The New Dark Age

The American Du Bois and the Crime of Revolutionary Memory

Every empire manufactures a usable past. It keeps the rebels whose names can decorate a courthouse, removes the ideas that might empty the courthouse, and returns the resulting corpse to the people as national heritage. W.E.B. Du Bois has endured precisely this operation. The United States that surveilled him, prosecuted him, confiscated his passport and treated his international commitments as evidence of disloyalty now celebrates him as one of its great democratic intellectuals. The communist becomes a civil-rights pioneer. The anti-imperialist becomes a critic who merely wanted America to honor its promises. The man who abandoned the imperial nation for revolutionary Africa is marched back across the border after death and placed beneath the flag he had learned to indict.

Bill V. Mullen’s Un-American: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution begins by tearing open this posthumous settlement. His target is not merely the omission of several embarrassing episodes from an otherwise respectable biography. It is the ideological production of what he calls the “American Du Bois”: a nationally contained thinker whose radicalism may be acknowledged so long as its political destination remains liberal democracy. Mullen offers a “counter-narrative to the American Du Bois,” recovering a life increasingly organized through communism, anticolonial struggle, Pan-Africanism, peace politics and the revolutionary movements that shattered Europe’s claim to govern humanity.

The recovery matters because the domesticated Du Bois is not simply incomplete. He is politically inverted. A thinker who came to locate Black freedom beyond the institutions, borders and loyalties of the American state is made to testify on behalf of that state’s capacity for redemption. His criticism survives as moral pressure upon the republic; his judgment upon the republic disappears. Slavery becomes an American contradiction rather than a foundation of capitalist development. Segregation becomes a failure of democratic inclusion rather than a system for organizing labor and citizenship. Empire becomes foreign policy rather than the world structure within which the color line acquired its full material power.

This domestication is counterinsurgency conducted through memory. The ruling order does not need to erase every revolutionary. Total erasure can create martyrs, preserve antagonism and encourage the dangerous question of what had to be suppressed. It is often more useful to separate the figure from the program, retain the moral vocabulary and destroy the strategic conclusions. Du Bois may therefore be honored as a scholar of race while his analysis of capitalism is softened; praised as a Pan-Africanist while his alliance with socialist states is treated as an unfortunate excess; celebrated for opposing war while the imperial system producing war disappears from view. The museum receives the portrait. The movement is denied the weapon.

Mullen opens from the opposite proposition: “The twenty-first century and its dissidents are haunted by the specter of one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious and unrealized projects: world revolution.” The sentence refuses the funeral rites performed over the revolutionary century. World revolution survives not as nostalgia for a lost age but as an unfinished historical problem. Capital remains international, empire remains armed, the colonial division of humanity persists beneath updated legal forms, and the struggles of workers and oppressed nations continue to confront a system whose power exceeds every national border. Du Bois belongs to the present because the contradictions that carried him beyond America were never resolved.

Mullen’s decisive achievement is to restore communism to the center of Du Bois’s political development. It does not appear as an eccentric attachment acquired in old age, when declining judgment supposedly replaced analytical rigor. Mullen shows it emerging through the accumulation of historical defeats and revolutionary discoveries: the destruction of Reconstruction, the racial treachery of organized white labor, the colonial partition of the world, the concentration of capitalist power, the First World War, the Soviet Revolution, African and Asian liberation and the persecution of peace activists inside the United States. Communism became increasingly intelligible because the alternatives Du Bois had tested kept colliding with the material structure of racial capitalism and empire.

His declaration—“I believe in communism”—did not fall from the sky into the mind of a tired old scholar. It condensed a lifetime spent measuring the republic’s promises against the republic’s history. The sentence is powerful because of its plainness. Du Bois did not say communism posed interesting questions, contained several admirable principles or deserved scholarly consideration beside competing philosophies. “I believe in communism” names a political allegiance. It joins historical judgment to revolutionary possibility and identifies private ownership, colonial domination and imperial war as structures that could not be corrected through racial inclusion alone.

Liberal scholarship has usually treated this allegiance as a biographical complication requiring delicate contextualization, as though Du Bois had spilled ideological ink across an otherwise distinguished résumé. Mullen places it inside the intellectual architecture of a man who had concluded that racial emancipation could not be secured while capital retained command over labor, land and the state. Communism did not cause Du Bois to abandon the Black struggle for a supposedly universal class question. It gave him a fuller account of how the color line had been constructed through slavery, colonial extraction, labor segmentation and the unequal distribution of political power.

Race and class were not two separate injuries waiting to be ranked. The color line organized labor, citizenship, land, wages, colonial rule and access to the wealth generated by the darker world. White supremacy supplied capital with a disciplined hierarchy and offered sections of white workers a degrading bargain: limited material and psychological privilege in exchange for political service to the ruling class. The ruling class did not need to elevate white workers into power. It needed to persuade enough of them that their relative position above Black and colonized labor was a possession worth defending. Racial membership became the counterfeit handed to workers in place of control over society.

Du Bois’s movement toward communism therefore sharpened rather than diluted the struggle against white supremacy. Black workers, colonized peasants and oppressed nations did not occupy identical social positions, but their exploitation had been organized through one expanding system. Capital crossed borders; armies protected its movement; racial categories identified whose land and labor could be seized with the least political consequence. Internationalism was not a charitable widening of Du Bois’s sympathies. It was the scale demanded by the enemy.

Mullen names the transnational field through which this understanding developed the “diasporic international.” It joined Black radicals, communists, anticolonial nationalists, writers, political exiles, peace organizers and revolutionary states. Du Bois did not merely collect foreign influences from a distance. His thought was remade through movements whose victories and defeats forced inherited categories into crisis. The Russian Revolution reopened the meaning of Reconstruction. African and Asian independence shattered Europe’s monopoly over political modernity. The communist movement placed colonial liberation inside a program for transforming the world economy, even when its own strategic decisions failed to honor that commitment consistently.

Mullen’s account is particularly valuable when it shows that the Soviet turn toward anticolonial struggle was not an accidental ornament to communist politics. He observes that Socialism in One Country “tipped the balance of world revolution forces in the direction of anticolonial struggle.” The formulation complicates the familiar Western story in which the consolidation of Soviet state power simply closes the revolutionary horizon. Whatever contradictions accompanied the turn, the colonial question moved toward the center of international communism. For peoples subjected to occupation, racial hierarchy and foreign ownership, the revolutionary century was not exhausted by the fate of industrial Europe.

Here, however, the book introduces the contradiction that will govern this review. Mullen recovers Du Bois through world revolution while describing the Soviet trajectory as a “dark hijacking of world revolution.” The metaphor does heavy ideological work. A hijacking presumes an authentic revolutionary vehicle seized and redirected by an alien force. It protects the emancipatory purity of revolution by separating it from the institutions, parties and states through which workers and peasants attempted to defend and reproduce their victories. The book restores the communist Du Bois, but its governing framework threatens to make the historical existence of communism less intelligible than his allegiance to it.

That tension should not obscure Mullen’s breakthrough. Before the book’s conclusions can be tested, the ground it recovers must be secured. “Un-American” was never a neutral description of insufficient patriotism. It was an accusation developed by a settler and imperial state against people whose loyalties exceeded the boundaries of ruling-class citizenship. The communist, Black internationalist, anticolonial militant and peace organizer became suspect because each connected domestic injustice to a world system. The accusation did not prove that Du Bois stood outside American history. It proved that he had entered too deeply into the history America required concealed.

Mullen captures this reversal through the political meaning of exile. “Un-Americanness and exile” became a passport to solidarities beyond the nation. The state intended exclusion to isolate Du Bois from legitimate political life, presenting international association as foreign contamination. Yet the accusation revealed the narrow loyalty being demanded. America required him to choose the imperial state over the colonized peoples confronting it, anticommunism over socialism and national belonging over the international majority struggling to escape Western command. Du Bois eventually answered by transferring his allegiance.

His departure for Ghana was not the retreat of a defeated intellectual abandoning the American battlefield. It was a political relocation toward one of the fronts where colonial power was breaking. Ghana was neither a completed socialist transformation nor an escape from contradiction. It represented the movement of African peoples from colonial subjection toward sovereign power and continental liberation. Du Bois did not cease to belong to Black America. He placed Black America within the unfinished revolution of Africa and the darker world.

Un-American thus retrieves Du Bois from the national mausoleum and returns him to the movements whose defeat allowed that mausoleum to be built. It restores the thinker who understood that Black liberation could not be completed beneath the political command of capital, that peace required opposition to imperial relations and that loyalty to the oppressed might demand disloyalty to the state oppressing them. Mullen’s first and indispensable act is to recover that refusal as the organizing truth of Du Bois’s life. The harder question is whether the book will extend the same historical generosity to the revolutions that made such a refusal materially possible.

