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DuBois: a lifetime —

— Jeading to Communism

By JAMES JACKSON
HAT EMERSON said of
John Brown can be said
with equal justice of W.
E. B. DuBois: “He was the most
ideal of men, for he wanted to
put all his ideas into action.”
This man of letters, this social
scientist, this scholar who scaled
the highest peaks of academic
attainment; this man of great
thought was also a man of reso-
lute action. No arm-chair philo-
sopher, theory for him was a
guidelight against the darkness
that concealed the path of pro-

Dr. DuBois was 93 when he
joined the’ Communist Party,
USA, and because of his age
there were those who wish to

efface this act from his recorded .

biography. To DuBois, becoming
a Communist was the consum-
mate act of commitment to the
social forces which the people
can command to forge and fash-

‘ion for all of mankind a bright .

and joyous future.

He came to communism only
after long study and reflection,
after years of experience and ex-
perimentation. I recall conversa-
tions with Dr. DuBois going back
for better than two decades on
questions of Marxist approaches
to problems of race and national-
ity, on the arts of political ac-
tion, on problems of philosophy
and ethics. '

Over the widest spectrum of
subject matter the DuBois logic
was essentially the Marxian dia-
lectical process of reasoning.
Yet, the purity of the man’s in-
tegrity was such that he protest-
ed that he was too old to ever
earn the right to identify himself
as a Marxist. “Most of my books
were written before I read deep-
ly of Marxism,” he said, “I
would have to rework, or append
afterthoughts to each of them. I
couldn’t possibly live so long.
No. They will have to judge me
with the contemporaries of my
‘generation against the then do-
minant philosophy — bourgeois
democracy.”

Nevertheless, our dialogue on
communist theory and practice
continued through the years.

‘When he decided to migrate to
Ghana to take up work there on

the Encyclopedia Africana, he. .

OTC Te TTC oe es a oP

_ The Suppression of the Afri-
can Slave Trade 1896
(Volume | of the Harvard
Classics)

The Souls of Black Folk 1903

John Brown 1909

Quest of the Silver Fleece
1911 (A Novel)

The Negro 1915

Darkwater 1920

Gift of Black Folk 1924

Dark Princess 1926 (A Novel)

Black Reconstruction in Amer-
ica 1936

WORKS BY W.E.B. DUBOIS

"Black Folk Then and Now

The Philadelphia Negro 1899 .

1939
Dusk of Dawn 1940
Color and Democracy: the
Colonies and Peace 1945
The World and Africa 1947
Battle for Peace 1952
The Black Flame: A Trilogy
The Ordeal of Mansart
1957 :
Mansart Builds A School
1959
Worlds of Color 1961
Autobiography 1968
(Published)

asked me to his home to take up
a serious matter.

“I think I’ve written enough
new things and added new ex-
planatory prefaces to a number
of old-works to take the title of
communist in good conscience
now,” he said. Though he was
dubious about delaying an an-
nouncement, he agreed that his
Letter of an American Commu-
nist be released after he was
well settled in his new home.

The DuBois letter to the Ame-
rican spokesman, Gus Hall, is'a
political testament of great pow-
er and historic moment. Stand-
ing upon the summit of great
works performed in a long life
of service to the cause of the
advancement of humanity, he
pointed to communism as the
direction in which human history
moves toward its golden tomor-
row.
“TI have been long and slow in
coming to this conclusion, but
at last my mind is settled,” he
wrote in his letter, which traces
the, evolution of his beliefs, his
judgment against capitalism and
his conclusion for socialism.

In it he disclosed a very early
socialist association: ‘At the
University of Berlin . . . I attend-
éd meetings of the Socialist
Party and considered myself a

TR OSU 4

“MARCH 8, 1968—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 10,

socialist.” Back in America he
joined the Socialist Party in
1911, “But still I neither read or
heard much of Marxism,” he re-
called. Soon, he was making a
serious study of Marxists works.
He hailed the Russian revolution
in 1917.

Ten years later he made his
first visit to the Soviet Union.
He returned to visit at almost 10-
year intervals thereafter. This is
the concluding section. of the let-
ter: “Capitalism cannot reform
itself; it is doomed to self-de-
struction. No- universal selfish-
ness can bring social good at all.

“Communism—the effort to
give all men what they need and
to ask of each the best he can
contribute—this is the only way
of human life. It is a difficult
and hard end to reach—it has
and will make mistakes, but to-
day it marches triumphantly on
in education and science, in
home and food, with increased
freedom of thought’ and deliver:
ance from dogma. In the end,
Communism will triumph. I want
to help bring that day.

“The path of the American
Communist Party is clear; it will
provide the United States with
a real Third Party and thus re-
store democracy to this land.

“Tt will call for: .

