, of the sort that is
absolutely essential in such a potentially dangerous and abusive position. This, unfortunately,
is more than can be said of any of his successors as head of Soviet police and security
organizations.
Dzerzhinsky was such a capable administrator
that he was simultaneously pressed into service in many other areas besides security work. In
April 1921 he was appointed the People’s Commissar for Transport and organized major
improvements in that sphere. He also directed other commissariats and in 1924 was appointed
chairman of the Supreme Council of National Economy, a top economic post.
As an honest and honorable revolutionary,
Dzerzhinsky had his own ideas and did not always automatically agree with Lenin and other
comrades, and sometimes he was clearly wrong in the positions he took. One example was in the
Georgian leadership crisis of 1922-23 where the stance that he (as well as Stalin and others)
took opposing the right of self-determination in Georgia was severely criticized by Lenin. But
overall Dzerzhinsky was a valuable revolutionary who made major contributions to the Russian
revolution.
Dictionary Home Page and Letter Index
MASSLINE.ORG Home Page
In the photo at the right we see a huge dust storm blowing off of Africa into the southern Atlantic Ocean.
Massive dust storms of this sort have become much more common as global warming dries out major areas of
the land, and as the increased energy in the atmosphere leads to stronger winds. Curiously, it has
recently been discovered that these dust storms are serving to block some sunlight from reaching the
surface of the planet and thus to hide, at least to some small degree, the true extent of actual global
warming. [Jan. 22, 2023]