The Color Line Becomes a World System

Du Bois did not arrive at internationalism by adding foreign affairs to a domestic theory of race. He discovered that the domestic was already international. The plantation, colonial port, segregated factory, mine and imperial battlefield belonged to one material history. Black labor in the United States had been formed inside the Atlantic slave trade; European industry had swollen upon colonial extraction; the wages and political loyalties of metropolitan workers had been shaped by wealth drawn from peoples denied sovereignty. The color line was never confined to the Southern courthouse or the American street. It had become a world system for distributing labor, land, citizenship and death.

Bill Mullen reconstructs this discovery through what he calls the “diasporic international,” the changing network of Black radicals, communists, anticolonial militants, writers and organizers through which Du Bois learned to read the twentieth century beyond the nation. This was not internationalism as polite conference diplomacy or mutual admiration among famous intellectuals. It was political infrastructure: newspapers, congresses, parties, correspondence, travel, exile, translation and common struggle. Capital had internationalized exploitation. The oppressed began the harder work of internationalizing resistance.

Mullen’s account is strongest when it refuses to make this formation a stage in one celebrated man’s private awakening. The diasporic international was a collective process through which Black struggle, Marxism and anticolonial nationalism altered one another. Du Bois brought slavery, Reconstruction and the color line into a communist movement still burdened by European assumptions. Revolutionaries from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the United States forced the colonial question into a Marxism that too often imagined Europe’s industrial worker as humanity’s finished political form.

The organizing contradiction is what Mullen calls the relation between “proletarian internationalism and national self-determination struggle.” Neither term can be discarded. Internationalism without national liberation leaves colonial property and foreign command intact. National liberation without proletarian power can transfer the flag while preserving the social relations beneath it. The danger begins when the two are treated as external alternatives—as though colonized peoples must choose between liberation of the nation and liberation from class rule.

Du Bois’s own formulation cuts through that mechanical choice: “I believe in Communism wherever and whenever men are wise and good enough to achieve it; but I do not believe all nations will achieve it in the same way or at the same time.” Communism remains the destination, but history supplies no single road. A colonized peasantry, an enslaved working population and an industrial proletariat do not enter revolutionary struggle through identical institutions or sequences. Uneven development is not an inconvenience waiting to be corrected by theory. It is the terrain upon which theory must prove that it understands the world.

For colonized peoples, national liberation was therefore not a sentimental retreat from class struggle. Foreign rule organized class power through stolen land, comprador elites, racial hierarchy, taxation and military occupation. Sovereignty—the ability to govern territory, control resources and destroy the institutions of colonial command—formed part of the class struggle itself. A people denied political existence could not leap over the national question into a socialism administered through the state machinery of its occupier.

Western socialism repeatedly misunderstood this because sections of the metropolitan working class had been incorporated into the imperial order. White workers remained exploited by capital, but exploitation did not erase advantages distributed through colonial citizenship, segregated labor markets and access to imperial wealth. The ruling class did not need to purchase the entire white proletariat. It needed enough privilege and racial identification to make solidarity with colonized labor appear as a personal loss. The worker was invited to mistake a slightly larger ration from the plunder for a partnership in power.

Mullen’s “capitalist-colonialist complex” names the structure holding these relations together. Colonialism was not capitalism’s regrettable foreign policy, nor was racism an irrational prejudice attached from outside to an otherwise color-blind market. Colonial extraction supplied profits, territories and raw materials; racial hierarchy assigned political value to different populations; imperial power defended the whole arrangement. Any internationalism that spoke of class while postponing colonial self-determination merely elevated the provincial interests of Europe into a universal doctrine.

The Communist International became decisive because it attempted, however unevenly, to break that hierarchy. The Bolshevik Revolution had broken the political monopoly of the capitalist powers and placed colonial emancipation inside the declared strategy of an organized socialist state. For peoples whose countries had been partitioned, occupied or administered as the private estates of European capital, this was no minor adjustment to doctrine. It announced that the destruction of colonial rule belonged to the revolutionary transformation of the world system.

But Mullen also shows that solidarity required organization. Kwame Nkrumah’s declaration—“Today there is only one road to effective action—the organization of the masses”—provides the material principle beneath the diasporic international. Shared injury does not organize itself. A common enemy does not automatically produce a common strategy. Newspapers had to circulate; cadres had to be trained; congresses convened; money raised; arguments fought through; political relationships maintained across prison, surveillance and exile. Internationalism became real only where sympathy acquired institutions.

This is why Mullen describes Dark Princess as Du Bois’s “ode to the diasporic international.” The novel’s world is populated by organizers, exiles and revolutionaries attempting to bind struggles separated by empire. Agnes Smedley’s correspondence with Du Bois, her relationship with Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, the Ghadr movement, the Berlin Committee, Lajpat Rai and the circulation of material on lynching were not footnotes surrounding the important ideas. They were the channels through which ideas became politically usable. The network was not background to the revolution. It was one of the forms through which revolution learned to recognize itself.

Du Bois’s line from Dark Princess—“Only working thinkers can unite thinking workers”—places intellectual labor inside this organizational process. The formulation rejects both the professional scholar who studies workers from a safe distance and the romantic worship of spontaneity that imagines oppression automatically producing strategy. Workers think; intellectuals must work; theory becomes revolutionary only when it is transformed through collective struggle. The point is not to make intellectuals disappear but to abolish their separation from the social forces whose movement gives theory purpose.

The same novel carries the international question into the United States: “You can work in Africa and Asia right here in America if you work in the Black Belt.” The Black Belt appears not as an isolated domestic exception but as an internal front of colonial and world struggle. The line joins the dispossession of Black people in the United States to the subjection of Africa and Asia without erasing their differences. Empire had brought the colonial relation inside its own borders. World revolution did not begin only after crossing the ocean.

George Padmore embodies both the power and the strain inside this convergence. His movement from communist internationalism toward independent Pan-African organization cannot be reduced to personal disillusionment, nor should it be converted into proof that Marxism and national liberation were naturally incompatible. The dispute concerned political command: whether colonial movements would remain subordinate to the changing diplomatic requirements of a socialist state, and whether communist organizations would treat colonized peoples as makers of revolution or auxiliary forces in a European contest.

The contradiction was real because the Soviet Union had become both the product of world revolution and a state compelled to survive within a hostile international system. Its strategic retreats did not erase the anticolonial meaning of October, but neither could every diplomatic adjustment automatically advance colonial struggle. Mullen is most useful when this remains a historical contradiction rather than a morality play. The question is which compromises preserved the revolutionary center, which weakened initiative elsewhere, and how internationalism might be institutionalized without reducing movements to instruments of state policy.

India placed the national question under still greater pressure. Mullen calls it a “template for measuring the tensions between nationalism and proletarian internationalism embedded in India’s freedom struggle.” British rule had reorganized taxation, agriculture, industry and famine around imperial accumulation. Independence was therefore indispensable, but it could not by itself answer who would control land, production and the new state. Political freedom opened the social question; it did not settle it.

Mullen’s discussion of the “Indian ideology” identifies how national myth can conceal these struggles. The narrative of “antiquity-continuity; diversity-unity; massivity-democracy; [and] multiconfessionality-secularity” represents India as a continuous civilizational whole whose unity supposedly precedes political conflict. Yet such unity can bury caste, class and religious domination beneath the national symbol. A colonized nation needs unity against foreign rule, but the ruling groups inside that nation will always attempt to define whose interests the unity contains.

The treatment of the Untouchables makes the danger concrete. Mullen records the argument that they were “bundled back in to the Hindu electorate” because separate political representation threatened the numerical and ideological unity of the Hindu bloc. The phrase exposes the violence that can hide inside national inclusion. A population may be welcomed into the nation precisely so its independent political power can be denied. Unity ceases to be liberation when the oppressed are permitted membership only on condition that they surrender the means to act as an organized force.

This is Mullen’s strongest warning about nationalism. An oppressed nation can require a common front against colonial domination while containing classes determined to halt the struggle at formal independence. National liberation is revolutionary when it destroys the institutions through which imperialism and domestic ruling classes govern the people. It becomes a shell when the colonial administrator departs but landlords, capitalists and inherited state machinery continue ruling beneath a new flag.

The warning, however, must not collapse every national struggle into the same ideological danger. The nationalism of an oppressed people fighting to recover land and sovereignty is not the nationalism of an imperial state organizing conquest. Political vocabulary cannot substitute for class content. Japan’s challenge to white supremacy did not make Japanese empire a force of liberation. Its ruling class entered the colonial division of Asia and imposed upon neighboring peoples the domination Japan claimed to oppose. A nonwhite flag changed the administrators, not the political economy of occupation.