Y DOG Rex, a big Ger-
man Shepherd, wander-
ed all over the place this

morning, obviously greatly
disturbed. His devoted com-
panion Smokey was nowhere
around. Where could she be?
After a time Rex’s worry rub-
bed off on me and I too took
up the search for Smokey—
a plain house cat. Smokey
had. been a member of the
family for over sixteen years.
It wasn’t like her to wander
off that way.

Last night I watched a
strip of ‘news’ film on Viet-
nam, It showed -American
‘know-how’ ‘in action. A U.S.
soldier at the controls of a
huge bulldozer scooping out
a big trench. The hole com-
pleted, the huge blade swung
aside to scoop up human bo-

 dies—the poor bodies of Viet-
nam peasant people, villagers
of a small Vietnamese hamlet
already put to the torch.
There were no tears in this
film, no last expression of
dignity for the dead,:no last
words ‘commiting their souls
to God’. God was at the con-
trol: of the giant bulldozer,
hurriedly hiding the infamy of
a horrible genocide.

Halfway down the block I
found Smokey, her dead eyes
turned. towards the only
home she had known in life,
and would not again return. I
gathered her up tenderly and
took her home, brushing the
wet from my cheek lest the
neighbors see an old man

an awful spectacle of human
weakness in a world of frag-
mentated steel, personalized
bombs, napalm and barbaric
genocide. One
‘made of sterner stuff’.

I remembered an incident
back in. my boyhood days in
our Scottish village on the
rocky coast of the treacher-
ous North Sea. There had
been a shipwreck and the
coastguard rescue apparatus
was bringing the crew ashore
from the doomed ship, one by
one in the ‘breeches buoy’. In
the Code of the Sea the Skip-
per is always last to leave the

_cumstances, a code rarely
broken by British seamen.
The crew were all safely
ashore, only the Skipper to
come. Where could he be?
Under pounding seas the ship
would break up any time.
What was delaying him?
| Long tense minutes which
seemed like hours passed
—then he appeared on the
stormlashed deck, clambered
into the rescue buoy and was
pulled ashore—in his arms
the ship’s cat. The Skipper

~ bulldozer,

shedding tears for a dead cat; .

should be

ship under any and all cir-\-tion even a dog can show

|

had placed his life on human-
ity’s scale to find and save
his cat. On shore the rescuers
and the rescued responded
with a mighty cheer, loud as
the roar of the angry waters
denied their prey. The news-
papers of the day gave that
human epic full coverage

Again the horror of that
bulldozer film and the broken
bodies churned into a tortur-
ed earth by its relentless
blade. Yet more goes into
that nameless bulldozed
grave than ten—or ten thous
and murdered Vietnames¢
village peasants. into it also
goes the dignity, the honor
the decency, the deep human-
ity — even the civilization of
the great American people,
not because of their will—but
in spite of it.

Nor can we in Canada feel
smug and innocent—becausé
the profit ghouls who fatten
on U.S. genocide, and the
gutless apologists who invent
specious excuses for U.S.
war crimes in Vietnam — OF
elsewhere —their hands too
were at the controls of that
covering up the
stark evidence of a colossal
crime. We too, pledged at
Nuremberg never to permit
such monstrous crimes
against mankind ever to hap-
pen again. Now it is brough
into our homes. ' Bt}

Without Smokey the old

place doesn’t seem quite the
same, simply because she
was just a mere house cat
and so could never know
just how. inhuman humanity
could be. Maybe for Smokey
that was just as well.
- When I watch Rex still
searching around the place
for his faithful companion, ! |,
think of a Vietnamese mo-
ther scratching in the scorch- |
ed earth of her native village,
looking for the child she bore
in anguish and love — now
churned into the earth by 4
U.S. bulldozer — to hide the
infamy of its vaunted ‘civil-
ization’.

What we in Canada — and
elsewhere, need right now,
‘before it is too late, is that
measure of love and devo-

a

towards a fellow-creature — —
plus the mass anger of 4
Nuremberg, determined at
whatever cost —to end U.S.
war crimes in Vietnam. ,
For far too. long we have
been talking and pleading
‘morality’ to U.S. war cri-
minals who know no morality
save that of the Hitlerite as-
sassin. The job ahead, for our
own survival and that of the
world’s peoples, is’ to begin
mobilization of the strength
required to impose it.
pe,

e “Public ownership of natur-
al resources and of all capital.

e “Public control of transpor-
tation and communications.

e “Abolition of poverty and
limitation of personal income.

e “No exploitation of labor.

e “Social medicine, with hos-
pitalized and care of the old.

e “Free education for all.

e “Training for jobs and jobs
for all.

_allow its citizens. to work fot

e “Discipline for growth and
reform.

e “Freedom under law.

e “No dogmatic religion.

“These aims are not crimes:
They are practiced increasinglY
over the world. No nation cali
call itself free which does not

these ends.” 2
(Excerpted from Freedomway$
magazine Vol. V, No. 1.)