China would pose a different problem because national liberation there became inseparable from social revolution. Foreign domination operated through landlordism, comprador capital and a fractured state. The communist movement did not postpone class struggle in order to reunify the nation. It attacked the domestic property relations through which imperial power ruled the nation. The peasantry, dismissed by mechanical Marxism as an inert residue, became a revolutionary force through land struggle, organization and communist leadership.

Mullen’s own architecture prepares this conclusion even where his later judgments resist it. Du Bois’s insistence that nations would not reach communism “in the same way or at the same time” denies Europe the right to issue a single institutional passport to world revolution. The colonial question did not surround the real revolution taking place elsewhere. It was where revolution acquired its mass base, broke the geography of European power and discovered forms adequate to societies in which workers and peasants confronted foreign domination together.

The diasporic international was the organizational expression of that discovery. Its strength appeared whenever oppressed peoples linked their different conditions without pretending those conditions were identical. Its weakness appeared whenever metropolitan class struggle postponed colonial freedom, national leaders suppressed workers and peasants, or racial solidarity excused an aspiring imperial power. Du Bois emerged from these conflicts neither as a nationalist who eventually discovered class nor as a Marxist who outgrew race. He learned that capitalism reproduced the color line, while socialism built upon colonial property and racial privilege would reproduce the very order it claimed to abolish.

Mullen returns Du Bois to a world in motion, where Marxism was being remade by Black struggle and anticolonial revolution rather than exported from Europe to grateful pupils. The achievement is substantial. The implication is sharper still: the liberation of colonized nations was not a secondary theater surrounding the true revolution. It was one of the principal terrains upon which world revolution became imaginable, organized and materially possible. The color line had become a world system. Breaking it required a world movement capable of joining national emancipation to the power of workers and peasants.

History from the Barricades

History is never only a record of what happened. It is a struggle over who possesses the authority to explain what happened, whose actions become causes, whose suffering becomes background and whose victories are renamed accidents. The ruling class does not merely command factories, banks, armies and courts. It builds archives, disciplines universities and teaches the oppressed to encounter their own past as spectators. Whole peoples enter the record as labor supplies, criminal populations or victims awaiting rescue. Their rulers act. They merely experience.

Bill Mullen’s deepest contribution is to recover in Du Bois a method built against that arrangement. The book opens with Du Bois’s declaration that “only through the present can we see the past,” because the future is partly contained in the past and the past remains active inside the future. This is not permission to force present opinions backward onto earlier events. It means that new struggles expose capacities, relations and alternatives hidden by the settlements that followed old defeats. The archive preserves what occurred. A revolutionary present can reveal what the victors taught the archive not to recognize.

Mullen gives this movement its sharpest formulation: “Revolution thus becomes the hermeneutic engine of both history writing and history making.” Revolution is not one subject among the many that occupied Du Bois. It supplies the machinery through which history becomes intelligible. Ordinary domination presents existing relations as natural: masters govern, workers obey, colonies remain dependent and the state stands above society. Revolution breaks that appearance. Classes declared passive become organized forces; populations treated as property become political subjects; colonial margins emerge as positions from which the world system can be seen more clearly than from its imperial capitals.

The formulation does more than recommend writing history “from below.” That phrase can become another professional courtesy extended to people whose agency remains secondary to decisions made elsewhere. Mullen’s hermeneutic engine relocates causation. The oppressed do not receive a more sympathetic role in a familiar story. Their activity changes the structure of the story itself. Once enslaved labor, colonial revolt and workers’ organization become causal forces, Europe can no longer appear as the self-generating source of modern politics.

Du Bois’s essay “Africa and the French Revolution” places the official history of modernity under precisely this interrogation. Academic common sense had arranged Africa and Europe as separate theatres: slavery and colonial trade occupied one archive, while enlightened ideas and revolutionary institutions occupied another. European fortunes could grow from enslaved African labor and colonial extraction, yet Africa would remain external to Europe’s political transformation because historians had already classified Africans as people without world-making agency.

Du Bois overturns the sequence. The enslaved and colonized cease to appear after the important events have occurred. Their labor, resistance and position within Atlantic accumulation enter the structure of causation. Europe’s celebrated revolutions become inseparable from the plantation world that financed modern wealth and from the struggles that destabilized colonial rule. Sympathy would leave the old map intact and ask that its victims receive kinder treatment. Du Bois redraws the map.

Walter Benjamin’s declaration that “the subject of historical cognition is the battling, oppressed class itself” clarifies what makes this knowledge revolutionary. The adjective is decisive. Benjamin does not crown the oppressed as automatic possessors of truth by virtue of suffering. The historical subject is the battling oppressed class: people transformed through collective struggle, organization and confrontation with power. Oppression produces knowledge of exploitation, surveillance, hunger and humiliation, but pain alone does not produce strategy. A worker may understand the foreman and still misunderstand capital. A colonized population may recognize foreign domination while following a domestic ruling class into a new arrangement of exploitation.

Struggle becomes cognition when experience is organized, compared, theorized and converted into collective action. This is why Du Bois’s knowledge deepened through movements rather than through scholarly distance from them. Black struggle, Pan-African organization, communist debate, peace campaigns and anticolonial revolution were not contaminants introduced into an otherwise objective intellect. They supplied the relationships through which historical problems could be seen in their full dimensions. The university separated slavery from capitalism, race from class, America from empire and scholarship from allegiance. Revolutionary organization reunited what ruling knowledge required divided.

Du Bois’s line that “only working thinkers can unite thinking workers” gives this method an organizational form. Workers are not mute material awaiting interpretation by professional intellectuals, and thinkers do not become revolutionary by praising workers from outside their struggle. Intellectual labor must enter the collective process through which the exploited investigate their conditions, test explanations and develop strategy. Theory becomes useful when those who produce it accept discipline from a movement capable of proving them wrong.

Black Reconstruction in America remains the commanding demonstration. The reigning account had presented Reconstruction as an age of Black incapacity, Northern corruption and tragic federal excess. That story served a definite class settlement. It justified the restoration of the Southern planter order, reconciled Northern capital with white supremacy and converted the defeat of Black democracy into evidence that Black people had never been fit to govern. The archive was not simply mistaken. It carried the ideological terms of the counterrevolution.

Du Bois restored the enslaved workers’ general strike, the political activity of freedpeople and the revolutionary meaning of emancipation. Reconstruction became a struggle over labor, land, state power and democracy rather than a morality play about incompetent legislators. Those once described as beneficiaries of liberation emerged as its makers. Their withdrawal of labor weakened the Confederacy; their military participation changed the war; their institutions advanced public education and democratic government. Their defeat cleared the road for a new alliance between capital and white supremacy.

This reversal changes more than the reputation of Reconstruction. It alters the meaning of the Civil War, emancipation and American democracy. Black workers no longer wait for history to arrive in the uniform of the Union Army. Their movement helps make emancipation unavoidable. The state remains decisive, but it does not act upon inert human material. Popular struggle changes the choices available to the state, creates new institutions and forces ruling power to respond. Historical reconstruction becomes political reconstruction because changing the subject changes the whole chain of causation.

Du Bois later wrote, “I can interpret the Soviet Union today through my experience with two million American Negroes in the last half of the nineteenth century.” Mullen properly treats the sentence as evidence of a reciprocal method. The Soviet Revolution helped Du Bois reread Reconstruction as a revolutionary crisis, while Reconstruction supplied a language through which he could interpret the Soviet experiment. The relationship was not mechanical analogy. Russia and the American South did not possess identical classes, institutions or historical sequences. Du Bois recognized a shared problem: laboring people previously excluded from power attempting to build a new order while displaced ruling classes gathered every available force for restoration.

The sentence also attacks the provincial hierarchy through which Europe explains the world while Black history remains a local specialty. Du Bois interprets Russia through formerly enslaved Black workers. The movement of knowledge is reversed. The plantation South becomes a site from which world revolution can be understood. Black experience is no longer admitted into Marxism as an example illustrating theories completed elsewhere. It becomes a source of theory.

Mullen’s account cuts against two failures at once. Liberal historiography isolates racial oppression from political economy and celebrates reform after stripping away the struggle that forced it. Mechanical Marxism acknowledges class but can reduce Black people to one fraction of the proletariat whose distinct history will supposedly dissolve inside a universal worker identity. Du Bois destroys both evasions. The formerly enslaved were workers, but their entry into class struggle occurred through a collective assault upon slavery, racial caste and political subordination. The specific form of oppression became the ground from which universal transformation could be attempted.

Such a method does not declare every movement of the oppressed revolutionary by definition. Historical agency is not political innocence. The oppressed can be divided, incorporated, defeated or mobilized behind reactionary projects. A revolutionary history must examine organization, leadership, class alliance, property and state power. It asks whether a struggle enlarges the people’s capacity to govern or merely changes the personnel administering their exploitation. The point is not to romanticize rebellion. It is to locate within struggle the knowledge required to distinguish liberation from its substitutes.

Mullen is therefore right to resist biographies that read Du Bois’s life as though every earlier thought secretly awaited his final communist commitment. Historical development is not fate written backward. Du Bois hesitated, revised himself, carried old assumptions into new situations and sometimes understood events only after they had passed. But rejecting predestination does not require pretending that his political destinations were interchangeable. A life can possess direction without following a script. Successive crises exposed the limits of positions he left behind: Reconstruction’s betrayal weakened faith in liberal progress; imperial war revealed the international organization of capital; anticolonial and socialist revolutions demonstrated that oppressed peoples could seize history rather than petition its custodians.

The present remakes the past because new struggles uncover unfinished possibilities buried beneath defeat. The Russian Revolution made it possible to reread Reconstruction as a struggle over workers’ power. African decolonization made slave resistance, Haiti and Pan-African thought legible as parts of a longer historical movement rather than isolated eruptions. The past does not physically change, but its structure becomes newly visible when living forces recover questions the victors had declared settled. A revolution teaches its ancestors how to speak.

This reciprocal movement separates revolutionary history from antiquarian remembrance. The dead are not collected for admiration. Their defeats are interrogated for strategy. Which alliances failed? Which classes retreated? Where did the enemy reorganize? Which institutions preserved popular initiative, and which transferred authority upward? Historical materialism becomes useful when memory prepares struggle. Otherwise even radical scholarship becomes a polished mausoleum where the oppressed receive respectful burial after being denied political descendants.

The contemporary administration of memory makes the method more urgent. Platforms determine which archives circulate; search systems rank the past; universities accept donor and state pressure over legitimate political speech; intelligence categories migrate into journalism and scholarship. Communists become foreign agents, Black insurgency becomes criminal disorder, anticolonial resistance becomes terrorism and state violence appears as an unfortunate reaction to extremism. Counterinsurgency operates retrospectively by breaking the conceptual links through which separate acts of repression might be recognized as one system.

Du Bois moves in the opposite direction. He reunites plantation and factory, colony and metropolis, archive and state, historical interpretation and organized struggle. Neutrality within domination usually means accepting categories prepared by the dominant. The scholar who refuses to choose between the slave and the master has not escaped politics. He has chosen the archive prepared by the master.

Mullen’s reconstruction of this epistemology supplies the standard by which his own argument must now be judged. If the battling oppressed class is the maker and interpreter of history, its agency cannot vanish when it creates parties, states, armies, planning institutions and new property relations. The method cannot celebrate the insurgent class while treating revolutionary government as something imposed upon it from outside. Workers and peasants remain historical subjects when they confront invasion, scarcity, administrative weakness, internal restoration and the terrible problem of keeping a revolution alive.

That contradiction becomes unavoidable when Mullen turns to the Soviet Union, Stalin and China. His strongest formulation has already armed the critique. Revolution is the hermeneutic engine only if it follows the oppressed through the hardest passage—from rebellion against the old order into the institutions required to construct and defend a new one.

When Revolution Becomes a State

Mullen restores world revolution as the horizon of Du Bois’s political life, then begins withdrawing recognition when revolution acquires territory, institutions and the means to defend itself. Insurrection appears as the self-emancipation of the oppressed; socialist construction arrives beneath the “long shadow of Stalinism.” The masses remain visible while breaking the old state, then recede behind bureaucracy once they attempt to build a new one. Here the book’s historical method collides with its ideological limit. Having insisted that the battling oppressed class makes and interprets history, Mullen too often treats revolutionary state power as though it descended upon that class from outside its own struggle.

The contradiction is concentrated in his phrase “the dark hijacking of world revolution.” Hijacking presumes an authentic revolutionary vehicle seized by an alien force and redirected against its rightful passengers. The metaphor preserves the innocence of revolution by separating it from the parties, armies and states through which workers and peasants tried to govern, industrialize and survive. October remains emancipatory at the instant of rupture; the Soviet state becomes the machinery of betrayal once revolution confronts civil war, economic ruin, invasion, administrative scarcity and the failure of expected revolutions elsewhere. History is divided into the beautiful uprising and the contaminated aftermath.

This division substitutes moral sequence for material analysis. The Soviet Union did not inherit a peaceful, developed society whose rulers freely selected centralization over abundance and repression over effortless democracy. Revolution inherited imperial war, landlord power, mass illiteracy, collapsed production and a state apparatus built for the old classes. It then faced foreign intervention, civil war, diplomatic isolation, famine, technological backwardness and the visible approach of another imperial assault. The immediate question was not whether socialism would unfold according to an immaculate constitutional diagram. It was whether the first workers’ state would survive long enough to develop at all.

Mullen’s category of Stalinism compresses these conditions into a political pathology. Planning, industrialization, collectivization, party discipline, Comintern strategy, bureaucratic deformation and repression gather beneath one ideological roof. The category appears to explain each phenomenon because it has ceased distinguishing among them. Imperial siege enters afterward as context, while internal coercion supplies the verdict. The historian examines the scar and leaves the knife outside the frame.

Siege must instead enter the causal structure. Revolutionary governments have been invaded, blockaded, denied credit and technology, subjected to capital flight and surrounded by states committed to their destruction. These pressures do not abolish internal responsibility. They determine the field upon which responsibility must be judged. Centralization necessary for survival can harden into bureaucratic command. Security institutions built against genuine subversion can enlarge themselves beyond necessity. Emergency discipline can become permanent political habit. These are contradictions inside revolutionary construction, not proof that revolution has vanished.

Siege socialism names that unity of achievement and deformation. The state concentrates power because imperialism concentrates force against it. Concentration may preserve public ownership, sovereignty and the population’s physical survival; it may also narrow participation and elevate administrators above those whose power they claim to defend. The revolutionary task is to protect the social foundations of socialism while struggling against every institutional form that substitutes command for mass initiative. Mullen’s framework too often preserves the second half of this contradiction by discarding the first.

His strongest case must nevertheless be stated in full. Mullen is right that revolutionary allegiance can become a shield against criticism, that communist parties have subordinated movements to diplomatic priorities, and that state ownership does not automatically equal popular rule. The Comintern’s policy toward the Kuomintang exposed Chinese communists to catastrophic repression. Administrative power can displace workers’ organization while continuing to speak in its name. A revolution defended “at any cost” can become insulated from the very class judgment that gives solidarity political content. These are not liberal objections to revolution. They are problems produced by the struggle to keep revolutionary power revolutionary.

Yet Mullen’s own language frequently settles the case before the history has been examined. He calls China a “‘compensatory’ revolution” that, in the eyes of the Comintern, merited “support at any cost, even when that support contradicted proletarian ascent and workers’ interests.” The formulation captures a real danger: national liberation can be made to stand in for socialism, and loyalty to a revolutionary state can become a substitute for investigating its class relations. But compensation cannot explain the Chinese Revolution itself. It explains why distant supporters might invest China with hopes generated elsewhere. It does not explain how Chinese workers and peasants destroyed landlord power, defeated foreign-backed rule and constructed a new state.

Mullen deepens the problem by arguing that “metonymic nationalism emerged as a substitute” for proletarian ascent. Again, the warning has force where national symbolism conceals class domination. Japan’s empire and the Kuomintang’s bourgeois nationalism prove that a nonwhite or formally anti-imperial state can preserve exploitation. But a category capable of grouping Japanese colonialism, Kuomintang rule and communist revolution beneath the same suspicion has become too broad to distinguish the class content of the forces it names.

Japan provides the necessary negative case. Du Bois once regarded it as a “champion of the darker world,” mistaking a nonwhite state’s challenge to Western supremacy for liberation from imperialism. Mullen is correct to expose this “romantic Japanese exceptionalism.” Japanese industrial development and racial defiance did not abolish colonial domination; they armed a ruling class that imposed it upon Korea, Manchuria and China. The lesson is not that racial or national liberation is fraudulent. It is that the social character of a state cannot be read from the color of its rulers or the enemies it confronts.

That lesson sharpens rather than weakens the distinction between Japan and revolutionary China. Japanese power entered the imperial division of Asia. The Chinese Revolution attacked the domestic property relations through which imperialism governed China: landlordism, comprador capital and a fragmented state subordinated to foreign power. National liberation and class struggle were joined because foreign domination rested upon internal class allies. Sovereignty did not replace socialist transformation. It created the political ground upon which transformation could begin.

Mullen nevertheless describes the Chinese Communist Party that took power in 1949 as “a small cadre of military leaders and intellectuals largely divorced from the Chinese peasantry and working class.” The claim cannot survive the history it is asked to interpret. A party divorced from the peasantry does not conduct a decades-long rural revolution, create base areas, redistribute land, survive extermination campaigns, cross a continent under military pursuit and return with sufficient organized support to defeat a larger state. Such endurance required social roots extending far beyond a detached command. Intellectuals without a mass base generally discover exile before victory.

The error arises partly from a standard of workers’ power too closely tied to industrial Europe. China was an overwhelmingly peasant society subjected to landlord domination, foreign occupation and comprador rule. The revolutionary question could not be postponed until an industrial proletariat achieved the demographic proportions prescribed by mechanical Marxism. Maoism developed the worker-peasant alliance as the form through which communist leadership could organize the actual majority. Peasant participation did not empty the revolution of class content. Landlord property was destroyed, land relations transformed, foreign command broken and national planning made possible.

Mullen’s phrase “a communism stripped of workers’ power” therefore demands a more concrete definition of power. Workers’ power cannot be reduced to party command or public ownership. Laboring people must possess institutions through which they can shape production, correct leadership and prevent administrators from becoming a power over society. But workers’ power also cannot be judged while ignoring land redistribution, the defeat of comprador classes, mass literacy, public health, planned industrialization and sovereign control over development. Class power appears in whose property is abolished, which forces are politically elevated and what direction the new state gives social accumulation.

The same material standard must govern judgment of the Soviet Union. Mullen often presents Du Bois’s continuing allegiance as “delusional hope,” an attachment sustained after the evidence should have dissolved it. The phrase psychologizes a political conclusion grounded in an observable world. Du Bois compared Soviet socialism not with an imaginary society untouched by violence, but with imperial powers enriched through slavery, colonial plunder and war. Those states segregated Black workers, crushed colonial rebellions and prosecuted Du Bois while lecturing humanity on freedom. Their indictment of the Soviet Union arrived on stationery embossed with empire.

The Soviet rupture was material. The commanding heights were removed from private ownership; production was reorganized through planning; an agrarian society developed the industrial capacity required to defeat Nazi invasion; and the existence of a major socialist power widened the possibilities available to anticolonial movements. These facts do not sanctify coercive collectivization, political purges, bureaucratic privilege or the restriction of popular initiative. They explain why Du Bois’s alignment cannot be reduced to blindness or nostalgia. Socialist achievement and socialist deformation belonged to the same historical process under siege.

Mullen comes closest to a dialectical treatment when he describes Du Bois’s position as “both an affirmation and a negation of Russia, 1917.” The revolution affirmed that workers and peasants could destroy an old ruling order, reorganize property and construct a state outside capitalist command. Its negations emerged through bureaucracy, repression and the narrowing of mass participation. This formulation keeps the revolution itself under examination. It asks how emancipatory power generates new contradictions instead of declaring that emancipation ended whenever its institutions failed an ideal test.

That standard should govern Stalin. Stalin was neither the solitary creator of Soviet development nor a demonic interruption of an otherwise harmonious revolution. He led within a party, state and society formed by class conflict, inherited backwardness and international danger. Accelerated industrialization was not an arbitrary appetite for gigantism. Without it, the Soviet Union would have confronted fascist invasion with the productive base of an exhausted peasant economy. The factories, transport systems and technical capacity built in the preceding years cannot be detached from the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Nor can necessity excuse every policy enacted in its name. Coercive collectivization, administrative command, purges and the elevation of security institutions damaged revolutionary life and inflicted immense suffering upon the classes socialism existed to liberate. Concrete criticism must ask which threats were real, which measures were avoidable, what class forces shaped policy and where mass participation might have corrected leadership. “Stalinism” too often relieves the historian of this labor. The label appears, the revolution is pronounced deformed, and the imperial powers that organized invasion and encirclement quietly leave the courtroom.

Mullen’s Chapter 4 contains evidence that pushes beyond his verdict. China, he writes, became “a bridge between the age of the Communist International and that of the Colonial International.” A bridge is not merely compensation for a failed European hope. It transmits revolutionary possibility into a new historical field. The Chinese victory demonstrated that Marxism could become a material force among the colonized majority, while the existence of socialist states altered the diplomatic, economic and military terrain upon which Bandung and African independence would emerge.

This makes Mullen’s description of diasporic internationalists especially revealing. Their support for China expressed “undying fidelity to the world revolution conception,” yet also, in his account, insufficient criticism of “ossification and devolution.” The contradiction cannot be settled by choosing fidelity or criticism. Revolutionary solidarity worthy of the name requires both. It defends socialist sovereignty against imperial destruction while investigating the bureaucratic forms, class compromises and strategic errors that weaken popular power. The imperial academy offers criticism without defense. Official apologetics offers defense without criticism. Neither is enough.

Mullen’s anti-Stalinist framework falters where it treats state power itself as the decisive break between emancipation and substitution. Defeated revolutions retain their innocence because they never had to feed cities, defend borders, administer production or suppress restoration. Surviving revolutions bear the marks of those battles and are then condemned for having scars. The proper question is not whether the state contaminated a pure movement. It is whether the institutions created through struggle preserved, enlarged or displaced the power of workers and peasants under concrete conditions.

Du Bois’s support for the Soviet Union and China should be judged on that terrain. He underestimated contradictions and sometimes withheld criticism where criticism was necessary. Yet his fundamental alignment was neither irrational nor merely compensatory. He recognized that the central division of his century did not run between immaculate liberal democracy and totalitarian excess. It ran between an imperial order defending private accumulation and revolutionary societies attempting, through uneven and often brutal struggle, to subordinate accumulation to human need.

Mullen recovers the communist Du Bois but hesitates before the world that made his communism concrete. His revolutionary horizon remains most generous while revolution is movement, insurgency and aspiration. The Soviet Union and China force the harder problem: what happens when the oppressed acquire the state power necessary to redirect history and must preserve that power under conditions chosen by their enemies? The answer cannot be found beneath the long shadow of a category broad enough to obscure the forces it claims to reveal. It begins by following world revolution into government, contradiction and siege without surrendering either solidarity or judgment.

Peace Was Another Front of the Revolution

Du Bois understood peace as a question of power. War did not descend upon humanity because diplomats misunderstood one another or nations suffered from insufficient tolerance. It arose from a world divided between those who commanded colonies, markets and armies and those whose labor and land were being seized. To struggle for peace therefore required opposition to the social order producing war. The peace advocate who refused anti-imperialism could mourn the bodies while preserving the machine that manufactured them.

Mullen’s final chapter, “Making Peace: Gendering the World Revolution/Reckoning the Third World,” recovers this unity at a decisive stage in Du Bois’s life. Yet its importance begins before Du Bois enters the podium. Claudia Jones supplies the chapter’s strategic premise: “Communist women, by their leadership among the masses of women, and learning from them to fight for their demands, will fuse the women’s peace movement under the leadership of the working class.” Peace does not appear here as a respectable cause floating above class struggle. It becomes a field of mass organization through which women confronting war, racism, poverty and repression might enter a broader movement against imperialism.

The sentence deserves its full weight. Jones does not imagine communist women descending upon an unformed mass with a completed program. They lead by “learning from” the women they organize. Revolutionary leadership is therefore neither administrative command nor passive celebration of spontaneity. It is a reciprocal process through which everyday grievances—food prices, housing, conscription, racist violence, threatened children—are connected to the system producing them. The peace movement advances toward socialism not because every participant begins as a communist, but because organized struggle can expose the class power beneath war.

Mullen extends this argument by restoring Shirley Graham Du Bois and a wider network of Black women radicals to the political transformation of Du Bois’s later years. Shirley did not merely provide companionship, access or encouragement to an aging intellectual. She helped move Du Bois toward communist membership, peace organization and deeper identification with the anticolonial world. Around them stood women who wrote, researched, raised funds, sustained correspondence, organized delegations and held movements together through surveillance and repression. Their work was not supportive labor performed behind history’s real actors. It produced the relationships through which internationalism became durable.

This is the chapter’s necessary correction to the heroic biography. World revolution did not travel only through famous speeches, party congresses and the decisions of celebrated men. It moved through households made into political workshops, letters carried across borders, publications assembled under pressure, children cared for while meetings continued, comrades housed during exile and organizations preserved when their public leaders were prosecuted. The revolutionary movement that devalues such labor eventually discovers that its grand declarations possess no social body.

Gendering world revolution therefore means more than adding women to a familiar procession. It changes what counts as political work, where strategy is produced and how movements reproduce themselves. Peace organizing drew women into struggle through the conditions imperialism imposed upon daily life, but it did not confine them to a supposedly feminine moral opposition to violence. Jones envisioned their movement contributing to “a new anti-fascist, anti-imperialist people’s coalition” advancing “to Socialism.” The peace front became revolutionary when it linked the defense of life to the defeat of the property system consuming it.

Du Bois’s own late language introduces a harder contradiction. “I do not believe,” he wrote, “that, in the economic revolution through which the present world is bound to go, force or violence is necessary.” He believed humanity was approaching a stage when “great and revolutionary change can be brought about by reason and peace.” The confidence is understandable after two world wars and beneath the threat of nuclear annihilation. It also sits uneasily beside the century Du Bois had spent studying. Ruling classes had not surrendered slavery, colonies, land or factories because reason finally defeated misunderstanding. They yielded when organized peoples made the old order impossible to preserve.

Mullen is right not to erase this tension. Du Bois had not abandoned revolution; he was revising the means through which he believed it might proceed. The question is whether peaceful transformation describes a possibility created by the balance of class forces or becomes a moral expectation imposed upon the oppressed regardless of what their rulers do. Peace can become a revolutionary strategy when mass organization, socialist power and anticolonial unity narrow the ruling class’s ability to wage war. It becomes surrender when the victims are ordered to renounce force while empire retains armies, blockades and covert action.

Du Bois’s praise for Lenin prevents his peace politics from collapsing into pacifism. Lenin, he wrote, “consistently and firmly spoke out for peace” while calling upon free peoples to support “by any means the national emancipation movements of the colonized peoples.” The two commitments belong together. Colonial rule is organized violence even when no battle is officially underway. Land theft, forced labor, famine, racial law and occupation do not become peaceful because the conqueror has stabilized them. National liberation appears to disturb the peace only because empire defines submission as order.

This distinction explains why Du Bois’s peace activism remained revolutionary. He opposed nuclear war without accepting the political arrangements that made war inevitable. He defended coexistence between social systems while refusing to equate coexistence with colonial obedience. Peace was not the freezing of an unjust balance between armed masters and disarmed subjects. It was the removal of the imperial relations through which one group of nations possessed the power to decide whether others would live, develop or govern themselves.

Speaking in Tashkent, Du Bois translated this position into political economy. African states, he argued, should refuse capital from the “exploiting world, led by America” and “buy of the Soviet Union and China as they grow able to sell at low prices.” His conclusion was sharper still: “Save thus your own capital and drive the imperialists into bankruptcy or into Socialism.” Independence was not secure while Western banks, corporations and commodity markets retained command over development. A national flag above an economy organized for foreign accumulation could leave the colonial relation alive beneath new management.

The language of boycott matters because Du Bois did not treat economic relations as neutral exchanges among formally equal states. Capital from the exploiting world arrived carrying the power accumulated through colonialism. Credit determined what would be built; trade rules determined what could be sold; foreign ownership determined where the surplus would flow. Du Bois saw relations with socialist countries as one means of loosening this command, preserving domestic capital and widening the space in which newly independent states might plan development for their own populations.

This was not diplomacy substituted for class struggle. Du Bois joined sovereign state action to a social objective. The imperialists were to be driven toward bankruptcy or socialism, not invited to administer decolonization more generously. Trade with socialist states could create room for national development, but room was not the same as popular power. Whether that opening advanced socialism depended upon which classes controlled the postcolonial state, whether workers and peasants were organized and whether sovereignty reached the ownership of land, finance and production.

Ghana gave this strategic problem a concrete home. Du Bois’s final migration was not a picturesque retirement beneath African independence. Ghana stood within a struggle to convert formal sovereignty into continental power. Nkrumah understood that fragmented postcolonial states remained exposed to foreign capital, military pressure and political subversion. Du Bois placed his remaining labor within that front because decolonization had shifted the center of world politics. The former colonies were no longer merely territories acted upon by the great powers. They were attempting to become makers of a new international order.

Mullen also identifies the danger. National unity could hide class rule; developmentalism could elevate administrators while workers and peasants remained spectators; nonalignment could become diplomatic maneuver without social transformation. The weakness was not that independence mattered too much. It was that independence could be emptied when the people lacked organized power over the economy and state. Peace, sovereignty and development remained revolutionary only when joined to the rule of those whose labor made society possible.

This is where Mullen’s description of Du Bois’s late outlook as “revolutionary nostalgia” becomes inadequate. Nostalgia suggests that allegiance to the Soviet Union, China and world revolution compensated emotionally for political defeats. Certainly memory shaped Du Bois’s judgment. Every revolutionary carries the victories and failures of earlier struggles into the present. But his strategic turn toward socialist trade, African sovereignty and communist organization cannot be reduced to longing for a vanished horizon. It responded to existing forces that had broken the Western monopoly over development and materially supported anticolonial emancipation.

The present confirms the continuing stakes of that judgment. Imperial power now operates through sanctions, control over finance, technological denial, military alliances, digital surveillance and the legal classification of resistance. Peace movements are permitted so long as they oppose war abstractly. Once they connect war to arms manufacturers, colonial occupation, racial policing or capitalist crisis, they are accused of extremism, foreign influence or sympathy with terrorism. The state tolerates grief more easily than analysis.

Anticommunism remains useful because it converts political opposition into disloyalty. The worker who challenges militarized production, the Black organizer who connects policing to empire, the student who joins Palestine to anticolonial struggle and the migrant defender who traces displacement to sanctions and war can all be placed beyond legitimate citizenship. Their offense is not that every one of them belongs to the same organization. It is that their struggles might acquire a common explanation and therefore the possibility of common organization.

Modern counterinsurgency targets precisely these connections. It maps organizations, donors, educators, legal advocates, media channels and international relationships. Political education becomes radicalization; solidarity funds become infrastructure; opposition to capitalism becomes ideological motive. The newspaper is targeted before it becomes a party, the delegation before it becomes an alliance, the study group before it produces cadres. Isolated grievances can be managed. A shared analysis can become power.

Du Bois’s peace politics moves in the opposite direction. It joins nuclear danger to imperial rivalry, African sovereignty to economic independence, Black liberation to anticolonial struggle and socialist states to the material possibilities available to the oppressed world. The method does not erase difference. It reveals how distinct wounds are produced within one structure. That is why the diasporic international remained dangerous: it allowed peoples governed separately to recognize the machinery governing them together.

China’s contemporary development and the wider movement toward multipolarity reopen part of this strategic terrain. The weakening of Western monopoly over credit, industry, technology and infrastructure gives states in the Global South greater room to maneuver. But geopolitical room does not determine class direction. A postcolonial ruling class may use new partnerships to bargain for a larger share while leaving workers and peasants beneath exploitation. Multipolarity becomes revolutionary only where popular forces turn sovereign space into social transformation.

Mullen’s final chapter is strongest when it reveals peace as another front of world revolution rather than an escape from it. Women’s organization, socialist trade, anticolonial sovereignty and mass political education belong to one strategic field. The contradiction inside Du Bois’s late thought remains: he hoped reason and peace might accomplish a transformation whose enemies had repeatedly answered reason with force. Yet his practice supplied the correction. Peace required organized masses, socialist allies and colonized peoples capable of withdrawing their labor, resources and obedience from empire.

Du Bois did not ask the oppressed to make peace with the conditions killing them. He asked them to build sufficient power that war would cease to be the private instrument of the imperial states. His route ran through women organizing the everyday life of resistance, African governments breaking economic dependence, communist movements connecting peace to class power and socialist countries widening the space for decolonization. Peace was not the silence left after struggle had been abandoned. It was the world that struggle was meant to make possible.

The Unfinished Road Must Be Traveled

Un-American succeeds where much of the Du Bois industry has failed. It restores a revolutionary life whose parts had been carefully separated for public consumption. The scholar of the color line returns to communism; the Pan-Africanist returns to socialist internationalism; the peace advocate returns to the struggle against imperial war; the exile returns to the anticolonial world that had become his political homeland. After Mullen’s reconstruction, the domesticated Du Bois can no longer be defended through innocent omission. His communism was not an embarrassing appendix attached to a respectable career. It was the political conclusion toward which the central contradictions of his century drove him.

That recovery is indispensable, but it remains incomplete. Mullen follows Du Bois into the century of world revolution, then hesitates before the revolutionary states that survived long enough to govern. His anti-Stalinist framework recognizes the liberating intelligence of insurgency while treating Soviet and Chinese state power as the point where emancipation gives way to bureaucracy, nationalism and substitution. Revolution remains most authentic while approaching victory. Once workers and peasants inherit borders, scarcity, industry, hostile armies and the wreckage of the old society, the historical generosity extended to rebellion begins to disappear.

The contradiction matters because it shapes what revolutionaries learn from the book. A history that recovers the oppressed as makers of revolt but reduces socialist construction to the administration of defeat cannot prepare anyone for the burden of victory. Existing socialism developed under siege. Invasion, blockade, technological denial, capital flight and the threat of restoration entered every contradiction of the new order. These pressures did not excuse bureaucratic privilege, coercion or the displacement of mass initiative. They formed the battlefield upon which such dangers emerged and upon which every effort to correct them had to proceed.

The standard must therefore remain material. Which property classes were defeated? Who controlled land, industry and finance? Did the state enlarge literacy, health, housing, productive capacity and national sovereignty? Did workers and peasants acquire institutions through which they could govern and correct leadership, or did administration increasingly substitute itself for their activity? These questions permit neither worship nor anticommunist dismissal. They judge revolutionary power by the relations it destroys, the human capacities it creates and the social forces it prepares for further struggle.

Du Bois supplied his own compass when he defined true revolution through “the uplift of the human race.” The phrase is easily domesticated into moral improvement only by removing the material content of his communism. Human uplift required liberation from private command over labor, colonial seizure of land, racial degradation and imperial war. It demanded institutions capable of feeding, educating and protecting populations capitalism had treated as expendable. A revolution that cannot enlarge human life betrays its purpose. A criticism that ignores millions lifted from inherited degradation because the process violated an ideal constitutional diagram betrays history.

Mullen’s call for the “decolonization and de-Stalinization of the archive” contains the book’s unresolved ideological struggle. Decolonization is necessary because the archive was assembled through imperial power. It treated Europe as the source of universal history, classified colonized peoples as objects and concealed the violence through which capitalist modernity was built. But “de-Stalinization” cannot operate as an equal and parallel solvent through which socialist states, communist parties and revolutionary compromises are dissolved into bureaucratic domination. Used without precision, it carries the Cold War’s verdict into the very archive supposedly being liberated from imperial command.

The revolutionary archive requires a harder discipline. It must recover mass initiative without pretending organization stands outside popular power. It must examine leadership without reducing history to leaders. It must expose repression without allowing imperial violence to vanish from the causal field. It must distinguish the centralized coordination required for survival from the bureaucratic interests that can grow inside that coordination. Above all, it must reject the familiar Western arrangement in which colonized peoples are celebrated while resisting empire but distrusted once they seize a state, plan an economy or defend their revolution by force.

This is where Du Bois remains useful beyond the accuracy of every judgment he made. He sometimes mistook racial defiance for anti-imperialism, underestimated contradictions inside socialist states and extended trust where criticism was necessary. His importance lies in the direction of his development and the scale of his allegiance. He placed Black liberation within the defeat of colonialism, capitalism and war. He refused the proposition that oppressed peoples must prove their political purity before acquiring power. He chose the turbulent construction of a new world over the polished barbarism of the old.

Mullen writes of the “untraveled routes” of the diasporic international. Those routes remain untraveled because counterrevolution destroyed organizations, severed relationships and domesticated the memories that survived. They ran among Black workers, colonized nations, communist parties, women’s peace movements, revolutionary governments and intellectuals who treated scholarship as preparation for struggle. Recovering them cannot mean arranging a reunion among their ghosts. A route exists politically only when living forces begin moving along it again.

That movement requires durable organization. Anti-racism severed from class becomes the management of inequality. Class politics severed from colonial history reproduces the privileges of the dominant nation. Peace politics severed from anti-imperialism requests quieter methods of conquest. National sovereignty severed from popular power can strengthen domestic elites. Multipolarity creates room beyond imperial monopoly, but no rearrangement among states automatically places workers and peasants in command. Each partial struggle reaches its limit where the others have been excluded.

The strategic bloc Du Bois pursued remains unfinished: Black and colonized workers whose conditions expose the internal structure of empire; sections of the metropolitan working class prepared to break with racial and national privilege; liberation movements capable of turning sovereignty into social transformation; socialist states whose existence weakens imperial command; and revolutionary intellectuals willing to place knowledge under the discipline of organization. None can substitute for the others. States without movements may bargain above the people. Movements without organization dissolve beneath repression. Internationalism without material institutions becomes a noble sentiment waiting for its next defeat.

A Weaponized Intellects review must do more than decide whether a book deserves admiration. It must identify which ideas sharpen revolutionary understanding, which reproduce defeat and which contradictions demand struggle within the movement. Mullen gives us a communist Du Bois who can no longer be contained by the American nation. That achievement must be retained. His framework becomes unacceptable where it recognizes revolution most generously when defeated, exiled or not yet burdened with power. The correction is a material defense of socialist construction joined to ruthless criticism of every bureaucracy, privilege and strategic retreat that weakens the people’s capacity to rule.

The final verdict is therefore neither acquittal nor condemnation. Un-American is a revolutionary recovery marked by a Western Marxist retreat. It restores Du Bois to world revolution while narrowing the legitimacy of the forces through which world revolution became durable. The contradiction does not make the book useless. It makes ideological struggle within the book necessary. Its strongest evidence points beyond its weakest conclusions.

Du Bois became un-American when he transferred his loyalty from the imperial nation to humanity’s revolutionary majority. To recover him is to confront the same demand. The task is not to admire his courage from inside the boundaries he crossed. It is to rebuild the solidarity those boundaries were designed to prevent: workers and colonized peoples organized across nations, revolutionary states defended without surrendering criticism, and intellectual labor returned to the hands of struggle. Revolutionary memory earns its name only when it shortens the distance to revolutionary power. The unfinished road must be traveled.

Un-American in the Era of American Decline

The unfinished road does not end at the border of Mullen’s book. It runs directly into an American present in which the revolutionary traditions recovered by Un-American are again being treated as objects of surveillance, expulsion and ideological quarantine. Du Bois’s passage from American reformer to communist internationalist was not merely a change of opinion. It was a transfer of political allegiance—from the nation that claimed him while degrading his people to the workers, colonized nations and socialist revolutions struggling to overturn the world that nation commanded. To become un-American in his sense was to break out of the prison of imperial common sense. In the second Trump era, the bars of that prison are being reinforced.

Mullen writes that capitalist hegemony sought “to incarcerate his mind, if not his body,” holding Du Bois within the “discursive limits of the possible.” Yet the book’s deeper insight is that Du Bois eventually converted exclusion into freedom. “Un-Americanness and exile,” Mullen argues, became both “a political necessity” and “a passport to global solidarity.” The phrase reaches beyond biography. Every ruling order marks the perimeter of reasonable thought and places armed guards around it. Capitalism may be criticized for excess but not displaced. Colonialism may be mourned as history but not recognized in the present. Black suffering may be commemorated, provided it is severed from the political economy that reproduces it. Peace may be praised, provided nobody organizes against the empire’s wars. Du Bois became dangerous because he crossed each boundary and kept walking.

The United States has spent decades manufacturing what Mullen calls the “American Du Bois”: the distinguished sociologist, founder of the NAACP, gifted chronicler of double consciousness and safely deceased ancestor of multicultural democracy. The communist who joined the party in 1961, defended the Soviet Union and revolutionary China, organized against nuclear war, moved to Ghana and placed Black liberation inside world revolution is left outside the museum. Mullen describes Du Bois’s development as an “evolutionary political embrace of the Un-American” before the term became the Cold War instrument of his “marginalization and dishonor.” American memory performs a familiar division of labor. Liberal institutions embalm revolutionaries after removing the cause of death; reactionary governments hunt anyone attempting to resume their work.

Trump’s restoration of official anticommunism makes that arrangement unusually visible. In November 2025, the White House proclaimed an “Anti-Communism Week,” portraying communism as an undifferentiated history of devastation and defining opposition to it as a national moral obligation. Earlier that year, the administration’s Loyalty Day proclamation explicitly recalled the holiday’s creation as an answer to the communist celebration of May Day. These ceremonies do not by themselves constitute a new Smith Act, but ceremonies announce who belongs to the nation and who may be cast beyond it. They supply sacred language for policies already teaching the public to associate the “radical left,” international solidarity and challenges to private power with subversion.

Martin Luther King Jr., speaking at a Freedomways tribute to Du Bois in 1968, warned against precisely this ritualized stupidity: “It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational obsessive anticommunism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.” King’s formulation cuts deeper than the familiar plea for tolerance. Anticommunism masquerades as analysis while beginning with its verdict. It adds every death under a socialist government to communism’s account, then loses the calculator when confronted by slavery, colonial famine, capitalist war, fascist dictatorship, structural adjustment or sanctions. It studies socialist societies without siege, revolution without counterrevolution and scarcity without blockade. This is not science. It is theology with an intelligence budget.

The renewed campaign is necessary because imperial decline has reopened questions the ruling class declared settled. Public ownership has returned as an answer to privatized ruin. Economic planning confronts the chaos of markets that can manufacture luxury while rationing housing, medicine and food. China’s rise has shattered the fairy tale that Western capital possesses a divine monopoly over modern development. Cuba survives despite generations of strangulation. Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, governments and movements are again seeking room beyond the dollar, the sanctions list and the military base. Not all of this is socialist, and none of it abolishes domestic class struggle. But it narrows Washington’s ability to define capitalism as nature and American command as international order. Anticommunism returns to national ceremony because socialism has returned to the field of historical possibility.

Trumpism should therefore not be understood as an alien force invading an otherwise innocent democracy. Mullen shows Du Bois arriving at a view of United States history organized around the category of “American counterrevolution.” The defeat of Reconstruction, the preservation of racial terror, the conversion of democracy into plutocracy and the expansion of colonial imperialism formed one historical process. Trump concentrates this inheritance. He did not invent a republic governed by wealth, police power, racial hierarchy and imperial war. He inherited its machinery, stripped away portions of its liberal upholstery and drove it harder under conditions of declining command.

Nowhere is the contemporary production of the un-American clearer than in the repression of Palestine solidarity. Trump’s January 2025 executive order instructed federal departments to inventory the civil, criminal, educational and immigration authorities available for use against campus activity classified as antisemitic. It specifically directed agencies to identify ways universities could report foreign students and staff whose conduct might become grounds for investigation and removal. The White House celebrated the measure as an offensive against “pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals,” deliberately collapsing political criticism, immigration status and alleged security danger into one administrative category.

Antisemitism is real, reactionary and poisonous to any emancipatory movement. Opposition to hatred of Jewish people, however, cannot require obedience to a state conducting occupation, dispossession and war. By erasing the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, the administration converts solidarity with Palestinians into a test of national loyalty. The state need not outlaw an idea outright when it can attach the idea to deportability, lost funding, revoked visas and professional destruction. The committee room has been digitized, dispersed and connected to the border database, the university budget and the social-media feed.

Du Bois faced prosecution because the Peace Information Center circulated an international appeal against nuclear war. Today’s mechanisms differ, but the governing question is recognizable: may people living inside the United States organize politically with the peoples against whom the United States and its allies exercise violence? Individual sympathy may be tolerated because sympathy can be consumed and forgotten. Organization is another matter. Organization builds memory, discipline, relationships and the capacity to interfere.

This is why Mullen’s discussion of Freedomways remains so urgent. The journal’s inaugural editorial declared its purpose to be “examining experiences and strengthening the relationship among peoples of African descent in this country, in Latin America, and wherever there are communities of such people anywhere in the world.” Freedomways did not treat internationalism as an ethical pose. It operated as infrastructure: a meeting ground connecting Black struggle, African liberation, Bandung, Latin America, communism and the peace movement. The state fears such relationships because power does not fear that the oppressed will possess opinions. It fears that they will discover one another.

Trump’s second administration has accordingly made the university a special battlefield. An April 2025 executive order expanded federal enforcement of foreign-funding disclosure rules and presented overseas financial relationships as threats to national interest. The administration combined this foreign-influence campaign with funding cancellations, accreditation pressure, immigration enforcement and restrictions aimed at institutions accused of failing to suppress campus unrest. Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly asserted that student visas could be cancelled when the government determined that foreign students were participating in activities it would have considered when deciding whether to admit them. The issue was therefore not simply criminal conduct. Political activity itself entered the calculation of whether a person deserved to remain.

There is no reason to romanticize the corporate university. It is financed by donors, military contracts, pharmaceutical capital, real-estate expansion and the debt imposed upon students. Administrators routinely discover an affection for free expression just after the police have cleared the encampment. Yet the university remains contradictory terrain because it concentrates international students, precarious labor, political resources and young people encountering the world beyond the ideology inherited from home. The Trump regime pressures administrations to police this terrain precisely because institutions too compromised to defend liberation can still be frightened into repressing it.

The phrase “foreign influence” performs the work once assigned more bluntly to “un-American activity.” The American ruling class maintains military alliances across continents, commands intelligence partnerships, coordinates financial institutions, subsidizes foreign governments and integrates corporations through planetary supply chains. This is called leadership. When Black radicals communicate with African revolutionaries, students organize for Palestine, socialists study China or workers coordinate across borders, international relationship becomes foreign penetration. Empire universalizes its own alliances while criminalizing the internationalism of its subjects.

Du Bois escaped this ideological enclosure by placing Black America inside a diasporic and revolutionary world. India, China, Africa, the Soviet Union and the movements of colonized peoples were not supporting scenery for an American freedom struggle. They were active fronts of one historical battle. His eventual exile to Ghana confirmed that the “century of world revolution was lived elsewhere than America,” as Mullen puts it, and that departure from the United States could constitute entry into history rather than retreat from it. He did not abandon Black America. He rejected the proposition that its future could be secured inside an imperial nation whose wealth and power depended upon the subordination of darker peoples elsewhere.

That standpoint becomes more—not less—necessary as American supremacy weakens. Imperial decline does not mean disappearance, nor does it guarantee progressive succession. A wounded empire retains aircraft carriers, sanctions architecture, intelligence services, financial chokepoints and a ruling class accustomed to issuing instructions to the planet. Its loss of cheap command may produce greater violence because coercion must replace consent and punishment must compensate for diminished authority. Abroad, the response takes the form of tariffs, blockade, technological denial, military encirclement and intensified struggle for the Western Hemisphere. At home, it demands loyalty enforcement: China must be feared, Palestine silenced, Cuba strangled and every alternative to private capital presented as tyranny.

The rise of China and the widening multipolar field nevertheless create contradictions the empire cannot abolish by proclamation. China’s socialist construction, state-directed development and international economic reach demonstrate that modernization need not proceed under Western tutelage. South–South cooperation and alternative institutions give postcolonial states bargaining power unavailable under a single imperial center. But multipolarity is not socialism by diplomatic association. Capitalist states can resist Washington while exploiting their own workers; national sovereignty can empower a people or enlarge the room in which a domestic bourgeoisie bargains. Du Bois’s method requires that we defend the erosion of imperial monopoly while continuing to ask who owns, who plans, who labors and who rules.

This is also where Mullen’s principal contradiction acquires present force. He gives us the Du Bois who escaped American ideological captivity, built the diasporic international and chose revolutionary socialism. Yet the book’s anti-Stalinist framework too often separates this emancipatory movement from the socialist states that gave anti-imperialism material depth. The empire makes no such polite distinction. It sanctions Cuba, surrounds China, attacks socialist governments, polices Palestine solidarity and criminalizes communist organization because movements, states and international alliances may become parts of one historical bloc. What Western Marxism separates into the pure revolution and the compromised state, imperial strategy studies as a potential chain of resistance.

Un-American passes the test of the present where it restores political treason against empire as a revolutionary virtue. It exposes the fraud through which the United States persecutes radicals in life and recruits them into national mythology after death. It reminds us that Du Bois’s communism was not the tragic excess of an otherwise useful thinker but the destination toward which his study of race, class, colonialism and war carried him. The book falters only when it approaches the institutional consequences of that journey and withdraws from the socialist power required to make internationalism more than a moral appeal.

To become un-American in the era of American decline is not to cultivate rebellion as an identity or exchange one nationalism for another. It is to withdraw political loyalty from the state that sorts humanity into allies and enemies according to the requirements of its supremacy. Du Bois crossed that line when he chose communism, Africa, China, peace and the colonized world over the respectability America finally offered him after doing everything possible to make the choice costly. Trump’s second regime is drawing the line again through proclamations, visa files, campus budgets, foreign-influence investigations and the old accusation of disloyalty dressed in digital clothes.

Mullen recovers the man who crossed it. Our task is harder. We must recover the journals, parties, unions, schools, solidarity networks and socialist states through which the crossing becomes a collective force rather than an individual act of conscience. Revolutionary memory earns its name only when it arms the living. In an empire losing its command but not its appetite, the most American demand will remain obedience. The future belongs to those prepared to become un-American together.